All Adults Here(100)

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—

The wedding had been small: the children, the grandchildren, a few friends. Nicky was already ordained from the internet (he’d married half a dozen pairs of his friends), and he performed the service, swearing to both of them that it was in all ways legal and legitimate. Porter cried, Cecelia cried, Wendy cried. They stood in a circle in the gazebo at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning. Nicky read a Mary Oliver poem and Birdie slid a ring onto Astrid’s finger and Astrid slid a ring onto Birdie’s finger and then there they were, in the middle of town, brides. Afterward, they all went to Spiro’s for pancakes.



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—

The ship had warned that internet service was spotty when they were at sea, and so Astrid made sure to find the business center. She wanted to check in at home before they were too far, just in case. She and Birdie sat in heavy chairs and dialed into a FaceTime with Porter. Astrid clapped her hands over her mouth when the screen went from showing their own faces to showing Eleanor Hope, her gummy mouth snacking on her mother’s index finger.

“How is it?” Porter asked, only the lower half of her face in the frame.

“Great!” Birdie said.

“Great!” Astrid said. She squeezed Birdie’s thigh. “She’s gotten bigger since yesterday, don’t you think?”

“Mom, have fun, please. Birdie, please make her have fun. Eleanor has not done anything exciting, I promise.” Onscreen, the baby sucked and sucked, drenching Porter’s finger.

“Well, no,” said another voice in the background. The screen swiveled and Nicky’s face swooped down to fill the frame. He was grinning, his open mouth so large on the computer screen that Astrid could see his fillings. “Eleanor rolled over, and then she rolled back! It was epic.”

Astrid moaned. “Oh, no, I knew we were going to miss something.”

Elliot appeared over his brother’s shoulder. “It really was epic.”

Porter took the phone back. “Shut up, guys. Mom, it’s fine. Birdie, you guys have fun. Go adopt a seal, save a glacier, please, something.” She pointed the camera back toward the baby, whose enormous brown eyes blinked at them.

Astrid rubbed Birdie’s back. “Yes. Yes, we will.”

Birdie blew a kiss. “Love you, Eleanor!”

There was so much that Astrid hadn’t considered: getting married again, having someone to coparent, copilot, cograndparent! What a thing to do, to skip having children and go straight to being a grandparent. Birdie was magnificent at it: Of all the adults, she was the best at dancing Eleanor to sleep. Maybe it was her arms, strong from decades of steady scissor-holding, maybe it was that Astrid had used up her powers on her own children, maybe it was just that Eleanor and Birdie were fast friends. Astrid hadn’t thought of herself as one of those people who just wanted to be married, but now that she was, she was so delighted, all over again. The word wife, which had once felt oppressive, diminutive, belittling—she thought of all the times she’d been introduced simply as Russell’s wife, with no additional qualifying details, nothing so brash as a name—now the word wife meant something else. It wasn’t Russell’s fault, it was the world’s! Now that it was a double—your wife, my wife—the word felt twice its original size. This was how it was supposed to feel. It wasn’t just that she belonged to someone else, it was that she belonged.

“Mom, it’s fine,” Porter said. “We are all fine. Honestly. We are all adults here. Except for Eleanor. She’s just a baby. But we’ll be fine. We love you. Have fun.”

“Okay,” Astrid said, and then Porter and Eleanor’s round cheeks vanished into thin air too quickly, and she and Birdie were left staring at their own reflections. Sometimes Astrid thought about everything in her life that could have been different—all the men and women she could have married, having her children or not having any children at all, moving to Paris, she and Russell dying in bed together at a hundred years old. She thought about how every decision of hers had rippled into her children’s lives, even this one, when she was still their mother every day but not actually in charge of their lives, not making decisions on their behalf. People said that everyone was born alone and everyone would die alone, but they were wrong. When someone was born, they brought so many people with them, generations of people zipped into the marrow of their tiny bones. She reached under the bolted-down desk and took Birdie’s hand and it felt just the way it had felt on their first date. Astrid had still been young then, though she hadn’t known it. Was it like that until you died, always realizing how young you’d been before, how foolish and full of possibility? Astrid hoped so. Outside, sunlight sparkled off the surface of the water, as if the ocean wanted to show the sky exactly how astonishing it was. Every day was a new day. She would call Cecelia later, and Wendy and the boys, her whole family. She’d call them until they were sick to death with love, just like she was. Astrid looked at their reflections on the blank screen, at herself and her wife, and felt so, so happy.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


My life changed enormously over the writing of this book, and so please forgive my lengthy acknowledgments. I was pregnant while writing my last two books (with two separate children—I am neither a speed machine nor an elephant), but while writing All Adults Here, I birthed a bookstore, with the help of my husband.