Jack & Jill (Arts and Lovers #2)

Chapter 1 Two Years Ago

TWO YEARS AGO

He looks handsome and kind, so he must be married.

That is one of the fundamental rules of dating over the age of thirty-five, at least in my experience.

The more he looks like a menswear model and listens like a therapist, the more likely it is that someone has already claimed him for the expanding empire of minivans and home mortgages.

If a man is thoughtful, warm, and mature, then you can bet that he is jointly filing taxes in the land of the happily married.

I used to live there myself, or at least on its fragmented borderlands.

Now I’m exiled from that nation, with no way back in.

“Borders closed,” the signs say. “All territories spoken for.”

My sense of isolation isn’t helped by the fact that I’m watching the man through the glass wall of my company’s conference room.

He paces in front of a large group of children, talking to them with the enthusiasm of an overcaffeinated kindergarten teacher.

It’s ‘Take Your Child to Work’ Day, the yearly event in late April when parents at my accounting firm get the chance to show our children the wonders of our jobs, which mostly involve book-keeping, financial services, and tax advice.

Our office tries to spice up the day with fun activities for the kids, so various employees always sign up to take turns entertaining their coworkers’ children for an hour or two while their parents desperately try to get work done.

I didn’t commit myself to a time slot this year, even though one of the kids in the conference room is mine. I honestly have no idea how to entertain more than one child at a time; I would probably have bought the kids golden retriever puppies and cans of Silly String out of sheer desperation.

This handsome, auburn-haired man is somehow managing it, though: eight children are standing against the wall behind the conference table, clutching papers in their hands and bouncing up and down enthusiastically.

The table near them is littered with discarded cupcake wrappers, which may explain why the kids look so excited; their charming Pied Piper created an invisible bouncy castle out of sugar instead of air.

The bounciest of all is my own daughter, Hannah.

She is six, with dark curly hair and an amusingly world-weary way of speaking that she picked up from her Aunt Abby, who babysits her after school for four days a week and helped teach her a pint-sized version of New York City cynicism.

As I watch, Hannah starts jumping from one leg to the other while explaining something to the man, waving both hands for emphasis like a lawyer making closing arguments in a courtroom drama.

The man in the suit nods in agreement, and I watch as she sways back and forth, giddy from all the attention.

Of course she’s glowing, I think; she isn’t used to having a reliable male presence in her life.

Her father, my ex-husband, is a lot of fun—don’t get me wrong.

He has taken Hannah to waterslides and outdoor movies.

He knows how to mimic motorcycle sounds and stomp his feet like a dinosaur.

But he is also a musician, and a few years ago he went to Los Angeles to pursue his dreams, insisting that we would join him as soon as he hit it big.

His refusal to return when he didn’t hit it big was one of the triggers of our divorce.

Ever since then, he tends to pop in and out of our lives at unpredictable intervals, like a ‘guest star’ on a tv show who never quite turns into a ‘series regular.’ Even before we split up, you could never count on Nick to show up exactly when and where he said he would.

Right now, I’m watching this nice married man spend more time with Hannah in an hour than her father has in the last three months.

I assume he is married, anyway: my firm is too large for me to know everyone by name, but I’m pretty sure he is one of the tax attorneys from the fourth floor.

He has red-brown hair, just long enough to be combed back, and his friendly face is framed by a short beard and dark, thoughtful eyebrows.

He is also wearing a green-grey tweed three-piece suit, which seems like further proof that he’s in the legal department: the lawyers are usually the sharpest dressers in our business-casual financial accounting firm.

I personally gravitate toward men in tattoos and jeans, but I can recognize good fashion sense when I see it; this guy looks like he should be cataloguing manuscripts in a library in Scotland.

“Are you ready for your parents?” he calls loudly enough to be audible through the doors. He has the faint trace of an accent: Cockney, maybe? Welsh? I haven’t watched enough British television shows to place it.

“Yes!” The children are fully jumping now.

The man opens the glass door with a flourish, letting in the other parents who have lined up behind me to come see their kids. He glances at me and blinks once.

“Come in,” he says after a second, casting his gaze to the ground.

Well, at least he thinks I’m cute, too. That’s something.

Not that I would ever hit on a married man; I’ve barely been on a date since my divorce, but it is nice to think that I am still capable of causing the occasional double-take.

I used to be considered pretty back in high school, when I spent hours curling my dark brown hair into shampoo-commercial waves.

Now that I’m nearing forty, I rarely bother with more than minimal make-up, and my hair is usually in a bun at work and a ponytail the rest of the time.

The best I can manage these days is ‘hot accountant.’

I pause at the man’s side as the other parents file in around us.

“Okay, confess. What’s your dirty secret?” I ask.

He blinks. “My uh…?”

“Are you some kind of ringer? Did they hire a schoolteacher for the day? How did you get them all to listen to you?”

He chuckles lightly. “Ha. No. I teach sometimes. Not kids, but…”

“You’re amazing with them.”

“Nah.” He blushes a little and runs his hand through his hair, messing it up a bit. He reminds me of a celebrity on late night television, ruefully giving an aw-shucks look at the floor, pretending he doesn’t know that he’s handsome and charming.

“Which one is yours?” I ask as I look around the room.

“Oh.” He shrugs, embarrassed. “None of them. I’m covering for my co-worker who was out sick today.”

My heart misses a single beat.

“But my wife is pregnant with our first, so I’m preparing myself for the chaos,” he adds with a grin.

And there it is. Of course he is married.

Of course he is about to become the perfect father to some lucky offspring in an upscale corner of Westchester or North Jersey.

The single population of New York would never have allowed him to remain on the market for longer than the length of a subway ride. He is too attractive, too likable.

I remind myself that I am happy being single. My daughter Hannah, my sister Abby, and I function pretty well as a little family unit. I’m happy, I say to myself. Happy and just a tiny bit sexually frustrated.

The children ready themselves in front of the room while their parents find seats around the conference table.

I grab one myself, not too far from the door.

It’s irritating how well I can imagine this man’s life: the wife who does Pilates, the color-coded nursery, the house with its artfully weathered front porch and climbing roses.

In my mind, this man has already bought his unborn child a pony and built a two-story playhouse in his backyard.

“Everyone ready?” he calls from his place near the door. “Let’s show them what we rehearsed!”

The children nod and then begin reading from the pages in their hands.

“Oh no! What shall I do?” cries a slender girl with the vocal commitment of a Disney channel starlet. “Our finances are a mess!”

“You need the greatest h-h-hero the world has ever seen!” cries another child, stumbling a bit over the words.

“Superman?” asks my daughter Hannah, her eyes shining.

“No,” says a small boy, stepping forward. “An accountant!”

Everyone laughs as the tiny ‘accountant’ strides forward.

“These numbers are all messed up. We need a tax attorney, too!”

Right then, the red-haired man’s cell phone rings. He glances at it, puzzled.

“Sorry,” he says quietly as he heads to the door. “I think I grabbed my wife’s cell phone this morning. Keep going! You’re doing great!”

The play continues, but my eyes follow him out into the hallway.

I glance between Hannah’s performance and the man I can still see through the glass wall.

He is staring at the phone. He hasn’t answered the call, but his expression grows darker as he scrolls through notifications.

Then his face shifts like he’s been punched.

I try to look away, but it is hard to ignore how upset he is, leaning against the wall, pulling his hand slowly over his face. I tear my gaze back to my daughter.

Hannah grins at me as she clutches a paper with our company’s Murano Accounting logo printed on it, and I smile back encouragingly.

She loves being on stage, just like I did at her age.

I used to tap-dance and sing even though my mother could never afford to get us lessons.

I copied whatever I saw on television, and I thought that meant I was a great performer until I got old enough to compare myself with the other girls whose mothers had bought them real lessons at local dance studios.

It was one step on my path to realizing that our family wasn’t like other families, that our life with my mother was a slow-moving trainwreck.

Does Hannah need dance class? I wonder. It’s one of a long line of doubts I have about whether I’m sufficiently enriching my child’s future. The constant worry hums in the back of my mind, a whispering voice that says I am not being a good enough parent.

She grins again, and I smile back. I can’t help but feel grateful to the man who pulled this silliness together, especially if he is having a bad day. I want to tell him that much, at least, whenever this is over—that he did something special for these kids.

But when I turn around to look for him, he is gone.