Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [116]
I logged out, picked up my bag, and walked into the sunshine. Hey, lady, hey, lady, the men on the square crooned. Back at my casita, I shucked off my swimsuit and stood under the water from the outdoor shower until it went from tepid to cold. I didn’t bother drying off. I lay naked underneath the single sheet, with mosquitoes whining against the netting, until the sun went down, and slept until almost noon the next day . . . and when I woke up, I knew where to go, and what to do when I got there.
BETTINA
By July, things had calmed down enough that I felt able to leave the apartment for a while. Annie was staying two days and one night each week, Tia was on duty every night Monday through Friday, and Jules, who I thought I’d never see again after our uncomfortable introduction, had surprised me by calling the week after we’d met and volunteering to babysit. “I don’t know much about kids,” she said, looking as terrified as I must have been the first time I gave her Rory to hold.
“It’s not hard,” I’d said. She’d handled the baby like she was made of glass, exclaiming over her every sigh and coo. The first Sunday I’d stayed with her. The second time I’d left her with bottles of breast milk and my cell-phone number and gotten on the subway to spend an evening with Darren for the first time since Rory’s arrival. Unbeknownst to him, I had an agenda: I wanted to get drunk, and then, as my old roommate would have put it, I wanted to get laid. I wanted to behave like a regular twenty-four-year-old, a woman with no vision past her own eyelashes, no plans beyond the next day, and no responsibilities beyond her own job.
Darren lived in Chelsea, in a building with an elevator but no doorman and disconcertingly narrow hallways. His apartment had, as I could have predicted, a flat-screen TV as its main piece of furniture, but other than that, it was surprisingly un-repulsive. There was an indigo-and-orange vintage poster for Orangina on the kitchen wall and a big leather couch in the living/dining room. There was no space for a kitchen table, but Darren had lined up three wood-and-metal stools in front of the narrow breakfast bar. When I arrived, he was unpacking a bag full of Chinese take-out boxes. There was fried rice and egg rolls, chicken lo mein and spicy prawns. I filled my plate, and we sat together on the couch.
“So?” asked Darren. “How’s motherhood?” He was barefoot in his chinos, wearing a T-shirt advertising some band I’d never heard of, and his horrible glasses. He needed a haircut . . . but, to me, he’d never looked cuter.
“It’s interesting,” I said carefully. I understood the problem, the situation I was in. When Darren and I had started spending time together, I was single and unencumbered. Now I had a baby. The fact that the baby was not technically mine did not, in the end, matter much. I was a woman with a child, and that did not make me more desirable than I’d been when we’d met.
“Any word from India?” he asked.
I shook my head. The truth was, I wasn’t looking for my disappearing stepmother too hard. With Annie and Jules and Tia in and out of the apartment, with the baby doing baby-like things that are probably boring to everyone in the world except for the people to whom the baby belongs—She smiled! She almost rolled over! She’s holding up her head!—I felt interested, engaged, needed in a way I didn’t think I’d never been needed in my life, and if, sometimes, I was so tired it was all I could do to keep from dozing off in the tub, if I missed my colleagues at Kohler’s, if I missed my freedom, it seemed a reasonable trade-off for a life I liked much better than the one I’d had. I had a tribe, a crew, friends in Annie and Tia and Jules. The baby, too, had grown on me. I’d even started posting cute pictures on my Facebook page.