Recipe for a Happy Life: A Novel (22 page)

“I want to shoot something gritty,” Skylar says, and it makes Hunter smile.

Hunter and Skylar jump from their seats. I see that my mother has loaned Hunter one of her cameras and I wonder why she’s given it to him. Shouldn’t she be giving me the things that are most valuable to her? After all, I’m the one who’s going to inherit them. Realizing that nothing will cast a pall on the day like the fact that I’m already thinking about what she will leave to me when she dies, I bite my tongue. Instead, I pick up the bags that my mother motions for me to tend to. But then, I remember that she’s instructed me not to walk on eggshells with her, so I reconsider.

“Why did you give that camera to Hunter?” I ask. She looks back at me, but doesn’t say a word. So, I clarify: “Shouldn’t you have given it to me?”

“Why would I give that camera to you?” she finally says. “You’re just the assistant.”

“Oh, right. Gee thanks,” I say.

“Anyway, I always thought you were content just to have the pictures taken of you. I never knew you to want to take the pictures yourself.”

I look over at Hunter and Skylar, and they are taking turns using the camera. Even with all of the natural beauty that surrounds us, Hunter only wants to shoot Skylar. It’s adorable how he can’t keep his eyes off her, both behind the lens and when she’s the one holding the camera.

I look out to the beach and think about what I would shoot. If I wasn’t the mere assistant today, that is. I see a couple on the beach, walking along the water, holding hands. It reminds me of Nate and I can’t help but smile. Friday can’t get here soon enough.

My train of thought is disturbed by Hunter—he’s still shooting Skylar, only now he seems to be playing director. “You’re a tiger!” he calls out. “You’re a tiger!” Skylar turns her hands into claws and begins to purr. Gray walks over to them quietly, with a small smile on her face. She puts her hand on Hunter’s and begins to make a few adjustments. “Tell a story with your pictures,” she says. Hunter nods in response. He shoots a few shots, and then conferences with Skylar to discuss the story they will be telling with their photographs.

My mother walks back to me and begins shooting.

“Don’t shoot me,” I say, covering my face. She doesn’t stop shooting. “My hair is a mess.”

“No, it’s not. You’re losing your light. Look up.”

“No,” I say, careful to do the exact opposite of what my mother has just suggested, so that she can’t get the shot.

“What made you say that?” my mother asks from behind the camera. She stops shooting for a moment, waiting for my response.

“Grandma told me that my hair was a mess this morning,” I say.

Gray laughs and I can’t help but laugh, too. Before I came out here, I really wouldn’t have noticed whether or not my hair was a mess. As long as it was relatively clean, that was usually enough for me. As we continue to laugh, I realize that we are bonding at the expense of my grandmother, and it makes me feel slightly uncomfortable. Is it okay for us to be laughing at her expense? Would my grandmother encourage us to do so because it means that Gray and I are at least getting along? It makes me wonder, what do they say about me when I’m not around? Do they laugh at my expense?

“Okay, let’s get a shot of you going this way.” My mother gently takes my arm, and tries to position me.

“Why don’t I shoot you instead?” I ask.

“What is wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” I say. “Why does there have to be something wrong with me if I want to take your picture?”

“Well, I don’t want you to take my picture,” she says. “I want to take yours.”

I reluctantly allow her to begin shooting again, but moments later, she takes the camera down from her face.

“I can’t concentrate with all of the teenage angst you’ve got coming off you. You’re worse than those two,” she says, motioning over to Hunter and Skylar. “Out with it already.”

“I want to shoot you,” I say. She furrows her brow, and I can tell that she does not plan on losing this argument. I decide to go for broke, tell her how I really feel. “If you just shoot me all day, all I’ll have left of you is a picture of myself.”

“No,” my mother says, walking over to me and putting her hand onto my cheek. “You’ll have a picture of the way you look through my eyes.”

Thirty-four

“How are things at the office?”

Priya rolls her eyes at me and shakes her head. I’ve worked at the firm long enough to know that this will always be her response. Things are the same as usual, which isn’t great, but it’s not horrible, and she’d rather not talk about it, especially on a day off. I shake my head back at her. The unspoken language of friends—you can have an entire conversation without saying much.

Priya insisted on driving out today to visit the Southampton Historical Museum. She tried to convince me that she simply had to see their exhibit of pottery made by local artisans, but I know she’s just checking up on me.

“This is so Southampton,” she says, pointing at a yellow bowl.

“So Southampton,” I say, but the truth is, I’m just waiting for her to say what she’s here to say.

“Your mom looks like she’s hanging in there,” Priya says, trying to be casual. She’s trying to sandwich this observation into the conversation, as if it’s not the whole reason she’s out here to visit, and I love her for it.

“She’s really tough,” I say, and I smile, because I know it’s true.

“She is,” Priya says, looking up at me, “and so are you.”

“I used to be tough,” I say, “but I’m not sure if that’s true anymore.”

“This blue is so beautiful,” she says, looking at a vase that’s painted a faded-out denim blue color.

“It is,” I say.

“I think you’re still tough,” she says, still looking at the vase. “You just don’t always show it. You’re still you, you know.”

“I’m not sure about that.”

“Remember when I met you?” Priya asks. “On that tax evasion case? The client saw the two of us and decided that we were way too young. And definitely too female. How did he put it?”

“He complimented our outfits and then asked us what year we graduated law school,” I say, remembering the story and smiling.

“So, you thanked him for the compliment, and told him that we’d graduated nine months prior, but then took over the meeting and wowed him with your knowledge of the case.”

“I remember,” I say. “I was so nervous, but I just wanted him to give a good report back to the partners.”

“And when we went out for lunch,” she says, “he called the partners to sing your praises.”

“Our praises.”

“Yours,” she said. “You were never afraid of anything, you were always so strong.”

“That’s not me anymore,” I say. “It’s like I’m just floating, since … well, you know.”

“You’re still you,” she says. “That tough girl who could take on any client, no matter how sexist or ageist, is still there.”

“Is she?”

“Yes,” Priya says. “You can handle anything. You have handled anything. Give yourself a little credit.”

“I just have no idea how I got here.”

“We all lose our way from time to time,” she says, running her fingers across an oval serving platter. “But you’re on your way back. I know it.”

“Thanks, Priya,” I say. As I let the words sink in, I start to feel that they’re true. Maybe I am tougher than I think. Maybe I can handle more than I give myself credit for.

We spend the rest of the day in town, shopping and stopping for lunch. We talk the whole time, but we don’t really say anything important, anything meaningful. Priya’s already said to me what she came here to say. She heads back to the city around three, and it gives me just enough time to get ready for tea with my mother at four.

As I walk into the house, the phone is ringing. I stop in the living room to answer it and practically walk into my mother, who was rushing to answer it. She waits with me as I answer the phone, just in case it’s one of her doctors.

The conversation doesn’t take very long.

“You’re green,” my mother says as I hang up the phone. “What is it? What wrong?”

I turn to face her, but no words come out of my mouth.

Panic lights up my mother’s face. “What did the doctor say, Hannah? Do I need to go back to see them?”

“It wasn’t your doctor,” I manage to eek out. “It was mine.”

“Your doctor?” she asks. “Is something wrong with you?”

“I’m pregnant.”

Thirty-five

“How can you possibly be pregnant?” my mother asks. But the thing is, judging from how far along the doctor told me I am, I know exactly when it happened. Two months ago, when I was still with Jaime, I’d had walking pneumonia. I remember asking my doctor about whether being on a strong antibiotic would lessen the efficacy of the pill, as I’d heard it could, and him telling me yes, we should probably use a backup. But the thing is, when you’re in a long-term relationship and you’re used to forgoing the use of condoms, it’s kind of hard to go back to them. Especially when you no longer keep any in your apartment.

I tell my mother all of this, and she looks back at me and asks the question I’m not yet ready to hear: “Are you ready to be a mom?”

“I am thirty-four years old,” I say.

“What does age have to do with this?” she asks.

“I don’t want to lose the chance to have a baby altogether,” I say. “Maybe the time is now.”

“But you still seem so lost,” she says, and in her eyes I can see how much it hurts her to say this to me. I know in my heart of hearts that she wants what’s best for me, and tries to help me in her own way, but she just never knows quite how. Which I suppose is the crux of what’s wrong with our relationship.

“You and I both know you’re just going to do what you think ‘normal’ is, and normal doesn’t include having a baby before you’re married—to a man who doesn’t want you, much less a baby.”

Her words are like a knife going into my heart. Before I can control it, I take a quick breath in and look down at the floor. It’s moments like these when I realize why we were never close. Why we can never be close. She doesn’t understand me in the way I need her to; she doesn’t know that now, what I need most is compassion, not tough love. I need my grandmother.

“What if I want to have this baby?” I ask. The look she gives me is too much to bear. I march right out of the kitchen, through the backyard, and onto the beach. The sand feels hot under my feet. I head toward the ocean, to the point where the water hits the sand, and the sand is cooler from the waves washing over it. Firmer. I stride past Nate’s house, and past all the other estates. I walk so far that I can no longer see any of the houses. There’s just plain untouched beach, and no one around. My legs begin to ache, so I sit down on the sand and look out to the water. The sun is burning down on me, but I can’t go any farther.

I’m pregnant. I keep thinking that it’s a dream, that I will wake up and this whole day will have disappeared, but the knot in my stomach tells me that it’s true.

How can I be pregnant? Jaime and I haven’t spoken since the first week I was out here, and now I’m with Nate. Happy. But I knew that my happiness couldn’t last. It’s as if I’m being punished for actually thinking it out loud. For daring to think that happiness could stay.

Nate. What am I going to do about Nate? I can’t have a relationship with one man while I’m having the baby of another. I can’t have a fatherless child. I won’t do to my own child what my mother did to me.

I try to think of a way to justify the fact that this child could be Nate’s. But there’s just no way that seven weeks can become two. I think about what a life with Nate would have been like. What kind of a husband he would have been. What kind of a father he would have been.

And Jaime. How can I tell Jaime? He barely wanted to commit to a relationship, much less bring a child into the world. I don’t know what he will say. I don’t know what he will do.

Hunter’s face pops into my head and it makes me wonder if I would be a good mother. If I could be a good mother. Maybe my own mother is right. Maybe I am too lost to have a baby of my own.

By the time I finally get back to the house, it’s hours later. The sun has already begun to set. My face and shoulders are completely sunburned, and as I walk into our backyard, I find my grandmother waiting for me on her favorite chair.

True, she’s spent most of this summer on this very lounge chair, but I know she’s waiting for me by the look on her face. Not to mention the fact that there’s nary a phone, a drink, or book in sight. She’s not out here to lounge; she’s out here to wait. Her eyes are trained on the little walkway that connects the backyard to the beach, and I wonder how long she’s been waiting here for me.

I walk over to her lounge chair and without a word, she stands up and gathers me into a hug. She holds me tight and kisses my head and tells me over and over how much she loves me. For some reason, even though she’s giving me the kindness that I need, I cry hysterically. The tears just fall from my eyes and there’s no way to control it. “It’s okay,” she tells me, over and over. “This is all going to be okay.”

“How is this going to be okay?” I say, through my sobs. “How can this possibly be okay?”

“Because we’ve got each other and that’s all we need,” she says. We sit down next to each other on the lounge chair and she rubs my back.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “With all that’s going on right now, we really don’t need this.”

“Maybe it’s exactly what we need.”

Thirty-six

I’m alone in the tub for almost an hour before it dawns on me that I probably shouldn’t be taking such a warm bath. The steam is making me feel faint and I get a fleeting image in my mind of my body cooking the baby from the inside out.

I walk into my bedroom and I’m grateful that my grandmother is the type of woman who believes that women should own a few different bathrobes. After my talk with my mother this morning, I’m desperate for warmth, for comfort, and a silk kimono simply won’t do. I put on the fluffy white robe and matching slippers that my grandmother bought for me and lie down on my bed.

There’s a gentle knock on the door and I can only assume that it’s my mother, trying to make peace. I turn over in my bed so that when my mother comes in, she won’t see me crying. Gray thinks that crying is a sign of weakness.