Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [56]
“You have more than one?” I ask.
“Isn’t that obvious?” She ekes out a smile.
“Well, I’ve resolved the Coke print crisis: I found your kid. Bart signed off on it, and we’re good to go.”
When I mention Bart, Josie’s eyes pop almost intangibly, but just noticeably enough that I wonder if she’ll pursue it. She doesn’t.
“Thank God,” she exhales, and slashes a Sharpie through an item on her list on her desk calendar. I used to make those lists, I think. Grocery lists. To-do lists. Katie lists. Best-damn-mother-of-the-year lists.
An hour prior, after filtering through the pile of plasticized-looking children, an e-mail popped into my inbox from Jack, confirming our date for the evening. And then I remembered that I already had the perfect child model: Allie. So I called Leigh, who seemed less than exuberant about whoring her daughter out for one of the nation’s largest junk food and soda manufacturers, but who also made the mistake of having the conversation while she picked Allie up from school, and thus was cornered into doing it by a six-year-old.
“I wanna be in magazines!!!!!!” I heard her scream from the backseat of their Volvo wagon. Leigh sighed and asked if we could push the shoot until the afternoon, so Allie wouldn’t miss school. I e-mailed Bart a snapshot of Allie from her birthday party, dressed in a prairie skirt and olive-green graphic tee, and then, just like that, it was done.
“God, you’re a miracle worker,” Josie says, when I explain the sequence of events.
I think of how far I’ve come, of how I’ve ended up back here half a decade after I’d done all of this before.
“You don’t know the half of it,” I say, standing to leave.
She grins a sad grin, and then, just as I’m turning out of her office, I look back, and watch any last-minute traces of joy drain from her face entirely.
“OUR PLACE,” as Jack referred to it in his note, was a cramped falafel dive on 114th Street and Broadway. The linoleum tables were covered with cheap paper place mats, and the aluminum chairs grated on the parquet floors when you slid them back to sit. Sitar music cooed out of the speakers that were perched near two corners of the ceiling. The air hung with the unmistakable scents of hummus and fried cooking oil, and every time that I stepped inside, pulling back the squeaky glass door, I thought of our first date.
If I’d been paying more attention on that evening, I realized later, far too much later when I was already sucked into heady love with him, I could have seen some of the signs. Signs that he wasn’t going to be my savior or that he wouldn’t be the flawless romantic writer whom I somehow imagined him to be on that initial date. The way that he talked about his meandering ambitions, of how he never really knew what he wanted out of life. Such joie de vivre! I thought, with euphoria. The way that his mother called him as he walked me home, and it didn’t occur to either one of us that he shouldn’t take the call. Such a loving son! I thought, my heart swelling at the very notion. And then I invited him inside, and we tore into each other in the way that you can do when you’re first tugged toward someone and the curiosity is only outmatched by the boundless passion, and from then on, I stopped asking questions. At least until we were too far gone for answers, anyway.
Tonight, Jack is here before me, and I spot him at a cramped table tucked into the back corner. Still, even though it has been months since I came back, I am surprised, awed even, when I see him. He looks up from the pita chips he’s been reaching into and finds his way to me, then smiles, his eyes crinkling like a paper fan, when he sees me.
“Oh my God, I’m so proud of you,” he says, pulling me close, then holding me by the shoulders from afar, the way that a grandparent might his teenage grandchild who has gone through an unprecedented growth spurt. “I mean, seriously! Jill! It’s amazing!”
I demur and pick up a menu, even though I order the same thing every time I’m here: the chicken gyro platter—and I do exactly that when the goateed