Chapter 17. Molly
One of the problems with almost never being earnest in public is that you fail to develop a graceful way to be sincere.
Other people seem to be able to express poignant sentiments without awkwardness. They can say, for example, “Wow, what a cute baby,” or “That piece of music was very moving,” and not want to throw themselves off a cliff. But people like me—people who are more comfortable treating life like everything’s a low-key punch line—become flustered when forced to acknowledge we experience human emotions. We don’t have the muscles to pivot back to normalcy. Instead, we dangle in the excruciating vulnerability.
Like I am now, after admitting my addiction to lullabies. My heart is racing, and my cheeks are so hot it feels like I’m having an allergic reaction.
Gloria’s friend Mona puts a hand on my arm. “That was such a beautiful story. It makes me want to call my mom and tell her how much I love her.”
Oh, God, make it stop.
“Yeah,” I sputter. “Thanks.”
No one else speaks, but everyone is looking at me.
I put my phone up in front of my bright red, miserable face. “I’ll text you my playlist, Glor,” I say.
A text comes in while I’m fumbling with the app.
Seth:Can you send me the playlist too?
I look up at him over the edge of the phone and he’s smiling at me, like he’s sending me emotional support with his eyes.
Ugh, I hate how well he knows me.
Molly:Why, are you pregnant?
Seth:Yes.
I pop the URL into the text thread.
Molly:Here ya go. Mazel tov
“Who’s ready for cake?” Elle asks.
Not I. I’m baby-showered out. I wish I had an excuse to leave.
Seth stands up. “I actually can’t stay,” he says apologetically. “I’ve got to get to the airport. I’m just going to change and then call a car.”
Don’t let him get away, a desperate voice in my brain wails.
I jump up. “Wait. Don’t do that. It’s so… expensive. I’ll drive you.”
Once again everyone looks at me. It is a rare Angeleno who impulsively volunteers to brave LAX traffic. To do so when one is on the Eastside, an hour away at this time of day, is unheard of.
But part of me already misses him. Regrets we didn’t get a chance to catch up. Regrets blowing him off in a fit of panic however many months ago.
“I’m meeting friends for an early dinner in Venice, so I need to head that way soon anyway,” I lie.
“Are you sure it isn’t out of your way?” Seth asks.
“Nope. Go ahead and get changed. I’ll meet you out front.”
I give Gloria and Emily big kisses and make my way around the table, saying my goodbyes.
Eliana grabs my arm as I reach the door to the kitchen.
“Wait,” she whispers. “Is something going on with you and Seth?”
“No!”
She raises an eyebrow. “Really? Cuz you sure looked like you wished there was in the pool.”
“Oh come on,” I say. “Can’t a girl tease her ex-boyfriend?”
“I kept waiting for you to drag him into the pool house to ravish him.”
“I guess I’ll do that in my car.”
She smirks. “That’s what I thought. Boy still can’t take his eyes off you. Get it, sis.”
I try to act as though this information rolls off me.
“Okay, gotta run and try to beat the traffic. Let’s get drinks before you leave.”
She pulls me in for a kiss on the cheek. “Love ya.”
“You too.”
When I get outside, Seth is standing there with a rolly bag.
“Where to, captain?” he asks.
“I’m the white Lexus.”
He scans the road until his eyes alight on my SUV. He laughs. “I didn’t expect you to drive a suburban mom car.”
“I love my car,” I huff. “Suburban mom cars are spacious and practical. And if you want the privilege of riding in one you will apologize to my dear Laurel.”
“Your car has a name?”
“Of course she does. I spend more time with her than anyone else.”
I pop open the back and he lifts in his bag and then climbs in next to me.
“Ready?” I ask.
“Yep.”
This is self-evident from the fact that he is in the car with the door closed wearing his seat belt. But now that I have extricated myself from the baby shower, I realize I’ve created another conundrum: What to talk about for the next hour?
I wanted this. But now my mind is a vast, anxious blank.
“So, how long is the drive?” Seth asks.
“Let’s see.” I plug in my phone and the maps app reports it’s a mere fifty-eight minutes.
“Oof,” he says. “You’re sure I’m not taking you out of your way?”
“Positive.”
In actual fact, the airport is in the wrong direction, I have no friends in Venice, and getting back will take even longer.
It’s worth it. For some reason, I really do want to do this.
Besides, now that we’re on the road, I feel calmer. I love driving in LA—the musical ebb and flow of traffic on ten-lane freeways brings me a kind of peace. People here aren’t aggressive on the road like they are in New York or in Florida, but they are quick and assured and competent. It’s like the whole city has made a gentleman’s agreement to get everywhere as quickly as possible without killing anyone. (In New York it feels like they would not at all mind if they killed you. In Florida it feels like they actually want to.)
“So what have you been up to since the game?” I ask.
“I went to the beach in Malibu.”
“Ah that’s nice. Too cold to go in though.”
“Not for me,” he replies. “I love a cold swim. I go to the beach in Chicago all the time.”
“Chicago does not have beaches.”
“It most certainly does.”
“Those little patches of sand on Lake Michigan don’t count.”
“They most certainly do.”
“You really go swimming in Lake Michigan in the winter?”
“Not in the winter, but this time of year it’s still bearable. A nice polar swim.”
“You are so wholesome.”
“I know.”
“You should have called me. I could have given you some bars and restaurants to try. Taken you out.”
He leans back in his seat.
“Molly,” he says slowly. “Not to be awkward. But I got the distinct impression you didn’t want me to call you. Like, ever again.”
I’m quiet. I know, of course, that I’ve been inconsistent with no explanation, and that this is likely confusing to him. But being clearer would require me to process my own emotions—which is something I find highly distasteful, as my long-suffering therapist can attest.
I drum on the steering wheel, grateful that the traffic frees me from the obligation of looking at him.
“Yeah,” I finally say. “I regret that.”
“You do?” he asks. There’s an intensity to his voice that tells me this information is not nothing to him.
That he really cared when I told him not to contact me.
There’s a long pause while I gulp down my innate resistance to even the faintest hint of vulnerability. But I owe it to him.
“I do,” I make myself say. “I’ve been debating whether to get in touch with you for months to apologize. For overreacting that night.”
He’s staring at me.
“I would have liked that,” he says. “I didn’t… realize you felt that way. Obviously.”
“Yeah.” I look determinedly ahead. “I’ve missed hearing from you.”
He shakes his head and laughs softly. “Wow.”
“And when I saw you at the game,” I confess to the rearview mirror, “I realized how dumb it was not to just get over myself, because I was really happy to see you. I mean, how many times in my life have I been grateful to Marian Hart?”
He snorts, but his voice goes soft. “I’m touched, Molly.”
For a moment, we’re both silent. I gather the courage to glance at him, and he’s looking at me sadly.
“But, you know,” he says, “I am aware I was out of line during that conversation. It was… too much. I understood why you felt the way you felt.”
Floating underneath his words is the unspoken thing he said. I’m carrying a torch for you. I wonder if it’s still true. If I dare ask.
No. That’s not the kind of thing one asks. It’s the kind of thing one has to earn back.
I fiddle with the air conditioner vent instead of saying anything.
The truth is I have no idea what to say.
Being a more socially adept person than me, Seth changes the subject.
“So how are you?” he asks.
“Right now? Kind of damp.”
“I mean generally speaking.”
“I’m doing okay.”
“So specific and expressive.”
I shrug, because I’m not going to tell him I’m exhausted from the nonstop social maneuvering of scrounging up work, and bored of the oppressive October heat, and lonely from my latest string of empty hookups.
“I’m fine,” I say. “Not much to report.”
“Oh come on. How’s your movie with Margot Tess going? I want to live vicariously through your glamorous life.”
I really, really don’t want to talk about this. See: scrounging up work. But I’m not going to lie to him. So I say, “Not happening. At least, not with me.”
He looks at me with the kind of disbelief that a person with a normal job has at the vagaries of a career in film. “No! What happened?”
“Margot decided she wants to take the script in a more ‘mainstream’ direction. Thought my voice was too ‘prickly.’”
I’m sure he, of all people, can understand what she meant.
“Jesus, Molly. I’m sorry.”
I shrug. “I mean, I still get paid for my work on it, so it’s fine. But it would have been nice to get something big into production.”
“I agree! I want more Molly Marks joints for my own selfish enjoyment.”
“How is your work?” I ask, because I don’t want Seth Rubenstein’s pity, nor further reason to dwell on my current career drought.
“You know, I’m a little bored, if I’m being honest.”
“All those divorces got you down?”
He winces. “I know you think I’m a shithead for practicing family law, and I get it, but you’re actually part of the reason I do what I do.”
I momentarily take my eyes off the road to narrow them at him.
“You were inspired by my childhood trauma to spend your peak earning years causing emotional devastation and financial ruin?”
“No, I wanted to help people. I’m serious.”
“I’m not sure how you could be.”
If I’m honest, it really does hurt me that he would go into that field, after seeing what happened to me and my mother. My dad left her when I was in eighth grade, and Seth was there for the fallout. He saw how my dad’s lawyers and business manager fucked my mom over by moving his money around offshore, and then kept her tied up in court for years when she tried to prove it. He saw how hollowed out we both were by the experience.
I mean, to be clear, we didn’t starve. My father paid his court-ordered child support and my tuition. My mom began cobbling together a new career in real estate. But it took her years to rebuild her finances. The two of us had to move to a shitty apartment, and every time the car broke down it was a roll of the dice over whether we had the cash to fix it. And that’s not getting into her yearslong depression, or my nonstop panic attacks.
Meanwhile, if you’re keeping score, my father bought the first of many sailboats, moved to an oceanfront condo, remarried a person seven years older than me, and saw me one weekend a month.
So yeah. Divorce lawyers. Not a fan.
“I thought there had to be a more humane way to dissolve marriages,” Seth says. “So when I made partner, I hired an in-house family systems psychologist who specializes in divorce, and I encourage all of my clients to work with her. I also steer them toward private mediation. It’s not always pleasant, obviously, but we’ve had a lot of success in guiding couples to amicable resolutions outside of court, even in situations that begin acrimoniously.”
I’m not sold.
“Good for you. You’ll have to forgive me for being skeptical.”
He meets my eyes in the rearview mirror. “I’m sorry for what he put you through. With your mom. I’ve never forgotten it.”
He’s alluding to the fact that my mother had a complete nervous breakdown during the divorce, and my father left me, his pubescent daughter, as her primary emotional support system. She’s apologized for that—the two of us even did family therapy. But it made my teenage years incredibly difficult.
“Thanks,” I say. “She’s great now. She started dating someone last year. She won’t really say how serious it is, but suddenly she’s been on me to ‘let my guard down and open myself up to love,’ like she’s Oprah.”
He laughs. “Good to hear it.”
Talking about myself in relation to romantic attachment is making me uncomfortable.
“Anyway,” I say, “why are you bored?”
“Well, I’m pretty much at the top of the game. But I feel a little bit like I’ve plateaued.”
“Can you do something else? Like, say, not divorces?”
“I’ve toyed with the idea of starting a nonprofit legal clinic. Or my own firm. But I don’t want to get really busy with work and then have kids and no time for them.”
I get a strange twinge of affection that he’s thinking of this. Taking care of his future children. He’s so… good.
“Got it,” I say, because Seth’s quest for a family is another unsettling topic to be discussing.
And that’s where the flow of conversation dries up.
There’s a pause so long I almost consider turning on NPR. It eats at me that I can’t seem to sustain a comfortable chat with Seth, a person I have never been unable to talk to. In fact, several of the best conversations of my life have been with Seth. Which is saying a lot, given we were under the age of eighteen when we had them.
But he seems as reticent as I am on the topic of his future.
“How is your family?” I finally ask, feeling like I’m checking off conversational boxes. Next, I’m going to be inquiring into his fitness routine and sleep schedule.
He smiles. “Amazing. I was actually with Dave and the kids last month. We drove up to Pigeon Forge and went to Dollywood. It was wild.”
“You did not! It’s my dream to go to Dollywood.”
He smiles at me wryly. “I don’t know. You have a pretty rocky relationship with theme parks, if I recall.”
“Oh God. Don’t bring that up.”
He is referring to when we went on an “ironic” date to a cheesy, second-rate water park in Central Florida and I almost died.
“Only you would commit a near-fatal error getting onto a water slide,” he says.
I rolled my ankle trying to get on a raft, slipped into the water, and was nearly sucked down the steep tube of “rapids” on my ass. Luckily Seth grabbed me, and I wasn’t hurt, but I think I am single-handedly responsible for millions of dollars of additional safety features at the Ocala Splash Attack.
I still feel emotional thinking of that day. How Seth held me as we climbed off the ride, me crying, him squeezing water out of my hair. It was romantic teenage trauma-bonding at its finest—like we were inside a John Green novel. We really do have the profile of two romance tropes. Seth the sensitive, cinnamon roll of a boy, and me the manic pixie dream girl. (Or manic pixie nightmare, more accurately.)
“I genuinely thought you were going to drown,” Seth says. “I couldn’t breathe for hours. Maybe days. Actually, I kind of can’t breathe right now, remembering it.”
He puts his face to the air conditioner vent and takes exaggerated gulps of air.
I pat his back. “Easy there. Head between your legs.”
He laughs but stiffens under my touch.
I quickly remove my hand.
“You were so sweet afterward,” I say.
He glances at me. “I was always so sweet.”
It chastens me.
“You were. You spoiled me. I’m not sure I ever thanked you for that.”
He shakes his head. “You don’t have to thank people for being nice to you.”
“Maybe you should when you’re bad at reciprocating it.”
I don’t just mean in high school. I mean in life. But especially with him.
“You were nice to me, Molly. You just have a different way of showing it.”
“Yeah. An alienating one.”
He gives me a long look. “Are you okay?”
“What do you mean? Yeah. Of course.”
“You seem like you might be depressed or something.”
“I’m actually not depressed,” I lie. “Which is a rare and momentous occasion for me.”
“Good.”
“I guess I’m just doing the thing you told me I do. Deflecting my feelings.”
“What are your feelings?”
Sadness that I let him get away.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say. “Nostalgia for the past, perhaps.”
He nods. “I suppose we bring it out in each other. Talking to you is like fanning through my high school yearbook while listening to Dashboard Confessional.”
“Pretty sure that’s not a compliment.”
“Oh come on. You loved emo.”
“I did not! That was all you, Rubenstein.”
“Oh right. You loved NSYNC.”
“Don’t make me turn this car around.”
“You wouldn’t dare. Then you’d be stuck with me.”
Stuck with him. God, I wish.
I’m so stupid. He’s been here for days, and instead of trying to reach out I just looked at my phone a lot, wondering if he would text me. And now he’s leaving, and things are weird, and all I want to do is tell him the feelings he confessed all those months ago turned out to be mutual.
I’m carrying a torch, too.
We pass the first sign for LAX.
I don’t want to let this man out of my car.
“You know, Seth,” I say quickly, before I can lose my nerve. “You haven’t been here for very long, and it sounds like you could use a longer break from work. You don’t have to leave yet. I have a spare room… You could stay and I could show you around the Eastside. Or, ooh, even better, I could drive you out to Joshua Tree and we could go hiking and eat greasy bar food and buy expensive incense. My friend Theresa has a gorgeous place out there. It’s only two hours—”
“Molls,” he interrupts, laughing a little in a way that seems forced. “That’s super nice of you to offer, but I have to get back.”
I want to die at this very reasonable rejection, but I’ve got momentum now, and I know I’ll regret it if I don’t just fucking say it, so I gather my courage and take a deep breath and plow on. “I guess I just think it would be nice to spend some time together. You know, we had a great time at the reunion, and then things went sideways, which might be my fault because, as you pointed out, I sabotage things and get in my own way. But I guess what I’m saying is… I like you, and I miss you, and I wish you would stay.”
I can’t look at him. I’m frozen, waiting for an answer. Praying I haven’t just embarrassed myself as much as it already feels like I have.
Seth puts a hand on my shoulder, and it sends my cortisol levels back down. His touch has always had an incredible, miraculous power to make me feel calm.
I gather the courage to glance at him, and something is flickering in his face, and I hope.
I hope.
When he doesn’t immediately say yes, I stutter out more. “Or, I could grab a flight to Chicago. Stay with Dez. We could hang out, and maybe—”
“Molls,” he finally says, so very softly, so very kindly, “I’ve met someone.”
The breath rushes out of me.
“Oh!” I say. “Oh, okay, sorry!”
“No worries.” He takes his hand off my shoulder. “You’re sweet.”
Sweet.Kill me.
I merge into the lane for departing flights.
“What airline?” I ask. I arrange my lips into a flat line, and check in the rearview mirror to make sure that they don’t quiver.
“American,” he says.
I nod.
It takes fifteen excruciating minutes to weave through the traffic to his terminal, and neither of us says another word.
I stop the car.
“Well, this is you.”
He bends over and kisses my cheek. I close my eyes.
“Be well, Molls,” he murmurs into my ear.
I manage to wait until he grabs his bag from the back before I start to cry.