Mike, Mike & Me Page 19

  “Who would these people be?” Janelle asked, looking confused—but also a little intrigued.

  Buoyed by the fact that I had actually captured her notoriously scant attention span, I forged on. “They could be roommates, or, um, a married couple. Or maybe total strangers we could throw together, just to see what happens.”

  “Like what?” Pat wanted to know. “What would happen?”

  “We don’t know. That’s the point. Just day-to-day stuff.”

  “That would never work,” Pat said, really getting on my overcaffeinated nerves. “And the budget would be huge. We’d have to bring in casting people to hire the actors, and scriptwriters—”

  “There wouldn’t be any scripts,” I cut in. “And there wouldn’t be actors. It would be real. You know. Real people having real conversations. Real arguments. Maybe real romance. Whatever. The whole point would be to capture regular people’s lives.”

  “Why would anybody want to watch regular people on television?” one of the talent managers asked. “People want to see celebrities. That’s the whole point of the entertainment industry.”

  “I have to agree with that,” said Janelle the celebrity, fluffing her red mane.

  “Haven’t any of you seen that show Cops?” I asked, frustrated that they didn’t get it. Granted, it was a half-assed idea, but the more I tried to convince them that it could work, the more convinced I was that it was brilliant.

  “Cops?” Janelle echoed. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a new show on Fox. Camera crews follow real cops around with cameras.”

  “That’ll never last,” Pat said, and everyone agreed.

  “Doesn’t anybody else have any ideas?” Janelle asked plaintively, looking around the room.

  “How about wacky-sidekick week?” somebody suggested.

  Talk about lame.

  “Wacky-sidekick week? I love it!”

  And they were off, brainstorming, leaving me to shift my attention back to the Mikes.

  Clearly, I couldn’t go on juggling them forever. Especially now that Mike was back in town to stay.

  Something had to give…and soon….

  twenty-seven

  The present

  If hugging my husband at the airport made me remember all the reasons I chose to be with him, the argument in the car was a reminder of all the reasons I almost didn’t.

  When we get home from the airport, I’m tempted to go straight to the computer.

  But I swear it’s out of curiosity more than anything else. I just have to know if there are any messages from HappyNappy64, or if he’s been permanently deleted from my life.

  I can’t quite bring myself to wish for that…nor do I dare wish for anything different.

  Anything different would be wrong.

  No, it would be more serious than wrong. It would be adultery.

  I have many shortcomings, but I refuse to let that become one of them. It’s one thing to juggle two men when you’re young and single. It’s another thing altogether when you’ve taken vows to be faithful to one person for the rest of your life, and when the future happiness of three children depends on your doing just that.

  And anyway, I love Mike. Even when he’s being a complete asshole the way he was when he switched lanes on the bridge.

  I have complete-asshole tendencies myself, in case you haven’t noticed.

  Yeah, I thought you might have.

  So anyway, if there’s an e-mail from HappyNappy64, it might be enough closure for me just to know that he cared enough to write. I might even delete the message and move on.

  Or I might read it and reply.

  Not that I would say anything provocative. I can just accept his apology for kissing me on the beach, and wish him well. Case closed.

  But e-mail will have to wait. There are hungry kids to feed, mail to open, laundry to unpack and start.

  To his credit, Mike takes over with the boys as soon as they’re done eating their canned, microwaved Chef Boyardee. He promises Mikey and Josh a trip to the town pool if they run and get their bathing suits on quickly.

  He looks at me, as if to ask if that’s all right.

  “Go ahead,” I tell him from beneath Tyler’s high chair, where I’m picking up soggy bits of the graham cracker he just ate—along with a petrified Cheerio or two. Ew.

  “Didn’t Melina come this week?” I make the mistake of asking Mike as I spot a stray—and green-speckled—piece of Wonder Bread crust under the table.

  “Oh, she came. And I’d be willing to bet she stayed all of an hour, since there was nobody around to keep an eye on her. When I got home that night, she hadn’t even flushed the pee I left in the hall bathroom toilet.”

  “How do you know you left pee in the hall bathroom toilet?”

  “Because I left it on purpose. To prove a point.”

  “The point being that she refuses to flush other people’s urine?”

  “The point being that you can’t clean a toilet without flushing it.”

  I sigh, crawling out from under the table. I’m disgusted by what was under there, but just as disgusted by Mike’s unflushed urine.

  “She has to go, Beau,” he says firmly. “If you don’t tell her this week that she’s fired, I will.”

  “We can’t just fire her, Mike.”

  “I can.”

  “She has kids to feed in Guatemala. We have to give her time to find another job.”

  I swear, this argument is as stale as the cereal strewn under Tyler’s high chair. But after the confrontation in the car, it’s almost a relief to be back on familiar ground.

  “If we had told her she was fired back when I wanted to,” Mike says grumpily, “she would already have another job. I’m serious, Beau. She has to go. I’m going to—”

  “I’ll do it,” I cut in, depositing the moldy crust, the old Cheerios and the graham cracker sludge into the garbage can. “I’ll fire her. Okay? Just let me do it.”

  “Why? Are you afraid I might be too mean?”

  “I know you will be.”

  “How? It’s not like I speak a word of Spanish.”

  “Your gestures and your tone will be mean. I can do it nicely.”

  Stacking the boys’ plastic bowls and collecting their crumpled, sauce-stained napkins from the table, he says, “Whatever. As long as she’s gone by the end of the week.”

  “How about the middle of next week?”

  “This week.”

  Silently, I decide that next week will be soon enough. That poor woman is going to be so upset when she loses a large chunk of her weekly income.

  Maybe I can squeeze an extra week or two of severance pay for her from what I saved on groceries while we were gone last week….

  “Hey, do you want to come swimming with me and the boys?” Mike asks, brightening a bit now that the Melina issue is apparently settled. “I bet the pool won’t be crowded on a Saturday night.”

  I bet it will. The pool is always, always crowded.

  “No, thanks,” I say. “I’ll stay here. I want to let Tyler relax a little bit after all this traveling.”

  “Okay.” He doesn’t sound the least bit suspicious.

  Well, why would he be? I’m allowed to stay home without him. I do it all the time.

  And even if he caught me checking my e-mail…

  So what? There’s no law against checking e-mail.

  You know, I might be overthinking this whole thing.

  I warn Mike, “Just don’t go into the deep end with the boys. And make sure you check the pockets of Josh’s bathing suit for food before he gets into the pool. Oh, and make sure he goes potty.”

  “Josh! Go potty,” he calls obediently as he runs water into the saucy bowls in the sink.

  “You have to make him go again when you get to the pool.”

  “I thought you said the bathrooms there are disgusting.”

  “They are.” I press the latches that release the tray on Tyler’s high chair and lift it o
ff. “But if you don’t make him go at the last possible moment, he’ll pee in the pool.”

  “Well, nobody will know the difference, will they?” This is coming from a man who pees and doesn’t flush on purpose. So why am I surprised?

  “That’s disgusting,” I tell him.

  “Oh, come on, Beau. You don’t think every kid in town isn’t peeing in that pool?”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s okay for ours to do it.” Hoisting Tyler onto my hip, I realize he stinks. For a second, I’m tempted to ask Mike to change him.

  Then guilt seeps in and I decide to do it myself.

  By the time I’ve got Tyler cleaned up and the diaper hermetically sealed in Diaper Genie, Josh and Mikey are calling goodbye from the back door as it slams closed.

  Alone at last.

  Well, sort of.

  “What do you say, Ty-Ty?” I ask my gurgling son. “Do you want to go in your Exersaucer?”

  Tyler informs me that he does.

  Either that, or he’s just babbling gibberish.

  But I carry him down to the family room and deposit him in his Exersaucer.

  After lining up an array of rattles, blocks and stuffed animals on the plastic tray that surrounds him, I say cheerfully, “There you go, little guy. That will keep you busy for a while, right?”

  He happily agrees that it will.

  I settle in at the computer a few feet away.

  During the few minutes it takes to boot up, Tyler manages to toss overboard every toy I placed on his tray.

  “Okay, sweetie, you’re going to have to hang on to these this time,” I say, crawling around on the floor to retrieve them. “You know Mama doesn’t want to do this again.”

  Obviously, he thinks Mama does, because a toy tugboat and a set of plastic keys are sailing through the air again before I’ve even returned to my seat.

  “Aaah,” says Tyler, which can be translated into I want my toy tugboat and my plastic keys.

  “Just a second.” I click on the Internet-server icon.

  “Aaah, aaah,” says Tyler more urgently, waving a plush hammer over his head, which means I want my toy tugboat and my plastic keys now, or the hammer goes too.

  I type in my password, then bend over and scramble for the tugboat, the keys, and yes, the hammer as the computer whirs and clicks through the sign-on process.

  “There. Keep your toys on your tray this time, bub.”

  “Blee-blah,” says Tyler.

  Translation: Yeah, right.

  Returning to my seat, I immediately see that I’ve got mail.

  Well, of course I do. I haven’t checked in a week. My box is probably stuffed with spam.

  It is.

  But a quick visual scan down the list reveals that there are a couple of “real” e-mails as well. One from Gaile, three from Valerie, one from my oldest brother…

  And one from HappyNappy64.

  twenty-eight

  The past

  I spotted Business Card Mike the second I stepped out of the air-conditioned building onto the blast-furnace street after work that night.

  Oh, no.

  What was he doing here?

  That much was obvious. He was waiting for me.

  Well, maybe I was mistaken.

  Maybe he wasn’t really here.

  Maybe he was just a figment of my sleep-deprived imagination, or…or…or a heat-generated mirage.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, shook my head around a little, wiped a trickle of sweat from behind my right ear and braced myself for another look.

  He was here, all right.

  Terrific.

  It had been a shitty day all around, capped off by an assignment from Janelle to come up with a list of ten possible wacky sidekicks before 9:00 a.m. tomorrow.

  All I wanted to do now was hop on the subway and go home…alone.

  But there was Mike, lounging against the subway entrance railing reading the NewYork Post, obviously waiting for me.

  Would it be wrong to turn and run in the opposite direction?

  I didn’t have a chance to find out. He looked up, spotted me and folded his paper under his arm with a smile.

  “Hey! There you are. I was afraid I’d missed you,” he said, walking over to me and planting a kiss on my cheek.

  “No…you didn’t miss me,” I told him, wondering why he had to be so darned good-looking.

  “Actually, I did…miss you, I mean. Listen, I was thinking we could go see Eddie and the Cruisers II and then get Indian food.”

  “There’s a sequel to Eddie and the Cruisers?” was the most scintillating response I could come up with at the moment.

  “It’s called Eddie Lives. Talk about giving away the ending,” he added with a grin.

  He was as charismatically sexy—and as off-limits, at least to me, from now on—as the black Jesus in that Like a Prayer video of Madonna’s that caused such a big uproar a few months ago.

  “Oh, hey…should I be worried that you didn’t return any of my calls today?” he asked, peering down at me, as if he’d just noticed something might be seriously amiss in Beau-ville.

  I quelled the urge to ask him how many calls, exactly, I didn’t return.

  Instead, I said, “Mike…we need to talk.”

  “We can go see something else instead if you want. I hear Uncle Buck is supposed to be pretty good.”

  “It’s not about the movie.”

  “Uh-oh. That’s not a good sign. I guess I should be worried, huh?” It sounded almost like a quip, but he wasn’t smiling anymore. “Should I be worried?”

  I evaded his question, pretending to hunt through my pockets for a subway token.

  “Beau?”

  God, I was exhausted, in desperate need of sleep or another dose of caffeine. Obviously, sleep was out of the question for the time being.

  “Let’s go get a cup of coffee somewhere,” I said reluctantly.

  “Make it somewhere with a liquor license. I have the feeling I’m going to need a drink after you say whatever you’re going to say.”

  That was funny, considering that I didn’t even know what I was going to say.

  Not funny ha-ha.

  I had the feeling that nothing at all about the evening ahead was going to be funny ha-ha.

  I had to tell Mike that either he had to agree to share me with somebody else until I figured out what I wanted…

  Or that he and I were as over as disco.

  Since I doubted that the first option was even an option, I figured he and I were about to go the way of KC and the Sunshine Band.

  But that wasn’t what I wanted, dammit.

  Was it?

  It would certainly simplify my overly complicated life, but…

  I wasn’t ready to say a permanent goodbye to him yet.

  Nor was I ready to say a permanent goodbye to the other Mike.

  As we crossed the street toward one of Manhattan’s ubiquitous Charley O’s, I asked myself what I would be doing if the other Mike had been the one waiting outside the studio for me.

  Would he and I be on the verge of becoming history instead?

  Was this what it came down to? Was I making a choice based purely on chance?

  Why, yes. Yes, I was. And it made about as much sense as any other scenario I could conjure at the moment.

  The bar area was crowded with happy-hour patrons, all of whom looked as though they didn’t have a care in the world.

  “Would you like to go to the bar, or do you want a table?” the hostess asked Mike, who looked at me.

  “A table,” I said, aware that the conversation we were about to have called for privacy.

  As she went off to check for a table, I jealously watched the cocktail-sipping, gossiping, not-a-care-in-the-world office drones.

  Oh, how I wished that I didn’t have a care in the world. What I wouldn’t give to be standing at the bar sipping an Alabama slammer and dissing my boss with my co-workers.

  “What if there aren’t any tables free?
” Mike asked, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

  Hmm. Good point. What if there weren’t any tables free? I had already made one decision based on chance.

  Why not another?

  If there were no tables free, I decided, we would stand around and have a casual drink at the bar. And since standing around casually drinking at a bar was no way to have a serious conversation, our relationship would be spared. At least for tonight.

  There. It was settled.

  I felt a little better already.

  The hostess reappeared, smiling.

  I told myself that she was smiling because there were no tables and she, too, was relieved that there would be no breaking up tonight.

  But she said, “We have a table opening up in back.”

  “Great,” I said as my heart sank.

  twenty-nine

  The present

  My suddenly sweaty palm maneuvers the mouse directly toward the e-mail from HappyNappy64.

  Behind me, Tyler shrieks loudly from his Exersaucer.

  “I know you want your toys again,” I say without turning away from the computer. “Wait a minute, sweetie. I just need to check one thing.”

  Click, and there it is.

  Subject: New York

  Subject…New York? I frown, reading on.

  We need to talk. I’ll be in Manhattan on business the week of the twenty-second, staying at the Pierre. Call me there.

  “No!” I say sharply…so sharply that Tyler, still babbling loudly in protest behind me, goes silent for a moment. Then he begins to cry.

  That’s it?

  Not a word about the Don CeSar, the beach, the kiss?

  No apology, no explanation?

  I reread the e-mail.

  Tyler cries louder.

  “Oh, sweetie…” Reluctantly turning my back on the computer, I hurry over to hug my son.

  I’ll be in Manhattan on business?

  Manhattan, of all places?

  I pick up all the toys and gently replace them on Tyler’s tray.