Life After Coffee

by Virginia Franken

  “Goddamn it,” he says, and dives in after it. He emerges thirty seconds later, phone in hand, and after a quick rub of his head (don’t find that gesture so attractive now) he pulls the case off and starts trying to figure out how to get the phone open.

  “There’s nothing you can do to fix it,” I say. “You’ll just have to buy a new one.”

  Matt suddenly sighs and makes a big show of taking his fury down a few notches. He’s probably wondering whether I threw his phone in the pool because he’d broken our agreement to keep phones shut off or because I’ve actually managed to get in there and see all his awful secrets.

  “I’m sorry. I know we said no phones. It’s just that Asher’s had a slight fever and—”

  “I saw the picture of the tits.”

  “What tits?”

  “Don’t do all that. I know what you did. In the bathroom.”

  He pauses and I can almost hear his brain assessing the risk of trying to continue his denials against the risk of being candid about what he’s done.

  “Amy . . . I am so, so sorry. It was just a physical interaction. It didn’t mean anything.”

  “Wait—isn’t that what you’re supposed to be saying to your wife about me? We haven’t even started anything yet and you’re already cheating on me.”

  “Amy. It was just a random fuck.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Honest to God, it was practically one step up from jacking off. It didn’t mean a thing at all. I haven’t been with Kimberly since you and I kissed, and then you wouldn’t do it till we came away and I just . . . I just lost it for a moment. She was there. She said yes.”

  “So you’re saying this is my fault?”

  “I don’t know. Kind of?”

  Why am I even having this conversation with this man? As Violet would say, I am “wasting up” my time.

  “Never contact me again,” I say.

  “Amy—”

  “Stop it. Do not try and justify any more of this or Kimberly hears everything.”

  “Okay,” he says, instantly cowed by the fact that I might tell his wife.

  He stands there in silence, soaked, holding his phone in his hand, waiting. After a moment I realize that what he’s waiting for is for me to leave. He isn’t even going to make a gesture toward trying to change my mind.

  It’s suddenly incredibly clear where I stand in the placement of things. Somewhere way below his work and his wife, probably only a couple of steps up from Bathroom Boobies.

  It takes me less than two minutes to pull all my belongings together. I move quickly, not that there’s any real need to. It’s fairly obvious that he’s not coming inside anytime soon to try and stop me. I turn my phone on. No messages. That’s a good thing. I go through Matt’s jeans pockets. Yup, just where I thought they’d be, the keys to his Maserati. On my way out I walk directly through the living room, ease up the lid of the piano, and shove the snapshots of his family inside. Good luck explaining to your wife where those photos with their irreplaceable frames have gone.

  I take the coastal route across the island to the airport. This island is still so beautiful to me, despite what’s happened. It’s tearing my heart in two that I’m leaving this place so soon after I got here. Perhaps it was actually Barbados more than Matt that I was so excited to get back to. I let one more tantalizing white-sand beach pass me by before I make the decision to pull over. I’m not going back without spending at least a bit of time on one of these heavenly beaches. God knows when this opportunity will ever come round again. As I pull my bag out from the front seat of the car, I wonder how such a pretentious vehicle could have made me feel like a slinky Bond girl when I first got in it. Looking at it now, it just seems like a silly blue Batmobile.

  I dump my bag on the sand, strip my dress off, and head out into the water, car keys in hand. As soon as I get waist-deep, I hurl the keys out into the luminous blue sea. Instantly gone. Over. That may have been a juvenile gesture, but it definitely felt good. The water around me is so clear that if it weren’t for the soft, sandy bottom, it would be just as if I were back floating around in the pool. All my anger and indignation toward Matt seem to have followed his keys out to sea, and now I feel nothing. Just empty. What have I been doing? How could I get angry with Matt for cheating on me when I was planning to inflict that same pain on Peter? And what I almost did to Peter would have hurt far more than what Matt did to me, because Peter actually loves me. I don’t love Matt. I haven’t genuinely loved him in years and years. I just mistakenly felt entitled to try on his lifestyle for a moment.

  Well, it clearly didn’t suit me. It’s time to go home.

  It’s not till I’m in the back of a minivan taxi that I check my phone again and see that I’ve missed a call. It’s from an LA area code, but I don’t recognize the number. There’s no message. Just as I’m about to put the phone back in my purse, it starts ringing again from the same number. I’m about to hit “Decline” when a small voice reminds me that I am—despite all my evil acts—still a mother. Which means that unless you know for a fact that it’s CarMax on the other end calling about the unpaid car loan, you pick up. You always pick up.

  “Hello!” I say with an edge of fear in my voice. I’ve suddenly scared myself into thinking the worst. I surely deserve it.

  “Amy?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Roth.”

  My brain’s empty. My mind flips back through the days and weeks, and then I remember.

  “Roth from Bean à la Bean?”

  “Y-es,” he says. “Roth” is a pretty unconventional and cool name, and he probably takes great pride at not being confused with “Roth from Wells Fargo” or “Roth from LensCrafters.” “It’s Roth from Bean à la Bean. And I’m calling to see if you still want a job.”

  CHAPTER 24

  I wake up to Billy’s freezing feet making contact with my shins. How he manages to have such acutely cold extremities in a place where it’s eighty degrees most of the year, I’ll never know. The rest of his body is bundled up into a ball, and he fits pretty much in the space between my knees and my chin. Kind of like an extra-large maternity bump. He’s taken to sleeping in the big bed with the rest of us recently. And why not? Of course I say “recently,” but it’s only been since I broke the news to the kids that I’m going back on the road again. Possibly for months this time. And you needn’t think that Violet took the news any better than Billy. You know when some people swear off the carbs and then one day decide to start chowing down on the Lay’s again, and their body weight instantly doubles? Take that idea and apply it to the fluctuating emotions of a three-year-old girl. I can’t even get in the car to run an errand without it triggering one of her epic meltdowns, and she’s right back to creeping in beside me whenever I try to take a shower. She’s terrified. She’s devastated. And so am I.

  Turns out Jasmine grew a pair of eyes and found out the truth about Roth and the nanny. Roth told me that they tried to work things out, but in the end they just couldn’t get there. The way he explained it was that ultimately neither of them wanted it badly enough to be able to motivate themselves to do all the work necessary to fix it. She left, and her father’s money left with her. Without the artificial buoy of pop-in-law’s cash holding things up, the accounting books of Bean à la Bean are pretty much sunk. Roth needs the Yayu. He offered me my old deal back and here we are. I’m booked on the three o’clock flight to Addis Ababa this afternoon.

  However, as the morning light slowly fills the room and I look at Violet strewn across the bed—her pale face even paler than normal; her chubby, sweet lips slightly parted as she lets out a teeny-tiny snore—I’m not sure I can do it. How can I leave them? I could barely bring myself to do it in the past, and now that I know them and love them more deeply and fully than ever before, how can I? How can I physically leave them behind? I think the pain of it might actually kill me. But what else would we do? The savings are gone. The unemployment benefits won’t last
forever. The credit cards are bursting at the seams. The house is a heartbeat away from being repossessed. We’re down to one phone and one vehicle. After Barbados, unsurprisingly, Peter has not been invited to return to Colburn Entertainment. He told me he left a few messages for Matt that were never returned, which he alleges is Hollywood Morse code for Your services are no longer required. I’m not sure if he’s telling the truth or not—I know he didn’t want that job. But after everything that’s happened, I’d be a nervous wreck over Peter working alongside Matt anyway, so I’m not pushing it.

  All in all, we are in dire financial straits. On the plus side, we do have the sleeping-in-one-bed thing down. Maybe we could just lug our mattress down to the railroad tracks, sling up a tarp, and join our local homeless community. I shouldn’t even jest. Not taking this job would be the first step toward that actually happening. And how could I ever risk that? How could I risk my children’s future, their safety? How could I risk them being hungry? But at the same time, how on earth am I supposed to leave them?

  This first trip back to Africa is going to run into weeks. Then I’ve got a quick stop home before turning around to fly out to Colombia for another epic trip. Roth had to lay off his other buyer in order to afford me, so I’m going to be running around the world covering a double workload till the Yayu starts paying its way and Roth can afford to bring on an additional buyer. The kids could be in middle school by then. They’ll already be completely different people by the time I get back from Africa. I touch my nose to the top of Billy’s head and try to subtly wipe my flooding tears onto his hair so they don’t touch his face and wake him up. My throat feels like someone’s got it in a clamp from the strain of holding back the floodgates. I try to flip on a mental video recorder. I want to keep every millisecond of this moment alive so that when I’m gone, I can teleport myself back here and make believe that we’re together again. I squeeze Billy’s sleeping body into mine, trying not to panic. I cannot afford to fall apart today, in any sense. This will be my last moment with my babies for weeks and weeks. I hear Peter softly knocking around in the kitchen, and before long the foreboding smell of bacon creeps into the bedroom. I only get another thirty seconds before my repressed snuffling rouses Violet. She blinks open her huge eyes, sleepy at first, then within one second they engorge with accusation. She sits up.

  “Why are you crying, Mommy? You’re the one who’s leaving us!”

  I give Billy’s limp body one final long hug. This is the end. From here till I leave it’ll be a manic blur of last-minute packing, followed by a gut-wrenching good-bye. This final hug marks the end of my time. It feels like it marks the very end of their childhood. I kiss the top of his silky hair, press my cheek to his head one last time, and sit up.

  In the corner of the room I see the new kitten squatting right in the middle of my open backpack.

  “Inkie, no!” I yell, pulling him off and running to his litter box. We make it just in time.

  The doorbell rings. I glance at the clock. It’s already later than I thought.

  And so the crazy begins. I can see from the kitchen that it’s Lizzie at the front door and she’s got a blanket in her hands. Looks like the one Banksy used when she gave birth in our closet. Turns out Banksy—as mysterious and subversive as her artist namesake—was actually a girl. Even after Lizzie’s helpful makeover, things haven’t been quite right between us. Especially since I shrank her dress while trying to get the blood out. But you can’t ignore it when the neighbor’s cat gives birth in your closet. And since then we’ve been more or less back to normal with each other, both of us on our best behavior.

  I open the door. Inkie immediately makes a bolt for freedom. I pick up his tiny black body with the top of my foot and drop him back inside the house. I slip out the door, closing it behind me. Who’s going to make sure Inkie doesn’t run off into the street when I’m in Ethiopia? Let alone feed the thing. I give that poor kitten two weeks at the most. I realize I’m standing out on the porch in my pajamas. They’re my most uncool pair (and believe me, there’s stiff competition for the title), covered in small snowflakes and dorky-looking penguins in top hats. I notice I’m not looking much worse than Lizzie, though, who’s in gray sweats and an off-white T-shirt. She’s not wearing a bra, and I think there might be a pimple brewing on her forehead.

  “Here’s your blanket,” she says. “I cleaned it.”

  I should hope so. That thing was covered in cat placenta last time I saw it. In fact, I’m not even sure I want it back at all. Though thinking on it, Inkie might enjoy it seeing as he doesn’t get to live with his mother anymore. I decide then and there that the human race is just cruel. What’s the purpose of this worldwide obsession with separating children from their mothers?

  “Thanks,” I say, gingerly taking back the blanket.

  “Off to Africa again today, then?” she says, except for the first time ever she refers to my working life without any overtone of judgment or undertone that she’s likely to call social services on me at any given moment on account of me being the World’s Worst Mother.

  “Yes,” I say. “Unfortunately.” I honestly don’t know whether to count myself amongst the fortunate or unfortunate anymore.

  “I wish I could give Daniel that gift,” she says. Her face looks very different with all the pious taken out of it.

  “What gift?”

  “The gift of being able to stay at home with Odessa.”

  Record scratch. Is she saying she wishes now that she was the breadwinner? If she’s trying to be nice, it really isn’t working.

  “You know, you might feel differently about that if it was a gift you actually had to give.” I am not in the mood to listen to her indulge her silly little fantasies about how neat her life would be if she could pop off to some hipster media job every day and have Daniel at home wearing his own version of The Apron whilst whipping up batches of cake pops. This woman should spend less time saying ridiculous things and more time advising her daughter to keep her fingers out of her nose.

  “Maybe I’d enjoy it. Maybe I’d hate it. But I do wish . . .”

  I stand there in my unhip pajamas, waiting for her to finish her train of thought. Last-minute packing be damned, I have the feeling she might be part of the way to a self-realization here that working mothers are not selfish harridans intent on destroying the very fabric of our society and I want to hear it.

  “I wish I could contribute.”

  “But of course you contribute.” I’m not making it easy for her. I’m going to make her spell it out. Loud and proud. I’ve been waiting for this moment for five years, and I’m not going to ease the words out for her.

  “I mean, financially. I wish I could contribute in that way.”

  “Oh,” I say, as if the concept had never occurred to me. “Well, didn’t you do something with fashion before Odessa was born?”

  “I was an art gallery assistant,” she says.

  “Couldn’t you do something like that again?” Unless perhaps there’s dagger-to-throat competition for gallery assistant jobs in LA? I honestly don’t know.

  “I don’t think it would help much.”

  “Why not?”

  “I mean it wouldn’t help as much as we need. Daniel lost his job.”

  Now, I don’t remember what Daniel does for a living specifically. Something to do with financial legalese. He tried to explain it to me once—back when we used to do neighborly barbecues, back before Billy peed on his Hush Puppies—but he lost me at “master netting agreement,” and I’ve carefully avoided getting anywhere near the subject ever again. Whatever the job was, it generated enough dough to float the huge mortgage on their five-bedroom Pasadena Craftsman and fund at least one skiing trip a year, as well as frequent getaways to their second home in Del Mar. I expect they’ll be feeling the loss quite keenly. This is my big chance to crow, to start a lengthy monologue on the pitfalls of relying on a man to earn your money for you. However, Lizzie looks so beaten, I don’t
have the appetite for it. And besides, our family is not exactly a shining and gracious example of how to do it right.

  “I just wish I had your kind of earning power. I wish I could carry my family like you can. This has happened and there’s nothing I can do. I’m helpless to do anything.”

  I wish I had the answer for her. But having just dragged my family through the hell that hers is about to go through, I can’t say I’ve learned anything about how to survive on no income. The only thing I’ve learned is how much and how deeply I love my children, which isn’t really a helpful revelation seeing as now I have to fly thousands of miles away from them. I’ve learned how to be a mother. But sadly, so sadly, that’s a job for which you just don’t get paid.

  “I’m so sorry.” What else is there I can say? “I’m sure Daniel will find something soon.”

  “Right,” she says, and continues standing there on my doorstep. All of a sudden she looks tiny, standing there in that off-white T-shirt. “So Odessa had these.” She hands over a pair of scissors. They’re bearing my ever-sassy “Amy’s Kitchen Scissors” label. I notice the blades are now extremely rusty. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how she got hold of them. I found her trying to cut off one of the new kittens’ tails.”

  “Oh God.”

  “I know.”

  Again, this would be a wonderful time for me to extract some level of revenge by asking her if she’s considered speaking to Odessa’s pediatrician about a child psychiatrist referral, but right now I don’t have the time and I don’t have the will. I can tell this woman is mentally beating herself up worse than I ever could. I’ll leave her to her work.

  “Lizzie, I’ve got to go,” I say, and crack open the front door.

  “Of course,” she says, and steps back off the porch. A second later she leaps back up and pulls me into a hard hug. After a moment I hug her back. She stays in the embrace probably about five seconds too long, and just as I’m starting to feel completely awkward she whispers, “I’m sorry.”