Rachel
2015
Jay had called me at the end of March, on a Thursday afternoon almost a year after I’d found out about Amy. On Thursdays, the girls had dance lessons. Delaney was enthusiastically attempting ballet—mostly because she loved the pink leotard and white tights, and she knew that if she made it to the recital, she’d get a pink tulle tutu—while Adele was the least energetic hip-hop dancer in the history of hip-hop. “I was wondering if I could come to the Seder.”
I tamped down my first instinct, which was to ask why he and Amy hadn’t been invited to celebrate with anyone. He’d moved into her place in Brooklyn Heights, just a few subway stops away from where we lived. I had seen the outside of their building but had never stepped inside. I hadn’t seen Amy, either, since the night she and Jay had made their confession. She’d left FAS, and I’d never found out where she’d landed. The girls would mention her occasionally—as in “Amy came with us to see The Nutcracker,” they’d say, or “Amy bought us sparkly shoes”—but I curbed my curiosity and never permitted myself to ask about her, or about them.
Per our divorce agreement, Jay got the girls for two nights during the week, plus the twenty-four hours from dinnertime Friday until dinnertime Saturday. Even after her departure, Amy must have put in a good word for me, because they’d approved my request to trim my hours from nine to three Monday through Friday, then work a long day every other weekend. Every weekday afternoon I’d dash to the subway to arrive at the girls’ school by the time the dismissal bell rang. Together, the three of us would go to the park or shop for dinner or pick up our clothes at the laundry. We’d go to the shoe store or the bookstore or to dance class, to Adele’s oboe lessons or Delaney’s playdates. I would make them dinner, and on Tuesdays and Wednesdays Jay would arrive at seven, and I’d send the girls out the door, each with their backpacks and a school lunch in their hands.
I thought that it was working as well as arrangements like these could work. Half the time, Delaney would cry on the way out the door, wailing, “I will miss my bedroom!” or, worse, “I will miss my mom!” Meanwhile, my super-organized Adele began forgetting things—her math binder, her sheet music—at Dad’s house, maybe, I suspected, in an effort to get the two of us in the same place as often as she could. I held it together for the hand-offs, but it had taken me a few months to stop being a wreck once they were gone. These days, I felt guilty about how much I enjoyed my kid-free hours. I could watch whatever I wanted, read a book uninterrupted, even go out for an eight o’clock yoga class, or to sit in a coffee shop if I liked.
I tried to make it painless, to assure the girls that Daddy and I might not live together but would always be their parents . . . but every time Jay took them, it felt like pulling a bandage off a half-healed wound, making everything bleed again. It hurt, sometimes in a way that felt unendurable. I blamed Jay. I blamed Amy. I blamed myself, too, sometimes, thinking if I’d only paid more attention to him, if I’d only worked less, if we’d only made love more. It should have been Andy, a voice in my mind would whisper when I’d think that way. You shouldn’t have settled—even though I’d never thought of marrying Jay as settling at the time. You should have waited for him.
“So, just you?” I asked my ex.
“Just me,” he said. “I already mentioned to the girls that I’d be asking. Just a heads-up.” Which meant, of course, that it was a fait accompli. As soon as school ended and Delaney came running toward me with her curls and backpack bouncing and her big sister following, walking and reading her book at the same time, the assault began.
“Mommy, Mommy!” Delaney said. “Daddy wants to know if he can come for Passover. Can he? Can he please? I want him to hear me do the Four Questions.”
“We were going to do them together,” said Adele, closing her book. She’d discovered Little Women, one of my favorites at her age, and was reading it for what had to be the third or fourth time.
“What do you guys think?” I asked.
“It would be great!” said Delaney.
“You’re only saying that because Daddy gives you ten dollars if you find the afikomen and Mom only gives us five,” said Adele.
“Ten dollars?” This was the first I’d heard of it.
“I am not!” Delaney said. “I am not saying it because I’m greedy! I just want Daddy to be here!”
I reviewed the guest list. My parents and Nana were flying up, as they did every other year, alternating New York with Los Angeles, where Jonah, who’d astonished everyone by excelling in law school, had passed the California bar on his first attempt, becoming a successful entertainment lawyer and marrying one of his law-school classmates, a coolly pretty and extremely businesslike woman named Suzanne. Brenda, who’d become a Seder regular, would be attending, along with Dante, one of my professional victories, who was getting ready to graduate from Cornell.