The Plus One

by Sarah Archer

  That weekend they redecorated, styling the apartment into something cooler and more modern, painting an accent wall a warm gray, fitting a faux sheepskin rug that Kelly picked out under the coffee table, replacing the basic rod lamp with something steel and sculptural that Ethan had found. “Thanks,” she told him as she handed him a nail, then stood back to make sure that the artistic robot picture he was hanging on the bedroom wall was straight with the others in its row. Something about the whole image—not just the fresh décor, but Ethan balancing there on a chair, a nail between his teeth, made the apartment suddenly feel like a home. She smiled behind his back.

  “It’ll be good practice for when I put up our decorations at Chrssmss. Christmas,” he corrected, removing the nail from his mouth.

  He said it lightly, but Kelly’s smile evaporated. By then, Ethan would be long gone.

  twelve

  • • • • • •

  At the end of the long day of redecorating, when they returned from dropping off the old furniture at Goodwill, Kelly immediately stripped off her pants. Especially given how literally buttoned up she was during the week, she liked her home wardrobe to be as comfortable as possible. Ethan took the pants from her outstretched hand at the door as usual, like it was the most normal thing in the world. “What do you want to do for dinner?” she asked. “Don’t answer that—nachos.”

  But instead of Ethan answering her, the doorbell did. Kelly groaned. Back on went the hated pants. She knew who was standing on the other side of the door. Her mom was her only semiregular unexpected visitor, making her, well, a semiexpected visitor. “Go hide, I’ll try to get her out quickly.” Kelly shooed Ethan into the bathroom. His presence here would raise questions that she wasn’t in the mood to have to answer.

  She opened the door to see her mother standing there, raising a brown paper grocery bag. “Don’t be mad! I brought food!”

  Kelly was mad, and the bracingly peppery tuna casserole she found herself picking at ten minutes later didn’t help. As it turned out, Diane seemed to have come expressly for the purpose of asking questions about Ethan. “So, you haven’t been answering my texts about Ethan. How are things going with him?” she asked, looking around as if hoping to find their relationship status inscribed on a wall.

  “Great, everything’s fine,” Kelly said simply.

  “Where is he tonight?” Diane pressed, still peering around.

  “I don’t know, probably at his place.”

  “You don’t know? Aren’t you at least talking to him every night?”

  “Most nights, I guess.” Kelly felt like there was a right answer to this question, at least right according to her mother’s finely honed nose for relationship etiquette, and she wasn’t sure she was giving it.

  “He’s already met your family, your coworkers—you should be moving forward in your relationship and frankly, Kelly, you seem like you’ve gotten stuck. Not to bring up your age again, but you really ought to be locking a man in.”

  “Ah yes, the bear trap school of dating,” Kelly replied.

  “Relationships are not a joke, Kelly!”

  “We’ve only been dating for a month! We’re just keeping it casual, seeing where things go.”

  “Keeping it casual is a good way to see it go nowhere. As soon as your father and I met, I started keeping tabs on him. He hasn’t sneezed in over thirty years without me knowing what tickled his nose.” Kelly briefly wondered how her dad would react to this proud declaration. Or if he would react at all.

  “Well, that’s what worked for you,” Kelly said shortly. “How did your sale go at the shop?”

  “How does it always go? I told all the girls they looked like princesses, they bought the dresses, another successful season in the bag.”

  “I’ve made some good strides in my project recently.” Kelly left out the part where she was actually still struggling with Confibot and regularly stress-eating raw cookie dough because of it. “Yesterday—”

  “Kelly, I don’t feel like you’re hearing what I’m saying,” Diane interrupted. “You have a good thing here, a rather astonishingly good thing.”

  “Ethan’s not a ‘thing,’ Mom.”

  “Look at your past relationships! Nick in college, then Robbie—they both gave me a Ted Bundy vibe. I’ve never seen such precision with a knife.”

  Kelly wasn’t proud of her relationship history, but her mother’s haranguing instantly put her on the defensive. “I can figure out how to conduct my own life, thanks.”

  “My dear, I’m only saying that you can’t just let your relationship happen to you. You have to take the reins.”

  “I thought you always said to let the man make the first move.”

  “Oh no, no.” Diane laughed, head thrown back. “You have to make him make the first move. Do you think your father wanted to ask me to marry him? Of course not. No man does. But if you asked, he would say it was his idea. To this day he believes that.” She spiked the air with her fork as she ate the tuna casserole, punctuating her point. “The next step is to move in together,” she continued.

  “Ethan and I aren’t anywhere near ready for that,” Kelly maintained. “And when we are, it’ll be a decision we make together. Not something I force him into.”

  “Honey, if you wait for him to want it, you’re going to be alone forever.”

  Kelly was losing the last of her patience. “Mom, from the day I turned thirteen, you’ve been saying you’re afraid that I’ll be alone forever. I finally get a boyfriend, a perfect, storybook, fairy-tale ending boyfriend, and you’re still telling me I’m going to be alone forever. When am I going to be good enough for you? When I’m in a marriage like yours?”

  Diane set her fork down. “A marriage like mine?”

  Kelly backpedaled. “I didn’t mean—that didn’t sound the way I meant it to.”

  Diane stood with dignity. “I have to run to the bathroom,” she managed to say. Kelly was irresistibly called back to her date with Martin—maybe bad excuses were genetic. She felt a guilty pang, watching her mother retreat to the bathroom.

  Then she remembered what was in the bathroom: Ethan.

  It was too late—Kelly ran to pull her mom back from the door, but Diane had already swung it open. There stood Ethan, looking as shocked as if Santa Claus had walked in on him. Diane looked between the two of them.

  “Diane, how lovely to see you,” he stammered.

  Kelly searched for an explanation. She and Ethan tried frantically to telegraph to each other with their eyes across Diane’s head. “Ethan was just—”

  “I was in the area—”

  “And he got something on his clothes, so he came here—”

  “To wear Kelly’s?” he finished. “No, not that—”

  Luckily, Diane was barely listening to their disconnected call-and-response. “Well, you cheeky little lovebirds!” she said excitedly, all offense wiped clean from her face, like rain from a windshield. “Why didn’t you tell me he was here?”

  “We just—” Kelly began.

  “Don’t tell me.” Diane held up a hand, an impish gleam in her eye. “I can tell that I’ve interrupted you two at a bad time. Or a very good time. Some Mommy and Daddy time, perhaps.”

  “Right,” Kelly said, trying not to gag.

  “Well, I’ll leave you two alone.” Kelly followed Diane as she bustled to the door, picking up her purse. She leaned in and whispered to Kelly, “If he’s spending nights, it won’t be long until he’s living here anyway.” She gave a little excited hunch of the shoulders as Kelly ushered her out the door. “It won’t be long!” she echoed.

  Kelly had her pants unzipped the second the door was closed.

  But even after Diane was gone, Kelly couldn’t settle back down for the relaxing night she had hoped for with Ethan. He watched as she paced through the living room, the whole conver
sation with her mother pinging through her brain like the silver ball in an arcade game. Finally she pulled out her phone and called Gary. “Mom’s being Mom again,” she said as soon as he picked up.

  “Hi to you too, Kelly,” he answered. “No, stop! Don’t touch that.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “It’s not a good time; Hazel’s learned how to climb the counters. I’m throwing out all the knives. We’ll eat pudding till she’s eighteen.”

  Kelly sighed. “Never mind, I’ll talk to you later. Hug the girls for me.”

  She grumpily pulled a bag of Goldfish from the cabinet, along with some peanut butter to dip them in. As Ethan joined her in the kitchen, she held a Goldfish out to him automatically. The sharing of Goldfish was literally one of the earliest things she’d learned. Normally when Kelly needed to stew about her mother, or work, or her mother, or the state of the universe, or her mother, she’d talk to Gary or Priya, and if neither of them were available, she’d do the only form of dancing she had yet mastered: holding in her emotions until they manifested in arrhythmic psychosomatic leg twitches. But if she shared her Goldfish with Ethan, maybe she could share her demons too.

  “When will my mom stop?” she burst out. Ethan calmly ate a Goldfish and listened. “I mean, finally I have you, which is what she’s always wanted me to have, and she’s still on my back. It’s like my life can never be good enough for her.”

  “You’re her daughter. I’m sure she wants the best life for you.”

  “Yeah, but it’s my life! She thinks that I need her to tell me how to do everything. I’m twenty-nine, as she loves to point out. Why can’t she just leave me alone and let me live?”

  “Maybe you could just ask her to leave you alone.”

  “Ha! I don’t need to ask. The only motivation she needs to forget about me is having Clara in the same room.”

  Ethan’s forehead pinched. “I’m sorry, perhaps I’m missing something here. I’m not seeing the connection between you wanting your mother to pay attention to you and wanting her to leave you alone.”

  “What are you saying, that I’m being illogical?” Kelly rammed a Goldfish so hard into the peanut butter that it crumbled into tiny orange flakes. She could hear the same bitter tone creeping into her voice that she had taken with Dr. Masden, and her mom, the tone that seemed to arrive, unbidden, anytime someone made her feel hot and uncomfortable and raw, but she couldn’t stop it.

  “Maybe it’s my logic that’s flawed.”

  “Yeah, maybe. Don’t bother trying to understand my relationships, Ethan.”

  “Okay,” was all he said, quietly.

  “I’m going to bed.” Kelly stormed from the room, not realizing until after she had said this that it was barely eight p.m.

  Back in her room, pulling a nightshirt from a stack and setting her phone on its charger, she wanted to forget Ethan’s words. But Kelly had a rational brain, and that brain was currently shaking off the irrational thoughts she was trying to cram into it like bad password attempts. She knew that Ethan was perfectly logical. And she knew that his assessment of her thinking was correct.

  She stepped back into the kitchen, where Ethan was putting away the food, and flipped her hair out from under the neck of her nightshirt. “I’m sorry,” she said. Ethan looked at her, startled. She realized that he probably had zero precedent for knowing how to react to her saying those two words. “You’re right about my mom,” she went on. “And I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”

  “Thank you for your apology,” he said sincerely.

  “It’s just, every time I talk to my mom it gets—” She searched for the word.

  “Complicated?” Ethan supplied.

  “Really complicated.”

  “You’re both complicated women.”

  “Complicated, crazy—you fill in the C word.” She sighed, but smiled and helped him wipe down the countertops. They fell into a harmonious silence, crossing the granite surface in complementary circles, like paired figure skaters. She thought back to Robbie and Nick. Both guys had pushed her, but in ways that made her feel worse about herself, setting standards of success in school and work that she had panted to catch up with, constructing molds of what their image as a couple should be that she couldn’t quite contain herself in. She could feel Ethan pushing her too, but in a way that actually made her feel good.

  thirteen

  • • • • • •

  Kelly knew that Priya’s two chief interests in life had been cemented from the day she kissed Marcus Rothstein on the second-grade planetarium field trip: science and boys. And so it really should have come as no surprise that Priya wanted to talk about Ethan. A lot. Historically, Kelly hadn’t brought much to the sacred table of boy talk, but now she had the ultimate offering. She tried to be vague to avoid getting caught in a lie, but Priya was not having it.

  “So do you know yet if he cooks?” Priya asked in a whisper. The girls were side by side in the audience at Tesla’s newest product launch. Snagging coveted tech industry invites was definitely a primo perk of the job, and this event in particular was one Kelly had been excited for. Tesla’s knack for packaging AI in a commercially friendly way without watering it down was exactly what she wanted to emulate with her own work in androids, and she could always pick up some ideas from their autonomous automobiles, which were essentially giant robots. But while Kelly was dying to soak in every detail about the sleek cherry-colored car Elon Musk was introducing onstage, Priya seemed more excited that she finally had Kelly in a corner.

  “Shh, he’s going to show the inside,” she said, nodding at Elon.

  As he stepped closer to the car, the doors winged open on their own. “And what’s the next logical evolution in self-driving automotives? It’s all about options. We’re calling it ‘Row or Ring.’” Kelly watched as the rows of seats inside the car smoothly split and oriented themselves as a circular bench inside the perimeter of the vehicle. She furiously tapped some notes into her phone.

  “I told you, customizable was the next big thing!” Priya hissed gleefully. “Private and commercial hybrid. I knew it.” The man on her right threw her a dirty, “stop talking” glare.

  Kelly nodded. “And where’s my collapsible trunk for easier parking?” she whispered.

  “Andre does red beans and rice and literally nothing else. Makes no sense,” Priya said, one eye on the presentation, taking notes of her own. “Wait, you didn’t answer my question.”

  “No,” Kelly said shortly.

  “And inter-car communication will not be limited just to future models,” Elon was saying. “Our newest update will put these features in every Tesla on the road. The car of the future will be chatty,” he said, to laughs from the crowd. “When vehicles can communicate reliably with one another, we’ll eliminate the need for any signs, signals, and markings on roads. And when cars can assess the drivability of any surface and safety of any area, in some places, we’ll eliminate the need for the roads themselves.”

  “We need to find out how they reconcile camera feed images in real time,” Kelly whispered. “We could definitely use that in the androids.”

  But Priya was frowning. “No, like Ethan doesn’t cook, or no, like you don’t know yet?”

  Glaring Man leaned toward them. “Shhh!” he said loudly. Chastened, Kelly and Priya focused on the stage.

  “And to reach the future faster, we’re making all of our inter-car communication plans open source!” Elon declared. The crowd roared.

  Kelly was still bubbling from the presentation as she and Priya made their way outside half an hour later. “Of course, the feasibility of that all depends on network reliability,” she was saying, until she noticed that Priya was bearing right down the sidewalk as she bore left.

  “This way,” said Priya, grabbing her by the arm to steer her. “Remember, we were going to hit up that new black ice
cream place? This is our first girls’ day in, like, a zillion years, you’re not escaping yet.” She waggled her eyebrows mischievously. “Not until you give me the dish on your new D.”

  Kelly’s stomach sank a little as she followed Priya. The fun of girls’ day lost its glimmer when she felt like she was spending the whole time playing Whac-A-Mole with her friend’s questions.

  Priya beamed contentedly at the light-bathed streets, the sun building lattices on the sidewalk through the shadows of the palm fronds. “How cool is it that we’ve finally both met great guys at, like, exactly the same time? I can’t believe I still haven’t really talked to Ethan. Anita totally monopolized him at that dinner. We have got to do a double date so Ethan and Andre can become besties too. Then, one day, when we’re all millionaires with vacation homes next to each other’s in Palm Springs, we can just hang out together drinking martinis in our glamorous midcentury modern living rooms. Do you ever wish you were a gay man?” Priya’s phone buzzed before Kelly could answer. She stopped walking to look at the text.

  “Ooh, Andre’s thing tonight canceled—you should call Ethan!” Priya hit Kelly on the arm. “We can all do dinner together. Double date tonight!”

  Kelly opened her mouth and closed it, unsure what to say. It would be so easy to just say yes. But Priya, more than anyone in the world, would be the one to figure out Ethan’s secret. It was just too big of a risk for them to spend time together. She had increasingly found herself avoiding Priya at work, hoping not to get into any tricky conversations. And between reduced time spent together and the gnawing knowledge of having a secret, she sensed a crack splitting the ground between her and her best friend. Today, their day out, should have helped to mend the crack, but Kelly felt the burden of her lie more than ever. Wouldn’t bringing Priya and Ethan into the same room only result in more secrecy? Wouldn’t all of Priya’s questions to and about Ethan just necessitate more evasive answers, thereby creating more conversational tension and dissatisfaction?