CRITICAL PRAISE FOR SLIGHTLY SETTLED

“Readers who followed Tracey’s struggles in Slightly Single, and those meeting her for the first time, will sympathize with this singleton’s post-breakup attempts to move on in this fun, lighthearted romp with a lovable heroine.”

—Booklist

“Tracey is insecure and has many neuroses, but this makes her realistic…. And like many women, Tracey needs to figure out when to listen to her friends and when to listen to herself.”

—Romantic Times

CRITICAL PRAISE FOR SLIGHTLY SINGLE

“…an undeniably fun journey for the reader.”

—Booklist

“Bridget Jonesy…Tracey Spadolini smokes, drinks and eats too much, and frets about her romantic life.”

—Publishers Weekly

WENDY MARKHAM

is a pseudonym for New York Times bestselling, award-winning novelist Wendy Corsi Staub, who has written more than fifty fiction and nonfiction books for adults and teenagers in various genres—among them contemporary and historical romance, suspense, mystery, television and movie tie-in and biography. She has coauthored a hardcover mystery series with former New York City mayor Ed Koch and has ghostwritten books for various well-known personalities. A small-town girl at heart, she was born and raised in western New York on the shores of Lake Erie and in the heart of the notorious snow belt. By third grade, her heart was set on becoming a published author; a few years later, a school trip to Manhattan convinced her that she had to live there someday. At twenty-one, she moved alone to New York City and worked as an office temp, freelance copywriter, advertising account coordinator and book editor before selling her first novel, which went on to win a Romance Writers of America RITA® Award. She has since received numerous positive reviews and achieved bestseller status, most notably for the psychological suspense novels she writes under her own name. Her previous Red Dress Ink title, Slightly Single, was one of Waldenbooks’ Best Books of 2002. Very happily married with two children, Wendy writes full-time and lives in a cozy old house in suburban New York, proving that childhood dreams really can come true.

Mike, Mike & Me
Wendy Markham

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Dedicated with love and friendship to the Siegel family,

Joan, Richard, Rory and Nicholas, and to

the three guys I adore: Mark, Morgan and Brody.

With special gratitude to the brilliant David Staub

of Network Expert Software Systems.

Contents

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Chapter fifteen

Chapter sixteen

Chapter seventeen

Chapter eighteen

Chapter nineteen

Chapter twenty

Chapter twenty-one

Chapter twenty-two

Chapter twenty-three

Chapter twenty-four

Chapter twenty-five

Chapter twenty-six

Chapter twenty-seven

Chapter twenty-eight

Chapter twenty-nine

Chapter thirty

Chapter thirty-one

Chapter thirty-two

Chapter thirty-three

Chapter thirty-four

Chapter thirty-five

Chapter thirty-six

Chapter thirty-seven

Chapter thirty-eight

Chapter thirty-nine

Chapter forty

Chapter forty-one

Chapter forty-two

Chapter forty-three

Chapter forty-four

Chapter forty-five

Chapter forty-six

Chapter forty-seven

one

The present

So in case you’ve been wondering, I married Mike after all.

Which Mike, you might ask?

And rightly so.

For a while there, it was a toss-up. But when I finally made my choice, I honestly believed it was the right one—that I’d chosen the right Mike.

Only recently have I begun to question that…and everything else in my life. Only recently have I been thinking back to that summer when I found myself torn between the guy I’d always loved and the guy I’d just met.

That they shared both a name and my heart is one of life’s great ironies, don’t you think?

Then again, maybe not. According to the United States Social Security Administration, Michael was the most popular boys’ name in America between 1964 and 1998. Odds are, if you’re a heterosexual female who was born between those years—as I am—you’re going to date a couple of Mikes in your life. As I did.

Meanwhile, if you’re a heterosexual male who was born in those years, you’re going to date a couple of Lisas. That was the most popular girls’ name the year I was born.

I’m not Lisa.

Remember that song? All about how she wasn’t Lisa, her name was Julie. It was a big hit when I was a kid. I remember singing it at slumber parties with my best friends—two of whom were named Lisa.

But I’m not Lisa. I’m not Julie, either.

My real name is Barbra. Spelled without the extra “a,” like Barbra Streisand’s. That’s not why mine is spelled that way; I was born back in the mid-sixties, before my mother ever heard of Barbra Streisand.

My father—who if his own name weren’t Bob probably wouldn’t be able to spell that—filled out the birth certificate while my mother was sleeping off the drugs they used to give women to spare them the horrific childbirth experience.

That, of course, was back in the Bad Old Days when they didn’t realize that the fetus was being drugged as well—otherwise known as the Good Old Days, when nobody was the wiser and nobody was feeling any pain.

I always figured that when it was time for me to give birth, I’d want those same drugs.

Am I a wimp? you might ask.

Um, yeah. I’ve never been good with pain—I’m the first to admit it. I stub my toe; I scream. I get a sliver; I cry. I see blood; I faint.

By the time I got pregnant, I had heard enough gory details from my friends to know that it would be in everyone’s best interest if I were knocked out before I reached the stage where it was a toss-up whether to call in the obstetrician or an exorcist.

I envisioned drifting off to a medically induced la-la land, waking up feeling refreshed, and having somebody hand me a pretty, pink newborn, even if my husband spelled its name wrong while I was out.

Alas, that wasn’t to be.

For one thing, we knew that our firstborn son would be named after my husband, who is conveniently familiar with the spelling of Mike.

For another, when—about five minutes into my first pregnancy—I asked my doctor about drugs, he recommended a childbirth class where I would learn to use breathing and imagery to control the pain. Call me jaded, but I didn’t see then and I don’t see now how huffing and counting and focusing on a flickering candle or, God help me, a favorite stuffed animal, can possibly make you forget the nine pounds of wriggling human forcing its way out of you the same way it got into you nine months—and nine pounds—ago.

As the scientific theory goes, what goes in must come out. Eventually. Somehow. And the coming-out part is never as much fun as the going-in part.

Whose scientific theory is that? you might ask.

It’s mine. And you should trust me, because I’m an expert.

If you’ve ever eaten all your Halloween candy before the calendar page turned to November—or if you’ve ever done too many shots of tequila on your birthday—then you’re an expert, too.

But if you can’t relate to childbirth or vomiting up a pound of chocolate or a pint of hard liquor, think about this: back when Mike and I were first married, he and my father carried our new couch up two flights of stairs to our one-bedroom apartment in Queens. When we moved a few years later, the movers we hired couldn’t get the couch out. No matter which way they turned it, they couldn’t make it fit through the doorway. They finally told me that the only way to get it out was to remove one of the legs.

Now, normally, I don’t balk at being the decision maker in our marriage. But, normally, strange men don’t request a saw to disfigure our furniture.

I tried to reach Mike at work to see what he wanted me to do—in other words, to ask his permission for the couch amputation—but he wasn’t there.

So the movers sawed off a leg; the couch fit through the door; they moved it to our new house up in Westchester.

When Mike arrived that night, fresh—not!—from his first train commute and ready to collapse, he immediately noticed that the surface he was about to collapse onto was tilting dangerously.

I explained what happened.

He was incredulous.

Okay, not just incredulous. He was other things, too. Including royally pissed off. Now that I’ve had almost a decade of enlightenment regarding Mike’s daily commute to the city, I can attribute his fury that night, at least in part, to an hour spent on an un-air-conditioned railroad car sandwiched in a middle seat between two large businessmen who carried on a conversation across his lap. But at the time, in my seminewlywed overanalytical self-absorption, I concluded that everything was all my fault.

Him: “How the hell could you let them cut the fucking leg off the goddamn fucking couch?”

Me: “I had no choice.”

Him: “We got the fucking couch in. They’re goddamn professionals and they couldn’t get it out? And what kind of movers carry a goddamn fucking saw around to cut the legs off people’s furniture?”

Me: “They don’t. I ran out and bought one.”

Him: “You bought the saw?”

Me: “The goddamn fucking saw. They told me to.”

Him: storms off, spends sleepless night trying to keep balance on the aforementioned—and seriously listing—goddamn fucking couch.

Me: spends sleepless night sobbing into pillow over first significant married fight.

When I say significant, I refer to the fights that stand out in a couple’s mutual memory. Not the arguments that happen along the way: arguments about the thermostat or what color to paint the bedroom or who should buy the Mother’s Day cards for his side of the family. I’m talking Fight, fights. Lying-awake-at-dawn-crying fights. Who-are-you-and-what-have-you-done-with-the-man-I-married fights.

Actually, I can count on one hand the number of fights and sleepless nights we’ve had in our marriage.

After the moving ordeal, our next sleepless night—and, incidentally, our next significant married fight—was a year or so later, when I was ten centimeters dilated and pushing. Does that fight count? I mean, I truly wasn’t myself at the time.

Who was I? you might ask.

I was Lizzie Grubman meets Shannon Dougherty meets Valdemort—a temporary state brought on by the sheer physical agony of childbirth.

And Mike—who was supposed to be coaching me—was just plain stupid at the time, a temporary state I’ll chalk up to low blood sugar. I’ll admit that it was due in part to the fact that I wouldn’t let him visit the hospital cafeteria—or even the vending machines—for the twenty-four-hours-plus that I was in excruciating labor, lest he miss the big event. That’s how stupid I was. I kept thinking that any minute now, there would be a baby. I kept thinking that for, oh, sixteen thousand minutes or so before it actually happened.

Anyway, here’s how stupid Mike was: He brought up the couch story in the midst of my agony.

“You can do it, hon,” he crooned. “You can get this baby out. Unless you want me to run out and buy a saw so that we can cut off one of its legs?”

Har de har har, right? Funny guy, that Mike.

Of course, he then found it necessary to make like Jay Leno and regale the nurses, the doctor and a passing orderly with the Couch Monologue. They all had a good laugh at my expense while I writhed and moaned and cursed the epidural that didn’t work and swore that if the baby ever came out I would be a single mother because I was getting a divorce.

As it turned out, I didn’t.

As it turned out, neither did my parents, although they’re such opposites that most people say it’s a miracle they’ve stayed together all these years.

Anyway, as I was saying before I went into my longer than anticipated digression, my father—who is good at many things, including, fortuitously for us, fixing freshly sawn-off couch legs—has never been good at spelling. He likes to tell people that’s because he’s an accountant—as though an accountant requires prowess only with numbers and not with that pesky alphabet.

So when he filled out the paperwork after I was born, he left out the second “a,” and by the time anybody figured it out, it was too late. My mother woke up and I was Barbra and that was that.

My three older brothers used to tease her—and me—that it was a good thing he had left off the second “a” instead of the third one along with the first “r,” in which case, I’d have been named after the large gray elephant in the French children’s story.

My mother wasn’t amused. It isn’t that she has anything against children’s literature; she is, after all, a middle-school English teacher. She is also a fanatic about all things spelling-and grammar-related. From what I hear, she didn’t speak to my father for a few days after she discovered the spelling mistake in my name. But, like I said, they managed to stay married.

Around the same time I came along, Barbra Streisand became a household name and validated the unorthodox spelling of mine. I can barely remember anybody ever calling me Barbra anyway. I was dubbed Beau early on, and I have never since been anything but.

My parents gave me the nickname because it’s short for Beaulieu, as in Priscilla Beaulieu Presley, Elvis’s wife. They thought I looked a lot like her. Which I do. In fact, complete strangers have come up to me and said that over the years.

I never mind when people do that. I mean, it’s not like they’re telling me I look just like Cyndi Lauper or something.

Priscilla was, and still is, beautiful.

Three pregnancies and a lifetime ago, I was also beautiful. Now I’ve got a seven-year-old, a preschooler and a baby. I’ve also got flab, stretch marks, varicose veins, dark circles under my eyes, sagging breasts that have nursed three children, with nipples that hit my belly button, and a childbirth-traumatized crotch that leaks pee if I laugh.

Which I don’t, lately.

That, I suppose, is a blessing. But it doesn’t feel like one.

Damn, it used to feel good to laugh until tears streamed from my eyes instead of my bladder.

Things that used to make me laugh that hard: being tickled by my dad. The scene in Planes, Trains and Automobiles where Steve Martin and John Candy are in the car that catches fire. Seinfeld—even the reruns I’ve seen a dozen times.

Oh, and my husband, Mike.

He really cracked me up back when we were dating. When we were first married, too, even after we moved up here to the suburbs.

He used to do this dead-on imitation of our crotchety old neighbor, Mrs. Rosenkrantz, that was hilarious—and, I suppose, cruel, if anybody but me had ever seen it. But nobody ever did. It was our special thing.

We’d be doing some mundane task—folding laundry or grocery shopping—and I’d say, “Do Mrs. Rosenkrantz for me, please,” and he would. He’d be Mrs. Rosenkrantz folding laundry or Mrs. Rosenkrantz grocery shopping, and I swear I’d be on the floor gasping for air.

Mrs. Rosenkrantz died right before I gave birth to our second son. I was in labor for the wake and in the hospital for the funeral, so we didn’t go. We came home with our tiny blue bundle to find a rented wooden stork on our lawn and a For Sale sign on hers.

Once or twice after that, I asked Mike to “Do Mrs. Rosenkrantz,” and he obliged, but it wasn’t the same.

A lot of things haven’t been the same since then. Some are better, some are worse—but nothing is the same. Lately, I find myself missing the way things used to be.

I don’t miss Mrs. Rosenkrantz, though—I just miss laughing at her. Or, rather, laughing at my husband’s impression of her.

A young family from the city bought her house. Where we live, in the leafy northern suburbs of New York, young families from the city always buy dead old people’s houses. This was a nice family, the Carsons. They have a daughter my older son’s age and a son my second son’s age and twins on the way any second now. The mom, Laura, is a lot of fun when she isn’t eight months pregnant with multiples in the blazing dead of July, and the dad, Kirk, coaches Little League with Mike.

On hot summer days we grill and drink beers on their deck or ours while the kids play in the sprinkler, and on cold winter days we shovel while the kids build snowmen. The Carsons pick up our mail and Journal News when we’re on vacation and we pick up their mail and Journal News when they’re on vacation, and we keep saying that one of these years we should vacation together.

It sounds good, doesn’t it?

Yeah. Suburban bliss.

Three kids, a raised ranch, an SUV and a 401K. We have everything but a dog, but the boys have been begging for one, and sooner or later I know I’m going to give in and we’ll have the dog, too.

They, like I, will have everything they always wanted.

I was born under a lucky star. That’s what my mother always said, shaking her head and laughing. Things came easily to me from day one. Friends…contest prizes…school elections…boyfriends.

If I wanted something, I got it.

This life is what I’ve always wanted. Isn’t it?

Well, isn’t it?

Back when I was young and single and dating my husband—along with the other Mike, the one I didn’t marry—I dreamed of the life I have now. I figured it would be mine for the taking, because most things were.

Be careful what you wish for—or so they say.

They being the same they my grandmother is always quoting; the they who say beauty is only skin deep, and when the cat’s away, the mice will play, and love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.

Or was that Frank Sinatra?

Not that it matters. Grandma Alice quotes him, too.

The thing is, there’s truth in all clichés—that’s why they’re clichés.

So here I am, a living cliché, on the cusp of my fortieth birthday, reminding myself that I have everything I ever wanted—and trying desperately to remember why the hell I wanted it in the first place.

two

The past

“If I were you,” Valerie told me, lounging on her unmade bed and polishing her toenails that stifling July night, “I’d wear the red. Mike likes you in red, right?”

“He does, but…” I surveyed my image in the full-length mirror we had bought at Woolworth’s and tacked to the back of our closet door only a few days ago. God only knew how we had managed to live in that apartment for almost a year without a full-length mirror.

But Valerie claimed that when she couldn’t see the thirty pounds she had to lose, she didn’t worry about them.

The day after we bought the mirror—my idea—she went back on her diet. It was the same diet she had been on—and off—for the past year or two.

You would think something as drastic as eliminating all fat grams from one’s diet would work. At least, Valerie would think that. It seemed a little extreme to me. But then, I was blessed with a normal weight and a high metabolism. I couldn’t imagine giving up ice cream, chicken chimichangas with cheese, or Popeye’s fried chicken with mashed potatoes and Cajun gravy.

Whenever Valerie was on her low-fat diet, I had to sneak my indulgences so that she wouldn’t be tempted to stray from her oat-bran-strewn path. Of course, sooner or later, she always did, but at least I knew it wasn’t my fault.

“This is new. Don’t you like it?” I asked Valerie, gesturing at the black spandex minidress I was wearing.

I wiped a trickle of sweat from my forehead as she contemplated my appearance. Damn, it was hot, despite the open window and the rotating floor fan in front of it. This was my second summer in Manhattan. Last year, I was so thrilled to actually be living here that I guess I didn’t notice the heat in our fourth floor, un-air-conditioned one-bedroom walk-up.

I do remember noticing the street noise—the round-the-clock horn-honking, sirens, construction-site jackhammers, the throbbing bass from passing car radios and neighborhood bars. It took me a while to get used to the incessant din that accompanied daily life on the Upper West Side. After I did get used to it, whenever I went upstate to visit my family, the nights seemed preternaturally quiet.

Valerie shrugged, set aside the bottle of pale frosted pink polish and said, re: my outfit, “I don’t know, Beau. Don’t you think it’s kind of…”

“Short?”

“Yeah, that. And…”

“Dark?”

“That, too. But also kind of…”

I opened my mouth again, but this time Valerie finished her own sentence.

She finished it with “slutty,” and I grinned.

“I haven’t seen Mike since April, Val. After three months apart, maybe I want to look slutty.”

“No, you want to look sexy. The red one is sexy. This one is slutty. There’s a big difference. Hey, I love this song!” She reached toward the stacked plastic milk crates serving as a nightstand between our two beds and turned up the volume on the boom box.

“I hate this song,” I grumbled, recognizing the all-too-familiar opening strains of Paula Abdul’s “Forever Your Girl.”

“I thought you loved it.”

“I didn’t ‘love’ it, I liked it. And that was last month, before they played it every five minutes on every radio station in New York.”

As Valerie sang the opening, “Hey, baby,” in an off-key falsetto, I couldn’t resist adding, “Anyway, I like new-wave stuff much better than pop. Pop is so over.”

“That’s what you said about Madonna last year, and now look. She’s everywhere again.”

“I give her five minutes,” I said darkly. “And Paula Abdul gets ten. Nobody will ever have heard of either of them in a few years. But INXS and The Cure will be around forever, like the Beatles. Mark my words.”

She was too busy singing along with flash-in-the-pan Paula to mark my words, so I picked up the hanger draped with the red dress. It was a month old and I had worn it at least three times already, but of course Mike had never seen me in it. Holding the hanger against my shoulders, I surveyed my reflection.

The short skirt had a ruffled flare, reflecting the lambada craze that had overtaken everyone’s wardrobe that summer. My light brown hair was pretty much bigger than the skirt: long, kinky-permed and teased on top, with the bangs sprayed fashionably stiff and curving out from my forehead like a tusk.

“I don’t know,” I told Valerie. “I think I like the way the black clings better.”

Lying on her back and waving her legs around in the air to dry her toenail polish, Valerie interrupted her singing to say, “I’d kill to like the way something clings on me.”

I never knew how to respond when she made comments like that. It wasn’t easy being five foot seven and a hundred and twenty pounds when your best friend was six inches shorter and a good thirty pounds heavier.

I know, I know…it was probably much harder to be the shorter, heavier one. But I couldn’t help feeling awkward whenever Valerie looked at me with blatant envy…like she was right now.

I tried to think of something nice to say about the neon-blue spandex bicycle shorts she was wearing with an oversize neon-orange T-shirt, but I was at a loss. Spandex wasn’t the most flattering trend if you weren’t built like a pencil. Which, fortunately, I was. And which, unfortunately, Valerie wasn’t.

“My toes are never going to dry with this humidity. Wouldn’t you kill for a window air conditioner?” Valerie asked, still waving her legs around in the air.

“Maybe we can scrape up enough money to buy one.”

“Yeah, right.” She snorted.

So did I. Naturally, we were both broke. She made eight bucks an hour as an office temp and had yet to land a full-time job with benefits. I had the full-time job and the benefits, but I made a mere seventeen thousand dollars a year. Back in my small hometown, that would have been a fortune. Here, it barely covered the absolutely vital three Cs in every girl’s life: cocktails, cigarettes and chimichangas. At least, those were the things that were vital in mine.

“I suppose you want me to clear out of here tonight,” Valerie said, getting off her bed to join me in the mirror, wielding a tall pink and black can of Aqua Net. She sprayed her towering blond hair liberally, then offered me the can.

I misted my head and handed it back. “Is that all that’s left? Didn’t you just buy that yesterday?”

She shrugged. “I’ll pick up more during lunch hour tomorrow.”

Ugh. Between the hair spray and the sweat, everything north of my neck felt sticky. I stripped off the black dress and stepped back into my own bike shorts—neon pink, with fluorescent green stripes up the thighs—and oversize neon-green T-shirt, which I knotted over my left hip.

“So, like, do you want me to see if I can sleep at Gordy’s tomorrow night?” Valerie asked, taking a cigarette from the open pale green box of Salem Slim Lights on her dresser and offering the pack to me.

Gordy had been our friend since the three of us met at college upstate freshman year. He moved to New York after graduation, same as we did. He was the ultimate cliché: an aspiring actor/waiter who came out of the closet only after his staunchly Roman Catholic parents finished putting him through college. They promptly disowned him, leaving me and Valerie as his only “family.” He had a studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, a scary neighborhood we ventured into only in pairs, and only in broad daylight.

“You don’t have to stay there,” I said around the cigarette in my mouth as I held a lighter to it. I took a deep drag, then told Valerie, “I mean, it’s a work night and everything.”

Naturally, I was hoping she would protest.

She did. Sort of. “Well, don’t you want to be alone with Mike on his first night here?”

“Yeah, I do, but…”

I waited for her to say that it was no problem; that she was absolutely going to Gordy’s. She didn’t say it. She just blew a smoke ring and shrugged.

Dammit.

Don’t get me wrong. Valerie was a great roommate. She didn’t snore, she washed her own dishes, she ogled Officer Tom Hanson aka Johnny Depp on 21 Jump Street with me religiously every Sunday night.

But she didn’t have much of a social life, which meant that unless she was at work—currently a temp job at a textbook publishing house—she was pretty much always home.

That wasn’t a problem when my boyfriend wasn’t coming to visit me for the first time since he’d finished grad school in Los Angeles in May.

Mike, who now had a master’s degree in computer science, had set up a bunch of interviews in Manhattan. I was praying he’d land a job and move back East, because I was starting to realize that the alternative was me giving up my dream job as a production assistant on a television talk show and moving out West. I had been born and bred in New York State, and I had no desire to move to southern California.

I sensed that Mike was going to try to convince me that I should, though. He was from Long Island, but he had fallen in love with California. When I visited him there in April, he kept talking about how I could get a great job in the television industry. When I pointed out that I already had a great job in the television industry, he pointed out that the quality of life on the West Coast was so much better than in New York.

“See, Beau? You don’t have to step over homeless people every time you walk out the door,” he said as we crawled along in his convertible on the 405 one sunny afternoon. He gestured at the blue skies and palm trees overhead. “Everything’s clean, there’s no snow and you don’t have to be jammed on the subway with a million strangers.”

“No, you just have to be jammed on the freeway with a million strangers in a million cars.”

That he so obviously preferred the L.A. traffic to the N.Y.C. crowds scared me then, and it scared me now.

He was really excited about some independent computer research project he and a couple of other grad students had been working on. The project was supposed to end when school did, but it had apparently morphed into something bigger, which was why he was still in California.

He hadn’t actually come out and said that he was considering staying on the West Coast for good, but I got the hint.

But thanks to my pushing, he had arranged these interviews in Manhattan. I had my heart set on living happily ever after with Mike, à la Michael and Hope on my favorite show, thirtysomething, and I was determined to do it right here in New York.

I figured that while he was in town this week, when he wasn’t busy interviewing or spending time with his parents, he and I could do some preliminary apartment hunting. He’d have a job lined up before he flew back West; I’d go with him; we’d load up his car with all his belongings and drive back here together. He could stay with his parents—or, better yet, with me—until our new place was ready. I was sure Valerie wouldn’t protest.

Never mind that our place was almost too small for us two women, and I hadn’t actually checked with her. Never mind that I had already used up my first year’s allotment of one week’s vacation. And never mind that Mike and I hadn’t yet discussed the prospect of living together.

I figured everything would fall into place the second I fell into Mike’s arms. Which, I saw, glancing at my new Keith Haring Swatch—was less than twenty-four hours from now. If the plane was on time.

I felt a ripple of anticipation. After all, Mike was the love of my life. We had met at summer camp in the Catskills during high school and fallen madly in love over roasted marshmallows and color war. We reconnected every summer, first as campers, then as CITs, and finally as counselors. We went to separate state universities but managed to keep up a long-distance relationship all through college.

This last year had been the hardest, though, by far. Instead of sixty-some miles of New York State Thruway between us, there was an entire continent.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

That was what my cliché-spouting Grandma Alice always said. She was—and still is—a big believer in true love triumphing over the odds. After all, she and Grandpa Herman started dating before he was shipped overseas to the Battle of the Bulge. Their relationship survived a world war.

My parents’ relationship survived the Vietnam War—not that my dad was sent to Southeast Asia or anything. But he did serve in the military back then, stationed in Alabama for more than a year when my sister and I were really young.

I couldn’t imagine that Mike and I would ever live through a war in this day and age, but I honestly believed, in my young and foolish heart, that we could make it through anything the future was going to throw at us.

three

The present

Splat.

“Shit!”

No, not literally shit. That would have been even more disgusting, but this is pretty vile. I have just been sprayed with Earth’s Best Organic First Sweet Potatoes.

“Beau! Watch your mouth!”

Startled by the voice, I turn to glower at my husband, who is standing in the kitchen doorway, fresh from his shower and wearing a crisp white button-down and maroon tie unmarred by pureed orange root vegetables.

“Well, I wish he’d watch his mouth,” I snap, gesturing at my squirming five-month-old, whose chubby cheeks are ominously puffed again. “He does this spitting thing because you taught him.”

“I didn’t teach him to spit food. I taught him to do this. Didn’t I, Tyler?” Mike leans over the high chair and blows a vibrating raspberry into our son’s face.

Tyler squeals with glee.

“Stop it, Mike. You think it’s cute, but lately he does that whenever he has a mouthful, and I’m the one who ends up wearing his breakfast, not you.” I reach for a cloth diaper from the basket of clean, unfolded laundry on the table and mop the mess from my face.

“Yeah, well, I’d trade feeding him his breakfast for getting on the train,” Mike says darkly.

Tyler does another loud raspberry.

“No, Tyler, that’s bad, bad.”

“No, don’t say bad like that—he’ll think you’re saying he’s bad,” I reprimand Mike for the millionth time since I read that parenting magazine article that claimed telling your children they’re bad will create self-esteem issues they’ll carry for a lifetime.

“Oh, right. What am I supposed to say again?” Mike doesn’t roll his eyes at me, but I can tell that he wants to.

“Tell him ‘that’s naughty.’”

“That’s naughty, Tyler,” Mike says, even as he strides over to the polished granite counter and peers at the coffeemaker.

A moment goes by. I pretend to be oblivious, focusing on circling the rubber-tipped spoon just below the rim of the jar until it’s coated with orange goo.

“Oh…no coffee?” Mike lifts the empty glass carafe, as if to be absolutely certain that steaming black brew isn’t somehow concealed inside.

I swallow a snarl as Tyler swallows the spoonful of sweet potatoes I’ve cautiously slipped past his drooly pink gums.

“No coffee,” I inform my husband curtly. “I haven’t had a chance to make it yet. I’ve been busy with the laundry and the baby.”

“Mmm,” he says, or maybe it’s “hmm.” Either way, the message is clear. He, the commuting husband, is feeling neglected by me, the stay-at-home wife.

“You can stop at Starbucks on the way to the station,” I inform him.

“You know I don’t like their coffee.”

I do know that. He thinks it tastes burnt, making him the only grown human in the tristate area who doesn’t patronize the place.

“Go to Dunkin’ Donuts, then,” I tell him. “You like their coffee.”

“It’s too out of the way. I’ll miss my train.”

I shrug. What the hell does he want me to say?

I clear my throat. “Sorry.”

That, I know, is what he wants me to say.

But now that I’ve obliged, he merely shrugs and strides to the sink, where he reaches for the orange prescription bottle on the windowsill.

You’d think he’d tell me that it’s okay. That, for once, he can live without his caffeine fix for the hour it will take him to get to his office in midtown. You’d even think he’d offer to get up five minutes earlier from now on and make his own goddamn coffee.

Nope, nope and nope.

He swallows the small white pill he’s been taking for his high cholesterol ever since the doctor prescribed the medication last winter.

You’d think he’d be grateful to me, his loving wife, for caring enough about him to insist that he get a physical after years of neglecting to do so.

Nope again.

If I’m in the vicinity when he takes his daily dose, as I am most mornings, he makes a big show of making a face as he swallows. Sometimes—like today—he throws in a heavy sigh for good measure, as if to illustrate how tragic it is that his very life depends on modern medicine.

Not that it does. His cholesterol wasn’t that high. But early heart attacks run in his family, and I don’t want to be a young widow.

Really, I don’t.

Shoving aside a twinge of guilt, I spoon more baby food into Tyler’s gaping mouth.

The fact that I have found myself fantasizing lately about being single again has nothing to do with wishing my husband dead.

I love Mike. I’ve loved Mike for almost half of my life.

It’s just that I’ve loved him more passionately in the past than I happen to love him right now.

Right now—as in, these days—he gets on my nerves.

Right now—as in, right this second—he’s really getting on my nerves.

“I thought Melina came yesterday,” he says.

Melina is our cleaning woman, and I know where this is headed. Teeth clenched, I scoop more baby food onto the spoon and say tersely, “She did come yesterday.”

“The sink doesn’t look clean.”

“It was clean after she left.”

He bends over to inspect the caulked groove where the white porcelain meets the black granite. “There’s a speck of red gunk that was here yesterday morning. It’s left over from the lasagne pan you washed,” he informs me. “It’s still here.”

“Then why don’t you scrub it off?” I snap.

“Because that’s Melina’s job. That’s why we pay her a hundred bucks a week. Why are we paying her if she’s not doing her job?”

Why, I wonder, are we having this conversation yet again?

“If you don’t want to tell her that she has to shape up, Beau, I will.”

“I’ll tell her,” I say quickly, driven by the inexplicable yet innate need to protect Melina from the Wrath of Mike. “It’s just hard. She doesn’t speak English.”

“Then show her. Bring her over to the sink and point to the gunk. Then bring her to the corner of the upstairs hall and show her the cobwebs that have been there for two weeks. Then bring her to the boys’ bathroom and show her the grunge growing on the tile behind the faucet. Then—”

“Okay! I get it, Mike.”

“Right. So will she, if you show her.”

I sigh. “Yeah, well, I can’t follow her around the house every time she’s here.”

“Then maybe you should fire her and hire somebody who doesn’t need to be shown how to do their job.”

“We can’t fire her. She has two kids to support here and three more in Guatemala. She needs the money.”

Mike shakes his head and mutters something, his back to me.

“What?”

He doesn’t turn around. “I just said, I don’t understand how a mother can leave her kids behind like that.”

I bite back another defense of Melina. I don’t understand it, either. The thought of leaving my babies behind—even when they’re adolescents—to go live and work in another country is as foreign to me as…well, as Guatemala is. Intellectually, I understand her reasons. Maternally, I’m at a loss.

I’d never heard of such a thing until I moved to Westchester and had my first brush with domestic help. In the past seven years, I’ve met countless nannies and housekeepers with children and spouses back in South America or the Caribbean or wherever it is they’re from. I used to find it shocking; now it’s merely unsettling.

I, after all, didn’t think twice about leaving behind a promising career in television production to become a stay-at-home mom after Mikey was born.

All right, maybe I thought twice. Maybe it wasn’t exactly a no-brainer. Maybe I believed I could have it all: marriage, children, glamorous career.

Maybe some women can.

But when my six-week maternity leave was over, I found myself crying daily on the commuter train that carried me away from my precious child. I lasted two weeks, until Mikey—poor sacrificial lamb—caught his first cold from a sick toddler whose working mother sent him to day care with a green runny nose.

That was when I knew the jig was up.

Hadn’t I been weaned on seventies TV? Didn’t I know that if you were going to make it after all, you had to be spunky and single and living in a bachelorette pad with a big gold initial on the wall?

I was never going to be Mary Richards. It was too late for that. No, I was destined to become Ma Ingalls meets Olivia Walton meets Marian Cunningham.

Tyler gurgles adorably and swallows more food.

I smile at him, spoon in another orange glob, and watch Mike try to catch his reflection in the window above the kitchen sink. He fusses with the dark hair that fringes his forehead, a forehead that seems to be getting taller with every passing day.

I never imagined that my handsome husband would have a receding hairline by his fortieth birthday. Most men do, I know. It’s just that Mike has always been as effortlessly good-looking as…

Well, as I was.

On that grim note, I watch him turn abruptly, cross back to the table and take his suit coat and briefcase from a chair. He asks, “Do you think you’ll be able to pick up my dry cleaning today, Beau?”

Oops.

“Yes,” I say. “I’m sorry I forgot yesterday. I took the boys to the mall to get them out of Melina’s way, and I forgot to stop at the cleaner’s on the way home.”

“I need my gray suit for tomorrow.”

“Your gray suit?” I frown. “I don’t remember dropping that one off.”

“I wore it last Friday and then I put it into the dry-cleaning hamper.”

“Well, I dropped off the dry cleaning on Friday morning, so it must still be in the hamper.”

“Beau, I needed that suit by tomorrow.”

“I’m not your wardrobe mistress, Mike,” I snap.

“Fine. Whatever. Bye.” He plants a kiss on Tyler’s head and heads for the door.

“Bye,” I say as it slams behind him, remembering that there was a time when he wouldn’t leave—or come home—without kissing me, too.

Tyler coos. I flash an absent smile in his direction, my thoughts drifting back over the years, remembering the path that led to this place—and wondering what would have happened if, when I arrived at the inevitable fork, I had chosen instead to head in a different direction.

four

The past

So life was good. I was young, pretty, living in New York and madly in love—not to mention happily employed.

I adored my job as a production assistant on J-Squared, aka J2 or the Janelle Jacques Show.

Back when I was fresh out of college and interviewing for the position, I thought I’d be the luckiest entry-level drone in the city if I actually got it—which I doubted I would. Ironically, most of the other candidates competing for the job were huge fans, but I’d never even heard of Janelle Jacques before I moved to New York. She was a fairly well-known soap opera actress, but I rarely watched the soaps, aside from a few months leading up to Luke and Laura’s wedding on General Hospital my senior year in high school.

Turned out, I was wrong about my not getting the job. I was also right about being a lucky drone when I did. My job was one of those too-good-to-be-true things fate throws at you, so good that you just know the bottom is going to fall out somewhere along the way…and then it never does.

A year later, the freshly hired glow had yet to wear off. It was hard work, but I was still fascinated by the whole behind-the-scenes television studio process. Disillusioned, yes, but fascinated just the same. Perhaps even more so as the months went on and I realized that in the entertainment industry, nothing is ever what it appears to be.

As an actress, Janelle Jacques had won a decent fan following and was even nominated for a daytime Emmy. As a talk show hostess, she left something to be desired.

It wasn’t that she didn’t have stage presence, because she did. She was svelte and statuesque, with a flaming-red mane, porcelain skin and delicate bone structure. All she had to do was walk onto the set and the rest of us instinctively stopped whatever we were doing or saying to focus on her.

But when it came to interviewing her guests, she just wasn’t very…good.

Yeah, okay, she sucked at it. I mean, even I knew, courtesy of my high-school journalism class, that you don’t ask simple yes-no questions when you’re conducting an interview; nor do you ask questions that can be answered in one word.

Apparently, Janelle Jacques never took a high-school journalism class. Her Q&A sessions were almost painful to watch.

Janelle Jacques: Did you have fun making your new movie?

Up-and-coming starlet: Yes, I really did.

Janelle Jacques: That’s great. Great!

Up-and-coming starlet: Yes.

Janelle Jacques: Where was the movie filmed?

Up-and-coming starlet: In Paris.

Janelle Jacques: And do you speak French?

Up-and-coming starlet: No. (Beat.) No, I don’t.

Janelle Jacques: So was it hard to live in Paris and not speak French?

Up-and-coming starlet: Yes, it was.

I mean, come on, Janelle! I kept expecting one of her guests to respond to one of her vacuous queries with an eye roll and an exasperated “Duh,” but nobody ever did.

Sometimes, as I watched the show taping from behind the scenes, I could see Janelle’s eyes glazing over and realized that she wasn’t even listening. And sometimes, when I had a clear view of the guest’s eyes—or more specifically, the guest’s magnified pupils—I realized that they’d ingested—and/or smoked—something stronger than Jolt Cola and cigarettes as a pre-greenroom pick-me-up.

But like I said, I was still enchanted by my job. Despite the inept host and the competitive late-night time slot—opposite Arsenio Hall’s new hit show—J-Squared was doing fairly well, so far, in its ratings. It didn’t hurt that the week before the pilot aired, Janelle eloped with Caleb DeLawrence, her former costar.

Naturally, the tabloids were all over the marriage, proclaiming the madly-in-love and stunningly beautiful newlyweds king and queen of daytime television. Almost immediately, the Star had Janelle trying to get pregnant, the National Enquirer had her well into her first trimester, and the Globe had her on bedrest expecting triplets, with Caleb hovering at her side, massaging her swollen feet.

Meanwhile, backstage at the show, an infinitely juicier rumor had it that the marriage was a publicity stunt. Supposedly, rugged heartthrob Caleb had a male lover and so did Janelle—only hers was married to a conservative congresswoman up for reelection in November.

At first, I didn’t believe any of it. After all, whenever Caleb was on the set, he and Janelle were nauseatingly lovey-dovey. Then I caught a reluctant glimpse of Caleb with his purported lover when he thought they were alone in the wardrobe room one night. I may have been a small-town girl who had never knowingly met a gay man before Gordy, but even I knew that straight men didn’t ruffle each other’s hair. And they sure as hell didn’t kiss, which my best work friend and fellow production assistant, Gaile, swore she’d seen them do.

Whatever. I mean, Janelle’s sham marriage was the least of my concerns that summer. I was preoccupied with dreams of—okay, plans for—my own matrimonial future with Mike.

The day of his arrival from California plodded along. The taping seemed to take forever, and when it was over, Gaile caught me looking impatiently at my Swatch.

“You’ve still got an hour to go before we’re off work,” she pointed out as we carried tubs of dirty dishes and utensils from a cooking segment to the kitchenette backstage.

“I know, but I thought I could cut out early and get a head start on a cab to the airport.”

“What are you going to do when you get there and have a couple of hours to kill?”

“I don’t know…read?” I was in the middle of a Danielle Steel novel the hopelessly sappy Valerie had forced on me.

“You could read,” Gaile agrees. “Or get drunk in the bar. That’s what I always do in airports.”

I laugh.

“I’m serious. Then I don’t have to worry about plane crashes.”

“Why did you have to bring that up?”

“Sorry. Don’t worry, he’ll be fine.”

I scowled at her. “That’s easy for you to say. Why did I have to go and rent La Bamba last weekend?”

“La Bamba?”

“You know, that movie with Lou Diamond Phillips as Richie Valens. You know…the day the music died.” I sing a few bars of “American Pie” for her.

Apparently, Gaile has no idea what I’m talking about.

“Never mind,” I say, giving up. “So, will you cover for me?”

“You’re going to stick me with all these greasy pans?”

“I promise I’ll clean the whole stage on my own the next time Janelle has that animal guy on the show.”

Gaile tilted her cornrow-and-turban covered head, considering it. “I’ll take grease over piles of monkey shit any day,” she concluded. “Deal.”

“Thank you!” I squealed, giving her a hug.

She laughed. “You knew I’d do it, Beau.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Sure, you did. You always get people to do what you want.”

I bristled at that until I saw the twinkle in her brown eyes. Still, I asked, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing bad. Just that you’re a little bit spoiled, girlfriend.”

“Spoiled? Me?” I feigned shock, but I’ll admit it: This wasn’t the first time I’d ever heard that. People were always saying it when I was growing up.

I guess, when you’re the youngest child of four—and the only girl—you grow accustomed to people doting on you. Back home, I was the princess.

Here in New York, I sometimes had to remind myself that not everyone was going to drop everything to cater to my needs.

Then again, people often did. Especially men.

“I’m going to go change my clothes,” I told Gaile.

“What did you decide on? The red or the black?”

“The red,” I told her. “What do you think?”

“I think that it’s the least blah out of two blah choices.”

I rolled my eyes and grinned. When it came to fashion, Gaile was anything but blah. She’d jumped wholeheartedly on the currently hot Afrocentric-garb bandwagon, decking herself out daily in exotic headdresses and flowing robes. The contrast of bright-colored native fabrics against her ebony skin was dazzling, but if you asked me—which she never did—her jewelry, invariably made of bones, tusks and teeth, made her resemble a one-woman archaeological dig.

And if I asked her—which I frequently did—my jewelry and my wardrobe were in desperate need of pizzazz. But whenever I tried to follow Gaile’s fashion advice, I wound up feeling as if I belonged on MTV with an all-male, eye-liner-wearing backup band.

“Let’s face it,” I told her now. “I’m a blah girl, Gaile.”

“You’re gorgeous and you know it.”

“Well, I have blah clothes. What can I say?”

“You don’t have to be blah.”

“Yes, I do. I have to be blah. Blah is my style.”

We deposited the tubs of dishes on an already cluttered countertop, next to a basket of bagels that had been sitting out since this morning, and half a dozen red-lipstick-stained, half-filled coffee mugs. Janelle was a caffeine hound, and she refused to drink out of the foam coffee-service cups. Only real porcelain—and just-brewed, steaming hot coffee—would do. As soon as the contents of her mug grew lukewarm, she pushed it aside and had an assistant—often, me—bring her a fresh cup.

But for today, I was finished with catering to Janelle’s every whim and cleaning up after her. Thanks to Gaile, I was free.

“Good luck, Beau,” she said as I headed for the door.

“Luck?” I stopped short. That struck me as an odd thing to say. “Good luck with what?”

“You know…”

“Not really.” I waited.

She looked me in the eye, as Gaile likes to do. “Your plans,” she said simply. “For you and Mike. I hope they work out.”

“They will.”

She ran water into the sink.

“They will,” I said again.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You said good luck.”

She shrugged.

“You don’t think Mike’s going to want to move here after all?”

“I don’t know what Mike’s going to want to do, Beau.” She squirted Palmolive into a pan.

“He’ll want to be with me,” I assured her with confidence.

But what if he didn’t?

What if, for the first time in my charmed life, things didn’t go my way?

In the ladies’ room, I slipped out of my blah black leggings and tunic and into my red dress. Being blessed with a good complexion and nice features, I rarely wore much makeup. But this was a special occasion.

I stood in front of the mirror and outlined my green eyes in dark liner, coated my lashes with black mascara and painted my lips the same color as my dress. When I was finished, I sprayed Obsession in the hollows behind each ear and each knee, and Aqua Net all over my head. I teased my bangs a little higher, sprayed again, and surveyed my reflection.

Perfect.

Okay, not perfect, perfect. I mean, I still looked like Elvis’s Priscilla, but by then Elvis was long gone and his ex-wife had faded from the spotlight. And I wasn’t really a dead ringer for bombshell model Cindy Crawford, despite frequent assurances that I was, from Ramon, one of the show’s security guards.

For one thing, I was almost a head shorter than Cindy. I knew that because Gordy and I spotted her in the Scrap Bar one night when she wasn’t famous enough to be recognized by anyone other than my celeb-crazed friend.

Nor did I have Cindy’s mole, nor Cindy’s voluptuous build.

My figure back then was straight and flat as the Long Island Expressway out East: no boobs, but no pesky hip, gut or thigh padding, either. Sometimes, I fantasized about cleavage, blissfully unaware that it would one day be in store for me—or that it would be bestowed only with cracked, sore, milk-spurting nipples and a baby attached to them 24/7.

Satisfied with my reflection, I snuck out of the studio and into the subway station. Too broke to pay cab fare all the way from Manhattan, I took the jam-packed, un-air-conditioned number seven train out to Queensborough Plaza, descended the elevated platform down to Queens Boulevard, and spent almost fifteen minutes trying to hail a taxi.

By the time I sank into a disconcertingly sticky back seat, my hair had wilted. Luckily, I’d tucked the can of Aqua Net into my oversize black bag, and I’d have plenty of time at the airport to repouf.

Fifteen minutes—and almost fifteen dollars—later, I did just that in a ladies’ room down by the gate.

Unfortunately, the lyrics to “American Pie” were still running through my head. I hoped it wasn’t an omen.

According to the monitors, Mike’s plane was on schedule, but I still had a couple of hours to kill.

Sometimes, even now, I look back and wonder what might have happened that night if I hadn’t forgotten my Danielle Steel novel back at the office.

Would I have plopped down in a chair and plodded my way through a few more chapters of Daddy until Mike’s plane landed?

Probably.

Would I have avoided the chance meeting that turned my life upside down and made me question every choice I’d made since?

I don’t know.

I mean, did I believe in fate?

Did I believe that my life was preordained?

Did I believe that what happened would have happened even if I hadn’t settled on the only vacant stool in an airport bar?

I ordered a gin and tonic, and drank it too fast, still uneasy about Mike’s flight.

Yes. I would look back on that day in years to come and see it as a turning point. Nothing would ever be the same again.

I would wonder time and again what would have happened if the television hadn’t been on above the bar.

Or if it had been a different night, any other night of the year.

Or if he hadn’t been sitting next to me.

five

The present

E-mail is an amazing new invention, don’t you think?

Okay, maybe you don’t think of it as a new invention. Maybe you’ve been online for years, along with the rest of the world beyond my cozy little domestic one.

Me, I’ve been online for three months, ever since my in-laws bought a computer for our family room. Technically, it was a birthday present for Josh, our middle son, and they gave him a shitload of Blue’s Clues and Disney software to go with it.

But Mike and I suspect the real reason they gave us the home PC is so that we can stay in constant touch with them now that they’ve moved to Florida year-round. Until recently, they’ve only spent winters at their retirement condo in St. Petersburg, and even then, they dropped hints that we need to call/write/visit more often.

Okay, not hints. They’ve been known to come right out and say, “You need to call—or write, or visit—more often.”

But Mike only gets two weeks of vacation from his job, and we always spend one in Vermont over Christmas with my family at a rented ski chalet. He doesn’t want to spend the other with his parents in Clearwater Beach. Naturally, my in-laws must assume that I, the daughter-in-law and only non-blood relative in the family, am the holdout.

In truth, I’d be thrilled to spend Mike’s second week off in Florida—or anywhere other than here, working on the house. But Mike doesn’t believe in hiring somebody to do something he can do himself—or misguidedly believes he can do himself.

Two Augusts ago, we dry-walled the basement; last August, we painted all the trim. I say we because although my job was technically to keep the kids out from underfoot and provide takeout pizza and ice water, I eventually wound up on my knees and on ladders right alongside my hapless home-improving husband.

This August, Mike wants to stick a half bath under the stairs. That’s how he says it—“stick a half bath under the stairs”—as though it’s as simple as sticking a magnet over Mikey’s latest crayoned depiction of a dinosaur on the fridge. Yeah. Right. Plumbing is not his forte. Is it anyone’s forte, other than a real live plumber’s?

But Mike doesn’t want to hire one of those. No, he wants to stick a half bath under the stairs all by himself.

Me, I want to stick my feet in saltwater.

Not necessarily the Gulf of Mexico, because according to my in-laws, it’s warmer than a bathtub in August. That, to them, is a positive thing.

That, to me, is not the least bit positive. I’m not sure why. Maybe because if August is so freaking hot in the New York suburbs, I sure as hell don’t want to go someplace where it’s even hotter. Or maybe because warm water makes me think of pee. For that matter, so does the word bathtub. That’s probably because I have a four-year-old who thinks of our tub as a walk-in urinal.

Anyway, re: the saltwater thing…I was thinking more along the lines of the refreshingly chilly North Atlantic.

You know, the beauty of being online is access to vacation information. I’ve been researching Cape Cod “family vacation packages.” For the unenlightened, “family vacation packages” come with accommodations that include bed rails and cribs, kiddie pools, well-supervised day camps and evening baby-sitters so that Mommy and Daddy can eat overpriced shellfish and drink watered-down frozen margaritas.

Yeah, yeah, I know. But trust me, it beats Kraft mac-and-cheese and Capri Sun fruit punch in a pouch.

Which is what I—and my two older boys—had for lunch this afternoon. Now, with the July midday sun too hot to venture outdoors, I’ve opted to keep the kids in the comfort of central air, at least for now. Mikey is building a Lego city in his room with Laura Carson’s daughter, Chelsea, and Josh is captivated by Dora the Explorer on television in the master bedroom and Tyler is dozing in his swing in the living room.

Here I am down in the family room at the computer, checking e-mail for the third time today. Why didn’t anybody warn me that it was so addictive? Every day, I wake up wondering who I’m going to hear from next.

Since I became Beauandco@websync.net, I’ve been in touch with my old friend Gaile, my favorite middle-school teacher and my campus alumni association. I’ve also heard from my in-laws on a daily basis, have deleted countless offers to enlarge my penis, and have been temporarily convinced that if I forward an e-mail to everyone on my list, Bill Gates will send me a dollar.

Since then, I’ve become more savvy about Internet hoaxes and spam, not to mention my mother-in-law. For example, I’ve learned not to respond to her e-mails during hours when she might actually be sitting at the computer, because then she’ll know I’m home and she might decide to call me and I’ll have to answer the phone and I’ll have to talk to her for an hour. More, if she puts my father-in-law on.

Now I know that the best time to respond to her e-mails is at four o’clock, when she and my father-in-law are likely to be at an early-bird special, or after nine o’clock, when they’re sound asleep.

Today, I sign on for the third time, and once again, I’ve got mail. Woohoo!

Okay, maybe not woohoo. I skim past two e-mails from MIL, several spams and a couple of lame jokes from my cousin in Ohio, who forwards everything that crosses her electronic path.

Then it happens.

A legitimate woohoo moment.

There, amid the junk mail, is a screen name that suddenly has my heart beating faster.

Okay, it’s probably spam, I tell myself as I grip the mouse and maneuver the arrow toward HappyNappy64@websync.net.

I mean, it has to be a coincidence. More than likely, a pornographic one. I’ll probably click on the screen name and be treated to a nude twelve-year-old girl reclining on leopard-skin sheets.

I stare at the screen.

HappyNappy64.

It can’t be him. It can’t be, yet I hear his voice echoing in my head from fifteen years and a lifetime ago.

You know what I feel like, Beau?

No, what do you feel like, Mike?

A happy nappy.

Then he’d pull me to the bedroom and we’d make love in broad daylight, then fall asleep in each other’s arms.

Happy Nappy.

That was what he called it, and it always made me laugh.

Somehow, despite all the details that have drifted back to me—especially lately—about the time we had together, I forgot all about Happy Nappy.

Now it comes back to me in a rush, all of it—not just the sound of his voice in my head, but the smell of his skin when I cradled my head on his naked chest, and the sunlight filtering through the crack in the blinds, and the way his mouth tasted when he kissed me after eating chocolate ice cream; his lips and his tongue sweet and cold and luscious.

Happy Nappy.

I forgot all about that, but not all about him.

I could never forget him if I tried.

And I had. Tried, that is. For a long time, I tried to forget him. I thought it would be better. Easier.

Then I realized nothing would ever be easy, and I stopped trying.

Lately, what I’ve been trying to do—maybe subconsciously, I realize now—is remember him. Remember Mike. Remember what we had.

Remember why the hell I was so willing to leave it behind, to leave him.

But for all the things I remember, I can’t remember that and I didn’t remember Happy Nappy.

Now, my heart beating in my throat as I stare at the screen name, I highlight HappyNappy64 and click on it.

Please, I beg silently as the battery-operated swing clicks back and forth behind my desk and animated televised Dora chatters in Spanish from the next room and Mikey and Chelsea argue upstairs over how many Legos are necessary for a properly tall Empire State Building…

Please don’t be porn.

Please don’t be porn.

Please be him.

Be Mike.

The Other Mike.

The Mike I didn’t marry.

The Mike I can’t forget.

Please, HappyNappy64, please turn out to be him.

And it does.

six

The past

“Can I get you another one?” the bartender asked, gesturing at my glass that now contained only melting ice cubes and a sliver of lime.

I contemplated the question. The first drink had gone down pretty easily, and I still had more than an hour to kill in the airport bar before Mike’s plane was due to land. But I didn’t want to be wasted when he got here, and the drinks weren’t exactly a bargain.

“Go for it,” a voice urged, and I glanced up to see that it had come from the guy on the next bar stool.

I immediately noticed that he was good-looking. I mean, how could I not? I was a red-blooded female, even if I was just biding my time until the love of my life stepped through the jetway.

Yes, this guy was good-looking. He had a brooding, Johnny Depp thing going on around the eyes. Plus he had style, no doubt about that. His dark hair was cut fashionably long on top, short on the sides, and brushed his collar in back. In other words, he had a mullet.

Don’t laugh.

Back in the summer of 1989, mullets were not reserved for rednecks and butch lesbians alone. No, mullets were the happening hairstyle of the moment, and this guy had one.

He also had on a pair of baggy jeans, a white T-shirt and a short black-and-white patterned jacket with shoulder pads.

Hair and clothes: A plus for effort.

But he was a babe even beyond those variables that were within his control. His dark eyes were fringed by thick, sooty lashes. There was a deep cleft in his chin and deeper dimples on either side of his mouth when he grinned.

He was grinning at me, and God help me, I found myself grinning right back at him.

He told me to go for it.

Yeah, and he was talking about the drink, I reminded myself.

Aloud, I said, “Go for it? That’s easy for you to say.”

“Well, why not? Oh, I get it. You’re a plainclothes pilot, right? You’re about to take off for Paris or something, and it would be irresponsible to take the controls after a couple of drinks.”

It wasn’t that hilarious, but I laughed as though it were the funniest thing I’d ever heard. “No, I’m not a plainclothes pilot. I’m just…”

“Broke?” he guessed, a little too close to truth for comfort.

“Not exactly.”

“Well, this one’s on me anyway. Another round,” he told the bartender, who nodded and headed for the top shelf and two fresh glasses before I could protest.

“Mine wasn’t Tangueray the first time,” I pointed out to the good-looking and fashionable guy, who shrugged.

“Mine was. And I’m treating.”

“Thanks. But…”

“But?”

I wanted to tell him that I had a boyfriend. But I didn’t know how to do it without making it sound as though I thought he was interested in me, which I didn’t. Or, even worse, as though I was interested in him. Which I wasn’t.

I mean, he was just a polite guy politely buying me a drink. To be polite.

Did I mention that in addition to being polite, he was very good-looking? Fashionable, too.

“Never mind,” I told him, and attempted to shift my attention elsewhere. Because he might be buying me a drink, but that didn’t mean we were now a couple.

I mean, he was a total stranger, and I was on the verge of being reunited with Mike.

“Mike,” the total stranger said just then out of the blue, and I looked at him, startled.

“Excuse me?”

What was he, some kind of mind reader?

Or maybe I’d just imagined it. Maybe he hadn’t said Mike at all. Maybe he’d said something similar. Like…

Might.

Or bike.

Oh, yeah. Bike. That made a lot of sense.

“Mike,” he repeated, sticking his hand out in front of me.

“Mike?” I echoed.

“That’s my name.”

No way.

He was Mike?

I decided the coincidence was some great cosmic sign. A sign that meant…

Well, to be honest, I had no idea what it meant. But it couldn’t be good.

“I’m Beau,” I said, because he was waiting.

“Nice to meet you, Beau.”

As I watched the bartender twisting lime into our fresh drinks, I told myself that I had to get out of here. Now. I would pretend I had to go to the bathroom and just not come back.

“Where are you headed?”

Again with the mind reading? I stared at him in disbelief, wondering how he could possibly know.

“To the ladies’ room,” I admitted, starting to slide off my stool.

I stopped when he burst out laughing.

“Hey, I hear it’s great at this time of year,” he said.

“Huh?”

“The ladies’ room. Never mind. Bad joke.”

The bartender set down our drinks. I reached for mine, needing it desperately.

He went on, “I meant, where are you headed from here? Flying someplace on vacation? Or business?”

“Oh! No, I’m just…I’m meeting somebody’s plane.” And I’m head over heels in love with him. So stop flirting.

Are you flirting?

Or is it my imagination?

“How about you?” I asked him, after taking a sip of my second drink. The second drink I shouldn’t have been having in the first place.

“I landed a while ago. My luggage missed the connection at O’Hare so I have to wait for it to get here on the next flight.”

“You’re in New York on vacation?”

“I just moved here a few months ago.”

“Oh.”

He just moved here. Which meant that he lived here. Unlike Mike. My Mike.

“So you live here, too,” he pointed out conveniently.

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Upper West Side.” I didn’t want to ask him where he lived because it really didn’t matter because I was never going to see him again.

Then again, it seemed rude not to ask, so I did.

“Lower East Side.”

“East Village?”

“Lower.”

“SoHo?”

“Lower,” he repeated with a shrug. “Chinatown, really.”

“You live in Chinatown?”

“Yeah. But I’m not Chinese,” he said, deadpan.

“You’re kidding. You’re not?” I asked, also deadpan.

“No. People make that mistake all the time, though.”

“They do?”

“Yeah, you know, they’ll ask me for my recipe for kung pao chicken or they’ll want to know how to play piaji, and I—”

“Piaji?” I cut in.

“Yeah, it’s a traditional Chinese game.” He grinned.

“Really?”

“Really. And actually, I really do know how to play. You soak up a lot when you live in the neighborhood, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“Like, I bet you know how to eat Sunday brunch like nobody’s business.”

“What?”

“Living on the Upper West Side. Forget it. I was trying to be funny again.”

“Oh.” I cracked a smile.

“I should probably give up my dream of starring in my own sitcom, right?”

I laughed.

So did he. Then he said, “Actually, I’m serious.”

“You are?”

“Yeah. I really do want my own sitcom someday. Dream big, I always say.”

I honestly couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not, so I just shrugged and said, “Yeah.”

“But for now, I’m working entry level at an ad agency. What do you do, Beau?”

“For a living? I’m a production assistant.”

“What kind of production assistant?”

“You know that show J-Squared?”

“Janelle Jacques? Yeah, I know it. You work for her?”

“Yeah. I’m a production assistant on the show.”

“You’re in the industry?”

“The Janelle Jacques industry? You bet,” I quipped.

He was already reaching into his pocket. “Here,” he said, and pulled out a small pale blue rectangle.

“What is it?” I asked, though it was obviously a card. His card.

“My card,” he said unnecessarily. “So you can get in touch with me if…”

“If Janelle becomes a sitcom producer and is looking for somebody to star in a new show?”

He smiled. “Yeah, or if you just feel like, you know…”

I did know, and I again wanted to blurt out that I was in love. With somebody else. Some other Mike.

But we weren’t talking about love.

“…getting in touch with me,” this Mike finished with a shrug.

I felt guilty taking his card, but I did. I shoved it into my bag without looking at it.

“Thanks,” I told him. “For the card and for the drink.”

“You’re welcome. What time does your friend’s flight get in?”

“Any second now,” I lied, and looked around as though I almost expected to see Mike—my Mike—lurking behind a potted palm, spying on us.

Not that there were any potted palms in the airport lounge. Even if there were, Mike wasn’t the spying, lurking type. He totally trusted me.

Poor sap.

No, just kidding. I was entirely trustworthy. I had no intention of cheating on him.

Yet.

“Oh, my God…look at that,” said the guy with whom I would not be cheating on Mike.

Yet.

I followed his gaze up to the television over the bar, where a special news bulletin was unfolding. The room had fallen silent as everybody seemed to notice the television at once. In mute horror, we watched a passenger jet crash-land and burst into a fireball.

“Where is it?” I heard somebody ask.

“Somewhere in the Midwest,” came the official-sounding reply.

My stomach turned over. Mike was flying over the Midwest.

Calm down, Beau. Thousands of people are flying over the Midwest right now. What are the odds that it’s his plane?

“What airline is it?” somebody else was asking.

“Looks like United.”

I gripped the arms of my bar stool to keep from toppling over. Mike was flying on United.

“Beau…are you okay?”

I looked up to see my companion watching me worriedly.

“My…friend is on United, flying from California. What if—?”

“Shh, listen…” He reached out and squeezed my hand reassuringly as the news bulletin proceeded.

I was too frantic to focus; I couldn’t see, couldn’t hear. I wanted to bolt, but I was afraid to move. I was afraid to breathe. It was as though the slightest movement could carry the tragedy home.

Still fixated on the television screen, Mike told me, “That plane was headed to O’Hare from Denver. Your friend was flying from California? Was it a direct flight?”

“Yes. But what if—”

“Do you have the flight number?”

“Yes.” Somehow, I managed to produce the scribbled information from the bottom of my bag, and handed it over with a trembling hand. My heart was racing and it felt as though a giant rubber band were compressing my chest.

Mike compared the scribbled flight number to the television screen, double-checking a few times before telling me, “The plane that crashed was flight 232. Your friend was on flight 194.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

I could feel tears springing to my eyes. I’d never been so relieved in my entire life.

Then I remembered that I had just held hands with a stranger.

Shit.

Reaching for my glass, I drained what remained of my drink in one long gulp, thinking it might steady my nerves. I plunked the glass back on the bar, heaved a shuddering sigh and imagined hurtling myself into Mike’s arms in the near future.

“The friend you’re meeting here…is she a she, or is she a he?”

I looked up to see the other Mike watching me. It dawned on me that even in my panic a few moments ago—my hand-holding panic—I couldn’t bring myself to say the B word in front of him.

“Boyfriend.” I said it now, then spelled out for good measure, “She’s a he, well, he’s a he, and he’s my boyfriend. Not my friend. I don’t know why I called him my friend.”

“Maybe because you didn’t want me to know you were involved with somebody else?”

I feigned shock. Now my heart was racing all over again, dammit.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said before I could respond. “You’re thinking I’m a cocky son of a bitch. Right?”

Fortified by gin, I said, “Well…kind of, yes.”

“The thing is, I would have asked you out, and not just because you work in TV. I would have asked you out before I knew that, because you’re gorgeous and I like your laugh and like I said, I’m new in town.”

“How new?”

“New enough not to have a girlfriend.”

Yet.

I was sure that wouldn’t last long. The city wasn’t exactly teeming with cute, stylish, witty, straight guys.

But I already had one of those, so I had no choice but to release this one back into the wild.

“Listen,” he said, “if it doesn’t work out with your boyfriend, give me a call.”

“It’ll work out with him,” I assured him with more confidence than I felt.

“Well, if you find yourself casting a sitcom, give me a call.”

I laughed. “Will do.”

But I was sure I wouldn’t.

So sure that the next morning, as Mike lay snoring in my bed, I crept across the room and removed the blue business card from my bag. I tossed it right into the garbage can without a second glance.

After all, Mike was back. My Mike. And I wasn’t interested in anybody but him.

Yet…

seven

The present

Hey Beau, Bet you’re surprised to hear from me. I Googled your name and found your e-mail address and figured I’d drop you a line. Where are you living now? I’ve moved around quite a bit, but now I’m pretty settled in Florida. Anyway, I’d love to know what you’re up to, so please write back. Take care. Mike

And that’s it.

I reread the e-mail at least a dozen times, just to make sure there isn’t something more. Some hidden meaning between the lines. Some clue as to why he suddenly decided to get in touch after all these years.

Unless…

No. It has to be him.

Of course it’s him.

He didn’t sign his last name. He didn’t have to. He knew I’d know who he was the second I saw Happy Nappy. Happy Nappy 64—the year he was born.

So…

Why?

Why is he barging into my life now, after all these years?

Because he Googled me?

Why did he Google me?

Okay, confession time: I Googled him, too.

It’s not as though he’s been on my mind every second for the past decade and a half, but like I said before, he does tend to pop up now and then. I can’t help getting lost in memories sometimes, and I can’t help occasionally wondering where he is, what he’s doing, whether he’s married with children.

Back when we first got the computer, I entered his name in the Google search engine and held my breath until it came up with thousands of hits. His name was too common. I gave up after the first few hundred. But I knew that if I really wanted to get in touch with him, I could have done it. I could have tracked down his parents, or old mutual friends, or hell, I could have hired a private detective.

Not that I would have gone to that extreme.

Still, now that he’s found me…

Now that I know where he is…

I have this sudden, pressing need to know more.

Like, what is he doing in Florida? He never said anything about wanting to move to Florida.

And…

Is he married with children?

But I can’t come right out and ask him that. I can’t write Dear Mike, Thanks for writing. Oh, by the way, are you married with children?

After all, his marital and paternal status doesn’t matter. It can’t matter, because, oh yeah, I’m married with children.

Not that he’s proposing anything in his e-mail other than an innocent e-mail in return. I could write and tell him what I’ve been up to.

But what could that possibly accomplish?

I read the e-mail again, then tear my eyes away, forcing myself to focus elsewhere for a minute. I have to clear my head.

The sun is streaming through the windows. It’s a beautiful summer afternoon. I should take the kids over to the pool. Or the park. Or for ice cream.

But it’s so hot. And the baby is sleeping. And…

And I would rather stay online and write back to Mike.

But that would be wrong.

Wouldn’t it?

I don’t know. I mean, I struck up an e-mail correspondence with Gaile after all these years.

But Gaile and I never took a Happy Nappy together. Gaile never tried to steal me away from the man I loved.

And still love, I remind myself. You still love Mike. Nobody is going to try to steal you away from him now. He’s your husband. You built a life together.

Yeah, and keeping that life running smoothly is my full-time job.

I look around the family room, noticing all the things that need doing. There are a few stray orange Goldfish cracker crumbs on the rug, which the incompetent Melina missed, which I was about to vacuum yesterday before somebody interrupted me. Beside the television is a scattering of kiddie videos and DVDs I was in the midst of matching with their boxes earlier in the week before somebody interrupted me. On the desk is a stack of bills I started paying last night before somebody interrupted me. And after that I decided to settle in and watch a movie before somebody interrupted me, forcing me to TiVo the rest.

TiVo might just be the most revolutionary invention known to man or harried suburban mother. We’ve had it for a year now. It’s nice to be able to hit Pause when the homeroom mother calls you just as CSI: Miami is starting, to remind you that you signed up last fall to bring two dozen homemade cupcakes for snack in the morning. Or you can hit Fast Forward when one of the kids shows up in the room just as some unfortunate soul is getting violently whacked on The Sopranos. Or you can hit Instant Replay when your husband erupts in a deafening sneezing fit just as Alex Trebeck is giving the right answer on Jeopardy.

You know, it’s too bad the trusty TiVo remote doesn’t work on anything other than the television set, because I could use a version of it to Pause, Fast Forward and Rewind real-life moments all day, every day. No matter what I’m doing, somebody is always interrupting me.

So why isn’t that happening now?

Why isn’t one of the kids bugging me to give them Gummi Worms or to wipe their poopy keister or to tell so-and-so to stop kicking/biting/looking-at-me so that I can forget about answering Happy Nappy?

I don’t have to answer him. I can delete him from my life with the press of a button.

Too bad it wasn’t that easy the first time around.

Back then, I didn’t know how to let go.

Maybe I still don’t.

My fingers are flying over the keys before I can stop them.

Dear Mike, Thanks for writing…

Good. Now what?

I was so surprised to hear from you!

Good. Now what?

I’ve been thinking of you a lot lately.

Not good.

I replace it with I’m sorry things ended the way they did, and I’ve always hoped for the chance to tell you how sorry I am that things didn’t work out for us.

Definitely not good.

I backspace over that and sit with my fingers poised on the keyboard, trying to think of something to say. Something that will lead us not into temptation. Something that isn’t trite yet won’t dredge up the painful past.

I mean, I broke the guy’s heart. I let him believe we could have a future together, even though I was in love with somebody else.

The somebody else I married.

The somebody else with whom I have three children, a mortgage and a retirement plan. I should probably point that out first and foremost.

I immediately type I’m still married to Mike.

Then I realize it sounds as though I thought we might not last.

I backspace quickly. Of course I’m still married to Mike. Why wouldn’t I be?

I try again.

Mike and I have three beautiful sons and a house in Westchester. He’s working at an ad agency in Manhattan and I…

I pause, frowning.

Hmm. How can I make my hausfrau existence sound glamorous and exciting?

Perhaps the more pressing question is why do I feel the need to make my hausfrau existence sound glamorous and exciting?

I delete the last line, all the way back to Westchester. That was probably TMI, anyway. He doesn’t need to know the intimate details of my life.

I just can’t help wishing there were some.

Time to wrap things up quickly.

I’d love to hear from you again when you have time. Take care! Beau

There. Short and sweet.

I hit Send before I can read it over and change my mind.

Time for a reality check.

I log off, march over to the phone and dial Mike’s extension.

His secretary answers.

“Hi, Jan, it’s Beau.”

“Beau! We were just talking about you.”

“You were?” I say, wondering who we is.

I hate when somebody says they were just talking about me. Not that it happens regularly, but still…

What could anybody possibly have to say about me? I don’t do anything. I don’t go anywhere. I don’t see anyone.

“Yes, I was just telling Mike how lucky he is to have a wife who’s willing to stay home and be with the kids. If I had to be at home with my kids, I’d kill myself.”

“Oh. Well…” What does one say to that? “It’s not so bad.”

“Well, I told Mike he needs to bring you some flowers once in a while too, to let you know how much he appreciates you.”

Too?

“He’s such a sweetheart, Beau,” she goes on. “I can’t believe he always remembers that purple is my favorite color.”

“Oh…he’s got quite a memory.”

So do I. I remember when my husband used to stop at the florist in Grand Central on his way home every once in a while. He’d come in the door with a paper-wrapped bouquet of my favorite flowers, heavenly scented stargazer lilies.

He hasn’t done that in months.

I hadn’t even noticed until now.

“Hang on and I’ll go get him for you,” Jan says, and puts me on hold.

It’s not that I’m jealous. If Mike’s secretary were the least bit buxom or beautiful, I might be jealous. But Jan, a married mother of toddler twins, has crow’s-feet, prematurely gray hair, saddlebags and an upper lip that desperately needs electrolysis. She and I are about the same age, but she looks a good decade older. She’s so not a threat to my marriage.

In fact, until recently, I didn’t think anything could be a threat to my marriage.

“Hey, what’s up, Babs?” my husband’s voice asks.

I hate when he calls me Babs. But at least he sounds cheerful, so I say, just as cheerfully, “Hi! I just…I wanted to see how your day was going.”

“Crazy. How about yours?”

Upstairs, I hear the clattering of a million tiny plastic pieces against hardwood. Apparently, the Lego city has met its demise.

“Crazy,” I tell Mike.

Because if an out-of-the-blue e-mail from an old lover isn’t crazy, I don’t know what is.

“Crazy how? Are the boys okay?”

“They’re fine. One is playing, one is watching Dora, one is sleeping. When are you coming home?”

“Late” is his prompt reply. “I have to take some people out for drinks. Don’t wait for me for dinner.”

“I won’t. Will you be home before I put the kids to bed?”

“I’m not sure. I’ll try. Kiss them for me if I’m not, okay?”

“Okay. I wish you were coming home soon.”

“Believe me, so do I. I’d rather be home with you and the boys than drinking Grey Goose and tonic at the Royalton on an empty stomach.”

And I’d rather be drinking Grey Goose and tonic at the Royalton on an empty stomach. Ironic, isn’t it, that we long for what we can’t have?

Like…

No. Stop that.

“Let’s go away,” I tell Mike spontaneously.

“Away? What do you mean?”

“Let’s go on vacation. Instead of staying here and working on the house. Let’s just go somewhere. Please?”

“Beau, I spend every weekday of my life somewhere other than at home,” Mike points out, sounding weary. “I’m tired of going somewhere. I want to go nowhere for a change.”

“But if we went out to the Cape for the week, you could go nowhere once we got there. You could sit in a chair on the beach for six straight days.”

“Do you know what the traffic on 95 is like between here and the Cape in August? It would be a nightmare.”

“But—”

“I want to sit in a chair in my own backyard for six straight days, Beau. And when I’m not sitting in a chair, I’m going to be working on that bathroom under the stairs. Believe me, you’ll thank me when you’re flushing that toilet at the end of the week.”

I don’t think so. Not if it means also flushing any hope of a real vacation this summer.

I sigh. “It’s just hard to be at home with the kids day in and day out, Mike.”

“Maybe you should get a hobby.”

Is it my imagination, or is he being condescending?

“What do you suggest?” I ask in a brittle tone. “Macramé? Model airplanes?”

“You know what I mean. You need something to do, other than taking care of the kids. I don’t blame you for being bored.”

His unexpected sympathy catches me off guard.

Before I can respond, I can hear a phone ringing on the other end of the line.

“We’ll talk about it over the weekend, okay?” he asks, slipping from sympathetic to distracted in a matter of seconds.

“Yeah, okay.”

We hang up.

I don’t want a hobby. I want…

I don’t know what I want, other than for this sudden restlessness to go away.

I stand there in the family room, listening to the overhead hum of childish conversation, Dora’s theme song, the rhythmic, battery-charged rocking of the swing.

I almost wish Tyler would start whimpering, just to give me something specific to do.

When did I get to be this aimless housewife?

Mike and I have three beautiful sons and a house in Westchester.

It sounds so fulfilling when you put it in writing. So much better than the reality.

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