He asked his boys to hold their questions until he finished with what he was about to tell them.
He hadn’t rehearsed, but he had thought through what he wanted to say.

One son was fifteen, the other two years older.

The boys’ father and mother have now been married nearly twenty year and have lived in the same home since the boys were toddlers. The kids are thriving in neighborhood schools, thank you, and by every measure life is good.

The man had watched attitudes toward divorce change from being seen as a sin, to being seen as a failure, to being seen as merely a mistake; until finally divorce had become just another rite of passage.

He had waited to tell the boys because he’d seen family uncertainties haunt several of their friends.

There’s a old-school steak house in the city where it’s easy to imagine people of substance meeting to discuss things of importance. He and the two young men had things to talk over.

Their mother was away on business, so that Saturday night in autumn was as good as any. The younger son, who is interested in a culinary career, visited the restaurant’s website to explore how their entrees would be aged, prepared and presented.

Something about the man’s tone of voice and his sons’ body language caused the waiters to hover within earshot.

He told the boys about the French woman he had married when he was young, about a number of she-did-him and he–did-her wrongs as well as the many kindnesses they had shared; that she was disappointed that he didn’t want to move to France. It came no surprise that their father and his first wife fought. The man admits to having a temper.

The boys were attentive as he laid out the experience.

When his oldest asked if they were going to be “meeting some new friends,” he explained there were no children from the earlier union. “Is this going to affect my college fund?” he also wanted to know — this from a kid who would move heaven and earth to get into a top-ranked engineering program.

His brother, who has a Bogart-Eastwood kind of quiet about him, proposed that his mother and father were the best parents anybody ever had.

By the time the rib-eye, the sirloin and filet mignon had arrived, the business at hand had ended. When the car was brought around the man slipped the valet far more than his usual tip.

He’d been drinking a bit so he deputized his son with a learner’s permit to get them home — guiding the new driver (metaphor alert) through a confusing maze of dead-ends and one-way streets.

Later, at home, they looked at photographs of grandparents and aunts and uncles posing alongside their father’s first wife. None of the boys’ relatives ever let on that their father had been married before.

All things in the fullness of time.