Chapter 9
DO YOU REALLY HAVE to go?” Ted whispered the words into Julia’s hair as they were lying in bed together, the night before her flight to San Diego.
Unlike last year when she took baby Veronica with her, she would be going to Coronado for the week on her own.
She’d already made an extra-full schedule for sisters’ week, filled with adult things that she would do with her sisters, actual adults.
It would be her first adults-only time away from Veronica in almost a whole year, since she’d quit her job to be a stay-at-home mom last June.
The year had somehow blended into one long, similar day after another, and Julia had lately been feeling a little restless.
She’d weaned Veronica promptly after her first birthday, stored the pump and her nursing bras on the high shelf of her closet for future babies.
The reality was, now that Julia was done breastfeeding, she was, in a way, untethered again.
Ted had agreed, months ago, to take a week’s vacation from work to take care of Veronica while Julia would be away with her sisters.
“Do you?” Ted said again now. His arm, which had been lazily draped around her waist, clung around her tighter now, and he pulled her toward him.
His thumb skimmed the top of her pajama bottoms, teasing at the elastic.
Though she had lost most of her pregnancy weight and gotten back in shape after buying a jogging stroller earlier this spring, she still felt self-conscious about her stomach, and fought the urge to push Ted’s hand away.
“Do you really have to go?” he murmured, rolling her over to kiss her neck.
“I do,” she whispered back. “You know I do.” Aside from her promise to Grandma Vera, and the fact that she missed her sisters, Veronica had recently learned the power of saying the word no, and Julia really, really needed a break.
She’d been counting the days until this trip, marking them off one by one on the wall calendar in the kitchen.
Ted moved his hand away, rolled over on his back. “Grandma Vera.” He sighed.
Annoyance flooded her chest. Grandma Vera was an imaginary person to Ted, a theoretical idea that inconvenienced him.
“I wish you’d met her,” Julia huffed. “And anyway, I can’t just cancel on my sisters.
” As a practical matter that was true, a more logical argument than her promise to Grandma Vera, or even her own desperate need for a break.
And Ted was always swayed by logical arguments.
“But I was thinking,” Ted continued, seemingly unswayed. “It’s just such a shame to use my vacation week this way. We could all go on vacation next week instead. The three of us. Drive up to Montauk.”
Ted’s parents owned a house in Montauk, and Julia had been only once, the summer after Grandma Vera died, just after they’d gotten engaged.
It was a beautiful white, three-story house near the water: gleaming, cold, and immaculate on the inside, much the way Ted’s mother herself was.
It didn’t feel like the kind of place you could relax on vacation, much less with a toddler.
And anyway, it was a moot point. She wasn’t canceling on her sisters!
“Why don’t you take Veronica to Montauk,” she told him. Though the idea of it made something strange thrum in her chest. Veronica, being with Ted’s mother, without her there. The judgment that would surely follow, that Julia was, due to her absence, somehow a bad mother.
“I mean there’s two of them.” Ted was still trying to convince her. “Emily and Nora can survive just this one week without you, can’t they?”
She chuckled. “You’ve met them.”
“They’ll understand. You’re married. You have a family. You’re just in a different place now, that’s all.”
“My flight leaves in the morning. Let’s not argue,” Julia said, rolling back closer to Ted, moving her hand slowly across and down his stomach, reaching beneath the elastic of his boxers until she heard him moan softly.
She tried to remember the last time they’d had sex, and she couldn’t put her finger on it.
Valentine’s Day? No. That had been the first time she’d drunk wine in over two years, and she’d fallen asleep right after dinner.
Ted’s birthday in March? No. He’d been in the midst of a trial and had come home late that whole week.
New Year’s Eve? Yes, that was it. Julia had just weaned Veronica a few weeks before and it was the first time in two years her body felt like her own again.
She wasn’t a vessel to grow a baby, she wasn’t a milk machine.
She had been feeling giddy inside her skin at the mere thought of it.
Ted stopped talking, pushed her underwear down, and rolled on top of her all in one smooth, practiced motion. It had been so long, they both finished quickly, and then Ted kissed her gently on the lips, rolled back off her, and promptly fell asleep.
She heard the soft sound of his snore, but now she was wide awake.
Her body felt relaxed but her brain wouldn’t stop.
She suddenly felt a little nervous about flying—it would be her first time since September 11th, and everything she’d read about the new security sounded stress inducing.
And how was she really leaving her daughter for a week?
A whole week! They had been together every second of every day for the last year.
What if Veronica needed something that Ted couldn’t anticipate?
She tried to shake that thought away. Ted was Veronica’s father. And they had always agreed they would be equal partners, co-parents. Whether it truly shook out that way or not, Ted had to be able to manage for one week.
Besides, she had left him a detailed printed schedule and notes of everything Veronica needed, at every time of day, when and what she ate, when and how she napped. All Ted had to do was follow all the instructions she left him.
She repeated the lists in her head now, the schedule. The order of it finally soothed her enough to fall asleep.
But when she got out of bed the next morning, Ted and Veronica were already gone. Her neatly arranged packet of instructions was still sitting in a folder on the kitchen table, next to it a sticky note that said: Gone to Montauk. Join us?
Nora was the first one of them to spot the strange, beautiful woman at Nate’s house.
As she got out of the cab and wheeled her roller bag up the front walk, Nora caught a glimpse of her on Nate’s porch.
A leggy woman in a lime-colored bikini, with vibrant strawberry-red hair and pale skin, was reading a book in a lounge chair.
She didn’t look like the kind of woman who took kindly to the beach, and she definitely didn’t look at all like she belonged on Nate’s porch.
“Who the heck is that?” Nora said to Julia after walking inside, abandoning her roller bag in the entryway and running to the side dining room window to try to get a better look through the slats of the mini blinds.
“Who is what?” Julia asked. She handed Nora a thick, stapled packet. The weight alone told Nora that Julia had spent extra time on their schedule this year. Great. Nora already felt annoyed as Julia stood on her tiptoes and peered over Nora’s shoulder.
“That woman, on Nate’s porch.” Nora pointed, but from this angle, they could only make out the shock of red hair.
“I can’t tell,” Julia said. “And anyway, why do we care?” she added breathlessly.
Nora was seeing someone in New York. She was waitressing at Joe Allen now, and she’d met Leo when she was his server one night when he’d come for a late-night steak.
It was March, the night Halle Berry had won an Oscar for Monster’s Ball—they’d been playing the Oscars on the TV back in the kitchen and Nora was feeling inspired by her acceptance speech.
“You look like you’re ready to be someone,” Leo had said to her after she’d taken his order.
And then he’d handed her his card: Leo Marks, producer.
It was only later, after she called him and met him for a drink, that she realized he had a wife.
A wife he was planning on divorcing, after which she would tell her sisters about him.
Emily might not care that he was married, but she would probably care that he was forty.
Julia, she was certain, would care about both things because she was Julia.
She supposed Julia was right about the woman on Nate’s porch.
She should not care in the slightest about her, whoever she was.
So why did she still feel a twinge of jealousy in her chest?
She was positive she’d outgrown her girlhood crush on Nate now that she was dating a real grown man back in New York, but she still felt strangely possessive of him.
“I don’t care,” she said now, perhaps a bit too emphatically, so that it both felt and sounded like a lie as it popped out of her.
“I’m just curious, that’s all. She doesn’t look right for him. Does she?”
Julia pulled the string to tighten the blinds all the way closed. “Nate’s a big boy,” she said. “Did you bring the graham crackers?”
Nora glanced at the thick schedule in her hand and saw Emily would be arriving in an hour.
Then there would be a walk to the Del, drinks (since when did Julia encourage them to drink?
!) by the water, fresh shrimp for dinner that Julia would cook here, and s’mores at seven.
She turned the page and saw tomorrow morning started at seven with a bike ride before coffee at Clayton’s at eight and a packed day from there.
She had brought graham crackers, but now realizing she only had an hour until Julia’s intense schedule began, she lied and told her she had forgotten. She could use a quiet walk to the store. “I’ll walk to Vons and buy some right now,” she said.
“Seriously, Nora.” Julia shook her head and smiled. “Sometimes I wonder how you manage the rest of the year without me.”