Mike, Mike & Me

WENDY MARKHAM

is a pseudonym for
New York Times
bestselling, award-winning novelist Wendy Corsi Staub, who has written more than fifty fiction and nonfiction books for adults and teenagers in various genres—among them contemporary and historical romance, suspense, mystery, television and movie tie-in and biography. She has coauthored a hardcover mystery series with former New York City mayor Ed Koch and has ghostwritten books for various well-known personalities. A small-town girl at heart, she was born and raised in western New York on the shores of Lake Erie and in the heart of the notorious snow belt. By third grade, her heart was set on becoming a published author; a few years later, a school trip to Manhattan convinced her that she had to live there someday. At twenty-one, she moved alone to New York City and worked as an office temp, freelance copywriter, advertising account coordinator and book editor before selling her first novel, which went on to win a Romance Writers of America RITA® Award. She has since received numerous positive reviews and achieved bestseller status, most notably for the psychological suspense novels she writes under her own name. Her previous Red Dress Ink title,
Slightly Single,
was one of Waldenbooks’ Best Books of 2002. Very happily married with two children, Wendy writes full-time and lives in a cozy old house in suburban New York, proving that childhood dreams really can come true.

Mike, Mike & Me

Wendy Markham

Dedicated with love and friendship to the Siegel family,
Joan, Richard, Rory and Nicholas, and to
the three guys I adore: Mark, Morgan and Brody.

With special gratitude to the brilliant David Staub
of Network Expert Software Systems.

Contents

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Chapter fifteen

Chapter sixteen

Chapter seventeen

Chapter eighteen

Chapter nineteen

Chapter twenty

Chapter twenty-one

Chapter twenty-two

Chapter twenty-three

Chapter twenty-four

Chapter twenty-five

Chapter twenty-six

Chapter twenty-seven

Chapter twenty-eight

Chapter twenty-nine

Chapter thirty

Chapter thirty-one

Chapter thirty-two

Chapter thirty-three

Chapter thirty-four

Chapter thirty-five

Chapter thirty-six

Chapter thirty-seven

Chapter thirty-eight

Chapter thirty-nine

Chapter forty

Chapter forty-one

Chapter forty-two

Chapter forty-three

Chapter forty-four

Chapter forty-five

Chapter forty-six

Chapter forty-seven

one

The present

S
o in case you’ve been wondering, I married Mike after all.

Which Mike, you might ask?

And rightly so.

For a while there, it was a toss-up. But when I finally made my choice, I honestly believed it was the right one—that I’d chosen the right Mike.

Only recently have I begun to question that…and everything else in my life. Only recently have I been thinking back to that summer when I found myself torn between the guy I’d always loved and the guy I’d just met.

That they shared both a name and my heart is one of life’s great ironies, don’t you think?

Then again, maybe not. According to the United States Social Security Administration, Michael was the most popular boys’ name in America between 1964 and 1998. Odds are, if you’re a heterosexual female who was born between those years—as I am—you’re going to date a couple of Mikes in your life. As I did.

Meanwhile, if you’re a heterosexual male who was born in those years, you’re going to date a couple of Lisas. That was the most popular girls’ name the year I was born.

I’m not Lisa.

Remember that song? All about how she wasn’t Lisa, her name was Julie. It was a big hit when I was a kid. I remember singing it at slumber parties with my best friends—two of whom were named Lisa.

But I’m not Lisa. I’m not Julie, either.

My real name is Barbra. Spelled without the extra “a,” like Barbra Streisand’s. That’s not why mine is spelled that way; I was born back in the mid-sixties, before my mother ever heard of Barbra Streisand.

My father—who if his own name weren’t Bob probably wouldn’t be able to spell
that
—filled out the birth certificate while my mother was sleeping off the drugs they used to give women to spare them the horrific childbirth experience.

That, of course, was back in the Bad Old Days when they didn’t realize that the fetus was being drugged as well—otherwise known as the Good Old Days, when nobody was the wiser and nobody was feeling any pain.

I always figured that when it was time for me to give birth, I’d want those same drugs.

Am I a wimp? you might ask.

Um, yeah. I’ve never been good with pain—I’m the first to admit it. I stub my toe; I scream. I get a sliver; I cry. I see blood; I faint.

By the time I got pregnant, I had heard enough gory details from my friends to know that it would be in everyone’s best interest if I were knocked out before I reached the stage where it was a toss-up whether to call in the obstetrician or an exorcist.

I envisioned drifting off to a medically induced la-la land, waking up feeling refreshed, and having somebody hand me a pretty, pink newborn, even if my husband spelled its name wrong while I was out.

Alas, that wasn’t to be.

For one thing, we knew that our firstborn son would be named after my husband, who is conveniently familiar with the spelling of Mike.

For another, when—about five minutes into my first pregnancy—I asked my doctor about drugs, he recommended a childbirth class where I would learn to use breathing and imagery to control the pain. Call me jaded, but I didn’t see then and I don’t see now how huffing and counting and focusing on a flickering candle or, God help me, a favorite stuffed animal, can possibly make you forget the nine pounds of wriggling human forcing its way out of you the same way it got into you nine months—and nine pounds—ago.

As the scientific theory goes, what goes in must come out. Eventually. Somehow. And the coming-out part is never as much fun as the going-in part.

Whose scientific theory is that? you might ask.

It’s mine. And you should trust me, because I’m an expert.

If you’ve ever eaten all your Halloween candy before the calendar page turned to November—or if you’ve ever done too many shots of tequila on your birthday—then you’re an expert, too.

But if you can’t relate to childbirth or vomiting up a pound of chocolate or a pint of hard liquor, think about this: back when Mike and I were first married, he and my father carried our new couch up two flights of stairs to our one-bedroom apartment in Queens. When we moved a few years later, the movers we hired couldn’t get the couch out. No matter which way they turned it, they couldn’t make it fit through the doorway. They finally told me that the only way to get it out was to remove one of the legs.

Now, normally, I don’t balk at being the decision maker in our marriage. But, normally, strange men don’t request a saw to disfigure our furniture.

I tried to reach Mike at work to see what he wanted me to do—in other words, to ask his permission for the couch amputation—but he wasn’t there.

So the movers sawed off a leg; the couch fit through the door; they moved it to our new house up in Westchester.

When Mike arrived that night, fresh—not!—from his first train commute and ready to collapse, he immediately noticed that the surface he was about to collapse onto was tilting dangerously.

I explained what happened.

He was incredulous.

Okay, not just incredulous. He was other things, too. Including royally pissed off. Now that I’ve had almost a decade of enlightenment regarding Mike’s daily commute to the city, I can attribute his fury that night, at least in part, to an hour spent on an un-air-conditioned railroad car sandwiched in a middle seat between two large businessmen who carried on a conversation across his lap. But at the time, in my seminewlywed overanalytical self-absorption, I concluded that everything was all my fault.

Him: “How the hell could you let them cut the fucking leg off the goddamn fucking couch?”

Me: “I had no choice.”

Him: “We got the fucking couch in. They’re goddamn professionals and they couldn’t get it out? And what kind of movers carry a goddamn fucking saw around to cut the legs off people’s furniture?”

Me: “They don’t. I ran out and bought one.”

Him: “You bought the saw?”

Me: “The goddamn fucking saw. They told me to.”

Him: storms off, spends sleepless night trying to keep balance on the aforementioned—and seriously listing—goddamn fucking couch.

Me: spends sleepless night sobbing into pillow over first significant married fight.

When I say significant, I refer to the fights that stand out in a couple’s mutual memory. Not the arguments that happen along the way: arguments about the thermostat or what color to paint the bedroom or who should buy the Mother’s Day cards for his side of the family. I’m talking Fight, fights. Lying-awake-at-dawn-crying fights. Who-are-you-and-what-have-you-done-with-the-man-I-married fights.

Actually, I can count on one hand the number of fights and sleepless nights we’ve had in our marriage.

After the moving ordeal, our next sleepless night—and, incidentally, our next significant married fight—was a year or so later, when I was ten centimeters dilated and pushing. Does that fight count? I mean, I truly wasn’t myself at the time.

Who was I? you might ask.

I was Lizzie Grubman meets Shannon Dougherty meets Valdemort—a temporary state brought on by the sheer physical agony of childbirth.

And Mike—who was supposed to be coaching me—was just plain stupid at the time, a temporary state I’ll chalk up to low blood sugar. I’ll admit that it was due in part to the fact that I wouldn’t let him visit the hospital cafeteria—or even the vending machines—for the twenty-four-hours-plus that I was in excruciating labor, lest he miss the big event. That’s how stupid I was. I kept thinking that any minute now, there would be a baby. I kept thinking that for, oh, sixteen thousand minutes or so before it actually happened.