“Caroline.” The expression on his face was so weird that she felt a pit in her stomach. “Iwantto be with him all the time.”
“But that’s right now, Van, while he’s a baby. He’s not going to be a baby forever.”
“No, but I’m going to be his dad forever.”
“Obviously. I know that. I’m not saying don’t be his dad. I don’t even know what that means…” Caroline trailed off.
“This isn’t fair to you,” Van said quietly.
“It’s temporary, Van. We knew it would be weird and awkward. Weknew we’d have to muddle through a tricky time when he was a baby. Remember? We talked about this. You asked me to try. This is me. Trying.”
“But I didn’t get it back then. I thought having a baby was just that—having a baby. But it’s having a baby that becomes a child that becomes a person. And there’s no end date on that. I’m never going to bedone.This is how it’s always going to be.”
How it’s always going to be.“So, what does that mean for me?” Caroline asked.
“I love you so much. I think you’re wonderful. But I can’t be a good boyfriend to you. I can’t go on vacation. I can’t go out to dinner. I can’t even spend an hour having brunch with your best friend. Do you know how shitty I feel about that?”
“Yeah,” Caroline said quietly. “That was shitty.”
“I want to be a good partner to you, but more than that, I want to be a good father.”
“And you feel like I’m getting in the way? Of you being a father?”
“I can’t do both,” Van said, and he looked so sad Caroline felt broken for him. She wanted to put her arms around him, but suddenly she didn’t know if she was allowed to touch him anymore.
“So this is it? We’re breaking up?” Everything was happening so fast.
“I’m sorry, Caroline.”
She wanted to ask for a time-out. She wanted to go back ten minutes to when she was talking about Portugal and Montenegro and undo the entire thing.Control, alt, delete, don’t save document.Could she make him take it back? But, no, she realized. He was breaking up with her. He was telling her it was over. Caroline felt her nose and eyes stinging, the tears about to come, so she turned around and walked away as quickly as she could before Van could see. She stumbled down thepath to the beach, the wind freezing on her wet face. In the parking lot she realized they had both come in her car, that Van would have to find his own way home, maybe borrow a truck from work, but she couldn’t stand to sit next to him, to have him watch her snot and sob and fall apart. It would be humiliating for her, and also unkind to him, to make him watch her suffer when he was hurting so much too. She got in her car and drove, leaving him behind.
This wasn’t something that he had just blurted out. She now understood he had been thinking about it. Understood he had rehearsed some of this speech. She felt so stupid that while she’d been waiting for him at her cottage, eating her sad little dinners, thinking about the trips they would take, the children they would have, he had been planning his goodbye. She’d been delusional, pitiable, a fool. This whole time she had been so worried about the other woman in their relationship, so sure that Bailey would be the thing to tear them apart, but she’d been wrong. It had been Dylan the whole time.
Eleven
Fran
The Hurt Waist
RJ was the biggest germaphobe Fran had ever met. He wouldn’t drink out of a cup his own children had used. He wouldn’t take a lick of Fran’s ice cream. He preferred to have his own tube of toothpaste, and he would rather have slammed a screen door on his finger than partake of a shared bowl of dip at a party. The guy was deathly afraid of germs (unless someone passed him a bong, and then suddenly he was fine with putting his mouth all over it). He was nuts, really, and so it shouldn’t have surprised Fran to realize that her children were growing into tiny little nutcases as well.
London had been to the school nurse so many times with so many imagined ailments over the course of the last year that Fran and the nurse had become friends. Fran knew her coffee order, they texted each other happy birthday, and she’d even bought the woman a dog bed for her new puppy. It seemed like London just needed a break from the classroom, and so Fran and the nurse eventually came up with a system where, unless he was bleeding, she would just let him color quietly in her office for half an hour before sending him back to class.Unfortunately, over the summer she had taken a better-paying job working for the school in Manchester-by-the-Sea, and the nurse Greenhead hired to replace her was decidedly less interested in entertaining a seven-year-old who said his “waist hurt.” So far this year Fran had needed to pick him up early from school five times.
Fran was in the middle of a complex plan for shipping an engine kit when her phone rang.
“Hi, is this London’s mom?” The nurse’s voice was vaguely singsong. It was like she enjoyed telling parents to come get their kids. “There’s no emergency, but London’s not feeling so great. We took his temperature and it’s normal, but his teacher and I have decided that he’s not himself and should go home.”
The thing was, there was really nothing to say once the nurse had decided your kid needed to leave. You could push back, you could insist they hold your kid in the office for the day, but then you just looked like a bad parent. Also, with Fran’s luck, it would be the one time he actually had appendicitis.
When Fran arrived at the school, London at least had the decency to look embarrassed. He coughed and gave the nurse a little wave as he followed Fran back to the car. “How ya doing, bud?” She kissed his forehead, and it was cool and dry, no fever.
“I’m okay. It’s just pain in my waist.”
“Did you eat your lunch too fast?”
“Maybe. Or maybe I had too much water? Like, I got too hydrated?”
“That’s not very likely.”
