Page 2 of Pretend You Love Me

“Jesus Christ, buddy, it’s right here,” I tell him, jiggling the bottle. “This is literally the only thing you’ve wanted for the past twenty minutes. I’m giving it to you. What more do you want from me? Blood?”

He’s not impressed by my rhetorical skills. His face has gone that alarming shade of red that makes my stomach drop every time, even though I know, logically, that he’s not actually in danger, just really, really committed to being mad right now.

From her position on the floor, Maisie watches this exchange with an expression that suggests she’s taking notes for her future memoirs: “Growing Up With These People: One Child’s Experience of Mental Illness.” Her eyes are wide and calm, tracking my movement with the focused attention of someone who’s already seen the punchline and is just waiting for me to catch up.

“Your brother,” I tell her, because apparently, I’ve reached the point in motherhood where I narrate our lives to people who don’t speak yet, “is going to be a lot of fun at parties someday. He has strong opinions and absolutely no ability to modulate them.” I lower my voice to a stage whisper. “He gets it from his father.”

The joke lands as intended, which is to say, not at all, but it makes me feel better to say it, to put it out in the air where it exists as something other than a knot in my throat.

I shift both bottles again, trying to find the magical angle that will get Milo to actually take the thing instead of just screaming at it. My back aches from standing, and I realize, with the dull surprise of someone who’s been too busy to notice their own body, that I’ve been in this exact position for at least fifteen minutes. The kitchen clock, the one my mother-in-law gave us as a housewarming present, with its aggressively cheerful “Family Makes a House a Home” motto, reads 6:32.

Daniel is already halfway to work by now, probably has the windows down in the car, radio playing something upbeat and uncomplicated. By the time he gets to his desk, Milo will have finished this bottle and started another one. By the time Daniel comes home, I’ll have lived an entire day in this alternate universe of chaos and tiny demands, while he’ll have had at least one conversation that didn’t involve bodily fluids.

It’s not supposed to be fair, I guess, or a competition. But sometimes, standing here in my milk-stained shirt while the man I married walks out the door smelling like a department store, I wonder what the hell happened to me.

Not that I’d change it. I just sometimes wish the person looking back at me from the bathroom mirror wasn’t quite so surprised by her own reflection.

With Daniel gone and both bottles finally draining, Milo’s aggressive sucking finally settling into something closer to actual eating, the kitchen switches into a slightly lower register of insanity. Milo’s still fussing, his tiny body vibrating with the effort of being very unhappy, but at least he’s doing it at a volume that won’t shatter the neighbour’s windows. On the mat, Maisie’s eyelids are getting heavier, her blinks longer and slower as she drifts toward sleep, the universe’s one concession to my sanity this morning.

The relative quiet gives my brain a moment to wander, something it’s been desperate to do since approximately 4:00 AM, and almost immediately, it lands on Page & Grounds. The café. My other life.

It happens without warning, the way it always does. One minute I’m counting Milo’s swallows to make sure he’s eating enough (twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty...), and the next I’m there, standing behind the counter, surrounded by the smell of roasted coffee beans and cinnamon and the particular dusty scent of old books that haven’t quite given up on their former lives as trees. I can see the mismatched armchairs Luca and I found at the estate sale last summer, the faded green velvet one with the questionable stain on the right arm, the navy leather one that probably cost more than our monthly rent before it started to crack, and the way they somehow work together anyway, like old friends who’ve seen each other at their worst. I can hear the soft squeak of the marker against the chalkboard as Luca redraws the menu for the third time this week, changing the font from “fancy but illegible” to “attempt at minimalist that looks like a ransom note” because he got bored between the breakfast and lunch rush.

The regulars take shape in my mind: Mrs. Chen with her crossword puzzle and precise pencil marks, never a pen; the two college students who claim the window table from ten to two, drinking endless refills and sharing a single scone; the quiet man in the back corner who always orders the same thing (black coffee, extra shot, lemon loaf) and never looks up from his laptop. They’re not just customers, they’re part of the place, the sort of people who’ve been coming in long enough that they feel like furniture, comfortable and necessary.

I think about Harper’s half-finished signed stock, still sitting on the back table from yesterday, the careful stacks of her paperback romances with their bright, cartoonish covers and snarky taglines. (“She swore she’d never forgive him. Then she discovered his secret...”) The Post-it notes she left on top in her perfect, slanted handwriting: “THESE ARE ALL MESSED UP. I WILL FIX TOMORROW. H.” She’s probably already there, fixing them, reorganizing the display that got knocked over during yesterday’s reading, running a hand through her hair and laughing at something Luca’s said.

And Liv, I can picture her at the small desk in the office, surrounded by sketches and colour swatches, chewing on the end of her pencil as she works on the redesign of the café loyalty cards. The project began three weeks ago, right after Luca declared the old ones “look like tax documents, if tax documents were designed to actively depress you,” and Liv took this as a personal creative insult. Now she’s deep in it, sending me increasingly frantic text messages at 2:00 AM about Pantone colours and whether a slightly off-centre logo would be “artistic“ or “the visual equivalent of having spinach in your teeth.”

The café exists in my mind as it is in reality: loud and warm and slightly overcrowded and entirely, completely mine. Or mine and Luca’s, anyway, the place where we built something that belongs to us, where we can be who we are without apology or explanation. Where we can be loud and messy and entirely ourselves.

I glance around the kitchen and feel the familiar pang, not of self-pity but of honest longing. There’s nothing wrong with doing this day in, day out. But God, sometimes I miss the simple pleasure of being good at something.

Milo’s bottle is finally empty; his angry sucking slowed to something gentler. I set it on the counter, one hand free, one still firmly attached to Maisie’s bottle, and reach for the cloth to wipe his face. He fights me, of course, twisting his head with surprising strength for someone who weighs less than my toaster.

“Hold still,” I tell him. “This is not a negotiation.”

“It absolutely is,” his face says back. “And I’m winning.”

I set Maisie’s bottle down, too, she’s slowed to the occasional sleepy sip, and move Milo onto my hip. “Okay, buddy. Let’s get you changed.”

The changing table in the living room is a monument to efficient planning, surrounded by everything I could possibly need in the exact order I need it: wipes, diapers, cream, a clean onesie, distraction toys for when things go sideways. Which they inevitably do.

I lay Milo down, talking to him in a voice that’s half-soothing, half-competitive sports announcer. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re seeing some impressive moves here from Milo, who is currently attempting the advanced technique of using both legs simultaneously to create maximum difficulty, oh! And he’s got it! That’s a perfect score from the French judge for the Full-Body Twist!”

The key to changing Milo, I’ve learned, is to move quickly, efficiently, and with a complete willingness to accept collateral damage. I have the old diaper off, his bottom wiped, and the new one mostly positioned before he manages to get both feet in the air and twist halfway onto his side. My hand shoots out to catch him before he rolls off the edge, one-handed, because I’m still holding the cream with the other, and we complete the change in what is essentially a combat position, me bent awkwardly over the table while Milo attempts to demonstrate that gravity is, in fact, optional.

“All right,” I say, snapping the onesie closed with perhaps more force than necessary. “You win this round. But I’ll be back.”

His response is to kick both legs straight up in the air, like he’s doing victory crunches.

Back in the kitchen, Maisie’s drifted completely to sleep, her tiny mouth slack, one fist curled under her chin. I transfer her to the bassinet by the window, moving whilst trying not to disturb her and hold my breath until she settles, not even a flutter of eyelashes to suggest she’s noticed the change.

Milo, of course, is having none of it. I settle him into his bouncer with the vibrating setting, a teething ring, and a small giraffe named Gerald who was probably expensive and is definitely going in his mouth the second I turn my back. Milo accepts these offerings with the grudging tolerance of someone who has been mildly disappointed. He’s not screaming, but he’s not happy either, he is just watching me with the narrowed eyes of someone who’s already planning his next move.

Then my phone buzzes on the counter.

The screen lights up with a message from Luca: