There’s an old quote about how holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. It’s been attributed to everyone from Buddha to Alcoholics Anonymous to Nelson Mandela.
It doesn’t really matter who said it first. It’s true. Anger filled every inch of me, like the spray insulation that expands with a whoosh to seal off all the cracks. I couldn’t breathe. And the worst thing about it was that when the negativity rushed in, it pushed all the joy right out.
Polly and I sat at separate ends of our dismissal bench. Once most of the kids had been picked up, Ethan moved over and sat down beside Polly. The two of them talked softly, their heads close together. Ethan rested one hand on Polly’s shoulder for an instant, and then it was gone.
We were down to our final pickup. Gulliver’s mom pulled up in her mammoth SUV, last but not even late, which was big progress. Polly rocked forward and pushed herself to a standing position, reached out a hand to Gulliver. The two of them walked over to the SUV, Polly opened the back door, gave Gulliver a boost as he climbed in, smiled and waved to Gulliver’s mom, shut the door.
A movement caught my eye. Or maybe I simply felt a disturbance in the force field.
Bayberry had a larger parking lot below the school, but the dismissal line snaked up the hill and around a portion of a smaller parking lot, essentially a single row of spaces edged by trees on one side. About halfway down the length of the row, a man leaned back against a pine tree, one foot resting on the bumper of a white car. The car was nondescript, generic.
The man was anything but. He was tall and lean and elegant. He was dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, a hipster black leather jacket, but he somehow managed to look like he’d just changed out of his James Bond tuxedo. He had dark hair with hints of caramel, velvety skin the color of coffee with heavy cream. Even from this distance, his eyes glittered a Caribbean blue-green that couldn’t possibly be real. Outside of Hollywood, he was the most spectacular looking man I’d ever seen. Maybe even inside of Hollywood.
I realized I was staring. Possibly even panting a bit.
But the man didn’t notice. Because he was looking right past me at Polly. I turned to watch her, too, as she slowly walked across the dismissal area on her way back to our classroom. Her winter coat was open, her arms crossed protectively over her baby.
I glanced back at the man again, then walked casually over to sit on the bench next to Ethan.
“Don’t look now, but see that guy over there?” I said.
Ethan looked.
“Do you know who he is?”
Ethan stood up. “I’ll take care of it. Go talk to Polly.”
Polly was sitting at the kiddie table in our classroom, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“I am so, so sorry,” I said. “If you want to date my father, it’s none of my business. You’re both consenting adults, and it’s none of my business, and as long as you don’t make them change too many diapers, the rest of my family will come around eventually. Did I already say that it’s none of my business?”
Polly wiped her eyes with the back of one hand.
I handed her a tissue, because that’s what preschool teachers do. I sat down across from her.
“What?” Polly said after she finished blowing her nose.
“My father,” I said. “I saw you two together at Jake’s Seafood last night. And I heard him coming downstairs from your room the other night. Not that it’s any of my business.”
“That’s what you’re mad at me about?” Polly said.
I shrugged. “Not mad. Exactly.”
Polly rested her arms on the table, her head on her arms. “So if things worked out between your dad and me,” she mumbled to the tabletop, “that means that technically I could ground you, right?”
I squinted at her.
She lifted her head off the table, started to laugh. “Are you insane? After all you’ve done for me? Everything in my life seemed so dark and hopeless. You gave me a job, took me in when my rental got flooded. Why in the world would I mess that up by dating your dad?”
I looked at her some more.
“He likes to keep me company. He talks about your mom, and tells me about all of you when you were babies. How you were bald as cue balls, except for Billy Jr.”
“Michael,” I said.
“And he worries about me getting enough to eat. That’s why we went out for fish and chips last night.”
I stood up, walked over to our whiteboard, grabbed a purple marker.
“Never assume,” I said as I wrote ASSUME in huge letters on the board.
I circled the first three letters. “It makes an ass.”
I made big circles around the U and then the ME.
“Out of you and me,” I said. “Although in this case, it probably just made an ass out of one of us.”
“Ohmigod,” Polly said. “That was one of my favorite episodes of The Odd Couple. Remember, the one about ticket scalping, and Felix asked to use the blackboard in the courtroom? I couldn’t believe he actually said ass on TV—it was such a big deal back then.”
“Benny Hill did an assume sketch, too,” I said. “We had a huge family fight about which show stole it from the other one. My father swore up and down that they both stole it from Abbott and Costello. From then on, anytime anyone assumed anything at our house, everybody would start writing all over the place and doing their assume bits, and eventually all hell would break lose.”
Polly smiled. “I can’t even imagine how amazing it would be to be a part of a family like yours.”
I shrugged. “It’s loud. And occasionally obnoxious. No, that’s a lie. More than occasionally obnoxious.”
“But the unconditional love you all have. That’s gold. I’d give anything to give that to this baby.” Polly patted her belly. “I have to tell you, the first time your dad asked me to marry him—”
“What?” I said. The poison was back.
“I said we weren’t dating,” Polly said. “I didn’t say he didn’t ask me to marry him.”
“I’m not sure the distinction is quite as significant for me as it is for you,” I said.
“Sorry,” Polly said. “He just wants to make sure the baby and I are all right.”
“It seems to me,” I said, “that there are plenty of other people around who could take care of that.”
“I’m fine,” Polly said. “I’m perfectly capable of taking care of this baby by myself. And I’m certainly not looking for a sugar daddy, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Ethan knocked on the doorframe, walked into our classroom. I was still standing in front of the whiteboard, holding the purple marker.
“Wow,” he said. “Your kids are way ahead of ours in terms of spelling words. We’re still working on cow.”
“Funny,” I said.
Ethan nodded at the board. “That was actually one of my favorite bits on The Odd Couple.”
“Mine, too,” Polly said. Polly and Ethan gave each other that look that always made me feel a little bit left out, like they had their own separate world.
“So what happened with the guy?” I asked Ethan. “Who was he?”
“Guy?” Polly said.
Ethan walked over to the kiddie table, sat down beside Polly.
“He was here,” Ethan said. “Your ex-husband. At dismissal.”
Polly’s cheeks turned bright red, then the color drained out of her face, leaving only the polka dots of her freckles behind.
“Holy crap,” Polly said. “How the hell did he find out where I work?”
“He probably tracked you through your cell,” Ethan said. “It’s not that hard.”
Polly wiped her nose with the soggy tissue. I handed her a fresh one.
“Thanks,” she said. “He kept calling and texting me to say that he was going to be in Boston on business and he wanted to see me. I told him to leave me alone, and then I stopped answering.”
Polly looked over at our classroom phone. “And then he called me here. He knows where I work. Ohmigod, what am I going to do?” She looked down at the unmistakable swell of her belly.
“I took care of it,” Ethan said. “I told him, Galen, that the baby’s mine.”
Apparently I wasn’t the only one who knew Polly’s secret—that her ex was the father of her baby.
“Really?” Polly said.
Ethan nodded. “He’s staying at The Inn at Marshbury Harbor. We’re picking him up for dinner at 7.”
“We?” Polly said. “As in you and me?”
“Seems like,” Ethan said.
“How’s that going to fly with your girlfriend?” I asked, because it seemed like somebody should.
“I’ll get back to you on that,” Ethan said.
“You don’t need to do this,” Polly said. “I’ll figure out something else.”
“It’s done,” Ethan said.
Crisis or no crisis, the holiday performance must go on, so the three of us headed to the all-purpose room.
Ethan began hanging a backdrop he’d made out of a painted drop cloth. Polly and I sat cross-legged on the floor on the other side of the room, hot glue gunning dog bones to plastic headbands for the “Dance of the Sugarplum Puppies.”
“So,” I said. “Would it be inappropriate for me to mention that your wasband is unusually hot?”
“Ha,” Polly said. “Usually the first thing people say is what is he?”
I picked up a red plastic headband. “I’m embarrassed to say that might have been my second question.”
“Galen’s a little bit of everything,” Polly said. “Ethiopian grandfather and Norwegian grandmother. Scottish-Hawaiian great grandmother on the Ethiopian side. Or something like that. I could never keep it straight. Either that or he kept changing it—his idea of truth was always pretty malleable. He’s crazy exotic looking though, isn’t he? It’s like a genetic fluke. Those turquoise eyes are real, too, by the way. I was sure they were contacts until I started staying over at his place and rummaged through his bathroom.”
“So that was the attraction?” I said. “His exotic good looks?”
Polly reached for a green plastic headband. “No. I mean, it’s hard to miss that, but he’s just one of those people who makes everybody he meets feel like they’re the most interesting person in the entire world. He’s got that laser focus, you know? When I met him, it was like he melted my soul. Although in hindsight, it might possibly have been another body part.”
“Ha,” I said. “Don’t feel bad. The kids get their body parts mixed up sometimes, too.”
“He’s like this big, beautiful spider who keeps weaving everyone into his web with flattery. We worked together. He was married. I knew better, but I got pulled in anyway. And then he did the same thing to me with wife number three. People, even strangers, have been falling all over him his whole life. I mean, you have to stand in line to have a crush on him. When he has us, he doesn’t want us anymore, and we’re just another one of the long trail of crazy bitches trying to get him back. But once we lose interest, he always knows. And then he wants us back.”
“Wow,” I said. “I just remembered when you told me who the father was, you said something like he’s an asshole, but he’s got great genes.”
Polly shook her head. “Pretty superficial, huh? I guess I thought he might be a better risk than the luck of the draw at the sperm bank. And maybe a part of me thought I deserved something after all the years I spent being sucked in to his relentless need for attention and drama.”
I globbed some hot glue on a dog bone. “You might not want to hear this, but you said you wanted a family for your baby, and it occurs to me that you’ve already got one. Didn’t you say your ex has three kids with his first wife, and one with the second?”
“At last count,” Polly said. “But, no way. My baby will have unconditional love and stability and absolutely no drama. Which by definition means no Galen.”
“So you don’t think he even has the right to know?”
Polly shook her head. “Galen only cares about Galen. His only interest in this baby would be as leverage over me. He’s a bad idea that feels good for a while, but he always, always lets you down. You can’t hang your heart on charm, you know?”
“At some point,” I said, “you might have to face the fact that you’re depriving your child of not just a father but some pretty exotic step siblings.”
“Maybe way, way down the road,” Polly said. “When and if I’m sure she or he is old enough to handle it.”
“Maybe that makes sense,” I said. “Like how old?”
“I don’t know,” Polly said. “But at least thirty-one.”