by Julia Kent
“When we are able to talk to each other at home,” she said, “it’s never the three of us. Whichever one of us is in charge of the baby, the other two are out cold somewhere on the couch, in bed, on the toilet—”
“Hey! I was tired,” Dylan interjected.
“You fell asleep on the toilet?”
“Don’t judge.”
“Fine.” Josie held her hands up in a gesture of supplication. “Let’s get back to business.”
“Let’s,” Mike added.
Madge whipped past with a thermos of coffee, pouring Mike and Dylan’s and then slamming the pitcher on the scratched tabletop, throwing down a little bowl of creamers and flashing past.
“She’s my new girlfriend,” Dylan said, emotion infusing his words as he cradled the cup of java as if it were a precious stone or his child, who was currently suckling off of Laura, the sounds of smacking hard for Josie to weed out as the baby latched on and off over and over again, making Laura wince.
“That doesn’t hurt, does it?” Josie asked as she poured herself a cup of coffee from the pitcher and started to look at the menu.
“Of course it hurts.” Laura glared at her. “Can you imagine having a baby’s mouth on your nipple twelve hours a day?”
“Twelve hours a day?”
“That’s what it feels like. You’d be all cracked and sore and peeling and—”
“Ah, God, I don’t want to hear it!” Josie said. “Please, I’m about to eat.”
“You’re a nurse. If you don’t have a cast iron stomach and can’t hear a few details about breastfeeding, then—”
“I’m a research nurse now. I deal with old people.”
“Not for long,” Laura reminded her.
Josie bit her bottom lip, curling it in under her top teeth. Madge saved her from what she wanted to say, which was Not in the way you think, but instead she was forced to order as the old coot bore down on her, looming over, casting her shadow on Josie’s seated form.
“What can I getcha? A hot doctor?”
Deflating, Josie said meekly, “I’ll just have the fried green tomatoes and a tossed salad with Italian.”
“What’s going on with you and Alex?” Madge asked, suspiciously. “He’s moping around, too.”
Four sets of eyes lasered in on her, Dylan’s eyebrows raised high, Mike calm and peaceful as always—either that or he was too tired to actually care.
“I would like the fried green tomatoes and a tossed salad with Italian dressing,” Josie repeated, over-enunciating the words.
She was pissed.
These were her people, all right. These were her crazy people that she wanted to get away from.
“Okay, then,” Madge answered, mimicking Josie’s affect. “I. Will. Get. You. The. Wat. Er. And. The. Food. You—”
“Oh, God, cut it out!” Dylan snapped. “Just—just take the order.”
Laura snapped back, “We’re all curious. We all want to know what’s going on with Alex. Doesn’t kill you to be patient.”
“Yes, it does. I want my food. I’m hungry.”
Now it was Josie and Madge’s turn to watch, because this was the first time she’d ever seen them snipe at each other like this. Trouble in paradise? Could it be?
“Well, maybe you wouldn’t be so hungry if you had remembered to make lunch for everybody like you were supposed to,” Laura said. Narrowing her eyes, she shifted the baby, who popped off and started to scream. “Oh, dammit,” she whispered under her breath, fumbling with her shirt, looking around the room, her eyes filled with tears, and Josie felt everything melt away, filled with a sense of compassion for how hard this really must be for all of them.
Baby Jillian’s wails filled their corner of the restaurant, drawing stares from fellow diners. “Omigod, people are staring. I don’t want them to see me breastfeeding.”
“Why not?” Mike asked. “It’s the most natural thing in the world.” His voice was reassuring but there was an irritability there.
Dylan went into protective mode, craning his head around the restaurant looking for a fight. He clearly didn’t want to find one with Laura, so any passerby would do. “If anybody says anything I’ll give them a piece of my mind,” he mumbled, looking around like a Navy SEAL doing a reconnaissance mission. “You have every right to breastfeed, and it’s beautiful and they can all just fuck off.”
Madge just shook her head. “We didn’t do that when I had my kids.”
“Do what?”
“Breastfeed. Only the hippies did that.”
“You weren’t a hippie?”
She threw her head back and cackled. “Honey, I was more Mad Men than Woodstock.”
She quickly took the rest of the orders and ran off to the kitchen. Laura shifted the baby out from under her nursing shirt and threw a burp rag on her shoulder, propping Jillian upright.
The back of her little head had a thin layer of that dark blonde hair that had been so lush at birth. It had worn away like a balding old man in the spot where she lay against the sheets. Josie had seen that in newborns before and knew that the baby’s hair would be back before her first birthday. Right now the bald spot was adorable and a reminder of how vulnerable and really, really tiny this baby was.
A belch like a sailor’s, better than anything Josie had ever heard back home at Jerry’s bar, from her mom or during any of the many booty calls that her so-called boyfriends had ever belched out after a night of partying and too many beers. It was so loud that a group of college students—mostly guys but a couple of girls sprinkled in the eight top—cheered, giving baby Jill a round of applause.
That finally seemed to crack the tension at the table, Dylan and Mike shaking their heads and laughing as even Laura tittered just a bit. Dylan finished half of his second cup of coffee and then leaned in, his forearms resting and stretching out on the table across from Josie.
“How, exactly, do you plan to structure the business? Let’s talk about the space.”
Josie caught Laura’s eyes. Laura nodded. Overwhelm was all too easy at this stage for the new parents. Hell, it was easy for Josie and all she had to do was take care of a cat.
“We need to get office space—nothing big, maybe a waiting area, two or three small offices and access to a bathroom and an elevator. It can be cheap and, frankly, it doesn’t need to be in the hot part of town because this is a boutique firm.”
Mike nodded. “I like that. How about personnel?”
“I’m only going to need me and one other person like an office assistant, somebody to do basic paperwork and filing and answer phones and respond to emails—customer-service-type stuff; anything that’s overflow from what I can handle.”
“You have someone in mind?” Dylan reached out to Laura. The baby had pulled away, deep in sleep, drunk off mother’s milk. Her lips were relaxed and a perfect little red bow dropped open with a tiny little blister right at the little V of her upper lip.
“What happened?” Josie said, turning away from all the business talk.
“Oh, that’s just a nursing blister,” Laura said quietly as she carefully, with Olympic-athlete-level precision, transferred Jillian over to Dylan with one hand and snapped her nursing bra shut with the other. Dylan slid his entire arm carefully under the blanketed form, froze momentarily as the baby snurgled and shifted, and then pulled her across. Laura let out a giant sigh of relief, leaned back and picked up her cold half-cup of coffee, drinking it as if it were the finest espresso at a Parisian coffee house.
Watching Laura take such luxury in the most commonplace of actions, finding it a pleasure to have seconds of not being responsible, physically attached to her child, made Josie marvel at the intricacies of this relationship that she hadn’t understood.
Was her mom like that with her when she was a baby? What about her dad? Had Marlene and Jeff sat in the Ohio version of a diner like this with month-old Josie, Marlene breastfeeding—wait, scratch that. Her own thoughts invaded her own thoughts. Had she breastfed Jo
sie? No scene, no imagined reality of her own infancy, would be complete without a picture of her mom with an inch-long ash hanging off a cigarette dangling over Josie’s head, her little baby form in her mother’s arms.
What she saw across the table from her and what she imagined her own infancy to have been were quite different. The similarity, though, was that there was a time in her life when she was so wanted and so precious and so vulnerable that her parents must have done the drudgery, have lived the endless marathon of seconds ticking by so slowly, of meeting every single need that she had that they could meet—her needs so simple yet so all-consuming.
And the idea that they loved her so much to do all of that made her appreciate all the more how changed her friends were.
“Who do you have in mind for an office assistant?”
“She could just take out an ad.” Dylan turned and looked at Mike, answering the question before Josie could even open her mouth.
“Actually, I have someone in mind,” Josie said.
Three sets of eyes looked at her quizzically.
“Already?”
Josie nodded. “My niece—well, she’s not really my niece, she’s my cousin, but we call her my niece.”
Dylan started humming the song “Dueling Banjos”. Josie reached across the booth and tapped him with the back of her hand on the arm, careful not to wake Jillian. He just grinned at her and laughed.
“It’s not like that. She’s my cousin by birth, our mothers are sisters, but I’m seven and a half years older and I’ve raised her—or, at least, been a major part of raising her since she was four—so we call each other aunt and niece. Anyhow, who cares about genealogy?” She looked pointedly at the baby. “Especially the three of you.”
“She’s got us there,” Mike admitted.
“So, my niece, Darla—”
“Darla? You have a niece named Darla?” Dylan said. “What’s her middle name? Sue?”
“No, it’s Josephine.”
“Darla Jo? Does she have an accent?”
Josie leaned back and crossed her arms, looking at Dylan pointedly. “What kind of accent do you think people from Ohio have?”
He pulled out the rankest, hickest redneck accent that it seemed he was capable of pulling out and proceeded to butcher it. “I don’t know, y’all. How y’all doin’? Good, let’s git on dow—”
“Oh my God, that is not how people from Ohio talk.”
“How do they talk?” he asked.
“They talk like you and me, but without the flat Boston thing you do.”
“I don’t do a flat Boston thing,” he protested. “It’s not like I pahk the cah in Havahd Yahd.”
“You can’t park a car in Harvard Yard.”
“You know what I mean.”
Laura nudged Dylan hard, almost waking the baby up, and then she cringed in horror, forgetting herself. “Shit! Shit, shit, shit,” she muttered. “Just—just stop, you’re going to wake up the baby,” she hissed.
“All right. Fine. So, Darla Sue Billybob Jo Jennings—”
“How did you know her last name?”
“Her last name is Jennings?”
“Yes.”
“I just…it’s the hickest last na—”
“It is not a hick – ”
“Cut that out.” Mike stuck his hand out, finger pointed at Josie, and then at Dylan, and then at the baby. “If you two wake her up right now, I will lock you in a storage facility in one of those eight-by-ten rooms with no way out, a two-day supply of food, and you have to find a way to get along.”
Laura put her hand up. “Can I go do that alone? Because I would totally take that deal right now.”
Josie just looked at her like she was crazy.
Laura looked back. “What? Two days alone, with food that’s made for me already? Are you fucking kidding me? That’s like…that’s like the equivalent of a week-long cruise to the mother of a newborn.”
“Can we just get back to the business?” Mike asked.
“So, I’ve got Darla,” Josie said. “She can be my office assistant.”
“Does she have office skills?”
“No.”
“Does she have any skills?” Dylan asked.
“She’s worked at a gas station for the past six years.”
“She’s worked at a gas station.”
“Which means she’s dealt with customers, cash registers, and inventory.”
“This isn’t exactly that kind of business,” Laura added. “I’m not saying that you shouldn’t hire her, she sounds fine, but—”
“Well, she does have one redeeming quality that is really, really vital to the company mission,” Josie said, nodding slowly.
“And what’s that?” Mike asked.
“She just had her first threesome with two guys.”
Dylan sat up. “Really?”
He leaned forward, as did Mike and Laura, though Dylan was hampered by the baby in his lap. He carefully shifted Jillian, who made a little snoring sound that was so adorable that Josie wanted to hold her now but held back. Heaven help her if she woke the baby up, because it appeared that three very angry human adults would rip her to shreds if that happened.
Mike leaned forward and put his elbows on the table then pulled back, reached for the carafe of coffee, and filled his cup again. “Do tell.”
“Well, Darla’s twenty-two and there were these two guys in her favorite indie-rock band who somehow ended up in our dinky little town in Ohio, and it turns out all three of them discovered for the first time that this was what they wanted.”
Mike and Dylan exchanged a look that seemed like ten years of history flowed between the two of them in an emotional exchange that left Josie breathless to watch—little tells in the way that their eyes moved, how their mouths smiled at each other, some sort of telepathic transfer of information and experience. Laura seemed to notice it, too, as she studied them.
“How did you guys figure this out?” Josie asked, venturing into territory she might otherwise have never wanted to know but had now become more crucial. It dawned on her that if she actually started this company, if this really went through, this was the kind of information that people would share with her over time or that she would need to elicit from them to provide the service—this very unique service—that the threesome sitting across the booth from her was proposing.
The look of affection that Mike gave Dylan was absolutely adorable in a masculine and seductive kind of way. “Before I answer that question,” he said, eyes on Dylan, “I think we need to ask Laura if it’s all right to talk about this.” He broke his gaze and looked around Dylan, a small shrug, eyes lifted, eyebrows up in an expression that asked the questions again.
“Of course,” she said, nodding her head. “I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t be okay to talk about it in front of me or to tell Josie whatever you want,” Laura said, finishing her coffee and reaching around Dylan who was besotted with his daughter, staring deeply into Jillian’s face as if drunk on her pure existence. “I’m not threatened by the fact that you have a past. In fact, it’s your past that makes everything that we have now as good as it is.”
In that sentence, Josie realized why she felt like sitting at the big kids table seemed so mature and so adult-like—because it was, except it wasn’t adult-like. She was sitting with three very aware, very evolved adults—people who had more than a nanosecond filter between information and reaction, between emotional trigger and reaction. People who didn’t judge automatically but instead evaluated experience and information and then made decisions about what to do next. People who valued love at the core of everything and yet respected folks who were different.
Watching Laura say “yes” to something that would threaten an awful lot of people in a similar situation or in dissimilar situations, whether it was a monogamous male and female relationship, or a non-monogamous male/male relationship, or insert-the-pairing-or-the-multiple-relationship-of-your-choice, the unfettered desire to be r
espectful, to be loving and to apply compassion in all interactions was what she admired most about Dylan and Mike and Laura.
And, she grudgingly admitted to herself, Alex.
“Okay then, spill it,” Josie said, looking at Mike then Dylan. “How did it work? What made you guys realize that”—she looked at Mike but gestured with her right hand to Dylan—“he completes you?”
Laura made a sour face, but Dylan laughed. He and Mike exchanged a look that Josie couldn’t even hope to try to decipher, and then they both looked at her, brows furrowed as they tried to figure out what to say.
“You go first,” Dylan said, looking at Mike with narrowed, laughing eyes.
“By all means, I defer to you,” Mike said, pouring himself yet another cup of coffee.
The t-shirt Mike wore was a ragged mess at the neck, a faded band logo that she couldn’t quite catch on the light blue fabric. His hands worried the mug handle, not in a nervous way, but in that distracted, tired way that one gets when too many nights of exhaustion kick in and the body just functions on autopilot. He looked at her with those crystal-clear blue eyes and tilted his head.
“You really should know this.” He smiled, a small grin that showed no teeth. “I mean really should, shouldn’t you? With this kind of business you’ll get people like us.” He nudged his elbow at Dylan. “You’ll get people like Laura.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Laura piped up.
“Nothing. Nothing,” he protested. “I don’t mean that offensively. I mean people like Laura, women and men—I suppose—who don’t realize that this is what they’re looking for but find themselves drawn to it. Dylan and me, I think…” He fumbled for words, and Dylan picked up where Mike left off.
“We didn’t plan it; it wasn’t some overt thing. I knew I liked women and I knew I liked Mike. It wasn’t like I went to college thinking oh, I’m going to go and find some guy who I’ll partner with and then we’ll go out and build this.” He and Mike shared a chuckle, looking at each other. “God, we still don’t have a vocabulary for it, do we?”
They shook their heads and Laura stretched, something in her neck popping as her muscles relaxed, the burden of the baby now carried by Dylan.
