To my disappointment, she responded to my offer with “Water would be great.” Ugh. Oh well, she couldn’t be here for more than an hour or two, and then I’d be able to pour a nice big glass of ten-dollar chardonnay, which I knew was waiting for me, already opened and chilling in my fridge.
“Crazy about Isabel, right?” I brought her up pretty much immediately, unable to restrain myself. “I really can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t believe she hasn’t turned up. And that we haven’t heard anything.”
“Ugh. Yeah. It’s so awful. I really hope she’s okay.” Miles lounged on her lap calmly as she sipped her water.
“You know, Vanessa and I went to her house. Her husband was nice enough. But he didn’t even know she’d been in a moms’ group. Kind of weird, right?”
“Yeah, I mean, to be honest, that sounds like typical dude stuff. Cameron has a pretty vague notion of what Miles and I do all day.”
“Yeah. I guess that’s fair.”
There was a long silence. It was becoming rather obvious that we’d never hung out solo before. We didn’t have a great rhythm.
I cleared my throat. “So you’re a lawyer, right?”
“I am. I’m a divorce lawyer and handle other ‘life changes,’ too.”
I actually already knew this through Kira. Selena was being modest when she said she was a divorce lawyer—she had started her own boutique firm that specialized in helping people manage the legal logistics of major life events: divorces, deaths, illness, and so forth. She worked with individuals but was also hired by corporations as a benefit for their top-level employees （since people with big jobs got divorced so often, apparently）。 A legal entrepreneur in her early thirties, she was a total boss.
“When are you going back to work?” I asked.
“I’ve been doing a bit here and there, but I’ll probably go back full time in early December. It will make it easier to settle back in, since things quiet down around the holidays. People tend to save their divorces for January, to give their kids one last Christmas as a family, so I’ll need to be ready by then! Luckily I have an amazing team who can handle things while I’m home with him.”
“Are you excited to go back? I’m supposed to go back at the end of the month, but I’m pretty nervous.” Understatement.
“It’ll be hard, obviously. I’m definitely not looking forward to pumping milk in my office all day like a cow. But I have to say that I’m excited to wear real clothes and use my brain in that way again. I love being with Miles, but there’s this whole other part of my identity that’s just kind of dormant right now. And I’m looking forward to waking her up. I grew up with a working mom—my mom worked for a senator, actually. She still works a bit, but she’s finally scaled back. Partly because she’s a grandma now.” I felt the familiar lump of bitterness and anger rise in my throat, thinking of how much my mom would have loved to be a grandma, how amazing she’d have been at it. Selena smiled in Miles’s direction. He was on his stomach on our play mat now, gumming a Sophie the Giraffe toy. “She’d kill me if I became a stay-at-home mom. It’s a feminist issue, for her. I really don’t have a choice. My mom has a lot of opinions, and she isn’t afraid to share them.” Her eyes flashed ever so slightly, and I realized, for the first time, that as much as I wished my mom were still around, the new grandma / new mom relationship was probably not without its own set of complications.
Fearing a reciprocal question about my parents was on its way, I was eager to return to the subject of Isabel. “Isabel didn—doesn’t work, right?” Good save on the tenses, Jenn. Isabel had never explicitly mentioned not working, but she’d certainly never mentioned a job, either.
“I don’t think so, no. In fact, I’m not even sure what she did before Naomi. She mentioned something about an off-off-Broadway performance she’d been in once, but it was kind of vague. I have the sense she hasn’t worked in a while.” I thought perhaps I detected the faintest whiff of disdain in Selena’s tone, but I was probably imagining it.
“So, can I ask—maybe you’ll have more intel on this as a lawyer—why do you think Isabel’s family doesn’t want to have a bunch of missing persons alerts on her? Like, no rewards offered, very little press coverage? Don’t you think that’s kind of surprising? I would think this would be a pretty high-profile disappearance, given their wealth.”