Recipe for a Happy Life: A Novel (23 page)

“Can I come in?” I hear through the door, only it’s my grandmother, not my mother.

“Yes,” I call out, but I stay curled on the bed, facing the wall. I don’t have the energy to get up.

“How are you feeling?” she asks. “I brought you some decaffeinated tea and cinnamon toast.”

I sit up and my grandmother places a tray on the bed. I want to ask her whether she made the cinnamon toast for me or if she had the chef do it, but then I think that maybe it’s beside the point.

“I feel okay,” I say, taking a bite of the toast. I don’t have to ask—I can tell by the taste that she made it herself.

“What are you thinking?” she says. “Do you want to talk things over?”

“I’m a little confused right now,” I say, taking a sip of tea. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Do you want to have a baby?” she asks. I can tell from the look in her eyes that she wants the answer to be yes.

“I really don’t know right now.”

“Is this about Nate?” she asks quietly.

“I don’t know,” I say. But then I decide to be honest: “Maybe.”

“You can’t make major life decisions based on a man you just met.”

“I know,” I say. “You think I should be dating more.”

“This isn’t about that,” she says. “This is about the fact that the only person you need to worry about is you. What do you want? What’s best for you? Make the decision for yourself. Not based on a flirtation you have going on with your next-door neighbor.”

“It’s more than a flirtation,” I say, looking up from my tea.

“It’s barely been two weeks.”

“We’ve slept together.”

“I know,” my grandmother says, without hesitation. “You were in my house.”

“I mean, it’s more than just dating.”

“Just because you’ve had sex with a man doesn’t mean it’s anything more than a flirtation. Don’t make it more serious than it is. You need to make a decision for yourself, and only for yourself. No one else should be in the equation.”

“Well, I want to be with Nate.”

“So, then, that’s your decision?” she asks, and I feel the muscles in my neck begin to tense. “Do you want to have a baby?” she asks slowly.

“It’s not that easy,” I say, and my grandmother cuts in before I can say more.

“Yes, it is,” she says. “You either want to have a baby or you don’t.”

“No, it’s not,” I say. “It’s not just whether or not I want to have a baby. This is Jaime’s child, and I need to decide if I want to have a child with him. I haven’t even spoken to him in weeks.”

“Now we’re talking about that musician again?” she asks. She won’t even say Jaime’s name.

“Things change,” I say, and marvel at how quickly things do, in fact, change out here in the Hamptons. One day, my grandmother was alone, a widow for the sixth time, and overnight, she reconnected with her first love. In a flash, I discovered something with Nate Sugarman. Just as fast, my mother found out that she was dying.

“Am I understanding you correctly? This decision is all based on which man you want? You either decide to have the baby and get back together with the musician, or you decide to be with Nate and you don’t have the baby?” my grandmother asks.

“No,” I say. The more I speak with my grandmother, the more my thoughts get all jumbled up inside of my head. “I’m not saying that. But if I’m going to have a baby, the baby’s going to have a father.”

“Hannah, this decision is as easy as you let it be. All you need to figure out is what you want.”

But that’s the one thing I’ve never been able to figure out.

Thirty-seven

“I don’t know if I can deal with this,” Nate says, and I can’t help but feel sorry for him. I want to tell him that I don’t know if I can deal with this either, but I know that it is hard enough for him to hear what I have to tell him without me editorializing it.

I take the kettle off the burner—my mother now has me completely obsessed with her tea from China—and pour the water into two mugs. I sit back down at the counter with Nate and give him his tea.

“It was one thing,” he says slowly, “when there was one man in your life. I could deal with Adam, but this is a different story.”

“I know,” I say, stirring the sugar into my tea. Nate hasn’t touched his. “And I’m so sorry that I’ve brought you into this crazy screwed-up situation. You should’ve stayed away from me.”

“I don’t want to stay away from you,” Nate says, and moves his bar stool a bit closer to me. He puts his hand on my left cheek and I close my eyes and put my own hand over his.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“You don’t have to be sorry,” he says. “Have you decided what you’re going to do?”

“I think so,” I say. “I know that I want a child. And you were the one who said the other night that ‘everything happens for a reason.’ So, maybe I’m supposed to have this baby. But, obviously, I need to talk to Jaime a little more about this, too.”

Nate looks down and slides his bar stool back. Under his breath, he says, “This is a lot to deal with.”

“That’s the thing,” I say. “I don’t want to make you deal with this. I feel awful about this whole situation. I’ve been thinking about it, and I think that what would be best here is to take some time off.”

“You want to take time off from us?” he asks.

I can’t meet his gaze. “What if I never get another chance to have a baby? I’m a widow once over. What if I never get to try again?”

“What if you do?” he asks, and I can see in his eyes what he’s saying to me. What if I had a chance to do this right? What if I had the chance to have a baby with him?

“I just think that maybe, for the sake of this baby, I should give it a try again with Jaime. When I told him about it, his first reaction was that we should get back together and I think that…”

Nate’s face crumbles. Clearly, he had no idea that this was an option. But how could it not be? A child needs to have a father.

“I’ve got to go,” he says, and jumps up from the kitchen counter.

“Wait,” I say, grabbing for his arm. “Don’t go like this. Hear me out.”

But Nate wrestles from my grip and runs out the door.

I find myself running after him, begging him to wait, because there are so many things I never got the chance to tell him.

I didn’t get to tell him that I don’t want my child to have the same experience I did. I do not want to repeat the mistakes my mother made.

I want to say to him: “Nate, I never knew my own father. I never even met him. He was just my mother’s friend, and when she decided that she wanted to have a baby, he agreed to help her, but only if he wouldn’t have to actually be my father. She didn’t want a husband, so she found someone who didn’t want to be a dad and together they made me. But I want so much more for my child.”

These are all the things I want to say to Nate. But when I get to the edge of our driveway I hear the front door of his house slam. Maybe it’s better this way. Maybe this is how it was meant to end.

Thirty-eight

“When you know the person you’re going to spend the rest of your life with, you want it to start immediately,” he says, and my stomach turns for two reasons: (a) my rocker ex-boyfriend is quoting rather liberally from
When Harry Met Sally
, and (b) that he’s quoting from
When Harry Met Sally
at all.

I met Jaime at a rock club where his band was the headliner. I don’t know what I was even doing at a rock club. It certainly wasn’t the sort of place I was used to frequenting, but a few of the summer associates at my firm were going, so I just sort of tagged along. It was a strange time in my life. A year and a half after Adam died. All I did all day was talk about my emotions, think about my emotions. I just wanted to go somewhere where it was too loud to talk, too loud to think.

When I saw him on stage, he was lost in the music, playing his heart out. He was so into his bass guitar—sweating, oozing sex from every pore. He caught my eye from the stage and made a beeline over to me the second the set was over. It felt like a movie: we literally saw each other across a crowded room. Priya once asked me what it was that I liked about Jaime so much, but it’s hard to say. I was drawn to him. An animal thing, physical, visceral, and he felt it, too. That night, I went home with him, something I’d never done before. But after a year and a half of therapy, I’d had enough of talking. I just wanted to feel.

After that night, we began seeing each other all the time. Usually after his gigs, late at night. We didn’t date in the traditional sense; I could count the number of times we went out to dinner together on one hand. More often it was grabbing a slice of pizza here, a falafel sandwich there. We’ve never gone to a movie together. Never went to a wedding or social event as a couple. But we were a couple. It was understood that we were monogamous, that we were together from the night we met.

We didn’t have much in common, didn’t have the same types of friends. He called most of my friends “Richie,” even to their faces sometimes. He grew up in New York City, too, but in a rough part of Brooklyn that was a far cry from the Manhattan my schoolmates inhabited.

Even though at first he resented all the money I had in my life, eventually he began to enjoy the creature comforts of my apartment. A shower that never leaked, an espresso maker that worked properly, heat in the winter.

“So,” I say, “you’re coming out here?”

“I’m coming out there,” Jaime confirms. I don’t know if I’m happy or sad about this. True, I’ve made my decision, but there’s something about getting exactly what you want. It tends to make you wonder whether or not you actually wanted it in the first place.

I think about my mother’s warning—that a baby can’t be the answer to your problems—and it’s haunting me. Is that what I’m trying to do? Solve everything that’s wrong with my life by having a child? That’s not a reason to bring a kid into the world. But the one thing I’ve figured out over the last couple of days is that I completely and utterly, with every ounce of my being, want to have a baby. I want to have this baby. So I need to make this work with Jaime.

When I told my grandmother about my decision, I couldn’t tell if she was happy about it.

“I thought you’d be happy that I’m considering more than one man at a time,” I said to her.

“It seems to me that all you’ve actually done here is to substitute one beau for another,” she replied. I wondered why that was such a bad thing. Isn’t that what she’d done her entire life? You don’t get to be a widow six times over if you don’t substitute one man for another.

“Do you think I should have this baby?”

“Do you think you should have this baby?”

“Yes,” I said quietly. “So, is it okay that I’ve invited Jaime to stay out here with us?”

“Whatever you want is okay with me,” she said. “I just want for you to be happy. Are you happy?”

“Yes,” I said, responding as quickly as I could. I didn’t want my grandmother to know that my actual response was: I don’t know. My eyes began to tear up and I took a deep breath to get them to subside.

“Oh, and Jaime,” I say, just as we’re about to hang up the phone, “there’s just one condition.”

“What’s that?” he says, and I can tell from his tone that he’s flirting with me.

“Your mother has to drop the charges,” I say. “She’s still having me investigated for attempted murder.”

“Consider it done,” he says. “And just so you know, I wasn’t actually planning to break up with you.”

Thirty-nine

The second I see him, my heart drops into my stomach. It’s as if I’ve forgotten what he looked like in the few weeks since I’ve last seen him. But as I watch Jaime coming off the train and onto the platform at the Southampton station, I realize it’s more than that. When you’re in a long-term relationship with someone, you take them for granted. You forget what made you fall in love with them in the first place. You don’t even notice what they look like anymore. I’d forgotten that Jaime’s long hair and dark hooded eyes get a reaction from every woman he meets.

Jaime sees me, smiles, and waves, and I can’t decide if I should get out of the car, or just let him hop inside. I’ve driven here today in one of the Mattress King’s fleet. My grandmother wanted her driver to take me, but I decided that the shock of the estate alone is going to be enough for Jaime. I didn’t need to freak him out with a driver, too.

I open my car door and get up, just as Jaime approaches. He throws down his duffel, grabs me, and kisses me hard. I lose my breath for a moment. I wasn’t expecting him to kiss me. I thought we’d have an awkward embrace, and laugh about how we should greet each other, what would be appropriate, given the circumstances. But then I remember something else about Jaime: he doesn’t do awkward.

“It’s so good to see you,” he murmurs, lips still all over mine.

“You, too,” I say, and we kiss again. His kisses are so different from Nate’s—Jaime’s kiss is more animalistic, as if he’s about to rip off my clothes and take me right here in the middle of the Southampton train station’s parking lot. I break from his embrace and take a deep breath. Jaime walks around to the passenger side of the car and as I watch him walk, I wonder how you can feel something for two people at once.

We get back to the house, and my grandmother gives Jaime the grand tour. (“It is rude for a hostess to be out of the house when a guest arrives,” my grandmother explained.) Walking around in his Rolling Stones concert tee and ripped jeans, he’s in sharp contrast to the manicured grounds. My grandmother doesn’t seem to notice, and it’s the sort of thing that I wouldn’t have noticed either before I came out here. I can’t decide what annoys me more: that I’ve noticed this at all, or that it sort of bothers me.

After the tour, I show Jaime to my room—our room—and he looks around. I considered having him stay out in the guest house instead of moving into my room, but since I was already pregnant, I wasn’t really fooling anyone with the Pollyanna routine. Least of all Jaime, who throws me onto the bed and jumps on top of me. In an instant, he’s tearing off my clothes.

“Slow down,” I murmur. “Slow down.”

“Why?” he whispers, lips all over my neck.