Chapter_4

Jordan was on the phone when Rosie got home. “I agree the optics are really bad,” he said as she gently closed the door behind her, “but this is really just a matter of an engineering tweak.” Seeing her, he raised his eyebrows, mouthed Hi, and mimed shooting himself in the head. A small box sat on the entry table, wrapped in brown butcher paper. She picked it up and ran a finger beneath its folded edge.

“Totally, totally,” Jordan said, pacing the living room.

Inside the box, the peeler rested at the center of a nest of kraft paper. It was even better than she had envisioned, its handle matte and elegantly bent. She held it in her palm like a baby bird.

“Well of course it’s unfortunate,” Jordan said with a short laugh. “No one’s disputing that—but we’re new on the scene, and obviously there are going to be kinks along the way.”

Rosie set down the peeler delicately, then pulled out her phone and opened the farmhouse listing Alice had sent her.

“Noguchi, I’m telling you, this is totally fixable. They just need to hire a few coders, or whatever, to fix the glitch. Maybe there’s a little settlement, and we move forward.”

She zoomed in on a photo of a clawfoot tub, the only fixture in one of the palatial rooms aside from a fireplace. Looking at it was like learning the word for an unnamed feeling she’d had her whole life.

“So we’ll circle back tomorrow,” Jordan said. “Beautiful. Thank you.” He hung up.

Rosie looked at him. “That sounded tense.”

“Oh, Jesus,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Can I tell you what’s going on, and you tell me how bad it sounds?”

“OK.”

“So... we got this kind of crazy customer complaint. Basically... this family bought a family friend. And out of nowhere, I guess, the family friend started calling the wife the D-word.”

“What?” Rosie said, matching his hushed tone. “It called her a dick?”

“No, the other D-word.” Jordan looked at her meaningfully.

Rosie racked her brain for another inappropriate D word.

“Dyke!” Jordan hissed.

“What? The robot called the mom a dyke?”

“Shh,” Jordan said, glancing around. “Shit. What a mess. Yes. Actually it called her a hot dyke.”

Rosie brought her palm to her mouth. “Why did it call her that?”

“This is the really bad part,” Jordan said. “It turns out, the family friend used to belong to a different household—some kind of communal house in West Philly, according to company records. They returned the family friend, it got a factory reset, and then we sold it to the family who complained.” A vein pulsed on the side of his head. “Clearly, it somehow retained some of the previous owner’s personal data,” he said. “I mean, I guess certain people... are allowed to say that word? Like it’s been reclaimed or something?” He had turned red. “The point is, the family friend obviously didn’t come up with that word by itself. This is a privacy nightmare for us.”

“You don’t have to whisper,” Rosie said. “It’s just us.”

“Well...” Jordan glanced at the family friend in the kitchen. He looked stunned, as though he’d just witnessed a car crash. “We have to get to the bottom of the glitch. And these things don’t tend to be a onetime thing... If other people start reporting similar issues... I mean, there are simply not enough lawyers on staff for this. There are tens of thousands of family friends floating around out there. You can basically count on me working around the clock for the foreseeable future.”

“What can I do?” Rosie asked, knowing there was nothing she could do.

Jordan smiled weakly at her. “It’ll be OK. Like I told Noguchi, these kinds of things just happen. We just have to pray we can jump the wave before it wipes out the company. Anyway”—he scratched the back of his head—“you’re home early.” He wrapped Rosie in a hug and kissed her cheek. “To what do I owe this pleasure? And what’s with the vegetable peeler?”

Rosie had been too obsessed with Alice’s farmhouse listing on her commute to prepare for how to tell Jordan her news. “Oh,” she said. “I bought it online.”

“Don’t we already have one?”

“Yes. Well, no. Not like this one.”

Jordan tilted his head.

She handed him the peeler, and he considered it for a few seconds. He seemed unsure of how to hold it. “Nice,” he said, handing it back to her.

She was suddenly nervous. “You know how you’re always encouraging me to quit my job?”

“Yes,” Jordan said. “I’ve been thinking about that, and I’ve been meaning to tell you I’m sorry.” He held her face in both hands. “It’s your job, and if it brings meaning to your life, I don’t ever want to minimize that. I just want you to be happy.”

“That’s the thing,” Rosie said, “It doesn’t really bring meaning to my life.”

“Oh!” Jordan said. “OK...”

“And so I took your advice. I quit.”

“Whoa. Really?”

“I know I should have talked to you first. I do have some savings—”

“I’m not worried about that,” Jordan said.

Rosie remembered his excitement when he first got the job at Family Friend, early on in their relationship. As long as she’d known him, money never seemed to be a concern. He paid the rent and always took care of the bill when they went out to eat. Rosie paid for their utilities, mostly as a gesture.

“I’m just surprised,” Jordan said. “Were you planning to quit?”

“No. It kind of just happened. I just broke. This guy got a hard-on from talking to me about punishing Republicans... and then my boss... I couldn’t do it anymore.” A hot pressure built behind her eyes.

“Hey,” Jordan said softly, holding her face in his hands. Rosie knew that if she looked at him, she would begin to cry.

“Talk to me,” Jordan said. “Is something else going on?”

“I think I’m really stuck here.”

“Stuck...” Jordan took a step away from her. “With me?”

“No,” Rosie said, “of course not. Stuck here, in the city. I want something different for myself. For us. This can’t be all there is.” She waved her hand in the direction of their double-wide windows. As if on cue, a sparsely feathered, one-footed pigeon hopped pathetically on the ledge. “What if we left?”

“Left? To go where? Queens? I mean, it would be great to have more space. I bet we could get an extra bedroom for the same price.”

“No, not Queens.” Rosie laughed a little and wiped her cheek with her wrist. “Upstate, like, the Hudson Valley.”

Jordan considered her for a moment, as though he were waiting for her to reveal a punch line. “You want to move upstate? But you’ve always lived in the city.”

“Exactly,” Rosie said. “That’s exactly it, and I feel like it’s suffocating me. Maybe it’s stupid...”

“No!” Jordan said. “It’s not stupid, I’m just—sorry, I’m just taking it in.” He rubbed his jaw. “How long have you felt this way?”

“Since we got married,” Rosie said. “I keep having these fantasies. Us, away from here, in a beautiful old home. Somewhere more... peaceful than this. Easier.”

“I...” Jordan said, and then he closed his mouth. “Huh.”

“I don’t expect you to have a fully formed opinion right this second,” Rosie said. “I know you’re settled here. You have your job and your friends and your routines. I know it’s probably hard to imagine.”

“I mean...” Jordan said. “Don’t you have friends and routines, too?”

Aside from Jordan, Rosie’s only real friend was Alice, and they hadn’t even seen the inside of each other’s apartments. Then there were the half-dozen NYU friends she got a drink with once a month, hoping they’d cancel. Rosie dreaded these drinks, in which they shared basic facts about their lives, vacation plans, and recent purchases. The bill was always exorbitant. Other than that, her social life comprised hundreds of strangers every day telling her how much they either hated or wanted to fuck her.

“Not like you do,” Rosie said. “I’m a little lonely.”

“What about your NYU friends?”

“I want real friends to share my life with. I want something... more. I read this thing about living a ‘wild and precious life.’ And I don’t know what that looks like, but I can tell you it’s not grabbing a coffee with someone I won’t see for another six months.”

“Aw, babe,” Jordan said, “you have so much cool stuff going on.”

Rosie was both relieved and ashamed that he didn’t try to elaborate.

“And you have me,” he said. “Maybe you just need a different job here.”

“No,” Rosie said. “I want a bigger change than that.”

“Is this related to the Mormon influencers you keep showing me? With all the beige linens?”

“Tangentially,” Rosie said.

“Upstate,” Jordan said, as though trying out a baby’s name. “Upstate.”

“Do you want to see a house I’m kind of obsessed with?” Rosie said. He had reacted better than she had anticipated, and she wanted to take the conversation as far as possible. “We don’t have to look,” she added disingenuously. “Is it too much? I can show you another time.”

“Let’s see it,” Jordan said. He reached an arm around her and pulled her closer. He was humoring her in a way that felt paternalistic, but she didn’t mind.

She pulled up the listing on her phone. “If you hate it, it’s OK,” she said, holding the phone against her chest. “Just—please don’t laugh.”

Jordan took the phone from her, and she watched him as he scrolled, swiped, and zoomed. “Cool,” he said. “Nice. How much is it?”

“Nice doesn’t even begin to describe it. It’s a million dollars, but you know, it’s probably negotiable, right?”

Jordan raised his eyebrows but kept scrolling.

“I mean, that woodstove?” Rosie said. “Have you seen the floors? Did you see that it has a little outbuilding? Jordan, not to be dramatic, but I am losing my mind over this place.”

“I can see that!” Jordan laughed. To Rosie’s delight, he was still scrolling. “This is a nice room,” he said, showing her a photo that she had already memorized. It was labeled nursery.

“Can’t you see it?” she said. “A perfect little bassinet?”

Jordan smiled.

“I’m not being crazy. I just know it would make me so happy. And now I’m admitting it to you.” She looked at him. “Tell me I’m not being crazy.”

“I haven’t seen you this excited since I told you you didn’t have to come to my work dinner last week,” Jordan said.

“You like it?”

“Well, I don’t know,” he said, dialing a number and lifting her phone to his ear. “I guess I’d have to see it in person to know for sure.”