The Overdue Life of Amy Byler

by Kelly Harms

  “What do you mean, the regular way?” he asks, perplexed. “All single women of any kind are online dating,” he says to me as though I am a little slow. “All the single humans in New York are online dating. That is the only way there is to date.”

  “Oh,” I say, though I’m still a bit mystified. “So if I wanted to date, I’d need an online dating profile?”

  Matt’s eyes light up dangerously. “You would. Do you want to date? Because that would make a great addition to my story.”

  I smile enigmatically and push all thoughts of John straight out of my mind. Instead I focus on that delicious feeling in my toes that I had when I kissed Daniel that morning in my hotel room. “I just might want to date,” I tell a gleeful Matt. “You never know, Matt. You really never know.”

  —

  When I get off the train in Allentown on Sunday, my kids don’t even try to play it cool. They both hug me at the same time. Cori can’t stop raving about my new look and says she’s worried Brian will want to try a Mrs. Robinson, then cracks an evil grin. Same old Cori.

  Joe, after just a week, is transformed. He stands taller and more poised than I’ve ever seen him. He tells me he missed me and I’m a way better parent than Dad, then proceeds to rave about every single minute the two of them spent together. At first the part of me that wants to be the center of their world wars with the part of me that wants them happy. But it’s futile; within minutes the radiating happiness of my kids wins me over. I see what John was saying—they’ve relaxed around him, let themselves enjoy the ride. The pressure has diffused. The children are safe and cheerful. My worst fears about the week have been allayed.

  I suggest we all go out for dinner together that evening—the two of them, John, and me—and their eyes light up so much that in the car on the way home, I feel I need to gently remind them not to try any Parent Trap stuff on their father and me. “We are not interested in being forced back together,” I tell them. I say it once for them, once for me. “Not now. Not ever.” Then we all go home to do laundry and catch up.

  By dinnertime I’ve made my decision. Well, one look at Joe when I arrived home, and I made my decision, but by dinnertime I’m ready to talk to the kids about it. We pile in the car, and the minute I back out of our driveway, I ask them if they’d like to spend more time with their dad this summer. They sweetly try not to actually cheer at the idea. There is no missing their excitement. “Can I work at the pool too?” asks Cori, and I tell her yes, as long as she wears embarrassing amounts of sunscreen and a rash guard. “Can I go to Space Camp with Dad?” asks Joe, and I tell him the two of them should get as much nerd on as they possibly can. Then I put the car in park at a stop sign, hold one of each of their hands, look them in the eye in turn, and say, “You guys need to understand, deep in your bones, that Dad will probably have to leave at the end of the summer.”

  Joe drops his eyes to the ground. Cori nods somberly. “We know, Mom.”

  “Do you know know, though?”

  “Yo, we know know,” says Cori.

  “You can’t tell yourself you can control whether he stays either,” I tell them, putting the car back in gear and driving again. “It doesn’t matter how fun you are, or how good, or how little you ask of him this summer. No matter his strengths as a dad or how well you get along. You won’t be the deciding factor on whether he stays.”

  Cori rolls her eyes—this must be old news. But Joe looks at me with hope in his eyes. “Who will be the deciding factor?” he asks. “Will it be you?”

  I sigh. The question hurts. The answer is worse. “No,” I tell them, trying to sound as matter-of-fact as I can. “It will be your dad. Keep in mind he works in another country. He has a life there too. He loves you—that much is clear—but it doesn’t mean he can or will stay.”

  Joe frowns. “You always say love isn’t a feeling—it’s an action.”

  “Well, at the moment the action is that he is here, trying to give you literally everything your big hearts could desire for the summer. And just FYI: it’s natural to want to jump on that opportunity, and you don’t need to feel guilty about doing it.”

  “Oh, we’re doing it,” says Cori.

  I smile wanly. “That’s my little opportunist. You get to be the one to inform your dad that he can buy your school clothes and supplies this year.”

  “Are you kidding? I already told him he’s paying you back for three years of private school tuition. A few notebooks are only the beginning of what I’m extorting him for.”

  I shake my head. “Cori . . .”

  “We’re worth it, Mom,” says Joe. “Besides, you can use the tuition money to take us to Harry Potter world!”

  “Ooh!” cries Cori. “Universal! Can I bring Trinity?” She grabs her phone, and I hope to high heaven she’s not actually texting Trinity right this second, even knowing that she is. “And maybe—wait.” Cori goes strangely quiet.

  “What is it?”

  “Mom. Look at this.” She tries to block my view of the road with her phone.

  “Stop it, Corinne! I’m trying to drive here.”

  “It’s you!” she exclaims. “Joe. Look at this.”

  He reaches forward from the back seat and takes Cori’s phone and starts swiping. “Oh my god. This is pretty embarrassing,” he says. “I mean, I’m well adjusted and everything, but ick.”

  “What? What’s embarrassing?” I say, feeling panicky.

  “Shut up, Joe; it’s not like it’s a sex tape.”

  “Ok, I’m pulling over.” I signal and pull off into street parking.

  “Give me the phone, Joe,” barks Cori.

  “Hold on—I’m looking at these retweets. Ugh, Mom, you’re, like, a sex object. I’m gonna barf.”

  “Give me the phone!” I shout.

  “Mom, don’t you have your own phone?” asks Cori. “It’s from your friend Talia’s Twitter account.”

  I take my phone out and start fumbling around with it, trying to open Twitter on the Safari browser and then find Talia’s account, all while listening to Cori’s and Joe’s incomprehensible but excited reactions. Finally, finally, Cori takes the phone out of my hand, navigates me to some app I didn’t know I had, and shows me the screen.

  @PureBeauTalia retweeted:

  PureBeautyMag:

  Get a load of these crazy hot after shots for single mom and superwoman Amy B—see more in our Aug issue 7/26 when we introduce the #momspringa

  “What’s a hashtag momspringa?” asks Joe. “Whoa, there’s a ton of tweets about it all of a sudden. Ew, Mom, some of these guys want to, like, meet you.”

  I click the hashtag. Sure enough, a small flurry of Twitterers has started peeping about where they’d take their momspringa and how badly they need one. And yes, two men have offered to, ah, entertain me.

  But the photos.

  Oh, those photos.

  “Mom, you look so, so hot,” says Cori. She is arching over the steering column so she can look at my phone. The photos are . . . they’re beautiful. In them, a long-haired brunette looks at the camera with a look of quiet strength and confidence. Her lips turn up as though she’s thinking about the mischief she can get up to while her family is away. Her eyes are sparkling, and her lips are parted just a bit, like she is seriously considering asking you to come sit by her. I cannot believe she is me.

  And as I am gazing upon myself in awe, my phone chirps. Facebook. A friend request. The picture is tiny, but the name looms large. Daniel Seong. The hot librarian of the year. Wants to be friends with me. The message attached reads, “You kick me out of bed at the crack of dawn and the only way to track you down is to follow the clues from a trending topic on Twitter? Now I know how Prince Charming felt. #glasstwitter”

  Well.

  This is unexpected.

  But not, I find to my own surprise, at all unwelcome.

  “Kids?” I ask, so quietly that their bickering over Cori’s phone stops, and they both look up at me. I crane around in the driver�
��s seat so I can look at both of these incredible kids and they can see in my eyes that what I’m about to ask is no joke. “How would you feel if while you were at Dad’s this summer, your mom spent just a little bit more time in New York?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Amy,

  Here are those camp forms I told you about. I think the kids will have amazing trips.

  I hope you’re going to have an amazing time in New York too. I will admit, when we first talked about me keeping the kids all summer, I imagined you a five-minute drive away in case I got in over my head. But that’s not fair to you. Believe it or not, I do really want you to be happy.

  Also. This is very awkward to talk about over email, but I don’t think you’d appreciate it as a phone call, either, so . . . I want you to know that things have ended between me and Marika. They’ve been ended for a long time. I just got the credit card statement and put two and two together, and I’m sorry for the stress I probably caused by not taking her card off the account. I took care of it yesterday.

  Anyway, that relationship was . . . an aberration. I’ve been single otherwise. I intend to spend that extra energy where it belongs from here on out, on my family.

  Ok! Have fun in New York! Give my love to Talia!

  -John

  —

  When I tell Talia I want to come back to New York, she tells me it’s a damn good thing, because she needs a house sitter ASAP. Then she says something about how when you take positive steps in your life, the universe rewards you by making your path forward easier. I ask her what positive steps she’s taking, and she says, “I’m talking about you, dummy.” I think of John’s email. Was his ending his relationship with Marika a gift from the universe? If so, I don’t feel terribly grateful. Just more confused.

  “The universe has provided you with a one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment all to yourself for the summer. The universe seems to have different things in mind for me,” Talia adds. “Hot, sweaty things.”

  Apparently, she tells me, the Pure Beautiful demographics are terrible in the South. “The ad sales guys say we’re too Yankee. We need a better handle on ‘real America.’”

  “What fashion magazine has a handle on real America?” I ask her, and she says, “That’s what I told them. And they told me to take a skeleton crew to Miami—as if that’s any more real—to work up three winter issues and run magazine events.” I can see she isn’t a fan of this idea. She loves New York and maybe, just maybe, thinks that civilization ends at the Hudson.

  “You might,” I tease, “actually like it there.”

  “Maybe,” she replies. “But while I am gone, consultants will be climbing all over the office, trying to figure out how to get this magazine to make money, and the solution might not involve the actual magazine itself,” she explains. “Paper and ink only have so much time left. This assignment out of town means that whatever is next for Pure Beautiful, my pretty little print edition might not be a part of it.”

  My face falls. “But then what will you do?” I ask her, worried.

  Talia winks at me. “Don’t you worry, Ames. I can always call Simon.”

  I blanch at the mention of her filthy rich but otherwise unexciting ex. She smirks.

  “I have a contract. I will come out ok, move over to online eventually. It’s inevitable. I’m just enjoying the last days of disco while I can.”

  I shake my head. “Don’t go. Stay and fight for the magazine.”

  But she packs up and leaves, promising to come back for a weekend, and tells herself soothingly, “No one spends August in New York anyway.” And then she laughs and adds, “Well, Amy Byler does,” and like that she is gone.

  It sets me back on my heels to know Talia’s job isn’t carved in stone. It was easy to tell myself that Talia’s life was simply perfect in every way. And honestly, she did make a single, child-free life seem pretty wonderful. But of course, she isn’t the master of her own destiny any more than I am. She answers to people. She takes her lumps. She just looks much better while doing it.

  So suddenly I am on my own in New York. The beauty, and maybe just the tiniest curse, too, of single parenting is that you are never, ever alone for more than three consecutive hours. On the rare evenings when I would go out without the kids, I’d meet up with Lena or another friend, and we’d chatter nonstop over wine. If Cori was out at night, I was with Joe at a tournament or home grading homework while he and his friends played Settlers and ate pizzas. If Joe went to a friend’s on a Saturday, Cori and I were at the movies watching stuff that would make Joe fall asleep before the opening credits were over, or she was hitting me up for a ride somewhere. Cori would go out every night if not for my school-night policies, but Joe is a homebody. I always had company.

  Now, for the first time, it’s just me. Completely alone. All-day-talk-to-no-one alone, if I want to be. I will have time to just have uninterrupted thoughts. Time to reflect.

  Or.

  Time to have fun. Time to work out until I’m pumped full of endorphins, find the best bagel in Brooklyn, have white wine lunches on downtown sidewalks, and visit every gorgeous library and bookstore in this enormous city.

  I can take my beautiful hair and my beautiful clothes out on big adventures. I can wander in and out of the shops in SoHo without feeling like an imposter. I can flirt with baristas. I can read in the park. I can do . . .

  Whatever the hell I want for an entire summer.

  Whoa.

  I flop down on Talia’s guest bed, stunned, and think: Ok, Amy. What’s the first thing I want to do with all this freedom? Chinatown? The Cloisters? A ride on the Staten Island Ferry?

  Nope. Nope. Nope. One thing tops my to-do list. Or rather, one person:

  One very hot librarian.

  —

  When it comes to writing back Daniel, my first instinct is not dissimilar to my teen daughter’s. I want to message Lena, Talia, Cori, and maybe even Matt, to run through the thousands of different interpretations of his Facebook message and the further thousands of different ways to write him back. But there is something else guiding me too. Something quiet and still and sure. When I sent Daniel packing the morning after our date slash one-night stand, I felt a strange mix of victory and shame, with a tinge of fear over the top.

  Now things are different. I’m not in New York for a week. I’m here for almost three months. I have time to do everything I desire. And my heart desires a hot librarian. And I’ve decided it’s totally safe to pursue that desire. Daniel has a teenager in arguably the best high school in New York and a great job here, too, and therefore is not a genuine threat to my emotional safety. There is zero chance we will have a long-term relationship. He is, if he’s interested in me, the safest possible summer fling a girl could ask for.

  So instead of debating and delaying and generally distracting myself from something that might make me happy, I decide to just write him back like a grown woman. I open his message: “You kick me out of bed at the crack of dawn and the only way to track you down is to follow the clues from a trending topic on Twitter? Now I know how Prince Charming felt. #glasstwitter”

  And I type back, “Sorry, your charming highness, but I had a major freak-out after our little night out. Was feeling weird because of the impossibility of our situation—me going back to PA, you in NYC. Since then, my plans have changed, and now I’m spending the rest of the summer in Brooklyn. Forgive me?”

  I hit enter and close my laptop. I think that I’ll be waiting a day or three days or whatever the standard rules are before I hear back. But ten minutes later my phone sends me a Facebook alert. Daniel replies, “Agreed. Situation totally impossible. But I think it would still be fun to hang out while you’re here. Plus, I have a ton of ideas for your Flexthology. Meet up next week at a quiet bookish pub on the Upper West Side?”

  I decide if he’s not going to be coy, then I won’t have to be either.

  “Absolutely,” I write. “Send me the time and place.” Then after a few minut
es I add, “Can’t wait!”

  There. Look at me. I am the ultimate sophisticate. Just casually making plans with a man I intend to sleep with outside of the bounds of a formal relationship. I am a modern woman! I am Gloria Steinem and Helen Gurley Brown and the slutty one from Sex and the City all wrapped up in one.

  But when we meet up, all my best-laid plans quickly go down the drain.

  —

  The Dead Author is a long, skinny, deep bar, a pool table in the way back that barely has clearance for a pool cue, a broken jukebox full of dusty AC/DC and Smashing Pumpkins records, and three high-top tables, one in the front, two in the back. The ceiling is made up of pages of novels torn out and affixed, well, remotely, by way of pencils and darts. I’m not sure how they stay stuck, but they do. The ceiling is so high I cannot tell which book pages are up there, mangled and stabbed through the heart. But the big dark wood bar seems to be set onto bookcases, and when I hoist myself up to it, my feet kick at a row of titles. At random I reach under the bar and pull a book out. It is a worn copy of The Catcher in the Rye. Ugh. I pull out another. Also Catcher in the Rye, different cover, different print date. Unable to resist, I climb off the stool and look at the upper shelf of books. I’d estimate they are 75 percent Catcher in the Rye. Another 20 percent are Franny and Zooey. The remaining 5 percent seem to be a completely random collection of nonsense books released roughly thirty years ago. Fishing guides and church cookbooks and gothic romances.

  Huh. Well, then, I guess I’ll read Catcher in the Rye. I open it up, read the iconic first line, inwardly groan, and then stare off into space hoping for Daniel to show himself soon. It is probably sacrilege to say it, but I don’t even assign CitR to students anymore. It hasn’t, to my mind, aged well. Now, David Copperfield—there’s a book I could read for hours in a bar. I take out my journal and write “Perks of Being a Wallflower vs. Catcher” and then write “David Copperfield modern rewrites?” I hope the entries make sense to me when I go to do lesson planning in August.

  After a few more moments go by, the bartender visits me. “What can I get you?” she asks, and I realize I’ve been sitting there for ten minutes without paying any rent on my barstool. I look past her at the wall of bottles behind her. Aha. There is an entire row of different rye whiskeys. All becomes clear. “I guess I’ll have a Manhattan,” I tell her. “It’s the only rye drink I know.”