Page 3 of ClickBack

I won’t pretend I was thinking only about myself when I tried on these shorts. I wanted Byron to look. I wanted him to have to rearrange his face in front of the woman he chose. Eighteen months divorced, forty-four years old, and still capable of an expensive, petty decision. My best friend would have recognized it before the dressing-room curtain closed.

My phone lights up.

Di: You look good. Don’t let your ex make you act ugly in fancy clothes.

I look at Rae. She is suddenly very occupied with the cake box.

Me: I don’t act ugly.

Di: Girl, I’ve known you since ninth grade.

I put the phone away. There is no winning an argument with a woman who remembers your original eyebrows.

Jeremy arrives with a gift card and his mother, who has brought a bag too large to slide beneath a chair. Zion leaves his friends mid-sentence to get to his father. Jeremy catches him around the shoulders, studies the shirt, then looks at Rae.

“We gave him merchandise?”

“His grandmother gave him merchandise,” Rae says.

“And this grandmother brought the accessories.” Ms. Kandy lifts her gift bag out of Zion’s reach. “After cake. Don’t pull on it. You see this tissue?”

He sees it and remains unimpressed. Ms. Kandy has never wasted tissue paper on a gift that would fit in a smaller bag. He knows there is something good in there.

She kisses him, then turns to me. “All right, Giselle. We aren’t letting the divorce win today.”

“Can we please not narrate me in front of the children?”

“I said it with love.”

“Use some of that love to put this bag somewhere it won’t trip somebody.”

She laughs and recruits Jeremy to find a spot. He and Rae have been apart far longer than they were together, but on days like this, they fall into the work without needing to negotiate every piece of it. She passes him the list of kids with game cards. He calls the boys over. Zion argues that birthday rules should entitle him to extra credits, and both his parents tell him no at the same time.

I’m smiling when Byron walks in.

I know his entrance before I hear his voice. Shoulders relaxed, chin lifted, that pleasant expression he used to put on for people who had never waited up for him. Sutton follows with her bag held in front of her, smiling toward Rae. She always looks prepared for a conversation she hopes nobody starts.

“Birthday man!” Byron calls.

“Granddad Byron!”

Zion runs to him. Twelve years old until that voice pulls four right out of him. Byron catches him, asks about the shirt, laughs at the answer. I watch them and remember why some decisions took me longer than they should have.

Then Byron sees me.

I get the look I paid for. His attention pauses at my hair, travels, comes back to my face. He starts to say something and changes his mind. I want him to have trouble finding the words. I want Sutton to notice him having it. There is nothing gracious about the little lift of pleasure I get from either possibility, and for a few seconds I don’t care.

Then I recognize the look. That is the part I hadn’t prepared for. I know what used to follow it, how certain I once was that being wanted by him meant being loved by him. My hand tightens around the cake-box lid. I had imagined this afternoon often enough to dress for it, but in every version, I felt better afterward.

“Giselle,” he says.

“Byron.”

Sutton steps beside him. I greet her, too. Behind me, someone drops a full cup of soda, and a boy says, very firmly, that it was already like that. Rae closes her eyes. Jeremy goes for napkins.

The moment is over. Byron asks where they should put Zion’s gift, and I point to the table. That’s all. No music swells. No long-overdue speech arrives. I’m still standing in the same shorts, at the same party, with a child insisting that soda has poured itself.

I reach for a clean cloth.