“I mean, when you gotta go, you gotta wait until other people who gotta go who got there first go. You know?” Emme snips back. I muster every ounce of restraint to stop myself from telling her to take it easy, to spare me the awkwardness. Then to Reid, she says, “And you need to get her some AirPods. You can’t take personal calls at a fucking—” Emme turns to me, pink cheeked “—sorry, at a very loud, very public concert!”
Gracie takes Emme’s castigation in stride. “Yeah, sorry about that. My headphones were dead, but my best friendis obsessed with the nineties and wanted to see some of the show. I couldn’t leave her hanging like that.”
Emme frowns, but she’s seemingly appeased by this explanation: She, too, is obsessed with the nineties, treating the decade with the same idealized fascination with which I imagined my parents’ youths in the sixties. It’s not uncommon for her to come to me with logistical, borderline anthropological questions about the preinternet era: What did you do if you didn’t know the answer to something? (You asked someone.) What if you got lost somewhere? (You asked someone.) But seriously, what if you needed the answer to something and no one around you knew the answer either? (You accepted the not-knowing and moved on with your life.)
“Understood,” Emme says now.
Confrontation over, the four of us stand in silence for a moment. But Reid is still looking at me. Likethat.
“Lili,” he says at last.
“Reid,” I say back.
Our names are the spell that breaks the dream. I feel crazy then, the dam of self-control utterly broken, and I start to laugh.
Reid joins me, a big, bold laugh that’s exactly as easy as I remember it.
Our daughters just stand there, jaws agape, clearly in shock.
When we calm down, Gracie says, “You know each other?” She points a sharp shell-pink nail between us.
“We... yeah,” Reid says.
I run a finger underneath my eye, cleaning up my smudged mascara. Emme looks horrified—by my sudden hysteria or by a past life she doesn’t yet know about, I’m not sure. But I know I need to tread lightly here.
“We used to be friends,” I tell the girls.
Over Gracie’s head, Reid gives me a semiamused look.Isthatwhat we were?
“It was a long time ago,” I add.
“I mean, it wasn’tthatlong ago,” Reid says.
“The MetroCard wasn’t even invented yet,” I say. “That’s how long ago it was.”
“A MetroCard is how you get into the subway,” Emme says to Gracie. I know she’s working on asserting herself, but I don’t love the condescension. Something to contend with later.
“Mm-hmm,” Gracie says. “I gathered that.”
OK, then. Confrontation not entirely over.
Reid and I share a look that lands somewhere between alarm and resignation. This, we both know, is what it’s like to raise a teenage girl.
For a moment, I wonder what it would be like to co-parent with him. This is not an unfamiliar thought. Sometimes, in the throes of my unhappiness with James, my mind would drift to Reid, to what might have been had he stayed in New York and things had worked out between us. I’d told myself he would have been supportive, encouraging, and loyal. To Emme—I could never imagine mydaughter being anyone but Emme, even with a different father—he would have been patient and endlessly kind.
Now I get to see it for real. Unconsciously, his hand brushes the back of Gracie’s head in a protective motion. The sweetness almost breaks my soul in half.
I need to regain control over this situation. To get a handle on what is real, even though reality admittedly feels tenuous.
Trying to play it cool, I ask, “What are you two up to now?”
Reid nods toward Gracie’s phone. “We were finding a place to grab a bite. Gracie wants to try this vegan soul food spot on Seventh Street—”
“Cadence?” Emme says.
Reid points a finger-gun at her, a move that would’ve been pocket-protector-dad nerdy had anyone other than him done it. “That’s the one. But I’m trying to convince her to go to John’s of 12th Street. I saw they have a whole plant-based menu going on.”
“You’re vegetarian?” Emme asks Gracie.
