Amy is on her first glass of champagne when Kiki and I arrive. She’s picked one of those fancy places where there’s a waiter whose job is just to pour your water, and it is filled with men in boring suits who have boring jobs and have no idea how boring they actually are. I have this weird thing where whenever I’m in a group of people I don’t know, I just imagine what they look like having sex. This dining room is filled with guys who keep their T-shirts on and have to be on the bottom because otherwise they’ll get winded.
Kiki’s reaction to the bread basket is to cradle the individual buns in her hands like they are kittens. She has tears in her eyes when she sees the tiny little balls of butter they come with.
“Thank you!” she cries to him, like she is a starving orphan. “This is seriously the best day of my life!” He brings two more baskets to her, and she receives each of them like it is a fucking Oscar.
THE REASON I DON’T HAVE A LOT OF MOM FRIENDS IS BECAUSE moms always want to talk about their kids. It’s like instead of the default topic of conversation being the day’s weather or your last sexual encounter, it’s just what your kids are doing on a daily basis. Amy’s kids are doing . . . a lot. They’re learning Mandarin, which is apparently a kind of Chinese? My kid can barely master English, and the only thing he’s interested in is baseball. You know what’s interesting about baseball? Absolutely nothing. It’s just a bunch of rednecks standing around in pajamas, and the games last at least six hours. I never thought I’d say this, but I am so glad he’s into baseball. Because at least it’s just baseball, and not the dozen random things that Amy’s kids are signed up for.
“No wonder you’re on the verge of mental breakdown,” I tell her. “Carting those kids around to all their shit is basically a full-time job.”
Amy nodded. “But I have to do it,” she says, sighing. “I owe it to them.”
That’s hilarious to me.
“You owe it to them? Like, you made a blood oath to kill yourself making sure they could go to absolutely every activity under the sun? You don’t owe them anything but food, safety, and love. I haven’t gone to one of Jaxon’s baseball games in four years. The last game I went to? The score was one to two. There were seventeen innings and, I swear to you, I would sooner go to Afghanistan than to another baseball game. And I don’t even think he’s noticed I’m not there. There’s like six hundred other moms cheering like they’re at a John Mayer concert every time a kid gets up to bat.”
“So, how does he get there?” Amy asks, like she’d never heard of the school activities shuttle . . . or a dad doing drop-off.
“You’re married, right?”
Amy twists her ring around her finger.
“Well, yeah . . .”
“Then where the shit is your husband and why are you doing everything?”
“He works . . .”
“You work.”
Amy downs the rest of her champagne.
“Is it hard to share Jaxon with your ex-husband?” she asks.
Ah. So here’s the real issue. I can always tell when married women are thinking about divorce because they start to take an interest in my divorce. Otherwise, divorce is something they pretend doesn’t exist. They act like it’s a communicable disease and they don’t want it to pass their lips, or they’ll jinx themselves and end up with a 50/50 custody agreement that essentially forces their kid’s dad to do the bare minimum of parenting.
Jaxon’s dad and I should have never been married, but if you get me drunk and dare me to do something, I’m gonna fucking do it. And it was fun for a while, but eventually you realize that the only thing that feels better than proving a stranger wrong is your freedom. We did a no-muss, no-fuss divorce that cost us a total of $149 because he printed the forms from the library. We didn’t use a lawyer, because we didn’t have any fucking money, and we didn’t argue. I could have been an asshole about it and made him pay me some alimony or child support, but I asked myself WWVDD and I realized that the Diesel thing to do was to remember that this big dummy had given me the most important thing I have: a family. I helped him pack up his shit in a U-Haul, and he got an apartment about a mile from my house. He’s married again to a chick who bartends at the bowling alley near our house, and the two of them take Jaxon every other week. Jaxon likes it over there because she’s got a parrot that knows swear words, and she always brings home leftover pizza and chicken fingers from the bar. But not everyone can be as blessed as I am.
“HE’S BEEN HAVING AN AFFAIR WITH SOME WOMAN ON THE Internet,” Amy admits, and Kiki looks like she’s going to throw up.
“But you’re so pretty,” Kiki stutters, and I have to agree. Amy’s hot, so this Mike guy must be a fucking idiot.
“Maybe it’s my fault,” Amy says, like an actual fucking idiot. “We don’t even have sex anymore.”
“Kent and I have sex every Friday, after Blue Bloods,” Kiki says like it’s perfectly normal to watch a Tom Selleck cop show before you bang your husband.
This is not Amy’s fault. It’s not even that Internet lady’s fault. It’s just a shitty thing that shitty guys do, even if you have sex with them all the time.
“Why are you still with a loser who doesn’t even help you? Is he like, superhot or something?” I know he can’t be that hot, or I’d already know who he is. I’m guessing he was real cute when they were younger, but now he wears flip-flops in public, like people want to see hairy man toes when they’re at Applebee’s.
“I think it’s just that . . . I got knocked up, and we got married, and we never got our twenties. We never got to have fun.”
Wild twenties are a magical time in a girl’s life. I swear, in my twenties, it was just raining dicks everywhere I went. I didn’t have to swipe left or right, I just stepped out my door and right into someone’s bed. Or car. I couldn’t even go to the Container Store without locking it down with some hot young shelf stocker. I’m lost in the vague memory of sneaking out of a wedding reception with an uncle of the bride when we’re interrupted by one of those I-wear-a-T-shirt-for-sex guys, standing over our table like he’s mistaken us for a group of “colleagues” or something.
“Kiki?” he asks, and I watch Kiki’s giant eyes pop out of her little tiny skull.
“Kenton! Hi, baby!” she squeaks, her voice rising to octaves I thought only dogs could hear. “How fun to see you!”
So this is the Kent who likes his briefs folded before they’re put in his drawer. The Kent who requires Kiki to email him the “dinner menu” for the night so he can approve it before she starts cooking. The Kent who needs to get kicked in the throat by a woman who is almost a yellow belt and should have worn jeans with a little stretch today.
“Kiki . . . what are you doing here? Where are the kids?”
“They’re with a babysitter, dipshit,” I interrupt. “Why are you here?”
Kent ignores me. “A babysitter . . . isn’t that your job, Kiki?”
Even Amy doesn’t like the sound of that.
“Really, dude? You think this woman is a babysitter? She’s the mother of your children. You better get on your hands and knees and THANK her for—”