Dave, meanwhile, had gone back to being tight-lipped and silent, his face unreadable and his body rigid as he passed me in the kitchen or the halls. I was afraid to try to grill him about L. McIntyre. I wanted to know the truth . . . but I suspected that the truth would burst my opiated bubble, revealing the unhappy realities that even four or five Oxys couldn’t mask—that my marriage was a sham, that my happiness was an illusion, that even though the pieces were in place and everything seemed okay, underneath the veneer of good looks and good manners, the three of us were falling apart.
Or, at least, I was.
Two weekends after my television triumph, the guilt got to me. I woke up early, chewed up sixty milligrams of OxyContin, took a shower, and announced, over a breakfast I’d cooked myself, that I was putting everything on hold and taking Ellie on a girls’ day outing.
“Great,” Dave said. He even managed to smile. Ten minutes after I’d made my announcement, he had his running shoes in his hand, his high-tech lap-and-pace-counting watch on his wrist, and his body covered in various wicking and cooling fabrics made from recycled bamboo. “Bye,” he called, closing the door behind him. Ellie gave me a syrup-sticky smile. “Can we go to my museum? And the Shake Shack? And the zoo? And to sing-along Sound of Music?”
“Sing-along Sound of Music was a special treat. How about you pick two of the other things?” I said pleasantly. Meanwhile, I was performing a mental inventory of how many little blue Oxys I had left, and how I’d space them out to get me through until noon the next day, when my next batch would come in the mail. You’re taking too many, a voice in my head scolded. I stacked dishes in the sink, then rinsed them and put them in the dishwasher, and told the voice to shut up. How much money did you spend last month? the voice persisted. Four thousand dollars? Five? I can afford it, I thought uneasily, shoving aside the memory of the petty cash I’d borrowed, or how worried I was that Dave would take a hard look at our joint checking account. As long as I stay on top of things, as long as I’m careful, I’ll be fine.
After lengthy deliberations, Ellie decided on the zoo, and burgers for lunch. For two hours, we admired the elephants, held our noses in the monkey house, screamed “Ew!” at the naked mole rats, and sat on a bench eating soft-serve pretzels in the sunshine. I let her have everything she wanted—a pedal through the pond on the swan boats, a pony ride, and a trip on the miniature train that circled the zoo. She got her face painted to look like a leopard (a pink-and-white-spotted leopard) and bought friendship bracelets and a souvenir keychain and widened her eyes in disbelief when, at the Shake Shack, I said she could have both cheese fries and a milkshake, when usually I made her choose one or the other.
The cashier gave Ellie a buzzer—by far, one of the highlights of the Shack. “It’ll go off when your food’s ready.”
“I KNOW it! I KNOW it will!” Using two hands, Ellie carried the buzzer to our table and set it reverently in the center after cleaning the surface with an antibacterial wipe from my purse. “Now, don’t freak out,” she instructed the buzzer.
“Okay. I won’t. I won’t freak out,” I answered, in character as Wa, which is what we’d named the Shake Shack’s buzzers, for the wah-wah-wah sound they made.
“Just be CALM, Wa,” she said, giggling.
“I’m gonna. I-I’m gonna be calm,” I stammered, in Wa’s trembling, not-at-all-calm voice.
“Just say, ‘Your food is ready,’ in a NORMAL voice. Don’t LOSE YOUR BUSINESS,” Ellie said, her eyes sparkling with mirth.
“I got it. I got it. No freaking out. No losing my business. No . . .” Ellie was already starting to giggle as the buzzer lit up and started to hum. “WA! WA! WA! Yourfoodisready!” I said. “Wa! Wa! WAWAWAI’MFREAKINGOUTHEREWA!”
“Wa, calm down! It’s just a burger!” Ellie gave the buzzer an affectionate pat as I continued to narrate its breakdown. An older woman sitting at the counter watched the proceedings. On our way back with our tray, she tapped my shoulder.
“Excuse me. I just want to say how much I’m enjoying watching you and your daughter.”
“Oh, thank you!” I said, touched almost to tears.
“So many parents, you see them on their phones, barely looking at their kids. You’re giving your daughter memories she’ll have forever.”
Now I was tearing up, thinking about what the woman would never see—the times I had been on my phone or my laptop or napping when Ellie wanted my company.
“That’s really nice of you to say,” I said, just as—irony!—my phone rang. I gave the woman an apologetic smile. “Hello? Mom?”