Life After Coffee Read Online Free Page B

pull Violet off my back and reattach her to my front so I’m not strangled by her choke hold. She nestles in just like she did when she was a baby. I’ve got to admit, it’s a little delicious. Within the sea of faces, I see one that I recognize.
    “Amber! How are you?” Heavily pregnant for starters. Last time I saw her she was nursing a newborn. I suddenly realize that I haven’t seen Amber in quite a while.
    “Oh, hi, Amy. Yeah, we’re good.” I open my mouth to ask her how old the newborn is now and when the next one is due, but she gets there first. “We’ve actually got to head out now, but it was so good to see you.” Something flat in her eyes tells me she actually doesn’t think it was that great to see me. I manage to shove a party bag her way before she escapes, and like some kind of suburban Pavlovian bell has been sounded, once the first guest gets going, they all follow after. I run out of party bags two kids from the end and dole out two wooden spoons instead. Their moms give me the stink eye. I know what’s going on in their heads: Really, I drop forty bucks at that crafty toy store in Old Town and you serve me a battered Lego cake and then give my kid a wooden spoon? Unacceptable.
    Within ten minutes the house is cleared. Good riddance. This is why I don’t do social. Billy descends upon his gifts. So many, opened in such a blur. I’m barely paying attention and I’ve no idea which is from whom. Looks like we’ll be skipping the thank-you cards this year. But have we ever done them any year? Don’t know, because with a creeping fear I’m starting to realize that I don’t know much about how this day-to-day parenting thing works. At all.

CHAPTER 4
    While I run Peter through the outline of our impending doom, I keep one eye on Billy as he sits on the couch. He’s yet to properly acknowledge my return. Billy’s a miniature male version of me with his white-blond hair, pink skin, and permanently concerned expression. He’s also a true iChild, always engrossed in any one of the multiple iDevices littered throughout our house. They can go right at the top of the list of things to be sold off. I’m all for restricting screen time to one hour a day. Peter always laughs when I suggest that.
    After I’ve finished telling Peter about the financial Armageddon that’s about to engulf us, he barely looks bothered. I’m a little surprised. Does he not get it? One hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year just walked out the door, possibly never to return. But then Peter always has been a “fuck up now, worry about it later—way later” type of guy.
    “So. What do you think?” I ask. Maybe I need to reiterate the whole “driving our family into the arms of Mistress Poverty” thing again.
    “I think it’s great. Perfect, actually,” he replies.
    “Excuse me?”
    “You’re tired of traveling all the time, right?”
    “Right.”
    “All you ever talk about is how you’re missing out on the most important time of your kids’ lives and how you’ll never get it back.”
    “Right.”
    “Well, now you get to see them all the time. No more work. The kids are now yours, round the clock.”
    “R-ight . . .” I prepare to launch myself back into Mistress Poverty, the sequel. He obviously didn’t hear me the first time around.
    “So let’s swap. I’ll earn the money and you stay at home with the kids. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
    “Well, yes. But how are you possibly going to replace my salary, Peter?”
    “I’ve all but completed it.”
    “Completed what?”
    “My screenplay.”
    Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
    “I’m just tidying up the final draft, but I know that this is The One, Amy.”
    The One. We’ve been talking about The One ever since Billy was born. The screenplay that he would write that would be so brilliant, so timely, so awe-inspiring that Hollywood would forget that Peter tried to sue Paramount Pictures for changing a story line on a script he’d already sold