“But no one in either of our families has anything like this,” Paul said.
“Does anyone have anxiety or depression?”
There it was. From the stories he told about his childhood, Jen always suspected Paul’s mother had undiagnosed bipolar disorder, and she was about to voice this when Paul spoke, his voice hopeful.
“Jen’s mom is really anxious,” Paul said. “You don’t think it’s just anxiety?”
Jen bit her tongue rather than subject Dr. Shapiro to an argument about whose mother was more emotionally stable.
Plus, she understood why he suggested it.
Anxiety was like the white wine of the diagnostic world: ubiquitous, assumed to be fundamentally harmless.
Abe suffers from anxiety, Jen would confide to friends, family, other parents at playgrounds and birthday parties (back when the entire class was invited).
Everyone would be right there with Jen—sharing how their own kids cared too deeply about grades, or got homesick on sleepovers, refused to eat any food that wasn’t white.
Yes, Jen would nod, it’s exactly the same. We’re all having such identical experiences.
“He’s never been violent with us,” Paul objected. “I mean, he’s never gotten physical.”
“Which is good,” Dr. Shapiro said. “But the behavior he’s exhibited with others—squeezing a hamster just because, stabbing a classmate who he feels has wronged him—”
“But she did wrong him,” Jen said. “If we’re talking about Harper French. She was awful to him.”
Dr. Shapiro nodded at Jen in a way that made her somehow feel both heard and dismissed before continuing.
“—challenging the teachers—we can see a cluster of aggressivity, an indifference to consequence. Talking with Abe, it was clear to me that he lacks remorse for this behavior. How is he with his chores?” Dr. Shapiro pressed gently, “Unloading the dishwasher, taking out the trash, mowing the lawn?”
Jen and Paul exchanged a guilty look. They never made him do chores. Getting through each day seemed to be enough of a burden for Abe.
“He might be so pleasant around the house because you guys are easy to manipulate,” Dr. Shapiro said matter-of-factly.
So maybe they weren’t such good parents after all.
“Give him chores and reward him for the effort with points that allow him to earn something.” Dr. Shapiro glanced at her notes. “Like that giant gaming monitor he mentioned to me approximately three million times. Most kids with these traits can learn to manage them, even grow out of them.”
The HVAC hummed peacefully and Paul absentmindedly rubbed his beard. His eyes looked glassy as they once again met Jen’s. She had a wild unhinged need for someone to tell her how to feel. Luckily, Dr. Shapiro was up to the task.
“Have hope, Paganos,” she said. “Have hope.”
Maybe it was Dr. Shapiro’s kindness that made Jen want to meet her halfway. Accept it, she challenged herself. Don’t fight it like you always do.
* * *
When they stepped into the empty elevator, Paul grimaced at Jen. “What’s up next,” he said, “couple’s root canals?”
“Colonoscopies first,” Jen said. “Then the root canals.”
The silver doors dinged closed.
“Congratulations,” he said, “we created a sociopath.”
“A burgeoning sociopath. But with hard work, who knows?” Jen tugged her tote bag onto her shoulder. “Do you agree with her?”
“The thing is.” Paul stared up at the tiles on the ceiling. “She seemed to really get Abe.”
“I know.”
On the tenth floor, the elevator lurched to a stop and a short blond woman with a green handbag stepped inside. She looked remarkably unburdened.
“Do you still want to stop at the farmers market before home?” Paul said formally.
“I do.” Jen matched his stiff tone. “We need bread.”
Paul sighed and once again regarded the ceiling tiles. “When I was six,” he said, “I used to deliberately step on ants.”
The blond woman stopped rummaging in her green bag and looked up with alarm. When the doors opened at the garage level and the woman was safely out of earshot, Jen said, “The ants aren’t the same thing.”
“We have to remember that even if this is right, even if he has this disorder, Abe is the same kid he was earlier this morning. He’s still Abe.”
“True.”
“It doesn’t even sound that bad. Conduct disorder. It sounds like—”
“Like you misbehave in class.”
“Like borderline personality disorder.” Paul pressed the key fob and their car beeped open.
“What?”
“It’s just always sounded so gentle to me, like it’s on the border of not being a problem. But apparently people with that diagnosis can suffer tremendously. I’ll drive?”
They opened the car doors and got in.
“Have you been researching mental illnesses on Abe’s behalf?”
Paul buckled his belt, looked at her bashfully. “It’s silly.”
“Not at all.”
Apparently, this was how to romance Jen, because she’d never felt more like hugging him.
Jen tried to forgive Paul’s distractedness: he was gone most of the week, traveling and working hard. Sometimes, though, when she’d report in on Abe, she felt like she was explaining a movie to someone who’d wandered in in the middle. Keep up, she wanted to scold.
Which was unfair. Paul’s job was work, and Jen’s was Abe, and this was the way it would be because Jen made approximately ten percent of what Paul did.
Even now, she wouldn’t have wanted to trade. If someone was going to focus on the puzzle that was Abe, it had to be Jen. (She’d feel like a caged tiger, otherwise, probably call home fifty times a day and bark at Paul that he was doing it wrong.)
But it did feel sometimes—and this wasn’t Paul’s fault—imbalanced. They’d started out on such equal footing, after their first date. Both of their careers had been theirs alone to manage.
Paul was very taken with you, Jen’s friend Candace had told her after one of her crowded house parties.
“Me?” Jen said.
To be singled out like this was a new experience for her. There had been partygoers spilling out of Candace’s house to the backyard, and Jen hadn’t been able to remember which one was Paul.
“You know,” Candace answered, bringing her hand to about three feet above the ground, “short, slight, really prominent eyebrows, looks kind of like a Muppet—but in a good way. I’m giving him your number.”
It didn’t sound promising.
When Paul called, he had a nice warm tenor and they made a date to meet at a restaurant in Chinatown. Jen hadn’t expected much, but when she saw him there, in front of the king crab tank, she smiled. (Which was really saying something: those poor crabs, trapped in that murky crowded water, legs pressed helplessly against the glass, always made her temporarily resolve to become a vegetarian.) Paul was short and slight, with the promised eyebrows—two thick caterpillars slanted downward, which gave him a stern, intense air.
Candace hadn’t mentioned Paul Pagano’s neatly bearded, even-featured face. Or those giant hazel eyes underneath the brows: the kindest eyes Jen had ever seen.
It was funny now to think that Candace, who later disavowed the Muppet comment—but come on, how could Jen have made that up?—was a social media friend who seemingly spent twelve hours a day filming and posting videos of her daughter’s dance team, and Paul had become everything that mattered.
Jen often wondered if she was the butt of some higher power’s practical joke. The part of life that she had expected to be difficult—finding a life partner—had landed in her lap, while the part she might have assumed easy—sending your school-aged child off to school—required Herculean effort.
Jen shouldn’t even go there anyway: Paul would never say they weren’t equals, and neither should she. They were a good team who�
��d made the only logical decision about resource allocation, and were both just doing the best they could.
Paul switched on the ignition. The podcast they’d listened to on the way to Dr. Shapiro’s—about a man who purchased a DNA kit and found out his uncle was his father—blared over the speakers like the world’s biggest non sequitur. Paul switched it off.
“It fits,” Jen said. “I don’t want it to but—”
“What?”
Jen’s phone had started to ring and the Bluetooth announced Mom calling in a soothing voice not dissimilar to Dr. Shapiro’s.
Jen looked at Paul helplessly. “I can’t.”
“Definitely don’t,” Paul said.
Jen hadn’t even told her mother about Abe’s expulsion from Foothills because she’d never felt quite strong enough to talk her down from the hysterics that would result.
Maybe her mother did have an anxiety disorder.
When the phone stopped ringing, Jen picked it up.
“Calling back so soon?”
“Nope, I’m looking up the school Shapiro mentioned.”
Dr. Shapiro had mentioned three alternative programs for Abe. Jen had already visited one of them before the move, and had not been impressed—too big, too impersonal. The second was two hours away, but the third, the Kingdom School, was a small religious school close to their home. It wouldn’t matter, Dr. Shapiro said, that both Jen and Paul were lapsed Catholics. Plus, sometimes the inherent structure and moral code of religion provided a helpful bright line to kids like Abe.
“There’s just a picture of a shack,” Jen reported. “And a paragraph about Jesus written by founder Nan Smalls. How do we know Nan Smalls?” Jen asked, as Paul turned onto to Main Street, which was as messy with traffic as usual.
“We don’t.” Paul stopped short on the brakes as a Mercedes jeep pulled in front of them.
“The name is familiar, though.” Jen paused. “Maybe if we send Abe to the Kingdom School, our prayers will be answered.”
Paul snorted but Jen hadn’t been entirely joking. She hadn’t prayed much before having Abe, not even as a relatively pure-hearted youngster, but at least once a week she would try to quiet her mind and channel a peacefulness and plead—not to God per se, but also not not to God—that Abe would find a sense of belonging outside of their family, that he would be okay in a vague general sense.
Jen was aware that by the dictates of fairy tales she was violating the rules of specificity. What was okay? Meaningful, reciprocal relationships? Or just not stabbing anyone?
The answer was a moving target.
The light changed and they inched forward, their bumper a little too close to the Mercedes’s.
“When we die, he’s going to be all alone,” Jen said.
“Of all our happy topics, this one is always my favorite,” Paul said.
“We can’t die, you know. Ever.”
“So you’ve informed me.”
The Mercedes in front of them suddenly stopped short and began backing up in a fruitless attempt to turn left on a road that was mostly behind them.
Paul slammed on the brakes and then the horn. “Asshole,” he said. “There’s no room behind me. Where do they want me to even go?”
“I’ll run in from here.” She opened the door. “Watch something calming on your phone.”
The town park in the middle of Main Street was an ode to autumn, with clusters of pumpkins and red-and-yellow leaf garlands twined around the lampposts. People wore knit scarves and tall boots and everything appeared gilded by the sunlight, which was so thick as to look artificial.
A dozen kids around Abe’s age had overtaken some of the picnic tables. Their laughter, the effortless way they bit into each other’s burritos and leaned their gawky bodies against each other, gave Jen an ache deep within her body.
Not a sociopath among them, she suspected.
(Although Dr. Shapiro had told them that it was more common than you’d think. A lot of CEOs, she’d said matter-of-factly.)
Jen sprinted to the baker’s stand, grabbed the last two baguettes, and then because the line was brief, and she and Paul deserved it, made her way to the good espresso cart.
Jen decided that she felt relatively calm. They had a plan now, which was good. It was always better to have a plan.
The two women at the front of the line left with their paper cups and waved at Jen: Priya and Janine from book club.
“Those beautiful pumpkins are a slap in the face,” Janine said, after the cheek-pressing had been completed. She was referring to the crop of large pumpkins clustered around the gazebo.
“Why?” Jen said.
“Because of the vandal,” Priya explained.
“What’d he do now?”
“Pissed all over Pumpkin Walk,” Janine said.
Cottonwood had several Halloween celebrations and Pumpkin Walk was, if memory served, the one where everyone put an intricately carved jack-o’-lantern on their stoop.
“Oh dear,” Jen said. “Not literally?”
“Metaphorically. As in he went house to house and smashed all of our carved pumpkins.”
“Not all of them,” Priya said.
“Enough of them,” Janine said. “We called the police and they don’t care. Wouldn’t you think they would?” She eyed the baguettes under Jen’s arm. “Is that from Glenwood Bakers? Did you happen to notice if there’re any left?”
“These were the last.”
The way Janine’s face crumpled disturbed Jen as much as anything had this morning: the woman always seemed so impervious.
Jen handed her a loaf.
“You,” Janine said, “are the absolute nicest. Is Foothills off too on Monday? Because we’re all getting together at my house to make caramel apples. You and Abe should come.”
Own it, Jen.
“Abe isn’t at Foothills anymore.”
“Why?”
Just a little conduct disorder.
“He’s an anxious kid,” Jen said. “It wasn’t a good fit.”
“Katie gets anxious too,” Janine said. “She’s a perfectionist. We’ve been really happy with Sacred Heart. Small and cozy. You should check it out.”
“Do you guys know anything about the Kingdom School?”
“Nan and Wes’s school?” Priya said.
“Nan Smalls, yes. Is it very religious?”
“I’d assume. They left my church because it was too loosey-goosey,” Priya said. “Nan is amazingly compassionate.”
“Does she live in Cottonwood? I was trying to figure out where I’ve heard her name.”
“She lives closer to town.” Priya grimaced. “And you’ve probably heard about her son.”
Yes, that was it. Last year, Jen had sat down on one of the benches by the gazebo and noticed the gold plaque—IN MEMORY OF DANNY SMALLS, OUR ETERNAL ANGEL.
Who would have calculated his heartbreakingly short life span? Jen had found an article online about a memorial 5K in honor of Danny Smalls, drowned, age four, in a swimming pool. There had been a photo of an adorable chubby-cheeked boy.
Jen hated to use someone else’s tragedy for perspective, but sometimes it worked that way, as a reminder that it could always be so much worse.
CHAPTER NINE
The cancer memoir was divisive from the start. Most declared it to be the world’s greatest love story, but a small and extremely vocal cadre dismissed it as treacly garbage.
Jen Chun-Pagano led the Treacly Garbage group, whose main complaint was that the wife didn’t seem like a real person.
But she is a real person, insisted the Greatest Love Story contingent. It’s a memoir.
“What pediatrician do you know who rides a motorcycle,” Priya said, “and swigs absinthe straight from the bottle? She’s a fantasy.”
Jen pumped her arms. Yes! Exactly, and Janine scolded them both for picking apart a man’s memories of his dead wife, because some things should be sacred, and yes, the author had gotten remarried suspiciously quickly
after his wife’s death, but who was the Cottonwood Book Club to tell him how to grieve?
“Is it me or is everyone a little intense tonight?” Annie asked Deb Gallegos under her breath.
“Maybe it’s the absinthe.”
“I thought absinthe was illegal?”
“Not the domestic stuff. You can order it online.”
“It just didn’t seem real to me.”
“The absinthe?”
“No. The marriage. I don’t know any couple that adoring,” Annie said.
“Really? Not Mike?” Deb said hopefully. “He seems like he’d be so attentive in bed. He’s not afraid to emote. And those biceps. He could probably support you in any—”
“Ugh. Deb.”
Deb winked exaggeratedly and fanned her hand in front of her face.
The way the women drooled over Mike was objectifying and inappropriate and felt disrespectful to Annie. She’d complained about it to him, pointed out that they certainly didn’t talk that way about any of the older husbands.
Mike had seemed confident that it had less to do with age or profession than his undeniable sex appeal. He was probably right, even if sex was way down on Annie’s list these days, usually after grocery shopping.
It was that way for everyone, she suspected. It had to be: Deb Gallegos’s whole act about how the kids were always walking in on her and Salvador was a pile of baloney. Or at least an exaggeration.
“Where do they think they’re going?” Annie pointed out the front window at Sierra and Laurel, who were supposed to be studying together in Sierra’s room, but were instead, for some reason, walking down the driveway to the street, purses slung over their shoulders.
Deb and Annie exchanged a bemused look.
Deb knocked twice on the window, and with a crook of her index finger, beckoned them inside.
“Can we go to the mall?” Sierra said, once the girls were back in the entryway. Laurel could barely make eye contact with Annie.
“Nice of you to ask now,” Deb said with a snort, “after you’ve left.”
“I sent you a text,” Sierra said. “We just didn’t want to bother you.”
“You can’t just skip off shopping,” Annie said, incredulous. “Without permission.”
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