Chapter 24
Ilena
Sunday Evening
Three Days After the Outing
“Be like you,” Ilena half sings, half hums as she perfects the angled pocket of her last napkin and sets it on top of the
black dinner plate. She sways as she circles the stainless-steel table, slipping knives, forks, and spoons into the cloth
pocket of her napkin folds. It’d look better against a table made of reclaimed wood and plates of white, all things she’d
learned by helping her mother, things that ended after her father left.
“Duh, duh, duh, and the man in the moon.” Her finger taps her belly to the beat. It’s surreal to be in this body, an unmistakable
and unceasing reminder that this is a different place, a different life, a different Ilena. When she spins around to get the
wineglasses, she sees Felix watching her. “Oh, hey there . . . you.” She’s really got to search this Ilena’s texts and emails
for a hint of any pet names.
“What was I thinking, even suggesting James host this? You are in your element.”
“So long as no one mushes cupcake under the sheets.” She laughs softly, mindful of causing an involuntary release of her bladder.
Felix cocks his head. “Why would anyone do that?”
A flash of Jonah saying “devil children.” “They wouldn’t. It’s just a figure of speech.”
“Is it?”
She tries to brush off the slip by adjusting the hydrangeas delivered with the order of food. Blue, not white. Again, fine
if it were a farmhouse table, but it blends too easily with the gray of the stainless. There was a time when she wouldn’t
have been able to stop herself from channeling her mother and would have marched right back to the grocery store and demanded
an exchange. There was a time when Jonah would have done it for her, before she saw the mistake, without ever mentioning that
Ilena was still trying to please a woman who could never be pleased. That was a long time ago, before Plum Island. Another
life, another world.
A world Mallory insists they get back to. They should, of course they should, except . . . AIM’s doing even better here. Ilena
checked with marketing, and there haven’t been any signs of suspicious focus group results, no strange accounts to suggest
the stock value isn’t earned. Plus, they’re going to be on the goddamn Shandy Shane Show, and Ilena doesn’t really care if it’s only Mallory. Though maybe she should with the unbalanced vibe Mallory’s beginning
to exude.
Then there’s Ethan. Alive. Not that she wants Aubrey to be with him here. But at least, here, the guilt that had become a
parasite might finally pass. Everything here is right; everything here is better. Except for James.
And Grayson.
That list doesn’t include Jonah. She had to let go.
For her, there is no Jonah here. And the one at home might have moved out by now.
Maybe back to the city, where he’d been wanting to go.
Ilena had kept insisting that you couldn’t raise kids in the city.
Each time she said that, he simply responded, Mallory grew up in the city.
A loaded remark inviting her to either speak poorly of her best friend or become a hypocrite.
But it was never about returning to the city. The city was a metaphor for the life they once had, in college, in their twenties
and early thirties when they didn’t mind smelling their downstairs neighbors’ pepperoni pizza through the bathroom radiator
or angling the outdoor couch on their narrow porch so they could no longer see the neon G of the Walgreens sign that poked through a gap in the trees. When they were enough for each other.
It was his decision to change that. Something he forgot as conveniently as he forgot that it was their neighbors’ use of the
common hallway as a time-out space for their shrieking three-year-old that made him want to move to the suburbs. She was the
one who’d been unsure initially. The restaurants, the cheese and wine shops, AIM, and most of all, Mallory, all within a short
walk, not a drive through traffic that was no longer relegated to rush hour. But eventually she’d come to appreciate their
small yard and their own four walls. And yet, she doesn’t mind living here, in Felix’s apartment. Maybe she’d have been the
one to move back to the city after the direct listing, once the divorce was final.
The singleton wallops her, and Ilena swells with renewed purpose. She resumes her table setting and hums, “Hmm, hmm, good
time, then, we’ll have a good time then.”
Footsteps from behind, then Felix asks, “What’s that you’re singing?”
“‘Cats in the Cradle,’ you know, silver spoon and all that.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Harry Chapin?”
“That’s a new one for me. Is it some kid’s lullaby?”
“Not really.” Is there no Harry Chapin here or is Felix’s musical taste not stuck in the seventies like Ilena’s? “My mom used to play it nonstop. Come to think of it, I remember her singing along to it and realizing it wasn’t really all that nice of a song.”
“I’m sure it’s not what you think. How many lyrics change meaning when you’re older?”
“Hmm, yeah, probably.”
“What a shame they couldn’t come.”
“Short notice.” That and the fact that Ilena never contacted them. She couldn’t bear for her mother to criticize this child
inside of her the way she criticized Ilena’s role at AIM (why not CEO!), her pixie cut (you’re practically bald), and her
husband (if only he were a “real” doctor instead of an anesthesiologist). Though Ilena would have liked to see this version
of her sister.
“Next time.” Felix juts his chin to the set table. “And we’ve got our extended fam, right here. I’ll get on the steak.”
Ilena pushes aside the thoughts of her family. “So glad I married a chef disguised as a lawyer. When there’s no lobster for
the risotto, he pivots just like that.” She snaps her fingers before reaching for the wineglasses in the rack above the buffet.
He helps her by sliding the glasses forward, the ones the singleton prevents her from reaching. “I told you it’d all work
out. Unorthodox, maybe, but we got this.”
“That we do.” She smiles broadly. “I’m even thinking an AIM spin-off? Gender-reveal, engagement, retirement, you name it.
Parties in an instant?”
“Might as well be your middle name.”
She laughs, but Felix doesn’t seem to be joking. He returns to the kitchen, and she rubs her stomach. Practical, responsible,
that’s who Ilena is. And yet she’d once made out with Jonah in the sculptured bronze lap of the John Harvard statue—after scouring the yard for campus police, but still, she’d done it.
She’d said yes to the dunk tank at the second AIM outing, and it was legal—Felix—who’d nixed it, which she highly suspected would happen, but no one needed to know that.
And she’d handed Mallory that roll of duct tape.
But that wasn’t because she thought it’d be fun or even for the bigger dorm room, though that was a bonus.
It was because even then, Ilena knew how much they each needed the other to become the women they were destined to be.
This is who Ilena was destined to become, she’s sure of it.