All Adults Here(60)
“Wow,” Porter said. It was not a thought that had ever crossed her mind. When her father died, Porter remembered Astrid sitting them down and telling them that they all belonged to one another, that if she were to die, Elliot and Porter would both be Nicky’s legal guardians, and their finances would be handled by Mr. Chang, at the bank, Astrid’s favorite co-worker. Porter had sometimes had dreams that her mother was dead and that the three siblings would have to move in with Mr. Chang, even though they were adults and could theoretically take care of themselves, and that Mr. Chang and his wife would teach them things that their parents never did, like how to play the piano and make pasta from scratch, and when Porter woke up, she would feel guilty about enjoying her new parallel life.
“So, if you both died, the boys would live with me.”
Wendy nodded. “And the baby. So you’d have three. Which is a lot of kids. Especially for a single parent. If it’s too much, please, say so.” She was still crying, silently except for a few errant hiccups here and there. Porter had never understood her sister-in-law, but she could imagine a world in the not-too-distant future where they could actually be friends, like how in postapocalyptic worlds ruined by plagues and zombies, you could be best friends with someone you’d otherwise never encounter. Maybe this was motherhood, a feeling of benevolence for all human beings.
Porter took her hand off her belly and reached across the table. “Of course,” she said. “Just in case you get hit by a school bus. Out of curiosity, is there a reason that my brother isn’t the one asking me this?”
Wendy wiped her cheeks with a finger. “Let’s hope it never happens, but yes. And your brother is a man, that’s why. Do you think any man has ever been the one to take care of things like this? No man I’ve ever met. We talked about it years ago and he said he’d ask and here I am.”
“Fair. But you’d trust me? With your kids?” Porter asked. “I’m sorry, that’s not what you want to hear. I’m saying yes, I’m not saying no. It just means a lot to me. That you think I can do it.”
“Of course you can do it,” Wendy said, snapping back into her more familiar mode, as crisp as a carrot stick. “Women can do anything. All the things that men are useful for—think about it, what are those things? Lifting something heavy? Taking out the garbage? Grilling steaks? Please. Elliot has never properly cooked a steak in his life. And I have to tell him when it’s garbage day. And I can pay someone to move a couch.”
“I guess you’re right,” Porter said. “I think I like you, Wendy.”
“Well, thanks,” Wendy said. “I’ll draw up the paperwork.” She took a long, slow drink of water. “If you ever need someone, you know, like an extra pair of hands, you can call me. I don’t want to sound like your mother, but it is a lot. A friend of mine from law school who had a kid on her own hired a night nurse for the first three months. This lovely woman came over every night, and my friend got to sleep, unless she was feeding the baby. There are ways to make it easier.”
It didn’t seem fair, after spending so much time thinking about wanting to get pregnant, figuring out how to get pregnant, and being pregnant, that you would so soon also have to think about the reality of having a child on the outside of your body too. Yes, one thing led to the other, of course—Porter understood human reproduction—but to reduce the physical and mental state of pregnancy to a way station, like waiting for a bus, seemed suddenly so deeply misogynistic that Porter felt offended on her own behalf, at no one. At people. At men.
“Okay, so what was the other thing?” Porter asked. Inside, the baby did a somersault. Outside, Clapham was enjoying the afternoon. The gazebo in the small grassy center of the roundabout was a makeshift jungle gym for a couple of kids with long, tan arms and legs.
“It’s about that, actually,” Wendy said, pointing.
“The gazebo?” Porter watched the kids climb all over it like she and her brothers had done when they were kids, taking turns jumping off the handrail into the center, zooming toy cars around the wooden plank seats. Her brain had just started to picture Aidan and Zachary and her nameless daughter, some years in the future, all siblings of a sort, when she realized that she recognized the children.
“Elliot bought it. Not the gazebo, the building across the way. The empty one.”
“Fogelmans!” she said, not quite hearing what Wendy had said.
“Excuse me?” Wendy said, following Porter’s gaze.
“Those kids,” Porter said. “I know their father.” The girl, Jeremy’s daughter, was the elder of the two, and had long blond hair like her mother. It swayed back and forth as she clung to the top of the gazebo. She had never seen the children this close up—they were older than she thought, probably close to Cecelia’s age. Why weren’t they in school? And then Jeremy strode up, camera in hand—a real one, the kind people bought to take on safari, not just his telephone held sideways. He crouched down to take her picture.
“Are you okay?” Wendy raised an eyebrow.
“I’m fine. So, wait, what? Elliot bought that building? What’s he doing with it? Astrid is going to flip. I’m sure he knows that. You should have heard her when there was a rumor that Urban Outfitters was going to take over the Boutique Etc? shop. It was like when crazy moms in the eighties thought that Judas Priest records were trying to make their kids worship Satan.”