Maybe the Moon

with its battalion of cats, he said: “Have you noticed how empty this place is?”
    “I have, yeah.”
    “The season must be over.”
    “Yeah, probably. I don’t mind a bit. I like having it all to ourselves.”
    “Same here,” he said.
    This time I let him carry me as we went down the stairs.

    The restaurant was very nice. I’ve already forgotten its name, but it was weathered and shingled and strung with lights and built out over the water on stilts. The food was nothing grand, your basic deep-fried seafood with iceberg lettuce and baked potato, but it tasted heavenly in the salt air, especially after two or three drinks with little umbrellas in them.
    “This is all right,” I told Neil, twirling one of the umbrellas as I gazed out at the moonlit sea. “I am one happy camper.”
    “Yeah,” he said. “I think we owe Janet one.”
    I smiled a little, tickled that we thought so much alike, then plunged headlong into the only subject still eating at me. “Linda seemed to like the song.”
    “She did,” he agreed.
    “I mean, a lot.”
    He shrugged. “It’s beautiful the way you do it.”
    “Yeah, but it seemed like it had…you know, some significance. Just the way she reacted when I told her I was doing it.”
    Another shrug. “I didn’t notice that.”
    “You didn’t? I did.”
    “Lots of people like that song.”
    “Yeah, I suppose.”
    He looked completely confused. I decided maybe I had been barking up the wrong tree.
    “She was much nicer than I’d expected, by the way.” I didn’tmean a word of this, but it was the only way I could think of to test him.
    “Oh, yeah?” he said, tossing the ball back to me.
    “Well, she was awfully sweet to the Gliddens.”
    “Janet was her friend,” he said, as if that took care of it. “They were in the same sorority or something.”
    “Yeah, but she was so helpful.”
    “That’s her,” he said grimly.
    I asked him what was wrong with being helpful.
    “Nothing. Unless it’s a substitute for ever showing any real feelings.”
    I closed the little umbrella, opened it, closed it again and set it aside. I’d wanted him to be philosophical about Linda, a little blase even. This maelstrom of unresolved emotions just beneath the surface was bad news indeed, confirming my worst suspicions.
    “She’s a cold fish,” he added.
    I nodded.
    “What are you getting at?” he asked.
    “I haven’t said anything.”
    “No, but you’re thinking something.”
    “Doesn’t matter.”
    “Yes it does. What?”
    “OK…just that…you don’t seem to be over her yet.”
    “Don’t I look over her?”
    I told him I wasn’t sure what that looked like.
    “Like this.” He framed his face with his big pink palms and mugged at me.
    I smiled at him faintly, unconvinced.
    “Why would you even think that?”
    “Just the way you’re talking now,” I said. “Your bitterness. If you didn’t still feel something, you wouldn’t resent her so much.”
    He was genuinely aghast. “I resent her,” he said with calm deliberation, “because she’s still in my life. We share a little boy, and she’s been one lousy influence on him.”
    Some people, I reminded myself, have kids in the equation.Neil loved his kid more than anything, so it was only natural to resent Linda for forcing him to subdivide that love. It made perfect sense. Of course he was over her. I felt like jumping off the pier in celebration. With one of those tacky little umbrellas over my head.
    “How,” I asked soberly, “is she a bad influence?”
    “Like I said, she’s a cold fish. She never should have become a mother in the first place. She does it now just because she thinks she should , because it’s one more noble responsibility for her to shoulder. She’s not even comfortable around Danny. She pats him on the head like he’s a neighbor’s kid or something. It’s a real crime, Cady. He’s shut down for days after he gets back from her.”
    “How awful.”
    “It is. You should see him. He has to pretend she loves him. He makes up stories about the nice things she does for him. You can tell he makes them up.”
    I nodded.
    “I don’t talk about it a lot, because it sounds…you know, typical. Fighting over the kid.”
    I reached out and squeezed his hand—or as much of it as I could manage: a finger or two. Neil squeezed back, looking straight into my eyes. “I just think he deserves better,” he said.
    I told him I thought so too.

    We got a lot merrier after