The New Husband(44)
“OMG, did you see Maggie? Could she have gotten out of there any faster?”
I knew the voice—Pam Epstein. Band kid. Not one of the meanies. But now even Sweet Pam was gossiping about me, thanks to Simon. I checked my phone to see what kids were saying on social media.
Sure enough, there were a few Snapchats about me, and even an Instagram post capturing my speedy departure (yes, they’d tagged me so I’d see it), but it was all pretty tame. I doubted that would last long. Kids would talk, and the story would grow from there. That’s how legends were born.
I opened Talkie, the new social media thing. Talkie was a good place for me to go online, a safe space where I could track the happenings of celebrities and athletes who got tired of Twitter. Today I wanted to see what, if anything, was being said about me.
When I logged in, I saw that I had a new Talkie to Me, which is what Talkie called friend requests. It came from a person named Tracy Nuts. My heart stopped. I couldn’t think straight. Everything was spinning super fast, and it felt like I was both falling and floating. I couldn’t breathe. The bathroom began to spin. I was sure I was going to get sick. My whole body started to tingle.
I know only one person named Tracy Nuts, and she is me. It’s my nickname, a little play on words about my deadly peanut allergy: Trace of Nuts. Get it? Tracy Nuts. The only person who ever called me that was the same person who’d given me the nickname in the first place.
My father.
It was kind of a jokey nickname for such a deadly serious condition, but my dad came up with it one day when I got sad because I couldn’t eat any of my friend’s birthday cake. He thought a little humor might make it sting a bit less, and well—he was right. There was a message accompanying the Talkie to Me request that I read a hundred times in the stall.
Sweetie, it’s me. It’s Dad. Accept this request and I’ll be in touch soon. But promise me, promise, promise you won’t tell a soul I’ve contacted you. Not your brother, not even your mother. There are reasons, important reasons I can’t get into right now. I’ll try to explain later. But please, please, please, keep that promise for me, OK? If anybody finds out I’ve contacted you it will be very bad for me and I won’t be able to reach out to you again. Try to understand. I love you to the moon and back and there and back again to infinity. xoxo—Dad
Maybe somebody, somehow, had learned about my Tracy Nuts nickname. Connor could have told somebody, so I considered it a possibility. It was also possible that somebody was being extra mean and cruel, piling on the pain after today’s humiliation, trying to hurt me more by sending a Talkie friend request using that nickname, maybe knowing my father had given it to me.
But some things were never shared, like the private conversations between a father and a daughter, which is why nobody, and I do mean nobody, not even Connor, knew that every night before I went to bed, my dad would kiss me on my forehead and whisper how his love for me went to the moon and back, and there and back to infinity.
CHAPTER 24
Hours after the school assembly, Nina, Simon, Maggie, and Connor gathered in the living room for a family meeting. Family meetings were something Nina had tried out from time to time over the years. They seemed to always convene in moments of great crisis—problems with attitude, chores, bedtime, homework, those breaking points where the parent (typically Nina, occasionally Glen) felt like they were being held hostage by miniature creations of their own making.
When things improved afterward, which they invariably did, Nina would promise herself to have these meetings regularly, but life had a way of derailing the best of intentions. And so the cycle would begin anew—crisis, family meeting, resolution, crisis, family meeting, resolution, and so on, until one day Nina discovered her children had outgrown the small issues and graduated to bigger ones.
With or without today’s incident, what Nina had seen six days into her new job convinced her these meetings were more important than ever, and she renewed her pledge to hold them weekly.
This was Simon’s first family meeting, and he perched himself on the edge of the leather love seat that had come from his home. Nina and Maggie sat side by side on the couch, close in proximity but worlds apart from a solution. Connor was on the floor, playing tug-of-war with Daisy using her favorite rope toy.
“Please tell Maggie what you told me,” Nina said to Simon as she rubbed her tired eyes. Once again she found herself dealing with lingering fatigue from another day spent reviewing case files on the Coopers and setting up home visits, all while planning the rest of her investigation.
She would have been home much sooner to deal with the crisis du jour, but Nina had several new cases on top of the Cooper case, two of them involving young people, each around Connor’s age, who were addicted to pain medication.
Knocking around in the back of Nina’s mind, erratic and cacophonous as a child banging a toy drum, were Simon’s words of warning: how the job would eat away at her free time, to the detriment of her family. The seeds of doubt he’d planted had unfolded into a gnawing worry that she’d miss something important, some critical juncture, and this would send one or both of her kids careening off course, eventually landing them in the case file of a social worker like herself. Nina understood it was irrational, but at the same time her daughter was showing real signs of strain, and Simon was not helping the situation.
“I am so sorry, Maggie,” Simon said with an anguished voice. “I had no idea how that was going to be perceived. Honestly, I was extremely upset with your situation, and felt compelled to speak up, to say something. I wanted the other kids to know there were real consequences for their actions.”