“God, remember how many games of MASH we used to play? I feel like I was somehow always living in a shack with Cole Bryant from algebra.”
“OMG, you would have been thrilled to live in a shack with Cole. You loved his dirty drawers!”
It’s funny to think of just how many hours—endless—that Jen and I devoted to imagining our future lives: where we would live, what we would do, who we would love, how many kids we would have. All we wanted was for our lives to hurry up and happen already. And now here we are. It was supposed to be the happily-ever-after part; what we didn’t understand is that adulthood would be a relentless series of beginnings—new cities, new jobs, new relationships, new babies, new worries. Which is probably why I can’t escape the feeling of always being on the cusp of the next thing.
“Here’s to us, all growed up.” This time, I clink my glass to Jen’s more enthusiastically. My head spins from downing my drink too fast and my stomach growls. “I really need some food.”
“Me too, we’re starving.” It takes me a second to figure out what Jen means by “we.”
The menu is a long strip of parchment affixed to a piece of leather and printed with the day’s date on top like a newspaper. Each dish has a gag-worthy “origin story.” Steak tartare from Bucks County, farm-fresh burrata from Haverford described as “barnyardy,” and honey procured from hives on the restaurant’s roof. It’s a long way from the Kool-Aid, Stouffer’s pizza, and boxed mac and cheese we grew up on.
“Everything is crazy expensive,” Jenny says, staring at the menu as if it’s a problem to solve.
It’s true, the prices for “the array of small plates” are as absurd as their descriptions. I should have picked a cheaper place, considering how much Jenny and Kevin are struggling. But the subject of money is something I try to avoid with her entirely, so she won’t be reminded of the reason it looms between us, the loan I know she’ll never be able to pay back. I didn’t have a choice though. I had to give her the money. When I was home for the holidays last year, and she stopped by my parents’ place as usual on Christmas Eve, she was a desperate wreck. It had been more than six weeks since her final round of IVF, her third try, didn’t work.
“What can I do?” I’d asked, as we passed a bottle of warm red wine between us, and then wondered what I would say if Jen wanted me to carry her baby in some sort of Lifetime-movie-of-the-week scenario.
“Nothing.” Jen lay down on my childhood bed. I stretched out beside her, wrapped my arms around her bony frame, and buried my face in her hair. It smelled like it hadn’t been washed for days, not a trace of lavender.
“You can try again, right?”
“No. We can’t.” Jen sighed.
“You can. You will,” I insisted. “What will it take for you to try again?”
There was a long stretch before she spoke.
“Money. We’re already, like, thirty grand in debt.”
“Thirty grand,” I repeated, taking in the staggering number. It was more than my annual salary in my first job out of college, working as a scrub reporter in Joplin, Missouri. And it was an insane amount of money to spend on something that didn’t seem to be working at all. They still didn’t have a baby. But I made up my mind not to judge. Besides, I’d never seen Jen like this. It was painful to witness someone you love want something so desperately, and to watch as each miscarriage fundamentally altered her—made her more fragile and bitter. Gigi said it was like Jen’s spirit itself was withering like forgotten fruit. There was only one thing to do.
“How much do you need?” I braced myself for the answer.
Jen didn’t respond right away, which made me think she might say no, and maybe that’s what I wanted. Finally, she said, in as small a voice as I’d ever heard her use, “Maybe five thousand? That could help us… if it’s not too much.”
Again, I tried not to react to the number and just wrote her a check, instantly wiping out more than half my hard-earned savings. The way she couldn’t stop saying, “Thank you, thank you,” as she hugged me and wouldn’t let go made it all worth it. So did her scream—so loud I had to hold the phone away from my ear—when she’d called to tell me the next round of IVF had worked. Still, sometimes the money feels like a little pebble caught in a shoe; you’re not going to stop walking, but you always know it’s there. We both look down at her belly now and silently come to the same conclusion—any awkwardness between us is a small price to pay.
“Don’t worry. I can expense dinner. We might do a story on this place.” I lie again to make us both feel better. “Order whatever you want. It’s on me… on the station.”
Jenny’s visibly relieved as she turns back to the menu. “Well, in that case let’s get it all. We fancy. We’ve come a long way from Chef Boyardee, huh?”
The bartender finally tears himself away from a gaggle of blondes who barely look of drinking age and pays us some attention. I can tell when he does a double take that he recognizes me. It’s embarrassing how much I like this, how it never gets old. I offer him a sheepish smile, but he’s all business, with a brisk “What can I get you?” and even then, he only addresses Jen, as if she’s the one footing the bill. I order $100 of overpriced small plates to prove a point, though what exactly that point is, I have no idea. The bartender walks away before I can even set down the menu.
“We’re gonna feast! Kevin’s been picking up all the shifts he can until the baby comes and doing overtime working the Eagles games on Sundays, so I’ve been eating a lot of cereal alone on the couch bingeing Fixer Upper.”
“The glam life of a cop’s wife.”
Jen bites the edge of her bottom lip, a lifelong nervous habit that’s left her with a tiny white scar. “I wish. It’s been hard. The holidays are such a shit time to be a cop. Thanksgiving and Christmas are supposed to be, like, the happiest time of year for most people, but there are way more calls, more domestics, and a lot more suicides. Kevin had to go to one last week—day after Thanksgiving, guy hung himself in the backyard from his daughter’s swing set. So awful, right? He left a note taped to the swings that said he couldn’t fight the demons. It messed Kevin up for days. He doesn’t say anything, but I can tell. It’s too much for the cops… to be the social workers, the therapists… Anyway, enough about that. God, so depressing. How’s Gigi?”
For as long as Jen has known her, she has called my grandmother by the same nickname my brother, Shaun, and I use, the one I gave Gigi when I was first learning to talk and couldn’t say “Grandma.” Of course, Gigi loves this, since Jen is basically her granddaughter too. I tease her that she loves Jen more than me and vice versa. Ever since the very first day Jenny came to the day care that Gigi ran out of our house, the one she started when she moved in with us after Grandpa died and she retired from thirty years at Bell Atlantic, she took a special shine to Jenny, calling her “my little firecracker.”
I always rib Gigi about this. “But can we trust her, you know, her being white and all?”