5. Caroline
CAROLINE
“I’m just not sure it’s really me,” I say, my voice rising into a whine that sounds foreign even to my own ears. Weak. Self-serving. Not the me that I’ve spent four years building.
I cup the mug of tea in my hand and hold it to my chest, soothing myself with its warmth. The steam from the tea curls between us in the cool evening air. The sun’s dipping low, casting long gold streaks over the cracked porch wood and the stubborn weeds growing up through the steps.
Alaina leans casually against the railing, her jeans hugging her hips in that effortless way women like me can only dream about.
Her mouth tips into a gentle, knowing smile.
Alaina was made to be a preschool teacher.
I came upon it begrudgingly, but she looks the part.
She has a sunshiny grin and that effortless preschool teacher messy bun.
When we’re together, I wonder how she stands me.
She has such joy in her. I feel embittered by everything.
“Girls, stop that!” she chides without looking back at our children in the yard. When I give her a questioning look, she says, “I just say it every once in a while. I figure a broken clock’s right twice a day. Maybe they’ll think I really do have eyes in the back of my head.”
Laughing, I give her a small, polite round of applause. “Diabolical.”
She continues, “Anyway, maybe it could be you.” She shrugs like it’s the simplest thing in the world.
I clutch the mug tighter to my chest, pulling the warmth into myself like armor. “That’s not a thing,” I argue. “It’s either me or it isn’t.”
Alaina’s neck pulls back into itself, and she looks at me with total shock, like I’ve said something she can’t believe. “What? That’s not true! I think back on who I was at sixteen, eighteen, twenty-two, whatever, and she’s a stranger. You can be whoever you want to be.”
I squint at her and glance at our kids playing together in the yard.
My Isaac and Joshua, her Aspen and Juniper.
Save for Juniper, they’ve found a suspicious looking rock in the yard that they’re all prodding like it might come alive.
Juniper, pigtails sagging, is up in a tree, her bare feet against the trunk.
I turn back to Alaina, whose eyes are trained on me, waiting.
“You sound like an after-school special,” I accuse.
She grins, not even a little bit ashamed, then fans her elbows out, still holding her cup. “All I know is that you look a little brighter than last I saw you.”
“That’s just because Jimmy isn’t here,” I deadpan, and then pretend to shudder at the memory of the little tyrant.
She doesn’t take the bait, prodding me, “Admit it. Mystery Man has you curious.”
“He isn’t a mystery man, exactly,” I mutter. “He’s in insurance.”
Alaina flicks a lazy finger my direction. “Well, now, that’s just rude.”
I blow on my tea, trying not to smile. “I’m just saying…
this is my life. Hanging out with my kids.
Hanging out with you. It’s what I know best. I’ve been doing this alone with them for four years now.
What would it even look like to introduce a man into it all?
” I set my drink in my lap, letting my thighs squeeze it in place, and gesture to the kids, the ailing house.
She taps a finger against her cup. “You could find out.”
“What if it’s bad?” The words slip out, softer than I intended, a little push that might end up in a landslide of truth and emotion. What if it’s not just bad? What if it’s catastrophic?
Alaina softens immediately. She doesn’t brush past the fear.
She lets me hold on to it for a second. She folds her lips in, looks behind her at the kids in the yard, now holding hands and jumping.
One of her hands slips into the back pocket of her jeans, and she looks back at me again.
“What if it’s good? What if he loves kids and he’s handy and he brings you flowers?
” As she says handy , she gestures to a falling gutter hanging by a thread from my roof.
I don’t say anything. I pull my knees up to my chin, hold the mug on the hilltop of my knees, and look down into it like I’m reading tea leaves.
Alaina adds quietly, “Plus, it’s been a long time. Your vibrator has to be begging for a break by now.”
“You’re disgusting.” I kick lightly at her shin with the toe of my sneaker.
She snickers into her cup. “Poor thing has been in the workforce since infancy.”
“What is wrong with you?” I laugh, finally giving in to her ridiculousness.
“I just want to see you happy,” she says, her voice more serious now. “Kids do best when their parents are happy. And you’re all they’ve got, so that’s all you, my friend.”
I bite my lip. It sounds so easy when she says it. So black-and-white. But life hasn’t been that black-and-white for a long time.
“Easy for you to say. It’s all well and good to spread that rhetoric when you’ve been happily married since freshman year of college.”
She holds up her hands in mock surrender. “Rhetoric is a strong word.”
I smile in spite of myself, settling my chin onto my knee. “Yeah, I guess it is. It’s just a simplistic worldview is all.”
“How’s this for simplistic? You should take advice from people whose lives you envy.” She sips her tea. “For what it’s worth, my vibrator leads a pampered, spoiled life. It rests in my bedside drawer most of the time and only comes out for special occasions.”
“Oh my God, what is your obsession with vibrators? ” I groan, laughing despite myself.
“What’s yours?” she fires back immediately, waggling her eyebrows.
“Enough already!” I kick my feet exaggeratedly at her, like I’m trying to take her out, and she avoids me with the ease of someone who grew up with seven siblings. “Besides, there’s nothing to even talk about if he doesn’t call me.”
“He will,” she says confidently.
“What makes you so sure?”
Alaina leans forward, her voice dropping into something soft and a little bit mischievous. “I have a feeling.”
I roll my eyes so hard they practically creak. “Oh, great. A feeling.”
“Don’t knock my intuition, Caroline. It’s very well maintained.”
“Like your vagina?” I shoot back.
Her face lights up in smug delight. “Exactly. Like my vagina.”
We dissolve into giggles, the tension finally breaking, the porch spinning with the easy, stupid kind of laughter that only comes when someone knows you to the bone.
Maybe going out with Insurance Paul, Mystery Man, whatever we’re calling him right now, wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe it’s okay to want more than the life I’ve been surviving. Maybe it’s okay to want.
For the first time in a long time, I let myself want , for just a second.
What if it’s good? What if he loves kids? What if he’s the kind of man who fixes gutters without being asked and who brings me my favorite flowers on a Tuesday just because? What if he’s kind where the world has been cruel? What if his touch feels like home?