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It’s just that the truth is so uninteresting. Amending it, changing the details, adding in color, is something I started when I was a kid, a bad habit—like
I was embarrassed, too. Mostly because I’d gotten caught.
But neither punishment taught me not to lie. It taught me to be a better liar.
I just want so badly to say the right thing, be the right kind of person, that when I open my mouth, out comes what I think someone wants to hear, whether it’s true or not.
I’ve always felt like there had to be more to my life than what it was.
Most of the women whose nails we do rarely look at us as we work, our bodies hunched over their feet and hands.
An embarrassing number of women assume an Asian girl in a nail spa has little to no grasp of the English language, never mind that Natasha was born less than twenty miles from here, both of her parents college professors.
this job, the stay-at-home-mom gig, is a hundred times harder than my job as an attorney. But it’s more fun.”
they make me feel completely inadequate.
I think I look old. I’m turning thirty-two soon.
She tells me how, growing up, she hated having a birthday in the summer because she never got to celebrate it at school.
This New York, the one with Violet in it, is different than the one I’ve lived in for the last fifteen years. It’s new and special, and finally, I belong here.
“Jay and I started dating right before Tinder launched. I’ve always wished that I could try it, at least once.”
I was, by contrast—as Taylor Swift puts it—on the bleachers, watching girls just like Violet, wishing someone would look at me like they looked at them.
It wasn’t uncommon for the teachers to babysit the kids on the weekends for extra money.
You can tell how much Violet loves being a mom, how much motherhood suits her.
She talks about it with a hint of nostalgia, and I wonder if she ever misses how things were before they became parents.
Even still, I want more than “okay.” I want a sister.
She wouldn’t believe me that it’s different this time. It doesn’t seem different, but it is. It’s not like the last time, with the box of red dye, dye so red it stained our towels. My relationship with Violet is different. Different, different, different.
I’d thought it was something everyone did when they were alone in someone else’s house.
then turn on a podcast. Crime Junkie or My Favorite Murder, you know, for inspiration.
She tolerated it, but she wished she didn’t have to.
She poses for me when she sees me holding up my phone, grinning, hand on her hip like she’s fifteen instead of almost five. Not everything about being a mother is easy, but this, this right here, right now, is magic.
“You’re not the woman I married,” he’d said, shrugging, by way of explanation. Like I was an old rag, once new and bright white, now disappointingly faded, stained, tossed into a bucket of dirty water and used to mop the floor one last time before being thrown into the trash.
Of course I was tired. I had a baby who woke up three times a night and every morning at five thirty, sometimes earlier. Who I carried everywhere, who wanted something from me every second of every day. I was swollen, puffy, both before I gave birth and after, my face sallow from the lack of sleep, nerves frayed from the crying—hers and mine. It’s not that I didn’t want to go out, that I didn’t want him, it was that I couldn’t. I was consumed by Harper, by her milk-sweet smell, her velvet-soft skin, by the warmth and weight of her, by how much she needed me. And, I wanted to know, if we did go
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Oh, wow, what a good dad! Should I give him a standing ovation? The bar for men is unspeakably low.
Do you think she’s seen Encanto?” I nod, laughing. I’d bet my life that every warm-blooded five-year-old on the planet has.
Jay was teaching Harper—like he had taught her, like her parents had taught her—that her worth was inextricably tied to how she presented herself to the world.
