16
I tell Ethan I’ll pick him up on Friday because I have the urge to drive. I feel like I am sick of being in the passenger seat.
I pull into his driveway just as he walks out wearing a powder-blue tuxedo and ruffled white shirt, straight out of a 1970s prom photo. His pants are an inch too short, and his expression is serious. He opens the car door, takes a deep breath, and says, “What do you think?”
I am stunned. I try to imagine Pete’s face when I show up with him as my lawyer. “Scooter. What the hell?” I burst out laughing. It’s the last thing in the world I thought I’d do today, and the laughter wipes out the morning’s nerves.
A smile creeps up the corners of his mouth. “Okay, this was worth it already. And, God, the look on your face is priceless. I have no clothes down here, and all of my dad’s suits are too small. I found this in his closet, and it called out to me.” His smile is huge now, like he’s successfully executed a practical joke. “You hired Scooter, might as well go all in.”
“Pete’s not going to know what to think,” I say.
“That’s the plan,” he says.
We drive through town and I can’t help but feel self-conscious about how I’m dressed. If Ethan’s playing the part of Burt Bacharach in Vegas, I’m playing the part of downtrodden housewife. I’m in a denim skirt (that’s a hard skirt) and a T-shirt with a cardigan in my bag in case of air-conditioning. I want to be in my navy suit or even in Mrs. Hogan’s Carmen Miranda costume. I just don’t want to look like a doormat.
The mediator’s name is Lacey. She’s younger than I am, which is fine except for the fact that she’s blond and charming. She greets Ethan with a smile that tells us she’s in on the joke about his outfit, and I have the weirdest urge to tell her that, no, it’s just our joke. We introduce ourselves, and she shows us into an office that feels more like it’s for therapy than for divorce. She has several paintings of covered bridges on the walls, which I’m sure are subtle metaphors for our journey into this next stage. We join Pete at a round table, which makes me feel, wrongly, that there are no sides.
“Pete, this is Scooter,” I say.
“I didn’t know Frannie had a kid brother,” Pete says. He’s in khaki pants and a white polo shirt and is eyeing Ethan suspiciously.
“I live in Massachusetts,” Ethan says. “Haven’t been around much. Thanks for letting me sit in on your meeting.” He takes his legal pad out of his briefcase and carefully places a pen on top. He smooths the ruffles on his shirt and gives me a serious look, and I bite the inside of my mouth to keep from laughing again.
Lacey starts by explaining how this is all going to go. Today is the first of three meetings. She asks us both for verbal confirmation that we are going to split all existing assets in half and gives us each a copy of the asset list that Pete put together for our review. The house, the checking account, the savings account, a brokerage account with barely anything in it, the 401(k)s, two cars, a jar full of gold coins.
“Looks right,” says Pete.
“When did you two buy these gold coins?” Ethan asks.
Pete looks up from the paper and narrows his eyes at him. “Why?” he asks.
Ethan turns to me for an answer. It’s a funny moment, because it’s been a long time since anyone has asked me to chime in. I hear my mom answering for me, and I feel it like an ache in the back of my heart. When it comes to anything with Pete, I’ve gone silent.
I say, “We didn’t, my mom left them to me.” I remember taking the ceramic cookie jar full of gold Krugerrands from the apartment and placing it on my kitchen counter next to the coffeemaker. It’s a treasure in plain sight, just like she liked it. They’re worth about sixty thousand dollars, an inheritance from her mother that she never touched.
Ethan is looking at me. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t know that about your mom.”
“It was two years ago,” Pete says, like two years is forever. Like he can’t believe my mom being dead is still a thing.
“Well, I’m sorry,” Ethan says, and turns back to his list. “Then that’s separate property.” He crosses the coins off the asset list. “What’s next?”
Lacey nods and crosses it off her copy too. Pete lets out a breath, and we move on.
Lacey says, “You’ve agreed to split the house. What’s the timing on that?”
Pete says, “I’ve agreed to let Ali and the kids stay there until Cliffy is eighteen, then we sell and split the proceeds.”
“Twenty-two,” says Ethan.
Pete drops his pen on the table and leans back in his chair. “Twenty-two what?”
“I think you two should consider keeping the family home until Cliffy is twenty-two. It’s disturbing to come home from your freshman year in college to a new place. From what I can tell an eighteen-year-old is still a kid.”
I have removed and replaced the cap on my pen about a thousand times. I am watching Pete watch Ethan. I am also reading his mind. Pete does not like being made to look like a jerk. I sometimes think the only reason he coaches the girls’ soccer team is so that he gets credit for participating and to distract onlookers from the fact that those are literally the only hours he spends with them now. I also know that Pete’s parents divorced and sold their house as soon as he left for college and that he was totally traumatized by it. He knows that I know this.
“Twenty,” he says. And we agree.
After an hour of reviewing bank statements and filling out forms, Ethan and I shake hands with Lacey, nod to Pete, and make our way downstairs and onto Delaney Street. It’s July–in–New York hot and humid, and I stand for a second and let the sun warm the air-conditioning off my skin.
“Feel good?” he asks. He takes my hand, gives it a too-quick squeeze, and lets go.
“Yes.”
“That was oddly satisfying.” He smiles at me. “I don’t know why, but it’s super important to me that Pete thinks I’m completely insane.”
“Well, you’re off to a good start, and thank you for saving me half the gold coins. I think I knew they were mine, but I’m not sure I would have said anything.”
“Why not?”
It’s a bigger question than I feel like exploring at noon in the middle of town. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ve gone quiet.”
“I’m really sorry about your mom. I remember her. And how you guys were together.”
“You do?” I look up at him and have the feeling she’s here with us, like he’s summoned her. I wait for her to say something in my head, but she doesn’t. What I really want, I realize, is to hear someone say her name.
“I remember you guys at the diner, and seeing you around town. Always talking about something, and I’d think, wow, who talks to their parents that much?”
I smile. Me, that’s who. We were so close. “It’s been really hard.” People are walking past us on the sidewalk and I’ve backed up to the hardware store to get out of the way. Ethan leans against the wall next to me. “We lived right there,” I say.
“Right where?”
I motion to the small yellow door across the street, next to the dry cleaner’s.
“I didn’t know that,” he says.
“Yeah, my parents moved into that apartment intending to buy a house and fill it with a million kids. It ended up just being me, and they divorced when I was little, so my mom and I stayed there.” I don’t say “seven miscarriages” because that always makes people uncomfortable.
“Then we were practically neighbors, both living in town.”
I give him a look that says not exactly. “Yeah, we liked it. That’s why we were always at the diner. I worked at the dry cleaners sometimes. I helped the tailor.” I don’t say how much I love ironing, because that always makes people think I’m crazy.
“And then you moved back and bought a house and filled it with a million kids.”
“Yes,” I say. “I did.” I look up to the picture window above the yellow door. Beyond it was our little black kitchen table with two chairs. She worked at that table, sketching her designs on four-by-four pieces of card stock. At the end of the day she’d secure her stack with a binder clip, and I’d either never see the designs again or one of them would be the featured jewelry item at Macy’s that season. She never seemed to care much about which designs sold, she just loved the process and formed her own opinion about what was good. “Alice!” she’d call from that little table. “I made a frog! Doesn’t he just sparkle?” My mother believed that when something came together in exactly the right way, it sparkled. She thought this of some of her designs, most of her big ideas, and all of my kids.
When I don’t say more, he lets it go. “What do you want to do now, besides clean out my entire house? I own you now.” He takes my hand, just barely, and runs his fingertips over mine.
This makes me smile because I’m actually dying to go through that house and make her open-house ready. It’s my favorite kind of quiet, satisfying work where you see your progress as you go and you know when you’re done. My boss used to tell me that I was the only person he ever knew who saw beauty in accounting, but I loved it for both the process and the moment that everything balanced. The thing about motherhood is that day to day there’s no measurable outcome. The mark of a successful day is just getting everyone back in bed.
Before I can stop myself, I reach out and brush my fingertips over his again. I love the way that whisper of a touch moves up my arm.
“Let’s start with lunch,” he says.
We sit at the bar at the diner and wait with serious faces for Frannie to come out and see us. “Oh hey, sis,” Ethan says when she comes out of the kitchen.
“Good God, Scooter,” she says, placing a stack of pancakes in front of the man at the other end of the bar and walking toward us. “Tell me you didn’t wear that getup to the meeting. Please.”
“He did,” I say. “And he’s a damn good lawyer too. Saved me thirty thousand dollars’ worth of gold coins. And got me two more years in my house.”
Ethan seems very pleased with himself. “Who knows, maybe I’ll wear the whole Carmen Miranda costume to our next meeting.”
Frannie laughs. “What did Pete think of you?”
“I’m not sure I’m his favorite,” he says.
“Oh, I like this very much,” says Frannie.
“Want to come in for a beer and a swim?” Ethan asks as I pull into his driveway. “As fun as it was messing with Pete today, I think I’m ready to get out of this tux.”
That sounds so lovely and gluttonous. How I would love to spend the rest of this summer day floating in a pool with this handsome man. I want to get Pete out of my head and just lean into this, the easy conversation and the way he makes me feel like I’m lit from the inside. This is what easy and fun looks like. “Thank you, but I need to get my kids from camp.”
“Okay. What’s tomorrow?”
“Saturday.”
“I know. I mean, what happens? Does Pete take the kids? Can you come by?”
“I’m not sure, I’ll ask him.” I don’t know if he means can I come by to help with the house or come by to just hang out. Those words, “just hang out,” make me feel like a teenager.
Ethan turns to me in the still-running car and his expression is serious. “Ali. At some point you’ve got to hold him to a schedule. If you’re going to share custody, you’re going to need him to be accountable for certain days so that you can make your own plans.”
I let out a laugh. “I don’t really have a lot of plans.” I make eggs, I kayak. I replace people’s wire hangers with wooden ones.
He leans toward me, just an inch, but I can feel the space between us crackle. There’s energy to it. The hum of my car idling surrounds us, and I’m having a hard time knowing what’s vibrating. He is so ridiculous in that tux, but I want to know what it would feel like to brush my cheek against his. I’d just like to know what it would feel like to have my face close enough to his so that I could feel his skin against mine. I want to feel his hands in mine again; I want to feel them tug on my waist. He’s looking right in my eyes like he can hear my thoughts, and I have to break eye contact. I turn to my steering wheel and say, “What?”
Ethan keeps looking at me. “I know you’re in there, Ali Morris. You are the most confident girl in the room.”
“Are you getting affirmations off of Instagram too?” I’m still looking at my steering wheel.
“That’s how I remember you. In total control because you were completely yourself.”
I smile at the gearshift. “Well, that was a long time ago.”
He raises his hand like he’s going to touch me, but he doesn’t. “That’s how I remember it. You were the girl who said what you wanted, wore what you wanted. I see you in the cafeteria grabbing a snack before soccer, walking by Jen Brizbane and her awful friends and not even noticing them. And my lame friends would say, ‘Show me more, Ali Morris.’ ”
I laugh.
“And you’re still that. I saw it the other night when you were with your kids, and even when you were trying to hop on that skateboard. Just so natural and sure of who you are.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“When I was a kid and had no idea who I was or who I could be in the world, I liked seeing how confident you were.”
I meet his eyes, and for a second I feel like I’m the girl he remembers.
“Cliffy definitely thinks you’re the coolest girl in the room,” he says.
This makes me smile. “Ferris does too,” I say.
“Ferris has great taste.” He opens the car door and the spell is broken. He leans back into the open window. “Okay, enough with the pep talk. You owe me thirty thousand dollars’ worth of organizing and a second date. Text me your schedule later.” And he straightens the collar of his ridiculous suit and walks into the house.