Chapter 42: Saturday

I wore the green dress.

Not because it was a special occasion in the formal sense. But because the last time I had worn it Chase had looked at me in a doorway and said that colour like it was the beginning of a sentence he didn't finish, and I figured if there was ever a day that needed something that had already proven itself, it was this one.

Chase picked me up at ten. He was wearing a dark shirt and his jaw was doing the tight thing and he had clearly been awake earlier than necessary because there were the particular shadows under his eyes that only appeared when he had been up since before six.

"You slept," I said.

"A little."

"Chase—"

"I'm fine," he said. "I just want today to go well. For Micah."

I looked at him. "It's going to go however it goes. And whatever that is, you'll handle it. You always do."

He looked back at me. Then he reached out and straightened the collar of my jacket, which did not need straightening, and left his hand against the side of my neck briefly.

"Thank you for coming," he said.

"Micah asked me to be here," I said. "There was no world in which I wasn't."

He nodded. We walked to the car.

They met at a park.

Not the campus one. A bigger one across the city with a proper playground and a café at the entrance and enough open space that nobody felt trapped. Chase had chosen it deliberately — somewhere Micah could move around, somewhere that didn't feel like a formal thing even if it was.

His dad was already there when we arrived. Standing near the café entrance with his hands in his jacket pockets, and from a distance I could see the resemblance to Chase even more clearly than I had at the restaurant — the height, the jaw, the way he held himself. He was not with his girlfriend. He had come alone, which I thought said something.

Micah saw him from the path.

He went still for about three seconds — which for Micah was a geological age — and then he looked up at Chase and Chase crouched down to his level and said something quietly and Micah listened and nodded and looked back at his dad across the path.

Then Micah walked over.

Not running. Walking. With the particular deliberateness of a six year old who had decided how he was going to do something and was doing it exactly that way.

Chase's dad crouched down when Micah got close. He said something. Micah said something back. There was a moment where neither of them moved and then Micah stepped forward and let himself be hugged and Chase's dad closed his eyes and held his son and from where I was standing next to Chase I could see his shoulders shaking slightly.

Chase made a sound beside me. Not quite a breath. Not quite a word.

I took his hand.

He held on without looking at me.

We stood there on the path while a father held his six year old son for the first time in over a year and the park went about its Saturday business around all of us entirely indifferent.

After a moment Micah pulled back and looked at his dad very seriously and said, at a volume that carried: "Do you know about Gerald?"

Chase's dad blinked. "What?"

"Gerald is retired now," Micah said. "Zara the Second is in charge. She has a gold crown. I can show you the drawing if you want."

Chase's dad looked completely lost but he said yes he would very much like to see the drawing and Micah immediately turned and ran back to us to retrieve his sketchbook from his bag which he had insisted on bringing specifically for this purpose.

Chase looked at me.

"Zara the Second," I said quietly.

"With the gold crown," he said back.

We stood there and both tried very hard not to laugh and mostly succeeded.

— — —

They spent two hours in that park.

Chase and I sat on a bench near the playground and watched Micah pull his dad from the swings to the climbing frame to the zip line with the efficient energy of a six year old who had an agenda and was implementing it. Chase's dad followed everything Micah directed him toward with the focused attention of a man who understood he was being given something he did not deserve and was not going to waste a second of it.

At one point Micah sat at the top of the climbing frame and pointed at something in the distance and his dad climbed up beside him and they sat there together looking at whatever it was and talking and I watched Chase watching them.

"You okay?" I said.

"Yeah." He said it slowly. Like he was checking as he said it and finding it to be true. "It's strange. Watching them. It makes me—" He paused. "It makes me angry and relieved at the same time. That he's here. That Micah is happy right now. That it took this long." He shook his head slightly. "All of those things simultaneously."

"That's allowed," I said. "You don't have to land on one feeling."

"I know." He looked at the climbing frame. "My dad asked if he could see me. Separately. Not today, not with Micah. Just us." He paused. "He said there are things he wants to explain that he couldn't say in front of a six year old."

"Are you going to go?"

He was quiet for a moment. "I think so. Not yet. But I think eventually yes."

"That's enough for now."

"Yeah." He leaned back against the bench. "It's enough."

At noon Micah came running back to us with his dad two steps behind and announced he was hungry with the urgency of someone reporting a crisis. We went to the park café. The five of us — Chase, me, Micah, Chase's dad, and a version of Saturday that none of us had planned for a year ago — sat at a table near the window and ordered food and Micah talked about Zara the Second for approximately fifteen uninterrupted minutes while his dad listened and asked questions and looked, across the table at Chase, with an expression that said everything the visit needed to say.

Chase met his eyes once.

Neither of them looked away immediately.

It was not a resolution. It was not forgiveness wrapped up and finished. It was just two people acknowledging each other across a café table with a six year old between them who had a sketchbook full of dinosaur dynasties and had asked for this day himself.

It was a beginning.

Long and complicated and probably worth it.