That Part Was True by Deborah Mckinlay

yourself, if you’ve lived a little. Trouble is, thirty-eight wears off.”
    â€œI don’t think about age, just what I’m doing. Work, mainly. I think about my work a lot.”
    â€œThat’s good,” Jack said. “Work is the lifeblood. Don’t buy into any of this horseshit about following your dreams and pissing time away wondering how you feel about everything. Do the work. You’re not gonna hit the moon with a bow and arrow.” He sounded preachy, even to himself. “Sorry,” he said. “My forty-ninth birthday just passed me at a dead run and I’m getting philosophical.”
    â€œForty-nine? I had you down for late twenties,” she said.
    He laughed. “I guess it’s just…I don’t know, fifty. It’s a time for taking stock. And my inventory is looking dog-eared.”
    â€œSix best-sellers and a play. Not so shabby from where I’m sitting.”
    â€œI guess I’m looking at it from the two divorces and writer’s block angle.”
    â€œWriter’s block. Is that a real thing?”
    â€œNo. It’s bullshit.”
    Hatty brought their food, but Adrienne went on looking at him. She paused from picking a caper from her plate and asked, “Really?” genuinely wanting explanation, interested.
    â€œIt’s a useful term, but the block isn’t really psychological. Not for me anyway. It happens about here.” He indicated his left elbow with the fork in his right hand, then tapped his forehead. “The stuff that starts out up here, doesn’t make it past my elbow in the kind of condition I want it to. It’s not that I can’t write. It’s that I start expecting myself to put down my grand thoughts and have them look as penetrating and erudite on the page as they sounded in my head. I hit these points from time to time when I expect what I write not to need editing. That’s why, in my case anyway, it’s bullshit. Everything needs editing.”
    â€œEverything.”
    â€œEverything: biographies, closets, address books, friendships, fiction, life.”
    She smiled at him and they ate for a while and then she put her fork down with finality, although her plate was still half full.
    â€œHow’d you know about the play?” he asked.
    â€œI saw it. A long time ago, in a little theater in Newbridge. I liked it. I liked it very much, actually.”
    â€œHah. Imagine that.” There was a moment’s silence. He wanted to get off the subject. “I’m guessing I’m not going to be able to talk you into any pie?” he said.
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    She hadn’t come back to the house. They’d said good-bye at the car again. Standing next to it, she had not looked at him in that yearning way women did sometimes on parting. She was sure of herself, this woman. Calm and sure. Initiating their kiss good-bye, Jack had felt calm and sure himself.
    Dear Eve,
    This is a difficult letter to write. And I think, possibly, for you to read. There are so many things that I would like it to say, but I’m not sure that I will find the words. I hope that perhaps you will find them, hidden in mine.
    I am writing to say I am sorry. There, that wasn’t so hard. And yet it has taken me more than twenty years. I have never said it. Not to you. I am saying it now. I know that I behaved appallingly at the end of our marriage, and I am shocked now when I think back to how young you were. Younger than Izzy is, and she seems to me, for all her self-assuredness and competence, not much more than a child.
    I have not come to this acknowledgement lightly, as you will imagine. You were always intelligent and I suspect far more aware of most things than you were given credit for. I remember you, too, as good; thoroughly, fundamentally good. I will do my best to emulate your example from now on. I am fifty now. Too old to be foolish and too young not to make the best of the years left to me,