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I shook my head.
“Not interested?”
“Pregnant.”
“Wow.” He pulled the joint back, the smoke blowing away from us. “That’s a buzzkill. Literally.”
He stared down at the joint, and I watched him taking the pregnancy in.
“Does the husband know yet?”
I flinched. The husband. The ex-husband. How was I going to tell him now? How was I going to tell him anything ever again? I shook my head.
“Why not?”
I shrugged. “He’s too busy showering with his new girlfriend.”
He took another drag. “Wow.”
Then he focused on the joint, neither of us talking.
“Have I told you I have three kids?”
I looked at him, shocked. “What?”
He nodded. “All different mothers.”
“That’s some sperm.”
He smiled. “The first one, I don’t know. I couldn’t handle it. I was eighteen, I behaved terribly. I spend most of my time making it up to the other two,” he said. “It’s not the same thing. My daughter, she’s my first, deserves to have a better father than I’ve been.”
“If you’re trying to make me feel better, it isn’t exactly working.”
“Make you feel better? I’m trying to make me feel better.”
“You were eighteen when you screwed up.”
“True,” he said. “And it’s not like I lied about everything in my life.”
“All right, enough.”
“Sent my husband into the arms of another woman. Threw away my job on a plate of peaches.”
“Please stop talking.”
“Pretty honest move, tossing the peaches like that,” he said. “No regard for the consequences.”
I looked at him, trying to read if he was still making fun.
He put the joint out. “I’m serious. When was the last time you did anything like that?”
“Crazy?”
“Honest. Without thinking about how it would appear to your many fans,” he said. “Just allowing yourself to have a moment that wasn’t curated.”
That stopped me. Curated. It was a perfect word for what was required of me in order to present A Little Sunshine to the world, in order to present myself to the world. Everything I’d done—for so long—had required it: si
fting through photographs, sifting through perfect phrases, to capture the moment I was supposed to be having. Sleeker, more interesting, more photo-ready.
