“Do you like pumpkin spice lattes?” I say.
She wrinkles her nose. “North Americans don’t understand good coffee.”
No one’s perfect. I feel a little less in awe of my new employee, and that’s probably for the best.
I text Nash as soon as she’s gone.I found her! She’s perfect.
He sends a smiley emoji in reply.
I can’t help myself when I send a couple eggplants and some raindrops.
Brady, I still don’t know what that means.
I write,Call me after work & I’ll explain. Bring your glasses so you can read the fine print.
Nash sends a scowly emoji.Smart-ass. Going to the boys’ soccer game tonight. Will call after.
I spend the rest of the day in a happy little fog. Nothing can get me down. Not even when the supplier sends an email saying the smart screen I ordered for Bill Immerchuk and his hall of learning is back ordered and will be available in October. Bill is very understanding, and we order a new model that will arrive on Friday. Lena will be here by then. She can help me do the install. Everything is working out.
I spend the evening writing invoices. I wonder if Lena likes to write invoices. She’d probably be insulted if I asked. But if she works out, I can go back to that plan I had of hiring someone junior to take over the office admin. We’ll be a team of three then. Three feels big. Legit. A real company, not just me and a laptop and some rented office space in an old jam factory.
As I fall asleep, burrowed down in a cozy nest of quilts and optimism, I realize that Nash never called.
22
Nash
Ihalf expect Dominic to bring an entire entourage to soccer to lecture me about my love life. His mother, his sister, her kids. And Karim.
Having seen him, I’m surprised at how much I’m not upset by his presence in Dominic’s life. Maybe it’s Brady. If I’ve moved on, I can hardly blame Dominic for meeting someone new. And it’s not like I was still hung up on Dominic himself. I’ve been grieving the death of my marriage, but only in that I was worried what it would mean for the boys, though they seem to be doing fine. Better than I am, most days. But I’m here for them, and we’re finding a rhythm. It’s inevitable Dominic and I are going to find people who make better partners for each of us, and who will someday love Jacob and Karter as much as we do.
But still, I’m relieved when I see Dominic sitting on the sidelines by himself. Because we should talk. About Brady and Karim. About what it means for the boys, and when we should tell them. I gather they’ve already met Karim, and I would have appreciated a heads-up about that, but we’re going to be adult about this going forward, starting now. And I appreciate not having an audience for this kind of conversation.
“Hey,” I say, setting up my folding chair next to his.
“Hey.” He’s wearing sunglasses and faces out toward the field where the kids are running drills before the game starts.
“Sorry I’m late. There was an accident on the 404.”
“It’s fine.”
A whistle blows, and the kids fall out of their drills. Chaos reigns for a few moments as pylons are rearranged, and coaches call at the little soccer players, trying to get them into position for the game to start.
“Did Karter get taller since last week?” I say.
Dominic smiles faintly. “Growth spurt. I’ve had to buy him new shoes twice this summer.”
The boys are identical in nearly every way. When they first came to live with us, we could only tell them apart from the mole on the back of Jacob’s right calf. Thank God we’d been matched with them in summer. We had a lot of bare feet and ankles, those first few weeks, while we learned their personalities. It’s funny that Karter is definitely a few inches taller than his brother. They’re their own people now. At two, they’d been an amorphous blob of chaos.
“So,” Dominic says.
“So,” I say, squaring my shoulders the way Brady did as we’d walked to our date and he’d tried to calm his anxiety over carrying his phone with him.
“You met someone.”
“So did you. He seems nice.”
“He’s a pediatrician. He’s the boys’ pediatrician, actually. Has been since we moved to Markham.”
