She sounded wistful, but not sad, so he pushed a little more. “What was your imaginary family like?”
“Two kids, a boy and a girl. Dan was not consulted, mind you.”
“Didn’t he want kids?”
“Someday, sure. But I wouldn’t have even considered it while he was still playing football. The NFL sounds glamorous, but it’s an awful job. The hours are endless, the work’s a grind, there’s no job security, and it seems like they’re always in PT for one injury or another. I’d have been a single parent, basically. And there wasn’t any way to guess how long he’d be playing or where we’d live or anything, really. That’s one reason we waited so long to move in together. The first couple years we were dating, he thought he might be released, and I was afraid to get too attached. Then he had a great season right as his contract was ending, and he got the offer from New York. I wanted to go with him, but he said maybe we should wait and see how the Jets panned out, first.”
“That’s a lot of uncertainty to put up with.”
“I didn’t think of it that way, like I was putting up with him. I thought it was just what you did, when you loved somebody.”
“You don’t sound so sure now.”
“I’m not.”
“That you should have put up with it, or that it was love?”
“Both, I guess.”
Ben took her lowered eyes and quiet voice as his cue to steer them into the more comfortable territory of sarcasm. “The money’s good, though.”
“There is that.”
They lapsed into silence, which allowed too much space for him to think about Sandy.
They’d had their share of drama, but by the end the writing on the wall had been twenty feet tall. He’d daydreamed about selling the restaurant and moving back to Sardinia, where he could open a local place. Something seasonal and dead simple, where the Michelin critics would never dream of visiting.
Sandy hadn’t been with him on the imaginary airplane.
He thought about May’s illusions. It was easy to love your idea of someone—to fall hard for their very best self. The question was whether, once you had to spend some time living with their worst self, you could bear to be with them anymore.
“You want to sit?” he offered. “Rest your feet for a while?”
“Sure.”
They found a flat spot beneath a huge oak tree, and Ma
y futzed with the grass, running her hand back and forth over it. He heard a bee several feet away where there was clover. Maybe it was one of his bees. They were only a mile or so from some of his hives.
“The thing is,” May said, “I’m not as sad as I should be. And that makes me sad, because it makes me realize I was being a dope. And then I wonder what’s wrong with me, and I go into this whole mental spiral, and that’s no good.”
“No.”
She turned her head sideways, resting it on her knee. All wrapped around herself, gold hair and red sweater, long legs and black boots. She looked gorgeous and disappointed. He wanted to fix her, but he was the wrong person. Ten times more broken than May was.
“I have a suspicion that I’m in the middle of one of those really important life lessons,” she said. “I’m just not sure what the lesson is yet.”
“I know how that feels.”
“It’s not a lot of fun,” she said. “But it’s really liberating, too.”
“Because you’re not who you used to be, but you’re not who you’re going to be yet, either.”
“And you don’t even have to figure it out if you don’t want to,” she said.
“Exactly. You can do what you want.”
“Tend bees,” she said with a smile.