2
TWO YEARS LATER
“It can’t have beenthatbad.”
“Think ‘twenty car wreck on the BQE. Home perm with bleach highlights.’”
I’m sitting in the courtyard near my office building with Vivian, my best work buddy. We always eat outside on nice days; it is cheaper than going to a restaurant but less stultifying than having a meal inside the Murano offices. Whenever the weather isn’t openly hostile, we grab a spot at the scattered tables clustered across the street from our thirty-story high-rise, watching pigeons filching potato chips from stoned teenagers and buttoned-up office workers.
“Okay,” she continues. “What was the worst part of the date?”
“Well, first he says to me, ‘You have pretty lips. Like my mother’s.’”
“Oh, no.” Vivi shakes her head. “No, no, no.” Vivi has enviously straight, thick black hair, and it swings back and forth to emphasize her disapproval.
“He says, ‘My mom had curvy lips like yours. Want to see a photo?’ And he shows me a photo and then zooms in on his mother’s lips.”
“And then you walked out.”
I shrug. “No. I figured, okay, that was weird, but a lot of people are awkward on a first date, you know? And then he starts talking about his home business.”
“He was some kind of entrepreneur, right?” This is my fourth date in as many months, and Vivi enjoys keeping track of the details. She is a happily married mother of twin boys who seems to get a vicarious thrill from her friends’ terrible love lives.
“Oh, that part was true,” I agree. “His business turns out to be selling essential oils, which he mostly advertises on porn sites.”
“So he’s basically selling oils to make men’s junk…”
“Smell like patchouli, yes.”
Vivi starts laughing. “Oh, honey. How do you find these guys?”
“They’re all that’s out there, Viv. This is why I tried so hard to make things work with Nick. He’s unreliable, but at least he’s sane.”
“I thought you liked Nick because he was a bad boy.”
“I’m over bad boys. I’m overallboys.” My voice sounds pathetic even to me. “But themenare all taken.”
“Well, you gave Nick his shot, so you have to move on from that dream.”
“I know.” She gives me a hard look. “I know, Vivi.”
The previous summer, when Hannah was seven, I spent almost two months living with my ex-husband Nick in his current city of Atlanta. The decision came after he insisted he had found a steady gig as a musician, and I should give him one more chance to patch things up. We would buy a cute little house together down there, and he would pick Hannah up from school every day, and we would turn into a real family at last. It was a roller-coaster ride for all three of us: four weeks of Hannah and me learning to live with her dad again...four weeks of romance,and family dinners, and the hope that Nick was finally going to put us first...and then three weeks of realizing he was exactly the same as he’d always been. He wanted Hannah and me in his life, but only on his schedule, and only when he was available. I ended up taking Hannah back to New York again and begging for my old job back.
Hannah is now eight and still hasn’t forgiven either of her parents for disrupting her life like that, only to return to New York a couple of months later. Not long after that, my sister Abby left the city to move in with her fiancé in Newfoundland, breaking up our little family even further. My daughter has gotten her revenge by making a precocious transformation into a sarcastic tween.
Nick isn’t entirely out of our lives, though. He says he is going to come to New York to watch Hannah during her upcoming April vacation, a break that lands right in the middle of peak tax season when it is impossible for an accountant like me to take time off. That is only a week or so from now, which means I will be dealing with my bad-boy ex-husband soon enough.
If he shows up.
I really want him to show up.
“There are good men out there, you know,” Vivi says, packing up the remains of her salad. “I married one of them.”
“And when you are killed by an asteroid, I will sweep in and ask out Peter.”
“Just wait until the day after my funeral. Otherwise it’s tacky.”
“Well, of course. Twenty-four hours. But only because we’re friends.”
