Page 32 of The Holiday

I laughed at this; perhaps I had lived unconventionally. Or maybe it just seemed that way to Athena. “I guess I have. I went into my relationship with your mother knowing that I’d never be a father—and I was okay with that.” I paused, squinting out at the ocean beneath the gray sky. “And we just lived our lives together traveling. Here, there, everywhere, for twenty years. It was a good life,” I said, thoughtful. “But yes, perhaps unconventional. I never worked in an office, worried about a pension, or thought about what life would be like when I got old, because…” And here I paused. “Because I knew that by the time I was old, most likely, I wouldn’t have Ruby.”

We sat there quietly until Athena spoke up. “Are you ever sorry—about anything?”

I could have taken this any number of ways, but I knew what she meant. “About being with someone who’d already done the big wedding, the long marriage, and the kids thing?” I shook my head. “No. I don’t think we have to experience everything in order to find the things that work for us. For me, I wanted real love, and I found it. I never needed children and grandchildren, but I’m honored to have you and your sister in my life, and completely blessed that Harlow considers me?—“

I was about to say “Harlow considers me a grandfather to her children” when the door to the kitchen banged open and two little tow-headed boys came barreling out onto the porch.

“Papa! Papa!” Byron shouted, launching himself onto my lap. His cold, bare feet made their way up my thighs as he curled himself next to my stomach. Byron, nearly three, was Harlow’s youngest, and infinitely lovable. “Patrick wants to feed me to a shark,” he said in his wide-eyed baby way.

I glanced at his older brother, Patrick, a five-year-old carbon copy of Byron. He was also wide-eyed, but less out of fear and more out of guilt.

“Hey, bub,” I said to Patrick. “Let’s not feed Byron to the sharks, yeah? We need him around.”

“Why?” Patrick asked, and honestly—solid question. Why does anyone need a kid brother around?

“Because when he gets old enough to catch a football or a baseball, you’re going to want him on your side. You two will be out there by the water, tossing a ball around together to impress some cute girls.”

“Ewwwww,” Patrick said, pinching his nose with his fingers and squinting his eyes. “Nooooo! I hate girls!”

I hoped he would change his mind about girls, as his mother came waddling out to the porch with a hand on her lower back. Harlow, seven months pregnant with a little girl, looked exhausted. She and her husband Brooks had waited until their late thirties to marry and have babies, and while I admired her pluck and determination to build a small army of baby Harlows and Brookses, I couldn’t imagine being over forty with a passel of toddlers and grade school-aged kids.

“Are you bothering Papa?” Harlow asked the boys, putting one fist approximately where a hip would be if her stomach wasn’t in the way.

“They’re good,” I assured her, still holding Byron in my lap. “We’re just talking about playing catch on the beach when they get a bit older.”

Athena sipped her wine as she watched the commotion from her Adirondack chair.

“It feels like I’m going to be changing diapers forever,” Harlow said, swiping the back of her hand across her forehead to wipe away the humidity of the September storm, which was still raging. “I’m not sure I’m young enough for this.”

“The toothpaste is kind of out of the tube on that one,” Athena said with a smile, waving her half-empty glass at both of the boys and then at her sister’s belly.

I’d always wondered about Athena’s unwillingness to have children, and about her intentional choice not to marry. When I met the girls, between the two of them, I would have always pegged Athena as the marrying kind, and Harlow as the eternal party girl.

“Come on, boys,” Harlow said, waving at her sons. “I have spaghetti and meatballs on the table for you. Leave Papa and Aunt Theen to talk, okay?”

The boys scampered back inside, leaving me with Athena as the evening settled around us. The storm started to roll away, out to sea, and behind it a torrent of raindrops fell on the sand and the house.

“Now I’ll turn the question back on you,” I said without warning, not looking at Athena. “Are you ever sorry about anything?”

“You mean about not having children of my own?”

“Mmm. Sure. Or not marrying. Any of it.”

Athena thought about this for a minute. “I know my mom thought I might end up with Elijah,” she said, referring to Marigold Pim and Cobb Hartley’s son, with whom she’d spent a fair amount of time in her twenties. “But we were always just friends, really. I think at one point I considered pushing for more just because it seemed time, but…it wasn’t right.”

I just listened. Talking and listening are two different skillsets, both important to a journalist, and I’d found over the years that simply shutting up and listening was my favorite thing to do.

“He was dating a guy named Jarret at one point?—“

“Oh,” I said, lifting an eyebrow.

“Yeah. Elijah is bi,” she said off-handedly, waving my raised brow away. “I thought you all knew.”

“Uh, not really. But I can’t say I ever gave it much thought.” Even though Ruby’s girls were just a dozen years younger than me, sometimes it felt like a million years. I could have easily attributed it to the fact that in my twenties, when I got my first full-time job as a journalist for the New York Times, I was instantly thrust into a world that left college parties, immature women, and the slothfulness of youth behind. I traveled, dated, and worked with older people, and so it made perfect sense to me when I met Ruby and fell in love with her. The age difference was nothing to me—immaterial. But the things my peers struggled with were also not of my world. And the things that people a decade younger than me took for granted were also not on my radar.

“Yeah,” Athena sighed, putting her bare feet up on the railing in front of her. “I just couldn’t bring myself to feel the things I needed to feel about Elijah in order to make it work between us. And I got the feeling that he couldn’t either.”

“But you’re still close.”

---