It was after one o’clock when he pulled into the driveway, so he entered the house as silently as he could, sliding the bolt gently home.
“I am awake, Kevin. It is all right.”
“What are you doing up? It’s very late, Abba.” He used the Hebrew word for father, as he always did.
Sol Laine, in pajamas and robe at the kitchen table, raised a quizzical eyebrow as Kevin walked in. “I need permission from my son to stay up late?”
“Who else’s?” Kevin dropped into one of the other chairs.
“A good answer,” his father approved. “Would you like some tea?”
“Sounds good.”
“How was this talk?” Sol asked as he attended to the boiling kettle.
“Fine. Very good, actually. We had a drink with the speaker afterwards.” Kevin briefly considered telling his father about what had happened, but only briefly. Father and son had a long habit of protecting each other, and Kevin knew that this was something Sol would be unable to handle. He wished it were otherwise; it would have been good, he thought, a little bitterly, to have someone to talk to.
“Jennifer is well? And her friend?”
Kevin’s bitterness broke in a wave of love for the old man who’d raised him alone. Sol had never been able to reconcile his orthodoxy with his son’s relationship with Catholic Jennifer—and had resented himself for not being able to. So through their short time together, and after, Kevin’s father had treated Jen like a jewel of great worth.
“She’s fine. Says hello. Kim’s fine, too.”
“But Paul isn’t?”
Kevin blinked. “Oh, Abba, you’re too sharp for me. Why do you say that?”
“Because if he was, you would have gone out with him afterwards. The way you always used to. You would still be out. I would be drinking my tea alone, all alone.” The twinkle in his eyes belied the lugubrious sentiments.
Kevin laughed aloud, then stopped when he heard the bitter note creeping in.
“No, he’s not all right. But I seem to be the only one who questions it. I think I’m becoming a pain in the ass to him. I hate it.”
“Sometimes,” his father said, filling the glass cups in their Russian-style metal holders, “a friend has to be that.”
“No one else seems to think there’s anything wrong, though. They just talk about how it takes time.” “It does take time, Kevin.” Kevin made an impatient gesture. “I know it does. I’m not that stupid. But I know him, too, I know him very well, and he’s. . . . There’s something else here, and I don’t know what it is.”
His father didn’t speak for a moment. “How long is it now?” he asked, finally.
“Ten months,” Kevin replied flatly. “Last summer.”
“Ach!” Sol shook his heavy, still-handsome head. “Such a terrible thing.”
Kevin leaned forward. “Abba, he’s been closing himself off. To everyone. I don’t . . . I’m afraid for what might happen. And I can’t seem to get through.”
“Are you trying too hard?” Sol Laine asked gently.
His son slumped back in his chair. “Maybe,” he said, and the old man could see the effort the answer took. “But it hurts, Abba, he’s all twisted up.”
Sol Laine, who had married late, had lost his wife to cancer when Kevin, their only child, was five years old. He looked now at his handsome, fair son with a twisting in his own heart. “Kevin,” he said, “you will have to learn—and for you it will be hard—that sometimes you can’t do anything. Sometimes you simply can’t.”
Kevin finished his tea. He kissed his father on the forehead and went up to bed in the grip of a sadness that was new to him, and a sense of yearning that was not.
He woke once in the night, a few hours before Kimberly would. Reaching for a note pad he kept by the bed, he scribbled a line and fell back into sleep. We are the total of our longings, he had written. But Kevin was a song-writer, not a poet, and he never did use it.
Paul Schafer walked home as well that night, north up Avenue Road and two blocks over at Bernard. His pace was slower than Dave’s, though, and you could not have told his thoughts or mood from his movements. His hands were in his pockets, and two or three times, where the streetlights thinned, he looked up at the ragged pattern of cloud that now hid and now revealed the moon.