“Big step,” Rae said. “Did they approve?”
“A little too enthusiastically. My dad’s ready to give me away. Said if Aaron asked for my hand tomorrow, he’d say yes.”
“Because as women we clearly can’t be trusted to make our own decisions about who we marry,” Rae said dryly. “We need the man of the household to weigh in with his opinion.”
“We ladies are far too emotional to make such a big decision,” Ellen said, tossing the sarcasm right back.
“Now you’re sounding like my grandpa,” Rae said. “I tried to explain dating apps to him. He kept referring to my ‘virtual boyfriends.’”
“I mean, it’s not far from the truth, is it?” Ellen said. “Think of how many guys we ‘talked to’ on the apps and never actually met in person.”
“Fair point.”
“So did you and your mom butt heads on all her love-life meddling?”
At midnight, Rae had sent Ellen a dramatic drunk text.Happy New Year Elle-belle my mom hates me and I’m so behind on the marriage and baby train and also I miss you and love you lots and lots.
Rae had gone over to her married friends’ house for New Year’s Eve, prepared to take notes about the important pillars of a long-term relationship, but they were too exhausted from their baby to contemplate their own love life, let alone help guide hers. Rae had briefly held the baby, a five-month-old boy, and it had been nothing short of terrifying, the way it felt like the little bobble-headed human would roll right out of her arms onto the tile floor.
She felt like she and her high school friends were at completely different life stages. New Yorkers liked to make fun of all the small-town folk who settled down right after college, but Rae was realizing that the joke was on the jokesters—they’d be racing the clock to raise kids before they reached old age.
After her friends had conked out at nineP.M., Rae returned home to sit on the couch with her mom, drinking champagne and watching the Times Square coverage on TV, glad not to be in the crowds while also somehow missing them.
“Our big fight was about something else,” Rae said to Ellen now.
“Mr. Non-Right?” Ellen guessed, correctly. Mr. Non-Right was her mom’s boyfriend. Rae preferred to leave names out of it, like how she thought of her dad’s wife only as That Woman.
Rae had figured Mr. Non-Right would soon exit their lives like the rest of the guys her mom had cycled through after the divorce. But two years in, he seemed a semipermanent fixture, which Rae found even more disagreeable than having him as a fleeting one. The only real value proposition Rae saw in him was that he was simplythere.
“He’s just not good enough for her,” Rae said.
“And you told her that?”
“She asked for my opinion,” Rae said defensively, though she knew the champagne had made her too honest. “I said she’s overcompensating after being cheated on by picking the safe option.”
“That’s not so bad.”
“I think I said a few more things too.” Rae winced at the blurry memories. “‘You just want a low-risk, low-reward life—no wonder Dad left you!’”
She’d apologized in the morning, and her mom had forgiven her, but their hug at the airport had been short and stiff, and Rae wished she could do it over.
“You’ll work it through,” Ellen said. “You always do. Did you hear from your dad?”
“He texted me a picture of his family Christmas card,” Rae said, showing the heavily filtered beach photo to Ellen. Her dad’s arms were wrapped around That Woman’s skinny waist, and his two “daughters” were each leaning their head on one of her dad’s shoulders. It made Rae very queasy. “Guess he decided I wasn’t worth wasting a stamp on this year,” she said, trying hard to find some humor in all of it. “And it came with a heartfelt message:Merry xmas!!Two exclamation points.”
“So juvenile,” Ellen said. “Did you text back?”
“I saidU2!!” She could play his game right back. Not that she was even sure he was playing a game. She was starting to wonder if perhaps he wasn’t being calculated, just careless. Maybe his short, sporadic texts weren’t passive-aggressive messages to punish Rae for refusing to bond with That Woman. Maybe they were just a sign that he was genuinely so busy and happy in his new life that he didn’t have much time to think about her. Rae’s cold-shoulder strategy wasn’t working nearly as well as she had forecasted. It didn’t seem to be accomplishing anything other than helping her dad forget her even more.
Part of her wanted to call him up and try to have a real heart-to-heart talk about how she missed him, how she wanted to workon their relationship, how she wasn’t going to think of his wife as her stepmom but maybe they could all get coffee together sometime. But even imagining the conversation exhausted her as much as a long workday—the feeling of walking on eggshells, trying so hard to please, playing the “good girl” character rather than just being able to be her messy self.
And seeking a real reconciliation felt like it would be a betrayal, both to her mom and to her morals. It would mean sending the signal that what he’d done wasn’t really that big a deal, when in reality it had been the biggest deal in the world.
“Dustin hasn’t replied to my text from this morning,” Rae said, switching the subject. “But I’m not worried. Remember how dramatic we were about everything last year?” She saidlast yearas if it weren’t synonymous withlast night.
“We’ve come a long way,” Ellen agreed.
Rae had ended up staying over at the Lorimer Loft after date three. It had gotten too late to take the subway, and Uber prices back to the West Village were over forty dollars, so they’d decided a sleepover was the only logical solution. Dustin had bought her a toothbrush from the downstairs pharmacy, and they’d fallen asleep with their clothes on-ish.
