But it’s not Jordana. It’s Jackson, and as soon as he sees Jackson, Michael feels a terrible guilt.
He has managed to avoid him—easy since Jackson has been spending so much time on Long Island—and on the rare occasions Jackson did come into the city Michael found it easy to act, easy to be easy, to simulate the same friendly banter they have had for years.
How can he do that today? How can he do that knowing that Jordana left Jackson last night, and came to his apartment and spent the night? How can he pretend, when he is fucking his wife, and in doing so seems to have fucked up Jackson’s life?
Jackson looks terrible. He walks in like an old man, bags under red-rimmed eyes, exhausted, having aged ten years overnight.
“Are you okay?” Michael says, not knowing what else to say.
“Not really.” Jackson pulls up a stool and sits down with a deep sigh. “Jordana left me.”
“What?” Michael feigns shock, but with it comes genuine upset. He never meant for this to happen, never meant to hurt anyone, least of all Jackson, who has been nothing but kind to him all these years. Jackson, to whom he owes everything. “Jackson, that’s terrible. I’m so sorry.”
“I just can’t believe it.” Jackson shakes his head. “She said she was unhappy, I wasn’t giving her what she needed. Michael, I’ve given that woman everything!”
“I know.” Michael shifts uncomfortably in his seat, feeling sick, and sorry, and scared, wishing there were some way to turn the clock back, wishing he hadn’t been quite so impulsive, wishing he wasn’t the cause of all this pain.
“What more could anyone want? And I love her. I love that woman. She means everything to me.” And with horror Michael watches as Jackson starts to cry.
“Jess! Breakfast!” Daff calls up the stairs, then goes back to the kitchen, sliding fried eggs onto pancakes.
Daff had always wanted to be the kind of mother who made breakfast for her child every day. She wanted to be the sort of woman who made her own granola, who watched Martha Stewart and proceeded to copy some, if not all, of the crafts, who had a beautiful little vegetable plot out back where tomatoes climbed over wire obelisks and clematis tumbled over a white picket fence.
Daff knows women like this. There are hundreds of mothers in school who do precisely this, who have immaculate crafts cupboards at home, who bring in beautiful doll’s houses for show and tell that they’ve just thrown together using shoeboxes and leftover scraps of wallpaper.
Daff has been feeling inadequate around these women since kindergarten. Hell, even before that—since pre-school. They are the mothers who fight to be room mother, who organize coffee mornings with home-baked scones and fresh lemonade, who float around school hallways with beatific smiles on their faces, never getting stressed, never getting overwhelmed, and never— God forbid—shouting at their children.
Sometimes Daff wonders if Jess would treat her better, be nicer, if Daff were a better mother. If she made macaroni and cheese from scratch instead of using Kraft’s best. If she and not Mrs. Entenmann made the chocolate-chip cookies she brought in for the school fair. If she, in short, were like those other mothers—Supermother, she thinks wryly.
Supermother does not have a daughter who sneers every time she tries to talk to her. Supermother does not have piles of papers and bills taking up almost all the counter space in her kitchen, and Supermother does not give her daughter Cheerios for breakfast, day after day after day after day.
So today Daff is going to be Supermother. It’s Saturday, her weekend with Jess, and she is determined to have a good weekend. She is taking Jess up to see their friends, Barb and Gary, who have a beautiful old horse farm in Roxbury, Connecticut.
They have four kids, and when they were all young, when Barb and Gary were neighbors, Jess and the oldest girl were best friends. They haven’t got together in a while, and Jess has always loved horse riding, so it will be, she hopes, a lovely surprise, to take Jess up there for the weekend.
The weekends are a struggle now that she is a single mother. She feels a need to be present for Jess in a way she never used to, to think of wonderful things for her and Jess to do, to keep Jess happy, whereas when she was married she and Richard would just do whatever needed