“What?” she says. “You thought someone would call you Champ and blow your cover?”
But he isn’t laughing. “Truthfully? I’m a little nervous for you to meet my family.”
“Why? Because of the divorce?”
She looks at him carefully, his sweet and handsome face. She reaches out to touch it with the back of her fingers. She would understand if he was nervous for her to meet his parents because of their impending divorce, but he keeps insisting that he is okay with it. He keeps insisting that his parents have just had a partingof ways since his father decided he wanted to convert to Buddhism and started moving his life in that direction. He keeps insisting that his parents, together, decided this meant their lives were going in very different directions. After thirty-five year
s together. How can Nate be so okay with that? Maggie’s wondered to herself more than once. Isn’t it the point of marriage— Maggie can’t make herself ask out loud—that you figure out how to make the different directions meet?
“There are just things,” he says, “important things that you should know before we go. Things that I probably should have told you before now.”
She tries to figure out how to say it so he hears her. “Nate, they could have three heads, and it wouldn’t change anything. I don’t care,” she says.
And she doesn’t. Historically, she would have. But historically she has been the one in any relationship looking for the way out. It used to take less than half a reason for her to look for an exit: someone’s parents, someone’s use of cologne, someone’s affection for Sting. But with Nate it is different, has been different from the beginning.
“Like what?” she says. “Your parents are actually going to stay married?” She is joking around, but he isn’t biting.
“I’m not sure you’re ready to hear.”
“I’m ready to hear,” she says. “Of course I’m ready to hear. Do I need to remind you that my childhood was not Leave It to Beaver?”
And it wasn’t. Unless you consider being raised alone by a less-than-fully-grown-up bar and grill owner in Asheville, North Carolina, Leave It to Beaver. Unless you consider Eli Mackenzie’s well-intentioned, but ill-advised choices—like having his fifteen-year-old daughter help with midnight shifts at the bar so they could have more time together—idyllic.
Nate smiles. “Wasn’t Leave It to Beaver a little before your time?”
Nate is four years older than Maggie is. He likes to pretend he is ten years older. Or, when it serves his purposes, a hundred. “Just tell me,” she says.
“You sure?”
“No time like the present.”
But then she puts her nose to his neck—and a heavy smell, like a swirling heat, like a combination of salmon and bad milk, comes back at her. “Jeez. What on earth is that smell? Do I even want to know?”
“Not good?” he says.
“No.” She shakes her head. “Not good.”
“That is Johnson the Contractor’s homemade one-hundred-herb gel. Complete with garlic extract and dried fish flakes from a sorcerer in Chinatown. He carries around a huge jelly jar of the stuff, and swears that it will relieve any residual pain I feel from last night’s labor.”
“Well, I hope it does, but . . . yuck,” she says, and for some reason, moves in closer to get a more pungent whiff. “That is one of the worst things I’ve ever smelled. You are maybe one of the worst things I’ve ever smelled.”
“That may be good news.”
“How do you figure?”
“Because when you move away from me when I tell you this next thing I’m going to tell you, I can blame it on the gel.”
“I’m ready,” she says, covering her eyes, in an exaggerated fashion, pretending that she is bracing herself, as if for a doctor’s needle shot, flinching in anticipation.
“It’s about my family’s money situation. It’s about what you would have found out if you opened those envelopes.”
She uncovers her eyes, meets his. She feels herself breathe out, feeling terrible that this is what he’s worried about. She has already made the assumption that while Nate’s family may be fairly comfortable—his father a pediatrician, his mother a former art teacher—they are certainly not very comfortable, considering that even with the restaurant’s silent investor, even with Eli giving them a little help, Maggie and Nate have been scrimping and saving and scrimping more, and taking out loans from three banks starting with the letter W and two different ones starting with C. Apparently, actually, three banks that start with C.
But maybe she was wrong to assume that Gwyn and Thomas were even fairly comfortable. Even if Nate did grow up out in Montauk. Maybe she was wrong to assume.
“I don’t care about that, Nate,” she says. “How can you think I’d care about that? Your family’s money situation . . . it makes no difference to me.”
“Really?”