Mike, Mike & Me Read Online Free Page A

his family, and I don’t want to be a young widow.
    Really, I don’t.
    Shoving aside a twinge of guilt, I spoon more baby food into Tyler’s gaping mouth.
    The fact that I have found myself fantasizing lately about being single again has nothing to do with wishing my husband dead.
    I love Mike. I’ve loved Mike for almost half of my life.
    It’s just that I’ve loved him more passionately in the past than I happen to love him right now.
    Right now—as in, these days—he gets on my nerves.
    Right now—as in, right this second—he’s really getting on my nerves.
    “I thought Melina came yesterday,” he says.
    Melina is our cleaning woman, and I know where this is headed. Teeth clenched, I scoop more baby food onto the spoon and say tersely, “She did come yesterday.”
    “The sink doesn’t look clean.”
    “It was clean after she left.”
    He bends over to inspect the caulked groove where the white porcelain meets the black granite. “There’s a speck of red gunk that was here yesterday morning. It’s left over from the lasagne pan you washed,” he informs me. “It’s still here.”
    “Then why don’t you scrub it off?” I snap.
    “Because that’s Melina’s job. That’s why we pay her a hundred bucks a week. Why are we paying her if she’s not doing her job?”
    Why, I wonder, are we having this conversation yet again?
    “If you don’t want to tell her that she has to shape up, Beau, I will.”
    “I’ll tell her,” I say quickly, driven by the inexplicable yet innate need to protect Melina from the Wrath of Mike. “It’s just hard. She doesn’t speak English.”
    “Then show her. Bring her over to the sink and point to the gunk. Then bring her to the corner of the upstairs hall and show her the cobwebs that have been there for two weeks. Then bring her to the boys’ bathroom and show her the grunge growing on the tile behind the faucet. Then—”
    “Okay! I get it, Mike.”
    “Right. So will she, if you show her.”
    I sigh. “Yeah, well, I can’t follow her around the house every time she’s here.”
    “Then maybe you should fire her and hire somebody who doesn’t need to be shown how to do their job.”
    “We can’t fire her. She has two kids to support here and three more in Guatemala. She needs the money.”
    Mike shakes his head and mutters something, his back to me.
    “What?”
    He doesn’t turn around. “I just said, I don’t understand how a mother can leave her kids behind like that.”
    I bite back another defense of Melina. I don’t understand it, either. The thought of leaving my babies behind—even when they’re adolescents—to go live and work in another country is as foreign to me as…well, as Guatemala is. Intellectually, I understand her reasons. Maternally, I’m at a loss.
    I’d never heard of such a thing until I moved to Westchester and had my first brush with domestic help. In the past seven years, I’ve met countless nannies and housekeepers with children and spouses back in South America or the Caribbean or wherever it is they’re from. I used to find it shocking; now it’s merely unsettling.
    I, after all, didn’t think twice about leaving behind a promising career in television production to become a stay-at-home mom after Mikey was born.
    All right, maybe I thought twice. Maybe it wasn’t exactly a no-brainer. Maybe I believed I could have it all: marriage, children, glamorous career.
    Maybe some women can.
    But when my six-week maternity leave was over, I found myself crying daily on the commuter train that carried me away from my precious child. I lasted two weeks, until Mikey—poor sacrificial lamb—caught his first cold from a sick toddler whose working mother sent him to day care with a green runny nose.
    That was when I knew the jig was up.
    Hadn’t I been weaned on seventies TV? Didn’t I know that if you were going to make it after all, you had to be spunky and single and living in a bachelorette pad with a big gold initial