“Stick with vanilla,” I say. “Go with coffee buttercream if Calvin insists on being fancy.”
“Feels like everything Calvin is doing for this wedding is to make it fancier than his last decision made it. I told him we should just skip it all and go to city hall, and he—” Doug shrugs. “Coffee buttercream. I’ll remember that.”
I try to look encouraging. No point in dumping my baggage on Doug. It’ll be two years this fall since his dad died, and for a while I thought we were going to lose Doug too. He was ghostly on the odd days he did come to the office. But since he and Calvin got engaged, he’s been doing better. Hopefully married life will help him turn the rest of the corner.
“Don’t worry about me,” I say. “I’ll take the weekend to relax.” In fact, I was going to take the boys to the aquarium. Jacob loves the shark tunnel.
“There’s always that gift certificate Harpreet gave you last Christmas.”
I snort. Hot yoga. I don’t know what she thought I would do with it. Yoga’s not really my thing.
But when I get home, the apartment feels impossibly huge and empty. It’s too big for me, but I chose the two-bedroom plus den so the boys would have somewhere to sleep when they came. I didn’t realize how infrequent every second weekend would feel when it got down to it.
I browse my phone for new movies. My secret guilty pleasure is anything with Jason Statham. I told Doug once, and he looked like I announced I’d laced the office coffee maker with cyanide. When you work at a film festival, people have a lot of opinions. And while most of Jason’s work is hardly a masterpiece for the ages, you can’t knock a shaved head and that jaw.
I wake up—or rather, I fall asleep on the couch, somewhere in the middle ofSnatchandthenwake up—in a puddle of my own popcorn-scented drool. The couch is a cheap one I bought from a warehouse on Dupont, and it’s slippery under my spit.
The apartment is too quiet.
My life is too quiet. I miss my boys. I miss their gappy smiles as they lose their baby teeth. Once, in the days between dropping them back at Dominic’s on a Sunday evening and picking them ten days later, Jacob and Karter lost three teeth between them.
“Look!” Karter had beamed. “The tooth fairy brought me five dollars! Isn’t that awesome, Daddy?”
His question is followed by another voice in my memory.
“I can’t decide if I want to call him daddy or if I want to call himdaddy.”
Brady. Fucking Brady. The idea of trying to meet someone new shrivels my dick like a week-old raisin smushed into a car seat.
Except for Brady. He’s been the one tempting distraction as he struts into the Out & About office in skinny jeans and skate shoes, his floppy hair saying he doesn’t give a shit about being a professional, when I feel like I have to keep up appearances for every sponsor and every member of the media who comes through our door.
Or maybe it’s that he’s so much younger than I am. When I watch his fingers fly over my keyboard, I’m reminded how much more technologically literate his generation is than mine, and I had mastered the art of programming a VCR before I could fully read.
His generation. Shit. I wouldn’t mind finding someone to call me a certain kind of daddy, but Brady’s not it. For one, he works for me—more or less. And two, he was probably still in high school when Dominic and I met. No, shit, maybe middle school. Either way, a relationship between us would be completely inappropriate.
I wipe the drool off the couch, throw the rest of my popcorn out, and go to bed.
I’m awake again way too soon. Too many years of early wake-up calls. For all of Dominic’s complaints that I wasn’t there as much as he needed, he has never been a morning person, so breakfast duty was mine from the minute the boys came home.
My cupboards are mostly empty. These days, I’m as likely to take Jacob and Karter out for a pancake breakfast as I am to make food at the apartment. I tell myself it’s because we should do something nice—make special memories as the three of us. In reality, Dominic is right, and I still work too much to reliably go grocery shopping.
I find a packet of instant oatmeal and heat it up in the microwave. I stare at the fridge as I eat the mushy, faintly apple-cinnamon-scented paste. The gift certificate is there, stuck behind a magnet.One free class. Hot Yoga. Curling Lotus Studio.
I have never done yoga in my life, but in a fit of annoyance, I grab the certificate. Fuck it. I can’t wallow all weekend, and I don’t want to turn my laptop on. Even without the boys, I’m not going to get sucked back into work.
I reserve a spot in the hot yoga class online that starts at nine. At the back of my very bottom drawer, I find an old pair of shorts and a T-shirt. So much of my wardrobe has become about wooing donors and putting on a good impression for the festival. I miss the days when I picked my shirts based on which one had the least amount of toddler spit on it.
The yoga studio isn’t actually all that far from my building. I’m greeted by a perky instructor in flowing pants and a loose top. She lends me a mat and gives me a whole stack of blocks, straps, and blankets.
“Why do I need a blanket if it’s hot yoga?” I say.
She grins. “Some people find it soothing as we cool down.”
I’m strangely nervous. Yoga isn’t really my thing, but maybe it could be my thing in this new single, part-time dad life I’m living.
A few people have already arrived, and they’re setting out their mats and stretching. I set mine off to the side and toward the back, where no one will notice if I make a complete ass of myself, but not so far back that I can’t see the instructor.
By the time she starts, the class is full. The instructor says a few words and invites us to lie down. The room is warm, but not uncomfortably so. I do my best to follow as she tells us about our breathing and talks about spreading awareness through our entire body. I’m very aware that my right big toe itches, but reaching for it feels against the rules somehow.
