“Seriously, Pheebs? They’re not your friends; they’re your project. They make you feel good about yourself. You’re their Lady Bountiful. We can write a check and bring the same result.”
For the second time in an hour, she used tricks against crying: Biting her tongue just past the edge of pain. Squeezing every muscle in an isotonic feat of unseen rigidity. She smelled a fight coming, but she wasn’t in the mood for backing down. “The Cupcake Project is the opposite of charity. This project means dignity. Work.”
He pulled on a fresh white shirt. “That’s not the issue. I feel as though you’re half here. You’re ignoring the kids—”
“Ignoring? The kids love this. They’re spending more time with me than with their friends.”
“They love being able to eat sugary crap whenever they want. What are you teaching them?”
“About helping people. Hard work.”
“You’re in another world half the time,” he said. “I feel as though we’re losing you, baby.”
Again, she felt twisted in confusion. Did he think she was always going to be here tending to any need he and the kids had at any given moment?
Jake tightened his tie. “You complain about your mother watching you and Deb like a hawk, but she cared a hell of a lot. You guys were number one for her. I want the same for our kids. For me. You’re the best wife and mother in the world, Pheebs. You hold us together. Don’t let go.”
? ? ?
Two weeks later, tangy ocean air rushed through the open windows. Indian summer had slipped in. Phoebe lifted the covers to slide out of bed.
“Wait.” Jake put a hand on her arm and pulled her toward him. “Why are you jumping out of bed?”
“It’s early,” she whispered. “Sleep.”
“It’s not sleep I want.” He brought her down to the cave of warmth their bodies made. He slipped his hand between her thighs. “It’s you.”
“I want you also, but—”
“But you’re running away from me to work. I know. Because I’m a bastard.” He rolled her to her back and raised her hands above her head. “I’m sorry. We can’t lose this time, or someday we’ll regret it. This life might not always be ours,” he whispered.
Jake sounded scared, as though they were back when she was in college, and he’d wanted her to stay with him in Brooklyn. He lifted himself above her, his still-muscled arms on either side. “You keep me together.”
After, he fell back asleep, and she tiptoed downstairs. As the coffee brewed, she sketched out a menu board. More important projects needed attention—a budget, an ordering system, and the many other tasks to divide up between her and Eva as business managers—but designing with colored pencils invigorated her. Writing up lists of people to approach for funds? Not so enjoyable.
Women people.
Jake didn’t know, but Phoebe’s intent was to eventually fund the Cupcake Project without him, to make it a woman-owned business, funded by women, for the benefit of the women served by Mira House. Helen thought it might interest Ms. Magazine, with the magazine listing it as an ethical investment.
An hour flew by while she worked during the quiet early morning. Jake and the kids would be up soon. After planning breakfast in her head—slow-cooked oatmeal—she checked on her list of donors to approach, beginning with Helen. Helen had a load of money but Jake still refused to take her and Alan into the Club, because Alan’s law office did work for Fidelity Investments. “He’ll be hocking me for details. I know the type.” Jake repeated the same bullshit anytime Phoebe mentioned them joining.
Phoebe and Helen maintained their closeness despite Jake’s and Alan’s enmity, agreeing that husbands were an entirely different breed of humanity. If women let the success of their friendships rest on their menfolk, there’d be nothing but lonely women out there.
Helen had lots of rich corporate clients. The only break she took for each of her kids’ births was three months. Her mother, who lived with them, virtually raised Helen’s three daughters, and the arrangement worked. Helen’s commitment to women’s rights had brought her all the way to serving on the board of the National Organization for Women. If Phoebe didn’t ask her to invest, she’d feel insulted.
Everything about the Cupcake Project delighted Phoebe. From the moment she’d slipped Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique from her mother’s nightstand a month before Phoebe’s high school graduation, she’d believed there had to be more to life than marriage and children. Two lines from the book remained wedged in her memory: “It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself,” and “The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.”
First Mira House, now the Cupcake Project, and soon, she hoped, like Jake, she’d travel in boardrooms. Boardrooms of her own.
? ? ?
Phoebe kicked off her too-high heels and rubbed her instep. “Thank God that’s over.” The awful country club they’d visited for cocktails receded in the side mirror view. If Trinity Chapel in Manhattan married Stonehenge and then birthed a faux Guggenheim in a frightening version of modern meets caveman, the result would be that building.
“Want to go to the movies?” Jake asked.
“Are you kidding? I can’t wait to take off this dress. We can watch something at home.”
“Come on. It’s only eight. We’ll go to the movie theater at the mall in Stamford. I’ll buy you a damned sweat suit at Saks on the way if you want to be comfortable.” He placed a hand on her thigh and squeezed. “I need this right now. A little escape.”
She looked at him as though he’d grown a second nose. “Jake. Really. It’s too late. We can watch a movie on TV.”
“I want to relax in a big dark theater. Do you think these nights are fun for me?”
“They’re sure not my idea of a good time.”
“They’re not supposed to be fun. They pay for being able to have our lives.” Jake opened the heating vent. “I need a break.”
“Let’s have a true break.” She squeezed his knee. “Seriously. We can ratchet everything down and make our lives simpler.”
“Really?” He pulled off the exit for the mall. “You think it’s that easy? Boom, we ratchet it down? Are you ready to give up your project?”
“We’re not out nights and traveling for my business.”
“You don’t have a business, baby. Cupcakes? You have a charity masquerading as a business-to-be that I’m underwriting.”
Jake could turn mean in one second. She felt as though he’d slapped her. Their marriage undertows, these hurricanes of love disassembling, were impossible for Phoebe to follow. When Jake spoiled for a fight, he’d twist through any road to spew out his mood. If she simply remained still, the storm passed, but immobility brought another kind of poison.
“Fine,” she said. “Hide your checkbook. I don’t need you.”