And Josey, suddenly distracted from her onstage class, her gaze on the backstage drama, was sure she would never forget, in her whole life, the look on the mother’s face. As the woman gazed at her husband and daughter, there was a glowing serenity about her, a sweet combination of love and satisfaction that reminded Josey of a holy madonna statue.
And although Josey couldn’t hear her voice, she instinctively knew that when the woman bent her head toward her husband, her murmured words were, “I love you.”
Then the pair slipped quietly back to their seats, and Josey returned her attention to her class, and the show went on.
When the curtain closed, all the parents jumped to their feet, clapping and whistling. Josey leaped onto the stage, pushed behind the curtain and lined up the children, holding hands, for their bow. When one little boy and girl in the middle refused to touch each other’s hand—fear of cooties, no doubt—Josey alleviated the problem by stepping between them and taking a small hand in each of hers. She nodded at the stage girl to pull the curtain open again, and as cameras flashed and camcorders whirred, Josey took the deserved bow with her hardworking, exhausted kids.
But in that moment, when she expected her heart would swell with its usual pride, it felt achy and hollow—a first for her.
When the last straggling child had gone for the day, Josey looked around the room, abandoned for the afternoon. Rays of sunshine filtered through the window blinds and lit up the desks in the front row. Everything was so familiar and yet felt strange to her. She felt strange, really. As if she’d never really seen anything before and now it was all suddenly clear.
Instead of rummaging through her desk for her take-home work—papers to grade, lessons to plan—she just went to the closet, grabbed her spring trench coat and flung it over her arm. She picked her keys absently out of her top desk drawer and left the classroom, slamming the door behind her.
The subway ride home passed in a daze. Josey hung on to the overhead bar, the car’s motion bumping her into fellow Boston commuters. She didn’t notice. She just stared at her own face, reflected in the window as the train moved through the darkness in between stations. She looked at herself, standing in the crowd, the way someone else on the subway might have looked at her, and she didn’t feel anything at all. She got off at her stop automatically, and walked the three blocks to her apartment building. It was a pleasant walk, and usually Josey thought about how nice it was to live in such a historic, if slightly overpriced, neighborhood. But today she may as well have been walking through a war zone, for all she knew.
She turned her key in the front door and without stopping at her mailbox, started up the stairs to her apartment. She didn’t bother knocking on Nate’s door to see if he was home yet, just dragged up one more flight and let herself into her own place.
The answering machine was blinking—two messages—but Josey didn’t care. She threw her coat over a chair and flopped onto the sofa, listlessly staring up at the ceiling. She didn’t care at all. She felt…empty. She kicked off her beige suede pumps.
What had happened to her? This day had been turning out so well. The play went off with barely a hitch. She was able to talk to parents without stammering… Even this morning, her kids had done so well on their spelling tests—
Her kids. Her kids.
They weren’t her kids. They were all someone else’s kids.
In the peeling ceiling plaster, Josey suddenly saw Jamie’s mother’s face again, beaming with pride and love at her family. Josey didn’t know what the woman did for a living, but she suspected family was the woman’s first priority.
Having a family had never been her priority.
She liked—no, loved—being single. She liked having different dates on different weekends, and getting to know a variety of people. Her girlfriends—Ally, for one—thought of dating as a necessary step to finding the right man and getting married. But Josey didn’t think that way. It was too much pressure. How could you go out to dinner with a man you just met and be checking him out for commitment potential? Josey knew she wouldn’t even get to dessert if her mind worked that way. She just liked talking to new people and having fun. Her dates were platonic, anyway, for the most part. She’d only had two boyfriends that she would have called serious—one in high school and one in college. Both relationships had run their course, though, and Josey, a resilient woman, had gotten over them. Plenty of fish in the sea…
Josey shifted her weight on the sofa and picked the remote control off the floor. She pointed it at the television, but dropped her arm almost immediately and began toying with the device, fingering the rubber keys.
She remembered Ally lamenting once, after a particularly horrendous date, “I know the perfect man is out there for me, and I can’t find him. You can’t find yours, either, but it doesn’t even bother you. You’re in the same boat as me, but if you have a lousy date, you just shrug it off.”
“Sure, I do,” Josey had said. “What’s the rush?” And she had believed it, then.
So why was she sitting here now, thinking maybe Ally and all those other single women were right? Thinking that maybe dating really was a means to an end, and she’d never get to that end if she just continued on the way she had been, accepting dates with nice people just to have a good time.
Did she really need more? Were there possibilities she had ignored?
Josey suddenly bolted up from the sofa and walked into the kitchen. She usually had a beer and watched TV before fixing a simple dinner, but when she opened the refrigerator, the thought of downing a beer and yelling at Oprah Winfrey’s guests seemed too…bachelorette. She slammed the fridge door and grabbed the mostly unused teakettle off the stove. She filled it with water and set it back down on the range, turning up the heat. Then she rummaged through the overhead cabinet for a clean mug. Tea. Very domestic.
Domestic?
Josey stopped in the middle of the kitchen floor. Was she really considering this? A family? Her? Born-to-have-fun, sworn-to-single-life Josephine St. John?
A husband?
The phone rang, startling Josey so much a small gasp emerged from her throat. She lunged for the phone, not wanting to hear one more offensive ring. “Hello?”
“Oh, you’re home early. I was going to leave you a message.” Nate’s rich baritone filled her ear. The reserved, slightly detached tone of his voice was typical of someone making a personal phone call from work, but then, Nate often sounded like that. Besides, Josey knew he had to be at work, because if he were at home, he’d be knocking on her door instead of calling her.
“Hey, Nate.”
“You sound exhausted. The kids wear you out? Oh no, wait, the play. How’d it go?”
“All right. I mean, fine. It went fine.” Josey, frustrated with her inability to communicate, pushed back a corner of the kitchen curtain and glanced outside. The bright late-afternoon sunshine made her squint, so she dropped the gauzy material.
“It’s Friday once again,” Nate continued. “And it’s your turn to choose. Japanese, Italian, Thai? Hamburgers?”
Oh, damn. Josey couldn’t believe she’d forgotten her weekly dinner out with Nate. But she was in no shape to go anyplace tonight. She was just going to get into her bathrobe and turn on some Billy Joel and stare into space. She was in the midst of some kind of epiphany, and she needed to stay here and sort out her mind. And maybe replan her future.
“Nate, you know what? It’s not really a good night for me.”
Nate paused, then asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Why does something have to be wrong?”
“All right, strike that.” Spoken like a true lawyer. “What’s going on?”
“Why does something have to be going—”
“Because