Monday morning is a regular school day, and Jessica and Sammy come banging against the door early, the way they always do. I’m sort of caught off guard, because in my own little mind, everything has changed completely, and nobody but Bedford and William Sullivan—and okay, Patrick—really likes me anymore, and Patrick doesn’t count because he’s leaving and I won’t ever see him again.
But there are the two of them: Sammy with his scooter, and Jessica all harried as usual with her bag over her shoulder and her coffee cup in her hand. As soon as I open the door, she gives me a big smile and starts apologizing for not checking in on me over the weekend.
“Here you had a head injury and everything, and I’m off sorting out my own little life, not even making sure you weren’t in the hospital or something,” she says. Then she laughs. “Well, I knew you weren’t in the hospital because that real estate lady on Friday said you were perfectly fine. And also I came to check on you in the middle of the night on Thursday, and found out you were with Patrick.” She narrows her eyes a little bit when she says his name, the girlfriend body language for so what was that about, and I shrug in reply, the body language of it wasn’t anything, believe me.
Sammy seems distracted, playing with the handle of his scooter and squirming around under his backpack. Every now and then he looks up at me like there’s something he wants to say. No doubt he has opinions about how badly our magic project turned out.
Join the club, my boy. Stand in line.
All of a sudden Jessica says, “Listen! I don’t really have to be in until noon today. I was just going to go get a haircut, but what if you and I got a little breakfast first? Maybe not at Yolk, of course.” She laughs and ruffles Sammy’s hair, and he does a comedic googly-eyed look right at me and mouths the word “Yikes” where she can’t see.
Marital situations can be so confusing for the little ones. Especially the ones who’ve tried to mastermind adult lives and found it horrifyingly difficult.
“Sure,” I tell her. “Breakfast it is!”
I’d forgotten the main thing about being with Jessica: how much fun it is to have a girlfriend who is also living some version of a possibly chaotic life. Most of the time, I have to say, I seem to be the person who can’t get it together, the one being left at the altar and then cutting up her wedding dress in the preschool, the one setting out for a strange city and failing at reinventing herself even there.
And yet here is Jessica, linking arms with me, walking down the street, and she’s actually laughing about the whole Thanksgiving catastrophe. She said she and Andrew keep referring to it as Fucksgiving. “Like, one thing went wrong, and then it just set off a whole cascade until absolutely everything was shit. Was that basically your take on it, too?”
“From what I can remember. I had a convenient head injury, remember.”
“Oh, yes. Although you coped masterfully even after that. As I recall, you took care of pretty much everyone, even through the yelling and screaming. And you solved two of your most pressing romantic problems—both Noah and Jeremy. It was actually kind of epic.”
“One of the only Thanksgivings I’ve had in which nobody ate any turkey.”
“Or clam chowder either. Or lobsters. Hence, Fucksgiving.”
She smiles at me. By now she’s steered us into a little breakfast place, far, far away from Yolk. A waiter has brought us menus and coffees, asking if we want almond milk, soy milk, cream, half-and-half, skim, or regular milk. And after that question is answered, he’d like to know which kind of sweeteners to haul over: pink packets, blue ones, yellow, stevia, Truvia, regular sugar, regular raw sugar, or sugar syrup.
“I’m going to miss this about Brooklyn,” I tell her when we’ve sorted out our order. “It’s a place you can’t be indecisive. Even about coffee. In Jacksonville, it’s so not this way.”
She runs her fingers through her long hair, shakes out her waves, and stares off into space, her mouth a closed, straight line. She has the kind of hair that should ensure its owner’s perfect lifetime happiness. Too bad her hair is not in charge of negotiating her love life, because then nothing would ever go wrong.
“So, tell me where things stand,” I say. “Andrew’s out of the picture, I take it. Relegated back to divorced dad status, but I just want to say—”
“Well, no, actually,” she says, but I don’t take it in because I’m talking at the same time, and what I’m saying is, “want to say that I think that was really a stupid move, for the waitress, that woman to speak up like that, right in front of everyone, to say she was, you know, the one.”
Jessica is looking at me with her wide blue eyes. “I know, I know, but you know what else? It made me realize how I am not remotely well enough to love Andrew completely. Which I was in such denial about. I was all like, ‘Oh, our kid is so cute, writing that little poem, and he needs us, and why don’t we just forget the past and get back together?’ when that was not even realistic. First fight, and we’re done again. Right?”
“I guess . . .”
She leans forward. “So bad as this was, it got us to talking. Which was painful and excruciating, and I’m surprised you didn’t hear us. On Friday we took Sammy over to my mother’s house just so we could fight and yell and scream and get it all out. I don’t normally approve of yelling and screaming, but Andrew said we had to air everything, and if voices were raised—then that showed we cared enough to risk it. Or something. Anyway, we did. And at the end of it, hours and hours of talking and pacing and yelling, he said he wanted to keep trying. And I said I did, too. And so we are.”
“Wow.”
“Because what I realized is that I had something to do with the marriage falling apart, too. Here I was blaming him and everything, but I was really the one who checked out of the marriage first. I was bored and frustrated at my job, and I started criticizing him for everything, and getting so annoyed with him, and ignoring him and doing stuff elsewhere—and he just felt pushed out. Plain and simple. And then she was there—and nobody’s saying it was right—but I can see how somebody fun and interesting might be appealing when your wife is going to bed at eight o’clock just so she won’t have to talk to you.”
The waiter comes over with our eggs, and we make room at the table for our gigantic plates, filled with eggs and potatoes and whole-grain toast.
“So the bottom line is that we’ve decided we need to be in a different house, not his, not mine, which is convenient because mine is getting sold—”
“But not yet!” I protest. “You can stay. I’d like it if you stayed, in fact.”
She shakes her head sadly. “Nope. No can do. We need a fresh start, symbolically if not for anything else. We’ll stay in Brooklyn so that Sammy can continue to go to a school where kids are allowed to write poems about breakfast foods to embarrass their parents. I want to start my own business at some point, and Andrew wants us to spend every summer at his parents’ cabin in the Berkshires, now that they’re getting old. So . . . big changes.”
On the way home, I fill her in as best as I can on Noah taking Blix’s stuff so his parents can challenge the will, and William Sullivan not giving up on Lola. And Jeremy getting furious with me and believing that I’d somehow known all along I didn’t want to marry him.
She wrinkles her nose. “Well, I have to say that I’ve never been quite convinced of your supposed love for this guy.”
“My family is probably never going to speak to me again. They’re all so sure he’s the guy I’m supposed to be with.”
“Sorry. Nope, nope, nope. You couldn’t have settled for him. I wouldn’t have allowed it. And now—I don’t care what your family says—you’ve got other people looking out for you. We’re your posse now.”