41. Keeley
KEELEY
H e leaves for New York, but it all feels different now, in a good way. I don’t hand in my notice because I intend to get as much paid maternity leave out of Kathleen Fox as possible before I quit, and the rest of my life is so good that a little aggravation at work hardly seems to matter.
We’re staying together. We’re going to have a baby, and a house, and I’m going to have my Mariah Carey closet, and once we’ve waited the required length of time after the delivery, I’m going to reacquaint myself with the not careful, not gentle side of Graham Tate in bed.
The only person more excited about this whole thing than me is Gemma.
“I found you a house,” she says, calling me for the sixth time in two days. “When we were walking Lola last week, we met this couple who said they were getting ready to move, so I stalked them, and she said it goes on the market next month. It’s perfect for you.”
I laugh. “Gemma, I don’t even know our budget.”
“Please. Graham could afford ten houses in my neighborhood if he wanted. How soon can you get out of your lease?”
I ignore the fear that this is all too much good fortune at once, that I’m building up to a life it will hurt too much to leave. I remind myself that having a life you don’t want to leave is a good thing.
“Graham has a copy,” I tell her. “I’ll check when I get home.”
I leave work at a reasonable hour—I now have loads of made-up doctor’s appointments going forward to prevent a week full of ten-hour days—and go into his room. His desk is neat as a pin, his bed is made, every folder in his file drawer labeled.
I flip through a lot of things that look financial, seeking something labeled with the word apartment , and land on Contracts, Keeley . Gemma calls just as I’m grabbing the file. “I think I’ve got it,” I tell her, flipping it open on his desk.
Gemma’s saying something about getting out of my contract but I don’t really hear it. Because it isn’t a rental agreement in this file. It’s a different kind of contract entirely.
“What the fuck?” I whisper.
Gemma asks if I’m okay and I can’t even answer her. I stare at the paper in front of me as my stomach slides to my feet. “Oh my God.”
“Keeley, answer me! Are you okay?”
“No,” I tell her, my voice breaking. “Gemma, he’s thinks I’m going to let him buy my kid.”
“What? That can’t be true. What does it say?”
“I, Keeley Maureen Connolly—” I begin and then I start to cry.
I, Keeley Maureen Connolly, do hereby voluntarily and irrevocably relinquish all legal and physical custody of (name) to Graham David Tate.
“Oh God, Gemma, this is bad. It’s really bad.” There’s a paragraph about compensation and a paragraph about visitation—at his discretion but generally discouraged for the welfare of the child .
“I’m on my way.” She’s using her stern lawyer voice, but behind it, I hear a hint of worry. “Stay there and don’t jump to conclusions. I’ll read it over. It can’t be the way it appears. I know him, Keeley. You know him. It can’t be as bad as it looks.”
I desperately want her to be right. I’m just not sure how she could be.
Twenty minutes later, she’s sitting at Graham’s desk, her mouth moving as she skims the contract, her brow furrowed. And then she picks up his pen jar and slams it against the wall.
“I’m going to kill him,” she says.
I sink onto his bed and bury my face in my hands. He’s on his way home right now. He thinks he’s going to waltz in here and pretend everything’s good. The way I guess he’s been pretending all along.
It feels as if I should have a response, but instead I’m just…empty. There’s nothing inside me right now but shocked, echoing silence.
“Are you going to call him?” she asks. “He needs to explain this.”
“He’s flying home right now,” I whisper.
I truly can’t even grasp what’s happened, can’t make sense of it.
And I’m not sure there’s an excuse or explanation in the world that’s going to make this okay.
He thought he could give me a million dollars to have no contact with my child, ever again.
He really thought I’d sign this. Even Shannon, with her sickeningly low opinion of me, wouldn’t believe that.
So what has this been, these past few months?
Was he was stringing me along all this time, simply to gain my trust?
Did he really want us to stay married and get a house?
Or were all these things just little insurance policies for him?
A homeless, unemployed mother could be made to look unfit pretty fucking easily.
It seems impossible, but it would be na?ve, at this point, to think anything else.
No wonder he wasn’t worried about sharing custody. He never fucking planned to.
He calls when he lands, and I let it go to voice mail. He texts, with more of that worry of his, the worry I thought was legitimately about me as a person and not about me as the vessel for his seed.
God, I was such an idiot.
I go put on makeup and the cutest dress that still fits and then sit on the couch.
He opens the door and the sight of his face breaks my heart a little. He looks so convincingly…besotted. I thought he couldn’t lie to me. It never occurred to me he might just be really, really good at it.
His smile fades. “Hey,” he says slowly. “Is everything okay? I texted you.”
I climb to my feet and set the folder on the counter closest to him. “I went to your file cabinet because Gemma wanted me to check the lease on the apartment. This is what I found instead.”
He flips the file open, and the moment he realizes what it is, I know there won’t be a good explanation. I’d held out the ridiculous hope that someone else had placed the contract there, but he isn’t surprised by what it says. He’s just surprised he got caught.
“It’s not how it looks,” he says quietly. He turns, reaching out a hand.
I take a step away from him. “Really? Because it looks like you thought I was the kind of person who’d sell you my child.”
His eyes fall closed. “Keeley, when I first came here you weren’t even sure you wanted to have a kid. You were talking about drinking at Coachella .”
He isn’t wrong, but doesn’t he know me better than that by now? Doesn’t he realize I didn’t mean it? “I was fucking with you, and you’ve had months and months and you never got rid of this. Which suggests that you were just holding onto it, waiting to see if I’d fuck up.”
“That’s not what it—”
“Out,” I say quietly. “I want you out.”
“Keeley—”
“I’m not interested in a goddamn thing you have to say. Gemma’s taking care of the annulment and I’ll be in touch when the baby is born.”
“Keeley—”
“Look, I’ve got a date. Be out by the time I get home.”
He stares at me. “You’ve got a date,” he repeats flatly, his voice hoarse. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“You were going to take my baby ,” I reply, and I have to swallow hard so the words don’t turn into a sob. “Don’t think for a minute you get to judge me now.”
I turn away from the pain in his face. Good. I hope it hurts . He can’t be nearly as hurt as I am.
I walk out the door and he doesn’t try to stop me. I wait until I reach the elevator before I burst into tears—it went exactly as I planned…I just can’t believe it’s all over with that quickly.
I pull it together and drive out to Silver Lake, to see the friends I haven’t laid eyes on since Graham first showed up at my apartment.
They’re going to dinner and a club. I already know I won’t be joining them for the second part of the night, but I’ve got to pass the time until Paul calls to say Graham’s out of the apartment.
If he’s not gone when dinner’s done, I’ll crash on someone’s couch—which is exactly the sort of thing Graham would expect of me, isn’t it?
My friends are all assembled by the time I reach the restaurant, and I’m welcomed back with open arms, though that might have to do with how drunk they already are.
They all saw my video. More than one of them comments on how gross it must have been.
Then they talk about how their tents blew away at some festival and they wound up with sunstroke.
They tell me about another wild weekend in which they got a guy we know really drunk and dropped him off over the border with no identification. As a joke.
I want to be the old Keeley, who laughed at everything, but maybe that ship has sailed. Or maybe I just need to become a different version of me once I give birth: Less Fun Keeley who drinks but does so responsibly and excuses herself when her friends decide to strand someone in a foreign country.
They start chanting “ blue meanie ” for some reason, annoying most of the diners surrounding us.
Aaron pushes away from the table and knocks into a waitress with a whole tray full of drinks, which go flying.
There’s glass everywhere, the people at the table beside us are covered in red wine, and my friends are laughing like it was a victimless crime.
“Erik,” Aaron shouts, “tell Keeley what you did!”
Erik laughs. “Nah, bro, you tell it better.”
I already suspect I won’t like it.
“So Erik and I have all this LSD, right, and we’re on this playground,” Aaron begins.
Yep, I won’t like it. “Right in the middle of the fucking day. And Erik’s talking to this little kid and then he’s like, ‘we’re already dead.
I’m dead and you’re dead’ and this kid starts crying and runs for his mom. ”
Everyone roars with laughter. And I don’t want to think about Graham now, but I do.
I wonder what he’d say if he was listening.
I wonder what he’d have done if this guy came up to our daughter and told her she was “already dead”.
I guarantee fists would have been involved, and I don’t want to approve of anything Graham says or does right now, but I’d approve of that.
I’d probably help.
“You can’t say that to a kid, Erik.”
Erik laughs. “Well, obviously. That’s why it’s so funny.”
“It’s not funny. It’s fucked up.” I throw some cash down on the table. “I’m out, guys. Good seeing you.”
They boo. “Pregnancy turned you into an old lady, Keeley!” Leila shouts.
No, it turned me into a fucking adult. I just wish I was a happy one.
I’m about to get a hotel room for the night when Paul calls to say Graham is gone. I wait for him to add something that will give me a little hope, somehow, but he doesn’t.
“Did he say anything?” I finally prod. It’s pathetic, me needing this reassurance.
“Nah,” Paul says. “Just thanked me for letting him borrow the hand truck. Sounds like he had a lot of files to pack or something?”
Jesus. He did this to me and all he was worried about were his fucking files.
I go to my apartment and look around me, staring at the kitchen where he cooked and the couch where he’d cover my feet and it hits me that we really must have been nothing .
All the times he seemed to look at me a moment too long, all the times he laughed and let me hope I’d made him happy—perhaps not a single one of them was even real.
I search the counter but there’s no note, no apology.
I guess I thought he’d at least say, “I know you better now. I know you would never have gone along with it . ” But he just walked out of here more concerned with his fucking files than me, so he probably doesn’t know it at all.