The Overdue Life of Amy Byler

by Kelly Harms

Lena:

  You New York girls are snobs. I think she should have slept with him. I mean, I would have, assuming he’d been a woman.

  Amy:

  I would have rather slept with a woman.

  Lena:

  There’s plenty of chances for that.

  Talia:

  No need to switch teams. There are so many more men where Dylan came from. Matt sent me the six-packs today. Amy is drowning in prospects. When’s your next date, Ames?

  Amy:

  Sigh. Tomorrow night.

  Talia:

  Excellent.

  Lena:

  Two dates in three days? Amy, you’re a tiger.

  Amy:

  Rar.

  He’s a doctor, he’s taking me to a pop-up dinner with some celeb chef I’ve never heard of. We’ve texted a little, and he actually seems pretty promising. He hasn’t mansplained anything to me yet, and he told me my kids sounded wonderful and that meant I was probably wonderful too. Swoon!

  Talia:

  Eh. Doctors.

  Lena:

  At the very least you’ll get a good meal.

  Amy:

  Excellent point. Last night I had oysters to start, then a pretty delicious salad thing with melon and crisped prosciutto, then scallops, then the world’s most perfect Meyer-lemon cake. To say nothing of two very strong martinis.

  Lena:

  And you still didn’t put out? Talia, this girl.

  Talia:

  A true princess.

  Amy:

  Trust me, ladies. I did the right thing. I would have spent the entire episode worried about chipping his beautiful teeth.

  Talia:

  Pro tip: If teeth are getting chipped, you’re doing sex wrong.

  Lena:

  Cut her some slack, T. It’s been a long time since she got laid on the regular. Maybe back when she last had a sex life, wooden clubs were still involved.

  Amy:

  I’m putting my phone on silent you guys.

  Talia:

  That’s cool. We don’t need you around to make fun of you.

  Amy:

  Good night you monsters.

  Lena:

  Good night your majesty.

  —

  The next time I come home from Flywheel alone, I take a shower, put on a pretty gray maxi dress that’s low enough cut to make me feel just a smidgen indecent, and head right back out the door. No more Ms. Cereal-for-Dinner. Tonight I’m going to be bold and treat myself to a restaurant I read about in the New Yorker, a place that “infuses everything meaningful about the current New York food scene into a tagine and a bowl of olives.”

  They don’t take reservations, and I’m expecting to be cooling my heels at the bar for hours, but when I tell them I’m looking for a table for just one, the hostess positively beams at me. It turns out dining here is at communal tables, and they love to fill every single stool at their wide distressed-oak high-tops that radiate from an open kitchen. So I get wedged between a rowdy party of five investment bankers and a couple on a date. Listening in on their various conversations is so fun I end up taking twice as long with the menu as I should, and when the server comes the second time, I finally just ask her to order for me.

  “Ooh!” she says. “Fun. Parameters?”

  The restaurant is relaxed, homey, and the pricing is reasonable. New Moroccan is what the review called it. “I’m not afraid of anything,” I tell her. “I’ll take your best salad, your favorite main course, and a glass of the perfect drink to go with each of them.” Look at me throwing around money like an oil heiress, and I can do it guiltlessly at least this one time, because John offered to buy the kids new school shoes that will save me twice the cost of this dinner.

  The server looks at me sideways. “I’ve got a hundred favorites, but I’ll do my best. Or . . .” She leans in closer. “Chef might cook you something special, you know, if I tell him what you just told me.”

  I color. Three of the bankers’ heads have twisted around at the word Chef. “That would be amazing too. I’m sure I’ll be happy either way.”

  “I’ll make sure of it,” she tells me, then gives me the sneakiest little wink when the man on the date next to me waves at her and hollers, “Miss!” as though she’s ten feet away. The server takes my menu and turns her attention to the couple, and I pull out my e-reader, which is loaded with a new Ann Patchett book I’ve been saving for just such a sumptuous occasion. I don’t waste Patchett books, but this place—and this adventure of dining alone for the first time in my life—is Patchett worthy.

  Ms. Patchett’s words are soon joined by a creamy, tender-finishing white wine and a salad of sweet, fresh carrots; toasted, crunchy chickpeas; mint; and a honey-and-vinegar dressing of some kind with just a bit of spicy heat. I eat and eat, and when I have polished off the very last chickpea, I wait until all my tablemates are busy with their own food and then lift the plate to my lips and lick up the last bit of sticky, spicy dressing shamelessly. I put it down and check to see no one caught me, but I am found out, by someone in the central kitchen, no less, and wearing whites. He nudges the chef and says something to him and then points at me.

  I try to look away, but the chef, a big, bald, tattooed man I wouldn’t want to meet in a biker bar, puts down his bar mop and steps through the little hatch in the half wall between him and us.

  “So,” he tells me in a thick accent that I can only place somewhere deep in the boroughs. “You like the salad.”

  I blush but then quickly decide to quit simpering. I’ll never see any of these people again, and I look really good in this dress, which has been confirmed by the occasional sideways leer of an investment banker ten years my junior. “I like the salad, and I hope you’ll make me something special to follow it up,” I tell him.

  “How do you like lamb?”

  “I like it very much.”

  “Are you in a hurry?” he asks me, tilting his head to the people on either side of me, who are silent, watching us with interest.

  “Not at all,” I tell him.

  “Good, then come sit over here.” The man starts to walk back to the kitchen but stops and puts me at an open bar seat right in front of him. “It is boring tonight—all very timid chicken eaters who read about me in the New Yorker.”

  “I read about you in the New Yorker.”

  He smiles. “And I thought you just stumbled in here from the street. I’m getting you some gray wine.”

  That sounds awful, but I nod and brace myself. What I get is thankfully not gray at all but more of a pinkish pour with a dry rosé-meets-citrus sort of flavor. The bottle is cool and sweaty, and my server pours a second glass for the chef, and he pours a good taste for her, and then they leave the entire remainder of the bottle sitting by me to work on as he cooks.

  I forget my book and watch him work. He’s relaxed and quiet, and he often pokes his staff with an elbow by way of communication rather than sparing a word. The tickets move past him with such speed. I see about five of the same exact dish, looking indistinguishable from one another, go out over and over and over again. I crane back and see the bankers ordering more wine, see the couple get their check. I keep watching and waiting, and sometimes the chef puts a tiny spoon of food up on my bar spot for me to taste. One olive. A sliver of preserved lemon. A rich, briny tomato sauce that seems only distantly related to an Italian ragù. Finally, after who knows how long, just as I notice I am getting hungry and my glass is almost empty, a plate comes up for me.

  It’s a ring of alternating quartered soft-boiled eggs and tiny lamb meatballs, making a shoreline for a moat of tomato-and-fava-bean sauce with bright-green olive tapenade on top. Standing upright in a little jar next to the plate are fried, stuffed sardines.

  I stare at the plate, then up at the chef. “Eat, now!” he urges me. I comply, and it’s phenomenal. Everything tastes of some smoky spice I’ve never tasted before plus the brightest, best version of tomato, parsley, lamb, egg. I could eat the sard
ines like french fries. I take a bite of the second one and dip it in the sauce on my plate, and the chef nods approvingly.

  He is busy—he hardly talks to me for the rest of my meal. But he constantly reaches up and pours another inch of vin gris into my never-empty wineglass, and when I’ve eaten every last bite of the kofta and sardines, he says something to my server, and she comes back in ten minutes with a large slice of rosewater-and-pomegranate pie.

  I do my best with that, but by the time my check is paid, I am uncomfortably full and very comfortably tipsy. My thanks to the chef and my server are sloppy and gratuitous, and I make a slow, careful path out to the street. It is late for me, but not for New York. Everyone is going somewhere. People are on dates. People are kissing quickly in passing or for long, unabashed hellos. I would like, I think, to be kissing a long, unabashed hello to someone. I would like to be going somewhere. Not back to Talia’s, but to see someone I could tell all about this stupendous dinner and the gray wine and the semifamous, quiet, yet whimsical chef. I don’t want to waste this perfect combination of satisfied and intoxicated; I want to walk up a long, endless avenue and talk and talk and talk until the sun comes up, because this is New York, and I am on vacation, and life is so very, very good.

  Needless to say, I text Daniel.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Dear Mom,

  Ok, full disclosure, this is turning out to be an amazing summer.

  First things first: I dumped Brian. He was hassling me about sex stuff. Also he’s just not a great guy. I was super nice about it. I texted AND called for follow-up. I told him it was because I needed to focus on diving. He didn’t believe me, so I told him it was because I didn’t want to have sex with him. Then he was quiet. He asked me if I was a lesbian. I just said, “Maybe,” because it seemed nicer than telling him he was revolting.

  So that was huge, because now I have more time to hang with Dad, who is just turning out super cool as he starts to relax and not be quite so obvious about trying to buy our love. He’s really a good listener, really nonjudgmental because he’s pretty much been as big a screwup as a person can be already. It’s easy to talk to him about my real feelings about some things, like guys or how I don’t actually like that many of the girls from my diving team or how I sometimes feel poor at our school even though I know I’m lucky to have clean water and shoes that fit and contact lenses. When I’m talking to Lena or my friends, I want them to like me, so I don’t always tell the straight truth. Dad obviously thinks Joe and I are god’s gift to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, no matter what we say.

  Also, Dad is super into adolescence. He says I should lean into it and label my feelings and embrace them. I told him not to worry about that. He says unpleasant emotions will pass through me faster if I name them and feel them. I was like, Dad, welcome to Stuff I Learned on Sesame Street. He said, “My generation never learned anything important like that,” and he told me that’s part of the reason he didn’t handle his problems well. Is that true? You seem to know how to have most feelings. I guess you’re a little low in the anger department—you never got very angry at Dad, and you can be kind of a martyr sometimes and then suddenly blow up at me for no reason except stupid stuff like spending Joe’s bus fare on Diet Coke and then telling him to walk home. He was ten. It was only three miles. If you let me have Diet Coke in the house, that never would have happened.

  Anyway, if you had just let rip on Dad and gotten angry, it would have made me and Joe feel a lot better. We thought we might be horrible people for hating him so much at first. Lena says you were protecting us from painful truths about our father. But I think if you had told us what he told us this summer—that he was being kind of a shitty dad to us, and things were only getting worse, and he was making you unhappy all the time—then we would have understood things a bit better.

  IDK. I’m not trying to pile on here. I’m just saying.

  Love,

  Your daughter, Cori, who read zero books this week but did look at a J. Crew catalog and gives it two stars for inventiveness of sweater color names

  —

  Amy:

  Hey, it’s late, I’m still up. You want to meet for a drink?

  Daniel doesn’t write back. I wander around in widening loops through Talia’s neighborhood, circling her apartment like a shark. I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want to put on the old, soft lavender T-shirt I sleep in and climb into bed and read myself to sleep like I do every other night. I want to live! I want to taste every bite of the cookie of life! I want to—

  Daniel:

  Hello to you too. I’m just finishing up dinner with much-cooler-than-me friends on the Lower East Side. I need an antidote to all this ironic facial hair.

  Amy:

  I don’t have even nonironic facial hair!

  Daniel:

  In that case, let’s meet for a drink. Are you downtown?

  Amy:

  I will be in ten minutes. Does that sound desperate?

  Daniel:

  It just sounds thirsty. There’s a Perth theme bar with outdoor seating on Pearl Street. I’ll send you the map and head down there myself now.

  I stare at my phone in disbelief. Did I just . . . was that a booty call? Was it a friendly version of a booty call? I have no idea what just happened, but apparently the end result is hanging out with Daniel at an Australia-themed bar with outdoor seating! Score! I jump in a cab, throwing financial caution to the wind. This is way too special for the subway, plus it’s late and I’m going to be lost on the Manhattan side and the financial district is always so dark and I am pretty sure serial killers get excited when they see a lost, tipsy woman from Pennsylvania.

  Plus, there might be cobblestone streets. It’s hard to flee serial killers on cobblestone streets. This way is much safer.

  Unless my cabbie is a serial killer? Wasn’t there a movie like that? Oh, look! We’re here!

  I try to climb out without paying. The driver gently reminds me to swipe my credit card. I tip him well to make up for the embarrassment on both sides of the Plexiglas. Then I make my way carefully into the Lucky Shag and try not to read into Daniel’s choice of bars too much. I order a Victoria Bitter and then think better of it and switch my order to soda with lime. I cool my heels at the bar, one eye fixed on the door. I wait.

  After about ten minutes I feel a tap on my shoulder. I jump a mile and then spin around. “Holy crap! You startled me!” I tell Daniel. “Where did you come from?”

  “I’ve been sitting on the veranda waiting for you! Come on out here. The view is kind of the whole point of this ridiculous place.”

  I follow Daniel up a staircase I didn’t even notice before and out a side door to a long, skinny outdoor balcony with just enough room for one row of very narrow tables. From the seat Daniel waves me toward, I can see a perfect view of the first tower of the Brooklyn Bridge rising above the streets, cars, and low buildings in the foreground. One of those lower buildings—maybe three stories high—is decorated with a pastel trompe l’oeil mural of the exact bridge view it blocks, as if to make up to those at street level.

  The real bridge is lit with streetlights all the way to Brooklyn, and the suspension wires are dotted with pretty white lights, and clouds of dark purple hang in the night sky.

  “Well,” I tell him. “This is pretty wonderful!”

  “And the moon is full,” Daniel tells me, pointing above our heads toward the city. “That explains why you texted.”

  I feel embarrassed. “Actually,” I say with a little edge, “I texted because I just had a spectacular meal cooked for me personally by the chef featured in this week’s New Yorker, and I was dying to brag about it to someone.”

  Daniel opens his arms wide. “Amazing! Brag away.”

  I inhale to give him the rundown—the sardines, the wine, the little tasting spoons, the rosewater pie—but then stop myself. “Also I just wanted to hang out with you.”

  Now Daniel smiles warmly. “I’m flattered. And
your timing was perfect. I didn’t realize it until you texted, but ten p.m. is way too early to end such a perfect summer night.”

  “Exactly!” I say a bit too loudly. “Look at this! This is exactly what a momspringa is supposed to be.”

  Daniel laughs. “There’s that word again.”

  I nod. “I’m coming around to it. Say it enough, and it starts to sound less stupid and more like a reasonable way to handle the stresses of motherhood.”

  “Do dads get one?”

  I pause. “Maybe single dads,” I say. “And widowers. But guys who come home and ‘babysit’ their kids once in a while so you can see your friends for the first time in weeks, or expect you to thank them when they do a load of laundry? Nope. They don’t need dadspringas. They need reality checks.”

  “And is that what your ex-husband is getting? A reality check?”

  I think that over. “Maybe. I know he is showing the kids a wonderful time, and he seems to have it all together. Joe is in hog heaven, with all their math and science adventures together, and Cori is getting her every demand met, plus getting a chance to slack off a little. If I were home, she’d be working longer hours in a harder summer job, reading something besides The Hunger Games for the fourth time, and seeing much less of her friends on weeknights. But . . . John’s right; it seems to be good for her to get a summer to let her hair down. Going by what she says in our talks and hearty use of unlimited texting, she seems to be chewing over our family situation in such a healthy, open-minded way.”

  “And you? How do you chew over sharing your kids with your ex-husband after three years without him?”

  I shake my head. “I have no idea what to think,” I say honestly. “He isn’t a bad guy, but oh, how he has hurt me. If I had a crystal ball right now, all I’d want to know is, Does he leave again when I get back?”

  Daniel inhales. “What are you hoping for?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know. I guess I’m hoping he’ll do whatever makes the kids happiest. After an entire summer together, I expect they’ll be bonded to him, and I have told him a hundred ways that he has a responsibility to them. But they were bonded to him before, and he still split.”