Chapter Twelve Bailey
Twelve
Bailey
Bacon
When Bailey was sixteen, she was a vegetarian for a year.
It started because she accidentally watched some report on beef processing.
She was so disgusted by the footage of the pink juices that she found herself gagging whenever she tried to eat a burger.
It rapidly extended to chicken and turkey, and before long she was annoying her entire family by pretending to enjoy eggplant or eating only the bread and lettuce on her sandwiches.
The thing that brought her back to the omnivorous fold, unsurprisingly, was bacon.
She was at her grandmother’s one day and a plate of crispy bacon sat on the table.
Without thinking, she reached out and snagged a piece.
It was perfect. She ate seven strips and never looked back.
When Bailey thought about her sex life, she wondered who her bacon would be, who might bring her back to her old self.
At this point she had been celibate for six months, the longest run since she was a sophomore in high school.
Her body was slowly healing, she was no longer bleeding, she could walk for an hour without getting dizzy, and the stitches had dissolved without her even noticing.
Her stomach, which in the early weeks after birth had been loose and squishy like a deflated volleyball, had finally started to flatten out again.
And yet, she had been skittish about the prospect of adult sleepovers ever since the shit show with Mac Maker at the hotel.
Her sister Kylie felt strongly that Bailey needed to “get out of the house and have a date night.” She kept bringing it up and offering to babysit.
“When Lulu was born, Jeff and I decided that we were going to have a date night every single week and we’ve done it ever since.
Date nights have saved our marriage,” she said wisely.
“It also means we prioritize our sex life. Physical touch is really important to Jeff.” Bailey fought back a gag.
But the funny thing about Kylie’s insistence on a “date night” was that she didn’t seem to actually understand that Bailey wasn’t dating anyone.
“Meet someone new!” she admonished. “When I was single, I’d go out on three different dates a week. ”
“The fact that you did that before Tinder is mind-blowing,” Bailey said. “I don’t even know how you found three different people without the internet.”
“Oh, it was easy. Our fund shared an office building with about six other investment banks and there was one big cafeteria filled with almost all guys. I’d just pretend to have trouble opening the fridge for a Diet Coke and half the time someone helped me he’d end up asking me out.”
“You were dating multiple guys who all worked in the same building?”
“Yeah, it started to get a little awkward balancing all of them plus the Bruins players, but around that time things were getting serious with Jeff, so it all worked out for the best!”
Bailey’s sisters were walking nightmares.
Still, Bailey went on Tinder and lined up a date with a real estate investor who lived in Southie.
They had cocktails and easy conversation, he was handsome and age appropriate, but halfway through her second drink Bailey started showing him photos of Dylan and everything got weird.
It wasn’t that he minded her having a baby, it was that Bailey realized the intense longing she felt to be home cuddling Dylan far outweighed any desire she had to pull off the guy’s clothes.
They said goodnight and Bailey was home by nine.
It was fine, Bailey decided, to just let that old part of her life go.
If she needed to sip a martini in a bar, she could ask Augusta or Fran.
If she needed to get off, she could do it on her own.
She didn’t want to be dating when she could spend every single night with the guy she loved best. Sure, she was a little lonely, and she desperately missed flirting, but she felt like she was fine on her own.
Fine, until the candle thing scared her half to death.
Over the past year Bailey had developed the most insane sense of smell.
It was possibly the weirdest part about motherhood, even weirder than the random crying jags, the hair loss, or the tingling nipples.
She felt like a drug dog or a truffle hunting pig, and while people talked about how strong smells affected women during pregnancy, she had been unprepared for the fact that her new superpower would stick around even after.
Bailey could smell the flowers on the kitchen counter from two rooms away.
She could smell leftover lasagna through the closed door of the refrigerator.
And most troubling of all, she could smell the diaper pail from every single room in the house.
Honestly, despite scented bags and pedal twisting mechanisms, there was nothing that actually worked to keep the horrific stench under control.
Without her mother coming by to watch Dylan in the mornings, Bailey found herself unable to take out the diapers for days at a time.
Dylan cried every time she put him down, and the act of pulling on boots and a jacket and hefting the steaming green bag out to the driveway while wearing the baby in his carrier just seemed utterly impossible.
So, to make her house habitable, Bailey started burning candles nonstop, the expensive ones that cost sixty dollars and masked Budweiser Manor in perfume.
It was like living in a sorority house where layers of vanilla and jasmine almost-but-not-quite obscured the stink of true filth.
It was noon on a Tuesday and Bailey was in her pajamas, trying to make a bottle while Dylan sobbed uncontrollably against her chest. When the fire alarm went off it was shockingly loud, a screaming siren from the second floor, and her first impulse was to cover Dylan’s ears.
She started for the staircase, but then, realizing she shouldn’t carry Dylan toward a fire, quickly unwrapped him from the carrier and lay him down in the middle of the kitchen floor.
Upstairs the alarm was so loud Bailey could feel it in her teeth, and she saw smoke, acrid and black, billowing toward the ceiling.
The candle—some off-brand thing delivered in a basket of cranberry scones and autumnal napkins she had received when Dylan was born—had come in a wooden dish rather than a glass votive, and instead of burning down and self-extinguishing, the wooden vessel had caught on fire.
The flames were ten inches high, and Bailey, heart pounding out of her chest, searched frantically for something to throw on it.
She had meant to buy a fire extinguisher, but she’d never done so.
She grabbed a blanket, a beautiful cashmere stroller blanket, and hurled it at the candle, but only succeeded in tipping over the dish, spilling wax all over the dresser and setting the corner of the blanket on fire.
“Shit!” Bailey swore. She ran into the bathroom and grabbed Dylan’s little bathtub, filling it with water.
It seemed to be taking forever, Bailey breathing frantically as the faucet glugged.
Just beyond the screaming of the alarm she could hear Dylan crying with outrage downstairs.
She hefted the baby tub into the room and threw the water at the dresser, finally dousing the flames with an angry hiss.
Black wax spattered everywhere, and the room filled with the stink of chemical smoke and burned goat hair from the blanket.
She opened all the windows, turned on a fan, and aimed it at the fire alarm until the deafening scream stopped.
Downstairs Dylan was purple with fury, and she scooped him off the floor.
She was panting and shaking with adrenaline.
“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” She held him to her chest. What the hell had she been thinking?
Starting a fire in a house with a baby? She wanted to call Van, but she felt too embarrassed by her own stupidity.
She pushed her lips to Dylan’s head, rubbing his back and pacing until her heart slowed down and she could breathe again.
An hour later, when he finally fell asleep in his bassinet, she ventured back upstairs.
The house was freezing from the open windows and the room was trashed.
Bailey set about bagging the burned remains of the candle and the baby blanket, crying as she took a hairdryer to melt the spilled wax so she could wipe it up with an old towel.
When she was finished there was a dark ring on the dresser, but she covered it with a music box and vowed never to tell anyone what had happened.
Deep down she was horribly shaken, though.
She was alone, solely responsible for Dylan, the greatest love and duty of her life, and she was just one candle away from burning her whole stupid house down.
Even though Bailey was too proud to call Van about the pumpkin-scented-candle fire, she had started texting him at random times throughout the day.
Now that he and Caroline Lash had broken up, Bailey didn’t have to worry as much about her accidental powers of flirtation, didn’t have to worry about making Caroline jealous, and she found herself sending Van links to interesting articles, memes about millennial parenting, and jokes about the healing powers of Diet Coke.
They didn’t talk about Caroline, and life carried on as always, as though nothing had changed, but maybe everything had.