Chapter 16

She was quite forward.

“Look. I’ve thought of you often. I spied on you remotely insofar as I could. I saw you were married and had a child. Not much else.”

I laughed. “Our generation is not quite so forthcoming online as my daughter’s.”

She asked to see photos of Mattie, and I pulled out my phone.

“I don’t know whether I would have had the courage to come out to my husband if Mattie hadn’t had the courage to come out to me. And I wonder how things would have been different if I had that kind of courage.”

“Well, you wouldn’t have met me,” she said. “You wouldn’t have been a high school teacher married to a lawyer and living on the Upper West Side.”

I looked at her.

She smiled. “I see you as having a string of lovers—women of course—and living in a dive in Greenwich Village while teaching in some underprivileged community school with no interest in attending a teachers conference at a middle school in Queens.”