All Adults Here(50)
“Ugh,” Cecelia said. She pulled out the top sheet of paper and kept reading. When she was done, Cecelia scribbled a small note, left it and the phone on Elliot’s desk, and then she walked down the stairs and found Aidan and Zachary horizontal on their designated monogrammed beanbags. She squeezed in the narrow place between them, and each boy moved his head a few inches closer to hers.
“So what’s this show about, anyway?” It was after her time, which was sort of nice to realize, that her childhood was far enough away that new cartoons had been invented. Eventually, she’d be old, too, just like Elliot, and Aidan and Zachary would have to explain all the things they automatically understood, just like she took it for granted that gay people could get married, or that Google could answer any question in a split second. She looked forward to there being things that young people would have to laboriously explain, their eyeballs rolling skyward. The boys didn’t answer, too deep in their simultaneous pleasure comas, and so Cecelia just watched with them until they’d seen five and a half episodes and she knew all the pups by name and the theme song and the ancillary characters that cycled through Adventure Bay to ensure that the pups weren’t always just rescuing themselves. When they heard Wendy’s key in the door, Cecelia swam back to the surface, kissed the boys goodbye, and then got back on Gammy’s bike to ride back to the Big House, her pocket fat with cash.
Chapter 22
Lady Date
Porter picked up Rachel before dinner—there was no reason for them both to drive.
“You be the designated driver on the way there, and I’ll be the designated driver on the way back,” Rachel said, as she slid into Porter’s passenger seat. “Or maybe we can find someone drunk and drive them home, too, instead of just wasting our sobriety on each other. Like the Guardian Angels of Dutchess County.”
Porter wanted to take Rachel to The Yellow Owl, a farm-to-table restaurant in Tivoli that was a few years old. It was one of a dozen or so places that catered to the Brooklyn escapees and the food photographers, meaning it had kale and crudo and expensive bowls of ragout. The inside of the restaurant was so dark and the space in between the tables so narrow that Rachel and Porter bumped into nearly every table on their way to their own, like Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
“That was harrowing,” Rachel said, once they were seated. A trio of tea lights sat in the middle of the small table. She picked up the menu and scanned it quickly. “I’m having the pasta. All I want is pasta, three meals a day.”
“It’s good. They use my cheese for their ravioli.” Porter gnawed on a breadstick. She watched Rachel rub her belly in time to the song playing on the stereo. “Raviolo. It’s just one giant ravioli. It’s kind of weird, I don’t know.”
“Have you heard from your husband?”
Rachel rolled her eyes. “Yes. I was going to text you, but then it just seemed too pathetic and sad. He keeps calling me. Writing me these huge, long emails. It’s like he was addicted to sex and now he’s addicted to apologizing. He showed up the other day too.”
“Showed up where?”
“At my house. It was like something out of a Julia Roberts movie from the nineties. You know the one I mean, where she has to learn how to swim in order to get away from her abusive husband? Like he’s following me. Which he is. I mean, he knew where to find me, obviously, but also obviously, I wasn’t responding to him and had no interest in seeing him.” Rachel took one of the breadsticks and crunched it between her back teeth. “This is good.”
“Did you talk to him?” At the next table, a couple was on a date. They looked maybe twenty-five and were holding hands over the middle of the table, tea lights be damned. Porter wondered what they had done right that she and Rachel had so clearly done wrong.
“No, I wasn’t home, thank god. He got my mother, which is, like, his worst nightmare. Even when he and I were on good terms, she was his kryptonite. Now, forget it. You have never seen a more satisfied angry person than a woman who’s been waiting her whole life to be a grandmother.” Rachel laughed. “She told him to take a long walk off a short pier. I don’t know, he cried. If I was there, I would have felt bad. But my mom did not feel bad. It’s kind of awesome.”
Porter nodded. “Do you think you’ll change your mind? And want him to be around?”
“When the baby’s born, you mean?”
“Yeah, or after. I mean, I’m on your side, obviously, but I just wondered if you ever considered his behavior being, like, a temporary insanity. Some men are really afraid of it. It being us, looking like this, and whatever comes after. Stretched-out vaginas, breast milk. You know, the perks.” Porter put her hands on her belly.
Rachel thought about it. “Maybe. I don’t know. The idea of it being my mom and me in the delivery room does kind of kill me—like, he got me into this, and he’s not there for the screaming and the pain? For my hemorrhoids? To tell me that my stretch marks are beautiful? That’s fucked up. He should have to suffer. This way, it’s like he gets a prize. Like, you don’t have to wake up in the middle of the night, congratulations, motherfucker! I don’t know, man. I think I will talk to him eventually. He’s my husband, you know? Like, he might be a total assface, but legally, he’s my assface. But then I feel like I want him around just to punish him, as if having the baby is a punishment, which it isn’t. I just know that it’s going to be hard and I want help, but I’m still so, so fucking mad. Fuck!” The couple at the next table turned to look at her. “Sorry,” Rachel said. “Hormones.”