around my face, in just the way he always used to love. I pick up my reading glasses and put them on. I don’t really need them—in fact, they make everything slightly fuzzy—but Sam says I look like the sexiest librarian he’s ever seen in the glasses, so what the hell. Jason can see me looking like a sexy librarian, even if to me he’s just a blurry fuzz.
“Hey, Jason,” I say casually, picking up a stack of books, walking through the hallway and waving, as if he had just caught me unawares, as if I had no idea he was coming, as if I weren’t nervous at all, and yes, ashamed as I am to admit it, I am nervous. Always. Still.
He is still exactly, but exactly, my type. And his smile still has the ability to completely undo me. And I look at his hands and remember exactly what his hands used to do, how they used to make me feel, and I could cry with my own remorse and pain.
Jason is such a good guy. He has always been such a good guy. I sit around, frequently, with other forty-something women, and they talk of their husbands, or ex-husbands, with disdain, with derisive laughter; they talk of the excuses they come up with to avoid having sex, the holidays they would much rather take with their girlfriends, and I always find myself looking at them as if they are speaking another language, for it was never like this with Jason.
Even when I was drunk, it was never like this with Jason.
When I was drunk, I loved him more. The fact that his eyes registered his disappointment only made me want to comfort him, reassure him in my slurry way that it wasn’t his fault, that I was fine, that I still loved him, no matter what.
“Hi, Cat,” he says, awkward. Always awkward. It was fine between us for a while, after I made the amends. We had a few weeks where I actually started to think that maybe we weren’t dead in the water, maybe we had a chance. On Annie’s birthday the only thing she said she wanted was the two of us to take her to see Matilda and then dinner at Wagamama—finally a place she loved unreservedly.
We did, and it felt like a proper family, like we were all supposed to be together, in the way we were together when Annie was very small.
Annie spent the entire evening beaming, and even though she had turned thirteen, she walked along between us, holding our hands, constantly looking from one to the other as if she couldn’t believe that not only were we together, we were having fun.
And we were having fun. We loved the play, then slurped noodles and drank green tea and delighted Annie by telling funny stories about when she was a little girl, which she has heard a million times before but never gets tired of hearing, and it was actually a shock, at the end of the night, when Jason said good night and went home.
There was a moment, at the end of the night, when he had gone in to kiss Annie good night, as she had asked him to do, and I had offered Jason a coffee, and he hesitated, and our eyes held for just a few seconds longer than was probably necessary, and my heart jolted, and I thought he was going to kiss me. He didn’t. He left, but I was certain that look meant he still loved me, still felt something, and surely it was only going to be a matter of time.
It was only a matter of time before he announced he had met someone. Cara. I didn’t hear it from Jason but from Annie, who bounced home after a weekend with her father filled with excitement about this amazing woman who had spent most of the weekend with them.
When I say woman, that isn’t quite correct. Girl. Or girl-like. I learned, that Monday afternoon when Annie came home from school, that Cara is, oh lucky Cara, only twenty-nine! Twenty-nine! Practically a child! So much younger than Jason. She is blond! said Annie. And beautiful! Well, of course. And so much fun!
I knew it was serious from the outset because even though I’m quite sure she wasn’t the first girl Jason had gone out with, she was the first girl he had ever introduced to Annie, and not just introduced, spent the weekend with.