She falls onto Scott’s bed, somehow keeping her beer from spilling. Then she says to the ceiling, “Unless you’re working. I can go if you’re working.”
“No. We finished around midnight. We’re watching a movie.”
Britney does something with her throat to allow her to guzzle twelve ounces of beer in one gulp.
Then she burps. “Okay. You finish your movie, I’m gonna pass out.”
And she dangles the empty beer bottle over the side of his bed, and lets it fall with a thud on the hardwood floor.
Charming.
Scott turns to me and smiles. “I guess it’s just us again.”
“I promise I’ll rock your world tomorrow morning!” Britney assures the ceiling.
* * *
An hour later, I am standing outside of Scott’s building, waiting for Mel’s car to pull up and drive my drunken ass home.
“I’m sorry Britney was being weird,” Scott says as we wait for Mel. “But you can totally stay.”
“It’s fine,” I tell him for the millionth time. “She obviously wants to be with you, and I am obviously cockblocking.”
“That’s not true.”
I turn to him in astonishment and furrow my brow. “She got up from your bed, took off her T-shirt, straddled you on the couch, then asked if I wanted to have a threesome.”
Scott gives me a weak smile. “I feel like you guys haven’t gotten off on the right foot. She’s really sweet once you get to know her.”
“I know,” I lie. “I just don’t want to know her biblically.”
“Tell you what?” Scott suggests. “I’ll bring your car to your house tomorrow, Britney can follow me in her car, and we’ll all have lunch. Okay?”
I know I should say no. It’s hurting like Hell to see him with another woman. I should get as far away as possible and let the relationship run its course without me in the bleachers watching every move.
But he’s asking with those beautiful eyes, and I have to leave him now, and I miss him already.
“Okay.”
Scott smiles at me as Mel’s car pulls up. “It’s a date,” he tells me, his voice awash with relief. He kisses me good-bye—a little more softly than usual, and gives me a warm hug.
I climb into the car as Mel and Scott wave to each other. The moment the door is closed, I turn to her and declare, “Okay, I’m in.”
“What?”
“Your lists. Your online dating. All of it. I’m in.”
Thirty-one
Nicole
The first day of school went beautifully.
Jason didn’t have to be at work until ten that morning, so we set the alarm for five-thirty, had a little sumpin’-sumpin’ to start our morning, then effortlessly woke the kids at six. I made pancakes. The girls put on their uniforms (brand new and clean for the new school year) without a fuss, excitedly carried their new backpacks with all of their new school supplies to their father’s car, and we left as a family at 7:00 A.M. for the thirty-minute car ride along Mulholland Drive, and over to Waxell, a private elementary school for mentally gifted children.
That morning, I had a leisurely coffee with Seema, walked around the L.A. County Museum of Art, then drove back to Waxell in the early afternoon to pick up the girls. We went to Coffee Bean and had ice blendeds. They gave me their thumbs-ups and thumbs-downs for the day. We went home and did homework: one page of English and one page of math for Malika. More for Megan, but not out of control or anything.
I was in Heaven. All of that worry about me getting in over my head was ridiculous: this mothering stuff was fun.
We are now one week, one day into the school year, and I am officially in Hell.
First off, the first day of school was apparently an anomaly. Jason does not normally like to wake up in the mornings. As a matter of fact, no one in this house does but me.
I don’t know why that man thinks setting his alarm for five-thirty, and then snoozing it seven times at nine-minute intervals, somehow gives him more rest than, say, just setting the God damn thing once for six-thirty and then waking up. But every night before bed he claims tomorrow will be different, and he will get up. And every morning he treats the snooze button like an obese rat treats the bar that dispenses food pellets in a lab. He hits it often, and with a desperate smack.
The second morning of our first week of school Jason woke up late, so I offered to take the girls to school. This way he could beat the grueling traffic getting down to El Segundo, in the South Bay, where his team practices in the morning.
I learned something that second morning: if you leave our house at 7:00 in the morning, you can get to school in plenty of time to be at the drop-off gate by 7:30, which gives the girls plenty of time to play and hang out with their friends before the bell rings at 8:00. If you leave at 7:15, you are going to be in hideous, one-lane traffic all the way to the west side and barely get to school at 7:58 for the 8:00 A.M. bell. Then you get to slog through hideous traffic going home (what is it about L.A. traffic at 8:00 A.M. that there is never a good way to get anywhere?).
By that second night, I had forgotten all about the morning debacle, Jason was so grateful to me for taking his place that morning, he thanked me with champagne, a romantic dinner after the girls went to bed, and mind-blowing sex. Which made it all worth it.
Unfortunately, my love of champagne, sex, and a grateful husband is how I accidentally assigned myself the job of sleep warden in the mornings.
This morning began pretty much like every morning except the first:
5:30 A.M.: Jason’s alarm goes off, and Ryan Seacrest blares into my bedroom with the latest interview with some singer I’ve never heard of, or some inane story about his love life. The alarm doesn’t gently go off—it blasts. Sound waves are ricocheting off our bedroom walls so fast, I swear we’re having an earthquake.
One might ask, why set the alarm so loud? Well, because Jason, the love of my life, is a very heavy sleeper. Very. So he needs his alarm clock to blast at decibel eleven so that, three or four minutes into the interview, something in his unconscious mind stirs that it might be time for wakey-wakey.
And why has he set it for 5:30 in the morning? Because every night he plans to wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, wake the girls, feed them breakfast, then take them to school, leaving himself plenty of time to commute to work in the South Bay before traffic gets bad.
Hah!
Other than the first day, this has yet to happen. But hope springs eternal in our house around eleven at night when Jason is setting the alarm.
So from 5:30 until 5:33, I am treated to blasting verbal abuse from his radio.
Which is followed by him hitting snooze.
Which he will now do seven times in a row.
Like he does every freakin’ morning.
I may kill him in his sleep.
Unlike my darling husband, I cannot hit snooze, then fall back into a coma. The moment I hear an alarm clock, I am wide awake and ready to start my day. Even if I don’t want to. Even if I desperately want to hide in bed with the covers over my head and avoid writing and job hunting and stepkids by sleeping the day away, I can’t. It is not physically possible for me to do so. If the alarm goes off, I’m awake. So from 5:33 until 5:39, I begin my daily ritual of trying to go back to sleep knowing full well I’m up for the day.
5:39: the alarm goes off again. This time, Jason is faster—his hand pounces down on the clock within thirty seconds, and he falls right back asleep.
The rest of the morning goes as follows:
5:40: I give up and get out of bed. I walk past Malika’s room and check to see what bizarre sleeping position she has finished with for the night. This can be anything from her head at the foot of the bed, to her head being on her nightstand, to once having her head on the floor yet somehow the rest of her body managing to stay connected and comatose on the bed. This is how the Washington family sleeps—like the dead. I walk in and whisper, “Honey, it’s time to wake up.” She
doesn’t move. She’s so cute when she’s asleep. I decide not to roust her just yet.
5:42: check Megan’s room. Her head is on the pillow. The moment I open her door, she yells, “I’m up!” This, despite the fact that her eyes are still welded shut.
“Good. I’ll get breakfast ready,” I say cheerfully, knowing that once I leave her room, she will grab a pillow to throw over her eyes and grab ten more minutes.
5:45: I putter downstairs to our enormous kitchen and wonder once again why anyone would spend so much money on a house with such a grand kitchen. I walk over to the coffeemaker, whose timer has allowed me to pour myself a fresh cup of joe.
5:48: while sipping coffee, I hear the alarm blast off upstairs, then just as suddenly be silenced.
5:57: same deal. I decide it’s time to begin rousing the troops.
6:00: I walk into Megan’s room. She once again yells, “I’m up!” I tell her she better be, and that I will not have another morning like yesterday. I cross my arms and try to look stern. She doesn’t move. I yell, “Megan!” She sits up and gives me her best preteen I am so over you voice, “Okay, I said I’m up.” I smile and tell her that I put the Frosted Flakes on the table. Then I leave.
6:01: Malika always looks so confused when she first wakes up—like an amiable drunk trying to figure out how she got to Seattle and, wait, what is she doing in pink hot pants? I tell her her Froot Loops are on the table downstairs, etc.
6:02: I walk into our bedroom. I sweetly tell Jason that I have a day planned, and that I really need him to wake up today and take the girls to school. He smiles, tells me how much time he still has, and pulls me onto the bed and into a spooning position.
I must concede, I very much like this part of the morning. Until …
6:06: fwap! He is going to break that clock one of these days.
“Seriously, Jason, if you don’t get up soon…”
“Baby, just one more snooze, I promise.”
6:15: fwap!
And I get up to leave my husband out cold and begin another round with my bonus children.
Megan is back asleep. I grab her covers, rip them off of her like I’m shucking a cob of corn, then run like Hell out of her room with her blankets balled up in my arms. I let her chase me and the blanket ball all the way down the stairs and into the kitchen, where we see Malika, bleary-eyed, staring at an empty cereal bowl. Megan stomps off to the bathroom. I pour cereal for Malika, and we talk about whatever she feels like monologuing about today. (iCarly? Build-A-Bears? How had I lived so long without knowing the nuances of the game Club Penguin?)
6:24: This is Ryan Sea … fwap!
6:28: I tell Malika to finish up her cereal, then I trot upstairs to discover that Megan has fallen back asleep, this time on the cold tile of the bathroom floor. I walk in to ask her, “Honestly, how are you ever going to get through college if you can’t wake yourself up in the morning?”
To which she responds, “No classes before noon.”
Then I say, “Okay, so you got college covered. But what kind of career do you think you’ll have if you can’t stay awake in the morning?”
“I’m thinking bartending or go-go dancing.”
6:33: I hear Jason yell, “Oh fuck! I did it again!”
As I stare at the carcass that is my eldest stepdaughter, I yell to him, “Honey, can you help me in here?”
Jason runs in his pajamas over to the girls’ bathroom, then screams at his firstborn, “Get the Hell up or Nic is leaving without you!” (As if that would ever happen. What am I going to do? Spend forty-five minutes driving Malika to school, then forty-five minutes trudging through traffic home, only to return to a house with a sleeping child on the bathroom floor?)
Jason turns to me. “I am so sorry to do this to you, but can you just take the girls one more time?”
“It’s fine,” I assure him. (Which, for the most part, it is.)
Jason continues to oversell me, “It’s just that we have a big meeting this morning with one of our point guards, and I need to get in early so I can review some of his—”
I smile. “I said it’s fine.”
Jason smiles and tells me for the millionth time, “We really need to get a nanny.”
“We do not need a nanny,” I assure him.
“But I feel bad. I keep messing up your day.”
“So you’ll wake up tomorrow,” I say, giving him a friendly wink.
He gives me a quick kiss, then heads back to our room for a shower.
The girls and I run to my car at 7:13. Like every other morning, Jason is tremendously grateful, and the girls are being sweet now that they’re actually awake.
The morning routine is frustrating, but it is nice to be needed.
Plus that, what the Hell else do I have to do that’s so important? It’s not like I have a job to race to.
By the time I drop off the girls, they look great—hair brushed, uniforms clean. My hair is unbrushed and in a ponytail. I am still wearing my flannel pajama bottoms, but have changed into an oxford cloth shirt. This is a trick I figured out on the third day of drop-off. You don’t actually have to get out of the car when you drop off your precious cargo. You wait in a long line of cars leading up to the school gate, and then once you’re at the front of the line, a parent volunteer opens the back door and leads your kids out. So if I wear a normal shirt on top, I could get away with wearing nothing but a thong and a tutu on the bottom, and no one would be the wiser.
“You need to go to the office to pay for my field trip,” Malika announces to me as I inch the minivan up toward the head of the line.
I look down at my flannel pjs and sigh. “The one to the aeronautics museum?” I ask.
“Uh-huh,” Malika tells me in her sweetest voice.
“Isn’t that included in your tuition?” I ask.
Megan lets out a guffaw. “Nothing is included in our tuition. We have to pay for lunches, books, field trips, everything.”
I sigh again, signal to the volunteer that I will be driving ahead to the main parking lot up front, and park my car.
The girls immediately race out of the car and head off to the playground, and I trudge into the front office in my L.L. Bean pajama pants.
Swank.
“Good morning,” I say to the pleasant-looking older woman at the front desk. “I’m Nicole Eaton … sorry … Washington. I need to give you a check for Malika’s field trip.”
“You’re Megan and Malika’s mom?” she says to me, a little surprised.
“Stepmom,” I force myself to say in a happy tone, even though her reaction grates on my nerves. People take one look at blond little me, and just assume I’m only the stepmother. Or, worse, the nanny—I got that from Malika’s ballet teacher earlier this year. People always quickly backpedal or change the subject. I know no one’s being malicious. But that unspoken assumption is one of those things that consistently makes me feel like a second-class parent.
The woman smiles at me warmly as she hands me a form. “It’s sixty dollars, cash or check. And you need to sign this permission slip.”
I write out a check for sixty dollars, then begin madly filling in all of the blank spaces on the permission slip. (Name, date of birth, reason why if we accidentally shoot your kid off into space, you can’t sue us…)
I hear a man’s voice coming from one of the offices. “Julie, do you know what we did with the Friends of Waxell budget? I can’t find a thing on this desk.”
I look up at the sound of the voice—my heart jumping into my throat.
Nah, couldn’t be. I look back down at my work: no, she’s not allergic to anything (other than alarm clocks). I write a note telling them that she may say she’s allergic to any kind of sauce, including plain butter, and vegetables, but that’s bogus.
“It’s in your top right drawer. Pink sheet,” Julie yells to the man in the other room. “Kevin, have you met Mrs. Washington yet?”
Kevin???
I look up, my eyes opening wi
de in fear. I’m pretty sure I resemble a terrified sorority girl in a B slasher movie, right after she insists on taking a walk alone in the forest to look for her scantily clad roommate, and two seconds before she is confronted with her executioner.
Obviously, I am discussing an ex-boyfriend. What else would inspire such a spirited reaction at 7:55 in the morning?
Kevin Peters walks out of the principal’s office looking fucking amazing. His brown hair is still short and wavy but now has a few flecks of silver that I can see. His eyes are just as clear, warm, and brown but now have a few small lines to show off all of the laughter in his life. His jaw is still just as chiseled as it was when we were twenty-two, and he still looks exactly like Prince Charming in the Sleeping Beauty cartoon.
And I’m in a pair of flannel pajama bottoms, an oxford cloth shirt I only ironed in the front, no makeup, and sporting a ponytail.
God. Fucking. Damn it.
Why is it that when we run into our ex-boyfriends, we always look like crap? I think back to any woman I’ve ever known. I have never once heard of a story where the woman is dressed in an evening gown, makeup done, hair perfect, and he’s a beat-up mess walking into a Chinese restaurant on a Saturday night in his battleship-gray sweatpants to pick up lo mein for one.
Kevin’s face lights up when he sees me. “Nic?”
I force a smile as he walks up to me. “Hi, Kevin.”
“You look fantastic!” he says, pulling me into a bear hug.
“Thanks,” I say. “So do you.”
He pulls away, his brown eyes sparkling at me. “So, do you have kids here?”
“She’s the Washington girls’ mom,” Julie tells him.
“Stepmom,” I correct her. “I mean, bonus mom. I mean…” Great. Now I sound like a nervous wreck. “What are we calling ourselves these days?”
“So you’re Jason’s fiancé,” Kevin asks, my reputation apparently having preceded me.
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