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Do you remember what you said to me on our wedding day?
If asked, Philomena wouldn’t be able to tell you their first meeting. She did remember the first lie though. She really hadn’t meant for it to be one.
“I studied accounting,” she told him.
“Accounting,” he parroted, nodding as if she had fulfilled some unknown criteria. “That’s...steady. Good.”
She frowned, realizing the sarcasm had come out wrong. The alcohol wasn’t helping. Did the man not recognize her? They were in eyeshot of the theatre!
“...is it?” she asked.
Caspar nodded again. He was just the other side of tipsy. The wine had been good at dinner. “You could build a family on an accountant’s salary.” He seemed unaware of the effect his words were having on her.
You’ll die alone and unwanted, her mother had said.
“I’m an accountant,” she said. Really, how hard could it be?
You said, “the greatest gift you can give someone is to know them and love them anyway. Philomena has given me that and I will do anything for her.”
“Don’t make that face.”
“I just don’t think it’s a good idea, okay? I’m allowed to have an opinion.”
“You know, I was hoping for some support.”
“I just don’t think you’re a management type. I know you, Caspar.” Philomena drummed her fingers against the kitchen table. Caspar had begun closing all the cupboards a little too harshly, which meant he was mad. Wasn’t he always. “You’d have to spend more time there–and you hate the DMV.”
Caspar stilled. “I could quit.” His voice was small.
“You’re comfortable there,” Philomena noted. “That’s not nothing.”
But it’s not enough, is it? Gratitude isn’t love. You tried so hard to be in love that we forgot what it was.
“I told you to wear the button down!” she hissed. “I even put it on the door to make it easy! How hard is it to do this one thing?” She gripped the steering wheel tightly.
Caspar huffed. “They’re my parents. They don’t care what I wear.” She could only half make out his face in the streetlights flickering through the car windows as they travelled.
“It makes us look like idiots. Like we’re failing as parents and I’m failing as a mother.”
“You’re not…you’re not failing as a mother.” His eyes flicked back to where David was sleeping in his booster seat in the back. David had heard his parents argue enough times that he was unbothered. Safely inoculated. “And my moms love you.”
She sighed. He was such an idiot sometimes.
“I love you,” she said quietly after a while, mostly for lack of anything better to say.
Caspar was staring out the window absently. Maybe he hadn’t heard her.
She had just worked up the nerve to repeat herself when he turned on the radio.
Philomena hated this song.
I loved you too much to let go. You didn’t love me enough to leave.
“I need a recorder for my son,” she told the worker. The proprietor of the music shop, if she wasn’t mistaken.
The man had deep smile lines. His eyes were a remarkably flat shade of green. “Oh, I think we have some in the back. They’ve been flying off the shelves–I haven't had a chance to restock. I’ll just be a moment, love.” He flew into the back room.
Philomena’s attention was drawn to the piano in the corner. A little girl had pressed down on a few keys as she passed it, her mother grabbing the girl's arm and gently pulling her out the door.
Philomena frowned. Something about those notes…
She pressed the keys and found herself completing the melody. By the time she was done, the proprietor of the shop was looming over her holding a red plastic recorder to his heart. “That was excellent! So much emotion!...are you alright, love?”
Pilomena frowned. She touched her face and realized her cheeks were wet. She needed to blow her nose.
“I used to be a professional.” it wasn’t something she had admitted in a long, long time. Somehow the fact that people used to pay good money to see her play had become embarrassing.
“Used to?” the man sounded heartbroken. Maybe he could be for the both of them.
“I decided to focus on having a family.”
The proprietor frowned at the recorder. “Well, you got as you wished. A life is best when chosen, I say.”
“He’s not my husband’s,” she said, like it was a normal response. “I told him today and he..”
The man’s eyes were soft. “Did he leave?”
Philomena shook her head. “He didn’t seem to care. I thought it was nice, at first…but then…”
She stood up. “Your piano needs tuning.” She grabbed the recorder from him and walked out without paying. Tears filled her eyes once more. The recorder was red. Red was David’s favourite colour.
I loved him too, but you loved him more than you loved me.
Divorce papers seemed like a hail mary, but how else was she supposed to wake him up from whatever the hell fugue state had possessed him to just..walk out like that.
He hadn’t even said where he was going.
He hadn’t even answered her phone calls unless she pretended she might have information on where their son was.
“Send them,” she told the lawyer.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
“I saved him,” Philomena mused. “That’s got to be worth something.” She wasn’t the Philomena Caspar had told her about: the accountant, the suburbanite, the woman with secrets Caspar never did figure out.
Instead, she had led a life of science and engineering. “The Ex Philomena” the diner crew insisted on calling her.
In the end though, as it often was with her and Caspar, the various timelines weren’t all the same, but they sure did rhyme.
“You did,” Leif agreed. He was nursing a beer on the stool beside her. The post-Krok celebrations had been going on for a few hours now, but Leif was sober. “You saved us all.”
It actually took her a moment to parse out what he was referring to. When she had heard David was in danger (“you left him where?!” she had shouted at Caspar), she had set off in her own space-time machine (which she could steer, thank you very much ridiculous husband) for Cryptessia, only begrudgingly stopping for the other members of her husband's scooby crew.
She frowned at Leif. She had felt this way before, when she discovered a cure for the pandemic that had been sweeping her world so that her shipments of gold would stop getting interrupted or when she had slowed her aging process to a halt so she had more time to perfect her androids. Like everyone else had become so obsessed with the means that they didn’t notice the ends she had reached.
Philomena waved away Leif’s statement. “Yes, but I saved him.” She gestured to where her son appeared to be instructing Fiona on keg stand techniques. Caspar had made his way across the diner to support her legs in the air. His brow was furrowed and he kept saying inane things like “don’t fall” and “we can just sit down”.
Philomena had programmed her androids with three distinct tasks: to obey her, to confront her husband, and to protect their child from serious injury or death.
It had been that last command that had saved this David’s life. It had also been a last-minute addition to their programming.
“I made them to hunt down my husband–every last version of him–and instead…”
Leif was studying her. “It’s like you did all the right things for all the wrong reasons,” he said finally.
Philomena was tired of his musings though. She grabbed at the beer he was holding loosely in his hand and took a swig. At least one of them should make use of it. ‘Come on.” She stood and tugged at his shirt sleeve. “I’m leaving in an hour and it’s been forever since I’ve had sex”
That gave Leif a start. “...I’m sorry?”
Philomena drummed her hand on the bar impatiently. “I have spent the last few days watching my ex-husband make eyes at that teenager over there”--she jutted her chin at where Ava had squished herself against Caspar’s side–”and it has brought to my attention the fact that it has been far too long.”
Leif was staring at Ava. The doctor’s smattering of grey hair was shining under the diner’s lights. “...teenager?”
Philomena rolled her eyes. “I am two-hundred and six years old. Caspar is one hundred and seventy five. Comparatively, yes, Dr. Maddox is a teenager. Also, yes, before you ask: I looked inside Caspar’s head it has been well over a century of celibacy for him too. Which I think we can both agree explains a lot.”
“You’re two-hundred and six years old?”
This was going to take all night, wasn’t it? “Forget about that. Let’s go.”
“Wait I just…there’s a code.”
“Seriously? Caspar! Leif wants to know if he can sleep with me.”
Caspar looked baffled. “Why are you asking me?”
David muttered something along the lines of “Mom.”
“There, see? It’s fine. Let’s go.”
“Wait,” Leif protested “what makes you think I want to sleep with you?!”
“Because,” Philomena smiled coyly at him. “If you do, I’ll tell you why your perpetual motion machine isn’t working…and how to fix it.”
“Are you trying to bribe me with science?”
“Yes.”
Leif looked up at the ceiling. “I have terrible taste in women. Fine”
She smiled at him and led him up to the rooftop.
I let you go, Caspar.