Chapter 66
The neon-vested crossing guard picked the wrong morning to whistle into Willa’s open window while she and the boys were trapped between a student driver in a BMW and a honking dickhead in a Firebird on the street that fed into the school’s drop-off lane.
“I can’t go anywhere!” Willa yelled at no one and everyone.
“The crossing guard is just doing her job, Mom,” Charlie said.
“But does she have to blow that thing into my ear?” Willa said, locking eyes with the whistle-wielding woman, who huffed, shouldered her stop sign, and moved on to her next victim.
“I think she’s nice,” James said.
“Yes, yes, I’m sure she is,” Willa said, improperly turning into the drop-off lane. “Now grab your things and hustle out. You’re about to be late, and so am I.”
“I want you to pull up further,” Charlie said.
“What? No.”
“But mawwwwm, it’s embarrassing to get dropped off here,” Charlie whined.
“Seriously, dude? I … alright, fine,” Willa said.
She edged the Leaf up a few more feet, then insisted the kids disembark. She now had just 12 minutes to get back home and clean herself up for a virtual conference call with a graphic-design client.
Willa had begun to take on a few more of these kinds of freelance assignments as a sort of professional backstop in case she was finally crushed by FitFams’ constant criticism. She didn’t necessarily need a Plan B from a financial standpoint. But she wanted it, because she honestly didn’t know who she was if she wasn’t working, and she knew from her two tours of maternity leave that being a stay-at-home mom was way harder than any “real” job.
She now had just 12 minutes to make the eight-minute drive back home, take off her “going-out pajamas,” throw on a bra and button-down, pull her hair into ponytail, and dab on some sub-par concealer while silently thanking the Zoom gods for the option to smooth out her appearance on the video chat. She always turned that blur all the way up.
With five minutes until the call, she opened her laptop and was greeted by a black screen.
What. The. Hell.
Thinking maybe she’d rudely interrupted the computer’s beauty sleep, she closed it and gave it about 60 seconds to rouse, then gently and politely reopened it.
Same thing.
No, no, no.
With no time or talent for troubleshooting — she could design the hell out of a brochure, but you wouldn’t get far if you asked her to find files on (in? around?) Dropbox — she fumbled through the mess of magazines, bills, envelopes, earplugs, dented cigarette packs, matchbooks, old cellphones, spare change, and condoms (they always joked that he shouldn’t get a vasectomy in case he wanted to impregnate his next wife) spilling out of the bedside-table drawers on Pete’s side of the bed. That’s where he usually kept his personal laptop.
She found it in the bottom drawer, beneath a pair of threadbare underwear of advanced age, and typed in his startup password, then opened her freelance-work email, Zoom, and InDesign, which she’d installed there for just this kind of emergency.
With three minutes left until the call, she saw it: An email from the client, asking to reschedule. She exhaled loudly and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. Then she heard a ping. Must be the client again, she thought. Without even looking at it, she clicked the notification that had popped up in the right-hand corner of the screen.
It took her to Pete’s email, which she hadn’t noticed was open and active in the background. The email was from someone named Beth Calloway, and the subject line read: “Thinking of you.”
Huh. Beth Calloway was thinking of Pete. How … nice?
Perhaps she was a new co-worker, someone he hadn’t gotten around to mentioning, who was 70 years old and hunchbacked and dressed in gray sacks and bonnets like a Martha from “the Handmaid’s Tale.” Or maybe she’d been his date to the prom (did he go to the prom? Willa couldn’t remember) who was once a smokeshow but was now more like Smokey the Divorced Bear. Or maybe she was his cousin; Pete had so many of them, he’d once mistakenly hit on one at the golf-course clubhouse in his hometown after playing a Genesee Cream Ale-fueled 36 holes.
Or maybe Beth was a hot nanny he’d met at the playground with the kids, or a hot bagger at the grocery store, or a hot lifeguard at the front desk of their community pool (“Sir, may I please see your membership … and your member?”). Willa could almost hear “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” by the Police (the 1986 version, since it was less of a bop) playing as the soundtrack to her runaway imagination.
Now, Willa knew she wasn’t exactly the picture of virtue (see: mixologist make-out session). She flirted. Maybe even a lot. And with her friends she’d been known to talk big about the latest Dan Savage column, and how maybe we’re wrong to think that a successful marriage is always a monogamous one.
So it would be hypocritical to fault Pete for a flirtation, or even something that was a little bit more than that. If she wanted certain freedoms, he deserved to have them too.
She should just close the laptop and get ready to go coach her classes.
But the idea that a stranger named Beth Calloway was thinking of Pete and perhaps felt an intimacy with him that left Willa outside, oblivious, naïve — that made her stomach churn.
The pain doubled when she realized she’d somehow gone ahead and invaded his privacy by opening the email.