Chapter Eighteen Bram #2
“Four,” Joey corrects glumly. “Four, and Riley says it’s all my fault because I didn’t use a condom the night she probably got pregnant. But the condoms were so far away!”
“Joey,” Sloane begins in a delicate tone. “Does Riley want any support visiting a clinic or help getting mifepristone? Because I help students with reproductive health every day, and it would be no trouble.”
“No, she wants four kids,” Joey says, and sighs down at his last slice of pizza. “So we’re doing it.”
“She wants four kids?” Alessandro asks. “Then . . . why the pizza and the tears? Why is she angry with you?”
“Because she didn’t want the fourth so close to the third.” Joey’s eyes fill as he picks up the slice. “She says it means we’ll have two in diapers at the same time, and she’s worried all the extra work of a new baby is going to fall on her, because I’ll have to keep an eye on the big girls.”
We ponder this. Joey is a good dad—if occasionally clueless—but four kids present some logistics issues even good parents can’t easily parkour over.
“I mean, we did two kids in diapers at the same time, didn’t we, Sara?
” I ask my ex-wife, who is inside a motel room that looks like it’s calibrated to the comforts of wind-grizzled fishermen.
(Asher is behind her on the bed, wearing noise-canceling headphones and bopping while they do something with an Excel spreadsheet.) “How did we do it with the twins?”
Sara squints at nothing, trying to remember. “It’s all a blur, honestly. And we were divorced by their first birthday, so maybe we’re not the best people to take advice from.”
That’s true. “We did get very efficient at changing diapers, though,” I say. “And we even did cloth diapers.”
“Perhaps a factor in the divorce?” remarks Leo.
“My point is,” I tell Joey, “maybe you can prove to Riley that you can find ways to make it easier on her?”
He stops chewing, swallows. “Like . . . like figuring out how to change diapers faster?” He looks hopeful for the first time since he got here.
“Sure,” I say encouragingly. “That’s a great start.”
“When is she due?” Sloane asks.
“The middle of May.”
We all exchange glances, including with Sara on the phone.
“Bro, it’s October,” Sara says. “She’s, like, for-real pregnant.”
“Well, she didn’t know because she still hasn’t gotten her period after Oksana, so it wasn’t like she was late or anything.
She was going in for some lower back pain today, and they wanted to do an X-ray, so they tested her first. And .
. . surprise.” The hopeful look has faded a little bit now.
“Fuck, guys. This wasn’t supposed to happen for another year or two. ”
Sloane rubs his shoulder and I decide it’s time for beer.
“When do you need to be home?” I ask Joey before I select a craft beer to bring to him.
“I don’t know. Never. By the time I came home from work, her sisters were there, and—” He shudders and we all shudder with him. Riley’s sisters are formidable, and when they perceive injury done to one of their own, they form an impenetrable phalanx of judgmental looks and muttered remarks.
“Stay here tonight,” I say, without thinking, and then remember the roommate that no one (but Sara) knows about. Shit. “Uh, or with Sloane. Or something. I’m grabbing something for us to drink!”
Very smooth.
I go into the kitchen and Sloane half follows me, peeling off to go into the dining room and rummage around my credenza for some gin.
Leo and Alessandro have started offering less-than-helpful advice to Joey, interspersed with some actual advice from Sara, and so no one’s paying Sloane and me much attention when she walks into the kitchen with a bottle of Tom’s Town and says, apropos of nothing, “Have you ever heard of Veronica Balentine?”
My hands still over the bottle of beer I’m cracking open.
“Yes,” I say slowly. It’s like asking if I’ve heard of nuclear reactors.
Veronica Balentine can be used to power NICU incubators or blight entire landscapes.
“She was the reason we took Topeka in the last election. But she also brokered that endowment to Geology from a very evil petroleum company.”
“She’s a sellsword,” says Sloane as she gets a martini glass from a cabinet. “Her skills go to the highest bidder. I ran into her a lot via Lucien’s, ah, circle.”
Circle sounds so much better than camarilla of rich monsters.
“What about her?” I ask, and pop the cap off the beer. I attempt a joke to hide how much I don’t like Veronica Balentine. “Does she want to endow Ecology next? We could probably find a way to do moss for capitalism.”
Sloane’s expression doesn’t change.
“You’re right, moss would actually be really hard to do for capitalism. Except, well, sphagnum is in its own category—”
“Veronica Balentine has been talking to Maddie,” Sloane cuts in. “I think she might be tapping Maddie for office.”
“Bram, where’s your upstairs bathroom?” Alessandro asks from around the corner. “Leo is depriving me of the downstairs one.”
“Up and to the right,” I say absentmindedly. And then to Sloane, “Would you repeat that, please?”
Sloane uncorks the gin and pours some into her glass, then recorks the bottle before answering.
“It’s not certain—I mean, nothing in politics is real until you’ve filed, but it’s looking like the party and the donors are in agreement: they want someone young.
Maddie’s got some name value from her work with the Wade Foundation, but she’s still green and scandal-free.
They want someone principled but maybe willing to get into the weeds a little.
Clean slate is the current buzzword amongst those in the know.
” She takes a sip of straight gin and makes a face. “This needs something.”
“A clean slate,” I echo as Sloane starts opening up my cabinets and closing them again. “Like . . .”
“Like no affairs, no drugs, no secret money from Russia, no social media posts complaining about Disney’s live-action remakes, no anything.
Just a tabula rasa of a prestigious law degree, a pretty smile, and cleverness that Veronica will make sure is titrated out.
You have to build up tolerance for an intelligent, strong-minded female politician, you know.
Like how you can build up a tolerance for poison. Mithridatism, but for constituents.”
I open a second bottle of beer. Thinking. Worrying. “Maddie hasn’t said anything about this.”
“She might not know how to bring it up.” Sloane has found a cinnamon stick somewhere and sticks it in her gin. “How often do people immediately bring up future jobs to their current employers?”
I’m so much more to her than a current employer, but I can hardly say that, and I can hardly kick up a fuss about Maddie talking to Veronica Balentine when Sloane thinks my only contact with Maddie involves school pickup logistics and how to use an air fryer.
But then the worst possible thing happens.
Alessandro sticks his head around the opening to the kitchen and says, “Oh, Bra-a-am,” in a singsong voice.
I look up at him, dreading whatever he’s going to say next.
“Why is there a naked nanny in your upstairs bathroom?”
Of course this has to be when the living room conversation has organically fallen quiet.
There’s a brief pause, like the gap between a lightning strike and the clap of thunder, and then I hear the scrape of my couch, the glassy thunk of a drink being set down, a flurry of footsteps.
Suddenly, I’m surrounded by Andromedas on all sides, all of them peering intently at me.
They might as well be tasting the air, like actual snakes.
“Is Sara alone in the living room?” I ask, to delay the inevitable.
“She had to go,” Leo says smoothly. “Now, about the naked nanny—”
“Is the nanny living here?” Joey asks.
“Childcare provider,” I correct, pouring some firmness into my voice. The nanny talk is just for Maddie and me. “And she needed a place to stay, so I offered—”
“So she is living here?” Sloane asks. “Bram, what the fuck?”
I heave a deep breath. “Okay, yes. She’s living here.”
“Does Sara know?” is her loyal follow-up.
“Sara knows,” I explain patiently. “I told her the day I offered my spare room to Maddie. She’s living here until she can afford her own place because she spent the last four years dating an asshole. She’s great with the kids, hilarious, smart, and it’s just temporary. I have the room to spare.”
They all stare at me with the same half-suspicious, half-amused expressions, and I regret everything in my life that means these people have known me for twenty years or more and can tell when I’m hiding something.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t keep trying to hide it. My breakfast of champions, my Sharpie notes, why the jasmine plant in my greenhouse gets me hard now, that should all be mine and mine alone.
“Anyway, back to Joey,” I say quickly, grabbing a beer. “Let’s have a toast to the fourth Kemp baby!”