The One I'm With

by Jamie Bennett

  “It would be a marriage on paper. And lots of people get married for lots of dumber reasons. They aren’t even friends like we are. So—”

  “So, no.” Brooks shook me gently. “No! Of course not. For one thing, it’s fraud.”

  “Sort of. But also sort of real.” My heart leapt up, just saying that. “We’re already living together.”

  “No, not sort of real. A marriage is two people building a life, not just living together. Peanut, thank you for offering. I appreciate that you would give up your future of dog-care to marry me.” He grinned for the first time since I had made the suggestion but it faded fast and he turned very serious. “Don’t you think you should marry someone you love?”

  Yes. That was what I had been suggesting. “I didn’t mean we had to stay married.”

  “Just until I received a whole bunch of money, thereby profiting from the fraud we had perpetrated. Lanie, think about what you’re saying.”

  I pulled away. “I have thought about it. I started thinking about it last December, when you needed the money. And now you need it again, and there’s no need to get all honorable and law-abiding.”

  “As opposed to how I’ve always acted before?” He started to laugh and I turned to start walking. Never mind. “That makes me a little worried about your opinion of me. You’re suggesting that me being law-abiding is new? What does that say about my character?” Brooks caught up and put his hand on my shoulder to slow me down. Maisie was groaning with the speed so I bent and grabbed her. Silly pig dog. I put my face against her fur so I wouldn’t have to respond about my opinion of him. My opinion was that he was my ideal, everything I would ever ask for in a husband.

  “It was a very generous offer, and thank you,” he said, now speaking to the back of my head because I couldn’t look him in the face at the moment, and maybe never again. What, exactly, had this incident said about my character? I hadn’t been generous at all. And there was certainly fraud involved, but not the way that Brooks meant. No, I was trying to get a hold of him in the only way I could, tricking him into marrying me and by saying that it was to help him and that it wasn’t real. I was trying to trap him, plain and simple, and I was suddenly so ashamed of myself that it almost made me sick. I wiggled out from Brooks’ hand on me, hoping that maybe a sinkhole could form in the street, taking down a few cars, and I could jump in also.

  But the only things that seemed to sink were the optimism and happiness I’d been floating along on all week. I was furious at my mom for trying to ruin his company and furious with myself for talking about marriage.

  ∞

  “Ms. March! Ms. March! Ms. March!”

  I wondered what my childhood development professor from college would have said if I responded to Quimby the way I really wanted to, by putting my hands over my ears and screaming at her to stop talking. Probably he would have told me that it wouldn’t be “best practices.”

  “Quimby, I’m standing next to you and I can hear you. Please stop saying my name and pulling on my shirt.” Hanging on my shirt. “I’m helping Frida right now, and I’ll be with you soon.”

  “Ms. March, can I ask you something? Ms. March?” Quimby continued. “Ms. March?”

  I had never hated my name so much, but I didn’t scream, and I didn’t run out of the class, so I considered it a win. I turned back to her to ask her also to please stop stepping on my feet while she said my name, but I started coughing instead. I demonstrated how to do that correctly by putting my face in the crook of my arm rather than coughing directly in someone’s face like Tobias had done to me, which was how I thought I ended up hacking out my lungs. Quimby pulled on my shirt again and I thought I heard it rip, but I was coughing too hard to tell her to let go.

  It had been that kind of a day so far. I hadn’t slept well after my terrible, stupid marriage proposal to Brooks. I had lain in bed and every time I thought about myself saying it, and the look on his face of surprise and (kind of) horror, I literally moaned aloud. Then I got afraid he could hear me moaning through the walls and that would have been a whole other kind of embarrassment if he speculated about why I was alone in bed moaning, so I had put the pillow over my face and hoped for a waterspout to sweep inland and take me back out to the ocean with it.

  The kids had been totally amped up for the entire day, really a little crazy. We’d done the traffic safety skit in the all-school assembly and they hadn’t ever come down from that. Everyone had done a good job and my colleagues had only made a few comments and jokes about kids falling off the stage and me flashing the audience. Ha ha. I had wanted to go out for some extra recess but it was pouring rain, and we had been stuck inside all day with the classroom full of coughing kids and alternating between blasts of dry heat and yucky, damp humidity from the weather.

  I really wasn’t feeling great—my head had been pounding since the middle of the night before. I rubbed my temples while both Quimby and Frida raised their voices to talk over each other. Despite their volume, I could still hear Mrs. Rosse’s sniff from across the classroom. She had been on a real tear, too, criticizing the way I was doing the reading assessments, telling me that the art teacher had mentioned that I had been late to pick up the class the day before (because I had been dealing with Felix), sniffing about how I had divided the kids into math groups and that the directions I gave to them weren’t clear. Basically, I was still doing everything wrong, and she let me know it.

  Towards end of the day, as free-choice time was rapidly devolving into chaos time, I was ready to put my head down on my desk and give up. I did briefly put my face in my hands and closed my eyes, just for a second, and that was when I heard my terrible old nickname snapped out above the racket in my classroom.

  “Lay-me!”

  I jerked my eyes up to Coco. She looked unusually disheveled in her yoga outfit. She didn’t have her puffy jacket over her cropped tank top despite the cold wind outside, her ponytail was messy, and makeup smudged under her eyes. She stormed over to our coat hooks and started batting through the bags and jackets. “I’m picking up Felix. Now. Where is his shit?” The whole class, which hadn’t been able to quiet down no matter how many times I asked them, had now frozen in utter silence and looked at her. And heard her curse.

  “Mommy?” Felix stood up smiling from the rug where he was building something with Jonah.

  “Let’s go, immediately,” she now snapped at him.

  “Coco, hang on.” I quickly walked over. “Did you sign him out in the office? Is everything ok?”

  She raised her hand and for a second, I thought she was going to slap me. “No, everything isn’t ok. My husband is dead!”

  Felix froze on the way over to her, in the middle of the numbers carpet where we had sung happy birthday for Mac after lunch. His whole face crumpled. “Daddy died?” He started to wail and I rushed over to him to hug him.

  “I don’t have time for this.” Coco stomped over too, grabbed her son’s arm, and pulled him away from me. She rushed him out the door as he continued crying.

  “Mrs. Rosse, please stay with the class,” I told her, and ran after Coco. I didn’t think she should take Felix or drive anywhere, with the state she was in. “Coco. Coco!” Felix was absolutely screaming. I made a split-second decision and ran into the lower school office, past the administrative assistant, and through Shirley’s door. “I know I’m not supposed to bother about Felix, but his mother just came in saying that Mr. von Schaffgotsch is dead, and she’s dragging her son down to the parking lot.”

  Shirley moved a lot faster than I thought she could. “Go back to your class,” she said over her shoulder. “I’ll handle this.” I did go back to find most of the kids now upset and crying because Felix’s daddy was dead, and we had to talk a lot about things like death and dead parents because they all had questions, including where we went when we died and if I believed in God. I felt sure that I was going to get a lot of emails that night. Finally, everyone calmed down, and then Jonah shared that his mom
had died too, when he was a baby. Now he had Evie, and as he put it, “Evie loves me just like a mommy. She’s like my other mommy.” He started to cry again. “I want Evie!” And that set off everyone else crying again too, because they all wanted their mommies.

  By the time I made it down to the parking lot at the end of the day, I was wrung out and exhausted. I had checked in with Shirley and she said, tight-lipped, that the situation was under control, whatever that meant, because clearly Coco had been not been in control of herself. As I started to get into my car, I heard another voice call my name.

  “Lanie!” Zara, Brooks’ sister, zipped towards me through the staff parking lot, weaving between the cars. “Hold on!” She stopped at my door. “I heard that you have the little Von Schaffgotsch boy in your class.”

  “Hi, Zara,” I answered guardedly. “Yes, Felix is in my class.”

  “I thought so. Oren von Schaffgotsch died this morning. Did you hear that?”

  “Yes,” I said, cautious again. “I heard.”

  “In a massage parlor. Getting some special treatment.” She nodded at me, eyebrows raised. “A special rubdown of his special parts.” I still didn’t respond. “I mean, he died while he was getting a blow job,” she explained.

  “I think you mean hand job,” I corrected, then asked myself, why?

  “What? Oh, you’re right.” She nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, no mouths involved, as far as I know. Until they tried to do CPR.”

  I fought down a gag—it was just grotesque. Hadn’t he been a little old for that kind of thing? And with a wife like Coco, he was still looking elsewhere?

  “I heard it was a heart attack or a stroke,” Zara continued. “And that there’s a recording of the whole thing, starting with when he came in and asked if he could leave with a happy ending.”

  “Oh, yuck,” I couldn’t help saying. “Is it online or something?”

  “Not yet, but it will be soon. Everything eventually comes to light.” She seemed excited by this. “Anyway, I heard that his older kids are already kicking Coco out of the house.”

  “What?” My fingers flew to my mouth as I gasped. “Oh, no! Poor Felix!”

  Now Zara did look a little abashed. “I know. It’s awful for the little boy. Apparently, Coco has been acting in ways she shouldn’t, also. I’m not surprised, because she’s a horrible, horrible woman.”

  I tried not to show any agreement in my face.

  “And there’s some kind of crazy pre-nup…do you know anything about any of that?” Zara looked hopeful.

  “No. Sorry, you’re much better informed than I am.”

  She shrugged. “I’ll call my brother. It’s a long-shot, but maybe he’s talked to Coco. You know they went out forever in high school. Like, first love. I never understood what Brooks saw in her.”

  “Mmhm.” I wanted to go, immediately.

  “And you know where to find me if you do hear anything else, right?”

  Zara and I had never once called, texted, exchanged Christmas cards—nothing. This current conversation was the most I had spoken to her without our mothers forcing it. She had been nice to me, but she had never been that interested in me, until this moment, when I might have some insider scoop. “I think you’re in the online directory, so I do know how to find you,” I told her. Not that I would be looking, not to gossip about poor Felix. Zara waved and took off towards the line of cars waiting at the circle for lower school pick up of the older grades. Probably she wanted to share about Oren von Schaffgotsch’s not-so-happy ending on the “massage” table.

  I got quickly into my car before I could get cornered by another parent or fellow teacher, because now I was more tired than ever, and I felt so, so horrible for Felix. He was too little to understand right now, but how about when he was older, and wondered how his father died? Everyone would know, and memories were long. And I didn’t think his father had been too involved in Felix’s life—for Christmas when the kindergarteners had made gifts for their parents, Felix had made his for his nanny instead—but now he only had Coco. That was terrible.

  It brought up all kinds of memories for me, too, of when my own dad had died. It hadn’t been sudden like this was, but it had been a shock anyway. I had known that he was going to die, and I had thought I was ready, talking myself through how he would be out of pain, at peace, and at rest. What I hadn’t been ready for was the sudden void he left behind, when, from one day to the next, he was no longer in my life. I would never get to see him, or talk to him…I started crying in the car as I drove, and when I sobbed a little, I started to cough. Oh, God. I was falling apart.

  By the time I got home, I was wiping snot and tears off my face and coughing simultaneously. I was also trying to silence my phone as I drove because my mom was texting and calling, having heard about Oren von Schaffgotsch and, like Zara, wanting to know if I had any insider information. I was still furious with her about reneging on her deal with Brooks, and I had nothing to say to her about the Von Schaffgotsch drama.

  I had thought I would sneak upstairs, hide from Maisie and Brooks, and fix myself up so I wasn’t quite the basket case I had been in the car. I had been wiping my nose and face on old receipts and freaking out about a spiderweb that seeded to blow out of the vent when I turned on the heat full-blast because I was suddenly freezing.

  Maisie, who cared less and less about my existence since she was becoming nearly symbiotic with Brooks, barked when I came in, like I was an intruder. “Peanut?” Brooks called.

  “It’s me.” It came out so rough and crackly that I cleared my throat and tried it again. “It’s Lanie.”

  “You ok?” I heard the chair creek and he came out of the office, trailed by his faithful dog companion. He startled when he saw me. “Lanie, what’s the matter?”

  “I don’t feel very well. I’m going up to bed.” I wiped my face with the back of my hand, afraid that I had some snot still on it.

  “Are you crying?”

  “A little.” Now I sniffed like Mrs. Rosse. “I had a bad day,” I said, and wiped my face again.

  “Ok, sit down. Let me get you…something.”

  I plunked down on the couch and Maisie managed to propel herself up next to me. She lay smushed between the arm of the sofa and my hip, and wiggled her little butt to try to get me to move over. “You could have sat on the other side of me, rather than trying to make me move,” I pointed out. I scooted over some and she put her head on my lap.

  “Here.” Brooks handed me a wet washcloth and I dabbed at my eyes. “No, here.” He took it back from me and wiped. “There’s some kind of grey stuff on your cheeks.”

  “Oh, the ink from the receipts. I didn’t have tissues in the car,” I explained, and hiccupped.

  “Can you tell me what’s wrong?”

  I couldn’t really seem to hold it in. I told him about Oren von Schaffgotsch dying and Felix being left with Coco, who was already having problems and fighting with her adult stepchildren, if Zara was correct in her gossip. How Coco had come barging into my classroom and how upset Felix had been to hear it announced across the room that his father was dead. My eyes welled up when I told Brooks that, because my heart was breaking for my little student. I explained that all the kids had ended up crying after they realized that Felix’s daddy had died. Then we’d had to have a general talk on death, which extended into not only Felix losing a parent, but also their dead grandparents, dead pets, dead everything. And all the kids had cried again. “And all the parents are going to be pissed, I know it,” I concluded.

  “Don’t worry about the other parents. If they give you any crap, let your boss handle them, since she’s the one who’s helping to create this situation with Felix. What were you supposed to do, pretend that his dad didn’t die and ignore the kids’ questions?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. Mrs. Rosse just stood in the corner looking all disapproving and sniffy. I’m sure that a more experienced teacher would have handled it better.”

  “But maybe anot
her teacher wouldn’t love them like you do,” Brooks told me. “I think they’re very, very lucky to have you.”

  I started to say thank you, but I coughed instead. Belatedly, I realized that I had just admitted to Brooks that Coco was the problem mother who I had been complaining about, and I had been so careful before not to use names and keep it anonymous. But at the moment, I was too tired to care. “I just need to go to sleep,” I said instead. Brooks stood and reached out his hand to me but I shook my head. “Don’t touch me, I’m a germ factory.” I rested my head against the couch. “Maybe I’ll just sleep here for a little bit. I think I’ll feel better afterwards—I was just tired out, that was why I got so emotional.” I suddenly remembered offering myself in marriage to him the day before, and I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t see Brooks’ face anymore. I felt him drape a throw over me and I thought he touched my hair, very gently.

  It seemed like a moment later that I woke up, but the room was dark and I was stiff from lying in one position for too long. I smelled something cooking—maybe burning—in the kitchen, but at the moment, I felt too tired and achy to go look. Also, Maisie had her entire body draped across me like a blanket, but a shedding and panting blanket.

  Brooks’ voice came from the tiny office. “No. No, that won’t be possible.” Then there was a long silence.

  I closed my eyes again, thinking that I might not be making into school the next day, wondering if my plans for the substitute were all ready to go, and considering that Mrs. Rosse was always happy when I was out because Shirley generally asked one of the retired teachers to fill in for me and Gretchen was friends with all of them.

  I heard Brooks speak again. “We don’t know each other, not anymore. We were together a long time ago and—” He broke off and waited for a moment. “I’m very sorry.”

  He was talking to an ex. This was not a conversation I should have been listening to, as much as I wanted to. I started to slide myself out from Maisie’s limp body and she picked up her head and growled at me for disturbing her, my bad little pig dog.