Page 68 of The Night We Lost Him

“I have to get my life in order too. Believe me I know that. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong about this.”

“Fine. So your observation is that I shouldn’t move on with my life because we lost Dad?”

“No,” I say. “My observation is that I think you are settling for a life you don’t actually want.”

I try to think of how to say it so that he hears me, what I see when I watch him. What became apparent to me when I saw Tommy watching him too.

“I think you don’t really want to work at the company. You certainly don’t want to devote your life to it.”

“I’m good at my job.”

“I’m sure you are. That’s different from doing it for the right reasons.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What if I could promise you that Dad never cared about you staying on at the company? Would you still want to be there now? Because I’m telling you, it was never about you working there. Or working with him. He just cared about having you close.”

“You don’t know that…” he says.

“Except that I do. I also know that there are only so many big hands you can lose before you stop wanting to place a big bet. Your injury, the breakup with Taylor. Now Dad. When do you decide you’ve lost enough?”

“Is this your version of a pep talk?”

“I’m just saying, extremely gently, that I think Morgan is a part of that same desire. To feel like you are on solid ground. But I’m not sure the ground gets to feel so solid for us anymore.”

He looks torn about this, like it’s opening something up in him, something he really doesn’t want to touch. Which I get. I’m there with him. In this way, at least, I’m right there with him. When you lose too much in quick succession, it feels unmanageable to risk losing anything else.

“I believe, in my gut, that we make bad decisions when we are operating from fear,” I say. “Take it for what it’s worth. But, it seems to me, that your less-fearful self is still hoping for something else.”

“And what’s that exactly?”

“A different life.”

I expect him to keep arguing. I expect him to say I’m wrong and I’m missing the thread again. But he gets quiet. He opens the window, keeps his gaze on the highway lights.

“You know, not too long after we got involved, Taylor asked me what playing baseball felt like,” he says. “I went into this long explanation about how Dad coached my Little League ball team when I was five, the travel teams I played on my whole childhood, how I knew by twelve years old that playing ball was the only thing I wanted to do with my life.”

He turns and looks at me.

“But I didn’t understand that she wasn’t asking for the biography. The history. She was asking what playing ball felt like. No one had ever asked me that before, so I didn’t get it.” He shakes his head. “And every time I see her, I want to tell her I have an answer now, as if that will change anything.”

“Well. Tell me.”

“It always felt like a kind of proof.” He shrugs. “I know that sounds corny, but it did. Not proof of something so large as God or death, but not so removed from those things, either. Like proof that a given moment was happening. These are my arms and this is my breath and what am I going to do about it? How am I going to work it out to get from here to there? I always had an answer. Without even trying, I had that answer. And after I got injured, I went looking for that type of certainty everywhere. I don’t know. Being with Taylor felt like the closest I’d come to finding it…”

I take that in as I steer down the Henry Hudson Parkway, New Jersey showing up across the river, Upper Manhattan in view.

“Except maybe now it’s the opposite,” I say.

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe when she walked away, it left you with the job of trying to prove it to yourself,” I say. “That the two of you mattered.”

He sighs. “This car ride sucks.”

I let out a laugh as he looks back toward the window, signs for Harlem starting to appear, the sparkly lights of New York City coming through the windshield in the distance. I see something come over his face, a sadness he can’t quite push away.

“I don’t know about how it was with you, but Dad was never big on offering me romantic advice, which made sense, three divorces in. But when Taylor and I broke up, he took me out for dinner and we both drank a little too much and he made this big point of saying that you only get so many chances.”

---