A THOUSAND MILES AND 200 ROLLS OF FILM
"Joe?"
Amanda came to an abrupt halt on her way to her table, a bundle of folders clutched against her chest and her mind on the contents, notes from the case she and Francine were working with the obnoxious Agent Doyle. She had not expected her ex-husband to be sitting in the middle of her current husband's favorite diner, but there he was, a cup of coffee in front of him, his menu open.
"Amanda?" Joe looked equally surprised. He half stood, then hesitated, then sat down in the seat with a thump.
"What are you doing here?" Amanda asked. "I thought you had meetings all week."
"I do, I just caught a break and wanted some peace and quiet. Phillip told me about this place."
Amanda nodded. "Lee's got both boys hooked, I'm afraid."
"That's nice," Joe said. He gestured to the seat across from him. "Do you want to —"
"Oh, I —" She'd planned on working through lunch, using the change of scene as a way to prompt new lines of thinking. But she couldn't very well say no and sit across the room with her nose in a folder, so she smiled at him and nodded. "That would be nice."
She drew back the chair and sat down across from him, wishing she'd brought her briefcase. She settled for tucking her files on the seat of the chair beside her and sitting her purse on top.
"Working lunch?" Joe asked. "I don't want to keep you—"
"Oh, no. Just a couple things I was going to mull over," she said, waving a dismissive hand. "It's probably good for me to take a break."
"Phillip said you've been working a lot lately."
Amanda felt a flutter of guilt at those words. She had been working late the last couple of weeks, though Lee had been home a lot to manage dinner and homework and whatever else the boys needed, and when he couldn't be there, Dotty had stepped in. "It goes in fits and starts, I guess. You know how it is."
Joe nodded, his expression suddenly tense.
Amanda flipped over her coffee cup and decided not to ask the follow-up question sitting on the tip of her tongue. Instead, she said, "What's Carrie up to today?"
"Oh, she's spending the day with her mom," Joe said. "Shopping, manicures, a whole day of stuff."
"That's lovely," Amanda said. "They must miss each other a lot."
As soon as she said the words she regretted them. She'd tiptoed around any reference to leaving people behind when she spoke to Joe for so long it was almost a habit now. Lee thought she was ridiculous. Her no-hard-feelings policy was a mystery to him. "There are hard feelings," he said, grumbling about how when it came to Joe, she did all the things she scolded him for over the years.
No hard feelings had turned into some definitely awkward ones. At their dinner a few nights before, Joe had told her about how he wanted to invite the boys to visit him for a month that summer. To pay for them to fly to Estoccia and stay with him and Carrie. Amanda had seen it coming — Joe had dropped hints all through his visit, with references to how easy the flights had been, how smooth his connection, how shiny and modern the airport in Estoccia was.
She'd left that dinner uneasy, not about the boys going but about their desire to go, which she'd suspected — correctly — would be non-existent. Joe had seen them the next day and extended the invitation, and Phillip and Jamie had come home demanding to know if it was compulsory.
Their waitress came and filled Amanda's coffee cup, offering her a menu. She waved it away with a smile and gave her order. She knew what she wanted — she'd been thinking about it all morning, as the AC in the meeting room at the Justice Department blew down the back of her neck. A hot bowl of soup, with a biscuit on the side.
"You must come here all the time," Joe remarked, when the waitress had left them. "Phillip practically recited the menu by heart."
"We all have our favorites, I guess," she admitted. "Lee would tell you to save room for pie."
Joe chuckled. "This doesn't seem like his kind of place."
"Oh, it is," Amanda insisted, thinking of Brenda and her parade of defectors. "When it comes right down to it he likes a good beef dip as much as the next person."
Joe smirked a little into his coffee cup, then his expression sobered. "Did you talk to the boys about the trip?" he asked, abruptly.
She felt a knot form in her stomach. "They told me what they think about the trip, yes."
"I thought they'd be interested," he said. "I thought they'd want to come and they don't."
"It's not that they don't," Amanda said. "It's that they…."
"Don't," he finished for her.
"Look, Phillip's focused on working as a camp counselor this summer. He must have told you that. He's been talking about it non-stop. And Jamie —"
"Jamie just doesn't want to."
Amanda held her breath for a moment, counting, before she spoke again. How could she tell him Jamie's objection was that he didn't feel close enough to his own father? "Jamie just isn't sure. That's all. You know how he is, and it's a long trip, and they've never traveled on their own."
He sighed.
Their food arrived, and the rhythm of the conversation was lost as they both settled into their lunch. Amanda was hungrier than she'd thought, and her soup was exactly the way she liked it. Not too salty, full of barley, beef so tender it almost fell apart in the bowl. Little cubes of potato and carrots and slivers of onion. She felt herself relax a little as she sipped it, and she saw Joe was doing the same as he ate his sandwich, pastrami on rye. He'd spent the entire trip eating things he couldn't get at home, and Amanda knew he and Carrie were filling a suitcase with treats to take back.
"What does Lee think about the trip?" he asked, salting his fries.
Amanda paused, her spoon between the bowl and her mouth. She set it down. "What does Lee think?"
"Yeah."
"He thinks it would be a great experience." She reached for her biscuit and a little pat of butter. "The trip itself and spending a few weeks with you."
She could see it wasn't the answer Joe had expected. She wasn't sure what he thought Lee would say, but this apparently wasn't it. She wasn't stretching the truth, either. She'd thought he'd have a thousand reasons they couldn't go, first and foremost his continuing fears for their safety, instead he'd tried to get them excited about the idea.
Lee had been jealous of Joe once, when Joe had come back to DC, but now they were polite but a little awkward with each other. "He's just so nice," he said. "I want to hate the guy and I can't." Amanda had to admit she'd felt a little vindicated by that — she wondered how people could automatically assume she'd have married a terrible person. Joe wasn't a terrible person, anymore than she was. They'd just made a terrible marriage together.
He wasn't a fantastic father, though. She had always said he'd done his best but when he'd gone overseas again she'd let herself start to wonder, partly because she knew the boys did. She felt guilty about that, as if it were some kind of betrayal, but the facts were the facts. Joe loved his kids but they weren't his first priority and probably never had been.
"Look," she said, "he's been on your side this whole time. I know you don't really believe that, but he has."
Joe chuckled a little, shaking his head. "You sure about that?"
"Of course I'm sure," she said. "What makes you think otherwise?"
The filling of Joe's sandwich had somehow developed a magnetic appeal for him. Amanda watched as he studied it, rearranging a slice of tomato over and over again. It was as if she were watching Jamie, she thought.
"Joe," she prompted. "I know things were a little rough at the start, but I think that's normal when any family goes through change. And we've had a lot of changes in the last couple of years."
"I know the boys were angry at me when I took the job this time," he said. "They told me."
"And so was I, and I told you, too. And then we all moved on." He turned his bright blue eyes toward her, and she realized what he must be thinking. "Now look, that wasn't what i meant. Lee's always been very clear about his relationship with them. He's never once tried to take your place. He's never said a negative word about you going back overseas. He's been nothing but supportive when you're here."
"Well that's good to know, I guess," Joe muttered, contrite. He put his sandwich back together and gave her a long look. "I guess I got the opposite message when he didn't want to join us for dinner the other night, or when he wasn't there when we came to your place last week."
"Oh." Amanda nodded. "I can see that, I suppose. But he really was working last week. One of our cases kind of blew up and he had to stay to lead the team. And the other night…" She hesitated. "The other night he said he felt that you and I should have time to talk about the boys without him around. Which was good in the end, right?"
She wasn't going to tell Joe that Jamie had been feeling down and Lee thought he needed to get out of the house. Or that later she found out that Jamie dreaded the visits with his father, and that Lee had tried to talk him around. She couldn't blame her younger son for the way he felt — his father had been on the periphery almost his entire life. They really hardly knew each other.
The flutter of guilt in Amanda's chest returned, the way it always did when she thought about her sons growing up without their father. Her mother would tell her she was dwelling, and dwelling was no use to anyone. "Besides, those boys had you and now they have Lee. They'll be fine in the end."
She wondered sometimes. She wasn't sure if that was dwelling but she did worry what having a father who slipped in and out of their lives on annual visits would do to them. Would they know how to be fathers to their own kids? Would they want to?
She thought of Lee and her guilt intensified, coloring her cheeks pink. He had worked so hard to build what he had with the boys. He joked he must have run a thousand miles and bought two hundred rolls of film just to get things started. But Amanda knew it was more than that — he'd given hours of his time, changed his entire life to accommodate her family, moved into what she knew he thought of as another man's house. He'd been to ball games and science fairs and helped out with algebra. She knew he'd occasionally felt like he'd never make headway, but he had and now they looked to him for advice or even comfort as often as they did her. More, perhaps.
She thought about the past Friday night, when she'd met Joe for dinner and Lee had taken Jamie out to eat. They'd been sitting on the couch watching television and eating pie out of takeout containers when she'd come in. She'd kissed them both and gone into the kitchen to make tea, and a moment later Lee had appeared beside her, offering her the last bite of his pecan pie and leaning in to murmur in her ear that he'd thought Joe would have come inside.
"He had to go pick up Carrie," she said. "Why?"
Lee tipped his head in the direction of Jamie, who was flipping through the channels.
"Did he want to talk to Joe?" she asked, her voice a whisper.
"I don't know if he wanted to, but he was prepared to," Lee said, his voice low.
So there had been an opportunity wasted, she thought irritably. She tried to tamp down her annoyance and focus on the conversation at hand, though the two were intertwined. She wasn't going to tell Joe about Lee and Jamie going out together. It wasn't fair and it would only serve to make Joe feel worse. Instead, she sipped her soup and waited for him to keep the conversation moving.
"Would Phillip stay at camp the entire summer?" he asked after a minute.
"That's usually what the counselors do, yes," Amanda said.
"The whole two months?"
"The whole two months."
Joe nodded, his gaze on his plate. "And he can't just do it next year?"
"This is the first year he's eligible and he wants so badly to go," Amanda said. "He must have told you about it."
Joe sighed. "Yeah. But I guess I didn't really hear him at first. Is it a sure thing?"
"As far as we know, yes." She hesitated. "Maybe it'd be easier if you came here for a month, instead of them coming to you."
"Amanda, I can't just take off work —"
"I'm just suggesting it. But think about it, Joe — maybe you need to spend a little longer stretch with them before they're comfortable traveling halfway around the world to see you. You know? Maybe that's part of it."
"Are you saying I don't know my own kids?" There was an edge to his voice. She knew she'd hit a nerve and she couldn't blame him, really.
Amanda bit her lip. "I'm saying they're changing all the time. They aren't the little boys you still think they are, but they aren't the logical adults you want them to be. It's messy and complicated, and we just need to work through it." She reached to lay a hand on his wrist. "I know you want to share your home with them, and I know you want to spend more time with them. I just think we need to let them lead the way on this one."
His shoulders relaxed. "Maybe you're right."
Amanda wondered how Lee would react when she told him she was trying to convince Joe to come stay for an entire month. "Good," she could hear him saying, "tell him to come during the big basketball tournament and he can take over the driving."
Of course he'd be joking. He liked going to the basketball games. He didn't even mind the driving. But he wasn't wrong about what Joe should probably be doing with his visits, and the realization hit Amanda like a physical blow.
Joe was a lovely guy in so many ways, but he had no idea where to start with his own kids. Not anymore. And she worked so hard to avoid comparisons, but she couldn't help noticing that Lee had figured out what it took to get on the right track.
A thousand miles and two hundred rolls of film.
