“You should pursue a hobby.”
“Like playing guitar?”
“Exactly.”
“I’m no expert, but something tells me you’re a little past the hobby level.”
She smiled. “Well, you’ve seen my basement.”
“I have hobbies. I’ve recently taken up boxing, so I guess I can put a check mark next to that one.” He’d grown up with three older brothers, so he knew how to throw a punch and how to take one. But he needed something to do on the nights Sasha was at Kimmy’s, to give him some semblance of routine. At thirty-seven, he relished the structure and discipline he’d fought so hard against at eighteen, and he needed an outlet and a way to blow off steam. Boxing was the only activity that sounded interesting to him. He’d gone to a class on a whim and he’d been boxing ever since. He showed up, he hit a bag, he felt better, he went home.
“You really need to get to know yourself and what it is you want.” She was becoming more animated as they went along, and it was adorable.
“That’s a little trickier,” he said, but he didn’t elaborate. He was still trying to figure that out.
“What all those articles failed to mention was how boring it would be,” Layla said. “I like my independence. I like it a lot. But sometimes I feel like I’m stuck in some sort of purgatory full of thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles that you have to spend time in before they let you out.”
“Maybe it’s better than the alternative. I knew a guy who met a woman a week after he split from his wife. And I don’t mean divorced from his wife. I mean he moved out and a week later he had a new girlfriend. Now they’re engaged and she’s already pregnant and he’s miserable and I’m not going to kick him when he’s down, but what did he expect?”
“That sounds incredibly shortsighted on his part. Maybe those magazine articles know what they’re talking about after all.”
“And don’t forget about online dating,” Josh said. “That is a whole other thing.”
“I made it as far as downloading the app one night.”
“My brother insisted that I at least try it. It was like being on a bizarre job interview. Also, I hated it. And I don’t think I’m supposed to be using an app considering I’m not officially divorced yet.”
“I don’t get the impression that online dating is highly regulated.”
“I wouldn’t know. Online dating didn’t even exist the last time I was single, which was, admittedly, a long time ago.”
“But it’s worked for so many people,” Layla exclaimed.
“Everyone knows someone who found the love of their life by online dating,” Josh said with equal fervor.
“I think I’ll pass,” Layla said.
“What else am I supposed to know?” he asked.
“If you’re lucky enough to click with someone, you’re not supposed to talk about what went wrong in your marriage, at least not at first. You’re just supposed to say it didn’t work out.”
“So, don’t meet someone before you’ve taken up a hobby and figured out what you want, don’t tell them anything about your life and what went wrong in your relationship, and once that’s behind you it’s okay to start looking for your next relationship.”
“And don’t forget that second marriages are statistically proven to fail at an even higher rate than the first,” Layla said.
“I get the feeling our views are not of the glass-half-full variety.”
“Which is probably the reason we’re still in purgatory.” She placed another puzzle piece in its place. “It’s nice to have somebody to talk to about it.”
“I agree,” Josh said. “People mean well when they offer advice, but unless they’ve been through it, they really can’t weigh in. I mostly feel like they’re just happy not to be in my shoes.”
Josh was a little bit curious about what had gone wrong in Layla’s marriage, but he couldn’t exactly say, So, were you the problem or was he? And that wouldn’t be fair, anyway, because if there was one thing he’d acknowledged it was that every relationship took two people to succeed and two to fail.
“Supposedly, you need to spend half of the total time you spent with someone getting over them,” Layla said.
“That means I’ll need about ten years. Awesome. I’ll be almost forty-eight before I get back out there.”
“I’ll only be forty. But this is also a stupid rule. I mean, no one wants to jump in too soon, but that rule is ridiculous and arbitrary.”
“Surely, there’s a happy medium,” he said. “Something to tide us over while we’re waiting.”
“I think it’s called friends with benefits. Which is not for me, by the way.”
“It’s not for me, either.” The one thing he and Kimmy had been short on for the last few years was an intimate connection. Friends with benefits didn’t sound so hot to him. Why even bother? “So, friends without benefits?”
“I think that’s just called being friends,” Layla said.
“Maybe there’s something in between that and friends with benefits.” There had to be, because he never thought about what it would be like to kiss his friends the way he was wondering what it would be like to kiss Layla.
“Friends with … potential? Is that an actual thing?”
“Works for me. Normally, I would just ask a woman out, but the rules…” They could joke all they wanted, but there was some truth to those rules. And he wasn’t in a hurry. Companionship was one thing. Falling in love was another. But committing to someone for the long haul. He wasn’t ready for that yet. “We could be friends with potential. What do you think?”
“Hmm, I don’t know. I mean, you’re so unattractive. It would be sort of torturous for me.”
That made him laugh, because it was not at all what he’d thought she was about to say. “And you’re my daughter’s teacher.”
“That’s not really a problem as long as we keep it on the down-low because the moms in the drop-off line would not be able to deal. I have a feeling you’re the subject of a lot of romantic speculation.”
A few of the moms had already struck up a conversation with him if they happened to be walking back to the parking lot at the same time he was. There was one in particular who he could almost swear arrived exactly when he did every day and parked right next to him. She was attractive and couldn’t be nicer, but he wasn’t interested in any of the moms. But he’d be lying if he couldn’t admit, at least to himself, that it was nice to know he was wanted by someone.
“This is something I missed,” he said when they took a break and Layla refilled their wineglasses.
“Puzzles?” she asked.
“No. Just something to do with someone else.” Kimmy was always on her phone, and Josh knew that if he went and found something of his own to do, it would only make the divide between them bigger. Like he’d be waving the white flag and admitting that the only shared interest they had by then was Sasha. “My ex-wife and I weren’t doing much together toward the end.” And when they were together, without Sasha, things were pretty contentious, which was putting it nicely.