“Yes, but they don’t have to hear me talk,” she says. “And I’m not being broadcast live on NPR.”
Ruthie pops her head in. “Need anything, Leanna, Phil? Water, coffee?”
“Water would be great,” Phil says on my mother’s other side. “Thanks.”
Dominic is sitting next to me, as usual, and it feels like there’s more space between our chairs than on past Thursdays. Don’t think about the way he smells. Or that he’s wearing your favorite striped shirt. Or that it’s rolled to his forearms.
I wonder if this is how it would feel if we’d actually dated.
It’s easier to reassure my mother than it is to reassure myself. When we chatted with the NPR producer, a woman named Kati Sanchez, she told us not to change a thing about the show. She’d write intro copy beamed out to member stations to use if they air our segment later. All we have to do is classic Ex Talk, be ourselves and all of that. With the knowledge that our listenership will be quite possibly multiplied by the thousands.
Ruthie returns with glasses of water, and Jason counts us down after the top-of-the-hour NPR newsbreak. I pile all my Dominic angst into a box at the back of my mind and nail it shut, determined to leave it there for the next hour.
When Dominic and I introduce ourselves, our voices aren’t as light as they usually are.
“We’re doing something a little different today,” Dominic says. “We’re talking about what happens after you lose a spouse or partner, and more specifically, stories about finding love after loss.”
It feels even worse, lying to my mother on the air when she’s sitting right next to me. But this isn’t about me. Or at least, not entirely.
I take a deep breath and speak as solidly into the microphone as I can.
“This show is especially personal to me because I lost my dad when I was eighteen. My senior year of high school.” I wait a beat—an unplanned beat because even though it doesn’t feel, sitting here, like thousands of people are listening, I know they will be. They are right now, live, and they will later. Losing him again and again. “My dad is the person who got me into radio. He had this store where he fixed electronics. Goldstein Gadgets. Maybe some of you out there in Seattle remember it. And okay, you know my voice isn’t the ideal radio voice”—I expect Dominic to maybe laugh at this, but he doesn’t. I clear my throat and go on—“but my dad, he had this perfect radio voice.”
“So if we’re talking about love after loss, I thought, what better person to have on the show than my mother. She lost him, too—in a different way than I did. Um, Mom . . . thank you for being here. Feel free to introduce yourself.”
Beneath the table, my mother squeezes my leg. “I’m Leanna Goldstein. I’ve played violin in the Seattle Symphony for about twenty-five years. And I’m a Sagittarius.”
This earns a few soft laughs from the room.
“Can you talk about how you met my dad?”
“Dan Goldstein,” she says, and she knew we’d start this way, but nothing about her feels rehearsed. She’s natural but poised in this wonderful way, like she is onstage but better because this is her voice. “We met as his shop. I had this metronome that had been giving me trouble, and I figured it was a long shot, but I brought it in to see if he could fix it. And much to my surprise, he did. And looked pretty damn adorable doing it.” Her expression morphs into panic. “Shoot, is it okay to say ‘damn’ on here?”
I assure her that she’s okay—the FCC won’t come after us for that.
“We’re lucky enough to also have Phil Adeleke in the studio, another Seattle Symphony violinist,” Dominic says.
“That’s me,” Phil says with his usual cheeriness.
“And you and Leanna have been sitting next to each other for—”
“Nearly twenty-five years,” he finishes, and he and my mother laugh.
“Could you tell us about your wife?”
That cheeriness doesn’t completely fade, but it does diminish a little. “Joy and I met in college in Boston, in a West African students association. We are both Nigerian, both came to the States for college. She was studying history, and I was studying music, and I proposed on our graduation day.”
He talks about how it wasn’t a perfect marriage because of course no marriage is. They didn’t always have enough money, and her first bout with cancer a year into their marriage almost destroyed them. But she fought it into remission, and for a long time, they were okay. They moved to Seattle, where she worked in a university library and he in the symphony. Four kids. A mortgage. A cat. Unex
pected kittens.
And then the cancer came back.
“I don’t know how you went through all of that,” my mother says to Phil. Like the two of them are having a conversation without either of us here, and this is where radio really becomes great. “For me, it was sudden. One day Dan was here, perfectly healthy, and the next, he was gone. It was unbelievably unfair, I know that. But my heart still breaks for what you went through.”
“We don’t have to play tragedy Olympics,” Phil says. “What you went through was terrible. What I went through was terrible. Nothing makes any of it any less terrible.”
Dominic and I sit back, letting them tell their intertwining stories.