“Um…maybe? Is he the…” She was stalling.
“He’s one of the co-founders of Magic Bean,” she said. Isabel looked at Sabrina expectantly. Sabrina had zero clue what Magic Bean was but gave Isabel a noncommittal murmur of approval. “So last night—I mean, you know, I was like completely wiped after work yesterday; I had even decided I was going to skip yoga.” Sabrina nodded. Last night she had rushed home to find Owen, who was five, screaming at the nanny that he wanted to watch another episode of Peppa Pig on the iPad and Amelia hiding under her bed, and then neither of them had wanted to eat the whole-wheat spaghetti with turkey meatballs that she’d made, so she ended up just serving them chicken nuggets. Organic, $8.99-a-package nuggets from vegetarian, grain-fed, free-range chickens, but still. “I just wanted to go home and crash. And then like literally the minute I get downstairs I get a text from Meredith, who works in Community at Magic Bean, and she’s like, Isabel, you have to come out to Flatiron Social, everyone is here, and I’m like, Meredith, I am beat, I need to just go home, and she Snapchats me a pic of Andrew at the bar, and she had written on it ‘Hey, girl,’ and I’m like, well, this is interesting, because she knows I think Andrew is so cute.”
Sabrina half listened as Isabel described telling Meredith that she’d be right over and that she and Andrew had ended up talking for hours just about, like, life. Isabel mostly amused her, though it was getting increasingly hard for Sabrina to even remember what it was like to be twenty-six and meet up with a guy you had a crush on. Obviously Snapchat hadn’t existed when Sabrina was twenty-six. Facebook had barely existed! People were just starting to really use text messages! It was only ten years ago, but it felt like a completely different world. She and Dan had met when she was twenty-five and in grad school—she was getting her MFA and he was a friend of her friend Natalie, and the fact that he had a job in journalism seemed hopelessly exciting. Romantic, almost. She wished she could go back and tell her twenty-five-year-old self that there was nothing special about journalists and to say yes to the cute guy from the business school who had asked her out at least three times. She’d looked him up on Facebook recently and learned that he was a managing director at Goldman Sachs and had three children and a wife who looked like she spent a lot of time at Pilates. She briefly considered messaging him, just to say hi, but chickened out.
Sabrina was also fixated on a seemingly minor detail of Isabel’s story, but one that—for someone whose formative years had been spent watching Sex and the City and absorbing the lessons of He’s Just Not That Into You and The Rules—was particularly mind-blowing to her. When she’d been single—and even now, when she talked to friends her age who were still single—everyone seemed to have a firm grasp on the Right Way to Deal with Men in New York City, a world in which women never initiated anything, and straight men held every single ounce of the power, mostly because of the simple math that there were fewer of them. The idea of just up and going to the bar to go after a crush seemed completely foreign. Even though Dan could be a real dick sometimes, Sabrina nonetheless felt grateful that she had him. The thought of being single at thirty-six was too much. Even Natalie—gorgeous, brilliant Natalie, who was the author of a series of wildly successful Hunger Games meets Gossip Girl YA books about a clique of girls at a postapocalyptic prep school who have to simultaneously fight for popularity and for the survival of the planet—hadn’t been in a relationship in three years. Maybe it was a generational thing? Isabel just seemed possessed of a self-confidence that Sabrina had never had. True, Isabel was very pretty, with long blond hair and impossibly clear skin and a seemingly year-round tan. But still.
“So now what?” Sabrina asked.
“He’s hosting the New York Startup Series tomorrow night and I think we’ll grab drinks after.” Isabel grinned. “So…what do you think?” She shoved her phone in Sabrina’s face. An unremarkably handsome guy on a ski slope stared back at her.
“Cute,” Sabrina said. Isabel had, on more than one occasion, told Sabrina how great it was to have someone older and wiser in the office, a “compliment” that Sabrina accepted with a forced smile.
Just then, her phone vibrated with a text, and the notification on the screen said it was from Willa, the Pratt student from Australia she’d hired to pick Amelia up from Slope Montessori and Owen from kindergarten every afternoon. “Sorry, one sec, it’s my nanny texting me.” She unlocked the screen and read: hey S! Sorry for short notice but i’m feeling really crap today and think it’s probs better for me to stay home. :( Don’t want to get the kiddos sick! xo
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Sabrina said under her breath. When had Willa started calling her S and signing her texts xo? Was there any recognition that Sabrina was, in fact, her employer?
“What’s up?”
“My nanny is sick.”
“Oh, that sucks,” Isabel said in the mildly sympathetic tone of someone for whom this was a recognizably bad yet wholly foreign problem.
“And we have that metrics meeting this afternoon, don’t we. Fuck! Sorry.” Isabel was looking at her with vague concern. “Maybe Dan can pick them up.” She texted Dan: Hey, Willa is sick and I have imp mtg this afternoon—any chance you can pick A & O up and wfh the rest of the day? To Isabel, she said, “Kids make life complicated.”
Isabel nodded. “I totally, totally get it,” she said.
Dan texted back: Super busy today—can you handle?