I'm Fine and Neither Are You(8)
It was something else entirely—something dark and unnamable.
Russ stared at me, and I was too rattled to look away. “Okay, Penny,” he said, his pale-green eyes still locked with my own. “I know you’re going to say no because we don’t have five-point safety bubbles, or whatever it is you’re supposed to trap the rug rats in, but how about we pile them into my backseat and I take you to wherever you need to be?”
I did not allow myself to think twice. “Yes. Thank you.”
We got the kids into Russ’ car and explained that, yes, they really did need car seats, but every so often rules had to be broken for a good cause. Miles began to cry, as he was known to do after missing an hourly feeding. “I don’t want to die,” he wailed. “I don’t want to—”
“No one’s going to die,” interjected Russ. “I’m the best driver in this whole damn town.”
“Really?” said Miles, instantly calmed.
“Mommy, that man said damn ,” said Stevie, who had once detonated an f-bomb in the middle of her school’s pan-denominational holiday play. (The boy beside her had stomped on her foot, and her mommy and daddy used that word when they were in pain, she explained when Sanjay and I were called in for a family meeting with her principal.) Now she pretended to be the morality police whenever adults were present.
“That man’s name is Russ,” I said over my shoulder, “and he’s nice enough to drive us to Auntie Jenny’s, so zip it.”
“Russell,” corrected Russ, who had begun going by his full name around the same time he had decided we should share a title.
“Sorry,” I said, checking my phone again. “Russell.”
When we arrived at the Sweets’, Jenny’s white SUV was in the driveway. She must have just gotten home, I told myself, because I had been swimming in desperation long enough that any shape in the distance was now a lifeboat.
“You sure you don’t want me to wait?” Russ asked as I helped the kids out of his car.
“No, you’ve done enough,” I said, even though I was ever so slightly tempted to finally introduce Jenny to the coworker I had been complaining about. “Thank you.”
“Awfully swank place,” he said as he took in Jenny’s midcentury ranch. With its floor-to-ceiling windows and sloping, manicured lawn, it looked like the kind of house you’d expect to see in Architectural Digest . Jenny and Matt had bought it for a song at the bottom of the market, and from what I had gathered spent hundreds of thousands transforming it into their “forever home” (as opposed to the FEMA trailer they must have thought our bungalow was, I sometimes thought when they said this).
“Yes, it is.”
“Even Yolanda’s house isn’t this nice.” He kept staring straight ahead. “Don’t you wonder sometimes?”
“About working in development?”
He shrugged, and I understood that he meant that, but also everything.
“Yes,” I admitted. “All the time.”
No one had answered the door, and the kids, who had run up the stairs, were banging on the windows on either side of the door. “That’s my cue,” I told him. “Thanks again for saving the day.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“Stop pounding on the glass, you guys,” I told the kids as I joined them at the front door. I pressed the doorbell once, and then a second time. I was still jittery, but my mind was already leaping ahead. If Sanjay didn’t call me back sometime soon, hopefully Matt or Jenny could drive us home; otherwise I would end up dragging the kids on the mile-long walk. Of course, I still had to find out where my car had been towed and pay what was sure to be an exorbitant fine in order to retake possession of it. But that would have to wait until the following afternoon, because I needed to spend the entire rest of the evening working on the Blatner proposal, then wake at dawn, at which point I would spackle over my exhaustion with concealer and caffeinate myself into—well, if not a charismatic state, then a competent one—
The whir of a car engine cut through my thoughts. I turned to see Matt pulling up in the driveway.
“Penny?” he said as he came striding toward me. Jenny’s husband was movie-star handsome, with a thick head of salt-and-pepper hair, hazel eyes, and a zero-to-sixty smile that seemed more like a flash of generosity than a facial expression.
“Am I ever glad to see you,” I said. “Have you talked to Jenny? I’ve been trying to reach her for hours now.”
“No . . .” He looked at me curiously, then over at his daughter, who was attempting to work Miles’ curls into a tiny ponytail. “So, you weren’t supposed to pick Cess up?”
Cecily lifted her head at the sound of her name. “Hi, Daddy.”
“Hey, Pumpkin,” he said.
I shook my head. “Jenny didn’t show. The school called you, and so did I. I thought maybe you had surprised her with a trip to Paris.”
Rather than the reassuring laugh I had been aiming for, his eyes glinted with concern. Then he opened the front door and waved us in.
The kids trailed behind me like ducklings, then decamped to the kitchen. As I watched Cecily retrieve snacks from the cupboard, I had a momentary flashback to childhood—scraping the remains of a tub of margarine onto stale, crumbled crackers and placing them in my brother Nick’s hands because there were no clean plates or napkins to use. Cecily had probably never tasted margarine. She certainly knew nothing of the insatiable hunger of being motherless. And yet she was so careful—opening each pack of gummies and handing it to my children before doing the same for herself—that I had the uncanny sense of having rewound and watched some secret footage of my past.