“Are any of those yours?” he asked.
Jess squinted at the trampoline as if searching for a particular child. “No,” she said eventually, as if hers might be in the bathroom, at soccer practice, inside taking a nap.
* * *
She heard nothing from him for several weeks, had forgotten she’d given him her number. And then.
A few group texts first, about getting together. A beer garden in Riverside. Dinner in a nearby town or in the city. A band they all liked at the Forest Hills Stadium. Did anyone want to go? His was the only number without a contact assigned. She didn’t know who it could be at first.
And then a direct text. Did I see you running by the train this morning?
For a moment she thought it was meant for someone else. Except she had gone for a run that morning, and her route took her by the train station. Then she remembered.
You should have honked! I could have used encouragement.
“All good?” Malcolm asked. She’d been at the counter dicing celery when Neil’s message came in. They were making dinner together for the first time in a very long time.
“Oh, fine,” she said. “That was just—” And then she turned her phone over so it was facedown on the counter. She thought of the show she’d fallen asleep to earlier that week, on National Geographic, about spiders, how they’re born knowing how to weave a web, without ever having seen one, without imagining what a web could be for.
Later, as they were washing up, she checked to see if he’d written again.
* * *
They exchanged maybe two dozen meaningless texts, spread out over many weeks. Mostly about town, Jess’s recommendations. She assumed he was asking Patrick these questions, too. Or Siobhán. Or his new neighbors. She assumed he had so many questions that he had to assemble a dozen people to answer because it would be too much for one person. Best sushi, best dry cleaner, whether the Y was clean. He probably had a thousand questions related to the kids, and school, and their activities, and it occurred to her that he was probably asking someone—a parent—for advice on those things. There were probably so many of “those things” that he was texting that person more than he was texting her. Once, she was driving when she saw his name pop up, and she pulled over to reply. Later, she wondered why she hadn’t simply waited until she got home. It was a little heartbreaking, when she considered it; having to make new friends in his forties, hoping to be included in things, hoping for his kids’ sakes to make inroads in a place that was not his home.
His messages ended with three exclamation points, sometimes. Sometimes no punctuation at all. Sometimes he mixed up “you’re” and “your.” And yet he seemed fastidious in other ways—she’d glimpsed the interior of his car, she’d seen the diaper bag. Some texts were strictly professional. He sent an article he read about Bloom. He sent an article from a law review he subscribed to. She once mentioned a band she liked, and several days later he sent her a Spotify link to a song by a band she’d never heard of because he thought they were similar and wanted to know if she thought so, too. He was over at the Hills’ house when Siobhán called to wish Jess a happy birthday. Jess heard two male voices in the background, and then Siobhán switched to speaker so everyone could shout their good wishes. “Who’s there?” Jess asked casually, as if she didn’t feel an electric current down her spine as soon as she heard his voice, and just as she knew she would, Siobhán listed Neil and his kids alongside the rest of her family. Alice and some other friends had suggested getting together for drinks, but Jess didn’t feel like it. It was a beautiful August night, the cicadas making a racket. Her father used to say that meant the next day would be very hot. “You still won’t come over?” Siobhán asked, taking her off speaker, and Jess felt a little taken aback, like Siobhán knew that Neil would be a particular draw for her and was surprised she held out. But Malcolm had already promised they’d do something to celebrate on his night off. She curled up in her bed with a book and woke up sometime in the middle of the night to the jarring brightness of her bedside lamp.
She saw him around town a few times, and noted the car he drove—a white SUV, the same as so many others—but his had a royal blue decal on the bumper in the shape of Cape Cod. She found herself looking for that sticker when she was running errands.
Thirty-nine is too young to give up on trying for a baby, the Facebook groups told her, even when she typed her whole history, six and a half years of heartbreak summarized into two paragraphs. She read compulsively and then closed her tabs and cleared her history. Women having miracle babies in their forties. One woman at forty-seven with numbers worse than Jess’s.
He was back at the Hills’ house for a Labor Day barbeque—they rented an enormous Slip ’n Slide for the kids—and Jess saw him glancing over at her a few times before he walked up to say hello. They were shyer with each other in person than they were on text.
“Where’s Malcolm?” he asked after they chatted for a bit. “Working?”
“Yes, working today, probably home tomorrow.”
“So many of Patrick’s stories are about that place. Fun times.”
“I’m sure.”
“Is it hard though?”
“Sorry?”
“All the nights and weekends?”
Jess laughed. “He loves it. He’s a night owl. Never complains.”
“No, I mean for you.”
“Me?” Her stomach tightened. He was looking at her so intently. Her heart knocked as if trying to tell her something important. “No, not really. We’re used to it. We have our rhythm.”
When he walked away—called over by Patrick, who wanted him to show the guys something on his phone—Jess felt shaky, like something had happened that she couldn’t describe.
He found her on Facebook a week or so after Labor Day, went on a tear of liking her photos one night. She screenshotted the notifications, wrote “psycho,” and almost sent it to him, but something told her to pause, to think for a second. She slowly deleted the letters of his name. She deleted the screenshot.
She put her phone down on her bedside table. She looked at Malcolm sleeping in a heap beside her, his cheeks heavily shadowed though he gave himself a close shave every afternoon. Malcolm lived and died by his routine. He woke up, went to the gym for an hour, stopped by his favorite deli for an egg sandwich on his way home, salt-pepper-ketchup, no cheese, had a quick chat with Jay, with his wife, Carmen, who worked the register, he asked about their kids, about Jay’s brother who had Parkinson’s and had moved in with them, he chatted with whoever else happened to be on line waiting for their own sandwiches, and then he headed off to buy three scratch-offs from the mini-mart. At the mini-mart he usually stayed for a minute to chat with Lorenzo, but if it was Rick at the counter, he just took his tickets and headed home because as Jess knew, as Jess alone knew, Rick gave Malcolm the creeps. He kept a specific scratch-off penny in the cup holder of his car and always scratched the tickets in their driveway, against the steering wheel, his sandwich and coffee getting cold beside him. When he lost, he stuffed the tickets in the pocket of his car door, only emptying them when they began to overflow. Once inside the house, he stood at the counter and read the newspaper for twenty minutes, the crumbs of his sandwich falling all over the pages. Then he showered, shaved, headed off to the Half Moon once again.