Warren Mitchell has been divorced for one year and five months now. It's good that he can't count the days and better because he can't remember exactly when the papers were signed. He still remembers the day he was married, though, because it's still circled and stamped on the calendar hanging in his office.
Warren Mitchell is terrible with dates. When he was still married to Joan, she insisted he fill in several years worth of calendars at once to appease her after a particularly sour fight. They sat in an untidy stack in the corner of his office at all times as a result. (She watched him put them there.) In the aftermath, it seemed funny: ludicrous, over the top terribly anti-climactic, characteristic of most of their fights. Now (the now after the divorce) it feels bittersweet. There are plenty of things of that were thrown away in the aftermath, his and hers and their alike, but, for some reason, he could never bring himself to get rid of those calendars.
It was always the small, stupid things with him. Take now, for instance. Keeping the calendars was, in and of itself, unremarkable. Using them, on the other hand, may not have been his best idea.
It's such an lazy scribble on the calendar: a circle and the words 'Our Anniversary' hastily blocked on there in capital letters and smudged Sharpie. A long time ago, there was an 'us' and everything was 'ours' but things changed.
Things continue to change.
He left.
He tries to make his peace.
When he takes the job in Atlanta, it's not like he's running. Maybe, in small sort of way, he is running, but it doesn't form the backbone of the arguments he runs in his head to rationalize why taking the place at Barden University is the best thing to do.
It's got good benefits, for one. The lecturers all get offered prime real estate to bid on (on campus real estate), the research hours are good and the teaching hours aren't excessive either. He actually likes teaching more than the research these days and he tries not to take that as a sign he's getting old or tired or that he regrets any part of pursuing academia. He could get tenure. They keep dropping hints about tenure and, as a bonus, if Beca ever decides to go to college they'll cover her tuition and board. Benefits. They're good benefits.
If the position at Barden also happens to be almost an entire coast away from Portland and Joan, then all the better. It's not like Joan wants to see him much these days; not that he can blame her. He's so no keen on seeing her either. The final, brutal knockout punch to their marriage may have come from him but they were both responsible for slowly suffocating the life out of it. Maybe that's not the best metaphor for it, though. It's not like they didn't try to save it.
God, did they try. They tried. They tried so hard but it just didn't work. It was gone: whatever was keeping them together. For Beca, they tried, but it was wrong and it doesn't fit anymore. They tried until it was awful and pointless and just made him feel a little sick. It was like performing CPR on a dead man so everyone in the room could clear their conscience. He just wanted to stop.
There were definitely more dignified exits from that, though.
He wishes he were a little more sorry.
He remembers telling Joan. Asking Joan.
"I still love you," Joan had said, face blank. She looked exhausted. "But that's not enough anymore."
The worst part is that he agreed.
The worst part is that he still agrees.
(It was the only thing they agreed on in months.)
Talking to Joan (communicating, really, because a lot of it gets done by e-mail) is…tense. Awkward is a kinder word for it but he doesn't think they're there yet. Awkward would be better, he thinks.
They don't hate each other, exactly, but it wasn't the cleanest of ends for their relationship. If they just hated each other, that'd be much easier and also much easier to understand. Even all the vitriol from the divorce can't erase all the years they spent together and it certainly can't erase Beca from the picture.
They can't go back to being friends. (Once upon a time, they were best friends.) They can't be friends but they can be amicable. For Beca's sake as well as their own.
They just didn't work.
He knows he was the one who asks for the divorce. He apologized for it. He was tired. So tired. Tired of patching sinking ships and not meaning anything he said anymore. They both knew it was a doomed effort and that just made the last days of it worse.
It was the hardest decision in his life because it meant walking away from Beca. That wasn't what he intended at all, but that was the fallout of it.
He misses Beca.
Phone calls aren't the same. Flights back to Portland make it better, but Beca knows and every time he goes back to see her she gets more and more reluctant, more and more closed off.
Phone calls become basically nothing.
He misses Beca.
Work is fine. He does his job. It's not outstanding, but good enough. The university has no complains. He thinks, maybe, they should.
This is sort of a tough time for him.
He doesn't want to be alone like this anymore. He's lonely, that's all.
At a few soirees the academics throw, his fellow professors tell him to get out there and wipe that dreary look off his face.
But how the hell do you just 'meet someone' anyway?
Oh.
Sheila is a pharmaceutical sales rep. She's good at her job. The men in the company call her a ball-buster. She doesn't have the time to be offended by it. She's a windstorm, tearing apart any poor fool in her way.
He meets her in a totally trite, cliché way that sounds straight out of a movie script. He's not looking where he's going and turns round in a coffee shop, spilling his coffee over her. After profusely apologising and getting a thorough verbal beat down for his absentmindedness, he buys her insists on buying her a coffee and replacement muffin for the one he knocked across the floor at it turns into conversation.
He just has a feeling. He likes her.
Saying he 'likes' any woman just makes him feel foolish and more childish than the kids he teaches at Barden, all full of an arrogant assumption they know the world, the kind of that only comes with being that young and hopeful. In a strange way, he feels that around her. The stupidity, sure, but also the hope.
She's not that interested, to be honest. She's not totally disinterested, either. It's like the first week of classes when the freshmen who sign up for Intro to Comparative Literature are sizing him up to decide whether or not they should commit to the class or a file a request for transfer before the deadlines pass and the student office gets snippy about it. It's like that, but he has none of the layers of indifference or a security built up over a career of teaching. It's like going back in time to his first ever class or the first ever time he asked someone out.
He doesn't want to deal with what might happen if he asks her number because he confidence feels shot so he scribbles his own onto a napkin and a shoves it into her hand with another muffin since she seemed to like the first one.
She sees the writing on the napkin at once. There's nothing smooth or debonair or even subtle about him and he feels stupid for trying to go that right.
Still, she smiles.
It's nice.
As it turns out, Sheila's been married once before as well and she has a daughter too, a few years older than Beca.
Warren's not going to introduce them any time soon but he's thankful for the middle ground. At the very least, Sheila knows where he's coming from when he goes on and on about how Beca doesn't want to talk to him or how Beca's getting into trouble at school or how Beca doesn't even listen to Joan these days, always cooped up in her room surfing gods knows what on the internet. It's not the most romantic of conversations topics but you know what? Warren just needs a space to vent about his worries. Warren talks about his students too in sparse anecdotes that are cut to a highlight reel: one exceptionally stupid question here (he knows there aren't supposed to be any questions but it would be nice if, by college, they'd actually bother to read the text), one wild theory there or a tale about how the undergrads end up in the most bizarre places to sleep.
His thoughts circle back to Beca a lot, though, because every time he hears a story about a girl on campus assaulted or a girl on campus missing or the things he sees and hears about just because students think their lecturers are invisible when they walk through the halls— He worries about Beca a lot: what she's doing and how she is. The calls to check in come less and less regularly and Beca insists that it's embarrassing to have either of her parents show up for non-necessary school things. Warren doesn't even know what those things are considering how Beca keeps taking about how much she wants to drop out of this club and that club and just practice her music at home. What kind of music is it anyway? Every time he asks Beca she just tells him it's not ready or he's probably never heard of it or if he had heard of it, he'd never get it and she doesn't want his judgments ruining her fun.
Sheila has troubles too and she shares them with him in their private space, dour walls and a lot of coffee over a sink. She talks about her worries on the house, her health, and the awful people at work. It takes him a few sessions to notice, but she never complains about her daughter.
However tired Sheila claims to be, however beaten down by the three thousand things she needs to remember at once she says she is, she always looks stunning. It's this intense drive; this zeal for her job that always comes through. She's persistent and relentless and he admires her terribly for it.
She always looks great too, obviously. He's never spotted a dark circle under her eyes once and her blonde hair is always glossy with elegant waves. She keeps herself in better shape than he does, too, and she's run a half-marathon before. (The result of some sort of bet with her daughter or her ex-husband. It's really unclear and he doesn't want to go there lest he get suckered into doing one too.)
Really, though. He's just taken aback. It's nice knowing her and talking to her and doing this with her.
It's nice.
There are still things to get over, like the way Sheila smiles always start of business-perfect and take time to soften into the droopy, half-lidded look of exasperation at him. (He knows that sounds bad but that's not the way he means it.) There's still this feeling like he's not sure if she's dating him or befriending him or if she's half as interested in him as he is in her. They've got a romance going on, she informs him, but he knows he's got a hell of a way to go before it really feels like that.
Still, it's really nice.
Time just sort of goes.
Warren was never good at anniversaries of any sort. He's fine with generalities and years (he knows Beca's age just fine and he remembers exactly how long he was married) but the dates, day and month, throw him off. Usually he can guess seasons right. It was a major point of contention between him and Joan and, thank god, Sheila doesn't care as much or them.
Still, it's early in the relationship and he'd really like to make a good impression (dating is still weird to him; he thought he outgrew this over a decade ago) so he makes it a point to remember her birthday and a plan a fancy date for it.
He goes to pick her up at her place in a nice, new dinner jacket that actually fits him now that he's shoulders seem to have shrunk a little with age and the style of the day is this super-fitted, tailored look. (He makes a mental note to maybe pick up some more nice pants to go with the look. His waistline, in contrast to his shoulders, seems to have grown. If anything, it's another reminder how long it's been since he's had to do the whole dating and wooing thing.)
Everything goes as normal, or as normal as normal goes these days as he picks her up at her house. It's a small, two-bedroom place (not that he's ever seen the bedrooms), cosy with a narrow hallway that leads into the combined kitchen/living area with a couch tucked away in the corner by a modestly sized TV. Little bowls are strewn everywhere that store knick-knacks and post its dot the fridge in varying shades of obnoxious neon. There's an upright piano out pushed against a wall even though it's cramping the room.
Then he sees it: flowers.
Something irrational and panicky springs up and buries itself in the pit of his chest when he sees a big vase of flowers sitting on the table in Sheila's living room. The arrangement is nicely accompanied by an elegantly understated birthday card in black and white, with silver foil embossed onto cardstock. He can't make out much of the card, still mostly closed but edged open enough time to sort of catch the fluorescent lights, but he makes out economical cursive and a signature that looks distinctly like the word 'Posen' as in Sheila's ex-husband.
Posen is the name on some of the letters that she gets sent to her house, though it's not the name she uses professionally or the one that gets printed on her business cards. Mostly, Sheila goes by her maiden name now. It was the name she was known as professionally before she became a mostly stay-at-home-mom and housewife with some part time work on the side.
Warren really, really wants to read the card. What is it? A courtesy card as a 'hey, thanks for all those years raising a kid together; we're divorced but still friends so have these totally platonic flowers' greeting? Some sign Sheila's ex is still hung up over her? Is it just common procedure to give your ex-spouse flowers on their birthday? He really, really wants to read it. Discretely as he can, while Sheila is still upstairs putting the finishing touches up on her makeup for their date (some things about this game never change; not since high school) he peeks it open.
Many happy returns
Faithfully,
Aubrey Posen
There's a P.S. just under it, too, but it's in the tiniest script Warren's ever seen handwritten and he can't even begin to handle that without his reading glasses. (He doesn't like to think about needing reading glasses. If Aubrey can write in anything that tiny, then he sure doesn't need reading glasses. Far-sightedness isn't a totally definitive sign of aging, he's quite aware, but that doesn't mean the thought of Sheila's ex still in position of the eyesight of a twenty-year-old doesn't throw him.) The handwriting is spidery, yet strong. Bold, deft lines that link up together well and in a nice fountain pen to boot; he can tell from the variance in the stroke.
Ugh. Aubrey. That's just the sort of old-fashioned name a guy like Sheila's ex would have, wouldn't it? At least he can console himself with the fact it's mostly a girl's name now. (He knows Sheila's ex is still going to be a grizzled, wall of a man, tough and built through years of gruelling service and an austere duty to his country but still. He can help himself however he likes. In another time, he can muse on how shallow and petty he's being (it is just a very, very civil letter between amicable exes and maybe he and Joan should take a book out of the former Posens) and how maybe it has something to do with the fact Warren hasn't dated in years and this whole affair (no pun intended) makes him feel he's in college again, desperate and unsure of himself.
He's definitely like that wide-eyed kid in college, though, because it turns out his thoughts turned into daydreams and he missed her walking down the stairs. She taps him on the shoulder and he's so taken by surprise he jumps and almost knocks the flower vase over. It feels like a contrived Rom-Com he's too old to be in, like the meet-cute in an old Meg Ryan movie that Joan would make him watch.
"Oh, don't mind the flowers," Sheila says. "My daughter sent them over for me this morning. My birthday and such."
"Your daughter?"
He always assumed that, when he came over, Sheila shooed her kid away to friends for sleepovers or that she was sequestered up in her room upstairs trying to pretend her mother wasn't actually dating someone.
But 'my daughter sent them over' doesn't really fit in with those assumptions.
"She, uh, doesn't… She's not with you right now?"
He has no idea what Sheila's daughter would even be like. Mostly he was thankful he wouldn't have to meet her yet. (That would be too soon, right?) The worst case scenario he imagined was Sheila's daughter opening the door to size him up, a sneer of distaste on her face before she slammed the door shut. Warren always assumed he was half-decent with kids (young adults, anyway) but Beca has really put most of his assumptions under question.
"She lives with her father," Sheila says. "She had the flowers delivered by the florists. She visits when school's out, sometimes, and time's permitting. I'm sure if I asked, she'd visit more but I think there's enough asked of her already. Now's not a good time."
He laughs and rubs the back of his neck. He jokes, "I thought women had a better chance at winning these things."
It turns out to be a terrible idea. He realises it as soon as he gets to 'winning' but by then he's committed to the sentence and the rest of it just comes tumbling out. He's about to apologise before Sheila speaks up.
"Not if the father asks for custody." She chuckles darkly. "It wouldn't have mattered anyway." Sheila blinks and looks away. "He had a good lawyer."
He knows it's time to change the subject. He rubs at the back of his neck again, trying to think up something even if it's stupid and inane but Sheila beats him to it again.
"Aubrey's such a dear," she says. "You know, when we were married, she'd send me flowers pretending to be her father because she knew he'd always forget to do anything."
He smiles weakly. "Sounds like a nice kid."
"She is," Sheila says. "Marc wasn't around most of the time, so it was nice to think he was thinking of me. She ran paper routes to buy them."
He glances over at the card again. Right. Marc is the ex. Aubrey is the daughter. Actually, Warren thinks it's a little weird they've never been mentioned by name before. He says, "You don't talk about her much."
"Who?"
"Aubrey," he says. "I go on about Beca all the time. I'm sorry if that—"
"Oh no," Sheila says. "Talk about Beca as much as you like; you just light up when you do." She laughs. "She's certainly a handful. I wouldn't mind it."
"Oh," he says. "Well, okay then. If it doesn't bother you."
"It doesn't in the least."
He glances at the card again. "Your daughter signs cards to you with her full name?"
"She's her father's daughter through and through," Sheila sighs. She rubs the corner of the card between her thumb and forefinger, admiring the grain. "It's very good workmanship on the card this year, though."
"Workmanship?"
"Aubrey hand makes me a card every year," Sheila says. "It's tradition. She's not allowed to cheat and buy a card. When she was seven, oh I think it was seven, maybe, she gave me this monstrosity covered in glue and glitter and I teased her and said one day she'd get lazy and just go to the store and buy me a card. She got so upset and promised that she'd keep making me cards herself if that was the kind I preferred. She even drafted up a little contract and made us sign it. It was so cute. I think I have it framed up somewhere. She insisted I keep it."
It's the kind of story he tells about Beca all the time but Sheila never shares about Aubrey. Her expression is wistful and a little pained. He knows that territory too.
"You don't have to talk about her. I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable."
"No, no," Sheila says. "You're right. I don't talk about her very much at all, do I? It's nice, actually, to remember her. Such an odd little girl."
Sheila looks like she's getting onto the verge of tears, though, which is emphatically not what he wanted at all when he brought up her daughter. He looks around and puts his hands back in the pockets of his jacket. "So…'many happy returns', huh?"
Sheila laughs. "Her father's daughter."
They have a date discussing their kids. On paper, it sounds awful, but they've been dating for a while now anyway and kids are an inescapable fact of their lives. (Aubrey's leaving the nest soon, though, and that's anxiety inducing for any parent. He's glad Beca still has a lot of growing up ahead of her; he's still got too much to try and tell her before she strikes it off herself.)
So, at the fancy restaurant with some nice wine and better pasta, they talk about their kids.
It only takes two stories about Aubrey for Warren to find not all little girls were like Beca at all. Intuitively, he knows it has to be the case. A part of him always thought Beca was their special little pearl in a sea, one-of-a-kind and special, and another side of him always wondered how much of that was rose-tinted glasses. Beca and Aubrey exist on polar opposites of child-raising experience, though, all the way from their position on the baby-spectrum.
When Beca was a baby, she bawled all the time and just kept going and going and going until Warren and Joan decoded the mystery secret that was their daughter's moods. Beca would cry at the drop of a hat. Aubrey, he'd been told, could sleep, quite literally, through a tornado and only ever cried when hungry or tired. Hell, they had to periodically check the kid's diapers because she had no real concept of discomfort and happily sat in her crib, stewing away in her filth lest she inconvenience her parents. Aubrey hardly ever cried, so much so that they wondered if it was a lung development problem.
(In later years, Marc had apparently blamed being 'coddled' for the lack of crying that implied a lack of lung exercise that he somehow used as the cause for much of Aubrey's childhood asthma: a condition that was, also apparently, nowhere to be seen in the family health records. Sheila tells this and other stories about her daughter's baby years, personally his favourite years of child rearing, with a wry smile and a distant fondness that's always painful to see. He wonders if he looks like that when he talks about Beca.)
When Beca was in her terrible twos, there wasn't a think in the world they could stop her from trying to put in her mouth. He and Joan spent many evening panicking she'd gotten into somewhere she shouldn't have gotten or that she'd hit or tripped and somehow terrible injured herself in her haphazard exploration of their house in the suburbs. It was typical new, young couple panic, he supposed, looking at this soft, squishy, tiny little thing they'd created. Beca laughed as much as she cried and tipped over many (plastic) jugs of water and cups in her attempt to figure out how they worked.
Aubrey, evidently, had no 'terrible two' phase. Marc didn't believe in such things. It's the most Sheila says on the matter, or any part of Aubrey's early childhood. She skips straight ahead to the last half of elementary, all without ever once showing Warren a baby picture.
Aubrey sends more flowers and a card, also homemade but looking sharp enough to be store-bought because of Aubrey's steady hand and excellent penmanship, to Sheila on Mother's Day.
It between her birthday and Mother's Day, Sheila gets another card in March. He can't think of any holiday that would require celebration then. Of course, Sheila's favourite book is Alice in Wonderland so maybe random flowers on her un-birthday are a running joke between her and Aubrey the way lightsabers used to be a running joke between him and Beca.
No, it turns out Aubrey sends flowers in March because that's when her own birthday is.
Her rationale was something along the lines of 'If I spent a whole day painfully pushing a object out of my uterus, honorary or otherwise, and then it spent the next eighteen years of my life annoying me, I'd like some congratulations on the matter, by the ungrateful whelp I spawned' or at least it to his best recollection of Sheila's summary.
Sheila gets lots of cards through the year and long letters with them too even though e-mails are faster because Aubrey likes tangible objects and Sheila like things she can file away into boxes and look at whenever she's feeling nostalgic. Sheila says Aubrey hates the wastefulness of gift giving and speaks lengths on the frivolity of flowers, cards and chocolates but, nonetheless, things dutifully trickle through in the mail.
Sheila has a manila folder full of things Aubrey sends her, photos and post cards and letters and souvenirs in padded envelopes and an old scrapbook of faded pictures.
"Marc hates birthdays," she explains later, thumbing through pages of a scrapbook. There doesn't seem to be much in the world Marc actually likes. "I think she's overcompensating."
Aubrey, as it turns out, overcompensates a lot.
"You get happy divorce day cards?"
Well, technically, it's a happy divorce day balloon with an accompanying card on tied to the string.
At first, he thought if was some kind of spiteful joke from Marc. Then he took a second to recall the terse words Sheila had to say about him and remembered the man had no sense of humour. (His opinion on Marc is not that well-informed considering Sheila only broaches the topic when she's annoyed and he's her current boyfriend so it's still to early days for much in the way of exes except in the way they tie in to their kids, or at least that's Warren's own rationale for how he's equally sparse, if not more so, with details about Joan.)
The balloon is the shape of a heart. It's one of those foil balloons that keep helium trapped in there for days without drooping, grand but not gaudy: gold foil with red lettering, bold in a way that echoes the glamour and freedom of a Beyoncé music video. (Is it Beyoncé? You know what? He has no clue. It's pop star glitzy without being kitsch.)
It's also very big.
Noticing the balloon floating in the centre of Sheila's living room (slash kitchen slash general entertainment area) is not snooping. Rather, it's part and parcel of being a sentient human being. It's like the flowers again, only not. Especially since the balloon is tied to one of the legs of a side-table next to the couch. The couch Sheila basically shoved him on because he wouldn't stop bothering her with the popcorn. It's right next to him, bobbing gently up and down and he doesn't know what to make of it. The envelope with the balloon is unmarked.
Sheila is pattering about behind the kitchen counter assembling some special mix of aforementioned popcorn, nuts and miscellaneous healthy snack food options (an oxymoron if he's ever heard on) into a bowl for their Netflix date. (He idly wonders when he became the kind of guy to go on a Netflix date but is mostly glad they've gotten to the part of the relationship where they don't have to go out as much, not that he doesn't like going out like Joan always claimed, but because it's quiet and comfortable and thoughtful. Then he wonders where the nearest Blockbuster is because he just misses being able to admire the box while waiting for people to be ready for the movie.)
There's just the sound of things falling into a bowl and humming for a while. He wonders if she heard him.
"So… a divorce day card, huh?" he tries again.
"Yes, I get them," Sheila replies. "I thought that much was obvious from the balloon you're sitting next to."
"Interesting," he says and twiddles his fingers in his lap.
"Don't play games, Warren," she sighs. "Just ask what you want to ask."
"Who sent it?"
"Aubrey, of course."
"Aubrey?" He frowns.
How did Aubrey even manage to get a divorce day balloon anyway? Are those a thing now? Are they special order? He doesn't want to purchase one (though he has a feeling Beca might like to, later on down the line when she has access to her own credit card for online shopping that doesn't need to be cleared by a parent) but he'd still like to know.
"Her sense of humour is a little…off," Sheila says, filling the silence.
"Do they bother you?" If Beca sent him something like this, he'd assume she was rubbing salt in the wound.
"No, no, nothing like that," she assures and smiles. "No, quite frankly I think they're funny too. It's Aubrey's own fault for forgetting to cancel her deal with the florists."
"Florists?"
"They came with flowers too." Sheila points to a vase on the kitchen counter. Usually it's filled with cheery daisies made from fabric and plastic that are pretty convincing until you're about a foot away from them. Now the vase is filled with orchids, lilies and an assortment of other dainty white flowers he doesn't recognise in a sort of riff on a wedding dress, he supposes. He didn't notice the change, too distracted by the giant balloon floating by the couch.
"How does a teenager even afford all this?"
"One year, she placed a bulk order for them to keep coming on my anniversary." She lets out an expasperated puff of air. "The marriage obviously didn't work out but Posens just can't back away from commitments. Even ones with florists who refuse to give refunds. She improvised, I suppose and she tops it off with balloons. I think she uses her allowance for that. She doesn't buy much else and she's got money burning a hole in her pocket from her jobs too. "
Okay. Now he understands overcompensating. Teenagers are supposed to blow their money on stupid things, not attempt to further impress their parents with it.
"There's got to be an interesting story behind this, right?"
The lights flicker off. Sheila plops down next to him on the couch, somehow still managing to look dignified and elegant as she does so. "I'll tell you after the movie. That is, if you behave."
He's endured many Rom-Coms in his life, but the one he watches that night is somehow even less bearable than usual.
So the story goes, after the divorce, Marc and Sheila wouldn't stop pestering Aubrey about if she was 'feeling alright' and really 'okay with things' because she 'didn't seem to be expressing her feeling' Aubrey just wanted them to leave it along because she was genuinely just okay with it. "Sometimes there are just no feelings to express." Aubrey, in a fit of teenage moodiness, exclaimed, "I'm fine! What more do you want me to say? Do you want me to make you a happy divorce day card?"
She did (mostly because no one told her she shouldn't) and when Sheila and Marc received the cards, the whole situation seemed so patently ridiculous that they both just burst out laughing. In any case, that was how they got through their first year of divorce. (The florists refused to refund the however many years of flowers Aubrey had back-ordered but were happy to shift the date of delivery from anniversary of marriage to anniversary of divorce.)
Aubrey was the reason they tried to stay married, the reason they went through with a divorce, the reason they could cope with the divorce and the reason, above all, that they tried to be happy.
"One day," Sheila says, and her smile is simultaneously sad and satisfied. "One day, without even realizing it, your kids will start taking care of you as much as you take care of them. As a parent, you hope that day never has to come and you don't realize how you got there but— It'll make you proud. The day you realize it, you'll be so, so proud."
Aubrey forwards scans of her report cards via e-mail and calls once a month. When she has a parent-teacher conference her father must be absent for, she brings her mother via a Skype line or her laptop. (Even when her father is present she'll still bring her mother on the laptop. Apparently, they still find a way to bicker through cyberspace.) Sheila loves the novelty of being a talking disembodied head at the events and Aubrey, from the sound of Sheila's stories, is too resigned to be anything other than ineffectual to the way students gawk at it.
Resigned may not be the best way to put it. Aubrey doesn't complain, but even through second-hand stories, Warren can tell she was reluctant to go along with a lot of her parents' requests and is, at the very least, embarrassed by some of their antics. (Sheila takes exceptional glee in retelling the story where Aubrey got stage fright at the school play, destroyed half the stage when she knocked a prop tree over in nervousness, and them absolutely refused to allow them to go to any more events until she was sure she was up to scratch.)
She's certainly an interesting kid. Most kids are, he supposes as he recollects Beca's more interesting temper tantrums, careering through shopping malls stolen mobility scooters.
Just like Marc didn't believe in the terrible twos, he also didn't believe in temper tantrums or sulking. By Sheila's account, Aubrey may, in fact, be the most well behaved child in the world. She's does what her parents tell her to do with minimal fuss, ate all her vegetables, went to be on time and with homework complete. (Warren thinks just because Sheila got a kid who actually enjoyed the education system, though. Beca's smart but she does not enjoy being told to express that in one way. She doesn't enjoy being told to do, anything, really, which was obviously going to be a pain if her mother wasn't the same in a lot of respects.)
So far, the only common ground he can find between them is that both Beca and Aubrey have a thing for music. Considering Beca enjoys blasting out her hearing with some sort of electronica beat thing on her headphones and Aubrey plays cello in the Northwest Indiana Symphony Youth Orchestra, he supposes that's not much.
He's bad with dates. It seems like they've been dating for a while, though. He still can't recall anniversaries but they've gone through a few minor holidays together and it feels substantial. It feels comfortable. Is this about the time a relationship tanks? No, that was a while ago. It wasn't like crossing a hurdle, but more like walking up a hill and now they're over it, or something like that.
He likes this, though. He's not lonely. He likes Sheila. Substantially.
Beca doesn't live with him (and is absolutely loathe to visit him) and Aubrey doesn't live with Sheila (but, by the sound of the stories, visits as often as she can).
His nerves are thankful they don't have to weather meeting Aubrey just yet, but the longer and longer he and Sheila are together, the more he considers days further and further ahead and the more meeting Aubrey seems like an inevitability that makes him sickening nervous, but also, in an even weirder way, excited.
(Who is he kidding? Kids hate him. Beca does and Beca is his own kid. The grad students like him but the undergrads have mixed opinions on him that get progressively worse the closer to freshman year you ask. Warren's appeal to kids peaks somewhere around nine months and then tanks until they make it past puberty.)
Aubrey visits a lot, he remembers. That's the only reason Sheila keeps the second bedroom in her house a bedroom instead of converting it into a storage room like she did with the other. Aubrey visits Sheila and not the other way around because Sheila's days of flying coach across coasts were, as she put it, 'well behind her' and also because Marc thinks Aubrey needs 'suffering to build a little character'. (Aubrey and Marc used to live in Arizona, and before that Washington, and, once, Alaska, but Indiana is apparently set home base for the time being. It's fewer flights, more buses, which is, apparently, a more agreeable arrangement for Aubrey.)
So summer is approaching and since Sheila has a timeshare with Marc when it comes to their child's time over the biggest school break of the year, Warren braces himself for meeting her and prays he can make a good impression.
"I thought you said Aubrey visited you every summer." He takes the dish from Sheila and wipes it dry before setting it, neat, into the pile.
"Usually she does." Sheila washes the soapsuds of the last of the dishes and passes it to him. "She has plans this year, though."
They haven't moved in together yet. (If they did, she'd presumably move into his house since it's bigger even though she's accumulated more stuff.) They spend and increasing amount of time at one another's place though and the whole experience makes him feel about twenty-something all over again: helpless and unequipped for reality. Sheila insists on helping him clean up after their taco dinner (mostly assembled from kits in the supermarket). He wonders if she's scoping out his domestic skills.
"You won't be seeing her at all, then?"
"No, not this summer." Sheila carefully looks over the way he dries the dish and his hunch is a step closer to being confirmed. "On the plus side, neither will her father."
"She's going to be gone the entire summer?"
Okay. He knows he was wishing to put off meeting Aubrey forever at the start of the year but now he feels a little scammed.
"She's a busy little bee," Sheila says. "She's going on a trip with her school to teach English or something in Sri Lanka and then she's going to be backpacking around Europe. Oh, and I think she managed to get some sort of job as a counsellor at a summer camp?"
Sheila told him Aubrey's age once but he can't remember it. Something like sixteen, he thinks. She's going to have an exciting time.
"Wait, hang on, backpacking through Europe? Whose parents are going to have the privilege of overseeing that?"
"No one's. They're just having fun on their own."
"You're really just going to let her go gallivanting through Europe with her friends?"
"They're more like her acquaintances," Sheila says. "They really needed fourth person so it's easier to book rooms and such."
"Isn't that worse? If they just only kind of know each other?"
"They're still classmates, so I'm not that concerned."
"You're not worried something's going to happen to her?"
"Aubrey quite well experienced with airports, travelling and foreign countries."
"What if she gets in trouble?"
"Well, she's good with languages and is a very pretty girl, so I'm confident she can talk her way out of whatever may come."
"What if she gets abducted? Like—" What was that movie they watched on their last Netflix date? "Like in that Liam Neeson movie!"
"Taken?"
"Yes! That one!"
"Then things will work out alright because Aubrey is nowhere near as trusting as the protagonist's daughter and, while Marc may not be as roguishly handsome as Liam Neeson, he's twice as stubborn. I'm sure he can go chase her down. Besides, the whole reason the daughter got into that mess in the movie was because she exploited her parents' lack of communication to go behind their backs and do something stupid. Aubrey has informed us of her intentions and produced this plan of what they're going to do."
Sheila digs through her handbag and pulls out a folded sheet of paper entitled 'trip proposal and fund request', either to show off her daughter's organisational skills or calm down her anxious partner.
He reads over the sheet. "They're going to Amsterdam? And the Red Light District?"
"What else would they do in Amsterdam?" Sheila shrugs. "If she's going to visit Amsterdam she may as well do it right." Quietly, she adds, "I should tell them to visit the Heineken factory."
How are they going to drink beer if they're not even eighteen? Whatever. "Amsterdam. With the drugs?"
"Aubrey is everyone's boring, sober, straight-edge friend who's responsible for making sure no one dies. She'll be fine."
"They might not even stick to this plan."
"They probably won't," she says. "But that's less because Aubrey's lying and more because things never go according to plan. I think it'll be a good experience for her."
"You're not bothered? At all? By what might happen? A lot of things could happen."
"I think you're overreacting here."
"Only because you're under-reacting," he says.
Sheila laughs. "Why are you so worried?"
"I just— I wouldn't let Beca do this."
"Beca's twelve. I rather hope you wouldn't."
"No, I mean, if Beca was Aubrey's age I still wouldn't let her do this! Neither would Beca's mother if I know her."
"Well, Beca isn't Aubrey age yet, is she? So you wouldn't know if she could really handle it. A lot can change in a few years."
"No, it'd still be out of the question." He rubs his chin. "I don't think I could sleep at night knowing Beca was out there all alone."
"Aubrey's travelling with friends…"
"You said they were acquaintances."
"So that's basically Aubrey-speak for what any other teenager would consider a friend. What Aubrey considers a 'friend' is what other people call a 'best friend' and what Aubrey considers a 'best friend' encompasses our idea of person you would willing be an accessory to murder for. She's a little intense."
His shoulders drop as he runs out of steam. "You've got a lot of trust in your kid to behave."
"Well, Amsterdam's actually pretty tame these days, you know? Back in my day it was something else."
"That's hardly reassuring."
Sheila pats his back. "Let's just hope Beca never wants to go too far from home, then."
He lets out another sigh and she laughs. "What?" he says.
"I was wondering why you were so worked up about it. Sometimes I forget how just about everything in the world reminds you of Beca."
"Not everything," he protests.
"You think too much," she says. "I know I should have expected as much from an academic but it's become a running theme with the men I'm interested in."
"It's not that bad."
"The other day, when we were shopping for plates to replace the ones you dropped, it was like every design inspired a different story about Beca."
"Beca has broken a lot of plates in her day. That's why my house is filled with plastic."
"I feel like I can guess where she got that from," she drawls.
He huffs. "Still, it's a shame."
"What's a shame? Your inability to wash china dishes without dropping them on the floor?"
He rolls his eyes. (The soap Sheila uses is extra slippery, that's all.) "No."
"What then?" Sheila says, smirking.
"I don't know. I was just hoping I'd get the chance to meet her."
"You want to meet my daughter?"
"Uh, well…" Was it not a good idea to want that?
Sheila senses his trepidation at once. "No, I mean, I'm not mad, I'm just—I'm surprised. I didn't know we were at that stage already."
"I mean we don't have to be"
"I'd like you to meet her too. Someday, I mean. But not this summer."
"Oh," he says.
"It's just— Well, she doesn't even know I'm seeing someone."
"Oh," he says.
That makes sense. He knows he hasn't mentioned anything about Sheila to Beca, but he figured that was more because he and Beca were on shaky enough ground as it was. Aubrey and Sheila seem to have a very different relationship. He never considered Aubrey just didn't know.
"Yes," Sheila says. "'Oh'."
He glances around the room awkwardly. Lamely, he tries to bring the topic of conversation back on track. "You're really okay with Europe?"
"Aubrey wants to do something fun just for herself," Sheila replies. "If anything, I'm relieved."
"You know," he says, looking over a postcard Aubrey has mailed over, this one with the Eiffel Tower on it, "Aubrey's handwriting is kind of a manly."
It's the kind of spidery cursive people don't really use anymore. It's the kind of handwriting you see on old documents, birth certificates, and ration cards in either of the World Wars: old-fashioned and official. If he was any younger, he supposes he wouldn't be able to read it. Maybe it'd be considered flouncy by modern standards, but it's like the handwriting of any male politician or dignitary or anything else back in the day.
"Manly, huh?" Sheila says. She playfully snatches the postcard from his hands. "I don't think I've ever heard that said about it before. Messy, sure, but that's only if she rushing, or flustered. Both, by the looks of this. She must be having fun."
"Don't look so upset about it. I thought you were glad she was having a big European adventure."
"Not if her handwriting is getting sloppy."
"Wow. Tough standards."
"If I let the girl go on a big European adventure, the least she can do is keep up her penmanship, don't you think? Oh well. Maybe she can be a doctor. Bad handwriting's a prerequisite for that right?"
"I wouldn't really call that bad…"
"Alright, I've decided," Sheila says, ignoring him. "I'd really like if she became a doctor."
"Who wouldn't?"
"I'd make a killing in health care costs if my kid was a doctor."
He snorts. "Killing."
Maybe Aubrey just has a thing for snail mail? First with the letters, now with postcards. The only stuff that arrives in his mailbox is a junk and bills. Sheila's received enough postcards to plaster a tasteful collage across one of the living room walls. (That's what she's done with the things, actually, after she cut the corner off where the stamps were.)
Sheila shows off the new postcards to him, of course. The conversations about them don't last longer than two minutes, but he's starting to get a sense of how she felt the week he wouldn't shut up about Beca (aka, the week leading up to her birthday. He called home and Joan answered, mercifully, forcing Beca onto the phone for five awkward but precious minutes, but that was the most of it.)
In any case, Aubrey has excellent taste in postcards.
(Sheila informed him Aubrey had excellent taste in everything except music, but he always though that that was just the typical rose-tinted view of a parent. It may just be an objective assessment.)
Saying things like 'it'll be fine' and 'nothing could possibly go wrong' is, by the convention of movies, a recipe for doom and disaster. Murphy's Law should be in action. Terrible things cross his mind. Sheila doesn't care and just watches daytime TV on her TiVo when she gets back from work, going about her life exactly as usual.
Against every conceivable odd, the trip goes exactly fine.
Aubrey has exactly one day to get over her jetlag before she's got to mind a bunch of rowdy children at camp for the remainder of the summer. Being the dutiful daughter she is, she uses several hours of that one rest day to debrief her mother on the Europe trip over Skype. It's a conversation that goes on and on with such vigorous intensity that Sheila doesn't have time to reply to any of his messages. (The one text she does send says she's too busy texting Aubrey that day and he was forewarned so he'd best deal with it.)
If Beca talked to him that long, he'd be pretty excited about it too so he doesn't mind, just glad she's happy. (He'd actually lock her in a room until he knew exactly what went down in those hotel rooms in Europe but that's not the point.)
She remembers they've set up a coffee around Barden the next day anyway. She never forgets and he's not sure why he ever bothers reminding her.
"Of course the trip went fine," Sheila says. "Posens are some sort of logistical savants. The trip went beautifully. She even got to see the Vienna Symphony Orchestra one night, she just went on and on about them. It was adorable."
"She convinced everyone else to go to the orchestra with her?" Maybe Aubrey's friends are just the cultured, nerdy types who spent all their time exploring the art museums of Europe. That would certainly explain why Sheila was so accommodating about letting Aubrey travel with them. Yes, that seems right. Aubrey is responsible and cerebral and has equally responsible and cerebral friends. What parent would just let their child run free thousands miles away from any sort of supervision or parental lifeline?
"Of course not," Sheila says, shattering any preconceptions of his. "They're teenagers. They hate the orchestra. They went clubbing. She was the sober friend who rescued them halfway through. That's why they keep her around. I thought I told you this."
Before he can register the fact Aubrey went gallivanting around a foreign city alone in the middle of the night, Sheila continues. "In any case, she had a wonderful trip and she got me these souvenirs."
Sheila digs through her bag to find a small paper bag filled with trinkets: magnets, small plates and old stamps. She preens as she shows it to him and explains what each one is and where Aubrey bought them. They're special, each and every one.
(He misses Beca.)
Does it seem like they talk about Aubrey and Beca a lot? Because they kind of do, but it's not as often as it seems. It'd probably be less often is Aubrey random cards didn't keep coming in the mail, though at least she defaults to store bought ones for the lesser holidays. Letters, too.
Aubrey only does Internet chats sparsely and the phone calls are only once a month. (Though, boy, are those calls long.) The texting after Europe was, it seems, a novelty, explaining even further why Sheila was so busy with it. Usually, Aubrey neglects to check her phone more than once a day ("why he even bought it for her I'll never know," Sheila grouses one morning) and her texts are efficient and polite. If Sheila asks a question, there is an answer to it, but no efforts to make a conversation. If Sheila doesn't ask a question, she just types back 'received'.
Letters, though. Aubrey writes a lot of those. Her letters continually come in, regular as clockwork, and when they arrive in the mail, Sheila mentions it. That's all. Just casually. He talks about Beca a lot, after all.
Sometimes, he just wonders if he'll run out of stories about Beca before Sheila will run out of letters from Aubrey.
Sheila bullies him into taking her dancing. He can't dance. She refuses to believe that's a problem, so much so that she ignores him when he apologises for stepping on her toes, either because she's pretending he didn't in order to preserve the magic or because it's happening so often she's just gotten used to it. She smiles gamely the whole night and Warren does his best to smile back even if he doesn't get what's going on.
By the time he gets into it and his feet have kind of learned not to smash into anything near by anymore, the night is almost over and, surprisingly, he's disappointed.
"I'm sorry I have no sense of rhythm," he says to Sheila over coffee as they sit in the living room of his house. She sips at it politely because it's the best drink he can make even if she prefers tea. (He should really buy some tea.) Warren thinks she just likes holding something warm in her hands.
"It's fine," Sheila replies. Her fingers drum against the side of the mug. Her hands are small and dainty and her fingers are shorter than he realised; he's only noticing now because of the way they lace over the mug. "I've certainly seen much worse. And you were a good sport too, which is more than I can say for some other people."
"Well, I do still have to do my best to impress the lady."
"Oh?" Sheila raises an eyebrow and lifts the mug up so he can't make out her expression. "Are you still trying to woo me?"
"Is the effort not showing?"
"Your efforts always show, not exactly subtly at that, but I wasn't sure how long this honeymoon phase of ours was going to last."
"Yeah, you're right," he says. "Pretty soon, we'll be lazing around on the couch because we're too tired to go out, arguing about how we're not trying anymore and sniping at each other's annoying habits."
"Can we skip ahead to that? Because I've got a lot of annoying habits of yours I'd like to address."
"Does that mean we've completed stage one?"
Sheila rolls her eyes. "Consider me wooed."
That feeling of familiarity and comfort grows by the day. He feels like things are good.
No, things are good.
For the first time in a while, he feels really, truly content.
"Do you remember the time we were talking about that Liam Neeson movie and you said you wanted to meet Aubrey?"
"Yes?" he says, though he doesn't know why he's phrasing it as a question.
"Well, now Aubrey knows I'm seeing someone," Sheila says. "She says I shouldn't have bothered informing her unless it was serious. So that makes me wonder. Are we serious?"
He swallows. "We're getting too old to not be serious, aren't we?"
"Warren," she warns.
"I would think so, yes. I think we're getting serious."
She smiles.
Eavesdropping is infantile and terrible breach of privacy but he'd just like a heads up on whether or not Aubrey will think he's the anti-Christ for daring to date her mother. Warren thinks of himself as a likable, reasonable sort of fellow and he's not exactly one to live life ruled under the iron thumb of his child's whims, but he's knows what family is supposed to mean. When he was dating Joan, he had to win over her parents. Now he's dating Sheila, he knows he'll have to win over her parents and her daughter.
He can't see anything but Sheila's kept the door to the living room ajar. The sounds are muffled but comprehensible.
"Do you remember when I told you I was seeing someone?" Sheila starts.
"Yes," he hears Aubrey say through the video chat. "I told you that I don't care."
"It became serious."
"…For serious?"
"Serious."
Aubrey makes a strange, thoughtful grumbling noise. At least, he thinks she does. It's a quiet, even through the absurd volume Sheila has the speakers set up at; maybe it's just the crackling of the connection. "Does he treat you well?"
"He does."
"Are you happy?"
"I am."
"Does this have anything to do with Dad?"
"No."
"Okay," Aubrey says. There's nothing difficult about the way she speaks. It's almost like a shrug, but he can't imagine the alien gesture on her stiff, proper posture. "I'm happy for you."
It's settled just like that. Aubrey goes on to talk about her school recital next week and how much she loathes the cello part for Pachibel's Canon in D (the most boring cello part in the history of cello parts, so much so even the second violins have it better off, whatever that means). It's like nothing ever happened, but not like the two of them are taking great pains to avoid the subject.
That went better than he thought it would.