I rise on my toes to peer over Lisa’s shoulder and confirm that my husband is indeed home and seated at the dining room table. There is only one reason why he would cut a work trip short, and that is to deliver, in person, the news I’ve waited twenty-two years, one month, and six days to hear. I bite my lower lip to keep from squealing, but my body defies my restraint and breaks out into a mini–Cabbage Patch dance.
“Sorry for showing up unannounced in my own house,” Thomas deadpans.
He and Lisa haven’t been each other’s biggest fans since a few years back when she invited me to be her plus-one on an all-inclusive trip to a resort in Cabo. Thomas hates to be alone, and rang to talk to me far too often for Lisa’s taste. Lounging by the pool on our second day, Lisa told Thomas if he didn’t stop calling, she’d toss my phone, and his neediness, into the Pacific Ocean.
Lisa shrugs. “Nice T-shirt, by the way,” she continues, pointing a finger. Thomas, ever a walking LonGev billboard, looks down at his blackDon’t Diecompany swag with a purple beet for a period.
“You too,” Thomas mumbles, and Lisa gives him a little shimmy. “I don’t mean to break up the girl party, Lisa, but I need to talk to my wife,” he states in a more serious tone than I would expect from a husband about to deliver the news his spouse has been waiting years to hear. “Would you mind?” He tilts his head toward the front door.
“Whatever you have to say, it’s not going to blow the pants off Callie,” Lisa says with a cackle, then steps aside to reveal my state of undress.
Once John and Andrew were both tucked into college, in an effort to console my weepiness, Thomas claimed one of the best things about being an empty nester was being able to walk around the house naked again. At the sight of me, though, his face is not registering this perk.
With a kiss on the cheek, I get a “Talk to you tomorrow, Callie,” from Lisa, code forText me immediately after you find out what’s up with your bummer husband.Though Lisa has been semi-supportive of my desperation to return to New York, I know she’s also been in denial about it actually happening, particularly when the “For Sale” sign on our lawn stayed put for one month, then two, and now six.
“I don’t have anything planned for dinner, but we can order in whatever you want.” I’m really hoping Thomas suggests Thai; I’ve been craving spring rolls all day.
“What’s that smell?” Thomas starts sniffing the air aggressively, leaning his body left and right, trying to locate the offensive odor. I adjust my panties to move the smoky evidence.
“Lisa was at a work happy hour before coming over. I think she strafed us with a whiff of warm beer and stale smoke.” I offer this harmless lie and pull out a chair to sit downwind of him.
My answer seems to placate Thomas for the moment, and his nostrils relax. He rests his forearms on the table, intertwining his fingers in a tight grip, unfolding and refolding them. I wait expectantly for the jocular commentary my husband usually employs when it comes to sharing life-altering news with me.
For well over two decades, Thomas has worked for LonGev, a tenure almost unheard of among Gen Xers. We are the originators of career dissatisfaction and corporate-company hopping, after all. I put my entire life in New York on hold for the opportunities LonGev promised it would provide our family in Sacramento, while Thomas put his entire existence into the company. The calculated payout we had been anticipating that would make the one-year-turned-decades away from our home, our friends, and our family, and at the expense of my burgeoning career as a broadcast journalist, was finally here.
I contemplate reaching out and placing my hands over Thomas’s, but my fingertips smell like nicotine, so I keep them out from under his nose. Though I had gone to Sacramento kicking and screaming, I was more than receptive to hearing that our gamble has paid off. Thomas, however, is uncharacteristically struggling to find the right phrase, other than “I told you so,” to convey that as the newly appointed CEO of LonGev, we are now in possession of two one-way tickets east on the company jet.
“I have something to tell you.”
“I know.” I lovingly smile at my husband, whose face holds the strain of the last six months of negotiations. Thomas has worked tirelessly to build a stable, secure life for our boys and me, and I want him to shake off the stress of the last half year and enjoy this celebratory moment with me. It’s huge. It’s what we’ve worked for. And God knows I’ve been more than patient, waiting for this change to come.
LonGev was founded in New York the same year Thomas finished his cardio-oncology fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering. I thought I was going to become a doctor’s wife like my mother, and we would be a twenty-first-century power couple like our peers, but Thomas’s professional interests forced a different path for me when he made an abrupt pivot out of the hospital and into technology’s role in the science of longevity. The industry was so undeveloped at the time that I didn’t even know it existed. The only version of longevity I was acquainted with was the whole “till death do us part” promise in marriage vows.
A week after I bought an enviable dress that showed off my svelte post-first-baby body to mark Royce Williams’s thirty-fourth birthday at his mother’s manse, and my triumphant-if-not-tired return to my work family, Thomas burst through the door, practically levitating in the tiny foyer of our Upper East Side one-bedroom, one-bath. He announced that he had turned down the job offer to join my father at Weill Cornell Medicine and instead signed on the dotted line with the start-up LonGev as an overqualified junior researcher, and that we were the new owners of a hypothetically excellent stock-option package.
Proud of myself for not responding with a knee-jerk reaction that might piss on his professional parade, I measuredly asked Thomas where in the city the research and development labs were located. With an infant at home, Thomas’s twelve-block commute to Sloan Kettering was ideal in that it allowed him more time with his son. If the new job location meant he would have to cross the park—or worse, head below Midtown—my one measly hour at the end of the day to run errands, get a mani-pedi, or sit alone in a café and readThe Washington PostorThe Atlanticwould vanish. Additionally, there was the issue of what would happen when I returned to work at CNN as a producer. The plan, at least in my head, was as soon as Royce Williams was promoted to hosting his own program, given his sway with corporate, I would make my move to the front of the camera to become the broadcast journalist my English degree from Princeton and master’s from Columbia School of Journalism proved I should be.
Shaking off his coat, Thomas answered, “The labs aren’t in the city.”
All I could think was,Oh my God, he’s reverse-commuting to New Jersey. I’m going to be raising this kid by myself!
“We’re moving to Sacramento.”
I had burst out laughing. Thomas had a witty talent for wrapping hard-to-swallow news in could-be-much-worse paper so that the actual truth was easier to digest. I loved that about him: He knew how to use humor to cut tension and help me relax in the face of unanticipated change. When we found out that we came home from our Riviera MayaMexican honeymoon with not just an unidentifiable rash but also the newest member of our family on board, Thomas comforted me with the assurance that one surprise-but-free baby was better than the in vitro triplets his cousin was about to push out into the world.
“The job’s really in Connecticut, then,” I had lobbed back, bouncing baby John in his Bjorn carrier, playing along with Thomas and his humorous banter. I was anxious to nail down the facts of this professional switcheroo, since we only had about three and a half minutes until our son would begin to wail with hunger and I needed to inform the nannies I was interviewing that the job would now likely be closer to fifty-five hours a week. Holding tight to my generation’s female rallying cry of “You can bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan,” in addition to completing the laundry, presenting perfectly, cooking nutritiously, and being lusty enough to want to drop everything and have sex with your husband, I projected optimism. As I swayed back and forth to keep John hushed, I tried to convince myself that Thomas and I could figure out our dueling careers. Under my breath, I prayed to the employment gods to have my back and let the research and development labs be up near Columbia.
“No, not Connecticut, Callie. California. LonGev’s labs are in Sacramento, California.”
Stunned, I responded with the obvious “But we live in New York. I work in New York.”
“Yeah, but you’re already on maternity leave, so the newsroom is used to functioning without you. They won’t really be that surprised when you quit, given ...” Thomas had pointed at John. There it was—the dispensability of my career versus Thomas’s solely because I had hothoused a human. “And we’ll only be gone for a year. Two, max. Then we’re back, promise.” Thomas had chucked me under the chin like I was a silly child, not his equal. It was meant to encourage me to buck up. Translation:Suck it up.
“But the birthday-party dress” was all I could formulate as an answer to the infuriating nudge on my chin. With a three-month-oldattached to my hip, for the most part my tired brain was incapable of planning farther into the future beyond worrying if I have plenty of ground dark roast to keep me awake through each day, and had I remembered to replace the emergency pack of diapers. But one plan that was etched in stone was the exact date I would be returning to CNN to reclaim my career.
“Oh, you should return the dress. Life’s way more casual in California. Plus, we need the money. LonGev doesn’t pay moving expenses.”
“Seriously? Then what do they give us to move across the country?” I had insisted, my voice rising, frantic at this life-altering option that Thomas was mistakenly assuming was a done deal. “Health insurance? Housing? A car? A job for me?”
