Better With You Here

by Gwendolyn Zepeda

Genres: Family Life; Hispanic & Latino; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

When Natasha's ex ups the ante and exposes some disturbing news about her friends, she's forced to cut ties, but can she really walk away from the women who have been standing by her side? Some friends help us heal . . . If you ask her, Natasha Davila will tell you there's nothing more important to her than her kids. She'll do anything for her son and daughter-even play nice with her ex-husband. Only now she's facing a problem she never expected: her ex is re-marrying and suing for full custody. She could fall to pieces . . . or she could call on her friends. Some help us change . . . There's Sara, whose tough talk hides a soft-and loyal-heart, and Haley, who has so much more to offer than a pretty face. When they're together, Natasha doesn't have to be someone's wife or someone's mother. She can just be. And some remind us what true friendship is really about . . .

Release date: July 17, 2012

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 353

Sample

Missy makes us real cupcakes.”

This is what my own son says to me, at 7:05 in the morning—​five minutes before we have to get out the door—referring to his father’s new girlfriend as he glares at the whole-grain minimuffin I just served him.

I’m standing at our too-shallow kitchen sink, rubbing a bloodstain with dish soap. The stain is on the yellow LYNX SPIRIT! T-shirt that my daughter just told me all kindergartners were required to wear to school today. It’s fresh from the pile of clothing in the corner of the bedroom that she shares with her brother. That corner smells like mildew. So before I could even start working on her T-shirt, I had to find the source of the smell. It turned out to be a pair of slightly damp Spider-Man underwear, and now I know that Alex sneaked a soda last night before bed. But his sheets aren’t wet, thank God. Regardless, we’re running late now, and I’m scrubbing as fast as I can, because Lucia’s front tooth finally fell out, just ten minutes ago, and of course her first instinct was to wipe the gum hole with her freshly Febrezed T-shirt and get blood right smack in the middle of it.

Fifty percent of my job as a mother is cleaning up bodily fluids. That’s what it feels like. And then the other fifty percent is worrying.

Lucia’s waiting in her camisole, sitting with her brother in the breakfast nook—or the breakfast square yard, as I like to think of it—at the table I put together with an Allen wrench a month ago, which barely seats the three of us. She’s picking at her own whole-grain minimuffin, which is not, as Alex has noted, a real cupcake. She’s looking back and forth between her brother and me, watching to find out who’s going to win the fight and which way, therefore, her loyalties should lie.

I pause midscrub to regard my son, Alex. Or Venom, which is the only name he’ll answer to this morning, since he’s wearing his Venom mask. Venom, the black Spider-Man. The first time Alex explained it to me, I thought he meant African-American. Maybe my son’s comic books were finally getting a little diversity, I thought. But no, Venom is actually black—Spidey’s literal dark side, the result of one of those scientific accidents he has a habit of getting into. This one was so bad it affected not only his personality but the color of his costume fabric, too. Serious stuff.

Never mind that this mask was a gift from me, Alex’s loving mother, for his birthday three weeks ago. Never mind that I’d spent two lunch hours trudging down Jefferson, looking into all those flea-markety little shops in search of something I could afford that was still cool enough for my beloved child.

I’d gone looking specifically for a luchador mask—the headgear of a Mexican wrestler. Not because I wanted to honor our Hispanic heritage or anything noble like that, but because Alex was temporarily obsessed with a Saturday-morning cartoon about luchadores. I searched the faces of skeletons, dudes made of gold, and what looked like robotic roosters, but none of them were good enough for my boy. Then I found him: Venom. Or at least the Coahuila knockoff version of him. The Mexican black Spider-Man, you could say. The perfect gift.

Alex loved the mask more than the Venom comics and action figure I’d also bought him. More than the cake and the ice cream. Not to be catty, but he liked it way more than the single present his father bought him—a video game for the wrong gaming system, featuring the wrong Spider-Man.

So now I find it a little ironic that Alex uses my gift to explore his own dark side and then aims the results at me. Missy makes them real cupcakes, he says.

If this kid is trying to hurt me, he’s going to have to try harder.

If he’d said, “Missy has way less cellulite than you, even though you’re the same age,” it might have stung a little.

If he’d said, “Missy has a happier, healthier relationship with Dad than you did, even though at first she seemed like a rebound,” it might have broken my skin. But my son, with stubbornness and smart-assery that are strangely familiar, isn’t trying to sting or scratch. No, he’s going in for the kill.

He says, “I want to go live with Missy and Daddy. I’m tired of living with you.” Then, to make sure I’m listening, he picks up his minimuffin and throws it at the wall.

Lucia immediately commits a copycat crime, pushing her own muffin off its plate so that it rolls in slow motion to the floor. Then she lets out a quiet noise, a cross between wicked glee and immediate regret.

I look Alex right in the face. Right in the eyeholes, so I can make sure he’s not crying and hasn’t lost his mind. No—his eyes are blazing. He’s glaring at me, daring me to lose it. And right now I think I might.

Right now I see his father in those eyes, and I feel like hitting him. Like maybe I can slap Alex hard enough to make Mike feel it, right through their shared DNA.

But instead I smile. “Well, sweetie, I’m sorry to hear you say that. Sometimes I wish I could stay home from work and make you cupcakes every day.”

His eyes are locked on mine. He’s listening.

“And sometimes I wish you could stay home from school and make me cupcakes. But, unfortunately, we all have to do things we don’t like, or else our lives would fall apart. Right? Like, right now I have to go to work so I can buy you healthy food, even though I know you’re going to complain about it. But I have to do it, because I love you and I don’t want you to get fat and have all your teeth fall out. You know what I mean?” He looks down. I wait for him to look back up at me. “And right now you have to clean up the mess you made and then go to school.”

He climbs out of his chair and picks up the muffin. I can see that he’s a little embarrassed, but also still angry with me. And that’s just the way it has to be for now.

Lucia sniffles and picks up her own muffin without being asked. Poor kid—a rebel without a cause, nipped in the bud.

For the rest of the hour, we move like soldiers, swift and silent. I wring and blow-dry the lynx shirt and pull it over my daughter’s head, then quickly repair her ponytail. The kids put on their shoes and the sweaters they don’t want to wear, the ones they won’t appreciate until they get out to the bus stop and feel that, hello, it’s October. Then we shoulder backpacks and purse and march out of the too-small apartment, past the broken elevator, down the nappy carpeted hallway, out the complex’s front doors, through the rocky parking lot and chipped front gate. As we wait on the sidewalk with the other kids, I hum and chat to Lucia until the bus materializes at the corner. Alex stays quiet but lets me squeeze his arm good-bye.

And then they’re gone. Not for long, but long enough to worry about, no matter how many times they go and come back again. Because half my job as a mother, I swear, is being worried. At least fifty percent of my life is mentally preparing for every single thing that might possibly happen when I’m not there to protect them.

I take a step back and draw a deep breath. Something’s poking me. Jabbing me in the chest, it feels like.

I feel it now, that thing my son said. And it hurts like hell after all.

Chick-N-Bix is always the same, no matter what neighborhood you live in. The one I used to take the kids to, on the northern edge of Dallas, had a kids’ area filled by a two-story maze of red and yellow tunnels and slides and ball pits, which were all undoubtedly filled with bacteria. And so does the one here, adjacent to Oak Cliff, on the opposite side of town. The Chick-N-Bix up north, in the cute new suburb where we used to live, was filled with bored moms eating their kids’ leftover chicken biscuits and watching them navigate the germy tunnels. And so here we are, myself and my friend and former neighbor Kate, eating and watching in the very same way we used to, in this completely different neighborhood where I now have an apartment.

“Zach,” she says. “Zach! Zach. Zach!” Every time she says his name, Kate pops out of her red plastic seat, as if to run and save him from a fall, then slowly sits back down. With her yoga pants and stretchy T-shirt, it looks like she’s doing squats. Maybe that’s how she stays so thin. And the yoga pants must help. They fit tight around her butt, like a string around her finger, reminding her that she’s not supposed to eat more than two of the waffle fries. Meanwhile I’ve eaten all of mine and half of Lucia’s. I can’t resist waffle fries, and that’s why I wear really loose-fitting jeans.

Kate’s son scrambles through the lowest levels of the maze, rolling and tumbling along, never losing his determination to keep up with Alex and Lucia. And I remember when Alex was that young, so very long ago, when I still had only him to worry about and I lived in fear of everything. At least I lived in fear of totally different things than I do now.

“Do his legs look a little bowed to you?” Kate asks me.

“I don’t think it’s worth trying to judge until he’s totally out of training pants,” I say.

“Was Lucia that clumsy when she was three?” Kate asks me.

I say, “I don’t think she could do the slide as well as Zach’s doing now until she was four.” It’s a lie. Honestly, I don’t even remember how old Lucia was when she first successfully made it through the Chick-N-Bix playroom, because I’m now experienced enough to know that it doesn’t matter. My kids are healthy, thankfully, and now I understand that all those little charts and records I used to keep about their first steps and first teeth were nothing but exercises in OCD.

But I don’t mind slandering my own child if it’ll get Kate to calm down. And it does. She finally stops calling her son’s name and turns back to our conversation. “So,” she says, “Terry thinks therapy’s a waste of time, and Joe’s still sleeping on the couch.”

“What is she going to do?” I say. This story is very interesting to me, because if Joe and Terry get divorced, Mike and I will no longer be the only divorced couple in the neighborhood gang. Not that I’d wish divorce on anybody for such a petty reason. But I’m interested.

“She doesn’t know. They’re going to try a different therapist, I guess,” says Kate. “They didn’t even talk to anybody at the block party. They were too busy arguing.”

The block party. God. I don’t want to ask, but here it comes out of my mouth before I can stop myself. “Was he there?”

“Yes.” Kate knows who I mean—Mike—without having to ask. She’s a good friend, not just because she still drives way over here to hang out with me but because she gives up the gossip on my ex-husband without judging me for asking. “He was there, and he brought her with him. She was way overdressed. We were all like, ‘Why is she even here?’ I mean, it’s one thing for Mike to show, so he can see all the guys at the same time. But she should’ve stayed home.”

This is gratifying. I’m not going to ask for any more. I’ll just use my imagination. I’m good at that. Despite the fact that I’m in the middle of a fast-food restaurant, surrounded by children’s screeches and the smell of their shoes, I can clearly imagine Mike and Missy at the block party in our old neighborhood. Missy is wearing one of her ridiculously low-cut, flowered sundresses and high-heeled sandals, even though it’s October. And too much makeup, of course. The guys are ogling her on the sly, except for Rick, who’s openly staring, which pisses off Tammy and causes her to open another bottle of beer. And Tammy and the other women are ignoring Missy. They’re saying, “God, I wish Natasha was here. I miss her. Mike’s an idiot for letting her go.” They add, “Mike ruined everything. Now there’s no one to make good potato salad, and our block parties suck.”

Unless Missy brought potato salad. That bitch—she better not have. I should ask Kate. No, don’t ask. Don’t say anything else about them.

I take a sip of my diet soda. “How’s Shannon doing?” I say, cool as a freaking cucumber.

“Good,” says Kate. “Can you believe she’s due next month already? I need to hurry up and get her—” She stops talking. She looks away. Under her green eyes, her cheeks turn pink.

“Get her what?” I say.

Lucia lets out a particularly loud shriek then. Her shrieks are very distinctive. I stand and pinpoint her location in the maze. She’s at the top right corner, and the reason for her scream was that her foot got caught in the rope ladder. The fastest way for me to get to her is to climb up these stairs and then stand on this plaster clown’s head. I take the first step. But now Alex has pulled her foot from the hole and she’s laughing again and moving forward, out of my sight. I sit back down. Kate looks stricken.

“They’re fine,” I say. “Zach’s right there in the ball pit, next to the girl in pink.”

“No,” she says. “It’s not that. Natasha, I feel terrible, but…”

“What?” I say. What is it? Missy made the potato salad, didn’t she? And it was better than mine, and no one missed me at all.

“Shannon’s baby shower is next week,” she says.

“It is?” I don’t remember getting the invitation. “Did she do those stupid e-mail invitations? Those always go straight to my junk mail.”

“No. Natasha, this is so lame, and I’m so sorry to be the one telling you, but she didn’t invite you. She had to invite Mike instead.”

“What?”

“I know. It’s so stupid. I’m sorry. But she and Rajeem wanted a coed shower, with the guys playing poker in the garage, and Rajeem really wanted Mike to be there. So…”

Now I’m the one turning red, most likely. I feel as if someone slapped my face. Neither of us says anything for a moment, and suddenly I’m eating those stupid waffle fries left on Lucia’s plate. Just pushing them into my mouth, one after another, the way my mother would chain-smoke unfiltereds.

I don’t want to ask, but I can’t stop myself. “Is she invited?”

Kate shakes her head. “I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t know. Probably not personally. It probably just says ‘Mike Davila and guest’ or something. Right?”

“Right. That would be the polite way to do it.” Which is a stupid thing to say, but so is her question. How could I know what the invitation would say? How could I know what these people would do, if they would treat me like this? When they’re my friends and neighbors? Used to be my neighbors. Supposed to be my friends.

Zach is crying now, in such a way that Kate really does have to run and get him.

I never cry. I haven’t cried in almost a year, and I’m not about to start again now.

Kate comes back with Zach in her arms, his thumb in his mouth. She arranges him on her lap and brings up a new topic of conversion. “Listen. Natasha. Forget all that. What about what we were talking about the other day? My friend? My friend Valerie’s friend?”

She means some divorced guy she’s trying to hook me up with. “What about him?” I say, more tersely than I mean to.

“Well, has he called you?” She won’t make eye contact with me anymore. She feels complicit in the baby-shower conspiracy, simply by virtue of being one of the invited. Who knows? Maybe she feels guilty for being happily married, too.

How long before Terry and Joe give it up and become the second failed marriage in our group? How long before the others are forced to start choosing between them? If Terry keeps the house, she’ll be the one at the block parties and the baby showers. But if she and Joe both leave the neighborhood, the way Mike and I had to do because we were only renting, she’ll probably have to move to a cheaper place, like an apartment. She won’t be a neighbor anymore. And all the remaining husbands might decide that Joe plays pool too well to be kicked off the guest list.

I’m not mad at Kate for being part of this group that’s forgotten about me. It’s been a year since the divorce, and she’s the only one who comes to hang out with me, on these occasional weeknights when her husband’s working late.

I’m not mad at the other women either. Most of them have kids starting kindergarten or day care this year. They don’t have time to drive over here to visit someone who used to live in their neighborhood.

I’m not even mad at Shannon for not inviting me to her shower. Mike’s been friends with her husband since high school, and eleven years of living with Mike taught me that his friends are the core of that social group. Girlfriends come and go. Apparently wives do, too, now. I don’t blame Shannon for doing what she has to do in order to keep the peace. I wouldn’t have invited me either, if I were her.

I’m not upset at all. And I’m not going to cry. Not here or now at least.

“Natasha. Did he?” says Kate.

“What’s that?”

“My friend Valerie’s friend Hector. Did he call you?”

“Oh,” I say. “Yeah. He asked me to lunch. We’re supposed to go tomorrow.”

Her face lights up, and now she can look at me again. “Really? Well, that’s exciting, isn’t it? Do you know what you’re going to wear?”

“I don’t know.” I want to go home now. I’m suddenly exhausted. “Actually, I’m probably going to cancel on him.”

“What? Why?” she says, sounding like a teenager, despite the toddler in her arms.

“I don’t know,” I say again. “Maybe I’m not ready for dating yet.”

She says, “What? Don’t say that.” She shakes her head, but not very enthusiastically.

Inspired by Zach’s example, Lucia exits the maze and runs to me, holds out her arms, and makes noises like a baby. I wouldn’t normally carry her, because she’s too old for that now. But I relent, just this once. I lift her onto my hip and call Alex to my side. I say good-bye to my friend.

“See you soon,” I tell her as we gather our children’s paraphernalia. Even though I know that “soon” probably isn’t the most accurate word.

My mother is so unreliable.

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” she whines into the phone at me. “You never give me any notice.”

I’m sitting at my desk, trying to look like I’m having a work-related conversation and not an annoying personal one. “I told you two weeks ago,” I say. Two weeks and one day ago, I asked her to baby-sit the kids for Parent-Teacher Conference Night. She said she would, and now she’s forgotten. She’s made other plans. “Can’t you go to AA another night?” I say.

“Natasha. You know they only have it once a month. If I miss this one, I can’t go until November. And then what about Thanksgiving?”

Because I’m at work, I’m not going to get into it with her. If I were having this conversation at home, at night, but someplace where the kids couldn’t hear me either—locked in the bathroom, say—then I’d remind my mother that she’d missed the AA meeting in September and also the one in August. I’d inform her that simply from the sound of her voice I can tell she’s halfway through her second glass of white zin. I’d tell her that admitting you have the problem doesn’t count as the first step if you never intend to take another step. Then I’d conclude by pointing out that she doesn’t need the whole month of November to plan a burned turkey and a box of cornbread dressing.

Instead I say, “So you’re not going to baby-sit for me?”

She says, “If you’d told me a week ago, I would have. But this Thursday? I just can’t.” And now I can’t go to Parent-Teacher Conference Night.

She’s still talking. “See, Natasha, this is what I’ve been trying to tell you. This thing with you divorcing Mike—you should’ve thought about how it would end up. You’re making it hard on all of us. Ever since you left him, I’ve been—”

“Mom, I have to go. Good-bye.”

The rule is, don’t get emotional on the phone at work. That’s why I hang up on my mother when her voice sounds like cheap white wine. And that’s why I never call Mike from here either.

And now my phone rings, and it’s a number I don’t recognize.

Which reminds me that I forgot to call that guy Hector and cancel our lunch date. Our blind date. No, I did meet him once, a long time ago, before he was divorced. So make that our legally blind date.

Because that’s what my good friend Kate thought my life was missing: one more thing on my plate. One more straw on the stressed camel’s back. Lately it feels like I’m eating stress for breakfast. There were no arguments this morning—if anything, Alex was completely penitent about yesterday’s outburst—but Lucia’s teddy bear’s arm ripped at the seam again, and she bawled all the way out the door. And then, on the way here, the Blazer was acting up again. I need to schedule that oil change. I need to find someone to watch the kids on Thursday. I can’t miss the Parent-Teacher Conference. Alex’s teacher has been such a witch to him lately, and I need to get that straightened out. I need to hurry up and make that appointment with the dentist, before the deductible starts up again…I’m going to tackle that—everything on that list—as soon as I finish this phone conversation.

“Waterson Price Merman O’Connell. This is Natasha.”

“Hello. I’m calling for Natasha?” he says.

Great. Good listening skills, guy. “Speaking.”

“Natasha, sorry.” He laughs a little. “I didn’t hear your name at first, with all the others. It’s me, Hector.”

He tells me he’s two minutes away. It’s too late to cancel on him now. There’s nothing to do but grab my purse, tell the others I’m leaving, and get this stupid thing over with.

 

Hector is shorter than I remembered. Shorter and a little heavier. He still has black hair, and the same amount of it. Slight mustache. He’s wearing a sport coat, no tie—his uniform for client meetings, he says. He looks like a nice enough guy. Nothing wrong with him.

Now I’m trying to remember if I was thinner than this back when he first met me. No, don’t think about that. What does it matter?

If I did gain weight—if he’s disappointed—he’s too much of a gentleman to show it. He says, “Is the chicken salad good?” He’s worried because neither of us has ever been to this café. He found it online by looking at a map of restaurants near my work.

“It’s pretty good,” I say. It isn’t. The dressing’s too sweet. And I don’t like the café itself either. The tables are too small and close together. But there’s no need to be rude, so I don’t complain. “How’s the burger?”

He says, “It’s pretty good.” After a moment he adds, “Maybe a little dry.”

That’s how the conversation has gone so far: stops and starts of meaningless comments. You can almost hear our thoughts between the words, and we’re both thinking, Why did I agree to do this?

What the heck…? I say, “Are you wondering why you agreed to do this?”

He laughs. “No. Are you?”

I laugh, too, and I hear how nervous it sounds. “Kind of. No offense—you seem like a nice guy. But I’m starting to realize that I’m not ready to start dating again. Since the divorce, I mean.”

He shrugs. “Let’s not call it a date, then. Maybe we’re just two people who are looking to make new friends.”

I can’t argue with that. “Sure. I could always use another friend.” It’s a funny thing to say. Is it really true?

Sometimes, since the divorce, I feel like a rocket. Not one of the space shuttles they use now, but one of those old-fashioned rockets we studied in school, the kind that breaks into pieces as it gets higher in the sky. First I had to break away from Mike. He was too heavy, dragging me down, and I needed to drop him if I wanted to go any higher. Then I lost our house—another section falling away. Slowly, my old friends a. . .