It's About Your Husband

by Lauren Lipton

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

32-year-old Iris Hedge isn't exactly on sure footing. She's left her husband in LA and moved to New York for her dream job as a marketing researcher at one of the world's most prestigious firms. But after only five weeks, she's laid off. Now Iris is in a new town with no job, has a divorce on the horizon and only one friend to speak of-a wild-child named Val. When Val's twin sister Vickie asks Iris to spy on her possibly-cheating husband, Iris is desperate (and poor) enough to agree. Soon she has a whole new business on her hands - spying on men for the doubting women in their lives. Things get complicated when Vickie's husband Steve catches on to the fact that their coincidental meetings aren't coincidental at all. Not to mention how Steve makes her heart race. A funny, heart-wrenching romantic comedy about starting over and coming to terms with the gray areas of falling in love, It's About Your Husband marks the sparkling debut of novelist Lauren Lipton.

Release date: October 19, 2006

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 354

Sample

ONE

Val is not herself today.

It isn’t like her to be so subdued. She doesn’t call to me as I make my way up the carved marble staircase, its edges worn smooth by generations of arrivals and departures. She doesn’t wave me over once I reach the top of the stairs and wrestle through the crowd, elbowing past Wednesday-afternoon revelers raising their glasses to celebrate the end of another workday. She doesn’t look up after I get myself a beer and approach her table, or offer any comment as I stand, dumbfounded, before the remarkable structure she has created. Here, in the mezzanine bar at Grand Central, with only a few square inches of table to work with, Val has erected a tower of shopping bags representing nearly every one of New York’s best B’s (Bendel’s, Barneys, Bergdorf’s . . . ). I’m ashamed to say, in my own state of mentally unstable not-quite-myselfness, this is the only unusual thing I notice.

Shopping. There’s something else I won’t be doing for a while.

I take a deep breath and put on the happiest happy-hour smile I can muster. “Look at you!” I chirp, holding my beer glass in a death grip, shoehorning myself into the three-inch gap between the empty chair and the edge of her table, goggling at the bags while using my free hand to push them out of my way. I poke a Burberry back from the edge of the table, where it threatens to drop into my lap, but that only makes the rest of the pile teeter precariously. I clamp down on the Boyd’s of Madison at the top and struggle to shift my chair to one side without spilling beer on myself. Val makes no effort to help. “If you wouldn’t mind,” I say, “could you help me move this stuff, just the tiniest—oh, my goodness!”

Val is crying.

No. Not crying—sobbing. Tears skid down her flushed cheeks to her jawbone and pause at the abyss a moment before splashing into her untouched cocktail. She’s got mascara running down her wrist onto the sleeve of her pink cardigan, her demure blond pageboy is all mussed, and she’s groping around in her pink quilted Chanel chain purse, perhaps for a tissue.

“What is it? You poor thing!” I’m no longer thinking about shopping bags and am halfway to forgetting why I’ve been feeling so sorry for myself. Until this moment it hadn’t occurred to me that Val could get this upset about anything. Her tears are as unsettling as anything else I’ve dealt with over the past few days. “What’s wrong? What’s the matter? This isn’t about me, is it? Because, really, I’ll be all right.”

She can’t possibly be crying over me. Heaven knows I’m upset—rootless, loveless, and unexpectedly jobless. But Val is distraught. Trembling and pale, with a red, brimming gaze that, at last, she turns on me. “My husband is . . .” she clears her throat. “He’s . . . ahem . . .” She takes a bracing swig of her pink parasol drink, sets it back down, and folds her hands on the table. “My husband is cheating,” she says. “Again.”

Her delivery—calculated, with a pause for emphasis after each word—makes it seem as if she were accusing me. It might be that all at once she looks more incensed than heartbroken, or maybe it’s the way she’s staring me dead in the eye. “Again,” she repeats icily, and it’s as if I were the other woman, here to confess all and beg forgiveness for coming between Val and her husband. That’s when something dawns on me. Several somethings. One, Val is a vintage-clothing connoisseur who would no sooner patronize any of these B-stores than she would cry like a baby in the middle of Grand Central Terminal on an early-May afternoon. Two, Val only wears black. Three, demure? Blond? Pageboy?

And there’s one very last little something.

Val doesn’t have a husband.

It’s a joke. Val doesn’t take anything seriously. It’s a joke, right? Val’s here to buy me a consolation drink to distract me during my time of crisis, and this is just another diversionary tactic. It’s typical Val behavior, but it’s freaking me out. “You’re not acting like yourself, and you’re scaring me.” I try to say it jovially, as if I’m in no way about to start crying myself.

But instead of erupting into laughter and pointing to a hidden camera, Val just covers her face and sobs some more.

Her commitment is impressive. Still, how long will the show go on? I’ve got jangled-enough nerves already, having spent two hours in a Midtown unemployment office at a mandatory New York State Department of Labor group-orientation lecture: “Job-Hunting Tools for the Twenty-first Century.” (“Does everyone here know what the Internet is?”) After that, I got all turned around coming over to Grand Central, first walking four long blocks west, only to end up on a desolate, trash-strewn stretch of Eleventh Avenue, leaving only two thousand nine hundred ninety-nine and two-tenths of a mile between me and my former life in Los Angeles—all right, the San Fernando Valley—before realizing I should have been heading east the whole time.

All this probably explains why she figures it out first.

“Oh, perfect. This is just great.” She lifts her head, sniffles, and dabs under each eye with her tissue. “You want Val.”

Later I’ll regret not having paid more attention to this moment.

I won’t have, though, and that’s too bad. It might have been an early clue that perhaps I’m unfit for the new career that’s about to fall into my lap. What was it they just said at the unemployment office? Our experience is our toolbox, with our skills as the tools? Well, it seems I’ve locked my observational skills into my toolbox and left it on a street corner somewhere. Since relocating to New York five weeks ago for a fancy focus-group moderator position at Hayes Heeley Market Research, and up until getting “restructured” right out of that very same position two days ago, I worked, went for coffee, and had lunch with Valerie Benjamin nearly every day. After this much concentrated time in her company I know what she looks like down to the last eyelash. I know her taste in men, clothing, and cocktails, her life’s philosophy, and her family background.

I know she has an identical twin.

In fact, one of Val’s favorite conversational pastimes is counting the many ways her sister is spoiled and selfish, sharing stories of behavior so abysmal I always find myself grateful to be an only child. I know Victoria doesn’t work, and that she is married to a commercial real-estate broker named Steve. Five years ago, minutes before her three-hundred-guest New York Times-approved wedding at their parents’ estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, Vickie got so overwrought that she screamed a string of obscenities at Val, then fell weeping onto her bed and refused to get up. Val was beginning to think she’d have to give Vickie a slap—and, considering the scene to which she was being subjected, was looking forward to it the tiniest little bit—when Vickie snapped out of it abruptly on her own, splashed some cold water on her face, and an hour later was flitting happily around her reception without so much as an apology to Val.

Right now, though, with Vickie here before me, bawling, I only feel bad for her. “I am so sorry. I did think you were Val. You must get that all the time.”

“Constantly.” Through her tears, Vickie sounds sarcastic. I’m this close to excusing myself and slinking away when Val, the genuine article, materializes at the top of the staircase.

I wave her over. Saved!

Now, in my own defense, I am preoccupied today. But Vickie is right; who could mix up these two? Yes, they have the same rosy cheeks, the same gray eyes, matching stewardess noses with the same smattering of freckles across the bridge. But Vickie wears a wedding ring, the Junior League hairdo, and sensible Ferragamo flats. And here’s Val, my friend and, until Monday afternoon, office colleague. Ecstatically single, with an unruly electric-red downtown crop, deliberately smudgy eyeliner, vintage sixties go-go boots, and a mod little miniskirt in which it’s pretty clear Vickie wouldn’t be caught dead. Vickie: Greenwich. Val: Greenwich Village.

“Iris! And Vickie?” Val, too, looks perplexed.

“Val, it was the strangest coincidence.” Life is looking better already. I provide a quick recap of the past five minutes while Vickie grudgingly clears two inches of space for her sister. Val’s black vinyl skirt makes a squeaky noise as she sits down.

“It’s not that strange,” she says. “Manhattan is just a big small town. People bump into each other all the time. It can be a real pain.”

“Believe me, if I’d known I’d bump into you here, I never would have come,” Vickie retorts.

“Now, now, Vickie-poo, I wasn’t talking about you. Tell me, Iris, is there a walk of shame in the San Fernando Valley?”

I lean closer, grazing my chin on the corner of a shopping bag. “Walk of shame? You mean Walk of Fame?”

“Walk of shame. When you go back with someone to his apartment and then, on your way home the next morning, run into one of your mother’s ladies-who-lunch chums, who can tell you’re blatantly wearing an outfit from the night before.”

Vickie eyes Val’s hemline. “Sort of like you’re doing now?”

“I’ll have you know, this is not a walk of shame. This is office attire,” Val snaps. “I’m simply explaining to Iris that New York is a small town.”

“Technically there’s no walk of shame in the Valley.” I say it quickly, sensing an argument about to happen.

“So, then, what were you wearing the first night you stayed over at Teddy’s place?” Val asks me. “And what did you wear home?”

I scrutinize my glass of Rolling Rock. Had I thought to get something in a bottle, with a paper label, I could now make myself busy peeling it off.

“Come on, Iris. Don’t tell me you wore his old sweatpants; that’s a hundred times more shameful—a fashion faux pas.”

“I just sort of never left.” I’m blushing. “I just kind of stayed.”

Both twins stare at me.

“Never mind.” I take a drink. “Where I come from, people scurry out to the curb when no one’s watching, dive into their cars, and speed home.”

“There you go,” says Val. “Another difference between the coasts. In New York, everybody walks at least one walk of shame. Now that you’re living here, it’s only a matter of time.”

“Well, I’ve never done any such thing,” Vickie says.

Val peers at her in a way that suggests her sister’s presence has only now sunk in. “Why are you here, anyway? Don’t they have bars in Yorkville?”

“I’m waiting for a train. And I do not live in Yorkville. Third and Eighty-fifth is Yorkville. Lexington and Eighty-fifth is the Upper East Side.”

“Whatever you say.”

“I know what I’m talking about, Val. My husband works in real estate. . . .” Vickie starts crying again. I look to Val for a cue, but she only rolls her eyes. Vickie sniffles loudly. “I can’t believe he’s cheating on me!”

Val doesn’t react. She rakes her hand through her hair, which was black the last time I saw her, Monday afternoon. “Like it?” she asks me. “I got it done last night. I was considering something really light, maybe pink, maybe platinum, but then I thought—”

“Excuse me!” Vickie shouts.

Val sighs. “All right, Iris, here’s the story. My sister suffers from seasonal suspicion disorder. Every six months, usually spring and fall, she decides hubby Steve is cheating on her, then retaliates by spending his money on new clothes.”

“That’s just mean!” Vickie swipes at her tears again with her tissue.

“It’s true,” says Val. “Remember the time you found the lipstick on his shirt, flipped out, and then realized it was your own lipstick?”

“It was Bobbi Brown Number Four! That could have been anybody’s lipstick! Every woman in America has a tube!”

Val stops tapping her right index finger softly but insistently on the top of our table long enough to wave over a waitress and order drinks for herself and me. Then she gestures at Vickie. “And another—what is that, strawberry daiquiri?”

“Virgin,” Vickie says.

Val rolls her eyes again. The waitress goes off to the bar. Val pulls out a cigarette and holds it in her mouth, unlit.

“No smoking,” hisses Vickie.

“No shit,” hisses Val.

This day keeps getting stranger and stranger. There are still hours to go before it’s over, and I’m stuck with the only twins in history who lack that supernatural love bond everyone always goes on about.

Vickie does have a point, though. At my former marketing company in Brentwood, I once had to round up women for a focus group on makeup. A few days later, I watched from the observation room as one participant waxed rhapsodic about the MAC lip pencil in “Spice,” and the universally flattering lipstick Bobbi Brown Number Four. “I have that, too!” said another, producing a tube from her Coach bag. The rest nodded knowingly and dug around in their purses until there were half a dozen Number Fours on the conference table. Afterward, I stopped in Sherman Oaks and picked up a tube. It was right on the way home, since Teddy and I had just bought our house in Studio City.

At least I still have that lipstick.

“This time there’s no question,” Vickie continues. “He’s taken up jogging. At the crack of dawn.” She gives us a look like, “See?”

“Pandora’s Box.” From above my head, the waitress places a drink in front of Val, who lunges at it.

“Virgin.” The waitress sets down Vickie’s daiquiri.

“Draft.” She hands me a beer. I guzzle the remains of my first and give her the empty glass.

Vickie takes a dainty sip of her daiquiri. “My husband has gone on a fitness kick. At least, that’s what he would have me believe. Men are such dogs.”

“You’re making absolutely no sense.” Val seems to be speaking directly to her cocktail.

“This is a person who hasn’t done any sport sweatier than golf since his squash days at Yale. Then three weeks ago, out of nowhere, he decides it’s time to get in shape.”

“He was looking a little soft around the middle,” Val interjects. Vickie responds with one of what I have already come to recognize as her patented I’m-going-to-shove-my-shoe-down-your-throat-if-you-don’t-shut-up looks. Val shuts up.

“And since then he’s been getting up every weekday at six forty-five, dragging the poor dog out of his little bed, supposedly to go jogging in the park. Except that can’t be where he’s going. When he gets home, he’s never even sweaty, and neither is the dog.”

“I didn’t think dogs got sweaty. Don’t they, like . . .” What a lightweight. I’m four sips into my second Rolling Rock and already starting to slur my speech. “Like, drool or whatever it’s called?” Forgotten the word. Better stop drinking now or I’m going to do something stupid. Such as, I don’t know, relocate three thousand miles from home, to a noisy, grimy, indifferent city, in order to be laid off.

“Pant!” Val starts to giggle.

“That’s it, pant.” I can’t help laughing myself. It’s all too absurd.

“Hey,” says Val, “maybe the dog’s the one straying.”

I should keep out of it. I should. I can’t. “Dogs are such dogs.”

“No!” Val howls. “Dogs are such men!”

“Oh, forget it!” Vickie starts crying again, with gusto. “This is why I never see you, Val. This is why I hate to tell you anything personal. You have no idea the stress I’m under right now. No idea!” She struggles to free herself from her chair, which is wedged between our table and the back of the woman behind her, and pulls an overnight bag I hadn’t noticed before out from under her seat. “I’ll wait for my train on the platform.”

I realize how heartless I’ve been acting. Val must feel equally bad, because she grabs her sister’s mascara-and-cashmere-covered wrist. “Where are you going?” She sounds contrite.

“To Greenwich,” Vickie says. “I want Mother and Daddy.”

“Don’t you think you ought to stick around here and—Iris, how do you say it?—work on your marriage?”

“Work on your marriage,” I repeat somberly.

“No.” Vickie starts to gather up the rest of her packages. Not an easy feat, since the lot of them is taking up as much cubic footage as my entire apartment. The couple at the table next to us ducks to avoid being B-headed by a Bloomingdale’s Big Brown Bag. “I should hire myself a detective to catch him in the act, and then use the evidence to stick him for a big, fat divorce settlement.”

I could tell her, because I know, that she’s oversimplifying things. In the no-fault-community-property-divorce state of California, for example, your assets get divided right down the middle, regardless of who did what to whom, unless you were cynical enough to draw up a prenuptial agreement. I could tell her, but I keep my mouth shut.

“Here’s a plan!” Val pipes up. “While you’re gone, want me to keep an eye on him? I could follow him around and see where he goes. I could be your scheming lookalike hiding in the bushes!”

“That’s brilliant, Val. He’ll never notice you. Make sure you wear that exact outfit.”

Maybe Val hasn’t been exaggerating about her twin. Whether or not Steve is the cad Vickie seems to think he is, he can’t have it easy being married to her. Still, I have a real problem with cheaters. I know exactly what infidelity can do to a person.

Then it comes to me in a Joan of Arc moment, like a celestial omen from Grand Central’s soaring signs-of-the-zodiac ceiling. I have no job and nothing to do. I have no social life. I barely have a love life. I have exactly one friend in this city: Val. And I’m broke. “Vickie!” I practically shout. “Hire me to do it!”

In the weeks to come, the foolishness of this idea will become so clear I’ll wonder why some sort of actual winged messenger didn’t appear—to grab me and smack some sense into me. At the moment, with a little alcohol in my system, and a thousand commuters bustling to and fro on the floor below, I’m picturing myself in an office with a frosted-glass door, smartly dressed in a suit (peplum, shoulder pads, brooch), feet up on my circa 1945 standard-issue metal desk, answering my old-fashioned dial phone: “Iris Hedge, dogcatcher.” For some reason, the image is in black-and-white.

Val, too, seems to have caught the fever. “Iris would be perfect! See how unobtrusive she is? She looks exactly like every other woman in America! She could follow him around all day, and he’d never notice.”

“She’s right,” I add. “Just tell me when to come over in the morning. In one day, you’ll know whether he’s telling the truth or not.”

Vickie wrinkles her nose. “How?”

“Come on. Think about it.” Val is Hayes Heeley’s youth expert, specializing in focus groups for teenagers. Right now she is using exactly the same casually jolly voice I’ve heard her use while passing around samples of pimple cream to a roomful of sulky eighth-grade goths. “She waits for him to come out of the building. She follows behind him on his, you know, morning rounds. If he is going running, then she’ll just get in her workout for the day. If he’s not, you’ll have your answer, once and for all.”

An incomprehensible message, the departure of the something-o’clock train to Staticville on track mumble, crackles over Grand Central’s public address system. Vickie consults her Rolex. “That’s my train.”

“I have to go, too.” With no small amount of difficulty, Val pushes back her chair. “You don’t mind cutting this short, do you, Iris? I’m meeting someone. He’s a musician. Really cute. We met on the subway.”

“You did not.” Vickie looks horrified. “He could be anyone! What do you know about him?”

“That he gets on at Fourteenth Street and has great tattoos,” Val says. “And his name is Ian, or Liam—something. Anyway I only just met him this morning.”

“Oh, my god! And you’re going out with him already? Don’t you know no man will ever marry you if you aren’t at least a little hard to get?”

“I have no intention of being hard to get,” Val says.

I’m only half paying attention. I’m swaying slightly from the beer, looking past the twins at the magnificent four-sided brass clock at the top of the Grand Central information booth. “Five thirty-six,” it reads. I’m thinking, But Val, you invited me to happy hour. I’m thinking I didn’t get to talk about my day.

Val and Vickie stand up and eye each other warily: opponents trying to get away with not shaking hands after the big grudge match. In the end, Val avoids the issue by patting her sister’s shopping bags instead of her sister. “Say hi to Mom and Dad.”

“Okay.” Vickie turns to me. “Take care.”

“Yes, right. You, too.” No spy assignment. So much for my new calling.

“I’ll talk to you soon,” Val promises me as she (thank goodness) settles the bill, and we all descend the stairs into the crowd, and the opposite twins head back to their opposite lives. For a moment I linger in the middle of the terminal, wondering what to do with myself, and am hit with the irrational urge to return to the bar, blow my future unemployment money on booze, and spend the night having gymnastic sex with a stranger off the six fifteen. Simultaneously, I am aware that what the evening really has in store for me is leftover sesame noodles from Szechuan Palace and, if the gods are smiling, a movie on TV I haven’t already seen. I wonder if I’ll have to cancel the cable.

“Iris!”

It’s Vickie, hurrying back over from the doorway to track fourteen, shopping-bag handles looped over every inch of both of her arms. She glances nervously back toward the platform. The train must be close to leaving. “Go ahead,” she calls over the din of the crowd. “Tomorrow morning. The address is Twelve Seventy-five Lexington, between Eighty-fifth and Eighty-sixth. He always leaves by seven sharp. You can hide across the street and follow him.” She waits, tapping her foot the way Val, impatient for drinks, was tapping her finger on our table earlier. “Okay?”

Sure, except I’ve never met her husband and have no idea what he looks like. “Can you give me a physical description?” I’m so busy being pleased with myself at “physical description” that when Vickie shifts her bags, works a hand into her purse, extracts a credit card, and holds it up to my face, it takes me a moment to understand she’s showing me her husband’s postage-stamp-size antifraud mug shot on the front. “Steven Sokolov,” the card says. I lean forward and study Steve’s tiny face: brown hair, brown eyes—your basic aging frat boy.

Vickie slides the card back into her purse, readjusts her packages, and starts back toward the train.

“Wait!”

She whirls back around, looking agitated.

“Height? Weight? Clothing? Unusual birthmarks?” I don’t want her to miss the train, but, according to the New York State Department of Labor, it’s important to gather the correct equipment for my job toolbox.

Vickie edges backward. “About five eleven, one-eighty. No birthmarks. Shirt, shorts—you know, jogging attire. He’ll be with a Parson Russell terrier. It’s really, really time for me to go.” She backs up a few more steps toward the platform doorway.

“Wait! What’s a Parson Russell terrier?”

“For heaven’s sake. A Jack Russell terrier. Same thing. All right?”

“Got it. Do you want me to call you afterward, or . . . ?”

She rips off a piece of the striped Bendel’s bag, again reaches into her purse, pulls out a Tiffany pen, scribbles a 917 cell phone number on the back of the piece of bag, and practically throws it at me. I’m impressed at Vickie’s ability to manage this cumbersome array of possessions while simultaneously walking in reverse and making me feel as if she’s my superior. “What’s your fee?”

“What?”

“Your fee. What you charge.”

My fee? Good question. She’s about to break into a run, so it might be smart to pin her down first. What would one charge for this kind of service?

“We’ll talk about it later!” Vickie shouts, and runs for the train.

Cognitive dissonance. That’s the official psychological term for what happens when you find yourself in a situation that completely contradicts the situation you were expecting, and your brain refuses to accept it.

For instance, you’re in Grand Central to meet a friend, and get her mixed up with her twin sister.

Or, on your birthday, at the out-of-the-way restaurant where your sweetheart has taken you for a quiet dinner for two, you bump into someone you know: your boss, or a friend you made in the Blue Jay cabin at Camp Sequoia when you were eleven. Your eyes take in this out-of-context character, and your brain thinks, Pat Sweeney at La Ventana the same night as us? Small world! In walks someone else. Aunt Rose, too? Spooky! Only in the face of overwhelming evidence—

like fifty people jumping out and yelling, “Surprise!”—does your brain finally make the connection.

Or maybe, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary day, you’re somewhere arbitrary—perhaps in a parking lot, walking back to the car after an appointment. Someone you love, someone you trust more than anyone, could be no more than a few feet away in an illicit embrace. But you’re not expecting to see this person, so the scene doesn’t register, and you walk on by. Cognitive dissonance is just another way of saying it takes some time to come to terms when a person you thought you knew turns out to be somebody else entirely. My mother once felt moved to describe it, “Just as Mother Nature hates a vacuum, human nature hates a discrepancy.”

This is what I ponder on my long walk home from happy hour. Any other day I would have taken a taxi without a second thought, but my new econo-life has me spending a lot of time—the one thing I suddenly have in abundance—performing what my “friend” Kevin would call cost-benefit analysis. Let’s see. A cab from Grand Central to my brownstone at Seventy-sixth and Columbus equals about what I make an hour, based on my new state-subsidized paycheck—about an eighth of what I was bringing in at Hayes Heeley. There’s the subway, but ten subway rides not taken equals one meal—two if I stretch the leftovers. Over the past two days everything but my rent has begun to seem a frivolous waste of resources. Truthfully, my rent has always seemed a frivolous waste of resources, but Val assures me that after enough time in New York it feels normal to spend half your take-home pay on a “cozy” studio with a parked-cars view and a kitchen renovated in seventies reject materials.

Michelle, my erstwhile boss and head of the qualitative-research department at Hayes Heeley, promised to send a check for two weeks’ severance in a week or two, and I’ve got six months of medical insurance, which seemed pretty good at first, considering I wasn’t there that long. (“Guilt money,” Val called it when I told her. “You should have cried. They would have started throwing hundred-dollar bills at you.”) I can also count on twenty-six weeks on the dole while searching for a new job. I’m certain I’ll land one before the money runs out. Fairly certain.

The truth is, we responsible career-girl types know we’re supposed to have a cushion of savings, equal to six months’ salary, specifically earmarked for times like these. I remember back in high school reading that savvy financial tip in Cosmopolitan, along with the more interesting advice about how to attract a man at the office by ever so subtly crossing and recrossing your panty-hosed legs: “The faint whisper of nylon on nylon will drive him wild!”

I never imagined I’d end up in a time like this.

“My roots are here. In Los Angeles,” I tried to explain to Michelle Heeley, after she phoned me at my old firm in Brentwood one day out of nowhere with what she called “a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity.” Despite my protests, she insisted on flying me to New York for an interview. “I couldn’t think of leaving,” I told her again in person a week later. “My whole life is in California.. . .