Chapter 3
Going to Lowe’s just to get a new paint roller cover is a bit like taking a Hummer pretty much anywhere: overkill. The aisles are so large and there’s so much stuff that the express lanes would be better served measuring gross tonnage than the number of items in your cart.
But Will was headed to the one in Lincolnwood anyway because he needed the drive time to think. He didn’t remember Rachel crying that night in bed after she’d shown her parents the tattoo just because it had been an intimate moment. He also remembered it because Rachel hardly ever cried, and never about anything to do with work, which was in direct contrast to what he’d just witnessed. Even when her boss’s boss had come down on her hard over something she’d done for the president’s office that she hadn’t cleared with him first, ranting and raving about how she was out of line, wasn’t a team player, etc., etc., she’d been unfazed. Her retelling of the incident had been dispassionate and a little bemused, all the way through to her wrapping it up with, “So anyway, confirmed he’s a dick. What do you want to do for dinner?”
No, to elicit the kind of emotion she’d shown about Creative Vices, whatever it was really had to mean something to her, get at the core of who she was. That was why he was so concerned to see her just brushing it aside.
He was still preoccupied when the screen on his dash lit up with a call from his mom. She’d already called around noon from the Apple Store to ask his opinion on whether she needed a new iPad. Getting two calls in one day was unusual, so he didn’t think he should let it go to voicemail, even if his mind was elsewhere.
“Hey, Mom.”
“Hi, Willie Will.” She’d called him Willie Will since he was a baby. “I’m sorry to bug you again. Is now a bad time?”
“Oh no, you’re fine. Just on my way to get some painting supplies. What’s up?”
“Right. How’s that going? Was Rachel surprised?”
Will thought about how to answer that. “Yes and no? She seemed happy with it, but she had a lot going on at work today, and that kind of dominated the conversation.”
“How’s she feeling? People will tell you the second trimester is easier than the first, but I always say, there’s no typical in pregnancy.”
“Yeah, she’s feeling pretty good right now,” he said, rolling up to a stop sign. “Physically, at least. It’s all just a lot sometimes, you know?”
“Oh, I remember that feeling. Make sure she doesn’t feel like she’s in it alone. Trust me, I ... well ...” More than 25 years after his dad had left, his mom still avoided talking about him whenever possible. She didn’t know eight-year-old Will had listened to their final fight from the other side of their bedroom door. “You’re giving her what she needs, right?”
“I mean, yeah, I’m doing my best.”
“Now I’m talking about everything, Willie Will. Just because a woman is pregnant doesn’t mean she doesn’t still have certain needs that have to be met. Do you understand?”
“Uh-huh.”
“In fact, she may need to feel desirable in that way now more than ever.”
She was really doing this, wasn’t she? “Mom.”
“I’m talking about sex, dear.”
“Yeah, I got it. And I don’t think you’re allowed to call me Willie Will while giving me sex advice.”
“Oh, it’s fine,” she said, laughing. “It’s just a part of life—a beautiful, wonderful part.”
It was hard to pinpoint precisely when it had started, but sometime after Will had graduated from high school, his mom had undergone what you might call a sexual awakening and truly embraced her single life. She had gotten married young and hadn’t really dated at all while Will was growing up, so he was happy to see her so happy. The first time she’d mentioned having sex on a blanket at a Billy Joel concert, though, he’d had to instill some conversational guardrails.
“Was there a particular reason you called, Mom? I mean other than to discuss my sex life?”
“Ah yes. I got the new iPad, but now I can’t set it up because I don’t know my Wi-Fi password. Because someone made me change it from something that was easy to remember the last time he was here.”
“Yes, I did. Because internet was not a good password. I’ll text it to you.”
“Not while you’re driving.”
“No, when I park.”
“Good. Thank you. All right, I’ve gotta go. I’ve got a date.”
“Make good choices, Mom.”
She laughed again. “No promises. I love you, Willie Will.”
“Love you too.”
They hung up. Conversations with his mom were often an adventure, but he’d be the first to tell you she knew what she was talking about. And she was right: he wanted Rachel not just to know but to really feel that whatever he could do to be there for her, he would. That meant showing her that she had every right to be bold and that whatever hesitations she might have could be overcome by radical faith in one another.
It also meant downplaying his own fears about parenthood to make sure they didn’t complicate things even further.
And in a weird way, Date Me Now! had given him the road map to do all that.
The show had long been Rachel’s reality TV comfort food, and he’d been watching with her for as long as they’d lived together. It could be skeezy, as is to be expected when you’re working from the premise that a couple of dozen people will aggressively vie for each other’s affections five minutes after meeting. And the exclamation point in the title was simultaneously confrontational and desperate.
But, man, could they put together some dates.
And now that Will and Rachel had a week off from work, what was to stop him from reminding her how incredible and how adventurous she was by doing the same?
Taking her on the epitome of a Date Me Now! date wasn’t feasible. He couldn’t, say, whisk her off to a glacier for lunch and then have them grab a hot-air balloon to the Icelandic Opera in Reykjavík, sipping 50-year-old port as they soared through the indigo sky, recounting the noble purpose (a past contestant’s now-iconic explanation for his motivations) that had brought them there.
For one, they didn’t live near any glaciers—although there had been a ski hill in college, rumored to be a former landfill, which was only a five-hour car ride away—and they certainly didn’t have the budget to fly to any (not if they hoped to send this kid to college, anyway). Also a hot-air balloon ride would run counter to their well-established heights embargo, put in place after Will hyperventilated while looking down in the glass balcony at the Sears Tower Skydeck. And as much as Rachel enjoyed the show, Noble Purpose was the name of the fictitious yacht she liked to say offered nonstop service to Doomed Pickup Line Island.
But still. He had a week. He had a car. He had never shied away from showing Rachel he loved her in ... nonsubtle ways.
It was too perfect. Five dates. Five cities. He could do this. He could make her remember they weren’t boring.
When Will got excited about something, he fell hard for the idea, and he was already so caught up in what this might look like that when the light he was stopped at turned green, he didn’t notice until the guy behind him honked. He waved his apology into the rearview mirror and accelerated, reviewing the parameters he would have to meet to make it all work.
That they would drive was a given, mainly because of the cost but also because flying would just complicate everything. He didn’t want to spend half their time in airports or trying to get to and from them. Plus they’d always been good road trip partners, even more so once he’d admitted he was never going to beat her at the alphabet game. (The letter j is an endangered species on American highways, and Rachel had an uncanny ability to spot them first.)
“So it has to be the Midwest,” he said to himself, turning off the podcast that had started playing after he’d talked to his mom and that he hadn’t heard a word of. “Or Midwest adjacent. And the dates have to mean something to her. They need to be special.”
A native Ohioan, Will knew the words Midwest and exotic date locale weren’t necessarily natural companions. Right on cue, he saw a billboard on the left side of the road advertising a restaurant in the Wisconsin Dells called I Plead the Fish, featuring its “World-Famous Flamethrowin’ French Fried Flounder!”
“I know you’re bummed about this whole job thing, Rachel,” he joked to the empty car, “but it’s nothing some fish puns and deep-fried alliteration can’t fix!”
Wisconsin did have Milwaukee, though—and that might be something. It wasn’t even an hour and a half away. And Will was pretty sure there was a T. M. Clemens house there. Clemens was the architect Rachel had written her thesis on at Michigan, and she’d taken Will on the guided bike tour of several of Clemens’s buildings in Chicago like a week after they’d moved in together, when she’d been going through a brief I’m-going-to-start-my-own-firm phase. (That had ended when she’d accepted a promotion at work that she didn’t really want but deemed the mature thing to do.) He could swear Rachel had mentioned something about Clemens in Milwaukee too. There was also Summerfest, this huge outdoor concert series they had talked about going to for a few years but had never actually gone to.
As he flicked on his signal to turn into the Lowe’s lot, his pulse quickened with the possibilities. He parked and, after texting the Wi-Fi password to his mom, immediately began googling. Yes! There was a Clemens house in Milwaukee! And it was open for tours ... on Saturdays.
Here was the first glitch.
It was Friday. The last tour time was 2:00 p.m., in just over 20 hours. Rachel was currently in the bathtub in their apartment, and he was sitting in his RAV4 at a Lowe’s, in flip-flops and a paint-splattered Nirvana T-shirt.
Not exactly road ready.
The early evening was still hot, so he turned his car back on momentarily to put the windows down. When he got in modes like this, the prospect of something exciting starting to take shape just beyond his grasp, obstacles didn’t make him panic. It was the opposite: they made him work that much harder to find an answer. He almost enjoyed it. Rachel was the artist; his creativity came out in the way that he believed if he just thought about something hard enough, he could figure it out.
It made his inability to picture himself as a successful father all the more unsettling. The man who should’ve been his role model in that regard—his dad—told his mom on the way out that maybe things would’ve been different if they hadn’t had a kid. Years later, Will would come to question whether he’d actually heard that at their bedroom door or he’d just convinced himself he had. By then, it almost didn’t matter. And either way, he’d be flying blind on how to be a dad.
But he could figure out Milwaukee.
He was also having this dawning recognition of Nashville as their final stop. Growing up, Rachel had ridden horses and listened to Dolly Parton and other women country artists while around the barn, and she loved them for their tenacity in the face of rampant sexism. There was something about musicians following their hearts to that city that he thought would get her thinking big again.
Maybe even thinking about Creative Vices again.
Things like a cross-country move or the distance from family, while intimidating, didn’t have to be deal-breakers. Sometimes they were just the tax you paid in order to have dreams. And Will and Rachel were going to still need two incomes after the baby came, so what was the difference between day care in Chicago and day care in LA? Better weather?
It was an interesting thought. So was the idea that there might still be time to get Rachel there for an interview.
Will caught himself.
“No,” he said, putting the windows back up. Not trusting where his train of thought was headed, he forced himself to stuff the phone back in his pocket, get out of the car, and begin walking into the store. She’d told him to let it go, and he would. He had to. It was her career, not his. Supporting her didn’t mean he got to tell her what to do. He believed that with every fiber of his being. This week would just be about the two of them and showing her that while they were about to be somebody’s parents, they would always be so much more than that. More fun than that. The trip couldn’t be about anything else. Will knew that.
He just wished she hadn’t ruled out the interview so quickly.
Because she did this sometimes, hunting for reasons why the thing she wanted wouldn’t work because going after it might initially be uncomfortable. It wasn’t just in her career. Take the tattoo, for example. Once they’d moved in together, it had taken him over a year to convince her that her parents would eventually get over it—and more importantly, who cared if they didn’t—before she finally made the appointment and went. And despite that night when she’d cried in his arms in bed, she had never once expressed regret over that decision, unlike with New York and the art gallery.
Too bad Rochelle hadn’t given them more time.
The automatic doors slid open, and his mind went back to Milwaukee. The tight timeline notwithstanding, it made sense to start there. If he had any hope of getting Rachel excited enough about this trip to abandon the Week-of-Nothing tradition and leave on practically zero notice, he needed that first stop, the one that would get them moving, to intrigue her while still being manageable. The Clemens house and Summerfest would accomplish that, and a total of an hour and 20 minutes on the road was all it would take to get them there. He would pitch the week itself as “Why sit around and watch Date Me Now! when we can do a budget-conscious kinda sorta imitation of it?”
Okay, so he could work on the pitch. It also wouldn’t hurt that the alternative would be a staycation filled with Target runs and asking each other “Does this still smell good to you?” when pulling containers out of the fridge.
Provided she said yes to going, that left only one problem: a little detail known as Lake Michigan. After getting distracted by the ceiling fans—they needed one in the baby’s room, along with an electrician to install it, and an entire squadron of them were hovering over him like white, wood, and brushed-nickel helicopters—Will considered the geography.
Lake Michigan was one of the largest lakes in the world, with Milwaukee on the western shore of it. But where did you go after that? Every other place he was thinking of (Ann Arbor to revisit their college campus?) was well beyond the lake’s east side. Maybe there was a ferry they could take across to Michigan, and maybe that ferry would let them take their car. But that was all moot because while Will did not do well with heights, Rachel didn’t do well with boats. She had gone on a cruise with her family when she was 10 and had sworn she would never willingly sail so far from land ever again, proclaiming to anyone onboard who would listen, “Everyone said the Titanic was safe too.”
Will was puzzling through this when something on the shelf caught his eye. It was a box containing the same model of ceiling fan as one of the ones whirring overhead. He’d noticed it because of the 25-percent-off sign in front of it. Then he noticed the words on the side: “The Evening Breeze. Part of the Mackinac Island Collection.”
Mackinac Island. He’d heard of that. It was a resort area. And it was right by the Mackinac Bridge, right? The thing that connected Michigan’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas?
Will got his phone back out, brought up his map app, and punched in Milwaukee as his start point, Mackinac as the end. There it was, a route right up the west side of Lake Michigan and through the UP. Six hours, give or take.
He put his thumb and index finger on the screen and spread them apart to zoom in on Mackinac. Okay. There didn’t seem to be any bridge to the island, which meant they were probably dealing with another ferry situation. Not to worry. It wasn’t a cruise. It had to be 15, 20 minutes tops. Rachel would be fine with it. Probably.
“Yeah, I’m gonna need to find a sweet hotel,” he said, closing his screen and heading for the paint section.
Nevertheless, he was feeling good. Chicago to Milwaukee. Milwaukee to Mackinac Island. Mackinac Island down the Lower Peninsula to Ann Arbor. Ann Arbor to ... somewhere. And somewhere to Nashville. He’d come up with all that in under an hour, and he was confident he could flesh out the rest if she said she was in.
No. When she said it. She needed a chance to focus on something other than the baby, something other than all the unknowns that came with pregnancy and impending parenthood. He had a hard time admitting it, but he needed that, too, and he couldn’t help but feel a certain urgency to make this trip work because he didn’t know the next time they’d get to have an adventure like this, just the two of them. If he could seize this moment, make the week into something unforgettable at the drop of a hat—what Aunt Katie would’ve called “taking the bull by the balls”—it would signal to Rachel that they were the authors of their story. Not her parents. Not his dad. Not some mommy blog or a stable but stale career.
Them.
He found the roller covers after only two wrong turns—two fewer than two days before—and paid before shifting his attention to what he was going to get himself for dinner. By the time he was unlocking his car, he’d decided on Chipotle and was about to open the app to place his order, but there was a little light continuing to blink in the back of his brain that was proving impossible to ignore.
So rather than opening the app, he pulled up his text thread with Ali, his best friend since Michigan and the one who had made him realize you don’t take someone you like to Buffalo Wild Wings on a first date. Their texts were an ongoing dialogue, rivaled only by Will’s thread with Rachel.
Scenario: Your wife turns down an interview for a job she clearly wants after the company’s founder personally recruited her for it.
Ali’s text-response times were the stuff of legend. Once, when Will was living in Philadelphia for the internship, he had written Ali from his desk at 8:15 a.m. to ask him which Muppet their freshman-year history professor had called “a mouthpiece for the establishment.” As soon as he did, he’d remembered Ali was in California on vacation and three hours behind him. That was when the answer had come through.
Sam the Eagle. He wasn’t wrong.
Sure enough, before Will got his key into the ignition, Ali had responded.
Okay . . .
Would it be acceptable,Will pecked out, under any circumstances, for you to intervene under false pretenses without telling her?
No.
Will tried again. What if it wasn’t just a job she wanted but her literal DREAM job?
No.
What if you were afraid she was going to regret it forever but the window was going to close before she realizes it?
No,Ali typed back for the third time.
What if . . .
Will sent that last what if on its own to buy himself a few extra seconds to come up with such a compelling argument that it would convince his friend to give him the green light.
No, Ali wrote.
You didn’t even let me finish that one,Will replied.
The answer is always no.
Are you sure?
Yes.
Will sighed to the interior of his car. Yeah, you’re right.
You’re going to do it anyway, aren’t you?
Will immediately typed No of course not. He had known the answer before he’d texted Ali. Part of him had been hoping his friend knew of a moral loophole that would allow him to do it without simultaneously being the embodiment of some sort of strange the-man-knows-best antifeminism. But he knew such a loophole didn’t exist. The whole thing was a terrible idea.
And yet 30 seconds later, No of course not was still staring back at him, unsent.