How to Be a Grown-up (22 page)

Returning home that night reminded me of walking into my parents’ house after a slumber party where I’d watched too many scary movies. An overdose of candy, a shortage of sleep, and enough information about the fate of horny teenagers to put you off orgasms forever. It was suddenly possible that, for no reason at all, someone would pop out of places a person would never have been before—like the tub drain—and try to kill you.

I kept hugging the kids, needing to reclaim a sense of ownership over our space and drown out Benjamin Stern’s invocations. “Mom,” Wynn said to me as he overheard me yawning my way through
Llama Llama Misses Mama
, “watch a show already.”

The next day I sat in the chair across from Blake at Melvin’s. The two men went back and forth about who would take what flatware, and I silently asked Blake,
Even if you could take it all, would you?

Then, when the elevator door closed behind us, Blake absent-mindedly beat-boxed the base that had been thumping from the karaoke club. And I grinned. And he lifted a finger. And I lifted a finger, like we used to for our performance of the world’s tiniest disco, and he laughed. And I laughed. Then he looked so sad it felt as if the weight of our loss could plunge us to Middle Earth.

But it was ours
. Our loss. And Benjamin Stern could find someone else to freak out, thank you very much.

“Dad wants to know where the checkbook is.”

“Wynn?” I asked, jerking to my feet from where I’d been showing Ruth how to lay out the ropes at the studio for the Valentine’s shoot. Before which I’d shown her how to unpack the crate. Before which I’d shown her how to fit the crate into the back of a van.

“He wants the checkbook—”

“Ror?” Blake was suddenly on the line.

“You’re over?” I asked, alarmed by my alarm. Of course he was over. He picked them up from school.

“On time, yes.”

“That’s not what I meant. Why aren’t you on your way to ballet?” I asked.

“Maya, uh, forgot her tights,” he said. But I was sure I’d put them in her bag that morning. “Look, I can stay late tonight if you want,” he offered. “My thing got canceled.”

“Why do you need the checkbook?” And why was he asking the kids about it?

“I was, uh, trying to remember what I paid the guy to retouch that head shot.” He sounded sheepish. “I want him to work on a new one to take out with me to LA for pilots.”

“You’re going out for pilot season?” I asked.

“Of course I’m going out for pilot season.”

“But you don’t have an—”

“I have contacts,” he cut me off. “I have thirty years in this business. I am liked and well respected.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean—it’s just, um, I have the checkbook with me,” I lied.
Why did I lie? Why did he need a new head shot? This whole thing felt off. Or did it?
“Can’t you just download the Chase app? I mean it’s all online.”

“I don’t want to stand here and download an app, Rory.” And then, as if challenging, he said, “Just read it to me.”

Only I couldn’t because it was at home in one of the wallpapered boxes over the TV. For once I thanked God that he didn’t know which end was up with our bills. “It’s at the office. In my desk. And I’m at a shoot. I’ll get it and bring it home.”

“Okay . . . I guess. I mean, that seems like a hassle, but if you’re cool with that.”

“Absolutely! No prob. You guys better hustle. You know how they are if you’re late.” Now I was the one using a sitcom voice. Did he notice? The line went dead.

“Ruth?” I summoned her.

She turned from her phone, no doubt tweeting my narration of how to do her job—sorry—
internship
.

“Road trip.”

Ruth Yelczek wasn’t the last person I’d have chosen to stand in my living room as I shoveled everything from our desk into two suitcases and a duffel bag as if a mob was storming the embassy, but she was close.

“So you really like Paris, huh?” She looked derisively at the prints I’d blown up from a shoot Blake had met me on years earlier. “You don’t think the iconography is a little clichéd?”

“Ruth.” I heaved the duffel onto my shoulder, bound for the security of Jessica’s Brooklyn basement. “I like Paris. People like Paris. They write poems about it and songs about it and sell their souls to cram into economy just to visit it for a weekend. Paris is real.” I wheeled a suitcase to her. “It’s older than you, bigger than you, and more beautiful than anything you can dream up.” I put her hand on the handle. “Someday you will go. You will remember asking if I liked it as if you were asking about hot sauce. And you will cringe. So in the interest of saving you from wasting time in Rodin’s sculpture garden feeling like an asshole, no more talking until we’re back on the island of Manhattan, ’kay?”

“What’s with the puffy-faced girl?” Jessica asked thirty minutes later as she leaned out the doorway of her Cobble Hill brownstone to peer at the curb where Ruth was smoking her way through her Worst Day Ever. “I don’t know if white slavery’s the answer, Ror.”

“If only she was worth selling. My intern. She’s got a Working for Old Bitches checklist, and I’m helping her cross off every box.” I exhaled, my breath visible in the cold air. “If Kathryn really wants to fuck JeuneBug, just lock Ruth in a room with Taylor and see which one’s tone-deaf declaratives make the other’s ears bleed first.”

“How are you dealing with that? Fucking JeuneBug?”

“I’m not. Dealing, that is. So, both boys are sick?”

“Yes.” She pushed her fists into her hoodie pockets and crossed the two sides in front of her. “And Miles is in Milwaukee for a conference and I have twelve posts to edit. God forbid I actually use the family sick leave my boss championed to the city council. There’ve been so many bodily fluids on me in the last twelve hours I have stopped changing my clothes, Rory. I stopped . . . changing . . . my clothes. Hey.” She perked up. “Does your intern want to nanny? Want to sell her to me?”

“Thank you so much for taking these.” I lifted the last suitcase over the threshold into her vestibule. “I have to get back to the shoot.”

“Seems kind of extreme, doesn’t it?” she asked. “Ror, unless Blake’s gotten a quickie law degree, he’s got nothing to fight you with,” she said with all the authority of someone in a T-shirt crusted in vomit. “He can want
all
the things Benjamin Stern said he’d come for. He can
want
them, but, I mean, I’m sorry, Blake and what army?”

“Rory?” Ruth called.

“Yes, coming!” I shouted back.

“No, um, I have to go,” she said, stubbing out her butt.

“What?” I asked.

“I have class.” She peeled herself away from the Honda she’d been leaning against.

“Why didn’t you tell me that?!” I demanded.

“I can help you tonight . . . maybe.” She started to walk away to the train, not even waiting for a ride back to the city.

“Mommy?” Jessica’s son, Henry, called from inside.

Jessica reached over our luggage to hug me. “Don’t kill her,” she whispered in my ear.

“There’s poop on the floor!”

“Don’t kill
them,”
I whispered back.

Chapter Thirteen

I thought I just needed some quiet time to catch up with myself and get a grip and waited eagerly for the day I’d take the kids to JFK to meet Val, who was flying them to meet Blake in LA for midwinter break.

They’d been wrestling over the headphones the whole cab ride, with Wynn taking Maya’s fluffy pink ones just to torment her because he was sick of me asking him to behave like the older one and me thinking,
I cannot get you guys through security fast enough
. But as they disappeared into the long line, their laden backpacks sagging over their bums, whatever had been binding my heart together abruptly disintegrated.

I cried so hard that the cabdriver, stuck with me on the highway, kept warning that I “better not to throw up.” Back in our apartment, I sat on their made beds in their silent rooms.
Come on, Freddy Krueger,
I thought,
climb out of a desk lamp and finish me.

So I walked right back out. I couldn’t be with Claire or Jessica, couldn’t bear to talk about it. I tried sitting at a hotel bar, but it was so terribly wrong I left before the bartender delivered my order. I bought a movie ticket but couldn’t make sense of what was happening on the screen.

I considered buying sneakers in which to roam the city for the next seven days. Maybe walk to the ocean, a pilgrimage to bring my family back. Standing outside the Runner’s Shop wiping my nose with a Dunkin’ Donuts napkin, my cell lit up with a number I didn’t recognize.

“Rory McGovern?”

I caught myself midsob. “Yes?”

“Hey, it’s James Stanhope. We met New Year’s Eve. Remarkable bathroom, unremarkable party?”

My puffy eyes went round. Hot guy? With the business card? The business card I’d kissed, thanked, and tucked in my jewelry box next to the kids’ baby teeth?

“Bad time?”

Ha. “Just leaving a late brunch, actually.”

“So, your work’s intriguing. Really smart stuff. You’ve got a great eye.”

“Two of them, I’ve been told.” I spun to my haggard reflection in the window. Had he tracked me down? Or stumbled on JeuneBug?

“As I recall, your attributes are many. Look, I’d love for you to come over.”

“Oh?” I fought the temptation to grab a passing stranger and confirm she could hear him, too. That the Boston cream donut hadn’t tipped me into dementia.

“Much as it pains me, my daughter’s outgrowing her nursery,” he explained. “I’d like your take.”

Oh, this was for work. Back to sad—or not! I’d never been asked to design a space people actually lived in for someone other than a friend. “I see. How old is she?” I asked.

“Suki just turned four.”

“My daughter’s the same age. Let me guess. She’s thinking something along the lines of Elsa’s castle?”

“And me with my bachelor pad . . .”

“Elsa’s castle as sublet to James Bond?” I suggested.

“Or vice versa.” Was that the sun coming out? “When would work for you?” he asked.

Now. Right fucking now. “Normally I’m fully committed, but my children just left to see their father for the break. I have some flexibility.”

“First trip?” he dropped his voice in concern. Oh please, no, not concern. Concern plus smoldering was going to make me run—in snowboots—to wherever he was.

I bit hard on the inside of my cheek. “Yep.”

“Yeah, there’s no comfortable chair, huh?”

“No.” I managed a little laugh. “Doesn’t seem to be.”

“Well, Ms. McGovern, come over. We’ll find you someplace to sit down.”