Weather Girl(72)

He slings an arm around her again, pulling her close, and she rests her head on his shoulder.

What . . . is happening?

Beneath the table, Russell’s hand finds my knee, thumb rubbing a soft circle. Maybe it’s reassurance that this is really happening. That maybe we really are done meddling.

“We should do this more often,” Torrance says, reaching for an olive on the too-pricey appetizer plate she and Seth ordered. By my calculation, each of those olives cost $2.50. “It’s been a while since we’ve been out with anyone from work.”

Seth gestures between Russell and me, and I try to push away all my Hale-induced shock. “How long have the two of you been a thing?”

“About three weeks, I guess?” I say, looking to Russell for confirmation. He nods. We haven’t talked about making this official, but I want to believe we’re heading that direction.

“I’ve gotten to know Ari a little better lately,” Torrance says. “But I’m afraid you remain something of a mystery, Russell.”

“And your daughter.” Seth spears an olive with a tiny appetizer fork. “Have you two met?”

“I sort of accidentally babysat her last week,” I say, hoping Russell’s okay with me mentioning this. “We were supposed to only do dinner, but we wound up spending the whole evening running lines for a musical she’s in.”

“Mixed families can be a lot of fun,” Seth says. “Both my parents remarried, and I have . . . fifteen siblings now.” He squints, as though mentally counting, needing to make sure he gets the number right.

“Sometimes just one is a lot for me,” I say with a laugh.

It’s only when Russell removes his hand from my knee that I realize he’s been quiet during this entire exchange.

“You two do make a great couple.” Torrance lifts her eyebrows in this suggestive way. “And if Ari and Elodie get along . . .”

A muscle in Russell’s jaw twitches. The Hales are pushing a little too hard, and I’m not sure how to politely tell them to back off.

“This is still very new,” Russell says, more to his glass of champagne than to any of us. He puts a half inch of space between us in the booth. It’s slight, but it’s enough to notice. “And . . . I’m not exactly in the market for a stepmom for my kid.”

The sentence hits like a one-in-a-million bolt of lightning, straight to my chest.

I’m not exactly in the market for a stepmom.

Suddenly, I feel very, very small.

Seth launches into a story about his last family reunion, but I can’t bring myself to do anything but smile and nod as the club around me blurs.

I think about the Russell I’ve gotten to know over the past few months. The man who got me vending machine junk food and watched a solar eclipse while holding his breath. He’s protective of his kid, and I can’t blame him for that, especially knowing his history. But if I’m being honest—and selfish, because god do I feel selfish for obsessing over it—my brain won’t let it go.

It’s not a role I’m actively seeking out, so I can’t understand why it feels like I’ve taken a fist to the stomach.

It invades the most vulnerable parts of my mind the rest of the night, when we’re dancing and when we’re saying goodbye to the Hales and later, too, when Russell comes back to my apartment and we’re too exhausted to do anything but sleep. Even then, I lie awake, wondering if this means he thinks I’d be a bad mother. If he somehow knows my history.

If he’s already decided we’re not meant to last.





25


FORECAST:

A tentative glimpse of early spring optimism

REDMOND IS NOTHING like the place I grew up.

Every time I come back, the suburb looks different than it did during my last visit. At first, those differences were small—I didn’t realize we had a MOD Pizza now or Was there always a CrossFit gym there? Now the downtown core is almost unrecognizable, chains having replaced the shops and cafes I knew so well as a teen. There’s no longer a forest two houses down from mine, and the hiking trail at the end of the road that once led to summers of blackberry picking—and my and Alex’s sorry attempts at making blackberry jam—has been turned into condos. I can’t remember exactly what went where in this strange suburban puzzle, only that I could have sworn some of my favorite spots were right there, and suddenly, they’re not.

All this time Redmond’s been changing, I’ve been just on the other side of the lake.

This is the first time I’ve seen this house in almost a year, and it’s made me a knotted, tangled mess all week.

I try my usually foolproof method of pushing all those messy feelings away, but today the silver linings feel more out of reach than they’ve ever been. My shoulders are tense, my breath stalled in my lungs.

It’s not working.

“No rush or anything,” Russell says from the driver’s seat. “But did you want to get out?”

“I’m getting there.”

Depending on traffic, Redmond is twenty to fifty-five minutes east of Seattle, and this afternoon’s drive was somewhere in the middle. We’re parked next to Alex’s Prius, early March sun streaming in through the windows. I let out a sigh and only fiddle with the seatbelt for a moment, then flex the fingers on my left hand a few times. Even without thinking about it, I’ve been slipping into physical therapy exercises to relax myself. They’ve been helping clear my mind when the silver linings won’t. Like right now.