“It’s Laine, Mom. And I’m here.”
Oh dear. But I always did get them confused. “HaLaPi,” Hank and I used to call the lot of them, and sometimes we’d just yell that out. Of course, it was almost always Laine who’d come running. And even now, she was being gentle with me, as was her way. She’d never shine a light on my flaws. “HaLaPi!” I said as cheerfully as I could.
She sighed, and I felt the tiniest bit of fear start to zip through my veins. I needed her. I needed her to come see that I was fine, truly I was. It was just that I could use a little help from someone who wouldn’t judge me.
And Laine must have known that, because she said, “I’m flying in later this week.”
FIVE
LAINE
Josh came rushing into the town house just as I was wheeling my suitcase to the front door. “Can we talk?” he said, slightly out of breath; he’d been at a ridiculously early breakfast meeting with an investor. Though his face was unlined and his hair was still thick and free of grays, he looked tired, and kind of down in the mouth. I probably did, too. Nearly a week had passed since I announced I wanted a divorce, and I think both of us had been waiting to see if this was a storm of a mood that would suddenly pass, leaving a rainbow in its place.
Instead, I kept dreaming about babies—Hadley’s twins, my neighbor’s adorable toddler, infants that didn’t exist but felt all too real in my dreams. And when I opened my eyes in the morning, I felt the same sense of absolute certainty about my decision to end our marriage. The trouble was, that certainty waned as the day went on. Just the night before, I’d thought about crawling into bed with Josh and calling the whole thing off. It was a good thing I was getting out of town for a while. Like Hadley said, I needed perspective; a chance to think without Josh being there all the time, influencing my decisions.
“Um, I guess? My Uber will be here any minute now,” I said. Topper’s assistant had emailed me with flight options within an hour of my getting off the phone with Hadley. After some debate, I’d decided to swallow my pride and accept their generosity because I couldn’t stand the idea of spending ten hours in a car without Belle or Josh to keep me company.
He shoved his hands in his pockets. There was a latte trail down the front of his rumpled button-down, and I resisted the urge to tell him to hand it to me so I could go spot-treat it. “Sure you don’t want me to drive you to the airport?” he asked.
“No, it’s okay,” I told him. The car service cost thirty dollars that I would have preferred to put in the savings account I’d earmarked for our future family life—the one we’d never have. But Josh seemed so unconvinced that I actually wanted to divorce that I’d started to wonder if he was onto something, and I was eager not to be in a confined space with him for even half an hour, lest I really lose my resolve. After all, I’d already announced my plan to my sisters and my mother. I couldn’t take that back now. . .
Could I?
“Then I’ll make it quick,” he said. He was staring at me with puppy-dog eyes, which didn’t bode well. “The thing is, Laine, I don’t want to get divorced. What am I going to do without you?”
At once, I understood how faulty my reasoning had been. Belle was gone, but someone did need me: my husband.
And how. While the man could code in his sleep and do complex equations faster than I could figure out how much to tip a waiter, he was markedly less adept at handling everyday life. For example, his idea of cooking involved microwaving leftover takeout, and more than once, he’d walked around an entire day with his sweatpants on backward. (When I’d pointed this out to him, he’d admitted that something had seemed off about the fit.) Who would pay the bills, stock the fridge, and remind him to take his vitamins? Leaving him would be like abandoning a calf in front of a wolf den.
As my gaze moved from Josh’s spiky black hair to the warmth of his dark eyes to the perpetual half grin of his thin lips, a wave of sadness came crashing over me. I adored him. He needed me. Why wasn’t that enough?
It was almost like he was reading my thoughts, because he leaned forward and said, “I love you. Last I checked, you love me, too. Has that changed?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head morosely. Josh and I had met not long after I’d adopted Belle. Like me, he’d attended the University of Michigan, although he’d been a year ahead of me. And like me, he’d decided to stay in town after graduation. I’d left Belle at the “dog parking” spot outside a café for all of a minute to order a coffee, and she’d barked her head off in protest until he’d strolled up and scratched behind her ears. And I’d immediately thought: That’s a man I could build a life with.
Now here we were, nearly a decade and a half later. It pained me to think that for all of Josh’s big plans, aside from Belle’s absence, our daily existence now was almost exactly like it had been then.
He’d begun to pace. The man hunched like he was forever trying to catch wind of what an Oompa Loompa was saying, but somehow it was incredibly charming on him. Why couldn’t he make this easy and say the one thing I’d been dying to hear? “You have to give me a chance to make this right, Laine,” he said. “Actually, you know what?”
I didn’t, and the glimmer in his eyes—which looked an awful lot like the one he got when he had one of his million-dollar ideas—was slightly alarming.
“I’ll make an appointment with a marriage therapist,” he said, nodding with satisfaction. “That’s exactly what I’ll do.”
A zing of excitement zipped through me. Maybe a therapist would help him come around to the idea of having a family without me needing to push him.
Then reality set in, and with it, the quicksand of pessimism. I knew Josh better than he knew himself. And while I was sure he intended to make an appointment, he would immediately get distracted by work, and before long, he wouldn’t even remember telling me that he was going to do that. Maybe he would have to learn how to tiptoe past the wolves on his own.
“Sure,” I said, not meeting his gaze.
“You’ll see, Laine. Haven’t the past twelve years been good? Remember our honeymoon?”
Recalling the quaint bed-and-breakfast where we’d stayed in Old San Juan didn’t lift my mood. We’d barely left our room except to get food, and even then, we’d run right back to bed. Where had that passion, that ease, gone?
“Remember when we first moved in here, the way Belle ran around out back like she was a puppy?” he said. The town house was beige and bland, but we’d chosen it because it was pet friendly and had a small yard—we’d get a bigger one when we had kids, we’d agreed.
Now my gloom was threatening to pull me right under. How had I not seen it earlier? Josh and I talked about children the way people who never bought a single lottery ticket discussed what they’d do once they won.
I blinked back sudden tears. “Obviously.”
He’d stopped pacing and was looking at me intently. “And remember when my dad died, how you were there for me? Then I was able to do the same for you six months later?” Neither of us had been close to our fathers, and as we discovered, that can cause a very particular kind of pain. We’d spent hours rehashing memories and futilely wishing these two men—one a Japanese immigrant, the other a fourth-generation New Yorker—would have been less short-tempered and more present in our lives. Josh had vowed to be a better father than his own had been. What’d happened to that promise?