The Overdue Life of Amy Byler Read online

  “The infinity symbol on your lower back?” she asks.

  “One twenty dot one twenty-five,” I banter back.

  Lena looks at me questioningly.

  “The Dewey Decimal classification for infinity,” I supply. “Not that we use that anymore. It turns out one twenty dot one twenty-five was not actually infinite.”

  “That’s deep,” says Lena. “Oh! I got it!”

  “Got what?” I ask, still thinking about the larger 120 category in Dewey. It’s epistemology. Knowledge about knowledge. One of my favorites.

  “The bag. Look!” She tilts the screen again. Next to the window of the consignment site, there’s the Longchamp website. Same bag, a full $1,000 more.

  “Holy crap! What in god’s name are you going to do with an eleven-hundred-dollar bag?” I ask.

  “Sell it on eBay,” she tells me simply. “For five hundred more than I paid for it.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. People will pay that much for a used purse?”

  Lena shrugs. “They have the last few times I’ve done this. Maybe they turn around and sell it for nine hundred dollars. Who knows?”

  “I take everything back,” I tell her. “That was ten minutes well spent.”

  She nods with a smile. “See?”

  “What exactly are you going to do with that extra five hundred bucks in your pocket?” I ask her. I’ve never known Lena to have a ton of extra money, which I previously put down to a teacher’s salary and a handbag habit.

  “I’m buying a mic stand and a new cordless microphone.”

  I look at her, confused.

  “For the DAYS camp. Talent show night.” Domestic Abuse Youth Services. Lena’s volunteer passion.

  “Oh, Lena,” I say. “I love you.”

  “I’m buying myself this too,” she says, clicking over to a cute canvas slouch bag with some gentle wear on consignment for thirty-five dollars.

  “Now that looks more like you,” I say.

  “You can borrow it anytime you want,” she says. “Maybe take it to New York.”

  “If I go to New York.”

  “Please go to New York,” says Lena. “Please consider having just a little bit of fun while you’re there.”

  “That’s what John said, after a fashion. Right in front of the kids. Like it’s not his fault my life isn’t cartwheels and champagne fountains.”

  “He said you should have a little bit of fun? What’s so bad about that?”

  “He tried to give me his credit card,” I say, spitting out the words.

  Lena pushes away from her desk and looks up at me in surprise. “What now?”

  “He wants to treat me while he’s with the kids. That’s what he said. It made me want to barf.”

  “A man wants to care lovingly for your kids and give you a blank check to spend while he does so? And that makes you want to . . . barf?” Lena asks.

  I roll my eyes at her. “I can take care of myself. I don’t want to be bought off.”

  “I suppose you could look at this that way.”

  “I’m not taking his money, Lena. It’s dirty money. When John ran for it, he left me really hard up. We were used to his level of income, I was staying home with the kids, and I hadn’t put my MLS degree to use at all in, what, twelve years? If this job hadn’t come up when it did, if faculty didn’t get reduced tuition . . . my kids’ lives would have been turned upside down. It was an awful time. I mean, to leave a librarian stranded on her own with two kids—it’s not cool.”

  “No. It’s not. You did an amazing job hitting the ground running. Letting John give you a week’s spending money wouldn’t undo that.”

  I tighten my jaw and shake my head. “It feels like it would.”

  “So you told him no?”

  “I did. I told him thanks but no thanks. Then the kids started in on me, saying I should take the credit card.”

  “I bet they did! They’re on your side. Just like I am.”

  I refuse to hear this. “They just like spending other people’s money. Cori was talking about New York restaurants she’s seen on Bravo shows. Joe was going on about the glories of the Natural History Museum. And the Transit Museum. And the Tenement Museum? Oh, that boy. God save me if he wastes all his greatness on a history degree.”

  Lena laughs. “You don’t want Joe to get a history degree now?”

  “I want him to get a degree in ‘Joe being happy for the rest of his life,’” I tell her. “Short of that, I guess prelaw.”

  “I actually think those two majors are diametrically opposed. But then what do I know? I teach ethics.”

  I laugh at her and shake my head. “I know it’s not my future to choose, but it is so, so hard not to see what you think would make your kids happy and just . . . sort of herd them in that direction. Joe is so good in his heart. I’m afraid he’ll do a job that is not well valued in our society, like social work or public school teaching, and his little spirit will get broken.”

  “I hear you. I can only imagine how it feels to let your kids make their own mistakes,” says Lena, gently reminding me that in both my mothering and teaching jobs, that skill is probably the single most important tool we have. But it’s hard—looking ahead, seeing their mistakes coming, and then, unless they are in actual mortal danger, holding their hands as they make them anyway.

  “Point taken. I think the thing about Joe that makes it so tricky is that he always makes such good decisions. I don’t have any practice letting him screw up on his own.”

  Lena smiles at me. “Then he’ll make a good decision on careers when the time comes. A good decision for himself. In the moment he’s in.”

  I nod and then spot myself an excellent segue. “And not taking John’s credit card is the right decision for me, in the moment I’m in. But the kids acted like I was being the biggest party pooper, and John insisted—I mean, he went on and on and on, until I finally agreed I’d take his card for emergencies and ‘incidentals’ as they came up. So now I’m the proud owner of my ex-husband’s American Express number. And here’s the worst thing. Are you ready for it?”

  Lena nods. “Lay it on me.”

  “I say to him, right there at dinner, trying to defend my position, I say, ‘Well, there’s no point in my even taking it because my using a card with a man’s name on it is going to raise some serious eyebrows, isn’t it?’ And do you know what he says? He says, ‘I already had the company issue me one with your name. Should be here in two days.’ And I say, ‘What? They’ll give you a credit card with your ex-wife’s name on it?’ And he says, right in front of the kids, ‘Well, you’re not really my ex-wife, are you?’”

  Lena starts and spins in her chair. “What now?”

  “That’s what they said too!”

  “You’re still married to John? I thought you filed years ago.”

  “I definitely filed. Isn’t there such a thing as a common-law divorce?”

  “There is not such a thing as a common-law divorce,” says Lena with conviction. “As you well know. Don’t play dumb with me.”

  I shrug. “He was in Hong Kong. Lawyers are expensive. Working through a divorce seemed too painful at first, and then just entirely unnecessary as time went on.”

  “Um, unnecessary how? Wouldn’t you have gotten court-ordered child support?”

  I sigh. “He should have paid without a judge telling him to,” I say. “I shouldn’t have had to demand it. He should have been here, taking care of his children without a court order.”

  Lena’s eyebrows hit the ceiling. “So you martyred yourself rather than stand up to John.”

  “I stood on my own two feet,” I correct. “And it probably came out for the better anyway. Most of our assets were—are—in the house, and he signed the deed over to me without a word. And . . .” I’m hesitant to tell Lena the next part, hesitant to voice my selfishness even to myself.

  “Yes?”

  “I got the kids.” I don’t admit how afraid I was to press the
divorce through, on the off chance he might ask for some custody. The legal starting place is fifty-fifty split placement, and I’d have a hard road to get full time with the kids if he wanted his share. As heartbroken as I was when he left, I wasn’t ready to contemplate missing every other week of my kids’ lives on top of that pain.

  “You’re still married,” Lena says, shaking her head in wonder.

  “I’m still married,” I agree. “To John.”

  “After three years apart.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you. It was on my list of things to do.”

  “That must be quite a list.”

  I try to explain another way. “Getting unmarried was more of a picky detail in a chaotic time when those details had to be ignored so I could survive. It was like how I stopped scheduling haircuts for a year. And then one day things calmed down enough for me to notice that I needed a haircut, and I got one. No big deal.”

  “So now you notice you need a divorce,” Lena supplies. “And you go get one, and it’s no big deal?”

  I blink. I haven’t taken the analogy that far yet. “I guess so,” I say.

  But I don’t guess that at all. Deep down, I have no intention of getting a divorce, I suddenly realize. I don’t think now is the time to upset the applecart.

  But I cannot tell Lena that. Honestly, I don’t even want to think about it too much myself.

  “John may be an asshole,” I say needlessly, “but he’s a reasonable one. A divorce will simply be a matter of putting pen to paper. Just like the haircut. No big deal.”

  And then I pretend not to notice Lena’s unquestionably skeptical expression.

  —

  A week later I’m in my bedroom packing. With a full week to go before I leave, it’s almost laughable to be packing right now. But Cori is going to be crazy busy for the next five days before the end of school, and I will, too, with the presentations and theses to read and just the nonstop rushing around of finals, grades, transcripts. And for once Trinity isn’t here. So if I want my fifteen-year-old daughter’s approval of every stitch of clothing I’m taking to New York, I have to get it now. And I do. She is the sartorial authority around here.

  The bedroom is spacious, and Cori’s sort of draped on the upholstered bench at the foot of the bed, using her foot to poke the pile of my shoes near her, trying to unearth something that doesn’t offend her. She has, at least once a day since she was eight, sprawled on this bench to tell me the secrets of her heart or the dramas of her friends. Not for the first time I thank my lucky stars that, against all odds, we never had to move after John left.

  We had a great mortgage and loads of equity, and I suppose that’s down to him—he insisted we put nearly a third down on this house to keep the monthly bill low and get it paid off faster. John was always really funny about debt. When he left, I refinanced from fifteen years to thirty and didn’t feel even remotely upset about it—and that dropped my monthly payment yet lower, making it cheaper to stay in our lovely big house full of memories than to rent anywhere nearby.

  And it is a lovely house. The kids have their own rooms, plenty of closet space, which has gone from holding LEGO sets and dress-up outfits to being packed with comic books (Joe) and mall sweaters (Cori). My daughter owns every mall sweater ever sold. Some in multiple colors. If I take her to the mall, I can be sure she is coming back with a sweater. She brandishes them with double clearance tags and her frequent-shopper discounts and tells me they were $6.88 or some other ridiculous price, but I cringe at the way she accumulates them, wears them once, and leaves them in a puddle on the floor for the rest of their days.

  Still, she always looks so nice, not just from youth but also from some kind of eye for color and shape that skipped my generation. Anything I bring home from the store has to go by her before I cut the tags off, and many times she just looks at the clothes still in the bag and then raises her eyebrows skyward and says something like, “It’s kind of exhausting to love someone who will never learn,” or “Are you buying ugly clothes to make a point?”

  I have just such a shopping bag today. I went to Target with a one-hundred-dollar budget—basically an extravagant no-limits shopping spree in clearance-rack dollars—and bought a stack of shirts and pants from the middle part of the store—not the totally dowdy “work” collections I usually beeline for just before the maternity clothes and the dressing rooms, but not the juniors madness of the front third of the store either. In my bag there are shirts in “trend” colors with vaguely low-cut necks, flowing blousy things with lace and embroidery, and even a just-above-the-knee skirt, though truth be told, I’m not entirely clear on how to wear skirts. Do they go with boots and tights in late May? I don’t think I can do bare legs, can I? Is there some sort of publicly agreed-upon age limit for bare legs?

  I also brought home two pairs of dark jeans with two very different cuts, even knowing at least one of them is heinously wrong and confident Cori will tell me which. That I have become pants blind—a common condition of aging, where you can no longer say with any authority which of your pants are cut fashionably and which are mom jeans—is proof of my complete inability to shop without help.

  I take them all out while Cori watches me keenly and lay them out on the bed. “I was thinking,” I tell her cautiously, “that these tops would match these pants, and these other ones would match the skirt, and then I won’t need to take much luggage.”

  “Shoes?” is all she says.

  “Oh yes. I am planning to wear them, absolutely.”

  She sighs. “Look. In New York City, with a schedule of conferences, meetings, dinners, and dates, shoes should make up approximately half of your baggage weight.”

  I blink at her. “Is this some kind of scientific finding? Can you direct me to the abstract for my own review? And who said anything about dates?”

  “Mom. Stop being weird. You’re going on dates.”

  I start to tell her I’m not but stop myself. A date might be kind of nice, actually, though I have no idea where any datees would come from. “Is any of this . . . date appropriate?”

  She looks down at the clothes with scrutiny. “Well . . . maybe . . .” She pulls the lowest-cut top from the jeans side of the bed to the skirt side of the bed and drapes it with a long jangly necklace. Then she rolls up the skirt at the waist twice, making it significantly shorter, and puts it down with the top. Then she waves the “wait a second” finger at me and disappears into her room. When she comes back seconds later, she is holding a pair of shoes I’m pretty sure I would not have approved had I known she had them. She puts them at the bottom of the outfit and says, “Date clothes. Not a fancy date, but you’re not really that fancy anyway.”

  I look at the conservative size-large mom clothes she’s somehow turned into a hooker costume. “Cori, I’m not wearing that.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter, does it? Because no one said anything about dates.” She waggles her eyebrows at me.

  Just for a moment I indulge myself in the idea of meeting someone in New York. “These are really pretty shoes,” I say, picking up one slingback and marveling at the luck of having a stylish daughter who wears the same shoe size as me. The toe is a black-and-gold geometric print—just a bit eighties, very “me” thirty years ago. The slingback strap loops all the way around the ankle, too, and is black leather.

  There is a tiny gold buckle. They are at once feminine and authoritative, understated and sexy. They are the most aspirational shoes I have ever seen. I want to be the kind of person who wears these shoes.

  “May I really borrow these?” I ask.

  “Of course, Mom. Not like I’m wearing them around Dad anyway. If he’s any kind of dad at all, he shouldn’t allow it. They’re weirdly sexy for how low the heel is, right?”

  “You’re right. You’re not allowed to wear these.”

  Cori just laughs at me. “They were practically free anyway,” she tells me, launching into the story of how she had a fifteen-dollars-off c
ard and there was a 40 percent off sale at Macy’s and so on and so forth. I tune out for a few moments, tilting my head and considering what it would feel like to wear a short skirt, slingbacks, and a slinky top around Manhattan in early spring. It would, I decide, feel incredible.

  “I’ll buy them from you,” I tell her right in the middle of her story. “Or buy you another pair that are less . . . adult.”

  Cori beams. “Deal! Here.” She hands me her smartphone, where she’s already pulled up a pair of ridiculous teal lace-up gladiators marked down below twenty dollars. “These are the replacement pair,” she says to me.

  I look at them for a moment. They are flats. Flats.

  “These are flats,” I say aloud. “So then . . . it’s going to be Brian?”

  Cori sighs deeply and lets her head tip to the side. “Brian. He’s very short.”

  “But cute,” I say. “Are you taller than him?”

  “We’re the same. Do you think he has a short-man complex?”

  “He’s still growing, Cori. Besides, that’s a thing people invented to justify judging men by their height.”

  “But what about Napoleon?” she asks me.

  “Power-hungry madmen come in all shapes and sizes,” I tell her. “Rather than worry about Brian’s measurements, let’s figure out if he’s good enough for you.”

  More sighing from my teenager. “I don’t know how to tell,” she says.

  “Slowly,” I say. “With your shirt on.”

  Cori raises an eyebrow at me.

  “Ok, pants.”

  “I can do that,” she says, and every single bone in my body sings with motherly joy. “What am I looking for when I try to figure out if someone is good enough for me?” she asks.

  “Well, what do you like most about the people you like? Include yourself,” I instruct.

  She thinks for a moment. “I like people who are pretty kind deep down. And also who tell the truth. I like people who show up when they say they’re going to. Oh, and people who don’t think they’re better than everyone else.”

  I nod. “That’s a terrific list of things to watch for in Brian. I see all of those things in you, so you deserve all that and more.”