April had gotten married so young, the summer before her last year of law school, Ross the newest associate at Thurman Architects. At twenty-four, she'd become a mother. It had all felt like progress at the time, but now she saw how much she'd rushed through, the liminal spaces where anything and everything was possible. Soon after giving birth, she became regretfully aware of all the other things in life she could not, now, do. Skydiving. Vows of silence. Hiking the Appalachian Trail or weeks-long business trips to Hong Kong or Mumbai. Sure, kids were portable, but there were limits. The second time she got pregnant, she was experienced enough to know that there was no way to prepare for the chaos. It didn't matter if you had a summer baby or a winter baby, if you breastfed or not, if the older one potty-trained early or late. There was a long dark tunnel and you were going in it. You might have marginally more confidence, but even so, inside the tunnel mistakes would be made. The beautiful plan you'd dreamed up in your head was going to be torn to shreds. If you were lucky, you'd all come out the other end, mostly happy and alive.
If you were lucky, and April hadn't felt lucky in a long time.
Oh, enough already, she chided herself. Self-pity didn't pay the bills. She turned her attention to the mounds of paper on her desk, the never-ending work that was expected of her. She had an hour before she had to leave for the engagement party.
Right on cue, April's cell phone lit up. It was Maddie, her oldest, whose magical powers for detecting when her mother needed to concentrate were as sharp at age twelve as they'd been as a baby.
"What's up, Pup?" April asked, thumbing through the settlement terms for another acquisition.
"I can't believe you're not coming to see me play. I mean, I'm only in sixth grade once."
"Nice try." April was used to deflecting her preteen's guilt trips, as if she wielded Wonder Woman's bracelets, but today she felt all too mortal. She was sorry to miss Maddie's concert tonight, but there would be others, and one engagement dinner for Junie. "Daddy and Coop will be front row center, and I'll come to the next one."
"But everyone else's mom will be there!"
"Hey," April heard Ross bark from across the room. Then suddenly he was on the line instead. "She was just supposed to call to say hi. Don't worry about her. In ten minutes she'll be relieved you're not coming and mortified that I am."
"I know."
Her daughter's adolescence and everything that came with it—moodiness, hormones, hair in new places and breasts she alternately wanted to smother under a sweatshirt or show off in her sports bra, crushes that were written all over her face alongside the murderous looks she'd give you if you had the temerity to ask about them—it was the weather their household lived under. And it didn't matter how devoted and present a father Ross was, April was still the mother. She was the parent Maddie raged against in her quest for individuation. The brain science talk the guidance counselors had given the parents at the start of the year was no help, like holding up a shitty little five-dollar umbrella in the storm of feelings that were roiling in middle school. The conversation with her daughter about how the girl's body and mind were changing was oceanic and ongoing and, nine times out of ten, April had to badger Maddie into having it. Maybe she wasn't quite the mother she'd thought she would be, patient and endlessly available, but she had so many other roles: loving wife, dutiful daughter, big sister, the youngest woman to make partner at the firm, number two in billable hours. And now she had this engagement dinner looming, where she'd need to be chatty and effervescent when she felt anything but.
"Just go and have fun tonight," Ross said as Craig popped his head in April's office, one eyebrow raised in that way of his that only ever meant one thing. "Tell Junie I said hi."
"You know it's still cheating even if we do it in a car?" Craig said when she should have been sitting down with her family in Philly but was sitting on him instead. "We don't get bonus points for not using a bed."
"Shut up," she said, her head ramming into the roof of his BMW in the parking lot behind the Walgreens. She sank into him with her hips and closed her eyes, unwilling to lose hold of this thread she'd caught, leading into the sweet, aching center of herself. She came extravagantly. In the stillness that followed was that grateful moment, all too brief, in which she forgot everything and everyone, even herself. The push-pull of their fucking was the engine of her desire. April craved this stolen pleasure, the only thing that cut through the noise of her life, and she loathed herself for chasing it again so soon.
