Every Other Saturday (15 page)

If he were giving out awards at the end of the experiment, Dave would have to give “Most Interesting” to Shira, whom he called Holly Golightly on his blog.

Shira was in her early thirties, a yoga teacher who did pet-sitting and dog-walking on the side. After a busy week, he emailed her on Friday morning, realizing they hadn’t set specific plans for their date.

“Just let me know when and where you’d like to meet,” he wrote. “I don’t have my daughter this weekend so I’m flexible.”

“Great,” she wrote back. “I’m teaching at eight. Want to come to class?”

“In the morning?”

“Why not?”

Dave sat with his fingers over the keys, trying very hard to think of why not, but couldn’t. “Okay,” he wrote back. “But please understand that my schedule is flexible, not necessarily my body.”

She’d sent him a smiley face and directions to a studio in Inman Park.

At 7:50 Saturday morning, he pulled into the parking lot of a small, colorfully painted building with water, towel, and a change of clothes for afterward. He recognized Shira immediately from her J-Date profile: long, curly black hair pulled back in a ponytail and a small glittering nose piercing. She wore short yoga pants and a salmon-colored tank top that exposed her flat midriff.
I need to work out more,
he thought.

“Hi, Dave.” She smiled and approached him as he entered the studio, pulling him into a hug before he could say more than hello. “Do you need to borrow a mat?”

She set him up, thankfully, in the back of the room and sat cross-legged on her own mat in the front, striking a little gong at the front to signal the beginning of class. Dave thought absurdly of
The Gong Show
and had to stifle a laugh.

For someone who’d never done yoga before, Dave thought he managed pretty well. He’d stayed in decent shape over the years and still did his baseball stretches a few times a week. His hamstrings were notoriously tight, though, and he found Downward Dog was a lot less fun than it sounded.

At one point during this pose, Shira made her way around the room, making adjustments. She stood behind him and gently pulled his hips up toward her. “Very nice,” she said softly, and he began to sweat. Was yoga supposed to be erotic? Apparently not, because Shira did the same thing to the woman next to him, and the guy on the other side of her.

As class drew to a close, Dave was proud that he’d avoided what he saw as the three dangers of a yoga date: pulling a muscle, farting during Downward Dog, and random erections inspired by skimpy yoga outfits. Shira led them into a corpse pose to end the class, which as far as Dave could tell was pretty much lying on the floor and trying not to think about anything.

“Clear your mind. Put your thoughts inside a big red balloon,” Shira said, “and watch them float away.”

He was a good sport. He tried. But Dave apparently had more thoughts than balloons could carry. The date who’d stood him up last weekend and never called. Wondering whether he and Aaron would ever be friends again, and whether Debbie still put him down as an emergency contact. Julia Mendel’s record collection.

“Dave.” Shira gently shook him. “Feeling rested?”

When his eyes came back into focus, Dave saw that class was over. People milled around: some rolling up their mats, others chatting softly near the door. No one seemed to notice him lying prone on the floor, asleep.

“Don’t worry.” Shira smiled, seeing his concern. “Happens all the time. Drink some water and we’ll go in a few minutes, okay?”

When the studio was empty, they both changed, and then walked a half mile to Little Five Points for smoothies. It was a clear, cool October morning, with a vivid blue sky. Despite the chill, Shira wore sandals and a long, colorful skirt that reminded him of Julia. She was easy to talk to and the conversation flowed more easily than it had on his other dates. Maybe yoga was the best icebreaker.

They strolled around Little Five Points, the eclectic, long-standing arts district that seemed equal home to hippies, yuppies, and every flavor of uber-cool counterculture. They browsed the store windows. She pulled him into the feminist bookstore to introduce him to a friend of hers; in return, he insisted they go into Criminal Records, where he very nearly bought Julia a vinyl edition of Bob Dylan’s
Blonde on Blonde
. Only the complete weirdness of buying something for one woman while on a date with another held him back.

Everywhere they went, people knew Shira. She stopped and chatted with passersby every few minutes; her apparent friendship with various store owners meant that their smoothies, coffee, and even their veggie falafels were on the house. “I trade for yoga classes.” She shrugged.

Their date was the opposite of his date with Lena, he realized, and it was fun to be with someone in her own element when she was so comfortable there. She claimed to also enjoy sports, which Dave privately doubted, but he could sense she’d be almost as comfortable in his world as her own. She was attractive and kind and supremely cool. He liked her. A lot. But for some reason, he found it hard to picture himself seeing Shira again.

She reminded him so much of Julia, he thought, as they hugged goodbye in the parking lot of the yoga studio. Weird and artsy and fun. But there was something missing…

Fire, he realized, as he drove home in the early October sunshine. Julia had fire.

# # #

On a Saturday morning in the middle of October, the kids were fighting before Julia could even get breakfast made. Mia wanted to watch something glittery on TV, and Brandon wanted some kind of show with fighting instead. She heard the disagreement begin while she stirred the pancake batter in the kitchen.

“No! I had it first.”

“Mom said I could—”

“Did not! You got to choose first last time.”

“No, stupid, last time we were at Dad’s, remember? We got to watch it in our rooms.”

“Don’t call me stupid.”

“Stupid!”

“Mooooom!”

The volleys drifted in to her in increasingly loud sparring until by the time she had flipped the first round of pancakes off the griddle, she had to go around the corner to the living room to intervene. She started out by playing dumb, which she knew would just infuriate them more. “Hey guys, what’s going on?”

“Brandon won’t let me watch
Katie the Princess’s Royal Hour of Girl Power
.”

“Mom, I hate that show. I want to watch
Justice League
.”

Brandon was right.
Katie the Princess
was horrific, and whenever forced to watch it, Julia had fantasies about chewing off her own arm. But that wasn’t fair to Mia. And
Justice League
, although substantially cooler and more watchable than
Katie the Princess
, still wasn’t exactly educational. It did, however, have Wonder Woman in it, which gave Julia a weird little thrill.

“Why don’t you watch
Katie the Princess
and record
Justice League
for later?”

“Um, Mom,” Brandon said, in that tone that told her she had exactly the brain power of the average garden slug. “We can’t record. We don’t have the DVR anymore.”

Oh, right. That was saving them fifteen dollars a month. At this moment? Not worth it.

“Why is it that you guys can’t find something you both want to watch? Like
Curious George
?”

“Ugh!” Brandon smacked his forehead dramatically.

“I tried so hard to raise you without all these silly gender divisions. How did we end up with princesses and superheroes?”

They both stared at her, blinking: Mia in her Hello Kitty pajamas and Brandon in blue camouflage. As babies, everything they’d owned had been green and yellow and chocolate brown. Julia didn’t even remember the point at which she’d given up and just bought whatever clothes were on sale and seemed likely to fit for more than ten minutes.

She tried a different tack. “Okay, here’s the deal. You guys have one minute to come up with a solution between you; if you don’t, we watch
House Hunters
instead.”

She changed the channel to a young couple walking along an exotic-looking beach, holding hands and taking turns pointing into the distance. “Oh goodie,” she said. “It’s
House Hunters International
.”

Mia and Brandon groaned together, and launched into histrionic whining, but Julia left the room with the remote. Seconds later, Brandon slumped into the kitchen looking defeated, hand out.

“
Royal Hour of Girl Power
?” Julia asked.

He nodded. “I get to watch
Hero Force
afterward.”

“Good man,” she said. “Want to hang out with me during
Katie the Princess
?”

“Sure.” He took the remote to the living room, and Julia heard the tail end of Katie’s insipid theme song. Brandon shuffled back in and climbed onto the single padded barstool that had survived all the way from Adam and Julia’s first apartment. There had been three originally, bought at a garage sale. They were Julia’s first furniture project: painted and lovingly recovered using a staple gun, hot glue, and every bit of profanity she knew. One had been lost in a move and the other had simply fallen apart, having been a bit unstable to begin with. The one that remained was stained and fraying at the edges, as much a part of her kitchen as running water.

“How was your special night with Dad on Thursday? We haven’t had a chance to talk about it.” Julia had been curious; it was so rare that Adam and Brandon had any one-on-one time.

“Cool, I guess.”

“Where did you guys go?”

“The Crackerbox.”

“The batting cages?” She could tell he didn’t want to elaborate but it wasn’t clear why. “Just for fun?”

Brandon sighed. “Freddie Freeman was there, signing autographs. You had to have tickets.” He said it as though he’d been caught stealing candy from the grocery store, his gaze pointed at the floor.

“That’s terrific, honey. Did you get something signed?”

He nodded.

“That’s great. Can I see it?”

“It’s in my other room…at Dad’s.”

Right. “Great!” Her voice was high and strained. “What is it? Maybe you can bring it and show me sometime.”

“It’s a baseball. Christy wants me to leave it there on my dresser. She said it’s a collection item.”

“Collector’s item. Christy went with you and Daddy?”

He shook his head. “Dad came late. He had to work. Christy picked me up from school and took me. She said it would be a shame to waste the tickets.”

This last sentence, Julia could tell, was for her benefit. He was not quite nine years old and observant enough to sense that she would feel betrayed by his spending time with Christy alone. Her heart ripped like canvas in her chest. She wanted to scoop him up and hold him and tell him it was okay and yet, she was hurt, too. She wanted to castrate Adam with a rusty pitchfork.

Julia steeled herself and put on the sunniest expression she could manage. “It’s a good thing Christy was able to take you. I know you would’ve hated to miss that. Did you get to talk to Freddie?”

He nodded.

“Was he nice?”

Another nod, this time with a smile. “He asked me if I play baseball. I said yes, even though I didn’t play this year. Is that okay? Can I sign up for baseball in the spring?”

“Sure, honey. I’ll talk to Daddy about it.”

“Great.” Brandon looked relieved. When his face relaxed, Julia realized how rare that was lately. His eight-year-old jaw had been set in a way more fitting of a thirty-something investment banker than a second grader.

“Pancakes are ready,” she said softly. “Go get your sister. We have to get to the store after breakfast.”

# # #

Two hours later, she paced in the barn behind the store, phone pressed to her ear, fury permeating every word out of her mouth.

“I can’t believe you would send that
home-wrecker
to pick up my son from school. I thought we agreed she was never to do that?”

“First of all, don’t use that word. Second, it’s a new school year. Christy and I have been living together for months. Don’t you think it’s time to stop being so fascist about it?”

“Fascist! I’m going to have her put on the do not pick up list. I’m calling the school.”

“You can’t do that. I have joint custody, and she’s my girlfriend.”

“She destroyed our family, Adam. She can’t just come to school anytime she wants and pick up our son,
my son
, without my permission. You can’t do that to me!” Her voice was shrill, echoing off the rafters.

“Calm down,” Adam said.

“Don’t you dare tell me to calm down,” she hissed. Still, she glanced through the window toward the little meadow, making sure the kids were still playing on the old tire swing, out of earshot.

“Julia,” Adam said, his tone too even, voice infuriatingly calm. “Christy didn’t destroy our family. I did. You can be as angry with me as you like, but you will not call her names. Do you understand?”

“Oh, stop with the condescending crap,” she said. Ever since they’d started what turned out to be futile marriage therapy, he had adopted this obnoxious tone whenever she was losing her shit. Part of her knew it was a more appropriate way for adults to talk to one another, but the fact that he was better at it than she was just made her angrier. “Just talk to me like a human being.”

He sighed deeply. “Fine. But I need you to understand that this was my fault. A client gave me tickets to the signing and I was going to surprise Brandon. But I got pulled into a late meeting so I asked Christy to pick him up. I called the school. I thought it would be good for the two of them to hang out a bit. I’m sorry. I should have called you.”

He had taken the heat from her anger, making it a humiliating, flaccid thing. She felt childish adding, “Yes, you should have.”

“Again, I’m sorry. Next time I will tell you if anything like that happens. It was insensitive of me not to tell you. I understand your feelings.”

He did not understand her feelings. Adam’s grief about their marriage—if there had been any—was long over by the time they divorced. He had brooded in silence, inexplicably disappearing for long periods. While she made ridiculous, vain efforts to save their marriage—all the while blaming herself—he’d been secretly seeing Christy and coming to terms with the end. When he left on New Year’s Day, Adam got to start over, but Julia’s heartbreak had just begun. How could he pretend to understand?

“I want to be notified anytime
she
is going to pick either one of the kids up, from anywhere.”

“Fine.”

“And next time you promise our child one-on-one time together, you will stand by that promise or I will skewer you. Understood?”

“Yes. I can apologize to Brandon if you want.”

“There’s no reason to bring it back up. Just don’t do it again.”

“Promise. Anything else?”

“No…well, wait. You said you thought Christy should spend time with Brandon. Why?”

“Oh, hell. Forget I said that.”

“Adam. Why?”

She could hear the deep, exasperated breath on the other end of the phone. “Okay, but I’m not getting into a discussion with you about this. Christy wants a baby.”

Julia nearly dropped the phone. “What?”

“She wants to get better at mothering, for our kids… and she’s been saying lately that she wants us to get married and have our own family, too.” He said it like Christy was thinking of dying her hair, or getting a puppy.

“That’s ridiculous! You have a family.”

“It’s not ridiculous. And it’s none of your business.”

“It sure as hell is my business. It impacts my kids.”

“I’m aware of that. Look, we are still talking about it. I told her we need to give it more time, and I want to see how things go with Brandon over the next couple of years.”

“It will derail him completely.”

“You don’t know that. And it’s not fair to Christy to tell her she can’t have her own children, just because…”

“Just because she chose to break up someone else’s family?”

“Okay. We’re done here. Hanging up now.”

The angry retort was still on her lips when the line went dead.