Читать книгу Slightly Suburban - Wendy Markham, Wendy Markham - Страница 7

The next morning:

“Happy anniversary!”

That’s me, to Jack, all kiss, kiss.

“Er…anniversary?”

That’s Jack, to me, all deer in headlights.

I know what you’re thinking: typical male, forgot his wedding anniversary already. This honeymoon is more over than cargo capris. From here, it’s all downhill, like that old Carly Simon song where married couples are fated to cling and claw and drown in love’s debris.

Well, I, Tracey Spadolini Candell, am here to say: Wrong!

Of course Jack and I are still happily married.

And it isn’t our wedding anniversary.

Jack just thinks it is.

But not for long.

“Wait…we got married in October, Tracey. This is March…” Jack’s eyes dart to his watch calendar, just to be sure. “Right. March.”

He looks relieved.

“I know.” I perch on the arm of his favorite chair, which he sat in, fresh from his morning shower, newspaper poised and stereo playing, right before I kiss-kissed him. “But it’s the eighth. We met on the eighth, remember?”

“Of December,” he says, after another brief mental calculation. “We met on the eighth of December.”

“Right. But this is kind of like our diamond anniversary, if you think about it.”

Apparently, Jack really is thinking about it, wearing the same expression he had the other day when I asked him what inning it was in the Knicks game he was watching.

Look, I’m no ditz. I’m not a big sports fan either, but I’ve been married to this one long enough to know basketball games have quarters and baseball games have innings. When I said inning it was a slip of the tongue because I was weak from hunger at the time, and we were supposed to be going out to dinner after the game was over.

He hasn’t let me live it down. “Hey, guess what, Mitch? Guess what, Jimmy the Doorman? My wife thinks basketball has innings. Har dee har har.”

Good stuff. I’m surprised Conan hasn’t called.

“Diamond anniversary?” he echoes now, wearing that same my wife is slightly crazy look.

It doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it did back when we were newlyweds and I was much more emotional and touchy. Probably because I, too, have a look: the one I flash at him whenever he stands cluelessly in front of the open fridge telling me we’re out of butter, or mustard, or milk.

Um, no, hello, it’s right here in this gi-normous-can’t-miss-it plastic jug, see? All you have to do is look beyond the week-old container of moo goo gai pan you insisted you’d eat for a snack, and the wee jar of quince jam that came in a gift basket from some Client back in December, which you also claimed you’d eat for a snack, and, voila! Milk.

Like my friend Brenda once told me, love might be blind, but marriage is no eye-opener.

“I sway-uh, Tracey, no married guy I’ve ever met can find anything around the house,” she said in her thick Jersey accent, “not even when it’s right in front of his face. Scientists should do some kind of study and find out why that is.”

I figure scientists are still pretty wrapped up in global warming and cancer, but as soon as there’s an opening, I’m sure they’ll get to it. Because it really is strange.

You know what, though? I don’t really mind Jack’s masculine faults. In fact, I find most of them endearing. Except for the one where he farts under the covers and seals the blankets over my head, laughing hysterically. He calls it the Dutch Oven.

I figured all guys also do that. But when I asked my friend Kate about it, she reacted like I’d just told her Jack was into golden showers.

“What? That’s disgusting,” she drawled in her Alabama accent. “Billy would never do that to me!”

As if Billy—who is a total douche bag—isn’t capable of flatulence, or, for that matter, far worse behavior where Kate is concerned.

But I won’t get into that at the moment. So far, I haven’t dared get into it with Kate, either. I’m waiting until the time is right to mention that I saw her husband walking down Horatio Street in the Meatpacking District late one night with a woman who wasn’t Kate.

Granted, I was walking down the same street at the same hour with a guy who wasn’t Jack.

However, I had just come from my friends Raphael and Donatello’s place, and the guy, Blake, was a friend of theirs and while infinitely gorgeous and masculine, not the least bit threatening to my marriage, if you catch my drift.

Blake and I were both a little loopy from Bombay Sapphire and tonics and were singing a medley of sitcom theme songs when I spotted Billy and the Brunette.

They weren’t kissing, or groping, or even holding hands, but there was definitely something intimate about the way they were walking and talking. As in, she might have been a colleague but she definitely wasn’t just a colleague, and they might have been coming from a restaurant but they definitely weren’t coming from a dinner meeting.

And she definitely, definitely, wasn’t his sister. For one thing, I know—and strongly dislike, but that’s neither here nor there—his sister, Amanda.

For another, if that woman turned out to be some other unlikable Billy sister I haven’t met, then there’s something distinctly Flowers in the Attic about their relationship.

How do I know Billy and the woman aren’t platonic? Sometimes I just get a feeling about things for reasons I can quite put my finger on, and that was one of those times.

Blake—who must have met Billy at Raphael and Donatello’s wedding three years ago but probably wouldn’t know him if he fell over him, which was not unlikely in his Bombay Sapphire-fueled condition—was oblivious to the situation.

He launched us into the theme song from One Day at a Time as I saw the rest of Kate’s life—as a divorcée—flash before my very eyes.

Maybe I was jumping the gun. Maybe they really were just colleagues.

Blake elbowed me as I stopped singing and turned to watch Billy and the woman get into a cab together.

“Tracey, you’re supposed to back me up. Let’s try it again,” Blake said, and sang, “Thiiiis is it…”

“Thiiis is it,” I obediently echoed in tune, watching the cab make a right turn onto Hudson, heading downtown, instead of continuing on the next short block, making a right onto West Fourth and heading uptown.

Billy and Kate, of course, live uptown. Shouldn’t he have been heading home at that hour on a weeknight?

And even if she lived downtown, if they were going their separate ways, shouldn’t they have gotten separate cabs? There were plenty around. Believe me, I checked.

I know, I know, I said I wouldn’t get into this whole Billy thing at the moment, but I can’t help it. It’s been weighing me down for weeks now and even though I know it could have been perfectly innocent, I also know that it wasn’t.

Getting back to Jack—who doesn’t know about Billy on Horatio Street and who, I’m absolutely certain, would never be heading downtown in a cab with a strange woman at that hour of the night—he’s still waiting for my explanation about our diamond anniversary.

“Twenty-five is the silver anniversary,” I explain to Jack as patiently now as I do when he’s being Ray Charles in front of the fridge, “and fifty is gold, and seventy-five is diamond.”

“We haven’t even been alive seventy-five years,” he says just as patiently in his reasonable Jack way, and looks longingly at the section of newspaper he was about to unfold.

“Not years—months. We met at the office Christmas party seventy-five months ago today.”

“Really?”

He actually looks moved by this news. The fact that he tends to find me endearing is part of the reason I love him so much—and find him endearing in return. Except when he’s Dutch Ovening my head. But I guess there’s a little leftover frat boy in most grown men, Billy aside.

(Or maybe not, because Billy’s recent behavior—all right, suspected behavior—strikes me as pretty damn immature and reckless. Not to mention immoral.)

“So it’s our seventy-five-month anniversary?” asks my endearing Jack. “I can’t believe you actually keep track of these things, Tracey.”

I’ll admit—but not to him—that I actually don’t. Not until this morning at around 6:00 a.m. when, unable to sleep, I glanced at the kitchen calendar and happened to realize what day it was—right around the time the circus freaks kicked into high gear up in 10J.

“Well…happy anniversary,” Jack tells me. Then, having concluded being endeared by my observation of our milestone, he goes back to reading the sports section of the New York Times.

“Wait…Jack?”

“Mmm.” He turns a page.

“So it’s been seventy-five months since we met. Wow!” I say brightly. “And almost two and a half years since our wedding.”

“Yup.” He’s reading the paper.

“Remember when we didn’t want to come back from our honeymoon?”

He snorts a little and looks up. “Who does?”

True. But we really, really, really, so didn’t want to.

Maybe because we had the most amazing honeymoon ever: we went to Tahiti and stayed in one of those huts on stilts above the perfect, crystalline aqua sea. I had been dreaming of doing that but didn’t think we could afford it. Jack surprised me.

Naturally, we spent much of that week lolling around that lush paradise scheming ways to escape our dreary workaday life. Anything seemed possible there, thousands of miles from this claustrophobic Upper East Side apartment with its water stains and dismal, concrete view.

The honeymoon flew by and the next thing we knew, we—and our luggage—were careening home from J.F.K. through cold November rain in an airless Yellow Cab that smelled overpoweringly of wet wool, mildew, chemical vanilla air freshener and exotic B.O.

“Remember how we both wanted to quit our jobs and move away from the city,” I go on, “but you said one life change per year was your quota?”

“Yee-eess…”

I have his full attention now, but he’s not letting on. He’s pretending to be captivated by a story about Yankees spring training. Which, ordinarily, really would captivate him. Except, I know he’s suspicious. He must realize where I’m going with this.

“Then remember how on our first anniversary I asked you about it again—” (I’d have bugged him sooner but I’d gotten over my initial impulse to flee when spring came early and our building was sold and the new owner nicely renovated everything) “—and you didn’t want to talk about it because you had just gotten promoted?”

This time, he doesn’t bother to answer.

“You know, I haven’t even brought this up in ages,” I say, “because I’ve been feeling like things are going great and why rock the boat…”

Renovated apartment, Jack’s promotion to assistant media director at Blaire Barnett, my move to junior copywriter…

Yeah, aside from what happened with Jack’s father, things have been relatively even-keeled lately. Much more even-keeled than ever before in my life.

Except…

The circus freaks moved in overhead, and someone’s shitting all over the building, and we can’t afford to live here, and I don’t think I can take another day of riding the subway or lugging stuff around or brainstorming clever taglines for Abate Laxatives—although I just had a sudden brainstorm. Hmm…

Mental Note: explore working the Mad Crapper into the Abate campaign.

“I feel like it’s time, Jack,” I tell my husband, getting back to my other, more palatable brainstorm. “Seriously, we’ve been together seventy-five months and I really feel like we need a major change.”

“Tracey, we can’t move to Tahiti.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

He sighs and folds the paper, putting it aside. “You want to have a baby?”

Huh?

“A baby?” I echo. “No. I don’t want to have a baby—yet,” I add, because presumably I will one day soon wake up with the urge to reproduce.

At least, that’s what my friends keep telling me. Including Raphael, who is about to become a father at last. Not via the original old-fashioned means, since his significant other—Donatello, his husband—is also ovarian challenged.

Not via a surrogate, either, which was one of their earliest plans. When I (and every other female they’ve ever met, plus a good many they haven’t) refused to lend them a womb—not that I don’t adore and wholeheartedly support their efforts—Raphael and Donatello decided to go the more recent old-fashioned route: foreign adoption.

Sadly, that didn’t work, either. You’d be surprised how many countries forbid a monogamous, healthy, well-off gay couple to adopt from their overflowing orphanages.

Or maybe you wouldn’t be. Maybe you don’t approve, either. But let me tell you, Raphael and Donatello deserve a chance as much as any stable, loving couple, and they are going to make terrific daddies. I know this for a fact, because they’ve had plenty of practice on the parade of foster kids they’ve been caring for over the past few years. Now one of those kids, Georgie, is going to become their son.

As for me…

“My biological clock isn’t ticking yet,” I inform my husband. Then I add cautiously, “Is yours?”

“Nah. I just figured you’d start thinking about it sooner or later. Or now.”

You may be wondering why this is only coming up after two-plus years of marriage.

Well, it’s not. It’s been brought up (by me) and shot down (by Jack) before.

I actually thought I might be pregnant when I skipped a period right around the time we got married. My ob-gyn said it was probably due to wedding stress. Still, I took a pregnancy test on our honeymoon. Of course it was negative.

Even then, I wasn’t entirely convinced. When I did get my period, I was actually disappointed, and went through a brief period during our newlywed year when I was gung ho to start a family. After all, hadn’t I always wanted children? Hadn’t I been told enough times by my evil ex-boyfriend, Will, that I have birthing hips? Hadn’t I once even won a Babysitter of the Year award from my hometown Kiwanis Club? (I was seventeen. Which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about my high-school social life.)

So, yeah, I’ve always wanted to start a family for legitimate reasons.

Mostly, though, I just hated my job as account executive and I was desperate for a way out.

At that point, anything—and I mean anything—round-the-clock morning sickness, childbirth without pain meds, endless sleepless nights, death by firing squad—would have been better than taking the subway to midtown every morning and dealing with my anal-retentive boss, account group director Adrian Smedly and an array of bitchy Clients.

Luckily for me, Jack didn’t think an eight-week maternity leave was sufficient incentive for motherhood. At the time, I was a little miffed. But since it takes two to make a baby the original old-fashioned way, and I couldn’t find a willing sperm donor ( just kidding ), I reluctantly set aside the baby dream—half hearted and short-lived as it was.

Not so long after, I found my salvation—or so I thought, pre-Crosby Courts—when I was at last moved into the Creative Department.

Meanwhile, Jack and I pretty much dropped the baby-making subject. I figured it would come up again, though, when one of us found a burning desire to procreate—or play hooky from work for a few months.

Or forever.

Which is how I feel right about now.

Seriously. I need to get out at some point. I’ve been at Blaire Barnett, aside from a brief foray as a catering waitress at Eat, Drink and Be Married, for my entire adult life. I’m so over agency life. And city life.

Things have to change.

So last night when I was eating overpriced turkey on overpriced bread with overpriced lettuce and drinking an overpriced Snapple, while keeping one eye out for cockroaches, trying to ignore the deafening crashes from 10J and watching the ten o’clock news with its usual urban murder and mayhem, I came up with a plan. A good one.

Nope, pregnancy isn’t my proposed ticket out this time. This new plan doesn’t involve nearly as much physical pain. Or sex.

Unless, of course, I need to use my wiles to bribe Jack.

Just kidding. I don’t really do that.

Much.

“So, look, I think we should start thinking about moving,” I tell my husband, officially launching Operation Fresh Start. “We said we were going to do it someday, and we’ve got the down payment.”

Thanks to his dad, who surprised us with a pretty big chunk of change for our wedding gift. I say surprised because even though he was filthy rich, he also was never the most generous guy in the world, and like I said before, he and Jack weren’t on the best terms.

But he had mellowed a little over the years, and he did give us money to use toward a house. Jack—who, as a media planner, is proficient with handling large sums, though it’s usually the Client’s tens of millions and not our own tens of thousands—decided to invest it in a CD until we need it. That sounded like a good idea to me, and Jack and I have always been on the same page about our household finances.

Unlike my parents, who have always argued over money—not that they’ve ever had any.

Also unlike Kate and Billy, who have also always argued over money—not that they’ve ever had any shortage of it, as bona fide blue bloods.

Anyway, Jack might be getting an inheritance, too, once his father’s will is sorted out. Jack Candell Senior had remarried a few months before he died, and his new wife is contesting his will, which left everything to his kids. She says he made a new one leaving—surprise!—everything to her. Only there seems to be some discrepancy about that.

Even without a cut of his father’s fortune, though, Jack and I can probably afford a decent house in the suburbs.

“So,” I say to Jack, “we’ve got the down payment, and I think we should start thinking about a move. Out of the city.”

Jack looks at me, shifts his weight in his chair. “I don’t know.”

Okay, the thing is…I didn’t ask him a question, so why is he answering one?

“You don’t know…what?” I ask. “What don’t you know?”

“Just…why do you want to leave the city?”

“I’m sick of it. It’s crowded and noisy and expensive and stressful and dangerous and it smells and we’re surrounded by strangers, some of whom are circus freaks and pickpockets and perverts. I can’t take it anymore. I want to live in a small town.”

“You grew up in a small town.”

“I know, but—”

“You left your small town the second you were out of college and moved five hundred miles to New York because you didn’t want to live in a small town. Remember?”

Of course I do, but he doesn’t. I didn’t even meet him until I’d been in New York a few years. I hate when he uses my past against me like this.

Okay, he’s never really done it before. But he’s doing it now, and I think I hate it.

“So are you saying you want to go back?” he asks.

“To Brookside? God, no!”

“Good. Because I don’t think I can live there. Nothing against your family.”

“I know I can’t live there. Everything against my family.”

Don’t get me wrong—I love my family. Do the Spadolinis have their little quirks and oddities? Absolutely. Like, as much as they resent stereotypes about Sicilians and organized crime, they do have a hush-hush sausage connection (my family pronounces it zau-zage, and I’ve never been sure why).

What the heck is a sausage connection, you may ask? Or you may know already, though unless you’re Spadolini compare, I doubt it.

See, my brother Danny knows this guy, Lou, who furtively sells homemade zau-zage out of the trunk of his car and let me tell you, it’s the best damn zau-zage you’ll ever taste, see?

It’s even better than Uncle Cosmo’s homemade zau-zage, which has too much fennel in it, see. When one of my nephews once told him that, he inadvertently started what is now referred to in Spadolini lore as the Great Zau-Zage Wars of Aught-Six.

So, yeah. We have our quirks and oddities, just like any other family.

Well, Jack’s family doesn’t exactly have quirks and oddities, per se. The Candells may have an organic-produce connection, but their (probably organic) family tree is barren of colorful relatives like Snooky and Fat Naso and Uncle Cosmo of the Homemade Zau-zage and Spastic Colon—who will tell you, usually over a nice zau-zage sandwich, that one has nothing to do with the other, but I’m not so sure.

Oh, and the Candells don’t discuss bowel function—or malfunction—around the Sunday-dinner table, either. In fact, they rarely even gather around the dinner table on Sundays or any other non holidays in the first place. When they do, it’s usually for takeout. Usually chicken. Not KFC, though. The Candells don’t go for battered, deep-fried food.

My family would batter and fry lettuce—iceburg, of course. They privately refer to the Candells as a bunch of health nuts, and they don’t mean that as a compliment. When my brother Frankie Junior found out at our wedding that Jack’s sister Rachel is a vegan, he practically shook her by the shoulders and screamed, “What the hell’s the matter with you? For the love of God, eat a cheeseburger, woman!”

So, while I do love my family, I do not want to live anywhere near them or, for that matter, in the bleak and notorious blizzard belt of southwestern New York State.

You’ve probably heard about the prairie blizzards of yore, and the historic Buffalo blizzards fifty miles north of my hometown. Let me tell you, that doesn’t compare to what we get in Brookside every year once the Lake-effect snow machine kicks into gear—and it lasts for months on end. Our Columbus Day and Memorial Day family picnics have both been snowed out more than once.

A few Christmases ago, my brother Joey parked his van on my parents’ side yard and when Lake-effect snow started falling, it quickly became mired. He had to leave it there overnight. Well, the snow kept falling, foot after foot after foot, and by the next afternoon, the van was completely buried. I’m talking buried—no one knew the exact spot where he had parked it, so it couldn’t even be dug out. Joey had to rent a car until well after Martin Luther King Day, when the roof emerged after a fleeting thaw.

So, long story that could go on and on—no, I don’t want to live in Brookside.

But I don’t want to live in Manhattan, either.

“I want to live someplace where the sun shines and we can have a house, and a garden—” I see Jack cast a dubious glance at the barely alive philodendron on the windowsill “—and trees,” I go on, “and a driveway—”

“We don’t have a car.”

“We’ll get one. Wouldn’t it be great to have a car, Jack? We’d be so free.” It’s funny how basic things you took for granted most of your life—like cars, or greenery, or walls, ceilings, and floors without strangers lurking on the other side—can seem luxurious when you haven’t had them for a while.

“I don’t know,” Jack says again.

“Come on, Jack.”

“But…I get allergic smelling hay!” he quips in his best Zsa Zsa Gabor as Lisa Douglas imitation, which, I have to say, isn’t all that great.

“There’s no hay. I’m not talking about the country. Just the suburbs. It’s time for a change.”

“I’m not crazy about change.”

“Change is good, Jack.”

“Not all change.”

“Well, whatever, change is inevitable. We might as well embrace it, right?”

Jack doesn’t seem particularly eager to embrace it—or me, for that matter. He’s starting to look pissed off. He aims the remote at the CD player and raises the volume a little.

“I just feel like we’re stagnating here,” I tell him, above Alicia Keys’s soulful singing. “We can’t go on like this. We need a change. I desperately need a change, Jack.”

I should probably drop the subject.

But I’ve never been very good at that—not one of my more lovable qualities, but I can’t seem to help myself.

“I really think we’re missing out on a lot, living here,” I tell Jack.

“Missing out? How can you say that? This is the greatest city in the world. It’s filled with great restaurants and museums, and there’s Broadway, and—”

“When was the last time we took advantage of any of it?”

“I took advantage of it just last night,” he points out, and immediately has the grace to look apologetic and add, “It wasn’t that much fun without you.”

“Well, I feel like all we ever do is go to work and come home, and on the weekends, we scrounge around for quarters and hope we can find an empty washer in the laundry room. Wouldn’t it be great to have our own washer? We could leave stuff in it if we didn’t feel like taking it out the second it stops. We wouldn’t have to worry about strangers coming along and touching our wet underwear.”

“I don’t worry about that.”

“Well, I do,” I say, shuddering at the memory of walking in on the creepy guy from 9C fondling my Hanes Her Way. “Seriously, Jack. I want a washer. In a laundry room. In a house…”

“That Jack built.”

“No! You don’t have to build it,” I assure him, and he laughs.

“No, it’s Mother Goose,” he says, and I’m relieved that he seems a lot less pissed off. “Didn’t you ever hear that nursery rhyme? This is the cat that killed the rat that lived in the house that Jack built. Or something like that.”

“There are rats,” I say darkly. “They’re living in the alley behind this building. I saw one the other day when I took stuff down to the Dumpster.”

“There are rats all over the city.”

“Exactly! And now there’s a bad roach problem in the building.”

“How do you know that?”

“Gecko told me. He also told me the Mad Crapper has struck again.” I fill him in.

“Nice.” Jack rolls his eyes.

“Why do we live here, Jack? Let’s move.”

Oh my God! He’s tilting his head! He only does that when he’s seriously contemplating something!

Then he straightens his head and says, “This isn’t the greatest time to invest in real estate.”

“Sure it is!” I don’t care, the initial head-tilt gave me hope, and I’m clinging to it. “This is a great time! We’ve paid down our credit cards, we don’t have kids yet, we’re both making good money in stable jobs…”

Mental Note: save part II of Operation Fresh Start—in which we quit our jobs, or at least I do—for a later discussion.

“I don’t mean it’s not a great time in our personal lives,” he clarifies. “I mean it’s not a great time in the country’s general economical climate.”

“Oh, come on, Jack. It’s not like there are soup-kitchen lines around the block. The economical climate is fine,” I assure him, while wondering, um, is it?

“Anyway,” I add quickly, lest Jack point out that lately my current-events reading has mostly been limited to page-six blind items, “real estate is the most solid investment you can make.”

“Not necessarily.”

“So you’re saying you don’t think we should buy a house somewhere?”

“No, I’m not saying that.”

“Then what are you saying?” I ask in a bordering-on-shrill voice I hate.

But I swear, sometimes Jack’s utter calm makes my voice just go there in response. I can’t help it. It’s like the lower-key he is, the shriller I become.

He shrugs. “I don’t think we should jump into anything.”

“We’ve waited over two years!” Shrill, shrill. Yikes. I try to tone it down a little as I ask, “How is that jumping in? The least we can do is start looking at real-estate ads.”

“That’s fine,” he says with a shrug. “Go ahead and start looking.”

I promptly reach into the catchall basket on the floor by the chair, which is overflowing with magazines I never have time to read anymore.

Pulling out the New York Times real-estate section—which I pored over while he was still in bed earlier—I thrust it at him.

“What’s this?”

“The listings. For Westchester.”

“Westchester?” He frowns. “We never said we were moving to Westchester.”

“Back when we got married, we said we’d look in Westchester.”

“Did we? I don’t remember.”

I frown.

“What? It was a long time ago,” he says with a shrug.

“Well, then, to refresh your memory…we decided Manhattan is too expensive, the boroughs are also expensive and if we’re going to pay that much we might as well live in Manhattan—”

“Which we can’t afford,” Jack observes.

“Right. And Long Island is too inconvenient because we’d have to go through the city to get anywhere else, and the commute from Jersey can be a pain, Rockland is too far away, Connecticut is Red Sox territory…”

Kiss of death for Jack, the die-hard Yankees fan. I am nothing if not thorough and strategic.

“So,” I wind down, “by process of elimination, it’s Westchester if we’re going to live in the New York suburbs at all.”

“You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?”

“Yup.” Pleased with myself, I watch him scan the page of listings.

Westchester County, directly north of the city, is an upscale, leafy suburban wonderland. It just so happens that Jack grew up there. His mother still lives there, as do two of his four sisters.

“Won’t it be nice to live near your mom?” I ask Jack. “This way, you wouldn’t have to run up there every time she needs something. You’ll be close enough to go running over there all the time.”

To some sons, that might sound like a threat. But Jack adores his mother. They’re really close. And as mothers-in-law go, Wilma Candell is the best.

“And when we have kids,” I add for good measure as he scans the newspaper page without comment, “your mom can spend a lot of time with them.”

“I thought we weren’t talking about starting a family yet.”

“We aren’t. We’re talking about finding the house where we’re going to eventually raise our family when we start one.”

Jack barely gives the paper another cursory glance before handing it back to me. “Okay, well…good.”

“Good…what?”

“This is good. There are houses in our price range, so if we decide to look up there at some point, at least we’ll have something to look at.”

We have a price range? And these houses are in it?

Hallelujah.

“But we have to strike while the iron is hot,” I tell him, and add for good measure, “You know, we can’t let the grass grow under our feet.”

“Slow and steady wins the race,” Jack returns with a grin.

“Maybe,” I say, slipping from the arm of his chair onto his lap, “but a rolling stone gathers no moss.”

What does that even mean? I don’t know. But it sounds motivational.

I guess not to Jack, though.

“We’ll look someday,” he says, pushing a clump of my hair out of my eyes, “when we’re ready.”

“I’m ready.”

“For family starting?” he asks, and I laugh and shake my head.

“No family starting yet,” I tell him.

Jack reaches for the remote, aims it at the CD player and presses a couple of buttons. Alicia Keys gives way to U2’s “With or Without You.”

Which happens to be a major aphrodisiac—at least for me.

Go ahead, try it—listen to that song and see if it doesn’t instantly put you in the mood.

The opening bass is enough to do it for me, every time—and Jack knows it.

“How about a dry run on the family-starting thing, so to speak?”

I loop my arms around his neck. “I’m game…if you’re game for a dry run on the house-hunting circuit next weekend.”

Jack tilts his head.

I kiss his neck.

Bono sings.

We are so there.