All Adults Here(94)
Nicky and Elliot rocketed back up to standing and looked around—past Astrid—and then Nicky pointed toward the other side of the street, which was still mostly closed off to cars and therefore full of people. They jogged across, toward Jeremy Fogelman. He was leaning against the window of Elliot’s building, smiling at nothing. Sidney and her mother were receiving guests on the corner like a deposed dictator and her second-in-command, but Jeremy didn’t seem to be in a hurry to do anything. Nicky and Elliot appeared in front of him. The street was noisy, and they all had to shout in order to be heard.
Porter watched them and said, “No no no no! No! Guys! No,” but her brothers were too far away to hear her. She watched as Jeremy stuck out his hand, and Elliot knocked it away. Jeremy raised his hands in fake surrender. Kristen and Sidney were watching now, and pretending not to. All Porter could think about was all the therapy that Sidney Fogelman was going to need someday, and how much of it she herself was responsible for. Wendy and the twins had wandered closer to a float to examine its mechanics, thank god. Porter didn’t want to feel responsible for ruining everything.
It wasn’t as if she’d never thought about it—of course she had. That’s why Porter had broken up with Jeremy in the first place. Or in the second place, the second time. As adults. She’d broken up with Jeremy because she wanted to be someone who made good decisions, and who felt valued for more than her willingness to play pretend. She’d made the choice to have a baby, she’d been doing great, and now this? What was it that made her fall back? Porter felt that if she fell any further back, she’d be dinosaur food. It was Cecelia’s being in the house, and seeing Rachel, all these things that made her feel like she had time traveled back to her youth, when in reality those years were gone, gone, gone. And she knew she didn’t miss them.
“Everyone makes mistakes, Porter,” Astrid had said in the bathroom. “You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t even have to pretend to be perfect.” But she wasn’t watching the boys.
Elliot’s finger was pointed at Jeremy’s face, only an inch of air between them.
“Oh, god,” Porter said. She pushed herself up and hustled across the street just as Elliot was drawing his arm back. She dodged a large, friendly golden retriever in the middle of the sidewalk and made it to her brother just in time to see Elliot let his fist fly directly into Jeremy Fogelman’s nose. Or rather, it would have flown directly into Jeremy Fogelman’s nose if Jeremy hadn’t ducked out of the way. Elliot’s fist, instead, connected with the part of the Plateglass window where Jeremy’s face had been.
“You idiot!” Porter shouted. “That is not what is happening here! What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m protecting you,” Elliot said, clearly stunned, as a tiny crack formed in the window, and quickly spidered out. Jeremy stepped out of the way, in case the wall of glass was about to come crashing down. Elliot was breathing hard, his fists balled at his sides, unsure what to do next. “Fuck, man, that’s my window!” he decided to say. “Damn!”
“I don’t need to be protected,” Porter said, gently. “And I definitely don’t need to be protected from that loser.” Jeremy shrugged and hurried away before the Stricks could change their minds.
“I tried to tell him,” Nicky said.
“You said he dumped her! And that he didn’t tell Porter that his wife was pregnant, which is such a dick move!”
“That is not what I said,” Nicky said. “I don’t think that’s what I said.”
“You guys,” Porter said to her brothers. “Thank you for trying to stick up for me, but I do not need it. I mean, I do need it, and I will need it, a lot, but not like that. This is not about Jeremy, okay? This is about me.”
“All Stricks across the street, right now,” Astrid said. She had hurried behind Porter and was hovering, but enough was enough. If they were still her children, then she was still their mother. She clapped sharply and then hurried into the middle of the street, holding a hand in front of her like a stop sign. She waited as her three children and Juliette and Cecelia all crossed, safe from the handful of cautious drivers who had returned to the road, which was still thick with bodies. Wendy and the twins looked up and followed, confused about the family procession, but getting it quickly: The Stricks were on the move, and they were doing it together. It was right here, Astrid realized, that Barbara had been standing. If she could go back in time and escort Barbara back onto the sidewalk, if they could have had a real conversation, standing next to the mailbox, would Elliot’s hand be flecked with shards of glass? Would Porter be carrying on like a teenager, would she and Birdie be carrying on like teenagers? Astrid hurried into Shear Beauty and riffled around under the counter until she found the plastic bin full of Band-Aids and antiseptic ointment. Everyone else sat on the bench. The boys went loose in the salon, and Wendy held Elliot’s wounded fist and then kissed his knuckles.
“Let me see if I get this right,” Cecelia said. “I try to make sure my friend doesn’t get, like, raped and murdered, and I get shipped out of town. I punch someone, and somehow I’m the family role model?”
Astrid jostled back into the narrow hall and handed Wendy the box. “What in the world, truly.”
“Can we just focus on me for a second?” Porter asked. “I didn’t ask you to hit him. It was my mistake, not his. I wasn’t crying because I was mad at him, I was mad at myself.” She had stopped crying and was holding her belly.