The Househusband Chapter 10

The Househusband Chapter 10 Dada

A few months passed after that.

The studio picked up two more projects and I started thinking about hiring an assistant. Business was good. Better than good.

James and I were talking about opening a second location in Jersey City. The kind of problem/I never thought I’d have. We hired a junior designer in February and an intern in March, and suddenly the studio felt like a real business instead of a two-man operation running on caffeine and determination.

Olivia and I went from coordinating playdates to grabbing dinner sometimes after the kids fell asleep at ond of our apartments. Nothing dramatic, nothing cinematic. Just two people who’d been through hard things, slowly getting closer without either of us trying too hard.

She didn’t ask about my past and I didn’t ask about hers. We just existed in the present, which was exactly what I needed.

She was easy to be around. She’d come over with a bag of groceries and cook something while I finished up work, and Leo would sit in his high chair and smear sweet potato all over his face. Mia would crawl under the table and try to steal his food.

It was loud and messy and completely unglamorous, and I loved it. Nobody was performing for anyone. Nobody was pretending.

The first time Olivia fell asleep on my couch after the kids went down, I sat in the armchair across the room watching her breathe and realized I wasn’t afraid anymore. Afraid of what, I wasn’t sure. Afraid of being hurt again, maybe. Or afraid of forgetting what Charlotte had done and letting it happen again.

But sitting there, with the city humming outside and two kids asleep down the hall and this woman on my couch who’d never lied to me about anything, the fear was gone.

Thanksgiving came around. I brought Olivia and Leo to my parents’ place upstate. Susan made enough food for thirty people, like always — turkey, stuffing, three kinds of pie, a green bean casserole that was mostly butter.

She teared up a little when she saw Olivia but pulled it together fast and ushered her into the kitchen to help with the gravy. Olivia didn’t seem to mind. She rolled up her sleeves and got to work like she’d been doing it for years.

Richard was in the backyard teaching Leo to step on crunchy leaves. Leo found a big brown one, stomped on it, and laughed so hard he fell over.

Richard picked him up and set him on his feet again, and Leo immediately went looking for another leaf to destroy. Richard laughed – the kind of laugh I hadn’t heard from him in years, the kind that comes from deep in your chest when you’re genuinely happy.

Susan watched them from the kitchen window and said quietly to nobody in particular: “That boy is so

much like his dad.”

After dinner, Richard pulled me aside on the porch. The air was cold and you could see your breath. The trees along the street were bare except for a few stubborn red leaves clinging to the branches.

“You look good,” he said.

“I’m good.”

He patted my shoulder. Didn’t need to say anything else. We stood there for a while watching the trees sway in the wind, two men who’d both loved the same woman at different times and had both lost her in different

ways.

Same day, somewhere in Manhattan. Charlotte sat alone in her new apartment – a studio on the third floor, no doorman, nothing like the Upper East Side. She’d moved out of her parents’ place a month ago. Said she needed to start over on her own.

She’d gotten a job at a small marketing firm in Midtown. Lower salary, smaller office, nobody who knew her name before the scandal. She took the subway to work every morning, same as everyone else, and ate lunch at her desk while her coworkers went out together.

Nobody was mean to her. They just didn’t include her. Which was worse, in a way – being invisible instead of hated.

There was a piece of paper on the small kitchen table. A letter to me. She’d been writing it for an hour, crossing things out, starting over, crossing things out again.

The trash can next to the table was full of crumpled drafts. She’d written “I’m sorry” a dozen different ways and none of them felt right, because none of them could undo what she’d done.

Finally she crumpled it up and threw it in the trash with the rest. She sat there in the quiet apartment, listening to the sounds of the city outside – sirens, traffic, someone laughing on the sidewalk below. Life going on without her.

Six months after that. An evening in Brooklyn.

“having something alive I was on the balcony watering the mint and basil plants Olivia had given me – makes a place feel like home,” she’d said. The sun was low and the light was that deep orange color that makes everything look like a photograph.

Leo was on the floor mat inside, stacking blocks. His favorite thing in the world was building a tower just to knock it down, then looking at me and laughing like it was the funniest thing that ever happened.

My phone buzzed on the railing. Unknown number. A text message:

“How is Leo?”

I stared at the screen for a long time. I knew it was her. New number.

She must have gotten it recently, maybe a prepaid phone she bought at a drugstore. Something about that felt sad – buying a phone just to text two words to someone who’d blocked every other number.

I typed two words: “He’s good.”

Then I blocked the number.

The sun was setting over Brooklyn, stretching long shadows across the balcony floor. Inside, Leo held up a block, looked right at me, and said something that sounded like —

“Dada.”

I knelt down, took the block from his hand, and kissed his forehead.