Chapter 20

When I got married, I’d always imagined that my mother-in-law would be like Mom Number Two. I’d be able to call her up to chat any time I wanted, we’d share books and recipes, and she’d babysit every weekend.

It isn’t really like that with me and Nancy. Don’t get me wrong—I like Nancy. And I think she likes me. But there’s always been a distance between us for reasons I don’t entirely understand. Maybe she’s just overprotective of her son. Maybe she thinks I don’t coddle him enough.

Tonight I convinced Nancy to let me help her with dinner, which was honestly like pulling teeth. Not that she’s given me any real responsibility. Right now, I’m cutting the stems off green beans. And she keeps watching me to make sure I’m not screwing them up. Like there’s some restaurant critic who’s coming to dinner tonight and will give us a bad review if a single green bean is cut improperly. Honestly, Leah will probably throw most of hers on the floor.

“Don’t cut them too short,” Nancy advises me .

I smile, thinking about something Ryan once told me. In surgery, the main job of medical students is often to cut the ends off of knots tied during surgery. It’s the absolute most menial of tasks, yet med students are constantly being criticized for cutting the knot either too long or too short—two years of grueling education and they can’t even get that right. Ryan told me that when he had a medical student he didn’t like, he’d always tell them their knot was the wrong length, regardless of whether it was or it wasn’t. And he didn’t like most of his medical students.

“Sorry,” I say.

I almost expect Nancy to relieve me of my responsibilities and shoo me out of her kitchen, but she allows me to keep chopping. She, on the other hand, is hard at work rubbing some sort of yellow goo on a whole raw chicken.

“What are you making?” I ask Nancy.

“A roast chicken,” she says. “It’s Ben’s favorite.”

Nancy is a Little Miss Suzy Homemaker. The opposite of me. Yet despite her domestic skills, things didn’t work out with her husband. The two of them got divorced when Ben was in grade school, for reasons he’s never been able to explain to me. A few times, I pressed him for details and he kept answering, “I have no idea.” I don’t understand how he could possibly not know though. I’ve got a detailed play-by-play on the chronic drinking problem that led to my mother kicking my own father out for good.

But with Ben’s parents, it’s not as clear. Richard Ross seems like a nice, decent guy. He’s remarried, but only met his second wife years after the divorce so she wasn’t the culprit. I don’t get it. Why did they split? And moreover, how could Ben never have asked his parents that question?

Men. They have no curiosity.

“I use a special rub for the chicken,” Nancy tells me. “That’s what gives it such an amazing flavor.”

“Oh,” I say. But what I really want to say is, Why did you and Mr. Ross break up? Was it because he abandoned you at the Museum of Science because he didn’t like the Science of the Park exhibit?

“I’ve been making this for Ben since he was practically a baby,” she continues.

“I don’t know if he likes any of my dishes very much,” I say. I take a deep breath. “Actually, the truth is, sometimes it feels like not much I do anymore makes him that happy.”

Nancy continues to massage the raw chicken. Her fingers get into the crevices of the bird, and part of me starts to wonder if she even heard what I said. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. After all, she’s his mom . What’s she going to say? “Yeah, my son can be a real jerk sometimes”? That seems unlikely .

“Ben can be hard to please,” she finally says, although she still doesn’t look up from the chicken. “But you’ve always made him happy. At least, that’s what he’s told me.”

A flush rises in my cheeks, although it could just be because of Nancy throwing open the oven. I’d like to believe I’ve always made Ben happy.

“But sometimes that can stop being the case,” she continues. She lifts the pot containing the chicken and slides it carefully into the oven. “And it isn’t the worst thing in the world, Jane. It happens.”

“Yeah,” I mumble, and I go back to chopping green beans.

_____

Nancy is putting Leah to bed tonight, which is amazing. Sometimes I think I have put her to bed every night of her entire life. That isn’t actually true, but I do feel like I could probably count on my fingers and toes the number of nights that I haven’t gone through some sort of bedtime ritual with her. At Leah’s age, kids are very attached to routine. If I don’t close the door to her room exactly the way she’s used to, she has a freak out. But since this entire house is new, she’s forced to make adjustments.

That or she’ll just spend the whole night up crying.

Ben and I are in the bedroom we usually occupy on the second floor of Chateau Ross. The first time Ben brought me here to visit, his mother gave us separate bedrooms even though we’d been dating for several months and were both around thirty. Maybe she was trying to preserve my honor? The first night, Ben snuck into my room after his mother was asleep. By the time we were ready to leave, we’d dropped all pretense of having separate bedrooms.

Right now, Ben is on his side of the bed (the left), his laptop on his lap, with a screen full of code facing him. I’m on my side of the bed, surfing the internet news on my phone. Apparently, millennial buying habits are changing the face of retail. I must learn more.

“Hey,” I say to Ben, “remember when your mom used to give us separate bedrooms?”

He doesn’t answer. He acts like he doesn’t hear me, even though he’s literally one foot away from me. It reminds me of when Leah was an infant and she’d be crying her head off right next to him, yet I’d have to come in from another room to comfort her.

“Ben!” I say more sharply.

“Huh?” He looks up like he forgot I was in the room.

“I was just saying,” I mumble, “that back when we first started staying here, your mom used to give us separate rooms.”

“Oh right.” His eyes go back to the computer screen. “I wouldn’t mind that right now. I could use a few nights without you kicking me. ”

“I don’t kick you!”

He nods. “Yeah, you do.”

“Well, you snore.”

“Whatever.”

Ben starts typing at his keyboard, apparently done with our conversation. My phone buzzes with a text message. It’s from Ryan:

Doing anything fun tonight?

I look over at Ben, who is still staring at that screen of code.

I grip my phone, itching to send a reply to Ryan. But I know I shouldn’t. I’ve probably encouraged him more than I should have already. So I delete the text and wander down to the kitchen to eat some of the Frosted Flakes that Nancy always keeps tucked away in her cabinet.