Eddie
By the time I arrive at Toby’s “decoy house,” my fingers are about to fall off from lugging the grocery sack of baked goods from my parenting class. I’ve still got my fake baby—perfectly burrito wrapped—in one arm when the door to the apartment opens.
A big dude with a long beard glares down at me from his nearly seven-foot height. He looks like he’s about to stomp on me, but then I hear a voice behind him.
“Rocko, relax. Don’t kill anyone.” Toby pushes past the big dude and stands in front of me, grinning. “Don’t worry. He only inflicts pain if you’ve got mud on your shoes—” He spots the fake baby and stops. “Oh, look at that little—”
I wait for him to lean in and then laugh at his reaction. “Plastic doll?”
I remove the doll from the blanket and hold it up by one arm. For just a brief moment, I panic and look around. If Roberta, my infant care instructor, saw me holding a baby like this, even a fake one, she’d flunk me in a heartbeat.
“Dude…” Toby says, laughing. “Totally got me with that. But seriously, what the fuck?”
The big guy is still staring, but Toby nods for me to walk into this elaborately decorated apartment. It’s filled with bright whites and contemporary blues. Off in the corner of the main room, there’s a miniset for a photo shoot. A man in a suit is over there talking to a woman.
Toby turns to me and lowers his voice. “Give me that baby. I’m gonna freak out my manager…tell him a woman dropped it off on the doorstep.”
He takes the baby, rewraps the blanket decently, and then decides against it. “Actually, I think I already used this prank last year with Bessy’s doll.” He drops the doll back in my arms and nods toward the hall. “Let me show you around.”
I follow behind him, poking my head into a room fixed up in pink and white lace and another one in blue with baseballs stenciled onto the walls.
“Hilarious, isn’t it?” he says. “Give my kids three minutes in this place—maybe one minute—and you wouldn’t even recognize it. Somehow, people believe the ‘interior’ photos People magazine loves to publish.”
I refrain from telling him that my own home—my parents’ place—is in similar perfect order.
“So this is just for your marketing or whatever?” I ask.
“And so the paparazzi don’t follow me home for real.” He opens the door to an office and leads me inside. He’s already got the signed pictures ready on the desk.
I offer up the ten-ton bag of baked goods. “I had to sit beside this and smell it for two hours.”
Toby pulls out a bag of croissants. He looks them over wearily. “I’m not supposed to eat this shit.”
“What, carbs?” I ask. Dating Finley has made me pretty familiar with the anti–white bread movement. I suppress the ache in my chest, thinking about her again. I need to figure out how to fix this thing with us.
“Well, yeah, that too. But I cheat all the time,” Toby admits. “I just mean shit people bring that got baked in their house. Security makes me swear not to eat anything someone hands me that isn’t sealed.” He gives me this look like I’m supposed to come up with a reason I know for sure it’s safe to eat. “Think they’d poison me?”
“Hell if I know. But if you’re not eating them…” I reach for the bag and grab some cookies, stuffing one in my month. I’ve developed a motto this summer: never turn down free food. Yeah, French Mama is definitely a baker. “These are unreal.” I swallow my last bite and add, “Don’t worry. I’ll tell them you ate fifty cookies and raved about them. If you want, I can dispose of the evidence…”
I scoop up the pictures from the desk and carefully slide them into my backpack. I figure he’s got celebrity stuff to do and doesn’t need me hanging around. But apparently, I’m wrong. He drops into a comfy desk chair, tosses his feet up on the desk, and points to an identical chair in the corner.
“Have a seat.” He’s still eyeing the baked goodies, but after I sit, he turns his attention back to the fake baby that I’ve dropped onto the floor by my bag. “So what’s the story with the doll?”
I glance at the well-diapered doll—I’m getting much better at this—and then back at Toby, deliberating what to tell him. Why the hell didn’t I stuff it in my bag? Probably because I felt Roberta watching me from all angles, sending her detailed report on my infant caregiving skills to a family court judge.
“You really want to know?” I ask Toby.
• • •
Toby sits there, silent, his thumbs wrestling each other. It’s the most serious I’ve ever seen the guy. Finally, he says something. “Your family fucking sucks. I don’t even know them, and I wanna send Rocko to kick their asses.”
Toby reaches under his desk and opens the door to a minifridge. He takes out a beer for himself and offers me a soda. I take a long drink and then panic for a second. “You’re not, like…gonna tell anyone about this, right?”
He makes a big show of punching buttons in his cell. “Just a sec. I got the Enquirer on speed dial. Hello? Anonymous caller here. I’ve got a story for you… It involves some Manhattan elitists and one very rich baby daddy.” He tosses the phone on to the desk and rolls his eyes. “You’re in my fucking decoy house. You know how many people step foot in this place? Less than ten or twenty…I don’t know exact numbers, but it’s not many.”
I lean back in my chair, not sure what to say about that.
“I’m not saying I’m naive enough to assume you’re trustworthy—I barely know you. But I did know, from when we first met, that you were a guy who knew how to keep his fucking mouth shut. And I was right.” He tosses a guilty look at the doll by my feet. “Sorry, I shouldn’t swear in front of the little one. It’s just that I keep it in check at home, so it’s, like, all bottled up and shit whenever I leave the house.”
“You ever take infant care classes?” I ask him. In my class, I’m usually seated between two middle-aged pregnant women whose husbands aren’t in the class, but all the other dads are there. Though not alone like me.
“Yeah…” Toby says slowly. “No. None of that. We just dropped the first one a lot and then figured it out. That’s not gonna fly for you though. Plus, it’s always better if you don’t drop them. So I hear.” He eyes me again, thinking. “You’re good with this lawyer you’ve got? Because I could make some calls…”
I nod. “He seems good. And he hasn’t made me pay him yet, so that’s another plus.”
“You’ll be rich again soon enough.” Toby starts to say something else and seems to stop himself.
“What?” I ask.
He blows out a breath. “What if you lose and the kid gets adopted? Are you gonna stay cut off from your family?”
I sink back into my chair and look up at the ceiling. I mean, I guess I hadn’t thought about it like that. Not exactly. But how could I just go back home and be in that world again? Even before Caroline got pregnant—before I got her pregnant, ’cause I’m all about owning—I fantasized about running away, moving somewhere in South America, living in a little hut on the beach. Doubt I would have ever gone through with it. My guess is I would have gone to Princeton, taken a job with the family company, basically been completely miserable.
I shake my head. “I don’t know.”
“I’m not saying you should go back to being their kid,” Toby reasons. “But just keep in mind that’s it near impossible to get by. I had a friend in high school, kinda like your situation. His family’s not as rich as yours, but his dad beat him. It was fucked up. He just decided to say the hell with it, I don’t want anything from them. He went to college and, of course, didn’t have money to pay for it. And he couldn’t get loans or anything, because his parents made too much money. Then he wrecked his car, broke a bunch of bones, and had a hundred-thousand-dollar hospital bill. Turns out he’d missed payments on his car insurance too, and they’d canceled his policy the day before the accident. He was twenty years old and filing for bankruptcy.” He stops to think again and then adds, “I guess if you keep booking Wang jobs, you’ll be fine. But you don’t want to do that, right?”
“I will if I have too,” I tell him. “Beats a lot of other jobs. And Finley wants—” I almost say she wants to split rent, but then I remember that was the source of our tension the other night.
“Finley? The blond from the party?”
“Yeah.” I explain a little about her family and then how we’re sort of on the outs.
Toby finally gives in and grabs one of the cookies from the bag. “YOLO!” He holds it up in a salute before taking a bite. “You should fix that. The girlfriend stuff. Let her do what the hell she wants. She seemed smart to me. Plus, you two have probably blown past the point of no return a long time ago.”
He’s right. Even Sam pretty much said the same thing. It’s too late to tell Fin she can’t be a part of my life. She’s right too. It’s not my choice. It’s not my place to tell her what she may or may not regret.
And somehow, I have to make things right. Not just because I need her, but because maybe she needs me. And if she does, I’m for damn sure not going to miss a chance to help her out for a change.
Then I remember something. It’s Friday. I bend over, unzip my bag, and remove the invite Eve had sent me earlier this week. I glance at my cell to check the time. “Oh shit.”
“What?” Toby says. “You gotta go?”
The words formal attire near the bottom of the invitation catch my eye.
I look up at Toby, a sheepish look on my face, I’m sure. “You don’t, by any chance, keep a suit lying around in your decoy house? Or a tux?”
He quirks an eyebrow. “As a matter of fact, I do.”