You Think It, I'll Say It(35)

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to get her to dish on the breakup,” Astrid said. Kelsey had been dating her absurdly handsome HBO costar, a dark-haired carpenter-turned-heartthrob named Scott Zaretsky, until she suddenly wasn’t. And of course Nina was going to accept the assignment—she wanted the five grand.

Before they hung up, Astrid said, “How’s le bébé?” and Nina assumed Astrid didn’t remember Zoe’s name. Nina had never told Astrid that she was pregnant, but someone else at the magazine had, and Astrid had sent Nina an email that said Is this like a NYC single independent woman taking control of her fertility or an Indiana white trash baby mama fuckup :)

Good question, Nina had emailed back.

Maybe the reason Nina wasn’t offended is that she herself had wondered—still wonders—the same thing. Truly, more than she feels upset by the last few years of her life, she feels bewildered: her mother’s lung cancer diagnosis; her mother’s death, which was five months after she was diagnosed, four and a half months after Nina returned to Indianapolis to take care of her, and four months after (unrelatedly, Astrid assured her) Nina was laid off. By that point, Nina sort of did and sort of didn’t know she was pregnant. Or she suspected, but how could she have attended to the situation while her mother was dying, even if—awkwardly, hideously—the dying took longer than Nina or even the hospice workers had expected? (She had adored her mother; every year on Nina’s birthday, until she turned fifteen, Nina’s mother made a mud pie out of Oreos, whipped cream, and gummy worms and served it in a real flower pot, and then she let Nina sleep that night in her queen-sized bed.) At the appointment Nina had finally made following her mother’s death, when the technician estimated the pregnancy at eighteen weeks, Nina had to ask herself—as, essentially, Astrid did—if she’d waited that long on purpose. She definitely hadn’t been trying to get pregnant; if she had, it wouldn’t have been by a forty-seven-year-old Indianapolis lawyer she’d met at Starbucks and gone out with a total of five times, a not particularly good-looking man who had never been married and didn’t want kids. (At Starbucks, Jeff had seen her doing the Times crossword and been condescendingly impressed.)

Their conversation about the pregnancy seemed like it belonged in an after-school special, except that the guy was thirty years too old. Their agreement is that he is giving her $1,260 a month in child support and that she has full custody of Zoe, though once every three weeks, on a Sunday, he comes over for an hour. Conveniently, it seems that none of the three of them wish for Zoe and Jeff to be alone with each other.

During that phone conversation with Astrid, Nina had been holding Zoe sideways in her right arm, Zoe’s head tucked in the crook of her elbow, Nina’s left pinkie in Zoe’s mouth, and whenever Astrid spoke, Nina was frantically making funny faces at Zoe because, pinkie notwithstanding, Zoe was clearly on the brink of bursting into tears.

“Le bébé is great,” Nina had said.

“Excellent,” Astrid said. “Now go to California and make me proud.”



* * *



—

Nina had planned to nurse Zoe just before leaving the hotel for the interview, after the sitter’s arrival, but Zoe won’t cooperate; she keeps unlatching from Nina’s nipple, making eye contact with Nina, and basically smirking. “Come on, Zoe,” Nina says, but Zoe continues to refuse and Nina has to leave. Riding in the taxi to Kelsey’s house, she feels the way she used to before dates: Her heart is jumpy, and she keeps checking her face in the mirror of her compact, even though she knows how she looks, which is like hell.

The interview is supposed to start at ten A.M., and the taxi driver drops her off at nine forty-seven. After confirming the address, Nina is surprised by both the house’s modesty and its accessibility. It’s a bungalow with a steep staircase leading from the street up to the front porch, a sloping lawn planted with something that looks like a cross between grass and cacti, and no hedges or fence. Given that this is L.A.—specifically, Silver Lake—the house is no doubt worth far more than its appearance suggests. (Nina then checks on her phone and finds that Sunshine Girl LLC bought the house for $920,000 in April 2012, so presumably after Kelsey had landed the role on Copacetic but before its first season aired—when she probably could feel her impending fame, which is why the purchase isn’t in her name, but before she was officially rich, which is why the house isn’t bigger.) The funny part is that, not counting the staircase, Kelsey’s house actually resembles Nina’s mother’s house in Indianapolis (estimated online value: $164,000).

Nina walks around the block once, then turns and walks around the block again in reverse, not passing Kelsey’s house either time. All of a sudden, it’s two minutes after ten. She hurries up the bungalow’s staircase. As she waits, she notices security cameras in two corners of the porch, positioned near the ceiling and pointed toward where she stands. She hears a dog barking—a big dog, from the sound of it—then the unfastening of locks on the other side of the door, and then Kelsey Adams is standing in front of her, impossibly beautiful, wearing a gardenia-scented perfume Nina can smell through the screen.

“Hi!” Kelsey says. She hugs Nina, and Nina wishes she had access to the footage in the security cameras and could post this hug on Facebook. Not really, of course—Nina tries to look at Facebook as infrequently as possible—but it’s strangely vindicating: Something Nina has for almost three years pretended to herself and others, which is that she and Kelsey Adams could have been friends, almost were friends, might be true.