She stares at me as if I’m speaking Swahili, prompting me to translate for her: “You’ll have to make do with pieces.”
Hearing this bit of tough love, she proceeds to grieve the toast that might have been. It occurs to me that a pretty easy fix would be to eat the French toast myself and make a fresh piece for Ruby, but there is something so thoroughly maddening about her expression that I find myself silently reciting the advice of my pediatrician, several how-to books, and my stay-at-home-mother friends: do not surrender to her demands. A philosophy that runs in marked contrast to the parenting adage I normally subscribe to: choose your battles—which I confess is secret code for hold your ground only if it’s convenient; otherwise, appease the subject in order to make your life easier. Besides, I think, as I prepare for an ugly gridlock, I am trying to avoid carbs, starting this morning.
So, my cellulite settling the matter, I purposefully set Ruby’s plate on the table before her and announce, “It’s this or nothing.”
“Nothing then!” Ruby says.
I bite my lip and shrug, as if to say, Bring on the hunger strike, then exit to the family room where Frank is quietly eating dry Apple Jacks—one at a time—the only thing he’ll touch for breakfast. Running my hand through his soft hair, I sigh into the phone and say, “Sorry. Where were we?”
“Your anniversary,” she says expectantly, hungry for me to describe the perfect romantic evening, the fairy tale she clings to, aspires to.
On most days I might hate to disappoint her. But as I listen to my daughter’s escalating sobs, and watch her attempt to roll her toast into a Play Doh-like ball in order to prove that I am wrong, and that food can indeed be reassembled, I delight in telling Cate that Nick got paged in the middle of dinner.
“He didn’t switch his call?” she says, crestfallen.
“Nope. He forgot.”
“Wow. That sucks,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah.”
“So you didn’t exchange gifts? Not even when he got home?”
“No,” I say. “We agreed not to do presents this year . . . Things are kind of tight these days.”
“Yeah, right,” Cate says, refusing to believe something else I tell her about my life—that plastic surgeons aren’t loaded, at least the ones who work at academic hospitals helping children rather than in private practice enhancing breasts.
“It’s true,” I say. “We gave up one income, remember?”
“What time did he get home?” she asks.
“Late. Too late for s-e-x ...” I say, thinking that it would be just my luck for my gifted daughter to memorize the three letters and spout them off to, say, Nick’s mother, Connie, who recently hinted that she thinks the kids watch too much television.
“So what about you?” I ask, remembering that she had a date last night. “Any action?”
“Nope. The drought continues,” she says.
I laugh. “What? The five-day drought?”
“Try five weeks,” she says. “And sex wasn’t even an issue . . . I got stood up.”
“Shut up,” I say, wondering what man would stand her up. Beyond her perfect figure, she is also funny, smart, and a huge sports fan, rattling off baseball trivia the way most women can recite Hollywood gossip. In other words—she is most guys’ dream. Granted, she can be high-maintenance and shockingly insecure, but they never glean that at the outset. In other words, she’s breakup-able, but not stand-up-able.
Ruby preaches from the next room that it’s not nice to say shut up as Cate continues, “Yeah. Before last night, I always had that going for me. Never been stood up and never dated a married man. I almost thought the former was my reward for the latter. So much for karma.”
“Maybe he was married.”
“No. He definitely wasn’t married. I did my research.”
“Wait. Was this the accountant from eHarmony or the pilot from your last trip?”
“Neither. It was the botanist from Starbucks.”
I whistle as I peek around the corner and catch Ruby taking a surreptitious bite of French toast. She hates to lose almost as much as her father, who can’t even make himself lose to her at Candy Land.
“Wow,” I say. “You got stood up by a botanist. That’s impressive.”
“Tell me about it,” she says. “And he didn’t so much as text an explanation or apology. A simple, ‘Really sorry, Cate, but I think I’d rather curl up with a good fern tonight.’”
“Well. Maybe he just. . . forgot? I offer.
“Maybe he decided I’m too old,” she says.
I open my mouth to refute this latest cynical tidbit, but can think of nothing particularly comforting to say other than my usual standby that her guy is out there somewhere—and she will meet him soon.
“I don’t know about that, Tessa. I think you might have gotten the last good one.”
She pauses in such a way that I know what’s coming next. Sure enough, she adds a wry, “Correction: the last two good ones. You bitch.”