The Chicken Sisters(12)
The fight. The same fight. How could he do this now? His plan, again—his ridiculous plan, born of, she had to admit, the worst deal he’d ever been staffed on, a merger between two monstrous restaurant chains based on the West Coast that had had him pulling constant all-nighters and taking the red-eye for months. His plan was for him to quit. I just need to take some time, he kept saying. I can’t even figure out what I want when it’s like this. A sabbatical, he kept calling it, but it wasn’t, not the way he wanted to do it, with no strings from the firm and thus no promise that they’d bring him back, even though he kept insisting they would. It was throwing himself into the abyss, and he wanted to take her with him.
This wasn’t fighting fair. He hadn’t even given her a chance to tell him what she wanted before he dumped this on her. She got it. He hated the hours. She’d hated the hours, too, back when they were both starting out in consulting, but unlike Jay, she was used to starting at the bottom of the ladder. Hell, where she came from there hadn’t even been a ladder. The consulting job they had once both had was a miracle for her, a major score, and she would have stuck it out, too, if they hadn’t agreed she should be the one to quit when Ryder arrived and everything got, not twice as hard, but seemingly exponentially so. It was one thing to have a nanny—they still had a nanny, especially now that Mae had built up her new business and written the book—but for both of them to stay free to work eighteen-hour days meant two nannies, really, and then why even have kids in the first place? But if one of them wasn’t going to stick with a steady paycheck and health insurance, they should never have—
But they had. Had kids, rented this place. They’d done it.
Now they were stuck. And Jay, Mae knew, truly felt stuck. If it weren’t for her, if it weren’t for the kids—had he ever even really had to do anything he didn’t want to before? Ever had to stick with anything? Looking at her happy-go-lucky husband across the table, Mae wanted, as she so often had in the past year, to throw her glass at him. Oh, sure, he’d gotten through business school, the same one his dad had gone to before him. Mae now knew there were two ways to get through B-school, and the first might be her way, by memorizing every business case and going to every study session and doing every extra thing and just generally grinding the hell out of it, and the second was through charm and talk and the willingness to throw every idea out there with abandon and see what your classmates could make stick. The latter involved what Mae’s friends called “the confidence of a mediocre white man,” and although Jay wasn’t white—his Indian heritage meant he didn’t tick that box—confidence he had in spades.
Which was what made him think he could just walk away from a good job and find another one waiting when he was ready.
Fine, if this was the fight they were going to have now, she would have it.
“Do you think that would really be a break for me, a zillion-hour flight and then staying in a house with people we’ve never met, with your mother and a three-year-old and a six-year-old?” The kids barely knew Jay’s mom. He barely knew his mom—his dad had raised him while his mom took Jay’s sister in a complicated divorce-not-divorce Mae still didn’t really understand, the kind of thing rich people apparently took for granted. Mae turned her own glass in her fingertips. She didn’t really want champagne. She wanted a cold Diet Coke, not that they kept anything like that in the house.
“I’ll be there too. And it’s not like I’m suggesting we go camping in the Sahara. There will be help.”
“Oh no, this isn’t the camping part. That comes after.” That was part two of Jay’s lunacy. After the trip to India, they backpacked around Europe. Or rented an RV and drove across the US. It varied, but it was like the man who loathed all social media had been spending all his time following #Airstreamlove and #havekidswilltravel. He’d be wanting a tiny house next.
“I can’t even process this right now, Jay. I mean, I just got basically fired. I know that fits in with your dreams”—she refrained, barely, from saying stupid dreams—“but it wasn’t in mine, okay?”
“We don’t have to camp. I just—look, Mae, I know you. I’m sorry this happened. But it did, and now you’re going to make choices because of it, and I want in on that.” He picked up his fork, then set it down. “Don’t you see? I’m just trying to buy us both some time.”
“I don’t want time,” she said, unable to keep her voice from sounding sharp. “The Sparkling thing is—a setback. But it’s just a small setback. I know you hate your job, Jay, but I don’t. I don’t want to tear everything up and start over.”
“But I do.”
His words hung between them for a moment—two children of single parents, two people who’d promised each other that whatever they did, they’d do it together, that their kids would never feel the way they had.
Jay looked down at his plate, took a bite, chewed. Mae bet he couldn’t taste it. She couldn’t even pretend to eat. “The lamb is good. I think the kids would like it, actually. I like the carrots.” Mae could tell he was trying to take the weight away from what he had just said. It wasn’t working. “Okay,” he said, “your turn. You said you had a plan. Spill.”
“I made enough to freeze,” Mae said, “They’ll get some.” Her plan sounded absurd now, after the argument they were having, but she couldn’t think of another way to present it. “The thing is,” she said, “my plan would make things so easy for you. I know this last deal was rough, and you’re about to get staffed on another one, so I’m taking the kids with me to visit my mother, and you’ll get to just—be here. Bachelor it. Whenever you’re not working, no us to worry about. I thought that would just take some of the pressure off, right? Give you room to hear yourself think.”