Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [73]
I shuddered and said nothing. Darren sat up, put his glasses back on, and flipped to a fresh page of his legal pad.
“Pros? Cons?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t tell him that a baby would mean that our family was irrevocably, irretrievably broken, that there’d be no going back to the way we were. I remembered the smallest things, every happy detail. In the Hamptons, after dinner, my father would pile us into the car for a trip to Carvel. Bring me a small dish of Thinny-Thin, my mother would instruct from the daybed on the screened-in porch, where she spent much of the summer curled up with the tabloid magazines she’d never permit herself in the city. No, wait, just regular vanilla. With a little hot fudge. And maybe some whipped cream. And nuts. Actually, vanilla-chocolate swirl. And see if they’ll throw on some cookie crunchies. I love those cookie crunchies. Tell them it’s for me.
If Darren thought his own parents’ divorce had turned out to be a good thing, there was no way he’d understand how I felt, how badly I missed my parents as a couple, the five of us together, my parents, my brothers, and me.
I looked at my watch and brushed my hands along my skirt to remove any bits of food or lint or pollen. Darren was watching me so closely that I wondered if I had ketchup or mustard on my face, or if my slip was showing. (How Vanessa had howled when I’d unpacked my slips! “You wear these?” she’d asked, pinching one between her thumb and index finger and holding it away from her body like it was going to attack her.)
“You want to get together some time for dinner?”
“Sure,” I said, thinking that maybe this was the one good thing that could come out of all this mess. I liked him. It was a nice surprise.
After work, instead of going home, I took the subway to my father’s office down on Wall Street, taking the elevator up to the thirty-second floor, where he and his assistants worked in glass-walled rooms that had floor-to-ceiling views of the Hudson River. When I was little the office had been smaller, and he’d just had one assistant, who kept a stash of caramel squares in her desk drawer and let me bang on an unplugged keyboard while I waited for my dad. I hadn’t been to his office in years, maybe not since high school, when I’d ridden the elevator flush with triumph, clutching my college acceptance letters. Now my dad’s assistants had assistants . . . but he didn’t keep me waiting for nearly as long as my mother had before waving me into his office.
“To what do I owe the privilege?” he asked.
He looked good, better than I’d seen him in years, his skin flushed, his hair recently cut and neatly combed. I thought he’d lost a few pounds—since the scare with his artery, he’d been trying to stick to a low-fat diet. He was on new medication for his cholesterol, plus a bunch of vitamins that India had researched. The last time I’d been over there’d been turkey meat-loaf and oven-roasted vegetables instead of the usual roast beef and mashed potatoes, but he’d been a good sport about it, and India had smiled proudly when he’d asked for fat-free yogurt for dessert. She’s good for him, the voice in my head said, and I told it to be quiet. Just because she could make a turkey meatloaf—or, more likely, tell the chef to make one—didn’t mean she wasn’t going to hurt him, or that she had his best interests at heart.
I took a seat opposite my father’s desk and opened my mouth to tell him: Don’t have a baby with this woman . . . or maybe just to remind him of the good times we’d had. Dim sum brunches in Chinatown, dinners at Daniel to celebrate each of our high school graduations, heading to the Hamptons on Friday afternoons, the five of us in a helicopter, smiling with anticipation, feeling that swooping sensation in our bellies as the city fell away beneath us.
“Bettina,” he said. “What’s up?” As he sat there looking at me, eyes crinkled at the corners, I noticed a new picture among the familiar shots of the five of us, over the years—Trey with braces, holding a striped bass he’d hooked in Montauk; Tommy with his first