Mae was almost convinced that this was better than the Sparkling plan, except that Sparkling was a done deal, and this would require connecting a whole lot of dots. She had her foot in the door, though, and that was what mattered. She would make it happen, and once she had a television-size fan base, one that wanted her specifically, she’d be set.
She placed her laptop on the counter and started typing before she forgot any of her great ideas, but just as she’d started playing around with an actual pitch, she heard the clink of the gate outside their stoop. Quickly, she stowed her laptop away. This was not the day to be working when Jay came home.
The door swung open, and Jay burst in with his usual vigor, one arm behind his back. He hugged her with the other and produced, with a flourish, a bottle of champagne. “I’m so sorry,” he said, and then, as he caught sight of the look on her face—Champagne? She knew he hated her job at Sparkling, but champagne?—quickly went on. “Not to celebrate. But my mom always says bubbles aren’t just for when you’re already feeling bubbly.”
If Mae had hated Jay’s mom before, she really hated her now. That was exactly the kind of empty pronouncement she would make, probably just before ignoring her grandchildren and leaving on a yearlong cruise around the world. Mae shrugged, and Jay leaned down and hugged her again around the bottle, his tall form making her feel even smaller than usual. “You’ll come up with something great to do next. I know you will.”
He meant this nicely, he really did, and it was sweet, especially after all the arguments they’d had over Sparkling in the first place. She hugged him back. She needed him to be on board with her plans, and while she knew that wasn’t likely to be his first reaction, she also knew he could get there, if he just understood how perfectly this could all work out and what it could mean for her. That meant she needed to give him calm, collected Mae. Mae who knew what she was doing. Mae who took setbacks gracefully and was always moving upward.
“I already have an idea,” she said. “But sit. Eat. Come on, I made us dinner.”
Jay looked at the table set for two—nothing in front of the high chair and the booster seat. “Where are Madison and Ryder?”
“I sent them with Jessa to the diner, just for an hour.”
“Which means you have a plan.” He set down his workbag on the counter and started up the stairs as Mae picked up the bag to hang it in the hallway. “I’m changing first,” he said. “I can’t handle a plan in my work clothes.”
When he came back, now in yoga pants, black hair mussed from where he’d pulled on his favorite 76ers T-shirt, he sat down and looked at the table appreciatively while Mae handed him his plate. “This is service,” he said. “Very Mad Men.”
Mae took a champagne glass from the shelf and began to pour as she had learned from watching him, glass tilted, but not too carefully, because those who were used to champagne handled it with a certain insouciance. Inside, she was calculating. Champagne meant an extra hundred calories, which meant she wouldn’t eat the rice she had put on her plate to go with the stew, but she’d have to make it look like she did, because her avoidance of rice—and white bread, and pasta, and all of their many high-glycemic friends—annoyed Jay endlessly.
He took his glass, then held it out. “I know. We’re not toasting. This sucks. But, Mae, it’s also your chance. Our chance. You’re always talking about seizing opportunities, and we could grab this one. Take my mom up on her plan, go to India, meet her family. Take a break from New York.”
The fight. The same fight. How could he do this now? His plan, again—his ridiculous plan, born of, she had to admit, the worst deal he’d ever been staffed on, a merger between two monstrous restaurant chains based on the West Coast that had had him pulling constant all-nighters and taking the red-eye for months. His plan was for him to quit. I just need to take some time, he kept saying. I can’t even figure out what I want when it’s like this. A sabbatical, he kept calling it, but it wasn’t, not the way he wanted to do it, with no strings from the firm and thus no promise that they’d bring him back, even though he kept insisting they would. It was throwing himself into the abyss, and he wanted to take her with him.
This wasn’t fighting fair. He hadn’t even given her a chance to tell him what she wanted before he dumped this on her. She got it. He hated the hours. She’d hated the hours, too, back when they were both starting out in consulting, but unlike Jay, she was used to starting at the bottom of the ladder. Hell, where she came from there hadn’t even been a ladder. The consulting job they had once both had was a miracle for her, a major score, and she would have stuck it out, too, if they hadn’t agreed she should be the one to quit when Ryder arrived and everything got, not twice as hard, but seemingly exponentially so. It was one thing to have a nanny—they still had a nanny, especially now that Mae had built up her new business and written the book—but for both of them to stay free to work eighteen-hour days meant two nannies, really, and then why even have kids in the first place? But if one of them wasn’t going to stick with a steady paycheck and health insurance, they should never have—
But they had. Had kids, rented this place. They’d done it.
Now they were stuck. And Jay, Mae knew, truly felt stuck. If it weren’t for her, if it weren’t for the kids—had he ever even really had to do anything he didn’t want to before? Ever had to stick with anything? Looking at her happy-go-lucky husband across the table, Mae wanted, as she so often had in the past year, to throw her glass at him. Oh, sure, he’d gotten through business school, the same one his dad had gone to before him. Mae now knew there were two ways to get through B-school, and the first might be her way, by memorizing every business case and going to every study session and doing every extra thing and just generally grinding the hell out of it, and the second was through charm and talk and the willingness to throw every idea out there with abandon and see what your classmates could make stick. The latter involved what Mae’s friends called “the confidence of a mediocre white man,” and although Jay wasn’t white—his Indian heritage meant he didn’t tick that box—confidence he had in spades.
Which was what made him think he could just walk away from a good job and find another one waiting when he was ready.
Fine, if this was the fight they were going to have now, she would have it.
“Do you think that would really be a break for me, a zillion-hour flight and then staying in a house with people we’ve never met, with your mother and a three-year-old and a six-year-old?” The kids barely knew Jay’s mom. He barely knew his mom—his dad had raised him while his mom took Jay’s sister in a complicated divorce-not-divorce Mae still didn’t really understand, the kind of thing rich people apparently took for granted. Mae turned her own glass in her fingertips. She didn’t really want champagne. She wanted a cold Diet Coke, not that they kept anything like that in the house.