"Did you come to see Scout?" she said to Zoe in a way she hoped would be charming to the toddler, but obviously she was doing it all wrong because Zoe only pressed her face harder into Will's knee. May was terrible with kids, scary clown when she meant to be fun auntie. She'd never had that tenderness Scout's sisters had. Her own sisters had always been happy to dote on their little brother, the oops-baby who came along when most people assumed that either Nancy had had her tubes tied or Frank had had the snip. Teenaged May would watch April cooing at baby July or Junie hoisting him up on her own small hips, and she'd wonder what was wrong with her that she didn't want to do those things, too. She'd look at her little brother, cheeks red from crying or eyes wet with joy, and she'd think, Nah. It had always been that way for her and still was, mostly. Except for her dad, people were tough to love. Animals were easy.
"We did," Will said, "but he was too far away to get a good look."
"He's a little shy today, too," May said. There, finally. A glimmer of a smile on Zoe's face.
"We should get going. It's nearly nap time and if we miss it, I'm..." Will mouthed the word fucked. "It's a little harder sticking to routine at daddy's house than mama's house isn't it?"
Zoe nodded, as if she'd understood him perfectly. And now May understood that he was single.
"Are you at the same number?" he asked. "We should get coffee sometime. Really catch up."
Was Will Mackenzie asking her out? Did she want him to be? Her palms were sweating, a sure sign if memory served, if she could think that far back to a time when she used to feel things.
"Yeah," she said. "Same number."
"Great," Will said, clearing his throat again but unable to hide the grin spread wide across his face. "I mean, it's really great seeing you."
The rest of that afternoon, May felt effervescent one minute, then annoyed with herself the next. It wasn't as if she'd had a meet-cute with Jane Goodall. It was only Will, but then he'd always made her feel this way, bubbling with a kind of potency. Even before they'd started dating her last year at UM, spending time with him was like charging up. Maybe at the rave-like hours their study group had kept, anything would've been persuasive, but Will made deeply nerdy things seem like great ideas. Dropping an egg and a watermelon off the roof of the engineering quad at the same time, running a 5K chained together like pistons in a V6 engine, doing an extra year to get their master's. He made it cool to focus, something May had never been able to do in a classroom before. Despite her mechanical aptitude, her grades in high school had been middling and her near-perfect score on the math SAT had come as a shock. No one, least of all May, had expected her to actually like college, let alone excel there.
The summer between undergrad and grad school, he finally worked up the nerve to ask her out. She'd just broken up with a poet who was so gloomy, and there was Will, who'd always made her laugh, offering himself as an alternative. Let me be your boy toy, he'd said, and she'd thought, Why not? It's one date. He wasn't really her type—too clean-cut, not enough scars or tattoos—but sexually, he understood better than any guy she'd been with what she liked and how to get her off. One date turned into several turned into the first real serious relationship she'd ever had. People in the department started to talk about them as if they were one brain. Willandmay. Their pairing started to feel inevitable. For May, a little too inevitable. Maybe everyone else had forgotten about her plans to see the world, but she hadn't. She was counting down the days until they had their master's and she'd leave for the Peace Corps. Then Frank was taken, and her life cratered.
She'd always wondered when or even if she'd see Will again, but she'd never imagined surging with crush potential for her ex.
When she got home that evening, she went to her room, the one she'd once shared with April and now had all to herself. It looked like a sick room, dark, soft, and built for sleep.
She cracked open the window to let in some light and fresh air. There were piles everywhere—of clothes, paperwork, empty food wrappers. Even the dog had given up. Jack Nicholson slept at the foot of Nancy's bed now instead of in here with his person. Nancy's crisp footsteps plinked down the hall. When she appeared in the door, the usual ribbed turtleneck and clogs in which she hunched over mouths in the over-air-conditioned dental office had been swapped out for a diaphanous blouse and kitten heels.
"What have you done with my mother?"
"Do you like?" Nancy asked, posing.
"You look like one of the Golden Girls. What are you, going on a cruise?"
"Yes! With April! It's a last-minute thing. She got some time off at work and wanted to go, and I told Tom he can do without me for a week or so."
You couldn't pay me, May thought. Not that she had any leg to stand on, still living at home, but vacationing with your mother? Voluntarily?
