Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,118

he said, pretending to swallow them as they giggled so hard they could barely breathe. He understood that devouring love.

So what if he took calls when he was with his kids? He spent time with them, they adored him, and it was his professional success, after all, that provided them with the kind of financial security that he wished he’d had growing up as the son of two teachers. Yes, John was under a lot of pressure at work, but he loved creating characters and making up entire worlds as a writer—the very craft that his father had always aspired to. Whether by luck or talent or a combination, John had achieved both his and his father’s dreams. And he couldn’t be two places at once. The cell phone, he told Margo, was a gift.

“A gift?” Margo had said.

Yes, replied John. A gift. It allowed him to be at work and at home at the same time.

Margo thought that was precisely the problem. I don’t want you to be at work and at home at the same time. We aren’t your coworkers. We’re your family. Margo didn’t want to be midsentence or mid-kiss or mid-whatever with John, only to be interrupted by Dave or Jack or Tommy from the show. I didn’t invite them into our home at nine p.m., she said.

The night before the trip to Legoland, Margo asked John if he would please stay off the phone during their vacation. It was family time away, and it was just three days.

“Unless someone’s dying,” Margo had pleaded—which John took to mean Unless there’s an emergency—“please don’t pick up the phone on this trip.”

To avoid another fight, John agreed.

The kids couldn’t wait to go to Legoland—they’d been talking about it for weeks. On the drive down, they wriggled in their seats, asking every few minutes, “How much longer?” and “Are we almost there?”

The family had decided to take the scenic route along the beach instead of the freeway, and John and Margo distracted the kids by having them count the boats in the ocean and play a game in which they’d make up silly songs together, each person adding a lyric more hilarious than the last until they were all cracking up.

John’s phone was quiet. The night before, he’d warned the show’s crew not to call.

“Unless someone’s dying,” he’d told them, quoting Margo, “find a way to handle it yourselves.” They weren’t complete idiots, he assured himself. The show was doing well. They could manage whatever came up. It was three fucking days.

Now, making up silly songs in the car, John glanced over at Margo. She was laughing the way she’d laughed with him at the party where they’d met. He hadn’t seen her laugh like that in—well, he couldn’t remember how long. She placed her hand on his neck, and he melted into it, responding in a way he hadn’t in—again, he couldn’t remember how long. The kids were jabbering away in the back. He felt a sense of peace, and an image popped into his mind. He imagined that his mom was looking down from heaven or wherever the hell she was, smiling at how well things had turned out for her youngest son, the one he’d always believed was her favorite. Here John was, with his wife and kids, now a successful television writer, heading to Legoland in a car full of laughter and love.

He remembered sitting in the back seat himself as a young boy, squeezed in the middle between his two older brothers, his parents in the front, his dad driving, his mom riding shotgun and navigating, all of them making up song lyrics and laughing their heads off. He remembered trying to keep up with his older brothers when it was his turn to add a line, and how his mom delighted in his wordplay.

“So precocious!” she’d exclaim each time.

John didn’t know what precocious meant. He assumed it was a fancy way of saying “precious”—and he knew that, to his mom, he was the most precious of the boys, not the “mistake” his brothers teasingly called him because he was so much younger than they were but instead, as his mom said, a “special surprise.” He remembered seeing his mom put her hand on the back of his father’s neck, and now Margo was doing this for him. He felt optimistic; he and Margo would find their way back to each other.

Then John’s phone rang.

The ringing phone was sitting on the console between him