“You are not allowed to talk about my parents.”
It feels fantastic to say that. If he can’t talk about them, he can’t criticize them. They’re my parents. Only I get to criticize them.
“I only asked,” he says.
“Well, don’t.”
I study the part of him I can see above the table for signs that he’s having an affair. I’m not sure what I’m looking for here—rashes, sneezing, an unusual level of attention to his looks?
“I thought you’d bring Rosie,” he says.
“It’s too close to her bedtime. She gets cranky.”
He accepts this, but I don’t. Bad mother, I tell myself. Wicked mother, keeping your baby from her father.
He could’ve said he wanted to see her, myself answers, and I chalk this up as a point for her.
Neither of the people physically present at the table has said anything for a while now.
“You’re the one who wanted to talk,” he says. “So talk.”
“I don’t know what to tell anyone,” I say. “Why are we doing this?”
He talks. After a length of time I don’t measure, I realize I’m not getting an answer, but I let him talk anyway. I study his face for rashes, although I don’t suppose this is the part of his anatomy I should check.
“Forget it,” I say. “Let’s talk about child support.”
He talks about bills and the mortgage on the house I don’t live in anymore. He says I’m going to have to go back to work.
“You think I don’t know that?” I say. “Of course I know that. But if you think I can support Rosie alone—”
We argue about child support and his spending habits and my spending habits, and about health insurance, the size of his paycheck, the size of my paycheck in the job I don’t even have yet, and whose idea it was that I not go back to work after Rosie was born. We argue about how much I spend on groceries.
He used to tease me for buying generic, and I did stop, although for some stuff, I swear, the only difference is the price. He coached me to buy 100 percent cotton percale when we shopped for sheets, organic when I shopped for food, microbrew when I shopped for beer.
He was worth it. We were worth it.
I, however, am not worth it.
We don’t mention credit cards.
The boy with the pierced lip and the bar code is staring at us.
“Can you keep your voice down?” I say to Thad.
A woman sitting two tables away turns to stare at me and I lower my own voice and whisper, “Can you keep your voice down?”
We reach a temporary agreement about child support and I ask if he can give me some money to tide me over. This will symbolize his commitment and let me be honest and aboveboard and never use the credit card again, although I don’t tell him this since he doesn’t know I’ve been using it.
He says he didn’t expect, and in any case he didn’t bring—
I remind him of the existence of cash machines.
We argue about the state of his bank account. I don’t mention microbrews, although maybe I should.
He hands me twenty dollars from his wallet and I shove it into my purse, alongside the wedding ring and the credit card, which is back from the kind of retirement people have when they discover their pension fund was invested in nonfat mortgage-backed securitized whatever they were called. Sold by Bernie Madoff.
When I walk to the door, everyone’s eyes follow me—I can feel them without having to look—and I lock my own eyes straight ahead until I get to the car, where I sit behind the wheel and burst into tears.
Thad walks by without seeming to notice me, and then he drives past, steering with one hand and holding the phone to his ear with the other. I follow him until he pulls into the parking lot of a small restaurant. Through the window, I see a candle glowing on every table.
I am consumed by hate. This burns calories even more efficiently than nursing.
I drive to my parents’ house.
My mother says, “I didn’t even know where to put my grandbaby to sleep—”
Rosie’s asleep on the living room rug. I pick her up and she melts into me without waking.
“You have got to get a crib for this child,” my mother says.
“She has a crib.”
“Not here, she doesn’t.”
I kiss the top of her head.
“Isn’t she gorgeous?” I say.
“She’ll fall out of bed and be retarded.”
“I’ll bring it over, okay? I’ll bring it this weekend.”
I wash Rosie and take her to bed with me and try to read, but I can’t concentrate.
I turn off the light, but in the dark I see restaurant candles glowing through the window.
What I should have done was let Thad get settled, then walk in to see who he was meeting. She’d be thin and beautiful, with a black dress and a sleek silver necklace. Or she’d be ordinary looking. She’d be younger than me, and thinner. Or older and more sophisticated. Someone more from Thad’s background.
For all I know about this new Thad, she could be a he. She could be the underage babysitter, except we never had a babysitter because we never went out together after Rosie was born.
Except tonight, which doesn’t count.
I turn on the light and try to read. I turn off the light and try to sleep.
I listen to my parents get ready for bed. The red numbers change on the clock. I try to imagine that none of this has happened.
I get dressed, wrap the blanket around Rosie, and buckle her into her car seat while she screams. I sing “The Eensy Weensy Spider” while I drive.
She cries until she hiccups and then she sleeps.
I park across the street from the house Thad and I bought back when spending money was sexy. A car that isn’t Thad’s or mine is parked in the driveway. It’s one of those things with gold-colored lettering to let everyone know it’s expensive. She probably leases it and pays the lease with her credit card. She pays off the credit card with another credit card. She swallows the MasterCard to catch the Visa; she swallows the Visa to catch the American Express.
The windows of the house are dark. All they tell me is that no one’s playing Scrabble in there.
If I dropped a match in her gas tank, I could be gone before anyone even noticed me, but I don’t smoke so I don’t carry matches, which I deeply regret right now.
Eventually I get bored and drive back to my parents’ house. When I unbuckle Rosie from her car seat, she wakes up and cries. I walk up and down in the driveway, singing “Bye, baby bunting, Papa’s found a dumpling.”
After she screams herself to sleep, I sneak into the house and carry her to bed with me.
The red numbers change on the clock.
I try to sleep.
Right. I’m as likely to sleep as I am to grow feathers. I bite my pillow. I list everything Thad’s done wrong, and, when I’m done with that, I list everything I’ve done right.
The second list is much shorter than the first. The only thing I can think of is creating Rosie, and I can’t claim credit for that. It’s not like I designed her.
No one loves me. Except my