She grins. “I do.”
Ron emerges from the kitchen. “Dinner is served!”
“Moo,” Tatum moans from the couch, which is something she’s started doing, first as a joke, then, as she grew, more seriously.
“You are not a cow.” I smile and offer a hand to haul her up. Then, to her belly: “Hey kid, your mom is the sexiest bovine I’ve ever seen.”
Tatum swats my butt, and I skitter.
“Can we go out later?” Leo pops his head into the living room.
“It’s Christmas Eve, Leo. Chill.”
“Dude, I have to check out the competition. See what’s hot here that can translate to the city.”
“Competition for what?” I shake my head.
“The nightclub he invested in, babe,” Tatum says as she hoists herself to her feet. “His outlet from that dreary job at Merrill Lynch.” She winks at him.
I vaguely remember the details he’d shared last night as I was drifting to sleep on the couch, and as he whisked out the door to a waiting cab. Something about a club in Florida—Miami, maybe?—that he and his friends had gone in on.
“Nothing’s open tonight,” I say to him, as Piper emerges from the kitchen with her hands in oven mitts and a steaming plate of green beans between them. Scooter tails her with a final casserole dish.
“We used to always watch a movie Christmas Eve, remember that, Piper?” Tatum calls to her sister. “Remember how Mom would let us choose?”
“You always got to pick,” Piper says. Then, to Scooter: “She was always Mom’s favorite.”
“Well, how could I not be?” Tatum says. “I mean, look at me.” She moos again.
“Stop, Tate. You’re beautiful,” I say, and I wink.I see you.
“OK.” She nods as if she knows that if I believe it, then it must be true.
I raise my glass. “To my beautiful wife. To ... family. To all of us being together here to celebrate.”
I put aside my baggage, and I stare at Tatum, my glowing wife ascending a meteoric star, and for the moment, I mean it.
20
TATUM
FEBRUARY 2008
The baby has been kicking me all night, and when I do manage to sleep, my heartburn roars up my esophagus and shakes me awake.
“I’m sorry, I’m a mess,” I say to Hailey, the makeup artist the studio sends.
“I’m sorry, I’m a whale,” I say to the seamstress who lets out my gown (more of a tent) another half inch.
“Don’t be silly,” they both say, because I’m now an Oscar-nominated actress who is due any day now, and they are effectively on my payroll and are told to say reassuring things like this to a hormonal tank several hours before she may lumber onstage to accept the award.
It’s a relief to be done with it all tonight. To be done with the air kisses on the red carpet, with the cocktail hours and dinners and Q and As and interviews, even though some of those interviews have granted me covers likeVariety. But my ankles are swollen, and my fatigue is drowning me, and I can’t possibly imagine how I could take one more week of the pomp and circumstance, of faking nice with Lily Marple in front of the cameras or at sit-down roundtables like withVariety, where she smiles at me but mostly just exposes her teeth. When we took a bathroom break before the photo shoot, she leaned close (too close) and said:
“How’s Ben?”
And I rubbed my belly and said: “We couldn’t be better.”
She raised her eyebrows. “I remember him being pretty good on the set of that little movie we shot too.”
