Lu found a lovely little café to work in. It was called Joy Bombs. The coffee was phenomenal, the Wi-Fi was free (password: makingwhoopie), and the specialty, small whoopie pies that came in a variety of flavors, were to die for. She bought a sampler plate, coffee for herself, juice for the boys. After the incident with Sebastian and Anthony, Lu wanted the boys within sight even while she was working, so Chase had the family iPad and Sebastian had Lu’s phone. Jeremy didn’t like the boys to be on electronics at all, not at their ages—he didn’t think it was good for their brain development. In fact, he’d brought it up just the day before, before he’d left again for the hospital. Lu didn’t think it was good for the boys’ brain development either, but it was easier to have a zero-tolerance policy about electronics when you worked sixteen-hour shifts and sometimes slept at the hospital.
They spread out at the table, and Lu began to write.
Readers! Let’s talk mozzarella and tomatoes. I don’t know if you’re lucky enough to have fresh tomatoes where you are. It’s early in the season for many. Here in the Midwest we’re still waiting for our first batches. My garden is telling me that July looks promising. If you have ’em, by all means use ’em! But remember what Dinner by Dad always tells you: a good canned tomato (and there are some, see my affiliate links) is waaaaay better than one of those waxy-looking villains from your produce section.
Lu wasn’t sure if she’d do the mozzarella and tomatoes for dinner tonight, but she’d definitely make ice cream for dessert. She’d brought her ice-cream maker with her for the summer. The boys would go ballistic. Leo churned his own ice cream, of course. Fresh strawberry in the summer, peppermint stick closer to the holidays. Everything was seasonal on Dinner by Dad. And local, whenever possible. Maybe she could use the balsamic vinegar from the tomatoes to make a glaze to go on top? Yes.
Lu had begun the blog as a hobby, sort of a lark, when the kids were really little, a way to pass the time and keep her mind sharp while they napped. She’d tossed up a few recipes, written a little bit of background for them, talked about her kids, her home. The usual. Yawn, yawn. Then she’d searched some other mommy blogs and realized that stay-at-home mom bloggers were a dime a dozen. Cheaper, even. You could probably get a dozen for a nickel.
Stay-at-home dads, though! Less common. Stay-at-home dads were sexy, warmhearted, exotic. And a stay-at-home dad who could cook, who laid a warm and nutritious meal before his two sons and his fingers-to-the-bone attorney wife each night? A dad who took the bacon his wife brought home, fried it up in a pan, broke it over an arugula salad topped by a perfectly poached farmhouse egg and homemade parmesan croutons? A dad who discovered (and then wrote about) such creative ways to conceal shredded zucchini and chia seeds that his sons never even for a second guessed they were there? That guy was worth real money. So she became Leo.
Leo was super-upfront with his readers about his struggles as a SAHD. The loneliness! The loss of identity! The insecurity! The way he felt after school drop-off when the moms clustered together and never thought to invite him in on their conversations! Sure, they waved and said hello, but he never really, truly felt a part of things. He was an interloper, an intruder, an outsider.
In the kitchen, though, he felt as at home as a duck in water.
The blog started to take off. The page views grew and grew: fifty thousand a month, then a hundred thousand, then two hundred thousand. Advertisers started approaching. A few brands popped up to gauge interest about sponsored posts. Then it was more than a few; it got so that Lu could pick and choose among them, agreeing to a sponsored post only when she thought it was something Leo’s readers would genuinely believe in.
After a time, Dinner by Dad’s family felt as familiar to Lu (sometimes more) than her own. She learned how to use Lightroom software for editing food photos. Most bloggers photographed themselves, their kitchens, their children, but Lu decided to do something different: simple charcoal drawings of Leo’s children, his wife Jacqui, occasionally himself. (There was a time, in high school, when Lu had considered art school over a traditional college; she’d been doing charcoal drawings for almost as long as she could hold a pencil.) She was active on social media: Instagram, Twitter. And now—well, Lu wasn’t making quite as much as she’d made as an attorney, not yet. But she could see her way clear to a time when she’d surpass that. It happened. Look at apinchofyum.com; look at smittenkitchen.com.
Lu opened a bank account in her own name at a different branch in town and squirreled away her earnings. She hadn’t yet spent a penny of her blog money. She was just letting it grow and grow, and when she had enough, when she was ready to step out of the blogging closet, she was going to write a big fat check to Jeremy’s parents for every dollar they owed them. And then, at last, she’d be free.
“What’s this?” the Trusdales would cry. “However did you—?”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” Lu would say, smiling gently, eyes modestly downcast. “I’ve been doing a little freelance work on the side, that’s all.”
You’re so lucky, Lu’s mom always said. To be able to stay home with your kids. Lu’s mom had worked for forty years as the office manager for a dentist; Lu and her sister had been latchkey kids, eating Doritos straight out of the bag after school and inhaling unlimited quantities of Santa Barbara and Days of Our Lives. There had been no vegan chili: there had been no chili at all, not unless they cared to open a can of Hormel and dump it into a bowl themselves. In fact, that’s why Lu had become a good cook in her mid- to late teens. Necessity really was the mother of invention.
Lu sighed. Tomato and mozzarella had been done and done again by every food writer in the blogosphere. She’d have to do better. Cube it? Add farro, salami, grill the bread? Make the bread first, and then grill it?
Leo and his family lived near a beautiful clear lake in an unnamed state. Somewhere vague, midwestern. The lake had glorious sunsets and offered lots of water sports. Leo was teaching the boys to paddleboard. He was a trained lifeguard, of course, and they kept the paddleboards in shallow water, so there was no real danger. Leo was really careful like that. You could trust him with anything.
Some summer nights, when Jacqui wasn’t kept too late at work, Leo packed up one of his delectable dinners and the whole family walked down to eat at one of the picnic benches near the lake. What a blessing it was to live somewhere so civic-minded, where taxpayer dollars went to keeping the town so beautiful and user-friendly. You could even recycle your plastics right there at the lakefront.
Sometimes they stayed to see the sunset, if the boys weren’t too tired. Oh, those boys did get tired! Outside all day, helping in the vegetable garden and (yes!) swinging from the tire swing Leo had hung from a branch of the old oak tree in the yard. Gosh, that tree must have been there for generations.
And of course Jacqui rose so early to get to work, and had to look so very presentable. Sometimes it was difficult for Leo to keep up with the dry cleaning. He didn’t let it get him down, though.
Lu scrolled through Google Images, wondering if she could find a photograph of a lake that would look anonymous enough that she could claim it as her own, as Leo’s own.
“You got a text,” said Sebastian. He’d come around to stand beside her, holding her phone. Lu chewed her lip. She’d only gotten—what? Four minutes of work done? She took the phone from Sebastian and glanced at it. Jeremy: rough here hows it going there? (Definitely cube the mozzarella, she thought. And farro . . . that could work. That could really work. Remember how Leo’s son Charlie had loved farro the first time he’d tried it? Nobody had expected that! But children were full of endless surprises.)
Lu tried not to feel like knives were scratching at her vertebrae. She loved her family to the moon and back, of course she did. She just didn’t need to be around them all day, every day. For—how many more years? Chase was six, Sebastian four. Fourteen years until they’d both be away at college. She was a terrible person for thinking that.
She wondered what would happen if she texted back, Im losing my fucking mind. Jeremy didn’t want to hear that; when he was at work he wanted to think of Lu and the boys packaged up nicely, tied with a bow, the perfect family.
Great! she texted back. Just packing up for the beach.
Wish i could be there with you!
Lu watched a family of five, two parents and three daughters—maybe college age down to ten or eleven—crowd around a table made for four. The youngest daughter said, “Cecily, you’re not giving me any room,” and the father, maybe catching Lu looking, smiled ruefully and said, “The magic of family vacations!”
She smiled back and returned to her phone.
Me too, she typed to Jeremy.
In theory, yes. In theory more time together would be wonderful. In practice, well. If Jeremy were there right now he’d be another person to make lunch for and clean up after, another person to hide her laptop and her secret life from. He might want to talk about Baby Number Three; he’d probably want to start working on Baby Number Three! She knew it bothered him that Sebastian was already four—he’d wanted the children parceled out every two years.
She should have added an exclamation point.
Me too! she revised. He’d be happy to get it twice. She added a smiley emoji.
Fourteen more years of picking up dropped towels and unloading the dishwasher and loading it right back up again so the next day she could unload it yet another time: a Sisyphean task if ever there was one. Her mother would be horrified if she knew that Lu was thinking this way—what she wouldn’t have done to have no responsibilities other than the home and the kids. Lu could never reveal her dark thoughts to her mother.
“Is that a lake?” Sebastian asked, pointing at the computer screen with his toy tow truck. The thumb of his other hand was hooked into his mouth. They’d let him get too familiar with the pacifier, which he’d then traded for the thumb, and they hadn’t been able to break him of the habit. She was supposed to be working on that.
“It is,” Lu said. “Isn’t it pretty?”
Sebastian nodded, his little face grave. “I want to go to there.”
“Yes,” said Lu. She pulled him toward her and stuck her nose deep into his hair. “Yes, baby, I want to go to there too.”
She heard the tinkling of the bells on the door and then a voice said, “Hey, girl!” but Lu was facing away from the door and she didn’t turn to look; she didn’t know enough people here to get hey-girled in public. (Or private, really.) But then a shadow fell across her computer screen and suddenly Jessica, the daughter of Nancy’s friend, was sitting down across from her, and Lu was caught remembering that she hadn’t texted her back about going out for drinks. “Fancy meeting you here!” Jessica said. She was head-to-toe lululemon, sweating tastefully, and as Lu watched, she reached (with some nerve, Lu thought) out her arm and helped herself to one of the whoopie pies Lu had bought. “Ohmygod, these things are so good,” said Jessica. Her eyes rolled back in her head in an exaggerated display of pleasure and she picked up her phone.
“I grew up eating these, in Pennsylvania,” said Lu, when what she really wanted to say was, What the hell? I was saving the raspberry for myself.
Jessica was tapping away at her iPhone, but she glanced up long enough to smile politely. Chewing.
“That’s where these came from, you know,” said Lu. “A bigger version of them. Long ago, they were called ‘gobs.’ Coal miners brought them in their lunch buckets.” She was visited by an overwhelming sensation of nostalgia, though she had never worked in a mine (probably a good thing). She might think about a gob-inspired post.
“Funny!” said Jessica absentmindedly. She was scrolling through Instagram, tapping the photos with what Lu thought was indiscriminate haste. “I’m going to have to run, like, three extra miles to make up for this indulgence,” she said, when she looked up. “Hey, we should totally run together! Do you like to run?”
“Er,” said Lu. “Not really.”
Jessica nodded. A little crater popped up between her eyebrows. It disappeared when she smiled. “I see. More of a gym girl?”
“That’s it,” said Lu. “That’s exactly it. Gym girl.”
“Then you must have taken Tommy’s class. I just came from there.”
Lu gave a half nod. “I think so . . .”
“Oh, you’d know it if you had, girlfriend. You’d know it if you had.” Jessica tapped the side of her hip. “You’d feel it right here.”
“Yes!” said Lu, tapping her own hip in the same spot. “Exactly. Tommy.”
“Anyway,” said Jessica. “I’ve got to zip on out of here. We should totally do this again.”
“Totally,” confirmed Lu.
Jessica waved at Chase and Sebastian on her way out. “Bye, boys.” The boys didn’t look up from their electronics. Lu knew she should also be working on their manners.
Lu looked around the shop. A young teen with a purple streak in her hair was giving a vigorous, robust wipe to the counters. Lu told the boys she’d be right back and went in search of cinnamon. She didn’t really need the cinnamon but she wanted to ask a question.
“What’s reinventing the whoopie pie mean?” she asked the streaky-haired girl. She had seen the phrase on the sign, and was intrigued.
The girl turned her attention to filling the napkin holders. Her shirt read That’s Too Much Bacon, Said No One Ever. “It just means whoopie pies used to be made with all sorts of crappy things, like Crisco and stuff. My mom makes them with all-natural ingredients, and they’re smaller. So you can have, like, ten of them.” She smiled. Her smile was charming, with a mouthful of metal that announced, My body is growing in crazy ways over which I have no control. Lu had wanted braces when she was a kid, but her mother couldn’t afford them. Jeremy said he liked the space between her two front teeth. Lu hated it. Chase and Sebastian, of course, would be given sets of braces along with their middle school locker combinations, the way children of means were.
“I see.” Lu filed this information away for the future. “So this is your mom’s store?”
The girl nodded. She moved along in a calm, unhurried manner—relaxed while being efficient. She reminded Lu of Lu’s sister, who taught at an inner-city high school in Baltimore with metal detectors at each door and not enough pencils to go around. Lu’s sister would probably kill to stay home with her children, but she was married to a cop and they needed both incomes. Which made Lu a privileged jerk for wishing she could work when she didn’t technically need to. Lu couldn’t reveal her dark thoughts to her sister either.
Before Lu could really sink her teeth into her guilt sandwich she heard a crash, a little scream of dismay. She whipped around to the table to see that a mug was broken and the family iPad was sitting in a pool of coffee. Chase, who was normally a pacifist, had his little fist raised like he was about to punch Sebastian. “Mommy!” said Sebastian, his eyes big and scared. “Mommy!”
Lu grabbed a handful of napkins from the newly filled dispenser and hightailed it over. The iPad’s screen was dark: not a good sign.
“Let me help,” said the girl, who brought industrial-sized rags and soaked up the coffee puddle almost immediately. To Sebastian she said, “It’s okay, buddy,” which was something Lu hadn’t yet thought to do. “This case looks pretty solid, it’s probably going to be fine.” The case was one of those indestructible rubber ones, so Lu had done at least one thing right, anticipating a liquid tragedy.
Lu took a deep breath. She felt like she was falling. Jeremy wouldn’t like this—he wouldn’t like this at all. She wasn’t supposed to need help.
“Is there any chance you’re looking for an additional job?” Lu asked the girl. “Because I’m hiring a mother’s helper.”