“Sometimes.” She shrugs. “Honestly, my first reaction is that it feels weird.”
“Well, you did tell me that you didn’t want my heart to get stomped on again.”
She looks at me thoughtfully. “I did say that, didn’t I?”
My gaze narrows at her. “Did you not mean it?”
“No, I definitely meant it. I told you, the sad mom thing is no fun for me, to be quite fucking—sorry—honest. I love you, but you ruined banana bread for me forever.”
I laugh. The months following the divorce were a haze of sugar and flour, me feverishly flipping through my mother’s cookbooks with religious fervor, as if the power of a perfectly fluffy pavlova could save me from myself.
“I really did believe in the healing powers of baked goods,” I admit.
“But when I get past the weirdness,” Emme says, “I actually think it could be good for you to have another person in your life. Someone your own age.” She eyes me for a moment, then looks back down into her mug. “Also, like—I just don’t want to be the reason why you don’t move on.”
That she worries about fucking up my life like I worry about fucking up hers—it’s too much to bear. My first instinct is to deny the situation entirely: Who says I haven’t moved on? And who says I need to be in a relationship to prove that I have?
But that instinct alone tells me she’s right. Maybe I have been keeping Emme too close, using her as a shield to protect myself.
To Emme, I say, “I’ll take that under consideration.”
Then I put on a smile and suggest we have a couch day, which is probably not the most tactful move, but Emme takes me up on it happily. We watchThe Fellowship of theRing, her comfort movie, pausing to order lunch from the diner and take an online quiz determining whichLord of the Ringscharacter we are. (Galadriel for me, Frodo for Emme.)
By the time the movie’s over, it’s late afternoon. I’m about to ask her what she thinks she wants to do for dinner when she suddenly sits up from where she’s been lying on the other end of the sofa. Her expression is inquisitive yet determined, a woodland creature emerging from a long hibernation.
“Is it too late to go to the show tonight?” she asks.
I check my watch. “If we hustle, we can make it. What made you change your mind?”
“I think I was holding out hope that Dad would suddenly turn around and tell me that he could take me. But now I feel like that’s never happening.”
Her words hang heavily between us. She doesn’t speak them with malice, or even much sadness, but to my ears, they are laden with melancholy. I realize that this is exactly the kind of behavior she saw from me with James: All this sitting around, waiting for him to domore. Be present. Care. And the disappointment when he never did.
Emme shrugs. “I’m just not going to make what he did worse by putting myself in time-out because of it.”
This is not the first time Emme has casually doled out a nugget of profound wisdom, but this one hits hard.I’m just not going to make what he did worse by putting myself in time-out because of it.I turn it over in my head until it sticks.
Emme pushes the blanket off her, arches her back into a long, luxurious stretch, then bounds up the stairs,announcing that she’ll be wearing a babydoll dress and sneakers to the show tonight, in honor of Juliet.
I follow her upstairs to shower and change. I check my phone, which I’ve successfully avoided for the past four hours.
The screen is lit with texts and a missed call from Hayes, my agent. I skim the barrage: There’s an opportunity withResonance, a major music magazine. The project would be a series of portraits of up-and-coming musicians. Hayes threw my name into the ring, and now I’m under serious consideration for the contract.
I call him on speaker while I pull out an outfit to wear to the show.
“They need an answer by Tuesday at three,” Hayes says. I can almost hear him pacing. “That’s two days. Less, considering that it’s almost five, and I’ve been calling you since noon.”
“I can see that,” I say. “I was working on images from the Jeff Buckley thing this morning, then spent the day with Emme.” As if I need an excuse.
“The Jeff Buckley thing being the free thing? Which you took without consulting me?”
Playful condescension drips off his tone. But I adore this man—and his pragmatic approach to creativity is what makes him the best person to have in my corner. He’s the kind of person I would hate to have on the other side of the negotiating table.
“Some of us are actually willing to do things without getting paid for them,” I say.
“And I will never understand you people.”
He’s downplaying his generosity. In the throes of my divorce, Hayes took it upon himself to come over every week with martinis, omakase, and a lineup of movies he dubbed “the Bitchfest,” starting withDeath Becomes HerandAll About Eve.
