How to Be a Grown-up (15 page)

Arriving at my brother’s house at the end of the cul-de-sac, the one with the maple leaf wreath, I let myself in the back door. If, in ninth grade, you’d told me I was going to grow up to envy a woman her mudroom, I would never have believed you. But Jen’s was something out of
Better Homes and Gardens,
complete with cubbies for each family member, a labeled sports equipment rack, and a framed chalkboard to jot such reminders as, “Start on stocking stuffers.”

I once heard an organization guru advise working moms to stock a separate school backpack for every day of the week, prefilled on Sunday nights with each day’s requirements to ensure that Little Johnny would never arrive at practice without his cleats. That would be ten backpacks for us Turners. For the cost of the square footage required to store them, we could hire a butler.

Stepping out of my boots I walked around the kitchen island that could have held my kitchen. In the basement, there was a room used only by my brother to watch football and another, used only by Jen, to scrapbook, and still another, where their kids had a stage to put on dress-up shows. There were no sounds of traffic to obscure the whir of the heat coming up through the vent or the wind rustling the branches of the fir tree outside. Was this what Blake and I needed—silence? Space? A place for him to retreat that was on-site? Did we have too much baggage—or were we just crammed unnaturally on top of each other without room to breathe?

My phone rang, startling me.

“Hey!” I answered, walking into the dining room and grabbing the gravy boat.

“Ror!” I was greeted with Blake’s sitcom dad voice.

“What’s wrong?”

“She found it!” he called to whomever was in the room with him. “Just making sure you didn’t get lost, there.”

“You okay?” I asked anxiously.

“In a minute, then! You too, bye!”

I hurried back, blasting the radio to calm my unease. Scrolling through the same stations I’d listened to while dreaming of being anywhere but there, I found the same songs playing as when I’d left town in the nineties. It was such a time warp that I half expected to find Chip Brown waiting to break up with me on the front lawn.

Making my way through an assembly line of McGovern hugs and hellos, I finally arrived in the kitchen, where my father was already carving the turkey and Blake was bookended by my mother’s sisters, who were probably already on their second glasses of chablis. His eyes flashed to mine.

“There she is! Welcome, Victoria.” Mom took the gravy boat before pulling me into her arms. “I’m so happy you’re here! Can you tell the kids to wash up?”

“So, your movie. When will we see it in theaters?” my aunt asked Blake, her palm resting on her cheek. Shit.

“I’ll tell all my friends to go see you,” my other aunt added.

“Well . . .” He gripped his beer. “There’s editing and we never know release dates for sure, but yes, thank you.”

“Rory, you’ll tell us when Blake’s new movie comes out, won’t you? You two are so modest. I mean, you’re friends with the director and everything! It’s like we don’t even have a star in the family.”

“Ah, ha-ha,” I trilled, actually trilled, as I went to the den where the kids were watching a game of Monopoly their older cousins had started hours ago. “Let’s wash up, guys. Grandma’s getting food on the table.”

The blessing bought us a few minutes of relief, but then my brother, Fred, who’d been glued to football for the initial inquisition, turned to Blake across the table. “So, big guy, what are you working on these days?” To their credit, Blake usually regaled us with behind-the-scenes vignettes about failed technical effects or directors acting like children. He liked to hold court, and I loved to sit back with my wine, the drive behind us and a lazy evening ahead, and watch Blake be Blake.

But now he could only gaze down at his plate. “Uh, well, I, uh,” he stammered. “As I was telling these guys, I just finished an indie. It’s, um, a great part, but, uh, hard to know what’ll happen from here.”

“When are you going to be on TV again?” Gus, my nephew, asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Pass me the creamed spinach,” I jumped in. “Did our pies make it out of the trunk?”

“What about directing your own thing?” my dad’s sister asked. “Like Costner did with
Dances with Wolves
?”

I could feel him choosing his words as everything I’d eaten hardened to a brick. “Yes, yes, I should do that.”

“Because I checked the kids’ 529s,” Dad said, reaching for the potatoes. “You haven’t put anything in to match our contributions. You gotta seed it early or the account’s not gonna grow fast enough to cover even a year of college. For Wynn, it may already be too late.”

“Dad,” I suggested, “maybe we should get someone in the city to do our taxes?”

“That’s ridiculous. Why would you waste the money? I know you don’t have it to waste.”

“Honey,” my mother reached across the table with her voice, and my dad filled his mouth with Thanksgiving.

From that point on, Blake went stonily silent, until, as the pies that had gotten crushed under Blake’s duffel were being picked over, he unexpectedly volunteered us for cleanup. “Rory and I’ve got it.”

“Are you sure?” my mother asked. “All by yourselves?”

“Really, babe?” I asked. Didn’t he just want to go lie down? I wanted him to go lie down.

“Yep!”

There were so many dishes it was like we were doing penance. When I took a break to put the kids to bed, we were still only halfway done.

“I needed silence,” Blake whispered when I asked why he had rebuffed everyone’s offers of help. “It was the only way to get a break.”

“So go up to bed,” I whispered back.

“I can’t lie in the dark right now. I’ll go crazy.”

I turned the water back on while he dried. “Do you want to talk about it?” I tried, as most of the guests had left or were snoozing in front of
Independence Day
in the den.

“No, I don’t. Please, Rory,” he begged, looking utterly exhausted. I wanted to touch him.

My phone buzzed by his elbow and he glanced down, his expression shifting. “Who’s Gavin Roth?”

“I’m styling his light fixtures for our next shoot.” I put another casserole in the drying rack.

“I want to give you the right impression,”
he read.

I grabbed the phone from him. “He’s my boss’s boyfriend. It’s about the shoot.”

“In the middle of the night on a holiday?”

“You get calls at all hours from work. I’m sure if I just picked up your phone you’ve gotten a billion texts since we got here—” I did and then went cold. “You’re on Tinder?”

He shrugged, his gaze dropping to his shoes.

“Oh my God, Blake, are you dating?”

“I’m not dating.”

“Sorry, ‘hooking up’? Do they even still call it that?” My uncle coughed in the next room. I stepped close, straining to keep my voice down. “I thought you just needed space. I
believed
that. How could you do this to me?”

“To you? To
you
?” he hissed. “Do you have any idea what you did to
me
? You gave up, Rory!”

“When?” I asked. “When did I give up? I’ve been fighting for us for months, but you had to retreat or whatever the fuck Weinstein called it—”

“You talked to my mother?”

“Of course I talked to your mother! You’ve been unavailable!”

He stepped closer so I was almost under his chin. “Look, you left me first. I got kicked in the balls harder than I ever have and you couldn’t get me to give up what I’ve devoted my whole life to fast enough.”

“Because we’re out of money, you asshole!”

He grabbed my arm and for a split second I thought he was going to lift me onto the counter and fuck me. For a split second, I wanted him to. And then he splattered a fistful of mashed potatoes in my face.

I was stunned. And then I was furious. Blindly furious. I grabbed at whatever I could—turkey fat, breadcrumbs box, serving spoons—and hurled them at him. I lost time. It might have lasted hours or seconds. All I know is that my father screamed my name and we were covered in food, panting. My parents were standing in the doorway, horrified.

“What’s going on?” My mother recovered her voice.

Blake slipped in the mess, holding on to the oven to steady himself as he caught his breath. “We’re getting divorced.”

Part II

Chapter Ten

There are things in my life I call the missables—moments I could have skipped, things I wish I could unknow: walking in on my brother with a
Penthouse
, waking up during my appendectomy (yes, that can happen), Demi Moore’s performance in
The Scarlet Letter.

I add to that list every excruciating minute between crawling into our bed—my bed—the Sunday night after we got back to the city and peeling myself out the next morning. With Blake officially living at Jack’s, I lay there, curled on my side, salty eyes unfocused on the bureau, torturously awake. They say eventually you pass out from pain. But the hurt pinballing through my body was like amphetamines. It was like my bloodstream was the CERN superconductor and the atoms of anguish were flying around, trying to collide and blow me up.

“I just need to—I just need to—I just need to—” My brain started the sentence over and over again, but for the first time since I taped Blake’s face to my social studies binder, I couldn’t finish the sentence. I had done it. Loved him, blown him, given him children, given him space, and yet there I was, there we were.

I cried, deep, wracking, relentless sobs, only to find there was no relief when they subsided.

Hurt supplanted humiliation, which was immediately supplanted by disbelief. How could I have been so stupid not to understand since Labor Day that this was where we were headed? How could he be doing this? Weren’t we worth fighting for?

Was I really getting dumped at forty-one?

The part of me that was a girl wanted to die right there in that bed rather than ever have to say out loud,
Blake left me
. Wanted the mass of pain in my chest cavity to press down harder until my ribs cracked like kindling, puncturing my lungs, ending it.

But, thankfully, the part of me that was a mom was louder. And she bellowed,
You are irrelevant
.

As the sun slumped into my room, I knew I had to get my shit together. I had to shower, have coffee, pack lunches, give hugs to our kids, give explanations, be warm, be reassuring, be
fine
.

“Come on, Rory,” I whispered. “You can do this.”

“Mommy?” Maya whispered back, wriggling under the covers. “Who are you talking to? Is Daddy here?”

“No, duckheart,” I said, rolling over to spoon her. “Just myself.” Her small back felt so good against the ache in my chest.

“Mommy.” She interlaced her tiny fingers through mine.

“Yes?”

“When’s Daddy coming back?”

We had sat them down at my parents, under the supportively disapproving eye of my brother and sister-in-law. Blake and I did our best to waffle our way through every horrible cliché about how much we loved them and each other and how nothing would change.

Only we didn’t love each other, or them, enough to stay together, and everything was about to change. I could see that’s what Wynn was thinking, and I didn’t know how to refute it. I would have given a limb to keep them from going through this, and yet—we were going through this.

“You are going to see Daddy all the time,” I gave a non sequitur answer I suspected I was about to become highly adept at. “Every day, probably.” I tried to reassure her from the certainty that he wanted to be in their life as much as possible and that I would never interfere with that. Of course, that was the same certainty from which I would have, until recently, said we were going to grow old together.

“Will he come to my birthday?”

“Of course. I can’t believe you’re going to be four in less than a month. Four years old, Maya! I’m going to order the decorations today. Have you made a final decision?
Frozen
or
Brave
?”

“Tangled!”

“Ooh,
Tangled
. I did not even know that was in the mix.” And we talked in low voices about decorations until the alarm went off.