How to Be a Grown-up (24 page)

Two hours later, I was standing at the metal barricades outside Jet Blue security having a nice last hyperventilation while I waited for Wynn and Maya.

“Everything?” Jessica asked.

“Everything,” I confirmed, having pulled up the e-mail with my contract from September, that, if memory served, I had signed by pressing it flat against a Dumpster while Wynn pulled Maya’s hair and she bit his forearm.

“Forward it to me,” Jessica urged. “Let me walk it down to Legal on sixteen and see if they can give me any advice for free.”

“Show them some leg,” I suggested.

“Yes, men go wild for broken capillaries.”

“On the plus side, if Blake wants alimony, let’s see, my base pay, after taxes, minus rent, minus after-school, minus groceries and utilities, yes, he is welcome to fifteen percent of my nothing.”

I caught sight of Maya’s pigtails swaying as she ran toward me. “Oh wow, there they are. I’ll e-mail you the contract.” I hung up and crouched to receive my girl, firecrackers of joy obliterating everything else. Wynn slammed around us, doubling my euphoria. I reached my arms around both of them, breathing them in, squeezing them close. As long as I had this in my life every day for as long as they were mine, I could get through anything. “Hi! Hi! Hi! Oh, I missed you! I missed you!”

“Mommy, Daddy got a job!” Maya held my face as I almost tipped back.

“What?”

“Yeah, it’s really cool.” Wynn lifted and dropped on his sneakers as if pumping out the information. “The guy who did the island show with the plane—”

“Fantasy Island?”
I tried to get to my feet. Val arrived.

“J. J. Abrams.”
She slapped an
Entertainment Weekly
into my hands. “He’s starring—starring—in the most anticipated show of next season. It’s going to be
huge.
Isn’t it wonderful?”

Chapter Fourteen

And then I lost my mind.

I spent hours that night online, tumbling down the rabbit hole of
J. J. Abrams
fan sites, all of which were breathlessly tracking the shoot. The premise of the show was that it took place entirely in a futuristic New York high rise whose tenants were being held captive by an unknown malevolent force via the building’s security system. Like
Lost
meets
Die Hard
. The show was going straight to series, and shooting was starting immediately.

There was already an entire blog devoted to the cast. How they would be doing their own stunts. Stunts! He’d be doing stunts.
Instead of just pulling them
, I thought, refilling my glass with more slosh than precision. On Blake’s page, the blogger had posted picture after picture, going all the way back to
Cooties
. She’d even gotten ahold of his wardrobe shoot. There Blake was—covered in fake blood, in a suit and glasses, in paramilitary gear, eating cheesecake in a towel between outfits. I was in a poisonous cloud of jealousy—of his success, his freedom, his cheesecake—so I missed the most relevant piece in all of this.

When it suddenly penetrated, I called Jessica. “Rory, what’s wrong?” she asked, with the fire alarm responsiveness of a mom who’d been asleep seconds ago.

“Blake has moved to LA,” I said, my hands shaking. “Permanently. He’s about to have more money than God. He can ask for anything. He could try to get full custody.”

“That’s crazy, Rory. He would never do that.”

“He’ll build Wynn a sports court and buy Maya a pony. They’ll never want to come home.”

“Rory.” I could feel her searching for a way to spin this. “At least now
you’ll
get child support, right? And he’ll finally be happy—the kids will have two happy, successful parents.”

“Could he maybe be so happy he wants to be married to me again?” My voice was small. Like Maya asking for a cookie before dinner.

“Okay, I’m on my way.”

“No, no. Go back to sleep. Thank you. Thank you, Jess.”

But in the morning, when I woke from dreaming about having sex with Blake in his trailer between takes I was even further from clear.

“Mom, you’re late,” Wynn grumbled when I shuffled to the table with my hair in a towel. “You never shower in the morning.”

Well, sometimes moms need to cry where no one can hear them.

“You’re trending,” Ginger came by my desk to inform me later that morning.

“What?” I was horrified. “On Twitter?” #StalkerEx?

“Oh God, no.” She pulled a face. “On Design Hub.”

Taylor clopped into the office. In her Thierry Mugler pony-skin suit, the effect was not unlike WarHorse. “
Some-one
,” she sang with pride as she passed me, “leaked the ice castle designs and we’re already getting preorders.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Neiman’s wants a sit-down, but I told them JeuneBug’s the exclusive retailer.”

“We should at least hear them out,” I said, standing to follow her. “They’re not a brand you want to risk insulting. If nothing else, we can leverage their interest—”

“Neiman’s can bite me,” she said, passing through her doorway and pushing it shut with her heel.

Having repeatedly reread my contract in hopes that the words would magically rearrange themselves, I now knew that I’d forfeited not only recourse and recognition but remuneration. I didn’t mention this to James when he told me Taylor, wasting no time after seeing his name on my sketches, tapped him to invest. As far as he was concerned, we were all going into business together. And whether he was kicking my tires professionally or romantically, the fact that I’d signed my share away against a Dumpster wasn’t exactly a selling point.

“Congrats,” Clark, the style vertical director, grunted at me from under his visor.

“Thanks,” I said, uploading Design Hub on my computer, which is like Porn Hub, only with slightly fewer cunts. Yup, there it was: JeuneBug’s new nursery line. Even though Taylor had only snapped the pics of my designs with her phone, the 3D renderings looked great. I felt a frisson of pride. I’d finally created something that would last longer than a shutter click.
If
Taylor and Kimmy didn’t fuck it up.

Then my phone buzzed. From Kathryn:
“Really, Rory? Really?”

Shit.

“How did Kathryn even know it was you?” Jessica asked over the phone at lunch.

“JeuneBug does a nursery line? Who would it be? Tim?”

“So what are you going to do?”

“About Kathryn being pissed at me?” I whispered.

“Yes.”

“Or my kids spending every other weekend Lakers courtside with Blake and Miranda Kerr?”

“Both things.”

“Sit here and eat this cupcake until the lambs stop screaming.” It was actually my second cupcake of three I had lined up on my desk.

“He’s not going to make you fly your children across the country every other weekend,” Jessica said practically.

“Remember when Ellen Barkin auctioned all that jewelry—millions and millions of dollars’ worth of precious stones. Which somehow under the pre-nup were hers to keep, although she left with nothing else?”

“Yes.”

“And it was a bitter, acrimonious bloodletting that went on for years?”

“Yes,” she said through a mouthful of salad.

“Well, once upon a time, Ron Perelman came home from work with tens of millions of dollars for her in a velvet box. Just because it was a Tuesday.”

“So?”

“No one sees it coming. The I-could-murder-you part. The get-your-ass-out-of-Mara-Lago part. Now that Blake’s bankrolled, we don’t know what I’m in for.”

“Oh, Rory,” she said. “I just want to hide you in my Kangapouch until this is over.”

“You’d get frosting on your fur.” I reached for a napkin.

“I’m coming over after work, and you can’t stop me.”

“Wasn’t going to try.”

Two nights later Blake still hadn’t returned my voicemails. Nor had I heard any more from Kathryn—and the anticipation was getting to me. Not that Kathryn didn’t have a million more important things on her radar, but still, there’d been stories. One about a mutinous editor who’d resurfaced as a dog walker. Another about a defiant designer spotted working at a Baltimore Home Depot.

I turned out the bathroom light, jumping when my phone rang.

James.

I hadn’t had the bandwidth to volley back his I-want-you serve since that night in his library.

“How do you feel about being whisked?” he asked as a hello.

“And then folded lightly into the flour mixture?” I leaned against the doorway, inviting him to flood my rattled brain with a tsunami of sex and hope.

“Off your feet,” he clarified.

“How far?” I walked to the bed.

“Milan.”

“For?”

“The design expo. You can help me pick up-and-comers. Tell me where to invest.” I sat on the duvet. The one I’d been putting off dry cleaning because it still smelled faintly of Blake.

“Be your consultant?” I asked.

“Exactly. Consultant with benefits,” he added.

“Ah. Well, I charge more for that.”

“So I can send you a ticket?”

I sighed. I wanted to tell him the truth. That my children’s father had unceremoniously moved to LA and I didn’t think Wynn and Maya could handle another parent gallivanting off to pursue some postmarital adventure. Instead I said, “With the nursery line, it’s all hands on deck.” Taylor’s hands deleting e-mails from Neiman’s. Mine not choking her. “You should appreciate that, Mr. Investor. How about we meet at an Italian restaurant and I bring my iPad? We can watch the live stream?”

“Yes, that’s just the same.”

I was not picking up what he was putting down. Was I scared? I was scared. No one but Blake and my obstetrician had seen me naked in over a decade. I wasn’t ready. “I promise I’ll make you feel just like we’re in Milan. I’ll sit way too close, smoke in your face, and charge you double for dinner.”

“Saturday?” he suggested.
Eek. Too soon. Too soon.

“A week from Saturday?” I bargained.

“It’s a date.”

I began doing lunges as I hung up the phone.

“Two words,” Claire said to me as I finished tying Wynn’s karate jacket closed that Saturday and waved him into class. “Spray tan. It hides myriad sins.”

“My boobs could be neon blue—they’d still feel like empty soup bags,” I whispered as Wynn ran into class. “If men woke up when their kid was six months to discover their penises were one inch long, postnatal plastic surgery would be a fucking birthright.”