Chapter 7
It’s Monthly Moms’ Malaysian. Only Alice calls it that. Only one of us is not a mom. Guess who.
Tonight the attendees (all of us from Blossom and Twig, the homeschool group) are me, Alice, Harini, and Molly.
Sometimes there are eight or nine of us, but it’s better when it’s small and we get to really talk.
Except that Molly is crying right now. The half a roast duck that Alice and I always share is mostly eaten, and it’s challenging to look properly sympathetic while I’m chewing around tiny bones, hoisin sauce smeared on my cheek.
Alice, wings of eye makeup dramatic under the fuzzy dome of her head, has a spot of sauce on the tip of her nose.
Have I not described her yet? My closest friend, Alice Choi: full-sleeve tattoos, buzz cut, gentle-but-in-charge momming skills, feminist rage, and homemaker proclivities. She still takes a few domestic violence cases a year.
“Sorry, sorry.” Molly pushes wisps of reddish hair back from her face. She is very pale, the chunky purple frames of her glasses the boldest thing about her. She’s just finished telling us about the stressful new job that is depressing her husband.
“It sounds like he’s under a lot of pressure,” says Harini, graceful in her bright kurtis. Her ornate gold nose ring glints in the low light of the hanging basket lights in our favorite strip mall restaurant.
“Maybe you could do some kind of a sex ambush,” Alice muses. “Like, catch him off guard? Just— ” She mimes a tearing off of clothes in the crotch region.
Harini rolls her eyes. “Okay, the sex will happen as your relationship heals. . . .”
Molly and I nod, and I tap my nose to show Alice where the sauce is. She taps her nose back, adding grease to the sauce.
“I feel like I’m angry because we could have this amazing life right now.” Molly blows her nose into a paper napkin. “We have this great home. . . .”
We all murmur agreement: The kitchen! The garden!
“Sinai has been doing really well. The allergy shots are working, so we’re not dealing with that all the time.”
I try to focus. It’s been two days since dinner with Joel.
He texted the next morning: You’re both always welcome.
Please don’t keep Ella from Mr. Button because of me.
And I still haven’t sent the response I’ve been composing: I think it’s better if we stop.
I’m sorry. Thank you for being so kind. But I will send it. I have to send it.
But if you didn’t kill Adam . . . whispers my immoral mind.
I keep managing to conveniently forget the coma.
That was certainly my fault, even if somehow his death wasn’t.
I felt better after I slept with him: The faint ache in my spine dissolved, the seeping weakness evaporated.
I looked better, too. My hair grew in happy and thick.
Daily nonconstipating iron pills and my gluten-free, leafy-greens-rich diet just can’t compete with forbidden demonic sex, in terms of keeping my energy and keratin levels up.
I check my phone under the table and there’s nothing new.
Grub’s last few messages are letting me know he’s located Dick Face’s old manager—out in Wyoming and unhelpful.
I’ve already watched his video message. “There’s some idiot on TikTok who looks a lot like him.
Like in the old music videos,” he told me, chewing on his lip.
“With that hair.” He did a floofy gesture over his head.
“You’re allowed to be upset,” Harini says firmly, rubbing Molly’s back.
And then time’s up—Molly and Alice have to get home for bedtime. I reach around the remains of a veggie curry to touch Molly’s wrist. “Something always shifts. It will get better.”
And it will, for her.
“Thank you, T,” she whispers. And then, “I bet you’re glad you don’t have to deal with this crap, right?”
She isn’t an insensitive person, she’s just upset right now.
I smile. No. I want what you have.
Alice’s greasy hand is on my knee, squeezing.
Do I really want what Molly has? Miserable husband, no sex even though they’re sleeping in the same bed and neither of them has a sex-related curse, an allergic kid and a surly toddler who is always blowing snot bubbles and throwing tantrums.
I do. I want it so much that I can’t help myself—I pull out my phone and text Grub under the table. Having a moment.
God, I’m pathetic. Using a sixteen-year-old as an on-call therapist.
Stay strong, he writes back immediately. He knows what I mean. Where u?
Out with friends. Srry.
I’m apologizing because he can’t even do that. Fuck me, he’s cut off his best friend, isolated himself completely, and yet I can’t even send Joel the text.
FUCK YOU, he writes psychically. And then, Kidding. They bein a bunch of moms and stuff?
Yeah.
I mean gross tho. Diapers. Adopt an older kid. Never have to wipe someone’s ass.
Any suggestions?
MEEEEEEEE.
I send a smile.
We finish with the checks, stand up, and hug Molly.
And then someone behind me says, “Tempest.” Except it isn’t a regular someone. We all turn, and Joel is somehow right there, like a large block of radiant cuteness in a black cloth jacket, smiling affably.
“Joel!” I clear my throat, feeling Alice’s eyes lock on my face. I’m suddenly aware of the way I’ve let him continue to use my Shakespearian-sounding given name instead of the less theatrical “T” that I usually go by.
He says, “Nice timing,” because we’re all leaving.
I’m shocked for some reason by the revelation that he was already here without me noticing.
In front of my friends, who are seeing him for the first time, he seems more attractive than I remember.
And I remember him being the most attractive man I’ve ever seen.
He’s introducing his companion—a friendly guy with a gray beard, another doctor, someone he works with. My friends exchange sly smiles, even Molly. How little they know. How little they can ever know.
And then we’re all leaving together; Joel holds the door like a gentleman.
This is so strange, this overlap of people.
So strange that I even know Joel, and have gone so recently from acceptance of my fate—bizarre backstory but ultimately not an unheard-of outcome: I am single—to this.
This gothic pining. This poetic, soul-level longing.
(Well, the clitoris and the soul. Those old friends.)
We begin to split apart; his coworker waves goodbye. Alice hugs me, whispering, “Obvious chemistry. Like, very obvious. I’m deeply offended that you didn’t mention him to me!”
“Nothing is happening,” I whisper back. “There was nothing to mention!”
A lie.
“Liar,” she says a little too audibly. She winks and kisses my cheek. “I forgive you. But we’re going to talk.”
I don’t want that. This was unlucky, running into him here.
For a second, I can’t remember where I’ve parked, even though it must be very close.
I’m disoriented. That eerie sense of wrongness comes over me, like when I thought for a second that the car was following Ella and me.
It seems like everyone has disappeared too quickly, and I am alone in the gray dim of the parking lot under the cold, almost sadistic fluorescent glow of the strip mall signs.
And then Joel is next to me, saying, “Do you have to get back?”
My body erupts in civil war, weapons firing full force, immediately interrupted by his next question. “Did you have one of those coconuts? Let’s go back in. I’ll get you one.”
Again, I notice the way he holds himself, steady but unimposing in spite of his largeness. I love the way his manner hovers at the edge of hesitation, gentle rather than awkward. But then again, calamitously, I love literally everything about him.
“You’re offering to buy me a drink,” I translate. So he can, what, tell me more about the woman he was supposed to marry?
“To apologize for the whole chicken-and-I-can’t-dateanyone thing.” He looks rueful. “I’m a schmuck. In my mind I thought it would be polite somehow—”
“You still can’t date anyone,” I remind him desperately. “But it’s fine. And the chicken was good.”
“At least something was good.”
“You don’t need to apologize.” I swallow.
I see him clock my hesitation. I’m not sure if I like how aware he seems, how tuned in. Don’t change your mind, I beg him inwardly. Don’t tell me you want to date me.
“Just one small coconut,” he says. “A baby.”
“I guess,” I hear myself say. “Since I’m in the baby business.”
He laughs kindly.
Run away, T!
My phone lights up in my bag. Definitely Grub, texting to see how I’m doing now. I ignore it.
And then we’re back in the restaurant and the waiter (the same one) looks uninterested in why, if he even recognizes me. Joel is asking how my day has been, like this was planned, like we meant to meet up all along.
“Good,” I say. “Fine! Good.” I shake my head, unable to remember even a single thing that happened. “Yours?”
We’re sitting a few tables away from where I sat with the moms, next to a family with a toddler who have propped a singing, squeaking iPad on the table.
On the other side, two older women talk loudly.
But they feel dangerously insignificant.
Everyone here does. None of them is making us not alone, and I feel the hum of Joel’s magnetism like the lowest note of the cello.
It’s in my blood, my cells, in the deepest parts of me.
His hand rests lightly on the surface of the table and I want—with such physical urgency that my own hand twitches—to run my fingers over the faint ridge of a tendon.
I can almost see the warmth of his skin; it is almost a shimmering force field around him.
I want to press his hand to my face, to lick the knob of his knuckle, to push his fingers into my mouth and taste his skin.
I try to get control of myself. I’m panicking because I’m exceptionally inexperienced, like a nun with a Pornhub problem.
Sometimes women are friends with men. Sometimes they have a coconut or two together—they’ve arrived already, with colorful paper umbrellas and long straws in them—and it’s no big deal.