“About three weeks, I guess?” I say, looking to Russell for confirmation. He nods. We haven’t talked about making this official, but I want to believe we’re heading that direction.
“I’ve gotten to know Ari a little better lately,” Torrance says. “But I’m afraid you remain something of a mystery, Russell.”
“And your daughter.” Seth spears an olive with a tiny appetizer fork. “Have you two met?”
“I sort of accidentally babysat her last week,” I say, hoping Russell’s okay with me mentioning this. “We were supposed to only do dinner, but we wound up spending the whole evening running lines for a musical she’s in.”
“Mixed families can be a lot of fun,” Seth says. “Both my parents remarried, and I have . . . fifteen siblings now.” He squints, as though mentally counting, needing to make sure he gets the number right.
“Sometimes just one is a lot for me,” I say with a laugh.
It’s only when Russell removes his hand from my knee that I realize he’s been quiet during this entire exchange.
“You two do make a great couple.” Torrance lifts her eyebrows in this suggestive way. “And if Ari and Elodie get along . . .”
A muscle in Russell’s jaw twitches. The Hales are pushing a little too hard, and I’m not sure how to politely tell them to back off.
“This is still very new,” Russell says, more to his glass of champagne than to any of us. He puts a half inch of space between us in the booth. It’s slight, but it’s enough to notice. “And . . . I’m not exactly in the market for a stepmom for my kid.”
The sentence hits like a one-in-a-million bolt of lightning, straight to my chest.
I’m not exactly in the market for a stepmom.
Suddenly, I feel very, very small.
Seth launches into a story about his last family reunion, but I can’t bring myself to do anything but smile and nod as the club around me blurs.
I think about the Russell I’ve gotten to know over the past few months. The man who got me vending machine junk food and watched a solar eclipse while holding his breath. He’s protective of his kid, and I can’t blame him for that, especially knowing his history. But if I’m being honest—and selfish, because god do I feel selfish for obsessing over it—my brain won’t let it go.
It’s not a role I’m actively seeking out, so I can’t understand why it feels like I’ve taken a fist to the stomach.
It invades the most vulnerable parts of my mind the rest of the night, when we’re dancing and when we’re saying goodbye to the Hales and later, too, when Russell comes back to my apartment and we’re too exhausted to do anything but sleep. Even then, I lie awake, wondering if this means he thinks I’d be a bad mother. If he somehow knows my history.
If he’s already decided we’re not meant to last.
25
FORECAST:
A tentative glimpse of early spring optimism
REDMOND IS NOTHING like the place I grew up.
Every time I come back, the suburb looks different than it did during my last visit. At first, those differences were small—I didn’t realize we had a MOD Pizza now or Was there always a CrossFit gym there? Now the downtown core is almost unrecognizable, chains having replaced the shops and cafes I knew so well as a teen. There’s no longer a forest two houses down from mine, and the hiking trail at the end of the road that once led to summers of blackberry picking—and my and Alex’s sorry attempts at making blackberry jam—has been turned into condos. I can’t remember exactly what went where in this strange suburban puzzle, only that I could have sworn some of my favorite spots were right there, and suddenly, they’re not.
All this time Redmond’s been changing, I’ve been just on the other side of the lake.
This is the first time I’ve seen this house in almost a year, and it’s made me a knotted, tangled mess all week.
I try my usually foolproof method of pushing all those messy feelings away, but today the silver linings feel more out of reach than they’ve ever been. My shoulders are tense, my breath stalled in my lungs.
It’s not working.
“No rush or anything,” Russell says from the driver’s seat. “But did you want to get out?”
“I’m getting there.”
Depending on traffic, Redmond is twenty to fifty-five minutes east of Seattle, and this afternoon’s drive was somewhere in the middle. We’re parked next to Alex’s Prius, early March sun streaming in through the windows. I let out a sigh and only fiddle with the seatbelt for a moment, then flex the fingers on my left hand a few times. Even without thinking about it, I’ve been slipping into physical therapy exercises to relax myself. They’ve been helping clear my mind when the silver linings won’t. Like right now.
I’m not exactly in the market for a stepmom.
No wonder I can’t find a silver lining.
Russell asks if I want him to carry the Whole Foods apple pie in the Subaru’s backseat, but I shake my head, tell him I’ve got it, and together we head up the drive.
The porch is lined with geraniums and marigolds and begonias that look newly potted, and maybe there’s my silver lining: my mother gardening again.
I knock, because even though I lived here for eighteen years and for a couple summers after that, it feels too intrusive to just let myself in.
When the door opens, Orion grins up at us, showing off another lost tooth. “Hi. Are you Aunt Ari’s gentleman caller?”
“You’re supposed to ask who it is before you open the door,” Alex says, jogging up behind him. His face lights up when he spots Russell, and with a narrowing of my eyes, I will him not to embarrass me tonight. “Welcome! I’m Alex, Ari’s brother. You must be Russell. And this is Orion”—he claps a hand on Orion’s mop of curls—“who just learned an important lesson about opening the door to strangers.”
“Sorry,” Orion says, fidgeting to get out of his dad’s grip. “I didn’t think Aunt Ari would bring over anyone bad!”
“He called Russell my ‘gentleman caller,’？” I inform Alex.
“We may have been watching too much of that new period piece on Netflix,” Alex says. “Guess he picked up a few things.”
Maybe a precocious five-year-old is exactly what Russell and I needed to break the tension, because he starts cracking up. “Good to meet you,” he says, shaking Alex’s hand.
The house is tidy. That’s the first thing I notice. Almost too tidy, as though my mother wanted to make sure we were seeing it at its best. No stray laundry, walls adorned with minimalist geometric artwork, the scent of a lemon air freshener stinging my nostrils. While it doesn’t have much in common with my childhood home, at least aesthetically, all the memories are still here, trapped inside these walls. Getting home from school after staying late at a science club, throwing open the front door and hoping I’d find a mother who was happy to see me. Hoping there wouldn’t be a stranger waiting to introduce himself to me and asking if it was okay if he stayed for dinner.
My mother rushes over, a light pink apron I’ve never seen before tied around her waist. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her in an apron. “Ari, hi. You look great. Traffic okay?”