“In Canada,” Colette says, “they have to hold a woman’s job for a year. In fact, the US is the only country besides Papua New Guinea that doesn’t mandate paid leave. The United States. The country of family values.”
Nell takes a drink, feeling the alcohol going to work on her muscles. “Do you think if we remind people that babies were fetuses not so long ago, more will be inclined to support maternity leave?”
“Listen to this,” Yuko says, reading aloud from her phone. “Finland: seventeen weeks paid leave. Australia: eighteen weeks. Japan: fourteen weeks. America: zero weeks.”
The song changes, Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell” blasts from the speakers. Nell points a finger in the air and sings along. “She don’t like slavery. She won’t sit and beg. But when I’m tired and lonely, she sees me to bed. This should be the anthem of motherhood,” she says. “Our fight song. I walked the ward with you, babe. A thousand miles with you. I dried your tears of pain, babe. A million times for you.”
Nell notices Winnie looking at the phone in her lap again and reaches down, takes it from her hands, and places it on the table.
“Come on, dance with me,” she says, standing up and tugging Winnie to her feet. “I’d give you all and have none babe, justa justa justa just to have you here by me, because— Here we go!” Nell clutches Winnie’s hand as the volume surges, as every woman at the table explodes into song at the refrain. “In the midnight hour, we need more, more, more. With a rebel yell, we cry more, more, more.”
Nell laughs and raises her glass. “Slash the patriarchy!” she yells.
Winnie smiles and then gently pulls her hand from Nell’s and looks away from the table, past Nell, beyond the crowd pressing around them, as the flash of someone’s camera, for just a moment, lights the features of her perfect face.
9:17 p.m.
At the bar, Colette has to holler twice to be heard—a whiskey on the rocks—thinking about making it a double, her hips moving to the music. The bartender slides the drink toward her, and she takes a long sip. It’s been months since she’s been out like this, enjoying a drink with friends, neither tending to Poppy nor worrying about the book and its quickly approaching deadline. Most nights at this time she’d be sitting with her laptop in bed (the room she envisioned as her home office when Charlie’s parents bought them the apartment two years earlier has since become the nursery), staring at a blank page, feeling exhausted and inept. How did I used to write? she wonders. She completed an entire book—the memoir of Emmanuel Dubois, the aging supermodel—in sixteen weeks, but since she had Poppy, words have become like wisps of air, outpacing her brain’s ability to capture them.
She takes another sip, savoring the warmth of the whiskey in her throat, and feels a hand on her lower back. She turns to see Token.
“Hey,” he says. She moves aside, and he slips between her and a woman in a straw cowboy hat who is vying for the bartender’s attention. “It’s a million degrees out there.”
“No kidding. You want a drink?”
“Sorry, what?”
She leans in closer to him. “Can I get you a drink?”
“I’m good.” He holds up his glass, half full. “I saw you come inside. Thought I’d say hi, take in the air-conditioning.”
She smiles and then looks away. She’s been with Charlie for fifteen years, an entire lifetime it seems, but Token is just the type of guy she would have once been attracted to: quiet, unassuming, and probably surprisingly good in bed. Nell is sure he’s gay (“I heard it myself,” Nell said. “He used the word partner.”), but Colette doubts it. She’s been watching him these past several weeks, since he arrived at a May Mothers meeting alongside Winnie. Colette can tell by the way Token looks at Winnie sometimes, his tendency to touch her arm when they speak, that he’s unquestionably straight.
“So,” he says. “You can’t tell us whose book you’re writing, but can you tell me how it’s going? I can’t imagine having to write a book and manage a newborn.”
Colette considers lying and telling him the story she’s been telling Charlie—it’s fine, I’m managing—but she decides, instead, to admit the truth. “It’s awful. I accepted the job two weeks before discovering I was pregnant.” She grimaces playfully. “The baby wasn’t exactly planned.”
He holds her gaze and nods. “You going to pull it off?”
Colette shrugs, and her hair comes loose from its knot, spilling over her shoulders and down her back. “When I’m writing, I feel a need to be with Poppy. And when I’m with her, all I think about is that I need to be writing. But I assured the editor and the mayor that the baby isn’t going to interfere with meeting the deadline in four weeks. Wanna know the truth? I’m at least a month behind.”
He raises his eyebrows. “The mayor? As in Mayor Teb Shepherd?”
Colette feels a hot stitch of regret. “I’m usually good at keeping secrets. Blame it on this dark, delicious whiskey. But yeah, I’m writing his second memoir.”
Token nods. “Like everyone else in the world, I read his first.” He takes a slow drink of his beer. “You write that one, too?”
She nods.
“I’m impressed.”
“Don’t tell the others, okay? I don’t even know why I mentioned it back there. This is a pretty hard-core stay-at-home-mom crowd. My situation is complicated.”
“Don’t worry.” He leans in. “I’m good at keeping secrets, too.” A man behind him pushes forward, pressing Token up against Colette. He nods toward the deck. “Shall we?”
They walk back outside and take their seats just as Francie starts to ding her glass with a knife. “I hate to break up the conversation,” Francie says. “But it’s time.”
“For what?” Nell asks.
Francie turns toward Winnie. “Winnie?”
Winnie lifts her gaze from the phone in her lap. “Yes?”
“It’s your turn.”
“My turn?” She seems caught off guard by the attention of the table. “For what?”
“To tell your birth story.” Colette likes Francie. She’s so good-natured and young—from the looks of it, probably not yet thirty—a triple exclamation point of a woman. But Colette wishes she’d let up on this ritual. It was Scarlett’s idea, back when they were all still pregnant, to start each meeting with someone sharing their birth plan. After the babies were born, the practice morphed into long, detailed stories of people’s birth experiences, and there is very little point in denying what it really is. A competition. Who performed their opening act of motherhood best? Who was the fiercest? Who among them (the C-section moms) had failed? Colette has been hoping the group might soon drop the whole thing, and yet she can’t deny feeling curious to hear what Winnie has to say.
But Winnie just glances around the table. “You know what? I’m going to take Nell’s advice. I’m going to get a drink. A proper one.” She nods at Token’s empty glass. “Want to join me?”
“Sure,” Token says.
Colette watches them leave and then turns to catch some of the conversations happening around her—doing her best to stay engaged, surprised at how quickly she’s finished her second drink, wondering if she should get one more. She rises to use the restroom. On the way, she catches sight of Winnie standing at the bar. She’s speaking to a guy—an astonishingly handsome one. He’s wearing a bright red baseball cap, and he’s leaning in, talking into her ear. Token is nowhere to be seen. Colette senses that she should avert her eyes, that she’s witnessing something she isn’t supposed to see. But she doesn’t look away. Instead, she steps around a couple in front of her to get a better look. The guy’s hand is on Winnie’s waist and he’s fingering the tie of her dress. He whispers something, and she pulls back, staring him in the eye, annoyed. Something about him, the way he’s positioning his body so close to hers, something about her expression—
“You good?” Nell asks. She’s appeared in front of Colette, blocking her view of Winnie, a menu in her hand.
“Fine. On my way to the bathroom.”
“I mean, are you hungry? I can order you something.”
“No, thanks,” Colette says. “I ate.” Nell walks toward the waitress station, and Colette looks back at the bar.