Theo keeps his shirt off the entire meal. It’s obscene. My eyeballs hurt from the strain of not looking.
Paul picked up sandwiches from one of the best spots in Marin County. The homemade bread is crusty perfection, and at least half of it ends up in my lap, little sourdough snowflakes drifting from my mouth every time I take a bite. It takes everything in me not to pick up each fleck with my finger after I’ve demolished my sandwich.
Our conversation flows smoothly thanks to Paul, who asks about my job (I continue the lie and say it’s great), what I do in my free time (I wing it, since hike and doomscroll aren’t legitimate answers), and how I got into photography.
Here I can be honest and tell him how when I was twelve, I picked up an old camera of Gram’s, which was collecting dust on her bookshelf.
Thomas tried to fight me for it, but I came out of our wrestling match victorious, albeit bruised like a peach. I started using it constantly so Thomas wouldn’t have access, but it turned into a genuine love. An obsessive one.
Paul smiles at this. “I’m familiar with the feeling. Now that you’re done with your meal, should I go grab what I wanted to show you today?”
“Yes,” I say enthusiastically. Theo lets out a soft huff. Not a laugh. Something rustier.
Paul disappears into the house, and the silence stretches between us.
“So why aren’t you doing your photography thing full time?” Theo asks finally.
I eye him, and the flake of bread caught in his chest hair. Disgusting. I want to pick that one up with my finger the most.
“Because you can’t just do things,” I say. “It’s not that easy.”
One eyebrow raises slowly, like a bridge lifting for a ship. “If anyone can just do things, it’s you, Shepard. You’ve been just doing things as long as I’ve known you.”
“You sound like an unhinged Nike ad.” I lean back in my seat, tilting my face to soak up the sun’s warmth. “It’s easy to invest time in something you love when you have the money for it.”
“You’d be surprised.” I look over at him, indeed surprised by the bitter edge in his voice. He runs a hand over his chest, dislodging the crumb in the process (RIP), and shifts in his seat. “You specifically can do anything you put your mind to, is what I mean. You were always like that in high school. Singularly focused, especially with photography. Good at everything you tried. Not as good as me, but—”
I snort, my chest tight. I want to be that version of Noelle, but I’m so far away from her, she feels like a different person.
“I can tell you love it still, is all,” he finishes.
I try to deaden my curiosity, but that’s like asking me not to breathe. “How’s that?”
“The deranged look in your eyes when you talk about it.”
“It’s just . . . not for me. I learned that lesson a while ago.”
Theo’s gaze turns sharp. I avert my eyes from his attention, that face and those shoulders, the skin, which upon closer inspection, is quietly freckled. I take in the backyard instead, needing space from his wordless probing. It’s small, immaculate. There are several raised beds along the perimeter of the pine fence, several bags of soil open and sagging against them.
“Your granddad’s house is beautiful.” I focus on a hummingbird flitting around a tall plant with tubular red flowers. Wish I knew their name. “How long has he been here?”
Theo removes his hat and tosses it onto the table, running a hand through his hair. His temples are damp. That shouldn’t be so hot. “Since February. He was in LA, but my grandma died last fall. He was getting lonely, so I moved him up here.”
My heart sinks so fast the world tilts. Paul’s gold band flashes in my mind. “I’m—I’m sorry. About your grandma.”
Theo shifts, uncomfortable. “Thanks. It’s not the same as what you’re going through. I mean, it was very sad, obviously, but she married my granddad when I was a kid, long after he and my dad’s mom divorced. Both of my biological grandmothers are still alive, but I’m not close to them. Not like I am with Granddad, anyway.”
“Grief is grief. You don’t have to qualify it.”
“Some grief is different, though,” he says, looking out at the yard. “You can be sad but be okay. If my granddad dies, you know—”
He stops, like it’s too painful to think about. That if a stand-in for the other word he can’t say out loud: when. I sense the same connection between him and Paul as what I had with Gram. That soulmate thing, the string connecting two people, longer than death, further than forever.
I want Theo to sketch out his family tree for me. I’m getting crumbs of so many different things, like the flakes still littering my lap, and it makes me hungrier. I know Theo is an only child, that his dad pulled him aside after every tennis and soccer match he attended, talking to him in low, intense tones while his mom watched. That he never looked happy with his son, nor with his wife when she intervened. Remembering that makes it hard to believe he came from Paul. Is that Theo’s grandma’s influence, the sternness Theo seems to have inherited, too?
I hate being curious about him. I’ve fought against it since the beginning. But I’m me and I need to know things, so I open my mouth to ask more questions. I barely inhale when he shakes his head, his expression shifting from melancholy to wry.
“Don’t make this earnest and uncomfortable.”
“No, totally. Emotions, right?” I pretend to gag. “Disgusting.”
He doesn’t respond, and a tiny, microscopic, very small part of me is disappointed. My blood runs faster in my veins when we talk. But surely that’s just irritation.
Theo stands, swiping a t-shirt from the chair at the head of the table. He eases it over his head, making it look like porn somehow. My body pulls tight.
One thing is certain: I’ll never figure him out. I don’t want to, and he’d never let me anyway. So I busy myself with brushing the crumbs from my lap, letting them fall to the ground. The birds can have them.
“Wow.” I gape as he lowers the box onto the table. “We’re going to be here for a while, huh?”
To my right, Theo sighs. I give him a droll look over my shoulder, where he’s parked himself against the railing, but he’s not looking. He’s been ignoring me since our near-brush with human emotion, grimly tapping out messages on his phone.
Paul takes Theo’s seat next to me. “Some of this is your grandmother’s. We saw each other once after we separated—before I sent the letter you found—and she gave me things for safekeeping.”
“What do you mean, for safekeeping?”
He sits back in his seat with a hum. Birds sing around us, tucked into trees. Somewhere nearby, a lawn mower buzzes.
Finally he says, “It’s no surprise you have so many questions, or that you don’t know much about your grandmother’s life prior to her marriage to your grandfather. Our relationship was not well received by her family, and when she left school, she didn’t leave with many reminders of our time together.”
“So you kept all this for her?”
“For us,” he corrects gently. “When our relationship ended, it wasn’t acrimonious. We wanted to make sure it’d always be a lovely memory.”
“But she made it a secret,” I say, watching as he begins pulling items from the box.
“No.” Again he corrects me. It’s still soft, but there’s steel behind it. “Whatever life she and I wanted, planned, or talked about was never going to be. Kathleen keeping a box of reminders of how she’d defied her parents would’ve prolonged her grief. Her parents and brother knew the whole story once it was over. I imagine it was initially too painful for her to recount further, and by the time you came into the world, well . . .” He smiles. “Life goes on.”
I look for pain or anger on Paul’s face, but all I see is nostalgia mixed with affection, softened with time.
“Your letter to her mentioned an elopement,” I venture.
“Yes, we did make plans to elope.”
“But it never happened. Because of her parents?”
“It was . . .” He pauses thoughtfully, his gaze going to the sky. “Not just that issue, but her parents were certainly the biggest hurdle to overcome.”
“Why didn’t her parents like you?”
He laughs. “Where to begin? We had one mess of a dinner with our families where everyone made it clear where they stood on a variety of subjects, including whether Kat and I should be together.”
“What were the other subjects?” Theo asks.
“Well, over appetizers, my mother got going on women taking a more prominent place in the workforce, which Kat’s homemaker mother thought was shocking. She already wasn’t thrilled that her daughter was at college. She wanted her to get her MRS degree.” Paul eyes us. “Do you know that phrase?”
I nod. “They wanted her to find a husband.”
“Right you are. I just wasn’t the one she was supposed to find,” he says with a little smile. “The most insurmountable thing, though, was that my father and I were outspoken about the US military taking action internationally. I even went so far as to say I’d be a conscientious objector if things in Vietnam ramped up. It wasn’t something her career-military father or her brother, who’d gotten a Purple Heart in Korea, wanted to hear.” He shakes his head. “In hindsight I should’ve bitten my tongue when the subject came up. Kat had prepped me not to bring up anything political in nature, but my temper got the best of me. That night was enough to set the path to disaster, though Kat and I didn’t give up afterward.”
“I see.”
And I do. My memories of my great-grandparents are fuzzy. I was young when they died. But I do remember my great-grandfather was an old-school, solemn man who’d shoot puzzled looks at my wild hair and Thomas’s pink T-shirts, even as he let us crawl all over him during Thanksgiving dinner. My tenderhearted, progressively minded dad had a complicated relationship with his grandfather. Gram did, too. But she loved him deeply, and he doted on her, even though it’s clearer to me now that his love could be destructive. One of my most vivid childhood memories was Gram crying at his funeral while I clutched her hand.
My thoughts go to Paul’s letter, his acknowledgment of their permanent separation. With this new context, it breaks my heart even more for both of them. “You said in that letter you would love her your entire life.”
He nods. “I did, and I will.” He places a stack of pictures in front of me, but I don’t pick them up yet. “She was my first great love. I was hers, as well. But your grandfather was her last.”
“Who was your last great love?”
“My wife, Vera. She passed last fall, but we had twenty-three wonderful years together.”
I put my hand over his. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
He pats my hand, his blue eyes watery. “I appreciate that.”
My curiosity over Theo’s other grandma—his biological one—is gnawing at me. But, given that she and Paul divorced, I’m going to assume it’s a story I don’t have a right to ask about.
Theo takes the seat across from us. His hat is back on his head, shading his eyes and any emotion lurking there. But I notice a distinct lack of surprise.
“Do you know all of this?” I ask.
“A lot of it,” he says.
“The marriage stuff, too?”
Theo says again, stoically, “A lot of it, I think.”
“How?”
His gaze darts to Paul before he squints off into the distance. “Kathleen wasn’t ever a secret in my family.”
I chew at my lip, wanting to ask more, but sensing I’m somehow pressing up against a bruise of Theo’s. His shoulders are tense, like he’s waiting for my next question. Like it’ll hurt to hear it.
I could push until he gives me answers or tells me to fuck off. God knows I want to know everything. But for reasons I don’t want to examine too closely, I let it go instead. “Let’s see what’s in this box, huh?”
“Dig in, kids,” Paul says, giving me a warm smile, as if I’ve passed a test I didn’t even know I was taking.
I start flipping through the stack of photos Paul handed me as Theo takes another. My attention splits between the images in my hand and the way Theo’s eyes scan each picture before he lays it carefully on the table and moves on. Occasionally his mouth will pick up in a half smile, and he’ll flip the picture so Paul and I can see it. Most of them are goofy photos of Paul, but some of them are gorgeous shots of Los Angeles, the UCLA campus, or the group of friends that start to become familiar as I move through my stack.
Paul notices that I linger over a photo of Gram standing in front of a fraternity house. She has one leg crossed in front of the other at the ankle and wears a mischievous smile. It could be me in the picture; our legs are long and lean, our smiles equally wide, a little crooked. Her bottom lip is even snagged a little on her left canine, like mine does. In this picture, she’s wearing my best-day smile. I know, deep in my bones, that when this picture was taken, she was happy.
It’s the power of photography. To capture it and let it live past the subject’s lifetime. To allow someone to look at it years later and smile along with them.
I press my thumb against the glossy paper, working against the moisture in my eyes and the lump in my throat.
“You look so much like Kat,” Paul says. I blink over at him, pulled out of my memories and hers. He nods his chin at the picture. “It’s almost uncanny.”
Across the table, Theo’s eyes trace my face.
“You and Theo do, too,” I say. “I actually can’t believe I didn’t notice the resemblance when I found the pictures. I spent so much time looking at them while I made that video.”
At this, Theo’s eyebrow quirks up. Even after years apart, I know his I’m about to be an asshole tell. “Was my face fresh in your memory, Shep? Been staring at my LinkedIn profile picture every night?”
“Please don’t project your fantasies onto me.”
Paul chuckles and even Theo grins, his damn dimple popping.
Ugh. Even when he doesn’t win, he wins.
I half stand and peek into the box, needing a distraction. There are more photos, ticket stubs, and envelopes yellowed with age. But my gaze snags on something even more interesting. It’s a map, folded up carefully and perched on top of a yearbook.
I take it out like it’s a precious artifact. Which, really, all of this is. “What’s this?”
“Take a shot every time Shepard asks a question,” Theo mutters across the table.
I shoot him my most innocent smile. “Oh, I’d love to see you play that game. We both know your tolerance is laughable.”
I’m immensely gratified by the way his cheeks turn pink. One night we were at a party—not together, but . . . existing in the same space at the same time—and he puked Mike’s Hard Lemonade all over his date’s shoes. I had to help her shower it off because they were both too wasted to get the job done.
He recovers quickly, his voice dipping. “My stamina has improved significantly since high school.”
I make a noncommittal sound. I don’t want to think about his stamina now.
God knows Theo and I could go for days like this, but my attention is diverted. As I unfold the map, the writing looped over top of Washington, Idaho, and Montana stops me short.
Paul and Kat’s Honeymoon Road Trip
