“I feel like I could lose you,” he said, to the ceiling instead of her face.
“Lose me?”
He nodded but didn’t look at her.
“You have Freya and now this book project.”
“Potentialbook project.”
“It’ll happen. It’s meant to be,” he said. “And ... I don’t know. How could you possibly have space for me? How could I even expect you to?”
She didn’t know what to say. His concerns were valid.
“It won’t always be like this.”
She spoke with certainty, though she wasn’t at all sure it was true. It felt quite possible that it would always be like this.
“I shouldn’t need your reassurance. I should be more emotionally mature than that,” he said. “But thank you.”
“Needing reassurance isn’t emotionally immature, silly,” she said. “It’s human.”
He took her hand in his and squeezed.
“I love you,” he said.
He kissed the corner of her mouth and then rolled over on his side, away from her. From the rustling of the sheets, she knew he was tending to his own needs. She had given him no other choice.
Chapter 7
Britt
When Britt was ten, a new man came into her mom’s life. Bill had mysteriously vanished. Or rather, it was mysterious at the time. Britt found out years later that he’d ended up in prison for sideswiping and injuring a bicyclist while driving his station wagon with a blood alcohol level of 0.30.
At first when Bill stopped coming around, Britt thought it was because her mom had finally had enough. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Britt persisted in seeing her mother as a smart and capable person. She needed to see her that way. Accepting the reality of her mom’s ineptitude, not only as a mother but also as an adult in the world, presented a terrifying question for a ten-year-old: What the hell was she supposed to do?
Steve seemed like a decent answer to that question.
Britt and her mom met Steve when their 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass had broken down yet again, necessitating a trip to the auto repair shop, where all the guys knew Britt’s mom and knew how shamelessly she would flirt in attempts to get a deal. Occasionally, she managed tonegotiate down a price, but she never got anything for free. She wasn’t beautiful enough, or the men weren’t dumb enough.
On this particular day, Britt watched her mom step into her very best dress, a pink flowery number with buttons up the front that barely closed over her midsection. She wasn’t fat, but she was bloated from drinking more in the weeks since Bill had vanished from their lives. Britt watched the way the dress pulled at the buttons, giving glimpses of her mom’s skin beneath. She was embarrassed on her mom’s behalf, embarrassed by her mother’s apparent unawareness of how she’d let herself go, gradually and then all at once.
Steve was new at the auto repair shop. He couldn’t have known why his boss groaned audibly when Britt’s mom walked in with her freshly glossed lips, her boobs in a too-small bra, busting out of the top of her dress. Even if they’d warned him, he would have still been kind. That was just how he was.
Britt’s mom seized upon his newness, walking right up to him and sticking out her hand to introduce herself: “Hi there. I’m Monica Taylor. I don’t believe I’ve seen your handsome face before.”
Britt lingered in the background while her mom performed her usual sob story about how she was a single mother and this was their only car and if she didn’t have a car, she couldn’t get to her grocery store job, which was six miles from their apartment, too far to walk on a daily basis.
Steve nodded along while Britt’s mom talked. He furrowed his brow in what appeared to be genuine empathy.
“Well, why don’t we just look at what’s going on with the car and then talk,” he said.
Her mother swooned, taking Steve’s hand in hers, squeezing it with a desperate kind of affection as she said, “Thank you, thank you.”
“Is this little girl yours?” Steve asked, peering over Britt’s mom’s shoulder, his eyes meeting Britt’s.
“Oh, yes, that’s Brittney,” her mother said. She beamed with pride, the way other mothers did naturally but she only did as part of a performance for a man.
“Hey there, Brittney,” Steve said, giving her a wave.
