Chapter 2
“Do you remember me talking about Rochelle Simmons?” Rachel asked.
“Rochelle—is she the woman from Creative Vices?”
“The founder, yes.”
Creative Vices was the Los Angeles–based marketing agency behind some of the most creative advertising and public service campaigns (and the corresponding viral memes) of the last five years. Rochelle had visited the university’s graphic design department to give a guest lecture a year before, and Rachel had stayed in somewhat regular touch with her over LinkedIn and email ever since. That had led to Rachel sharing her portfolio, which included both designs and original artwork, and Rochelle had told her it was as good as anything she’d seen.
“She has an opening for an associate creative director,” Rachel said. “I’ve seen her posting about it for the last month, so I checked it out, just out of curiosity. It’s a way bigger job than what I’m doing now. So I kind of put it out of my mind. Which was easy since I wasn’t exactly looking to move us to California in the first place. But then she called this afternoon to ask me if I’d consider applying, because they’re scheduling interviews, and she’s not excited about any of the candidates they have. She thinks I would be perfect for it and wants to fly me out a week from Monday.”
Rachel sat down on the window seat, careful not to rest her legs against the paint below in case it was still wet. The sun was streaming in from behind her, making it hard for Will to read her expression from his spot across the room, where he was putting the lid back on the can of paint.
“I agree with her: you would be perfect for it,” he said. “So I’m still not seeing how this is a problem. I mean, my job is basically remote at this point, so I’m sure I could make that work.” He wasn’t completely sure, but that was a detail for later. When Rochelle had written her about the portfolio, Rachel had called him sounding like she’d won the lottery. Will hadn’t heard her talk about her work like that in a long time. “And isn’t this why you’ve kept talking to her? To maybe get a shot at something like this?”
“Well, yeah, but it was a lot less real then. She needs an answer by the end of the day. Like, today. She’s on vacation next week and wants the interviews set before she goes so they can wrap this up when she gets back.”
“And?”
“And it’s LA. An entirely new career in LA. I’ve never even been west of Denver.”
“Why do you think it’d be an entirely new career? You’ve been doing this kind of stuff for years now.”
Her laugh came out as more of a snort. “Comparing marketing communications at a university to marketing at an Adweek Agency of the Year is like saying a Yorkie is basically the same thing as a wolf.”
“Uh, no offense, but the whole crippling self-doubt thing is kinda my vibe, not yours,” Will said, hoping to elicit a smile from her. Joking or not, he wasn’t wrong, though he came by it honestly enough. His childhood and adolescence had often left him wondering where he fit in. Like on the first day of 10th grade, when the girl he’d had a crush on since freshman year greeted him enthusiastically at their lockers, and he thought maybe he’d have a shot at taking her to homecoming—until he overheard her and a friend laughing about his clothes that same morning. Asking girls to dances was not his thing after that. But to be fair, Will’s denim vest had been objectively awful, and the girls couldn’t have known just how vulnerable he was to feeling rejected.
“Don’t do that,” Rachel said, all too aware that Will’s insecurity stemmed from his relationship (or lack thereof) with his father. Will and Rachel were each the first person the other had ever really opened up to about their complicated relationships with their dads—and in Rachel’s case, with her mom also. “I hate when you downplay what he did to you.”
“My point is,” Will said, taking the spot next to her on the bench seat, “there’s no way you’d not be great at this. Rochelle obviously thinks so too.”
“That’s very sweet, thank you. Misguided maybe, but sweet. But you seem to be forgetting the part where we’d have to move across the country. I can’t have this baby two thousand miles away from home.” She had just gotten the faintest hint of her bump, and she rubbed her stomach instinctively. “I mean, my parents are my parents, but they’re also still my parents.”
“That sentence was like an out-of-body experience.”
“Word salad, I know. But does it make sense?”
“It does,” he said. “But it’s not like we go over to their house every Sunday for dinner or anything. When was the last time we even saw them?”
“The last time you saw them was when we told them I was pregnant. But they’ve been making more of an effort with me. Mom’s even come to campus to have lunch with me a few times.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know. I guess because I haven’t quite known what to make of it. It’s like they get me more now that I’m pregnant—like I finally make sense to them. And on the one hand, that drives me absolutely crazy. But on the other, it feels kinda ...”
She trailed off, and Will knew she was tearing up again.
“Nice?” he offered. His dad had basically been out of the picture since he was eight, so he was no stranger to yearning for a parent’s attention.
Rachel nodded. “And it’s not like we couldn’t use the help when the baby comes, right?”
He thought of how his own brewing panic was the reason they were sitting in a two-thirds-painted room and knew she had a point. Unlike with his dad, he had a great relationship with his mom, but she lived several hours away in Ohio. And his heart hurt when he thought the obvious person for them to call on would’ve been his aunt Katie, who had been like Will’s second mom and had moved about 45 minutes west of him and Rachel not too long before they’d gotten married. But Katie had died suddenly from a pulmonary embolism a year earlier, leaving his mom without her sister and Will without a role model he’d come to rely on.
“Plus there’s my sister,” Rachel continued, “and the miscarriage, and I know they’ve been trying again, and it’s not working, and her marriage is a mess, and ...” She was crying harder now. “And I want to be there for her, but I feel like me being pregnant is just making it harder on her. So I already felt guilty about that, and now I’m ...”
She stopped because the sobs started shaking her whole body. He pulled her in for another hug, and her next sentence came out in fits and starts between breaths.
“Now . . . I’m . . . complaining . . . about not being able to take a job . . . because I am pregnant . . . and I feel like the most ungrateful . . . self-involved . . . person ever.”
It was one of those moments that called for just the right words, and he found it far easier to summon them on her behalf than trying to reassure himself, as his dad’s rejection didn’t hold nearly as much sway outside of Will’s own head.
“Our second date. We went to the botanical gardens. Have I ever told you why I picked that?”
He felt her shake her head slightly on his chest.
“When I’d picked you up for our first date—Buffalo Wild Wings, because I had no clue what I was doing—I had seen that painting of orchids you’d done. So for date two, I thought Matthaei Botanical Gardens. They had flowers. They had art. It was perfect.”
He paused for effect. Rachel leaned back from him, but he kept his arm around her shoulder.
“And then came the coleslaw,” he said.
She hiccuped a small chuckle.
“You’d think after seeing you order a salad with a side of fries at friggin’ BW’s, it would’ve at least crossed my mind that you might be a vegetarian. But no. I went to that deli on my way to your apartment, confidently ordered one roast beef sandwich and one turkey sandwich, and then, being the gentleman that I was, presented them to you on a picnic blanket and invited you to choose. At which point you told me you were a vegetarian, but that it was okay, you would just eat the coleslaw.”
“You looked like you wanted to crawl under the nearest bench and die,” she said. “I felt bad for you.”
“Oh, I was mortified. But you were super nice about it. Even after that bee proceeded to sting you, and your finger swelled up to twice its normal size.”
“It wasn’t twice its—”
“Nevertheless,” Will pressed on, raising his free hand to signal this was his tale of woe to tell, “you soldiered on, right through my awkward attempt at a good night kiss that, instead, resulted in me patting you on your back. Like I was your uncle hugging you at a funeral.”
“I don’t even remember that.”
“Of course you don’t. Because you were about to get violently ill as a result of food poisoning from the tainted coleslaw I force-fed you.”
She grimaced at the memory as she moved from under his arm and tested the wall lightly with her index finger to see if it had dried. Deciding she was in the clear, she rested her back against it and put her feet up on his lap, the indentations from her sandals not yet faded from her skin. It was still a little early in the pregnancy for her feet to be swelling from the baby, but they had always done so in the heat, and he knew she was worried about what they would feel like by the end of the summer.
“Between the hacky sack on the quad, the Buffalo Wild Wings, and that disaster of a second date, I just assumed I’d never hear from you again,” Will said, massaging her soles.
“Ha, I was not so easily deterred.”
“And do you remember what you said to me when you called?”
“Honestly, no,” Rachel said.
“You said, ‘You should probably let me plan date three.’ Then you laughed. Laughed, Rachel. I was stunned. ‘There’s going to be a date three?’ I asked. And you said—and I’ll never forget this—‘I like you, Will. You’re you, and you let me be me.’”
She managed an actual laugh this time. “I had a real way with words.”
“You did, actually,” he said. “And that’s the reason I’m telling you all this. Because you, self-involved? Rachel, people who’re self-involved, they don’t see people like me for date three. Especially not at twenty years old, and especially not when I know for a fact you had plenty of other options. You are the most genuine, thoughtful, caring human being I’ve ever known.”
Her face was serious again, and she looked out the window. “Well, we’ll see, won’t we?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve never taken care of a baby. Neither of us have. What if I’m terrible at it? What if I’m so sleep deprived I don’t hear her or him crying in the middle of the night? What do I do if he or she has a fever? What if I try to breastfeed, and I can’t?”
“Do you want to breastfeed?”
“I don’t know!” she said, turning back to him, exasperated. “My sister’s the one who’s always been into this stuff, but she doesn’t get to be a mom. Meanwhile, I don’t even have an opinion. But everyone acts like I’m supposed to. The only thing I do seem to know is that apparently I’m going to blame my baby for getting in the way of my career. Real mom-of-the-year material there.”
“That’s not what you’re doing.”
He thought about telling her he was scared, too, but it didn’t seem like what she needed to hear. Not then, anyway. He also didn’t like that she seemed to be falling back into that trap of shelving what she really wanted because of what other people might think.
Rachel leaned toward him and put her hand on his cheek. She smiled.
“I love how supportive of me you are,” she said. “That was one of the things I could tell from the beginning. But it’s just not the right time. I can’t take all this on professionally while also trying to figure out how to be a mom, with no one for us to ask for help. I’m not going to do that to the baby, and I’m not going to do that to us. Sometimes the boring job is the right job.”
Sometimes the boring job is the right job.
Will heard that sentence, and it was like the smoking gun attesting to the fact that she felt she was at a professional dead end. And who knew? Maybe she was bored with other things about their life. It made him queasy.
“I really do think that together, we could handle this,” he said, his own doubts about parenting thousands of miles away from anyone they knew no match for his desire to make sure she didn’t grow unhappy with their circumstances. “All of it.”
“What? The job? California?”
“Yeah.”
“Will,” she said, hands on both his cheeks now, “I want you to listen to me on this. I know being an awesome parent is as important to you as it is to me. And I don’t feel like I can be that in Los Angeles right now. I’ll get over it. So I need you to also. Okay?”
“But—”
“Will. Okay?”
The sun gave her entire face a warm glow, but there was no mistaking the sadness in her eyes.
“Okay.”
“Okay,” she repeated. She swung her legs back down to the floor and stood. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go write Rochelle back and tell her no in the most artful way possible, and then I’m going to kick off my Week of Nothing by allowing myself to wallow a bit longer in the privacy of a bubble bath. Can you pick us up something for dinner?”
“Sure. I wanted to go out and get a new roller cover for the second coat, so I can do both. Any preference on food?”
“You surprised me once today. I’ll bet you can do it again. Just be prepared to binge some reality TV when you get back. The shamelessness of Date Me Now! is a balm to my soul.” She disappeared out the door and down the hall before calling back, “On second thought, get whatever you want. This is an ice-cream-straight-from-the-container night. Don’t judge me.”
He wouldn’t. Not only because he wasn’t a jerk, but also because she’d just given him another idea altogether.