I'm Fine and Neither Are You(40)

“I’m telling Mommy!” Stevie hollered. “Mommy!”

Miles reacted by screeching like a chimpanzee. A passerby would have reasonably wondered whether he had just snapped his femur, but I knew better. This was his power play to Stevie’s tattling.

I paused, then poured fresh water from the coffee carafe into the machine.

The screaming continued.

I measured coffee grounds and tapped them into the coffee maker’s metal filter, trying to ignore my pounding head.

There was a sudden surge of silence. I smiled, thinking Sanjay had finally intercepted.

Then a heavy thud and a new cry—a real one. I pressed the “Start” button on the coffee maker and marched into the living room.

Stevie, clad in her nightgown, was sitting on Miles’ chest. “What?” she said, like I was interrupting a private moment between them.

Miles’ face was crimson, and he was gasping for breath. “Help!” he wheezed.

“Get off your brother before I spank you,” I said to Stevie.

Still sitting, she glared at me like I had already swatted her. Then she began to berate me. “Our family rule is use your words! Hitting is mean , Mommy! Mean!”

“Oh, I’m sorry, were those your words sitting on your brother’s chest suffocating him?” I pointed up the stairs. “Go up to your room and get dressed, or I’ll show you mean .”

Glowering, she lifted herself off of Miles.

“Go!” I yelled.

Miles’ face was returning to its natural color, but he was still lying there crying. And as I looked at him more closely, I realized he was also looking at me as if I were the ghost of Joan Crawford. “Don’t spank Stevie, Mommy!” he yelled.

The enemy of my son’s enemy was his beloved sister. “Oh, come on, Miles. I’m not going to and you know it.”

“Then why did you say it?” he wailed.

Desperation? Another occasion that felt like rock bottom but was actually a trapdoor to somewhere even lower? It was anyone’s guess. “Go up to your room and get dressed,” I told him. “Now.”

Then I went to look for Sanjay. He wasn’t in the living room, so I assumed he had fallen back asleep. But when I reached our room, I found him sitting up in bed on his laptop with a pair of headphones on.

“Hey,” I said, though what I wanted to say was Headphones or not, how the hell did you miss that racket?

He pulled the headphones from his ears. “Hey.”

“Didn’t you hear the kids?” I said.

“No,” he said, glancing at the screen. “Sorry. I was working.”

I reminded myself not to scold him for doing what I asked him to. “That’s great, but it’s Friday. The kids have to be at camp in forty-five minutes, and I need to hop in the shower and get to work.”

“I’m sorry.” He seemed sincere. “I was just really caught up in this.”

My head was throbbing. Three glasses of wine on a school night! Who did I think I was, Mick Jagger? “What are you working on?” I asked. Naturally, I was hoping he would say job applications.

He smiled shyly. “You know that jazz article I’ve been working on for the past several months?”

No. “Yes,” I said.

“I was doing it on spec for the Atlantic ,” he said. “Remember?”

Now I remembered. Alex had put Sanjay in touch with someone at the publication, who had passed Sanjay’s pitch to the web editor. He had liked the concept, but since Sanjay didn’t have a lot of national credits to his name, the editor said he would have to write the entire piece before they bought it.

“It’s the one about the lost history of jazz’s impact on American politics,” he added.

“Right—you were excited about that. How’s it coming?”

He sat up and closed his computer. “It’s done. I sent it in yesterday.”

“You did?” I couldn’t disguise my surprise. Sanjay had been a perfectly efficient worker at Hudson , but he had been a junior editor back then, writing little more than headlines and photo captions. As a journalist, however, I had known him to obsess over a single paragraph for a full week. Really, the more he cared about something, the less likely he was to finish it. As such, I had half assumed he’d still be working on the Atlantic article when the ball dropped in Times Square at the end of the year.

“Yes, and the editor already read it and just wrote to say she loved it. And I quote: ‘No major edits needed.’”

“That’s wonderful!”

“They’re going to publish it in October. Online and in the magazine. Print triples my fee.”

I walked over to him and kissed him. “I am so proud of you.”

“Thank you,” he said. “But there’s more.”

Dollar signs began dancing through my head. The Atlantic offered him another assignment! Or maybe even a column!

“My editor told me this story is the kind of project that they often see morph into a long-form piece,” he said. “Or . . . even a book.”

My excitement exploded into a million little pieces. A book? That could take years to write. The pay was usually lousy, and that was sure to be true for a tome on a semiobscure subject. Even if Sanjay sold it for a moderate amount, it would come in a lump sum that would not provide the sort of steady income we needed. I wondered whether he had considered this, or if he was still riding an early wave of enthusiasm.