A gentle knock on the nursery door, and there’s Felix, holding a box of tissues. “Just in case.”
She smiles weakly. “Apparently hormones are a thing.”
“Oh? I hadn’t noticed.” He enters the room wearing an untucked polo and blue-and-white-checkered shorts. “It’s clearly my fault though. I wasn’t thinking last night. How can one eat lobster risotto without a glass of muscadet? I should have made mac and cheese.”
“Please don’t. Ever.”
“Not even for the singleton?”
She wraps her hands around the top rail of the crib. “Homemade, with Vermont cheddar only, not that imitation crap.”
“You got it, Lennie.” He winks, and she tries not to startle at the unexpected nickname.
She knows Jonah’s mood from the way he slides his phone off the nightstand each morning, can guess what he’ll choose off a menu at any restaurant faster than he can, and can time his ejaculation to the second hand of her rose compass clock. After twenty years with Jonah, there’s so little that’s new or surprising.
As Felix crosses the room, he pauses at the small pegs on the wall beside the door, each home to a little hanger dangling a onesie. Above is a small shelf that she only now realizes holds a framed photograph of her family. Ilena, her sister, and her mom on what appears to be her sister’s college graduation day, which threatens more tears. Her sister didn’t graduate in her world. She couldn’t take the pressure to be the best. There’s no sign of her dad, and disappointment fills Ilena to think he was no different here.
At twelve, Ilena had been old enough to understand what it meant that her father was moving in with a woman who wasn’t her mom, but too young to realize that the hug Ilena had given him, begging him to stay, was tantamount to her choosing a side and his was the wrong one. The betrayal never left, seeming to linger in her mother’s criticism of everything from the way Ilena packed the dishwasher to the shape in which she plucked her eyebrows. Her mother had always been demanding, expecting Ilena and her sister to be perfect daughters, to live up to the reputation of their attorney father and president-of-their-synagogue mother. The picture-perfect family. Her father leaving shattered the image her mother needed, the one that tamped down her insecurities. The one that allowed her to let go of her practical side and be the fourth in their games of Uno or shout out crossword answers as Ilena and her dad bent over the kitchen table on Saturday mornings.
But that mother disappeared just as her father had done. And as much as Ilena knew it was her father’s choice to break up their family, she couldn’t stop blaming her mother. Sometimes she wished that when her father had left, he’d taken her too.
Yet her father being who he was had set off a chain reaction. If he hadn’t left, Ilena wouldn’t have begged him to stay, wouldn’t have betrayed her mother by choosing him, wouldn’t have had to work so hard to be the best at everything. Would she have gotten into Harvard, met Mallory, founded AIM? Her dad’s infidelity may be the key to Ilena’s success. But it had been the opposite for her sister. When their mother demanded perfection, her younger sister stopped trying because it felt impossible. Yet here, she hadn’t. She’d finished college. Ilena couldn’t be more proud. Her sister had found a way to succeed in spite of their mother. The same way Ilena had.
“It strikes me that we’re overdue. Do you want to invite them?” Felix asks, turning and coming to rest on the opposite side of the crib. “Your mom and sister?”
She nearly laughs out loud. The Cohens operate independently, as Felix’s “overdue” and her father’s absence from this photo implies is the same here. She’s not sure what Felix knows of her family, and now’s not the time to find out. She’s juggling enough as it is. “Invite for what, exactly?”
“James offered to do a gender-reveal party.”
“He did?”
“Well, after I asked him to. But really he owes us for missing the wedding.”
“James missed the wedding?”
A fake laugh. “Funny. Sure, sure, we barely noticed bad sushi stopped our best man from attending.” He reaches into the crib and lifts the white envelope from the ultrasound technician. “Well, party too tacky?”
She stares at the envelope, then the photograph atop the sailboat sheet. “Definitely, but let’s do it anyway. Except, I’ll host.”
19
Ilena
Two YearsBeforethe Outing
“We’re never hosting again, promise me that,” Jonah said as Ilena scrubbed at the chocolate ice cream ground into their hand-knotted cream rug.
“Grab your phone, you can record me.” She pressed herself back on her heels. “Never again. They’re monsters.”
“Monstersis too kind. What’s worse than monster?”
“Banshees?” Ilena said, dabbing at the rug and only making the stain grow.
“Beast?”
“Chupacabra?”
“Devil children.” Jonah plopped down beside her with a spray bottle of rug cleaner. “Even Satan’s scared of them. Truly, that’s how Bree and Sean got them.”
