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3
MARY-BETH
I didn’t sleep well that first night at Alex’s apartment, but then, I never do when I’m somewhere new. The second night, I was awake again too, though – and that was annoying. Maddy was asleep, so I needed to be too. She would only go until three a.m. at the longest, and I needed to grab the rest where I could.
I was also annoyed about Alex’s presumption. He hadn’t said anything about supervising building work on the phone. That made me pissed, because it was information I hadn’t been given, and not something I’d signed up for. I hated curve balls and surprises, apart from Maddy, of course. She was the single best surprise of my life, well, joint first with my seventh birthday, when my mom threw me a horseback riding party on the beach back in Cali. The staff from the nearby hotel had brought out a cake with my name on it. My full name - Mary-Beth Veronique Lisette (yes those are my middle names – mom had a thing for France) Holmes.
And yes, that is my surname. Holmes. I have one of those famous last names, and I both love and hate it. Having the same last name as Sherlock Holmes, the great fictional detective, should be a major plus – like, by somehow giving me magical abilities of deduction. All it had actually done my whole childhood was make other kids come up to and tease, “Elementary, my dear Mary-Beth.”
Hilarious, right? Really freaking hilarious, guys. And that was the upside. The downside, to me, was that Holmes sounds like ‘Home’, like I was the homey, motherly type. Like I was always sitting in a rocking chair sewing stuff, possibly in some kind of prairie settler scenario involving a big skirt, stoking a range and crochet (to be fair, I do love crochet but that’s not the point).
The homey image my name conjured up couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, I was a mom, but I was anything but motherly. Like, I’d be trying to get Mads to eat something other than yogurt by – yes, genius me – hiding it in yogurt, or getting her to go in the bath, and we would just pause in the middle of the persuading and the refusing and look at one another. So far, she could only say a few words. But I bet you, in those moments, if she had the full range of her vocabulary, she’d say, “Are you entirely sure you know what you’re doing, because you’re not exactly excelling at this motherhood gig.” And I’d say, “I know, kid. But I’m all on my own doing this and I haven’t slept for a very, very long time.”
Maybe I was being too hard on Alex. The new information thing was a bit of a trigger for me because of spending the last year dealing with Caleb. He either forgot to tell me vital things, like once last fall, he didn’t tell me that Maddy had a high temperature for the entire day when she was visiting him. By the time I got her back, she was really sick and I had to rush her to the Emergency Room. Or he dropped sudden intel on me, like that he’d be bringing her back three hours early because he had a date. That was on the day I’d roped in my brother and Clare’s on/off boyfriend Ralph to help me get the furniture store ready for opening. No, I am not kidding – he put a date before his daughter on the one day he saw her in, like, a month.
Horribly, at that moment, he called, as if I’d conjured him up just by thinking about him.
“Hey, M-B,” he drawled.
“Don’t call me that,” I said stiffly. “What do you want?”
A long pause. Was he high? Or watching men jumping off burning buildings on TV at the same time as talking to me? He loved stupid prank shows.
“I was thinking… How do we know we exist?”
I took in a deep breath. “Seriously? That’s what you called me to ask?”
“Yeah. And can you bring pacifiers when you drop Maddy off next time because she wouldn’t stop crying before.”
That hurt my heart. “No, I can’t. I don’t like pacifiers and she doesn’t need them. And, about your first question, something must be aware of your existence, to even make you ask if you exist, so yes, there must be consciousness or awareness or a higher level of mind or some shit, so that’s how you know. Bye, Caleb.” I ended the call.
Caleb saw himself as some kind of musician/philosopher/poet, but really he was just a giant pain in the ass who could barely fix himself a sandwich or operate a washing machine. If he had time to wonder if he existed, he should have been working more to help me out more with the costs of everything Maddy needs (which is a lot!).
Or spending more time with her. And I mean, spending time with her doing healthy and enriching things. Like taking her to play parks and the aquarium and Tiny Farmers and other stuff that one-year-olds like. Not just parking her in the corner of a dodgy rehearsal studio in her buggy while he wrote miserable songs about the pain of his (debatable) existence with Tall Pete and TJ. Obviously, he was banned by me from taking Mads to a full-on band rehearsal or recording session. Her ear drums have to last her whole life.
Maddy did scream her little lungs out between dinner and bedtime, though, which kind of made me want to jump out of one of Alex’s beautiful lead glass windows. She’d had an exhausting day, bless her. Caleb didn’t respect her napping schedule, and everything here was new to her. Plus, she was picking up on the fact that I felt really uncomfortable being here. Now she was sleeping, and I couldn’t, and I needed something to drink, and maybe some crackers and cheese. There was nothing else to do but grab the baby monitor and head for the kitchen. I’d just have to hope Mr. Grumpy wasn’t in there.
Unfortunately, he was. “Did you pick up Kayla’s cello today like I asked you?” he said, by way of a greeting.
Urgh, that had been my first task as Kayla’s nanny. Kayla herself had gone back to her mom’s about an hour after she’d met me. Between getting Maddy to Caleb’s and going to finish cleaning my store and old apartment so I’d get my deposit back, I’d totally forgotten about the damn thing.
“I forgot,” I said. Sorry wouldn’t come out of my mouth.
“Her teacher goes on vacation tomorrow,” he said. “It’ll have to stay there for two weeks now and she won’t be able to practice for her exam.”
I moved past him to the refrigerator, feeling that frisson of heat between us again and carefully ignoring it. I pulled out the jug and poured some of the iced tea into a glass. Then I saw the bottles of rum and ginger ale on the side. He was having one, so I did too.
“Look, I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in basically a year, so go easy on me,” I said, cracking the bottle open on the edge of the makeshift kitchen counter.
“Help yourself to a drink,” he said. “Oh, you already did.”
I lifted the bottle towards him. “Yep. Cheers. And, actually, it’s been more like eighteen months awake, because I had morning, noon and night sickness, then coccyx pain, which is an absolute killer, by the way. And then when I got big, there was no comfortable way to sleep.”
I thought Alex would say something sympathetic, but obviously, being massively self-centered, he just made it all about him. “Don’t talk to me about pain,” he said. “Every week when I go out on the field it’s like going into battle. It’s brutal – you’ve seen it. I get battered and bruised and I have to keep going, I can’t just stop for a little lie down in the middle of the game.”
I gasped, horrified and offended at once. “You think I get to have a little lie down in the middle of the day or something?” I pretty much shrieked at him.
The cheek of the man! He was helpfully making himself way less attractive to me, though, with every second, by acting like a complete asshole. For that, I should’ve been thanking him. But instead, I went on the attack. The Bills might think they have a great offense, but Alex Harper hasn’t seen anything on the field like the whirlwind fury of a new mom who’s work ethic is being questioned.
