Page 26 of Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl
“I may have heard some things,” replies Leo evasively. “But we’re getting off topic. The real topic is you and the nanny.”
“Childcare provider.”
“Having congress and not in a political science way,” Leo goes on.
“Leo.”
“Congress with the nanny?” Sloane turns to me with wide silver eyes. “Bram!”
“No—the—” I blow out a breath and drag my hands over my face. “Look, the congress predates the childcare, okay? There is currently zero congress.” Aside from Sunday, when I’d pinned her against my bookshelf and fondled the soft, wet cunt under her dress.
But that hardly counts, right? It was a... a slip. A momentary lapse in control brought about by her bad manners and ridiculous accusations and the adorable jut of her jaw when she admitted she was jealous.
That she wanted me all to herself, even when I wasn’t hers to have.
And Christ, did I know the feeling.
I come back to the moment to realize Leo and Sloane are arguing about my romantic history.
“I’m just saying, and with respect to you, Bram, that I don’t think you ever dealt with the emotional fallout of having Fern,” Sloane is saying, “and your grandparents cutting you off and how traumatic those early years were. You were learning how to be an adult and a husband and a father all at the same time, and then when the dust finally settled around money and your career, you had surprise twins. I just don’t think you ever had a chance to learn whatyouwant outside of scraping together the best life possible for the girls.”
“My grandparents didn’t cut me off,” I explain patiently.*“They just said that if I was man enough to have a baby, then I was man enough to pay for it. So I paid for it.”Itbeing a shitty apartment and a car seat and a Pack ’n Play and cloth diapers and bags for breast milk and onesies and a little glowing seahorse that played lullabies and ocean noises. Sara scooped ice cream for people we’d gone to school with, for students our age completely unburdened by responsibility, for little kids like we were about to have, and I’d spent the summer working on a highway road crew until our first semester started at Astra, and then I transitioned to tutoring and after-hours janitorial work at the student bookstore. We’d finally snagged married student housing, used a combination of the campus’s subsidized childcare and the goodwill of our friends to get through our studies, and somehow, eventually, clawed enough money together to make a down payment on a derelict house.
“And we were all okay,” I add. “We made it through.”
Leo snorts. “Yeah, I bet you were okay after your grandfather died and your grandmother decided to give you tons of regret money.”
“People change,” I say evenly.
My parents died in a car crash when I was a baby, so my grandparents were all I’d ever had growing up. They’d never said as much, but I knew they’d been extremely content turning their small plant nursery into a highly lucrative, multistate enterprise, and the presence of an unexpected infant in their lives seemed to have upset them as much as losing their daughter. I never doubted that they loved me, but their love had always been reserved. Conditional. Uninterested in the neediness of a child who was scared of the dark and bullied at school. They wanted me to be worth the work, I think, and when I had to confess Sara’s pregnancy to them in the last year of high school, they realized I’d been a bad investment. No sense throwing good money after bad, after all.
But after Grandad died, Grandma had changed. She was older and lonelier and who wouldn’t want to know a kid like Fern? Fern, who’d been the sweetest baby, who’d been raised underneath library tables and playing with lab goggles at our feet, chasing butterflies through fields while I collected samples, coloring on the floor of the student bookstore while I vacuumed. Fern, who learned to crochet before she learned to ride a bike, whose prized possession was an ancient Brother sewing machine that we found behind an old microwave at a thrift store.
So for the last few years of her life, Grandma had gotten to know Fern. She’d finally acted civil to Sara. She’d gotten to hold the twins when they were still tiny little burritos with red faces and lanugo on their delicate shoulders. She’d tried to apologize with money, and more money again, and when I’d explained that it wasn’t necessary, that all was forgiven, she’d cried into my shoulder until my shirt was soaked.
My grandmahadchanged, she had tried to make amends and be better going forward. I can even believe that she’d tried her best when I was younger too. Her best still hadn’t been good enough, but that’s okay. I don’t want to carry that kind of resentment—I just want to focus on making sure my kids never feel like my love is qualified by an invisible profit-and-loss sheet that only I can see.
Anyway, after my grandmother died, I sold the family nursery to the longtime manager, put the substantial inheritance into a trust for the girls, and laid the past to rest. It’s done. We’re all okay. We’re all working to be good to each other in the creaky, cluttered house bought with spare change and sweat.
“I just think that you may have associated love with privation, that’s all,” Sloane finishes.
Leo waves her off. “That’s not Bram’s damage. The problem is thathe’s too good. No one ever taught him how to be selfish.”
“Or,” I say, “seeing as I’m the expert here, perhapsyou’re both wrong, and I’m simply focusing on my kids and my career. I don’t have the time or energy for anything else.”
I’m given identical silver-eyed stares of doubt.
“Really,” I protest. “I’m not interested in”—I nod in Leo’s direction—“whatever it is that you do with your love life.”
“Lovelife?” Leo sounds offended.
“I’m perfectly happy with the way things are,” I maintain. “And if there’s anything I was missing, I wouldn’t find it doing some kind of facile, drive-through intimacy.”
“You’re right,” Leo says, earnestly. “I’d say you could only find it while actually driving. Or while parking. Or while having your parking spot stolen, perhaps?”
“Hmm. Why do you think she caught your interest when no one else has?” This Socratic musing is from Sloane.
“I have ideas,” Leo volunteers, and starts counting on his fingers. “Spankings. Sweater sets. Parking revenge. Sounds made while spanking—”
