One Last Thing Before I Go

but his heart’s not in it. It’s hard to hate the Fucking Coopers, which just makes you hate them more. The Fucking Coopers are a fingernail picking and pulling at every hardened, crusty scab on every man in the Versailles.
    “One day,” Jack says. “One day she is going to fuck a trainer or the goddamn UPS guy, or he’s going to fuck someone on a business trip, or her best friend, or maybe her sister. Or he’s going to hit her, or gamble away their nest egg, or become an alcoholic, or their kid is going to turn out to be a little sadist who drowns kittens in the bathtub . . .”
    Silver stops hearing him. He watches Shaun climb into the water, sees the way Courtney smiles at him, leaning back against his chest while they watch their son swim. He remembers with painful clarity how it felt to be young and in love, with so much living left to do. He would hate them too, he knows, just like Jack, if he wasn’t so goddamned tired.
    * * *
    It’s late afternoon by the time he gets up to his apartment. He fell asleep in the sun and can feel the first flickers of sunburn spreading across his forehead like a fever. He steps into his kitchen to find Denise sitting at his kitchen table, in jeans and a black T-shirt that makes her look ten years younger, sipping thoughtfully from a can of diet soda. She has been in his apartment exactly twice, last night being the first time, and her presence here is deeply disconcerting to him. His feelings of shame and exposure were ameliorated last night by the darkness and mutual nudity. But now the sun is out and everyone is dressed, and while he’s been known to misread signals before, he’s pretty certain that no one will be getting undressed today.
    He has lost her, he realizes. In truth, he realized it last night. He saw the look on her face when Rich walked out, and he understood that whatever insanity had moved her to sleep with him last night, it was not love, or, at least, not a love with any practical implications. He thinks about Denise and Casey and feels a sense of grief, and then frustration, because it doesn’t seem fair that he keeps losing the same things over and over again.
    Denise looks up at him, her expression tired, her eyes red and somewhat swollen. “You don’t lock your door,” she says.
    “I lost the key.”
    Denise nods. “Of course you did. I assume she didn’t sleep here last night.”
    He doesn’t actually know. He looks around and shrugs. “I guess not.”
    “She didn’t come home.”
    “Did she stay at the Lockwoods’?”
    “No. Valerie has circled the wagons. She’s somehow reached the conclusion that her son is an innocent victim in all of this.”
    “She’s just upset.”
    “Yeah, well. Join the club.”
    Denise sits back in her chair and looks around his kitchen, taking in the shabby veneered wood of his cabinets, the industrial granite countertops, the crappy appliances, the unwashed dishes in the sink. “I feel like you,” she says.
    “What do you mean?”
    She hesitates for a second. “Last night I sat in my house. Rich was gone, Casey was gone, and I sat there, on my living-room couch, just wishing they would come home, even though I knew they wouldn’t. And I felt alone and terrified, and then I thought about you, and I realized, this must be what it feels like for you every day.” She looks up at him, her eyes searching his face.
    He has no idea what she wants him to say. He has always felt this way around distressed women, that there is something they’re waiting for him to say, and if he could only figure out what that is, he could soothe the thing in them that needs to be soothed. He has never figured out what those words are, and he has always believed that if, just once, someone had given him this vital piece of information, his entire life would have shaken out differently.
    “Is that how it is for you?” Denise asks him.
    “Sometimes.”
    “And the rest of the time?”
    He thinks about it for a moment. “I guess I just feel like I’ve disappeared. Like I’m already gone.”
    She absorbs that for a moment, blinking back a couple of unanticipated tears. “I’m sorry, Silver,” she says. “I’m sorry you’ve been so alone.”
    “It wasn’t your fault.”
    She smiles when he says that. “Oh, I know that. Believe me.” He is struck by how beautiful she looks. There’s a version of his life that was meant to be spent with her, and every so often she looks a certain way, just for an instant, and