Chapter Two Talia
Chapter Two
Talia
Talia Danvers knows what she wants, and it isn’t this.
It feels uncharitable to think that way, especially since Gracie is pretty funny and sweet.
But looking around Meera’s cramped two-bedroom Tarrytown condo—every surface crowded with unfolded laundry and Barbie dolls and Gracie’s art projects from school—Talia doesn’t feel envy.
She may be thirty-one and childless, but she knows when it happens for her, it’s going to happen the right way.
On the couch next to Talia, Gracie watches cartoons while upside down, her bare feet dangling over the back of the sofa and her head grazing the carpet.
She’s still in her pajamas, though Meera has asked her three times already to get dressed.
Talia wasn’t allowed to watch TV growing up, but she can at least identify this character on the screen as SpongeBob SquarePants.
“Why don’t you want to go to your dad’s?” Talia asks.
Gracie’s eyes don’t leave the screen. “Because his house is stupid, and every meal has to be GGB.”
“We don’t say ‘stupid,’” calls Meera from the bathroom, where she’s dragging a mascara wand through her eyelashes.
“What’s ‘GGB’?”
“Stupid,” Gracie mutters.
Meera ignores this. “Grain, green, and bean,” she tells Talia. “It’s her dad’s requirement for all meals. Hari’s girlfriend is a vegan now, apparently.”
“I see.” Talia kicks off her flip-flops and swivels her body around so that, like Gracie, her legs hang over the back of the sofa and her hair grazes the carpet. Blood rushes to her skull, but Gracie giggles, delighted to find Talia’s head hanging beside hers.
“I don’t like beans,” she whispers to Talia.
“I don’t like beans either,” Talia whispers back. “They make me fart.”
Gracie laughs again, her big brown eyes crinkling in the corners.
“Do you like your dad’s girlfriend?”
“She’s okay.” Gracie turns her attention back to the TV screen. “I’d rather hang out with you and Mom.”
From upside down, Talia watches Meera frown into the bathroom mirror. She hates seeing her friend stress.
“You know what’s cool about your dad’s house, though?” she asks Gracie.
“What?”
“Marty lives there, and you get to spend the next two days playing with him.”
She doesn’t respond, but Talia can tell Gracie is trying not to smile; she loves her new dachshund puppy.
“And I bet Marty will eat all of your beans for you, even if they make him a little gassy.”
“He will.” Gracie nods, her dark ponytail bobbing with her.
“Your dad will probably be here soon to pick you up. Want me to help you pick out an outfit? I bet he’ll have Marty with him.”
“That’s okay.” Gracie plants her hands on the carpet and performs an effortless backbend kickover off the sofa. Talia can’t really remember being seven, but she feels certain she could never move her body like that.
With some struggle, she gets herself upright again on the sofa, and Meera joins her. Together they watch as Gracie disappears behind her bedroom door.
“I don’t know how you did that, but thank you,” she says.
“Anytime,” Talia replies, and she means it.
She’s good with kids, and it feels nice to have this skill, one she knows men appreciate.
Of course, she knows not to seem too interested in children, lest a guy think she’s desperate to procreate.
Dating means having to navigate a thousand contradictions, but if Talia’s instincts are right (which they usually are), she’ll never have to go on another first date again.
After Meera’s ex arrives to pick up Gracie, she and Talia head to brunch at Maudie’s Café in Westlake, which Meera claims is the best Maudie’s location.
Personally, Talia doesn’t love the idea of breakfast tacos, but there are few things Meera likes about Austin, and Tex-Mex is one of them.
For her best friend, Talia is willing to stomach a plate of greasy chorizo migas.
The host sets them up on the patio facing the parking lot, where they perch on wobbly metal chairs and bake in the heat of exhaust fumes and the already-hot sun. Struggling to peel her laminated menu off the table, Meera wrinkles her nose.
“I thought you loved Maudie’s,” Talia says, teasing.
“I do. Just not between the months of April and October.”
“Manhattan gets hot too.”
“Yeah.” Meera finally unsticks her menu from the table. “But even when it’s hot, it’s still cool.”
It’s been eight years since Meera’s then-husband convinced her to leave New York City to move to his hometown in Texas, and she’s still bitter about it (mostly because Hari ended up leaving her just a few years later).
But Talia—who moved from Lee County, Alabama, about three years ago—loves life in Austin, where being over the age of thirty without a ring on your finger doesn’t invite strange looks.
At Auburn University, she was one of three girls in her sorority who didn’t get engaged before graduation.
Here in Austin, there’s far less pressure to settle down—though that doesn’t stop Talia from putting pressure on herself.
Meera fans herself with her menu. “Fuck. I don’t know how anyone functions in this heat. How am I supposed to go on a date when I can’t stop sweating?”
“Have you?”
“Been sweating? Yes, a fuck ton.”
“No.” Talia swats her friend. “Been dating.”
“A little. As it turns out, no one wants to date a thirtysomething, chronically ill divorcée who’s still carrying baby weight, even though her kid is seven.”
“C’mon. You’re a knockout, and an awesome mom, and a badass engineer. Any guy would be crazy not to want you.” Talia doesn’t quite believe the words she’s saying any more than Meera probably does, but it feels like the right thing to say. After all, Meera didn’t expect things to end up like this.
Meera was still married and had already been at Cuff for a year when Talia was hired as a machine learning engineer.
Talia had never imagined herself working for an online dating service—she’d hoped to become an AI trainer—but Cuff had just been acquired by Match Group and wanted to expand, so getting an entry-level position was easy.
Talia liked to say it was fate that she and Meera were paired together for Talia’s first assignment (though being the only female engineers on the machine learning team probably had something to do with that decision).
Initially, Meera seemed like someone who wasn’t looking for new friends, what with her handsome husband and handful of a toddler at home.
But still the two bonded over Shonda Rhimes shows and sushi restaurants and the pitfalls of being women in STEM.
And when Meera’s marriage started to crumble, Talia was the one who kept Meera from falling apart too.
Three years and a messy divorce later, Talia considers Meera the closest thing she has to a sister—despite having an actual sister, to whom she hasn’t spoken in years.
“Yeah, okay.” Meera flips her off with both fingers. “What about you, hot stuff? Whatever happened with that lawyer who took you to the fancy omakase restaurant? Has he gotten a chance to see your new little French-girl haircut?”
The server arrives then, saving Talia from having to answer right away. As he fills their water glasses and takes their orders, she steels herself. Then she takes a deep breath and tells Meera the news she’s been both eager and reluctant to share all morning.
“He was nice, but I don’t think I’m going to see him again. I think I’m seeing Townsend again, actually.”
After that night a few weeks ago when they watched the bats take flight, she wasn’t sure Townsend would call.
She hoped he would, obviously, but she’s been working on letting things unfold at their own pace.
For years, she was always hurry up and go, impatient to get to the happily ever after she’d always longed for.
Now, however, she knows that some things just take time.
For the right guy, she’s willing to wait.
Like a perfect gentleman, Townsend rowed her back to shore, kissed her chastely on the cheek, and said they should see each other again soon—on purpose, next time. It was a piecrust promise, she figured. Easily made, easily broken.
But he did call. He called her the next morning (a phone call, not even a text) and asked her to dinner that night.
For nearly four hours, they laughed over pre-Prohibition cocktails and pommes frites at Péché in the Warehouse District, where the lighting was so dim and the drinks were so strong that Talia was tempted to kiss Townsend right there at the table.
But she didn’t kiss him then, and she didn’t kiss him three nights later, either, when he took her to Red Ash and ordered a $950 bottle of Barolo and finally, fully, apologized for how their relationship had ended last year.
No, it wasn’t until their Saturday-night date at the Blue Starlite Drive-in—one week after they’d reunited—that she leaned over the center console of Townsend’s silver sports car and kissed him, just as she’d been dying to do for the past six months since their breakup.
Neither of them cared about the movie (some slasher flick about an aspiring actress stalked by a vicious killer in 1980s Los Angeles), so they left and returned to Townsend’s condo, where they had sex twice before falling asleep in each other’s arms. It was the happiest Talia had felt in a very long time. Perhaps ever.
In the morning, they stayed in bed and talked, the conversation spanning from a childhood trip Townsend took to Monterey, to Talia’s childhood fear of stingrays, to Townsend’s dream of spending one more afternoon with his father, to Talia’s wish that she could have been there for him when his dad passed.
“It just means the world to me that you’re here now,” he told her. “With all the fucking pressure I’m under right now, I feel like you’re the one person keeping me sane.”
“I’m here for you,” she promised him. “I’m not going anywhere.”