All Adults Here(30)

What Porter couldn’t (and wouldn’t) say was how often she imagined going back in time and marrying Jeremy Fogelman, how many times over the year she had punched things in her bedroom and thought, What the fuck, twenty-year-old Porter? Who were you waiting for? Because then she could have a person who she loved instead of just borrowing him illicitly, on and off, over the last eighteen years. She hadn’t told anyone. Everyone—her mother, Rachel, John Sullivan—knew that Jeremy had been her boyfriend when she was a kid, but no one knew that it had gone on well after Jeremy got married. They often met at the barn, but sometimes, when they were feeling a little luxurious, they went to Manhattan, and got the smallest room at the best hotel they could afford. Vets had annual conferences, too, in sexy locations such as Minneapolis in February! Memphis in August! Porter could always find a handy excuse. It came back to planting the flag: He was hers first. Whatever came after got layered on top, like whipped cream and sprinkles. Whatever she and Jeremy were to each other, it was the base. They were the bananas in the banana split.

The last time they’d slept together, almost two years ago, they’d gone into the city—all the way to Brooklyn, where people their age were still finding themselves. They did what they usually did, which was that Porter checked into a hotel (this time a new and glossy place that was shaped like an upside-down pyramid), and then she and Jeremy would “run into” each other at either a bar or a restaurant or a movie theater and sit next to each other, shocked and amazed at the coincidence. Then they’d go back to the hotel, have sex a few times, take a shower, and then Jeremy would leave and Porter would watch bad television and sleep alone in the clean hotel sheets. It was a pretty sublime arrangement, if you didn’t think about it too much.

But this time was different. Porter had had something on her mind. They’d had dinner at a Mexican restaurant nearby, and she’d had three strong margaritas, each one making her tongue more wiggly in her mouth.

“So,” she said. They were stumbling down the hallway in the hotel, bumping into the walls and each other. “I’ve been thinking.”

“Me too,” Jeremy said. “I’ve been thinking about taking off your pants and licking your clit until you scream.”

“Stop it,” Porter said. “I mean, that sounds good, let’s come back to that in a minute. But I’m serious.” She slowed to a stop, bracing herself against a doorframe. “You aren’t happy.”

Jeremy laughed. “How can you say that? I have everything I could possibly want.” He came closer, squeezing her sides with his big hands. Porter put her palm flat against his chest.

“You don’t have me, not really.”

“Of course I do, look at us!” He leaned forward and started kissing her neck.

“But you also have Kristen.”

Jeremy straightened back up. “Come on, Port.”

“I told you, I’ve been thinking. You aren’t happy in your marriage, and I’m right fucking here! You always said that you would be okay with me finding someone, and I have. I found you. I want to cut the bullshit, Jeremy. I want to have babies before I’m too old, and who would I have babies with, if not with you?”

But Jeremy had already had his kids. He’d also had a vasectomy, years ago, when his youngest was four. And that was it, she’d drawn the line, a line carved with her own wants and frustrations, and he wouldn’t (or couldn’t) cross it. They’d gone into the hotel room and had sex twice in a row, which Porter had understood as a mutual admittance that they would never have sex this good again, with anyone. After that, there were no more hotel rooms, no more well-lit lobby bars in remote cities, no more midmorning fucks in the barn, her back against the grainy wood. The one positive aspect to breaking up with a person you weren’t married to was that it could all vanish in a puff of smoke: there were no lawyers, no shared assets, no bookshelves or record collections to peel apart. And so Porter had moved on. She dated people she didn’t care about. She swiped right. What had he said? It was timing. When they met, they were too young, and she wasn’t ready. When he was ready to get married, there was Kristen, Kristen who had been born with a wish-list registry, who had a favorite diamond shape. Porter didn’t care about jewelry. That was the very worst part of being an adult, understanding that there was no fairness in the world, no unseen hand on the Ouija board. There was only the internet and the paths you chose for whatever stupid reason that seemed right at the time, when you had one extra drink at a party, or were feeling lonely at exactly the moment that someone else was too. And wasn’t everyone, always?

Rachel put out her hand and Boo Boo licked it again, and finding nothing there, turned tail and ran away, bleating, as if warning the rest of her friends that these two round humans had nothing to offer. Rachel coughed, and then laughed. “Do you have a human bathroom here? I think I just wet my pants.”

“Right this way,” Porter said, leading her inside.





Chapter 14





Cecelia’s First Day



Clapham Junior High, from the outside, was a brick fortress. It had green grass and a flagpole and a parking lot. Cecelia’s school in Brooklyn had been unremarkable in different ways—crowded, diverse, with kids from a thousand different countries; inedible, bland food in vast quantities—but she had yet to discover the center of the Venn diagram in which the schools overlapped. Lockers? Hallways? It wasn’t a long list. She’d gone into the school building exactly once, with Astrid, for a new-student orientation, an hour-long chatty tour by a seventh grader named Kimberly. Why did schools not understand that the best person to introduce kids to a new school would be someone who acted like it was no big whoop? No one wanted to be singled out for anything. All anyone in the middle of puberty wanted was a larger rock to hide under, and the spotlight pointed somewhere else.