Pretty Baby. Mary Kubica

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       HEIDI

      When I wake in the morning, Chris is gone. Beside me, on the distressed wooden nightstand, is a mug of coffee, tepid and likely filled to the gills with hazelnut creamer, but still: coffee. I sit up in bed and reach for the mug and the remote control and, flipping on the lifeless TV, stumble upon the day’s forecast. Rain.

      When I finally wobble down the hall to the kitchen, bypassing Zoe’s school portraits from kindergarten through seventh grade, I find her standing in the kitchen, pouring milk and cereal into a bowl.

      “Good morning,” I say, and she jumps. “Did you sleep okay?” I ask, and kiss her gingerly on the forehead. She congeals, uncomfortable with the mushy stuff these days. And yet, as her mother, I feel the need to show my affection; a high-five—or secret handshake as Chris and Zoe share—simply won’t do, so I kiss her and feel her pull away, knowing I’ve planted my love for the day.

      Zoe’s dressed already in her school uniform: the pleated plaid jumper and navy cardigan, the suede Mary Janes that she hates.

      “Yeah,” she says and takes her bowl to the kitchen table to eat.

      “How ’bout some juice?”

      “I’m not thirsty.” Though I see her eye the coffeemaker nonetheless, a door that she previously opened and I firmly closed. No twelve-year-old needs a stimulant to get going in the morning. Yet I fill my mug to the brim and douse it with creamer, sit beside Zoe with a heaping bowl of Raisin Bran and attempt to make small talk about the anticipated day. I’m inundated with yeses, noes, and I don’t knows, and then she scampers away to brush her teeth, and I’m left with the silence of the kitchen, the steady percussion of raindrops on the bay window.

      We head out into the soggy day, bypassing a neighbor in the hall. Graham. He’s pressing at buttons on a snazzy watch, the gadget letting out various beeps and bleeps. He smiles to himself, clearly pleased.

      “Fancy meeting you here, ladies,” he warbles with the most decadent smile I’ve ever seen. Graham’s longish blond hair flops against a glossy forehead, strands that will soon be fully erect thanks to a generous supply of gel. He’s wet, though from rain or perspiration, I honestly can’t say.

      Graham is heading home from a morning run along the lakefront in his head-to-toe Nike attire, an overpriced watch that tracks mileage and splits. His clothing matches entirely too well, a lime-green stripe in his jacket to match the lime-green stripe in his shoe.

      He’s what one would call metrosexual, though Chris feels certain there’s more to it than that.

      “Morning, Graham,” I say. “How was the run?”

      Leaning against the wheat colored walls with their white wainscoting, he squirts a swig of water into his mouth and says, “Incredible.” There’s a look of euphoria on his face that makes Zoe blush. She glances down at her shoes, kicks invisible dirt from one shoe with the toe of another.

      Graham is a thirtysomething orphan, living in this building because the unit next door to theirs was left to him in his mother’s will when she died years and years ago, and Graham, consequently, made out like a bandit, acquiring not only his mother’s inheritance, but hundreds of thousands of dollars in a hospital settlement, as well, money that he’s slowly squandered away on fancy watches, expensive wines and lavish home decor.

      Graham planned to put the home on the market after his mother died, but instead he moved in. Moving vans replaced all of her eclectic furniture and belongings with Graham’s modern ones, so sleek and stylish it was as if he’d climbed from the pages of a Design Within Reach catalog: the crisp lines and sharp angles, the neutral colors. He was a minimalist, the condo sparse but for sheets and sheets of computer paper that littered the floor.

      “Gay,” Chris assured me after we’d stepped foot in Graham’s new condo for the first time. “He’s gay.” It wasn’t only the home decor that caught Chris’s eye, but the closets full of clothes—more clothes than even I owned—that he left purposefully open so we would see. “Mark my words. You’ll see.”

      And yet women came to call quite regularly, stunning women that left even me speechless. Women with bleach-blond hair and unnaturally blue eyes, with bodies like Barbie dolls.

      Graham had arrived when Zoe was still a toddler. She took to him like fruit flies to a bowl of browning bananas. As a freelance writer, Graham was often home, staring blankly at a computer screen and overdosing himself on caffeine and self-doubt. He came to our rescue more than once when Zoe was ill and neither Chris nor I could miss work. Graham welcomed her onto СКАЧАТЬ