After they walked away, I looked at Jimmy, who had an amused expression on his face. “What was that about?” I asked him.
“She was in Ash’s class in high school,” he said. “She’s the worst.”
I laughed and looked past him to make sure Alexis was out of earshot. “Really,” he went on. “She’s even worse than the coven that Ash is always with now. She would have loved nothing more than to be able to report to the whole town that I was eating dinner with an unidentified attractive woman.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Really. She’s nothing but awful. In high school, she once fed so much beer to someone’s pet bird at a party that it died.”
“Oh, God,” I said.
“I know. She had all the makings of a serial killer. Poor Fletcher better watch his back.”
The waitress brought our food over then, and we didn’t talk as we arranged the onions and tomatoes on our burgers, poured just the right amount of ketchup on them. I’d just taken a huge bite when Jimmy said, “So the question is, do you think my dad will legally adopt Matt as his son by the time dinner’s over?”
I laughed because I knew that’s what he wanted me to do and then managed to swallow and ask, “What do you think they talk about all the time anyway?”
“You know, how smart they both are, stuff like that.”
“Ha,” I said. And then because I felt like I couldn’t ignore it, “I’m sorry if it’s weird for you, them going out to dinner. I feel like I’d be annoyed if I were you.”
Jimmy shrugged. “Nah,” he said and then laughed a little bit. “It’s fine. Plus, I’d much rather eat dinner with you than with my dad.”
I thought then how happy I was that Jimmy was still himself, that while Matt and Ash were morphing into weird personalities, Jimmy stayed the same. Ridiculous sometimes, sure. Self-centered, maybe. But that’s who he’d always been and I felt the most relaxed when he was around.
I put my cheeseburger down on my plate, wiped my hands on my napkin. “You know,” I said, “I bet we had more fun than anyone tonight.” And Jimmy looked up with a serious expression before winking and saying, “Obviously,” then shoving the last large bite of his burger into his mouth.
—
Later that week, Matt and I watched Viv while Jimmy and Ash went to a birthday dinner for her friend Ainsley. All of the Dozens were attending with their husbands, and Ash had reminded Jimmy of the dinner no fewer than twenty times. We were sitting on the floor with Viv in the TV room when they came to say they were leaving, both dressed up.
“Have a good night,” I said, and Jimmy said, “Oh, I’m sure we won’t.”
Ash decided to pretend he was joking and she swatted him on the arm. “Very funny, Jimmy.”
After they left, Viv wrinkled her brow and cried a little, but she recovered quickly and soon seemed delighted that she had our undivided attention. It felt a little odd to be alone with Matt — since we’d moved to Texas, it had rarely been just the two of us. But I tried to ignore any weirdness and be happy that we were spending the night together now, even if it was just because we were babysitting.
Viv had a koala bear that she was very attached to (Ash sometimes worried that her obsession with it wasn’t normal) and she kept handing it to Matt and then taking it back, shoving its arms and legs into her mouth.
“Koala is going to need a bath soon,” I said to her, and she smiled and whipped him on the ground.
“Are you mad at Koala?” Matt asked, and Viv looked up at him as if she were considering the question. “Maybe you’re just bored with him. You probably want another baby to play with. You should ask your aunt Beth to help you out. Maybe she will. You just have to ask her.” Matt said all of this in a singsong voice while looking at Viv, but it was clear he was waiting for me to respond.
I didn’t say anything at first, just stared at Matt. It felt like this was coming out of nowhere — we hadn’t talked about having a baby in months, not in any serious way. In fact, we hadn’t even mentioned it casually, and I couldn’t tell if Matt was joking now. Finally, I just said, “Funny, funny.”
“I’m not trying to be funny,” Matt said. He was looking at me strangely then, and I had the feeling that he wanted to start a fight, to make the night unpleasant.
“You seriously want to have a baby in Texas?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not? We wouldn’t be in Texas when the baby was born anyway.”
“Why not?” I asked. “Why not?” was his reason for wanting to have a baby?
“Yeah, why not?”
“Right. So, let’s say I got pregnant right now. Then I’d be back in DC looking for a job while I was visibly pregnant? That timing doesn’t seem great.”
I was aware then that Viv was watching us, and while I knew she didn’t understand what we were saying, I still felt strangely guilty having this conversation in front of her.
“I don’t think the timing is ever completely right,” Matt said. There was a challenge in his voice.
“Maybe not,” I said. “But this timing seems completely wrong.” I didn’t say what I was really thinking — which was that I couldn’t imagine having a baby with someone who was so angry all the time. That he barely talked to me lately, that he didn’t seem like himself and the thought of negotiating the complications of a child while he was like this seemed impossible, or at the very least, the thing that would end us.
Also, a tiny part of me thought that maybe he wanted a baby because it was something that Jimmy had, that it would be a way to even the score between them. But I just stayed quiet, because it seemed that telling him any of this would most certainly lead to a fight. And finally he sighed as though I were deeply disappointing him and said, “You know, you can’t keep making excuses forever.”
Chapter 17
“Did you see this?” Matt asked, pointing to his computer. We were all in the kitchen eating breakfast and Matt’s laptop was in front of him, but I didn’t know if he was talking to me or Jimmy or all of us.
“See what?” I finally said.
“The Dallas Morning News reported that Candace Elroy raised ten times what we did last quarter. And half of the money came from donations from oil and gas companies. This is so fucked up.”
“I’m so sick of this shit,” Jimmy said. He was pouring himself a cup of coffee and my heart jumped for a second, thinking he was talking about Matt’s constant delivery of bad news. But then he went on, “How can people not see how corrupt this is?”
“I thought we made a rule about these things at breakfast,” Ash said, lightly tapping the top of Matt’s laptop. He gave her an apologetic look as he closed the computer and placed it on an empty chair. A couple weeks earlier, Matt had sat at the breakfast table and read us an article about Jimmy that picked apart his career, claiming he had no experience with anything remotely related to oil and gas, that his résumé was fluffy and light, that he was trading on being Obama’s aide. We all stared at Matt as he read out loud, and I kept thinking he’d stop eventually, especially when it started to get nasty. But he just kept going. The article had appeared on some conservative blog, but Matt said it got a lot of traffic, that plenty of people would read it. After he read the last line, “A Democrat hasn’t been elected to the Railroad Commission in two decades,” he finally looked up and realized that he’d just ruined everyone’s day, all before 8:00 a.m. It was after that that Ash started insisting everyone (meaning Matt) keep the computers off the table while we ate.