Chapter 46
Stevie was three months old when they brought her home—they drove five hours to get her from a breeder in Missouri—and she
was already as big as a full-grown schnauzer.
She was a roly-poly sausage. Fluffy and white, with a bandit mask and a comically long tongue that rolled out like a lizard’s
every time she yawned.
“She looks more like a Gene Simmons than a Stevie Nicks,” Cherry said.
Tom carried the puppy into the house like a baby. “You look like a Stevie Nicks—don’t you, Stevie Nicks?”
“I didn’t think I’d feel threatened by a dog, but then you named it after your dream girl.”
“You’re my dream girl,” Tom said, swatting Cherry’s bottom. He was in a good mood.
He wanted this, and Cherry had made it happen.
He’d been circling the idea of a dog for months. Hinting. Sending Cherry links to breeders when they were sitting right next
to each other on the couch. Sending her photos of puppies.
“You really want to do this?” she’d ask.
And he’d say, “I don’t know. It’s a big commitment. And I’m traveling so much . . .”
Those were the same reasons Tom didn’t want to have a baby.
That had felt like a mean trick. A real switcheroo.
In the beginning of their relationship, it was Cherry who didn’t want to have kids. She’d grown up in a big family in a small house, and she was done with kids by the time she was done being one.
Cherry wanted to work. And travel. And she wanted to love Tom with her eyes open.
You know how parents say they blinked one day, and their kid jumped from kindergarten to college? Cherry didn’t want that.
She wanted her years with Tom to go slow. She wanted to savor them.
It was Tom who’d said, “It’d be nice to have a family, don’t you think? Someday?” Back when they were first dating.
It was Tom who said, “I don’t know. There’s a lot of life to be lived as a parent.” After they got engaged.
And then, on their honeymoon—“It doesn’t seem like people usually regret having kids.”
It planted a seed in Cherry.
Maybe it would be nice, she thought passively. Maybe kids would make their life richer. Maybe parenthood would be another thing she and
Tom could share.
She didn’t immediately say so. But she softened. And started to assume they were headed that way.
She started to make plans. Cherry couldn’t not make plans. Everything in her life was on a timeline. (Women are born with clocks in their hips and calendars in their bellies,
and Cherry’s brain never stopped ticking.)
It was a shock—the first time she said out loud, “Maybe we should start thinking about getting pregnant,” and she realized
that Tom hadn’t been making plans.
His face dropped. “I thought you didn’t want to.”
“Well, I wasn’t sure. I thought you did want to.”
“I wasn’t sure, either.”
“If we’re going to,” she said, “we should do it soon.”
“Yeah . . .”
The next time she brought it up, Tom’s face clouded over. He got quiet. His knee bounced.
Cherry pushed him to explain himself.
He said it had gotten harder to imagine making a choice that would change their lives that much. And harder to imagine taking
on that much responsibility.
“So . . .” she said. “No kids?” She felt empty saying it. Like the horizon ahead of her was the flat line of an old TV turning
off.
“I’m not saying that,” Tom said. “I just don’t want to mess up a decision this big.”
That was exactly what he’d said when they’d found their house. They’d had six hours to make a bid, and Tom had been so angry about the deadline
that he didn’t even want to talk about it. He couldn’t, really.
Cherry had been the one to pull the trigger. If she hadn’t, they’d never have gotten out of their apartment.
But she couldn’t just pull the trigger on a baby.
She wouldn’t.
There was another way to tell this story: that Cherry said no; then she said nothing; then she said she wanted to wait; and
then, when Tom was at his most overwhelmed, she pushed it onto his plate.
Her timing could have been better.
Tom had only seemed interested in giant dogs—dogs who could guard the underworld or welcome the Darling kids home from Neverland.
“Every dog you show me looks like a mythical creature,” Cherry said.
They were sitting on the couch, and he was showing her a picture of a Saint Bernard. “I like big dogs,” he said. “They seem
more alive to me.” He laughed. “Is that a terrible thing to say?”
Cherry laughed, too. And kissed his shoulder.
“Maybe. Honny told me that when she had Maddox”—Honny’s second kid—“the doctor came in one night to check on the baby, and he was just standing there smiling down at him. And he told Honny that doctors like fat babies best, because they know they’re going to be okay. Like, they have a firmer hold on life.”
“There you go,” Tom said.
And Cherry didn’t say, “Let me give you a fat baby.”
Instead she called a NewfiePyr breeder in Missouri and put down an eight-hundred-dollar deposit.
All the way there, Tom worried that they’d made a mistake. And all the way home, he glowed. He was so happy.
He was pretty sure Stevie Nicks was the cutest dog he’d ever seen. And Cherry couldn’t argue with him—Stevie was very cute.
She was smart, too.
Tom had her house-trained in a few weeks. He taught her to ring a bell by the door. It was adorable.
He used to send Cherry photos of the puppy while she was at work. (Tom had quit his job by then.)
And Cherry would send him photos of the puppy when he was on the road.
The dog was a lot for Cherry when Tom was traveling. Stevie chewed on everything at first. You couldn’t look away from her.
She chewed the corner off an antique Persian rug. She chewed up a pair of Rachel Antonoff penny loafers. Cherry had to go
home at lunch to take the puppy out, and then again right after work. And she felt guilty going anywhere at night and leaving
Stevie in her kennel. It was like having a baby she’d never wanted.
Tom doted on Stevie when he was home, especially as things got bad—when they were going unmanageably well—with Thursday.
He took longer and longer walks with her.
He took to sitting on the floor with her while he drew on his tablet.
Tom couldn’t sleep the night before he left for his first big trip to California to work on the movie.
“I feel bad leaving you with Stevie for this long.”
“It’s just a month,” Cherry said. They were lying next to each other in bed. Cherry had rolled onto her side, facing away
from him.
“It’s at least a month,” he said glumly. “If you want, I could hire someone to walk her.”
“You don’t trust me to walk her?”
“I trust you. I don’t want to burden you.”
“It’s not a burden,” she said.
“You don’t mean that.”
“It’s a small burden.”
“You don’t mean that, either.”
“It’s only a month, Tom.”
Tom slung an arm over her waist, his hand on her stomach. “I could do all this over Zoom.”
“You hate Zoom.”
“Do you want me to go?”
Cherry had to think about that . . .
She didn’t want Tom to go. She hated sleeping without him.
But he was so unhappy, so much of the time. And he always seemed angry lately. Not with Cherry—with the world. With everyone who was asking too much of him. (Any amount of asking seemed like too much. Cherry couldn’t imagine a question
that wouldn’t snag at Tom and needle him.)
She’d thought Tom would feel better when he quit his job, but in a way this was worse. Now Tom had several jobs. He answered to people in New York and Los Angeles. He answered to the entire internet. To late-night talk show hosts
and those assholes at Saturday Night Live. He always got so much email. He always got so much mail. He got up early to take phone calls from reporters in other time zones.
Tom had to be on all the time and smart all the time. He had to be creative and productive and game. And he couldn’t seem to be all those
things and be happy. He couldn’t seem to be all those things and be the person Cherry had fallen in love with.
She still loved him.
She loved him.
She couldn’t sleep without him.
But it was like living with a shadow—like living with someone who never smiled at you and never looked forward to anything. (It was kind of like living with her dad.)
Did she want him to go?
What Cherry wanted was irrelevant.
She’d already decided that she was never going to be the reason that Tom said no to something. She never wanted him to have
a smaller life because of her. She would support him at every step, even if it meant spending her whole life carrying his
water. And watching his dog.
“I want you to do as well as you can on this movie,” she said. “I want it to be a good experience for you. And I think it
will be better if you really invest yourself in it.”
Tom rubbed her stomach. Cherry didn’t have to roll over to know that he was frowning. She could scent his unhappiness in the
air now. (Like her dad’s.)
He sighed. “Yeah, all right,” he said. “I’ll go.”