Wishful Thinking (35 page)

The carrot incident?

Jennifer pulled Jack even closer. He responded exactly as she needed him to, burrowing into her like a baby bunny and saying, as he always did, “Mama.”

Their food arrived. She and Norman chatted over their garlicky, mayonnaisey Caesar salads about the boys and other things, as much as they were able. She asked about his teaching. He asked about her work. Then, out of nowhere, Norman asked her when she had seen Vinita last. Jennifer made up an excuse, then asked, “Why?” as casually as she could.

“I saw her at pickup today,” he replied. “She asked me to keep an eye on you.”

“That’s weird,” she said, stabbing a crouton with her fork and shattering it.

He shrugged. “She said you’ve been working too hard. Which is even weirder considering what a flexible schedule you have now.”

Jennifer took a big bite of crouton. She didn’t know if she should feel touched or annoyed. She was leaning toward the latter.

The boys made quick work of their dinners, and after some talk about what was happening at school, Julien asked if he could play on Norman’s phone. Norman, to her surprise, said yes. Jennifer raised an eyebrow, smiling. “I thought you didn’t believe in Angry Birds,” she said teasingly.

“It’s Candy Crush,” he replied curtly. “Helps with spatial reasoning.”

Norman could always be counted on, Jennifer thought, to say something stupid like that just when she was beginning to warm up to him.

In an instant, the boys were totally absorbed, enclosed in a video-game bubble, Julien holding the phone and Jack craning over the table to see. The boys’ bickering over who got to play and when was so irritating, however, that Jennifer asked them to slide into the next booth, which was empty.

This had the unfortunate effect of leaving her alone with Norman.

“We have a custody hearing coming up,” he said quietly the moment the boys were settled.

It was true. Jennifer hadn’t been able to put it off any longer. The wheels of the judiciary had been set in motion, and while Jennifer’s lawyer had assured her that once a custody schedule had been set, as it had been in their mediated agreement, it was enormously difficult to change, the fact that she was likely to win had seemed less and less like the point. Instead she’d felt, over the past few months, that while a judge probably would not force her to give Norman more time with the boys, her conscience might.

“Did Melissa help you with that time log of yours?” she suddenly found herself asking. “The one you gave me last fall?” All this time, and she had never asked. But the suspected betrayal had clouded her relationship with Melissa enough to sadden her, and she wanted to know.

Norman put down his fork, took a sip of his Diet Coke, and looked at her. “No,” he said. “Julien did.”

Jennifer gulped. She hadn’t expected that.

“He didn’t know he was helping me,” Norman added quickly. “I would just ask him things. He’s like a little tape recorder, you know. He doesn’t forget a thing.” Jennifer nodded, trying not to let her expression betray her—the idea of
Norman’s quizzing Julien like that made her furious. But Norman, as usual, misinterpreted the look on her face. “Oh, man,” Norman said. “I could see how you would have thought Melissa did it. That must have been hard, thinking she and I were in cahoots together.”

“It’s okay,” Jennifer said. “I should have just asked you in the first place.”

“There’s something I probably should have told you in the first place, too, Jen,” he said.
What now?
she thought. “The time log wasn’t my idea,” he said. “It was your mom’s.”

“My
mom’s
?” she repeated incredulously.

“Well, no, wait,” Norman said, backpedaling. “Not the time log specifically. It was more … your mom pushed me to ask for more time, to take on partial custody of the boys. When she was so sick. She worried that you wouldn’t let me help you after she was gone. She worried that it was too much for you, trying to do it all by yourself. And, frankly, she gave me quite a talking-to. About how I had been as a dad.”

This revelation was more than either of them could bear in front of the other. Norman immediately took advantage of a minor squabble between the boys to turn away and scold them.

Watching him referee as the boys’ verbal disagreement quickly devolved into punches and thrown elbows, Jennifer remembered the afternoon when Norman had come to visit her mother in hospice. “You’ve got to try to forgive him, sweetheart,” her mother had said after he’d left. “For your sake, and for the boys’.” Jennifer had nodded noncommittally, hearing but not hearing, overcome with her grief. Her mother had then clasped her hand, hard. “You can try to be everything to them,” she’d said, “but you can never be their dad.”

How had she forgotten?

Leaning over into the booth where Norman was grappling with the boys, Jennifer forced the words out before she could think twice. “Do you guys want to stay with Daddy tonight?”

Norman looked at her, eyes wide.

“I mean, if that’s okay,” she said.

“No, no,” he said, smiling. “I’d love it. And I’m sure Dina would too.”

“Yeah!” Jack said.

“Okay,” Julien said, more doubtfully.

Once they were outside, Julien motioned to her to come over to the edge of the sidewalk, where he was standing. She leaned down to listen. “Mommy,” he said, “why don’t you come to Daddy’s too? You never come to Daddy’s. I want to go to Daddy’s, but I want to be with you too.” Before Jennifer could answer, Julien called out to Norman. “Daddy, can Mommy come too?”

“Julien,” Norman said, shifting uncomfortably, “you know that isn’t how it works. Dina will be home later, and—”

“I don’t
want
Dina!” Julien cried with a fierceness that nearly knocked Jennifer off her feet. “I want
Mommy
!”

Now Julien was the one with tears in his eyes. Her stoic boy, who kept it in so tightly, who so rarely melted down. Pulling her toward him, he whispered, “Why does Daddy have to marry Dina? Why can’t Daddy marry
you
, so we can all live together like before?”

Julien still remembers those days
, Jennifer thought. Jack, she knew, did not.

Julien’s tears were coming fast now, dropping off his cheeks and landing on the sidewalk. His expression was both so hopeful and so heart-wrenching, she almost lost her composure completely.
Oh, to protect him from everything!
she thought.
To guard him against all pain!
To give him what he wanted—his mommy and daddy, living together, with him,
and for it to be a good thing, and not something miserable, as she knew it would be for all of them.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She paused for a moment, wanting him to hear it. “I know it’s hard for you. But when Daddy and I live together—”

“You can’t be friends,” he said quietly, wiping his tears away as he delivered the second half of a line she and Norman had cribbed from a therapy book somewhere and relied on heavily ever since.

“That’s right, darling,” she said softly. “But I’m still sorry that it’s hard for you sometimes.”

Just then Jack, joining them, elbowed his way into Jennifer and Julien’s embrace.

“I don’t want you to marry Daddy,” he said defiantly. “I want you to marry me!”

Julien, taking a deep breath, laughed out loud. “You can’t marry Mommy, dummy!” he said. “She’s your
mom
!”

“Don’t call your brother a dummy,” Jennifer said to Julien, but she was smiling at him. She stood up. Norman looked at her inquiringly.
Is this really okay?
She nodded. She wanted them to go now, before she thought about it too much longer. The boys didn’t know that Dina was pregnant yet, and she wasn’t sure how they would feel once they found out. Better to let them get used to spending more time at Norman’s now, when he could still focus on them completely.

Norman turned to the boys. “Who here,” he said, clapping his hands together, “would like to stay out a little bit later and go get ice-cream sundaes?”

Ice-cream sundaes?
Jennifer thought.
When Julien hasn’t even done his homework yet?
It was nearly seven o’clock! Jennifer opened her mouth to say as much, when she stopped. “Oh, ye of little faith,” Norman had said earlier. She needed to let him be their dad, his way. It was time.

* * *

I
T WAS THE RIGHT
thing to do, she knew. But that didn’t make it any easier to watch as the three of them walked away from her, a merry band of boys, Jack perched up on Norman’s shoulders, turning to wave to her every few seconds, Julien blowing her kisses like a silent-movie star, until, after a block or two, they rounded a corner and left her sight. Jennifer stood there for a few minutes, looking into the empty space where they had left her.

Space. Taking out her phone and smiling to herself, she texted Owen.

Hi love
, she wrote.

The response came immediately.
Thinking of you. What are you going to wear tomorrow?

Tomorrow? And since when did he care what she was going to wear? Jennifer opened her calendar. It was hard to sort through the legions of colored blocks representing her appointments for the day stacked two and three deep on the barely visible white background of her calendar. There were meetings and conference calls and reminders accounting for every minute at work, a midnight-blue Wishful Thinking appointment on top of them sending her back in time to pick up the boys and take them to swimming lessons at the Y, and then, sure enough, yet another Wishful Thinking appointment to go to a costume party with Owen at 7:00 p.m.

It was nuts.

No idea
, she wrote.
Call later?

K
, he replied.
Don’t forget.

Xoxo
, she texted back. She sighed. Just thinking about all she had planned the next day made her head ache. If she did it all, she would live thirty-five hours tomorrow, not twenty-four. She would be the perfect worker, the perfect mother, and
the perfect girlfriend, and she would lie to her coworkers, her children, and her boyfriend to do it—never talking about her kids at work, or about her boyfriend to her kids, or about her job when she was with her boyfriend. The worst lie of all, she thought, was leading all of them to believe that, wherever she was, she had made a choice to be there and nowhere else.

When you can do anything all the time,
she thought,
what does anything you do mean anymore?

Leaning against a lamppost, Jennifer looked heavenward, gazing into the milky reflection of the city’s lights in the dense cloud cover above. Somewhere beyond the clouds, she thought, lay a kind of order, a rhythm of days and nights and hours and atoms that her body and mind had, over the course of millennia, been built for. Right here on Earth was another kind of order, a set of choices and sacrifices everyone she knew wrestled with and made every single day as they balanced work, family, and love. An order Jennifer was longing to be part of again. It was time to rejoin the world she knew, she thought, as flawed and difficult as it could sometimes be: to jump back onto the merry-go-round and hang on just like everybody else. What did she have if she didn’t have that? Suddenly she realized: in these past months using the app, she had felt like a superhero, but, like every superhero, she had also felt terribly alone.

The wind was strong that night, pushing the clouds swiftly across the purplish sky. After a moment they cleared, revealing a single star—something of a rarity in New York. But Jennifer was done wishing.

She looked down at her phone. Her calendar app was still open. With a tap of her thumb, she closed it. With another tap she pulled up her Favorites. First was Melissa. Then came Vinita Kapoor. She pressed her friend’s name, and a throwback Thursday photo of the two of them from college—
Jennifer with bangs hair-sprayed to ghastly proportions, Vinita looking as beautiful as ever—appeared. She was about to call when she realized that Vinita wouldn’t pick up. She’d said she wouldn’t until Jennifer promised to stop using the app. So she texted instead.

You were right
, she wrote.
I’m not going to do it anymore.

J
ENNIFER WOKE UP THE
next morning with a skull-crushing hangover—perhaps because Vinita, ecstatic that Jennifer had finally come to her senses, had decided to celebrate by coming over and whipping up some of the deliciously deadly Indian martinis she had concocted for the surprise party. The timing of Jennifer’s call had been perfect, as Sean was back in town after having been away for two weeks and owed Vinita big-time. Vinita had left him with the girls and come over immediately. After some apologizing and hugging it out (more than was generally comfortable for Vinita), Jennifer had caught Vinita up on all that had happened since her birthday.

Vinita had been dismayed, but not surprised, by the apparent embezzlement from One Stop. She also harbored no doubt that Bill was to blame. “That guy called me ‘honey’ at your surprise party and told me to get him a drink like he owned the place,” she’d said. “Guys like that take whatever they want because they think everything belongs to them already.” (Being married to a guy who worked in the upper
echelons of finance, Vinita had some authority in this regard.) She was most saddened to hear the reason for Dr. Sexton’s disappearance. “What kind of cancer is it?” Vinita had asked. Jennifer realized she didn’t know. They considered calling Dr. Sexton and asking her to join them, but Jennifer had already texted her to tell her Jack was all right and hadn’t heard back from her. So they decided to wait, figuring she was probably with Susan.

At around midnight, way past the bedtime of two early-to-rise moms who had just downed three martinis each, the two friends had decided they might as well have a sleepover too. (“I can’t wait to see what Sean does about packing lunch,” Vinita had said gleefully.) In the end, however, this had entailed little more than passing out at roughly the same time on Jennifer’s pullout couch, right in the middle of a rerun of
Top Chef
. And now it was morning, and Vinita was already dressed, looking snappy and fresh, pouring coffee. “Oh my God,” Jennifer groaned. “You’re so peppy!”