“Fine,” he said, not a smile on his face. “No need to get so celebratory. That’s the way it’s supposed to go.”
I still had a stupid grin on my face. Who cared? Let him fire me. Let him show me the door.
He pointed at his own turned-down lips. “This is what I mean when I say stop celebrating.”
“Chef, I’m just happy to be here,” I said.
“Be happy quieter,” he said.
“Cooking from Scratch, huh?” Ethan said. “That’s not bad.”
I’d been way too excited to go home—especially when that home happened to no longer be mine—so I drove over to Ethan’s after work.
We went out to the docks, put our toes into the water. It was one of the perks of living in Montauk. That late-night peace. The moon crawling down over the horizon, everything a gorgeous shade of blue. The sailboats resting in the harbor, the docks quiet and serene.
Ethan reached into his cooler, pulled out another beer, handed it over. “Non-alcoholic,” he said.
I clinked the bottle against his. “Thank you,” I said, taking a long sip.
“So you’re going to do it, right?” he said.
“I think so,” I said. “It would be pretty crazy to turn it down.”
Ethan paused, hearing something in my voice. “Are you asking me or telling me?”
“Telling,” I said. “And maybe asking.”
“Why? What does it matter what I think?”
I shrugged. “It’s just a little hard to trust yourself when you’ve made such terrible decisions in the past.”
He took a long sip, considered. “Does it make you happy? To think about doing it?” he said.
“Well, I’m at war with my husband, and my sister hates me. And I’ve been squatting in your girlfriend’s house for the last couple of nights. So you know, happiness is a bit of a lofty goal.”
He laughed. “That’s really the only goal.”
“How do you figure that?”
Ethan moved closer. “The issue with what you did before isn’t that you hurt anyone else. It’s that you were so unhappy. I mean, that’s no way to live, embarrassed by who you are,” he said. “Though I guess we’re all doing that a little.”
I smiled. “I’m not sure why I’m asking you for permission to say yes,” I said.
He took a sip of his beer. “Well, it’s yours, if you need it. I think it could be a good thing.”
I met Ethan’s eyes. “You’re a surprising guy, you know that?” I said.
“Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know. Of all the places I thought I might find comfort during all this, I wouldn’t have put you high up there.”
He put his arm around me. “I’m very comfortable.”
I laughed. “If you do say so yourself?”
He laughed too. Then he leaned in.
Ethan leaned in and tried to kiss me. I was alone and pregnant and surprisingly hornier than I’d ever been.
But I pushed him away. “I can’t.”
“Why? Your husband coming back?”
“I’m guessing no . . . probably never.”
“Well, you’re already pregnant, so, you can’t be worried about my super sperm. And it can’t be that you don’t find me attractive.”
I smiled. I wanted to tell him that I found him unbelievably attractive, but that felt like its own form of betrayal—a line I could cross but shouldn’t. And I was sticking to it. The right side of shouldn’t.
“So the lady doesn’t find me attractive. All right, then,” he said. “What does it say about me that my lukewarm attraction to you just grew by leaps and bounds knowing that?”
I laughed. “Everything.”
I put out my hand. How easy would it be to slip into this new life? How nice in so many ways. A clean slate, a new me. But that was how I had ended up here, and I wasn’t going to do that again.
“What’s this?”
“You’re still the only friend I’ve got. And I really don’t want to lose you.”
Ethan sat back, and I could see it flicker across his face. My honesty had touched him.
“Then I guess I won’t let you,” he said.
And he took my outstretched hand. But instead of shaking it, he just held on.
47
I took a risk doing it, but there was one other person I needed to discuss this with.
So, the next afternoon, I stopped by her camp.
I arrived in time for afternoon snack, Sammy generously offering to share her applesauce and pita chips. I sat cross-legged with her on the floor and took a few grateful nibbles, making sure she ate most of it herself.
“You’re never going to guess what I was just doing,” she said. “Guess.”
“Let’s see. Were you learning to tap-dance?”
She laughed. “That’s a terrible guess. This is science camp.”
I smiled. “So you better just tell me.”
“Our group went down to the pond and we dissected frogs! Or, the counselor did, but we got to watch.”
“For fun?”
She dug into the applesauce. “No, for science.”
I put the spoon down, officially done eating. Maybe done with applesauce for the rest of the pregnancy, its creaminess now wrapped up for me with Sammy’s frogs.
“It was awesome,” she said. “I got to see the heart.”
I interrupted her, fighting back the vomit. “That’s great, Sammy,” I said. “I’m so glad you had a good time.”
She motioned in the direction of her classroom. “Do you want to come see the frogs?”
“Definitely not,” I said. “I did want to talk to you, though.”
“About what?”
“That school you were telling me about.”
She looked up, and I could see it wash over her face. Excitement. And then the opposite.
“Okay,” she said.
“I’ve been wondering about something. If there was a way to make it work, would you like to go there?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
I met her eyes, waited.
“I would like to,” she said. “Why?”
“There’s a job I could take. It would make it possible to help pay for it. Get you and your mom a place to live nearby there.”
“My mother won’t want that.”
“Probably not, but . . . I think it’s a good thing to know what you want. If you do, you have a chance of getting it. If you don’t, you have a chance of getting only what someone else wants you to have.”
She wiped her hands. “I think I’d like for you to take me home.”
48
It started raining on the way back to the house—a summer shower—though by the time we pulled down the driveway, the shower had turned into a downpour. And we had to make a run for it, to not get soaked on the way inside.
When we walked in, Thomas was standing by the stove and making dinner. Or, more accurately, Thomas was hobbling on crutches by the stove, attempting to make dinner. It looked like a lasagna, rich and meaty, with about a pound of cheese on top. And totally burnt. The smell rose off of it, gnarly and intense.
Sammy pinched her nose as Thomas turned and saw us in the doorway.
“I thought we were ordering pizza tonight,” she said.
He looked back and forth between us. “We are now,” he said.
Then he pushed the lasagna away, dramatically for effect.
Sammy laughed. “Great,” she said. “Call up when it gets here.”