CHAPTER 9

What Fear Cost

DEE

Some silences are empty. This one is full to bursting.

We walk out across the deck and stop mid-ship, looking up at an ocean that goes on without any interest in us at all. Neither of us speaks. The water does the talking. It slides past the hull in long green folds, endless and indifferent, and I think — not for the first time — that this is why people go to sea to grieve. The ocean is the only thing I have ever met that is bigger than the feeling.

I realize, standing there, that I don’t miss the Gary I knew. What I mourn is that he left before becoming the man I could see he was capable of being. It is a strange grief, mourning a person for who he didn’t turn into. There is no funeral for that. There is no casserole.

I hear John reciting the Serenity Prayer, the way he did every morning of his sobriety, standing at the kitchen window with his coffee going cold in his hand. The courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. And another thing John used to say: The hardest people to forgive are usually the ones trying hardest to forgive themselves.

I wonder if that’s what this is.

The pool deck is loud — music blaring, children shrieking, a cannonball every four seconds and a lifeguard’s whistle answering it. Gary sees me flinch and, without saying anything about it, steers us up a deck and aft, where there are lounge chairs and quiet.

He noticed. He adjusted. He didn’t announce that he’d done it.

Note that, I tell myself. Facts, not fear.

“Did you think I wasn’t worth a goodbye? Even a one-word goodbye?”

It feels good to ask it out loud. I have asked it silently ten thousand times, in the car, in the shower, into the dark of a bedroom that used to have two people in it. Out loud it has edges. Out loud it can cut something.

“I couldn’t bear to type the words. I was a coward.”

“Did you know I wondered whether you were dead? I searched obituaries. For months.” I did. I want him to sit in that. I typed his name into the newspaper of a city I had never visited, again and again, half-hoping — God forgive me — for the clean grief of a death over the dirty grief of being discarded.

He looks away, and his face goes red, and he does not defend himself.

“I never dreamed you’d think that. I’m sorry.”

“Did you ever consider a text? A single emoji?”

“I started many times. I stopped every time.”

“It makes no sense to me. I don’t even know whether I’m more hurt or more angry. I’m confused, mostly.”

We walk on and come to the pickleball court, where another couple is setting up — sixties, matching visors, the loose competence of people who play three mornings a week at home. The paddles are stacked in a bin by the gate, ship-issue, scuffed. And the sight of that bin does something I don’t expect. It swings a door open in me, and I am five years and one ocean away.

The first time Gary asked me to play, I tried to get him to agree to play privately but he insisted on doing it with his entire pickleball set of friends.

I had taken lessons — a nice young pro at the community center, an hour every Saturday for a season — but I had never once played doubles, and doubles is a different animal. Doubles has a partner. Doubles has someone whose afternoon you can ruin.

“I’ll embarrass you,” I told him.

“You won’t.”

“I’ll embarrass myself, then, in front of your friends.”

“You won’t do that either.” He’d looked at me with that steadiness he had even then, before I knew to distrust it. “Everyone I play with is kind, Dee. Nobody keeps score of your worst shot. They keep score of whether you’re fun to be around. You’ll be the most fun person on the court.”

So I bought an outfit. I want to be honest about how much this mattered to me, a grown woman, a widow, a serious person — I bought a new outfit and I laid it out on the bed the night before like a girl before the first day of school. A black skirt and a bright pink top, and little socks with pink on the heels, and I stood in front of the mirror and thought, there she is, there’s a woman who plays pickleball, as though the clothes could reach back in time and give me a whole athletic life I never had.

And the warm-up went well. That is the part I hold onto. Gary and I dinked back and forth across the kitchen line, and he fed me easy ones and called out there it is and you’re a natural and I felt, for about ten minutes, exactly like the woman in the mirror.

Then Kale arrived.

I had heard the name — Gary’s regular partner, played every day, took it seriously. He had said she had a “spectacular serve.” When I met her I tried to keep it light and noted his compliment as a way to get in nice with her. She was the only female in the group so I thought she would appreciate having someone there. What Gary had not mentioned, because I don’t think it had ever occurred to him that a person could be this way, was that Kale took one look at me in my brand-new pink and decided I was a problem to be solved. Clearly an athlete, she was out to destroy the lady.

Nothing you could point to. That was the craft of it. Kale never said an unkind word — never had to. When it was Kale’s turn to serve to me, the ball came low and wide and dying, so that I had to lunge into the corner and shovel it up off my shoetops while Kale watched with a small, patient, disappointed face, as if to say well, we tried. When I managed a decent return, silence. When I missed, a glance at Gary — just a flick of the eyes — that said everything. Every other person I have ever played with says good try and nice hustle and don’t worry about it, my fault. Pickleball people are relentlessly, almost aggressively kind; it is the whole culture of the thing. Kale gave me the evil eye across a net and dropped serves where no sixty-year-old woman on earth could reach them, and never once, not one single time, said the word nice.

I spent that entire afternoon feeling my new outfit turn to a costume on me. By the end I wasn’t playing pickleball. I was managing my own humiliation, which is a game I know far better and have far more practice at.

And Gary — this is the part I turn over now, on this ship, five years later — Gary never saw it. Or if he saw it he didn’t name it, didn’t defend me, didn’t take Kale aside. He was kind to me the whole time and blind to the unkindness happening a foot from his elbow, and I filed that away, back then, in the column I was already keeping without admitting I kept it: lovely man, will not protect you.

When we left the court to grab dinner, Kale glared at me. Full glare, no mistaking it, the look you give a stain. I smiled back the way my mother taught me to smile at people like that, wide and warm and completely closed, and I took Gary’s arm, and I thought: I will never see that person again, and thank God. Part of me wondered if she was the reason Gary ghosted me, did she say something or cause some issue? Probably my paranoia.

I was wrong about never seeing her again, as it turns out. But I didn’t know it then.

“Play with me,” Gary says now, and I come back to the deck, to the scuffed bin and the matching visors and the man five years older asking me the same question he asked me then. “Let’s take those two. It’ll get some of that out of you.”

He has a point, which annoys me.

“I haven’t played in two years. I was never good.”

“Good enough. Together we can handle them.” He glances at me. “One hour of fun, and then I swear I’ll explain everything.”

“The hour is already running.”

“Then I’m spending it on you.”

We each go for a paddle and collide reaching into the bin. We’re eye to eye, close enough that I can smell his soap — the same cedar-adjacent thing, or near enough that my body doesn’t wait for my permission to remember it. I retreat to the court.

“Talk to me constantly out there,” he says. “Talking is the whole game.”

We warm up dinking, back and forth, an easy rhythm, and I hate how quickly it comes back, the muscle memory and the pleasure of it both.

“You’ve got this. You’re already better than the first time you played.”

The first time you played. He says it lightly, and I know he means the warm-up five years ago, the good part, the part before Kale. He remembers a good day. I remember the whole day. That is the difference between us in a single sentence, and I let it go by, because today is about evidence and not about scores I could settle.

They serve; I return it clean.

“Perfect. Like riding a bike.”

The next one comes back deep and behind me. I’m nowhere near it. He’s there — “I’ve got it, no worry” — and puts it into the fence with an entirely unnecessary amount of power, and I understand, watching the ball rattle the chain-link, that he did that on purpose. He could have let it drop and made it look like my miss to save himself. Instead he flung himself at a ball he couldn’t get and buried it spectacularly, so that the point died as his error, loudly, where everyone could see.

Kale would have let it drop and looked at Gary.

“Out. Our serve.”

I serve so hard the ball clears the fence and lands in the wading pool a deck below. A small child shrieks with delight. Somebody applauds.

“Now that,” Gary says, “was full of feeling.”

I laugh despite myself, which makes me angrier, and then it doesn’t.

We win, more or less easily. The matching visors are gracious about it — good games, good games — and mean it, and I feel the difference in my whole body, the difference between a court that wants you there and a court that doesn’t. And walking off, I turn something over carefully, because I have decided today is going to be about evidence.

He never once criticized me. Not one shot. Not one correction. Not one wince.

John used to say a man shows you who he is when you’re losing. He never said what it means when a man shows you who he is on a court where somebody else is being cruel and he doesn’t notice. I suppose I’m still gathering evidence on that one.

“We were a surprisingly good team,” I say.

“Do I still have my hour? I’m hoping pickleball didn’t count against it.”

“It didn’t.”

He comes back from the bar with two sodas and a plate of chips and dip. “Figured you’d worked up an appetite after that small salad.”

Thoughtful. That goes in the column too.

And then, sitting there sweating with a soda in my hand, I notice something I don’t have a column for.

I have been happy for eleven minutes.

I check the feeling the way you’d check a stove you weren’t sure you turned off. Eleven minutes without thinking about my stepmother, or my inbox, or the phone that might ring. And I catch myself waiting — actually, physically waiting — for whatever comes next to come next.

This is what I do now, I think. I don’t enjoy things. I brace.