Life and Other Inconveniences

by Kristan Higgins

  “Well, if that’s what dying looks like, I wish I were dying, too,” Beth said.

  “No more margaritas for you,” I said. Another round of giggles floated up, and I felt utterly, completely happy.

  “Jamilah, how are things going with Jason?” Beth asked.

  She shrugged, glancing at me. “We’ll see. He’s a great father, and the boys really miss him, so that kind of sucks. Being the only parent is so much harder than when you can pass the kids off to someone.” She closed her eyes. “I’m sorry, Emma. That was insensitive.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s true. Single parenting is brutal.” I sipped my drink. “He and I were never together, not really. Not after high school.” Beth and Calista, who knew the inside scoop on that, side-eyed me but didn’t contradict.

  “What makes a great father?” Beth asked. “Because I’m looking. I want babies so bad my ovaries spontaneously triple in size every time I see a picture of Lin-Manuel Miranda.”

  “Happens to us all,” I murmured.

  “Is Jason a great father to Riley?” Calista asked. She had a grudge against him, which was easy to do, since she’d never met him and encountered his easygoing charm and Jake Gyllenhaal eyes.

  “He is,” I said generously. “He’s never forgotten a birthday, and he always gives Riley the best presents. He calls or texts a couple times a week, and he visits at least once a year. And then he always takes her somewhere cool or does something amazing with her. Rock climbing or sailing or The Lion King. She adores him.” I paused. “Thank you for making that easy, Jamilah.”

  “Oh, God,” she said. “It’s nothing. He just needs a nudge.”

  I tilted my head. “I meant, thanks for being so understanding,” I said. “What did you mean, he needs a nudge?”

  “Uh . . . nothing.”

  I looked at her a minute. Her cheeks flushed, and she played with her ring.

  “So that’s all you?” I asked. “The calls and the visits and remembering her birthday?”

  “Well . . . I put a reminder in his phone to call her. And of course her birthday is on our family calendar.” She pressed her lips together.

  “Do you schedule the visits?”

  She winced.

  “And pick out her gifts?”

  She grimaced. “I . . . yeah. It’s me.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I asked. “I mean, well done and thank you. But really? It’s not him?”

  “Surprise, surprise,” Calista muttered.

  “He absolutely loves her,” Jamilah said. “I just . . . I didn’t want her to ever feel second-best, you know? When we got married, I told him I wanted her to be a priority, and you know he’s kind of scatterbrained, and—”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s fine.” I swallowed. “It just makes me like you more, in fact.”

  “And like him less, we hope?” Calista said. “No offense, Jamilah.”

  “None taken. We’re separated. Does anyone here really like Facebook? Because it’s ruining my marriage.”

  The conversation swung around to social media, how ridiculous it was, how no one would get off it, how everyone felt worse for being on it.

  My mind was busy recalculating. All those years, Jason never said a word about his wife having a hand in his . . . fathering.

  “Here’s an idea,” Beth said. “I’ll move in with you, Jamilah. We can coparent those beautiful kids of yours. I won’t even ask for sex unless you beg me.”

  Good old Beth. We all laughed, and the tension was broken. In fact, I felt a little relieved. Jason wasn’t quite as perfect a father as he pretended to be (and as I’d believed him to be). And my daughter’s stepmother loved her. Life tooketh with one hand and gaveth with the other.

  “No one has provided me with a man, by the way,” Beth said. “It’s been five minutes. You don’t know anyone?”

  “Move to Chicago,” Calista said. “I’ve got at least four interns who could use an older woman to help them grow up. They’re children, but they have high earning potential and good hearts.”

  “A cougar,” Beth said thoughtfully. “I like it.”

  The doorbell rang. “I’ll get it,” I said and hauled myself off the chaise lounge.

  “Bring more guacamole,” Calista ordered.

  “Yes, my liege,” I said.

  “See, she gets our dynamic,” Calista said. “I tell her she doesn’t have Huntington’s, she makes me guacamole.”

  “Completely fair,” Jamilah said.

  I was still smiling as I went into the foyer and opened the door.

  It was Miller. “Hey!” I said. “How are you?”

  “Hi. Nice to see you.”

  “You too. What can I do for you?”

  “Uh . . . it’s cocktail hour?”

  “Oh! Um . . . Genevieve’s not here. She’s in the city with Donelle doing a pub crawl. Which, given the state of that toe, is an accurate description. But come in, come in. We’re having girls’ night.”

  “Shit. She did leave a message, and I forgot. I’ll go. I don’t want to interrupt.”

  “Miller. I assume you have a babysitter, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So get your butt in here and have a margarita and hang out with us for a little while. We’ll kick you out when we start talking about periods.”

  He almost smiled. No, he did smile, and suddenly I realized that he was . . . well . . . kind of hot in that tragic, manly way. Jason was the looker of the two, but Miller had a quiet appeal that was . . . well . . . very appealing.

  Perhaps I should also stop with the margaritas.

  “We’re on the deck,” I said.

  “No,” Jamilah called. “We’re in the room with the stone floor because the mosquitoes were killing us. Oh, hi, Miller! How are you, hon?”

  “Jamilah.” He gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Hey, Beth.”

  “Hey, hottie.”

  “Miller,” I said, “this is my best friend from back home, Calista Daniels.”

  He nodded. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Miller is Genevieve’s friend and Jason’s cousin, Calista. He’s got a three-year-old named Tess, and Riley’s helping take care of her here and there.” Like I hadn’t given Calista the details already.

  “Nice to meet you.” She winked at me, sort of blowing my cover.

  “How about a margarita, Miller?” I asked.

  “I’ll take a beer. I’ll get it, though,” he said.

  “You forgot the guacamole, princess,” Calista said.

  Miller and I went into the kitchen.

  No doubt about it. Miller was a hottie, and I was a little surprised I hadn’t noticed it earlier. I mean, there had never been anything wrong with his looks, but age had made him more attractive. His dark hair was graying a little in a way that made my ovaries squeeze—the tragedy of the widower was shamefully sexy . . . so much cleaner than a sloppy divorce. And his sense of duty got me right in the feels, because a father who put his daughter first was not something I’d seen a lot firsthand.

  “How’s Tess?” I asked, handing him an IPA from the fridge.

  He shrugged. “She’s fine.”

  I sliced an avocado carefully. Helga did have very sharp knives. “Riley adores her.”

  He gave a half smile, and my ovaries stirred again. “Riley is amazing. She knows all these cool things to do that keep Tess interested. Little things, too, like pulling all the pots and pans out of the cupboards and giving her a wooden spoon and whisk and letting her bang the hell out of them. Or the other day, she filled up the sink with water and put dish soap in and just made bubbles and splashed. This morning, they put rocks in a bucket for forty-five minutes, and Tess was happy the whole time. Where do they teach that stuff? All my time with Tess is spent trying not to get her to break things and hurt herself.”<
br />
  I smiled to myself. Riley had learned those things from me, because I’d done them with her. My mother had done them with me. “Well, it’s a lot easier when your job is just to entertain someone. You have to do all the work, too. Cooking, laundry, cleaning, taxes, doctor’s appointments . . .”

  He picked at the label on the beer bottle. “Does it ever get easier?”

  “Hand me that cilantro, okay? And yes. It does.” I mashed up the avocado, added the cilantro and some jalapeño and red onion. “You’re a good dad, Miller, and you’ve had extraordinarily hard circumstances.”

  “I’m not really a good dad,” he said, and there it was, his deepest fear, out in the open. I could tell both from his tone of voice and the way he was so carefully studying the remains of his beer label.

  “Do you hurt her?”

  “No! Of course not.”

  “Do you feed her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you keep her safe?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Do you take her to the doctor when she’s sick?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Yes.”

  “Do you try your best, even though she’s a fiery little demon, and tell her you love her?”

  He sighed. “Yeah. Even when I don’t mean it.”

  “Then you’re a good dad, Miller. Trust me. I’ve seen bad fathers. You’re not even in the same neighborhood.”

  Suddenly he met my gaze. “Sometimes I think I hate her. Ashley died because of her.” He looked away and took an unsteady breath. “Shit. I never said that out loud before.”

  I put down the fork I was using to mash the avocados, rinsed my hands, dried them, then set his beer bottle on the counter and held both his hands in mine. They were workingman’s hands, and I held them tightly and looked into his dark, dark eyes. “That’s a perfectly normal way to feel,” I said. “It doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you a grieving husband.”

  He looked at me, too, his eyebrows drawn together. Then he was hugging me, and God, it felt good, because in that moment, I knew I’d said the right thing at the right time, and it hit him in the exact right place.

  Poor guy. Poor, sweet, kindhearted guy.

  He was lean and warm and smelled like sunshine and salt air, and he was taller than I thought. My face fit against his shoulder.

  “Shit, is there romance brewing here?” Beth asked, and we broke apart.

  Miller wiped his eyes in that way men do, one-handed.

  Beth leaned on the counter. “Did I interrupt? If you guys need to start kissing, I can just stay here and watch in a totally non-pervy way.”

  “We were not kissing,” I said.

  “Yet,” Beth said.

  “Make yourself useful and grab the chips, Beth.” I patted Miller’s arm (his bicep was rather gloriously hard and full) and took the guacamole into the conservatory.

  Miller didn’t say much, but he made a fire in the fireplace, as it was getting chilly, and I lit a bunch of candles and kept the windows open. Got a few Genevieve London cashmere throws, and we sat there, laughing and talking and drinking wine and eating my very good guacamole. Amid stories about how Calista and I had met (me falling off my bike and thinking I had a hematoma and not just a bruised ass), and how Beth and I had met (first day of fourth grade, fell off the monkey bars and got a legit concussion, and Beth walked me in to the nurse), I found myself looking at Miller more than a few times.

  He wasn’t boyishly good-looking, the way Jason was. He was a man, and his battles showed on his face—the grief, the responsibility, the weariness. But there was intelligence there, too, and when he smiled, it felt . . . profound. Not just a knee-jerk reaction, but an affirmation that life still held beautiful things.

  We talked about traveling, kids, books, television shows, what our parents were up to (I sat that one out; I wasn’t sure whether my father was even in the country or not). It was lovely, really.

  “Well, I should get going,” Miller said eventually. “I told the babysitter I’d be home before ten. Thanks for tolerating me, ladies.”

  “It was tough,” Calista said. “You’re rude and ugly and we don’t like you at all.”

  There was that smile again.

  “I’ll walk you to the door,” I said, standing up.

  He thoughtfully grabbed his beer bottle and the now-empty bowl of chips and put them in the kitchen. We passed through the formal dining room, where there was a painting of the sea over the fireplace.

  “Is that a Winslow Homer?” he asked.

  I squinted at the signature. “Yes.”

  “Holy crap. It’s gorgeous.” We went into the foyer. “This is such a beautiful house,” Miller said.

  “It is,” I said. “I heard you did some work updating it a few years ago.”

  “Will you have dinner with me sometime?” he replied, then looked away, rubbing the back of his head with one hand. “Sorry. Not exactly a date, but just . . . well, maybe a little bit of a date. Except you’re Jason’s ex and it might be weird for you, and I’m not exactly firing on all pistons these days, kind of a mess, really, and—”

  “I’d love to.”

  He looked up. “Yeah?”

  “Sure.”

  He gave a crooked smile, and my heart squeezed a little.

  It had been a long time since I’d felt any kind of way about a man other than Jason. A really long time. I shushed the warning voices in my head and smiled back.

  “Great,” he said. “I won’t kiss you or anything.”

  “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.” I winked, then cringed internally—leave the winking for George Clooney, Emma—and kept the smile firmly on my face. “I’m kidding. Dinner will be really nice.”

  He looked at me another minute, still smiling. “Okay. Bye.” He nodded and went down the walk.

  That warm, tight feeling in my stomach stayed.

  I went back into the conservatory.

  “Someone has a boo,” Beth said, and they all laughed their tipsy heads off.

  I didn’t deny a thing.

  CHAPTER 27

  Genevieve

  On a sunny afternoon the week after Donelle and I had had one last trip to New York, I decided to practice suicide by swimming. My original date for this endeavor had been postponed due to weather.

  The trip to the city had been everything I hoped. I’d booked us a day at Great Jones Spa, where Donelle’s grumbles of “how the one percent lived” turned into groans of joy with the aromatic towel massage and Italian blood orange sea salt scrub and lemon verbena manicure. She even drank a green smoothie.

  It was a true pleasure to see her so pampered, swathed in a luxurious bathrobe, being fussed over by angelic creatures with soft voices. Not that she’d worked terribly hard for the past fifteen years, but even so. Where would I have been without her?

  After the spa, we went to a posh cocktail bar in the West Village, where, much to my delight, I’d been recognized by the bartender. He made us a special cocktail with gin, sage, honey and lemon and dubbed it “the Genevieve,” took our picture, posted it on social media and said it would be a permanent fixture on the menu. For the next round, he made “the Donelle”—a gin and tonic with rhubarb, lemon and a slice of jalapeño, “because I can tell you’re a handful.” Obviously, she was delighted.

  We avoided the Genevieve London store on Madison Avenue. Why bother? I doubted Beverly would let me raid the racks the way I had with Riley, and besides, Donelle knew those weren’t my designs anymore. In fact, she was the only one, aside from my attorney, who knew everything.

  Once I died, she was going to Scottsdale, Arizona, to live with her sister. I wished I could’ve found a way for her to stay at Sheerwater, and yet, the thought of her here without me filled me with a heavy melancholy.

  At any rate, today was a good day to prac
tice. Emma was off at Rose Hill—which made me a little uncomfortable, as she was wont to spread family gossip, and Rose Hill was my territory. Riley was helping at Miller’s with his precious child.

  I went into the den, where Donelle, surrounded by the dogs, was tapping away at her laptop. “What are you working on?” I asked. “Ordering a new bra?” She had dozens, each promising miracles that none delivered.

  “I’m writing my book. It’s a tell-all about you.” She looked up. “Just kidding. I was online, looking for a girlfriend in Arizona. There are a lot of my kind of women out there.”

  I ignored Carmen as she dragged her hind end across the carpet. We had just been to see Anne, the veterinarian, who cheerfully diagnosed her with “itchy butt” and nothing worse.

  “Are you a lesbian now?” I asked. Anne and her partner were, and Donelle did quite like them both.

  She shrugged. “May as well try it, right? Men don’t interest me anymore. Life is all about change, blah blah. I’ve always thought boobs were gorgeous. And the downstairs lady bits are much prettier than a drooping twig and berries. Stop laughing.”

  “Oh, Donelle. You’re too much.”

  “What are you up to?” she asked.

  “I’m going for a swim,” I said, bending to pet Allegra, who was snuffling my foot. “To test the waters.”

  “Clever. So you’re gonna practice offing yourself?”

  “Must you be so blunt?”

  “Have we met?”

  “Regardless. Would you like to come?”

  “To kill myself?” she all but shrieked.

  “To swim, Donelle. I’m not going to kill myself today.”

  “When are you?”

  “So eager for me to go?” I asked, linking my hands behind me and stretching, pleased that I still could.

  “So eager for you to tell the truth, missy. Tick tock.” She glanced at her foot. “You going in the Sound? Maybe the salt water would be good for my toe.”

  “Or maybe a sea creature would bite it off. Either way, a win. Mac, come here, boy, and gnaw off Donelle’s toe.”

  “It’d be a mercy, Mac.” She closed her laptop. “I don’t have a bathing suit. Besides, me and Helga—”