Page 13

Rebecca

I want to tell you about the beginning of my marriage. It began as a love story. I need you to know that.

You probably won’t believe me when I say that. I barely believe me.

Especially since I left Lizzie’s hotel room and texted Dan (@SingleDadDan) and asked if I could come over.

I needed to blow off some steam and Dan is always game for blowing anything.

There are lots of rumors in the influencer world about Dan, but I started most of them so that no one would know I was the one he was spending after-hours time with at these conferences.

The #FitnessMom orgy rumor I made up would have been a bit much if there hadn’t been a scandal a couple of years ago where a group of the conservative influencers were all swapping spouses at house parties and dry-humping like high school kids.

When they got caught, they made it clear that what they were doing was “soft swinging,” or everything but penetration. It was very confusing.

So because of the rumors I started everyone believes Dan is a cad and something of a nonstop sex machine, and I don’t think he minds at all.

Our thing has been pretty transactional since the beginning. The one time a year I get away from my children at this conference, all I want is to feel like a woman with a body that is all my own again.

He is sweet and funny though. I have to give him that. The first time we met at MomBomb San Diego years ago I had asked him to grab me a drink at the bar because I thought he was a waiter.

“I can try. I’m trying to get a drink too,” he’d said.

“Sorry I thought you were a server,” I replied.

“Because I’m handsome enough to also be an extra in the next Mission: Impossible movie?” He delivered a thousand-megawatt smile and raised his eyebrows. He had dark tousled hair and baby-blue eyes that had already looked me up and down. I could tell he liked what he saw.

“No. Because the only other men at this mom conference are the ones serving drinks.”

He was sheepish and explained why the conference organizers had invited him, how he was weirdly enjoying himself in San Diego for the first time since his wife passed away three years earlier.

“I guess I feel less alone here,” he’d admitted once we had gotten a couple of beers.

“That makes sense,” I’d said. “Me too.”

“I’m so sorry.” He looked genuinely chagrined. “Are you a widow too?”

“No. I just don’t have any actual friends.”

We laughed even though it was my truth. Talking to him was always easy and we had a good time joking about how weird the entire world of social media was, how it was so strange that this was an actual job.

“My mom always wanted me to be a doctor,” he said.

“What does she think about you doing this?”

“Oh, she has no idea. She isn’t on Instagram. In real life I’m still a podiatrist.”

He wasn’t joking. That’s part of what was so charming about him. On Instagram Dan did funny dances with his daughters and joked about not knowing how to braid their hair. In everyday life he scraped bunions.

***

But he was clingier than usual when I went to his room after Lizzie’s. Also drunker than usual, which was irritating to me because it made him sloppy in bed.

“We should get married and become a modern-day Brady Bunch,” he joked. I gave him a polite laugh and handed him a Red Bull from the minibar to try to perk all of him up.

“I’m serious. Imagine the engagement we’d get off an engagement.” He giggled at the homonym. “And a wedding. We’d make so much money off of a wedding.”

I usually love talking about money, but not with Dan, not then.

I would have preferred that he didn’t talk at all, and I pushed him down on the bed, pleased to see that the Red Bull had given him wings.

Dan usually let me be in charge, and I enjoyed it immensely.

He rested his hands gently on my hips and lowered me slowly on top of him, reaching up to run his hands over my breasts, pinching my nipples the way he knew made me crazy, and I clenched around him and lost myself in the pleasure.

I peeled myself out of his sweaty sheets right afterward to leave and do what needed to be done, to put everything into action.

“Hey, B,” he murmured. He had called me B since I revealed I actually hated being called Rebecca.

“Yeah?”

“I meant it. We could do it. Be together. It would be nice.” His voice was slurry and dreamy.

“I’m married.”

“Divorce him.”

I almost told Dan my plan then, almost spilled the whole thing because it was already bursting inside me and I wanted someone else to tell me it was going to work out.

“It’s not that easy. You know that.”

Dan gripped me around the waist and pulled me back to the bed, kissing my hip, my back.

“I’ll do whatever you need me to do to make it easier. We could always kill him,” he said with such innocent humor that I flinched.

“I gotta go.”

My future wasn’t going to be easy or pretty, at least not for a while, but there was no turning back. I had a plan.

But before I tell you about that, I need to tell you about Gray. We were in love once. Painfully and crazily in love.

When I graduated college I had these big plans to move fast and break things, to lean in and be a girlboss.

I had gone to the best undergraduate business school in the country and that’s what the girls in my class there were told to do.

Never mind that a lot of the women I was friends with at that school had moms who hadn’t set foot in an office since before their maternity leaves, after which they promptly quit.

Those mothers were on boards and ran charities.

That wasn’t leaning out, not really. Not working becomes more respectable based on the number of zeros in your bank account.

My bank account was at zero, actually less than zero, when I moved out to San Francisco after graduation.

I owed more than a hundred grand in student loan debt even after working my butt off to pay for school as I went along.

I tried not to worry about it, but debt is like a paper cut that never goes away. It stings when you least expect it.

But I had a plan. I was going to work for a tech start-up and save all my money in order to do what I really loved.

I wanted nothing more than to open my own pastry shop and bakery and then a chain of bakeries and finally a mail-order delivery service for artisanal baked goods, a monthly box delivered right to your door.

I would be the CEO and the master baker.

I was good in the kitchen. So fucking good.

My mom had passed that down to me. When she wasn’t working two jobs to support the two of us on her own, she lived in the kitchen, lived for baking.

Making bread cut down on grocery costs, but she also adored it.

Sometimes it seemed like the only thing that brought her any joy.

Joy was in short supply during my childhood, but we nearly had it together during those moments in the kitchen.

Mom was strict because she didn’t want me to end up like her, pregnant and alone at sixteen without an education or a penny to her name.

She worked insane hours cleaning houses and stocking shelves at big-box stores, but it still felt like we never had enough cash to pay for new clothes or all the doctors’ bills when her diabetes got bad.

And then she was gone. Dropped dead right at work and I was left to pay for life on my own starting at age sixteen.

I quietly moved out of our apartment before the landlord evicted me for not paying rent and slept in the backseat of our old Mazda to avoid getting put in the system.

My grades were good. I was varsity in track and on the debate team.

I’d always kept to myself because Mom had instilled in me an intrinsic fear of everyone and everything, but it became a necessity senior year so I could fly under the radar.

On paper I was an ideal candidate for a good school, and I didn’t hold back in my personal statements to college.

The unstable mother, her untimely death, living alone in the car.

You might even say it was practice for my future in confessional blogging.

Getting to college after having such a difficult and joyless upbringing was like walking onto a movie set, like opening up one of those cakes that someone jumps out of and screams surprise . I liken it to what the Amish kids must feel when they go on their rumspringa, their year of self-discovery.

From the moment I got to campus I loved being in love.

I was desperate for it. It was all I wanted and maybe sometimes I went about it the wrong way.

Maybe sometimes I said yes to things I shouldn’t have in the hopes that doing so would lead to a real date and not just a night in the frat house.

Did I deserve the names they called me? Maybe.

Did I own them? Absolutely. Because what the hell else was I going to do?

And besides it felt like a massive screw you to the world to wear a T-shirt emblazoned with the words Slutty Bex that I ordered for myself on the Internet.

I made my bed, and I lay in it. And plenty of others. I make terrible jokes when I’m nervous.

Other girls mocked me, some of them feared me.

Some were jealous. But never Lizzie. She loved me straightaway despite all my flaws and all the various costumes I tried on over the four years of college.

I thought being in a sorority would bring me a gaggle of giggling girlfriends like I saw in the movies, but our connections were pretty sterile.

Not with Lizzie. She was the first person who made me feel completely comfortable just being me.

Lizzie believed in me when no one else did.

We could sit comfortably in silence or snort-laugh for hours.