Chapter 3 – June
JUNE
I'm standing in front of a wall of throw pillows deciding whether our bedroom needs texture or whether that's just a word decorators use to charge you more, when someone grabs my elbow from behind.
"June! Oh my God, I knew that was you. I said to myself, that woman has June's posture."
I turn around and there's Tanya, in oversized sunglasses and a cream sweater that probably costs what I used to make in a month, holding exactly zero shopping bags. It's a Tuesday morning. Of course she's here.
"Tanya. Hi." I do the smile. The good one. "What are you doing in this neighborhood?"
"Just wandering. I had a facial at eleven and now I'm floating." She says floating while gripping my arm hard enough to leave marks. "What are you getting? Oh, pillows. Fun. Matt always said you could make any room look expensive."
I file that one away to examine later. Matt always said. Past tense or present tense? When is she talking to my husband about my decorating?
"How are you feeling?" I ask, because I'm not a monster, and because it's the question you're supposed to ask a pregnant woman.
"Disgusting in the mornings, starving by noon. Nobody warns you. Or they do, actually, everyone warns you constantly, it's all anyone wants to talk about." She waves a hand. "Hey. Since you're here—this is fate, actually, I was dreading doing this alone—come look at baby things with me?"
"The baby's the size of a raspberry, isn't it?"
"Ten and a half weeks, thank you, I have the app.
" She's already steering me by the elbow toward the escalator.
"The nursery floor is three up. Rob won't go, he says it's bad luck to buy things early, which is just his way of saying he doesn't want to spend a Saturday holding onesies.
Please? It'll be fun. We never do anything just us. "
We never do anything just us because in sixteen years she has never once suggested anything just us, but she's right that refusing would make me the villain of a story she'll tell at brunch. So I go.
The nursery floor is a pastel universe. Tiny socks arranged in gradients. A rocking chair with a four-figure price tag. Tanya makes a beeline for the cribs and runs her hand along a white one with turned spindles.
"Okay, honest opinion. This one or the gray?"
"The white. The gray will look dated in three years."
"See, this is why I needed you. Rob's mother wants to buy the crib and she has such specific taste. Everything in her house is from 1994 and beige. If I let her pick, my daughter will be sleeping in a doily."
"You're having a girl?"
"I don't know yet. I just feel it." She presses a hand to her stomach, which is, at ten weeks, completely flat. "A girl. Matty will be such a good uncle. He's always been so good with kids. You must know that better than anyone."
"Mm."
It's a small sentence. There's nothing in it I can object to. That's her gift. Every barb comes wrapped in something you'd sound insane complaining about, so you just stand there bleeding internally and nodding.
We move to the clothes. Tanya holds up a tiny cardigan with embroidered ducks and goes soft for one genuine moment, and in that moment I like her.
I actually do. There's a woman in there who's scared and thrilled and about to become somebody's mother, and I feel a wash of real tenderness toward her, and I reach out and squeeze her shoulder.
"You're going to be great at this, Tanya."
She looks at my hand on her shoulder, then at me, and something closes behind her eyes.
"That's sweet. You'd know, right? All those years of teaching." She turns back to the rack. "It must have been so hard, giving up your career. I could never. I need my own thing, you know? I'd go crazy just being someone's—" she catches herself, makes a show of it, "—well. Everyone's different."
Just being someone's wife. She stopped herself from saying it and made sure I heard her stop, which is the same as saying it twice.
"I don't regret it," I say, evenly.
"Of course you don't! You have the penthouse and the pillows. It worked out." A pause, timed to the second. "Do you ever think about going back? Now that the move's done? You're, what, forty-five? There's still time."
"Forty-six."
"Right, sorry. Forty-six." She says it gently, the way you'd correct the record about someone's diagnosis.
I pick up a onesie printed with tiny whales and focus on it very hard. It's soft. The stitching is good. I am not going to give her the satisfaction of watching my face do anything.
Two hours. It takes two hours. She buys the ducks and the whales and a set of crib sheets and a stuffed elephant she names Gerald on the spot, and twice she says Matty will love this, once about a mobile and once about a night light shaped like a moon, and both times I smile and say nothing because what is there to say that doesn't make me the petty one.
She's known him since she was seven. She's allowed.
That's the whole fortress she lives inside—she's allowed.
At the register she asks the salesgirl to gift-wrap the elephant, then turns to me with her eyebrows up.
"You're not getting anything?"
"It's a little pointless for me to be buying baby clothes."
"Oh." She tilts her head. "I just thought—never mind. It's silly."
"What?"
"Nothing." A beat. "I just thought you'd want to. For the baby. Since you're going to be Aunt June." She smiles, and there's genuine confusion underneath it, or a very good forgery of it. "But you're right, it's early. Forget I said anything."
And there it is, the full maneuver. If I'd bought something, I'd be presuming. Since I didn't, I'm cold. The game has no winning square and she designed the board.
"I'll get the baby something when there's more baby," I say pleasantly, and she links her arm through mine and calls me a pragmatist, which in Tanya's vocabulary sits one shelf below spinster.
I make it home by four with a headache camped behind my right eye and a newfound hatred of ducks. I drop my keys in the bowl, pour a glass of water, and am standing at the kitchen window decompressing when Matt comes through the door, which is its own event—it's not even five.
"Hey, you." He drops his briefcase, comes over, kisses my temple. "How was shopping?"
I look at him sideways. "How did you know I went shopping?"
"Tanya texted me. Said you two ran into each other and made a whole day of it." He grins, loosening his tie. "That's great, June. Really. I love that you two are spending time together."
Of course she texted him. Of course she did. She spent two hours taking careful shots at me and then drove home and narrated the day to my husband before I even got my shoes off. She's writing the record. She's always writing the record.
"It was fine."
He catches the flatness. He sets his phone on the counter—facedown, which is its own small miracle—and leans against the island, studying me. "She said you seemed a little out of sorts toward the end."
"Did she."
"Hey." He crosses to me, takes the water glass out of my hand, sets it down, and wraps his arms around me from behind, chin on my shoulder.
"Long day? Come out to dinner with me. Just us.
That place on Hudson with the bar you liked, I'll call for a table.
We haven't done a spontaneous weeknight dinner since we moved. "
I laugh. I can't help it. It comes out sharp.
"What?" he says.
"Out of sorts. What gave her that impression, I wonder.
Was it the part where she spent the entire trip talking about herself?
The part where she told me I'd be lost without my own thing, because clearly being your wife isn't a real occupation?
Or the part where she made a whole performance of me not buying a stuffed elephant?
She keeps score, Matt. Every conversation is a match and I didn't agree to play. "
He goes quiet for a second. His arms stay around me, but I feel him recalibrating, choosing the gentle gear.
"June. Baby." He turns me around to face him.
"She's pregnant, she's hormonal, her fiancé's a jackass and she knows it.
She talks too much and half of what comes out is noise.
But she adores you. She texted me the second she left the store—June was amazing, I don't know what I'd do without her. Her exact words."
I don't know what I'd do without her. She said that to him, and to my face she said I was a pragmatist. Both things can be true.
That's what makes it exhausting—I'm not even sure she's lying to either of us.
I think Tanya Curtis contains many different personalities and every one of them wants something from my man.
"Maybe I misunderstood," I say, because it's easier, because he's standing here at five o'clock with his phone facedown offering me dinner, because the man is trying, and the war I'd have to start to make my case would cost more than the victory.
"That's my girl." He kisses my forehead, misses the flatness of the sentence entirely, the way he always does. "Go get dressed up. Wear the green thing. Seven o'clock reservation, and I am turning my phone off at the door. You have my full, undivided attention for one entire evening."
"You don't even know which one the green thing is."
"I know it makes you happy and that it has a zip I like."
I swat him and head for the bedroom, and he smacks my hip on the way past and calls out something about wine, and it's nice. It's genuinely nice. This is the version of him I married, the one who notices things, and he's offering me the whole evening on a plate.
I stand in the closet in my slip, looking at the green dress.
Tanya was supposed to have her own orbit now—Rob, the baby, the house, the ring.
Her own gravity. And instead she's shopping with me on a Tuesday and filing reports with my husband by four, and Matt is telling me what a good time we had, a good time she invented and he believes, and I'm standing in my closet letting it go because fighting it makes me the problem.
I've seen this exact configuration before. Three years ago I drank champagne alone in my kitchen because we'd finally escaped it.
I pull the green dress off the hanger and put it on and zip it up myself.
Old patterns, I think, and smooth the skirt down over my hips. We're falling right back into all the old patterns, and I'm the only one who can see the grooves.