4. Cali
CALI
Is it legal to have an emotional breakdown within five hundred yards of an elementary school? Asking for a friend.
I'm fourth in line. Ahead of me, a woman in head-to-toe Lululemon is leaning out her window to flirt with the crossing guard.
Behind me, somebody's idling Tahoe is blasting a podcast about how to manifest abundance.
And here I am, parked in my little metal insane asylum, doing my best not to scream.
To distract myself from the impending meltdown, I've been scrolling through Google.
Best divorce attorneys NYC
Aggressive divorce lawyer Manhattan
Asshole shark divorce lawyer to rip your cheating husband's head off
Divorce lawyer cheating husband freeze assets
Fro-yo shop near me
The results are kind of bleak. Firstly, there's no fro-yo for ten blocks in any direction, so I can't just pop out of my car real quick and run to get a sweet treat to lift my spirits.
Secondly, lawyers and private investigators are both insanely expensive.
The first result demands to be paid in unmarked, non-sequential bills like he thinks he's Don freaking Corleone.
The second one's website has a stock photo of a man in a trench coat peering through binoculars, which feels too on the nose to take seriously.
The third one is a sharp-eyed woman named Donna who specializes in "infidelity and asset discovery," which sounds perfect, but the retainer she requires for the case assessment is fifty thousand actual, you-have-got-to-be-shitting-me United States dollars.
That's fifty grand, just to see IF she'll take you on as a client!
I can't squirrel away that much money without drawing Todd's attention. No way, Jose.
I haven't confronted him. I want to. Every cell in my body is screaming to march into his office, flip his ergonomic desk, and feed him his own stupid, oversized watch until he confesses everything he's done.
But there's a new gremlin in town, a colder, borderline sociopathic one that's urging me to play my cards carefully. Don't tip your hand, it counsels in an icy whisper. Not until you understand the board.
So I sit in the pickup line and I don't even spend that much time calling Todd and his anonymous, 142-lb mistress every nasty name in the book. I just put on a meditation track, close my eyes, and try to find my inner Zen.
It works—kind of. For five-ish minutes of Buddhist bliss, I am at peace.
Then knuckles rap hard on my window.
I leave my earthly body behind and levitate out of my skin, like I just got caught doing something illegal. I don't think I have, but the flush on my face says otherwise.
I can only breathe again when I turn to see that it's Paula.
Oh, thank God. Just the woman I wanted to see.
Paula Sampson, Hayden's fourth-grade teacher, is leaning down to my window with her hair backlit by the afternoon sun like she's the subject of a Renaissance painting about the patron saint of being effortlessly hot.
I roll the window down. "You scared the literal piss out of me, girl."
"Cali Bear!" she sing-songs. "I thought that was you. I almost didn't recognize you!"
That's a weird thing to say to a woman you've known since freshman year of college, when we shared a dorm room the size of a parking spot and a single working hot plate.
But I let it slide, because it's Paula, and that's just how this space cadet lives her life.
Rekindling our friendship is one of the few good things to come out of this whole school-pickup-line season of my life.
"Hey, you." I'm relieved to find I can still produce a smile, even a battered one. "How's my kiddo? Did he superglue anyone to anything today?"
"He was a perfect baby angel, as always. Which makes sense, given who his mama is." She rests her forearms on my window frame and leans in to touch my hair. "I mean, my gosh, look at you? Have you lost weight? You look incredible. I need you to bring me to your Pilates class, like, ASAP, queen."
I frown. Not once in fifteen years of friendship has Paula ever commented on my weight.
Not when I gained the freshman fifteen, not during either pregnancy, not after.
It's a sort of unspoken pact between us, born of the fact that Paula has the metabolism of a hummingbird and the bone structure of a gazelle, and I…
do not. She has always, always had the decency to never mention the disparity.
What's changed?
"Oh, uh, thanks," I say. "I've been trying, I guess."
"Well, it's working." She reaches in and squeezes my shoulder. "You're straight-up glowing. Honestly, I'm jealous. I've been wanting to lose, like, five pounds before summer break, but I just can't seem to find the discipline."
She may be my best friend, but I still have to suppress the urge to laugh out loud.
Five pounds? On her? Where on her body, precisely, will she lose that weight from?
Her long, flowing mane of blonde hair?! The girl is a willowy supermodel, with a waist like a toothpick and gravity-defying boobs that are, against all odds, natural.
A little flag goes up in the back of my brain. Not red yet. Just a sort of curious, fluttering beige.
"Paula," I say, "you weigh approximately as much as one of Isabella's American Girl dolls. You do not need to lose five pounds."
She laughs brightly and bats the compliment. "Oh, shut up. You can't be skinny and nice. That's too much."
Funny—I could say the same thing about her. But God gives to some people with both hands, as they say, and Paula has been this effortless ray of beautiful, bodacious sunshine for as long as I've known her, so I guess that's just how it goes.
What I need right now is not envy, though. I just need a kind heart, a listening ear, and maybe a shoulder or two to cry on.
And who better than Paula? She's my best friend. For goodness' sake, she slept on the floor of my hospital room after Isabella was born when Todd had to go back to work. She'll hear me out and make me feel better, and then she'll know exactly what to do next.
Yeah. I'll just tell her. It's better just to come out and say it, I think. Rip the Band-Aid off.
"Hey, Paula, can I—" I clear my throat so I stop sounding so wobbly and teary. "Can I tell you something? Something kind of awful? I think… I think that maybe… that Todd might be…"
I bend toward her, just slightly, the way you lean toward someone you're about to hand a piece of your broken heart that you also don't want any of these Range-Rover-driving Upper West Side moms to overhear.
And that's when I smell it.
Floral. Warm. A little powdery, with something sweet underneath it, like vanilla or spun sugar.
It's pretty. Truly lovely.
It's also familiar. I know why: because I had my face buried in it just a few hours ago, on my husband's pillow.
Time does something strange. It doesn't stop, exactly. It just sort of folds in on itself, like how the duvet was folded, hospital corners and all.
I look up at Paula and see so many things that I somehow missed before.
Her hair—honey blonde, thick, glamorous. The kind of color that takes a gift from God or three hundred dollars and four hours in a salon chair.
Her lips. The exact muted mauve-pink of the crescent on my praying mantis mug.
I look at the French manicure on the fingers still resting on my window frame. French-tipped nails raking down my husband's back.
Oh.
Oh, no.
Oh, no, no, no.
"—might be what?" Paula prompts. Her tone is so warm, so soft, and so completely, monstrously fake that I genuinely cannot believe I didn't hear it before. "Todd might be what, sweetie?"
The sunny smile she's giving me. The effusive compliments. I almost didn't recognize you? Have you lost weight?
She isn't being weird because she's a bad friend.
She's being weird because she knows exactly what's coming for me, and she's enjoying the view from the front row.
A lever inside me clicks over. I actually feel it happen, a physical sensation, like a circuit breaker tripping in a basement. All the heat—the rage, the grief, the snotty, weepy, lie-on-the-bathroom-floor-and-bemoan-my-fate heat—drains right out of me.
What's left behind is cold and fanged.
I close my mouth.
And then I smile.
I've given birth twice without an epidural.
I once pitched a roomful of venture capitalists with a fever of a hundred and two.
I can produce a convincing smile under conditions that would break a lesser woman.
Watch me do it right now, like a magic trick.
A radiant, toothy beam, bright and easy, that does not so much as hint at the fact that I just clocked my best friend as the homewrecker who's sabotaging my marriage.
"Todd might be taking me on a surprise trip," I lie. "For our anniversary. I found, like, a little stash of plans. I wasn't supposed to see, so don't say anything, okay?"
I don't know if it's my imagination or not, but I could swear I see a ripple of something pass across Paula's face. She catches it fast, though. One microsecond of a falter, and then she's back to normal Paula Sampson, my best friend of a decade and a half, my son's teacher.
"Oh my gosh!" she squeals. "That's so romantic. Todd's such a good guy!"
"He's one of a kind," I agree.
"You two are couple goals, honestly."
"Aren't we just?"
A bell rings somewhere inside the building. A moment later, the front doors burst open and a stampede of nine-year-olds comes pouring out like someone kicked over a beehive. Paula straightens up, adjusts her hair, and puts on her no-B.S. Ms. Sampson face.
"There come the hyenas," she laughs. "I should get to my post. But Cali—" She bends down one more time, cups her hand on my elbow again, and looks at me with those big, sincere, treacherous eyes.
"I just want you to know, if you ever need anything, okay?
Anything at all. I'm here for you. Always have been. "
I look at her hand on my arm. French tips. So pretty.
"I know you are," I say. "That means more than you realize."
She beams, satisfied, and turns to wave at a clump of parents getting out of a Tahoe. I watch her go, this tall, glowing, gorgeous woman who slept in my bed, and I feel absolutely nothing where the love for her used to be.
No. That's not quite true.
I feel one thing.
I feel focused.
I've become a new woman in the ninety seconds since I caught a whiff of Sweet Spun Vanilla Betrayal through my driver's side window.
Up until this moment, I'd been thinking about this whole thing the wrong way.
I thought I was a victim. I'd been thinking about getting even.
Expose Todd, make him grovel, and then take the moral high road of forgiving him and letting our marriage resume its happy natural state.
But getting even is for people who are content with staying behind. If that's your goal, the very best you can hope for is a tie, two people equally bloodied, nobody ahead.
Fuck that.
I don't want to get even.
I want to get ahead.
And Paula's reaction tells me everything I need to know: that she and Todd are completely clueless. I bet they're giggling to themselves in bed. She's so slow and gullible, isn't she? Your soft, sad, curvy little wife has no idea what we've been doing.
But in reality, they're the ones who are a step behind, all because of one innocuous-looking little scale.
It's only one data point, and I'll need more before I make my move.
But Paula is an airhead who's always looked out for her own selfish pleasures above all, and Todd is a forty-year-old man-child.
They've made other mistakes, I'm sure of it.
So my job now is to root those mistakes out and document them.
How ironic. The one thing I am genuinely, world-class, unimpeachably good at is taking a giant mess of scattered data points and assembling them into a picture nobody else can see yet.
A blonde hair. A tube of mascara. A lipstick crescent. A perfume. Hospital corners.
Add it all up, let me work my magic, and it becomes a picture that nobody can deny.
One way or another, I'm getting the receipts.
The car ahead of me rolls forward. I let off the brake and ease up to the curb. Moments later, the door behind me pops open, and Hayden hurls himself and his Pokémon backpack into the back seat with the grace of a sack of potatoes thrown from a moving truck.
"Mom!" he announces. "Did you know that a group of crows is called a murder?"
"I did know that, bug." I catch him in the rearview mirror. He's got Todd's chin, my eyes, and a smear of what is either marker or blood on his cheek. My whole entire heart, bouncing around in the back seat with a cowlick in his strawberry blonde hair. "Buckle up."
"A group of owls is a parliament. A group of jellyfish is a smack."
"You are just full of fascinating little tidbits today, aren't you? Seatbelt."
He buckles up. Before I pull out into traffic, I check the mirror one more time. As I do, I get one last glimpse of Paula on the sidewalk, herding stragglers, golden and gorgeous in the four-o'clock light.
Enjoy the view from the front row, Paula.
You're about to watch me work.
"Mom, can we get Shake Shack?"
"Yeah, baby," I say.
I'm gonna get some right along with him, because one of the things I'm done with—in addition to my marriage—is this stupid anniversary diet that's been killing me. Why would I keep eating sad lettuce just so that a man who's screwing my best friend will find me palatable at client dinners?
Tofu? No thank you.
Grapefruit for breakfast? Not a chance in hell.
I'm getting revenge with a side of fries.
And when this is over—when I have salted the earth where Todd Bradshaw used to stand, when I have my kids and my house and my company and every cent that's mine—I am going to be done with one more thing, too.
Men.
The whole product line. Every model, every make.
I'm swearing them off. Forever. I am going to be one of those magnificent middle-aged women who has a dog and a wine fridge and absolutely no tolerance for anyone's nonsense, and I am going to be radiantly happy about it.
But that's later.
First, we gather the receipts.