“You still haven’t told me much about what your job actually entails.”
“There’s not much to tell. It’s the same kind of work that I used to do.” She sounded sleepy, the words coming out almost in a mumble.
“Do you know how much you might be traveling?”
“Not yet,” she answered. “I guess I’ll find out.”
“That might get tricky with London.”
“London will be okay. You’ll be here.”
For whatever reason, I’d expected her to say more: how much she’d miss London, or that she was hoping to find a way to travel less. Instead, she drew long steady breaths.
“Do you know your salary yet?”
“Why?”
“I’m trying to figure out our budget.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t know yet.”
“How can you not know?”
“There’s the base salary, bonuses, and different kinds of incentives. Profit sharing. I sort of tuned out when they started to explain it to me.”
“Do you even have a ballpark estimate?”
She flopped a hand onto my arm. “Do we really have to do this now? You know I hate talking about money.”
“No, of course not.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“Thanks for watching London this week.”
Or two weeks, I immediately thought, but I kept the words to myself. “You’re welcome.”
I couldn’t fall asleep, and after staring at the ceiling for an hour, I slipped from the bed and padded toward the kitchen. I poured a small glass of milk and finished it in a single swallow, thinking that since I was up, I might as well check in on London. I entered her room and could hear the hamster wheel squeaking and whirring, a hamster party in the middle of the night.
Thankfully, London seemed not to notice. She was sound asleep, her breaths deep and steady. I kissed her on the cheek before pulling up the covers. She shifted slightly and as I stared down at her, I felt a tug at my heart, a mixture of pride and love and concern and fear, a mixture that mystified me in its intensity.
Afterward, I sat outside on the porch. The night was warm and the sound of chirping crickets filled the air; I vaguely remembered something from my childhood when my dad had told me that the frequency of chirps roughly correlated with the temperature, and I wondered whether it was true, or just something that fathers say to their sons on late summer evenings.
Pondering that question seemed to free other thoughts, and I suddenly understood why sleep seemed so elusive.
It had to do with Vivian and the fact that she hadn’t told me her salary. I didn’t believe her when she said she’d tuned out when it was being explained to her, and that bothered me as well.
In all the years we’d been married, I’d always shared with Vivian exactly what I’d earned. To me, sharing such information was a prerequisite of marriage; the last thing any couple should harbor was financial secrecy. Secrecy could be corrosive, and ultimately stemmed from a desire to control. Or maybe, I was being too hard on her. Maybe it was simply she hadn’t wanted to hurt my feelings because she’d be earning an income while my own business was floundering.
I couldn’t figure it out. Meanwhile, I’d been handed the responsibility for our daughter, and all at once, the real reason for my insomnia seemed all too obvious.
Our roles in the marriage had suddenly been reversed.
CHAPTER 6
Mr. Mom
When I was young, my parents would load the camper and bring Marge and me to the Outer Banks every summer. Early on, we stayed near Rodanthe; later we stayed farther north, near the area where the Wright brothers made aviation history. But as we grew older, Ocracoke became our spot.
Ocracoke isn’t much more than a village, but compared to Rodanthe, it was a metropolis, with shops that served ice cream and pizza by the slice. Marge and I spent hours roaming the beaches and the shops, collecting seashells and lounging in the sun. In the evenings, my mom would make dinner, usually burgers or hot dogs. Afterward, we’d capture fireflies in mason jars before finally falling asleep in a tent while our parents slept in the camper, stars filling the nighttime sky.
Good times. Some of the best in my life. Of course, my dad recalls them differently.
“I hated those family trips,” he confessed to me when I was in college. “You and Marge would fight like cats and dogs on the whole drive down. You’d get sunburned on the first day and you’d whine like a baby the rest of the week. Marge would spend most of the week sulking because she wasn’t with her friends, and if that wasn’t bad enough, as soon as your skin began to peel, you’d throw the remains at Marge to make her scream. You two were a total pain in the ass.”
“Then why did you bring us every year?”
“Because your mother made me. I would have rather gone on vacation.”
“We were on vacation.”
“No,” he said, “we were on a family trip, not a vacation.”
“What’s the difference?”
“You’ll figure it out.”
For the first three years of London’s life, trips out of town required D-Day–like preparations, diapers and bottles and strollers; snacks and baby shampoo, entire bags packed with toys to amuse her. While out of town, we visited places that we thought she would enjoy – the aquarium, McDonald’s playgrounds, the beach – running ourselves ragged, with little time to ourselves and even less time to relax.
Two weeks before London’s fourth birthday, however, Peters sent me to Miami for a conference, and I decided to use a few vacation days after it ended. I made arrangements for my parents to take care London for four days, and while Vivian had initially been hesitant to leave our daughter, it didn’t take long for both of us to understand how much we’d simply missed being… free. We read magazines and books by the pool, sipped piña coladas, and took naps in the afternoon. We got dressed up for dinner, lingered over glasses of wine, and made love every single day, sometimes more than once. One night we went to a nightclub and danced until well after midnight, sleeping in the next day. By the time we returned to Charlotte, I finally understood what my dad had meant.