“He implied that the girl was dumb, right?” Alex asks.
I huff. “Really? This is the analogy you’re using?”
“Yes,” Alex says with a hint of humor.
“Dad, he called her a ‘dum-dum’ right to her face.”
“Right, Noah. It was wrong of him. But then your mom went outside and knocked his ice-cream cone out of his hand.”
“Yeah, she did.” Noah looks at me and smiles, as if to say,Good job, Mom!
“But what happened?” Alex says.
“Ugh, why are we dragging this out? What your dad is saying is that two wrongs don’t make a right,” I blurt out.
Alex looks at me with slight irritation. “I want him to understand that his behavior got him nowhere.”
“I think the cop realized he was wrong for profiling Jose, so he had to use me as a scapegoat,” Noah interjects.
“That’s not the point. Never mind. Listen, Noah, you’re not in trouble. Don’t ever do that again. I’m glad you were defending Jose, but Jose got to go home and you got handcuffs. The man got a new ice-cream cone and Mom got banned from the Galleria mall. You see my point? I know you both do. We’re all tired. We are not punishing you, okay? Let’s call it a night,” Alex says.
I agree, after feeling a little wounded that I was being reprimanded alongside Noah. It’s almost 2a.m.and I don’t want to drive home. Part of me wants to ask where Alex came from earlier, but I don’t.
“I’m gonna set up the blow-up mattress for the boys, and I’ll just sleep on the couch.”
“No, you can have the bed. I’ll sleep on the couch,” Alex says.
We’re both strangely calm in this moment, even though this situation is uncharted territory for us. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, a hundred percent.”
I commandeer the bathroom first. I brush my teeth, wash my face, and look for something to wear, but I don’t have anything here, so I strip down and throw on a T-shirt that Alex left hanging on the towel rack. He won’t care.
In the bedroom, he knocks and pushes the cracked door open as I’m getting into bed.
“What’s up?” I ask. I feel modest with him for the first time in ages, maybe forever. I point to the T-shirt. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, of course not.”
He sits on the edge of the bed. This is all so strange and I’m not sure what to make of what he’s doing.
“I want to help out more, with the boys, with the household stuff, whatever,” he says in a low voice. He hardly ever talks quietly because he is so hard of hearing.
“What is this? Are you implying that I’m doing a bad job because of what happened tonight?”
“No, not at all.” He starts to get up to walk out. “I knew you were gonna get defensive.”
“Sit down, please. What is this all about?”
He sits down and angles his body toward me. I can smell a woman on him. It’s either perfume or some kind of soap or lotion. In this moment, I feel like the realization would be easier to accept if we said it out loud, if we came clean. He can say who he’s been sleeping with, and I’ll say I hooked up with my ex a handful of times, and then we can just move on. I’ll leave out the part in which I felt dogged and disposable from the whole dating experience. He doesn’t need to know that, he’s probably having a good ol’ time.
There have been many instances in my kids’ lives when I’ve used the “ripping the Band-Aid off” analogy. I think it applies here, but Alex isn’t like that. I can throw something in a closet and forget its entire existence, as if I have no sense of object permanence, but when it comes to people, my brain never stops. Alex can “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” actualpeople. So, in his case, he wouldn’t want to know anything. My imagination, however,livesfor the possibility of what people are doing at any given moment. In my head, I’ve basically already married Alex off to whoever’s perfume this is. They have some kids, maybe three, and I’m wondering who I will be to those kids.
“Listen, Dani, I’m not bringing this up because of what happened, I swear. Other than this snafu tonight, the boys are doing great. You’re an awesome mom, you always have been. It’s not that. You just look tired all the time lately.”
“Thank you very much. Everyone knows thattiredis code for old and ugly.”
“Dani, you are so skinny right now. And you’re shaking from anxiety! You’ve also been a little forgetful lately and—”
