There's Cake in My Future (28 page)

“Because, if that’s true, I’m a Thespian,” Megan tells me.

The next hour went … Well, it didn’t go horribly. I think that’s the most any parent or stepparent in my situation can hope for.

At eleven o’clock, Megan is finally in her room and I am avoiding writing by going through Facebook.

Carolyn, my friend who got the money bag charm and then won the lottery, has posted pictures of herself and her boyfriend at the Hotel Gritti Palace in Italy. It looks exquisite from what I can see, and she looks like she doesn’t have a care in the world.

I don’t mean to be jealous, but I am. I longed for that trip. I know what I have is more important than a trip to Italy. But it sure looks pretty.

And soothing.

And bedtime argument free.

Jason’s ex, Jacquie, she of the typewriter charm, posts an impassioned speech from the governor’s office. I’m torn in my jealousy of her. On the one hand, I wish I was still following my dreams with the tenacity she has. But on the other hand, I get to spend time with her kids, so I don’t envy her too much, as I know she is wracked with the kind of guilt that only a working mother can have. (Sorry, dads—but, yeah, I said it.)

And finally, a quick note from Mel:

You know how Scott just told Seema last night that her shovel might not mean a perpetual life of work, but might mean something else? Well, what if my red hot chili pepper doesn’t refer to a hot sex life? What if it is just trying to tell me that I’m going to keep getting burned by men?

I am about to write back to her to ask what happened, when up pops a friend request from Kevin Peters.

I puff out my cheeks as I stare at the request.

How the Hell did he find me? There are over a hundred other Nicole Eatons on Facebook. (I always thought I had a distinctive name until I got on Facebook.)

I click on our two mutual friends: two friends from college, no parents from the school.

I click over to his friends list: several parents’ names I recognize from school. Jacquie and Jason aren’t on the list, but I’m not sure if that means anything.

Having done what little investigative journalism I get to do these days, I click back to the friend request, then stare at the screen.

Okay, on the one hand, what’s it going to hurt if I’m friends with Kevin? Jason’s on Facebook with at least one ex (his ex wife) and probably way more. I’m not threatened by that, nor should he be threatened because I’m friends with an ex. I am not a retrosexual looking for a fling, I am a happily married woman, as my status clearly states and all of my photos show.

On the other hand—he has been sneaking into my thoughts ever since I ran into him at the school the other day.

It’s nothing bad. It’s not like I’m thinking back on my life with him and wishing I was with him instead of Jason.

But, like just now … without meaning to … I let my mind drift back to the night in the haunted house. Our first Halloween. We had been dating for a few weeks, and were going to some local haunted house, a makeshift tent decorated by some high school students to raise money for a class trip or something. At some point I had accidentally walked ahead of him, and ended up in a graveyard filled with zombies trying not to be buried by the local villagers. I turned around to search for him, only to be confronted by a teenaged Dracula, who made me jump a foot. I backed up, ran into someone, screamed, and turned around.

There was Kevin, giving me an amused smile. “Hi,” he said softly to me.

“I…” I stammered, still jumpy. “I thought I’d lost you.”

He smiled and leaned in to kiss me. “You’ll never lose me.”

And we kissed in the middle of the phony graveyard. And all was absolutely perfect in my world until …

Get your head out of the clouds, Washington.
Until you dated for almost three years, and he wouldn’t put a ring on it. So when he he moved to New York, you “took a break.” And instead of calling you a month later to propose, he called to announce his new girlfriend.

Which is good.

Because if I hadn’t broken up with Kevin, I wouldn’t be married to Jason. And Jason is, by far, the hottest man I’ve ever been with.

I am about to click the ignore button. After all, what good can come from exes being friends?

Then I stop to reconsider.

How is it going to affect Malika and Megan if I reject his Facebook request? It’s not like he’s asking me out; he’s just asking to be able to e-mail me. Am I overreacting?

I’m overthinking this. I click the confirm button.

I am immediately roped into chat by Kevin:

KEVIN:
Are you avoiding writing?

My head jolts back in surprise. Why is he roping me into conversation? I decide to go with humor.

NICOLE:
Nice opener. Do you walk up to strange women in bars and ask them if their thighs really need that third glass of wine?

KEVIN:
Hah! No, I asked because I’m on here avoiding writing.

NICOLE:
Wait. You’re writing now?

Since when does Kevin want to be a writer?

KEVIN:
Just a TV spec idea I had. Probably nothing will ever come of it, but writing is something I always wanted to do, I just never had the nerve to follow through on it. Probably why the women I fell in love with were writers: I loved living vicariously through them.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. What the Hell is that? Flirting? Getting the past out of the way so we can have a clean start for our future? I stare at the screen, wondering how to respond.

NICOLE:
Well, good for you! Can I read it when it’s done?

KEVIN:
Sure. So, what’s up with you? You looked great the other day.

NICOLE:
Yeah—when trying to impress people I always go with pajama pants, no makeup, and unbrushed hair.

KEVIN:
You look better with no makeup. So, are you still with the
Tribune
? I haven’t seen any of your articles lately.

Again, I am startled by what I’m reading on the computer and I don’t know what to make of it.

NICOLE:
No. Got laid off earlier this year, decided to take some time off to be with my new family.

KEVIN:
You remember Howard, my editor friend? He’s at the
Globe
now. Do you want me to see if they’re looking?

NICOLE:
Actually, he offered me a freelance gig after I was laid off, but I decided not to move to Boston. Thanks, though.

KEVIN:
Just a thought. You’re such a good writer.

“Daddy!” I hear Malika yell from upstairs.

“Your dad’s still at work, sweetie,” I yell back.

I wait for the pause, followed by the predictable, “I had a bad dream! Can you come upstairs?!”

NICOLE:
I’m sorry. I gotta go. Malika just woke up. She had a bad dream, and I need to get her back to sleep.

KEVIN:
Okay, go. Let me know when you want that coffee.

I look at the screen and debate. What would it hurt to go get coffee?

Then again, something in my gut is telling me that’s a bad idea.

“Nicole?!” Malika whines.

“Coming!” I yell back. Then I type.

NICOLE:
Soon. Gotta go though. ‘Night.

KEVIN:
Good night.

I click off Facebook, walk out of my office, and head up to Malika’s room.

Thirty-five

Melissa

It’s not speed dating if you actually have dinner. Yes, I’m a bit defensive about this idea—it seems so nineties. But I have a friend who met her boyfriend through this service, so I’m willing to give it a shot.

“Six at Six” is a dinner/dating service where twelve people meet for dinner at a lovely Italian restaurant and exchange conversation over food courses: predinner cocktails, appetizer, salad, soup, entrée, dessert. Because you’re not limited to five or seven minutes at a time, you actually can have a conversation that doesn’t consist of saying “I’m a high school math teacher.” And “No, I haven’t seen that movie” over and over again.

This extended conversation, it turns out, can also be a bad thing.

“I think an addiction is an addiction, not a disease,” Bill, the man across the small table, spits out at me angrily. “I don’t decide to drink cancer.”

I haven’t said a word since he started his tirade twenty minutes ago. It started with a diatribe on women with cats, quickly moved on to why he hates the Los Angeles Zoo, then segued into an attack on all things yogurt.

“Uh-huh,” I say innocuously.

And then, for the first time since Bill sat down, we have silence.

Uncomfortable, lengthy silence.

“You seem angry,” I say diplomatically as I lift my glass of sauvignon blanc up to my lips, then put down the glass self-consciously before drinking any.

“You can drink that,” Bill tells me. “It’s your body.”

“Oooooo-kay,” I say, taking a sip of wine.

Bill eyes me disapprovingly. “That said, I don’t understand why you would intentionally put poison in your body, knowing your meninges can’t deal with it.”

The words spill out of my mouth before I have a chance to edit myself. “Actually, it’s my liver that can’t deal with it.”

“What?”

“The meninges cover the brain and the spinal cord,” I tell him awkwardly. “It’s the liver that removes alcohol from your body.”

Bill stares at me.

I’m probably in trouble, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say to hold up my end of the conversation.

Bill continues to stare at me in silence. Finally, I start talking again. “The liver produces an enzyme called dehydrogenase, which—”

A bell rings.

“Oh, thank God!” we both say in unison.

A perky blonde walks up to the front of the room. “Our cocktail course is over. Gentlemen, please move to the table on your right, so that we may begin eating our appetizers. Ladies, stay in your seats.”

Bill stands up and runs away from me as I take a big ole gulp of wine and prepare for the next guy, an older, darker-haired gentleman who didn’t bother trying too hard with his choice of clothes when he got dressed this morning. “Hi,” I say as he sits down. “I’m Melissa.”

“How old are you?” he asks me right off the bat.

I hate him already. “How old are you?” I answer back.

“It doesn’t matter,” he tells me as the waiter puts down our shrimp cocktails. “A man can impregnate a woman well into his eighties. By the time women are thirty-five, genetically their eggs are inferior, and their ovaries are starting to shrink.”

I force a smile. “In the first place, that’s biologically incorrect,” I tell him. “But the point is moot, since you won’t be getting anywhere near my ovaries anyway.”

The minidate during the salad course starts out fine, albeit a bit strange. A nerdy, slightly overweight gentleman introduces himself as Chester (are men still really called Chester?), then begins to talk to me. “So what would you do if you won the lottery and never had to work again?”

I start off with a joke. “Well, in the first place, I don’t play the lottery, since I figure my odds are the same of winning either way.”

This falls flat. Chester looks at me, confused. “That’s not true. In the California Lottery, your chances of winning are one in forty-one million, four hundred and sixteen thousand, three hundred and fifty-three. Therefore, if you played eleven tickets per game, your chance would be one in less than four million. Not great odds, but certainly not the same as not playing.”

I have no response to that. “True,” I finally concede. “I don’t know. Travel, maybe? My friend just won the lottery. She’s traveling.”

“Really?” he says to me, fascinated. “So, is your friend single? Because, let’s face it, we have no heat here.”

Soup guy opened with, “Have you heard the word of Jesus?”

Entrée dude opened with, “So what political party are you registered with?” (By the way, never answer that. No matter what political party the guy is in, you are just encouraging an angry monologue.)

By dessert, my ego wasn’t yet shattered, but it was definitely cracked. So when my date said to me, as I put the spoon of chocolate mousse up to my mouth, “Are you really gonna eat that? Because, you know, a moment on the lips, an eternity on the hips,” I responded with an irate, “You, sir, just blew any chance of spending an eternity with these hips.” And proceeded not only to eat my chocolate mousse, but his crème brûlée as well.

At the end of the night, I decided to chalk up the evening as an amusing aside for my future memoirs.

Thirty-six

Nicole

In the dead of night that Friday, lightning is flashing through my bedroom, thunder is booming, and I have just been awakened by a colossal kick in my stomach.

“Ugh … Son of a … bitch,” I call out, the wind knocked out of me.

I open my eyes. Attached to my stomach is Malika’s foot.

She’s terrified of thunderstorms, so I told her she could sleep with me tonight.

No good deed goes unpunished. That tiny girl has managed to stretch out her entire body across our bed to lie in an odd little asterisk position to take up most of the king-size bed, leaving me to move my body farther and farther out to the side, until I look like a car halfway over a precipice.

I sit up in bed, move Malika’s head onto Jason’s empty pillow, and her feet down to the foot of the bed. “Honey, wake up,” I say to her sweetly.

She’s out cold, her mouth is slightly open, and she’s doing this little snoring thing that makes me worried she needs to have her tonsils and adenoids removed.

“Honey,” I whisper. “The storm is passing. You can go to sleep in your own room now.”

BOOM! pounds the thunder.

Malika sits bolt upright, but with her eyes still closed. As I start to softly repeat, “Sweetie, you can move back to your own room,” her whole body plunges down diagonally right at me, full force. I scurry out of the way, leaping out of bed just as her head hits my pillow with a thud.

Great. Now I’m standing outside of my own bed, trying to figure out a way in.

First, I try Jason’s side of the bed, empty due to a road trip. I slowly and silently lie myself down, trying not to disturb her royal highness. Malika immediately whips her body around to me, then throws her entire body on mine.