Charles delicately picked each of his daughters up and tucked them into bed, laying a kiss on their foreheads and making sure they were covered.
And then he quickly showered and changed and grabbed a manuscript he was trying to read and headed to his own bed across the room. The book was bad and he hoped with each page it would get better. A few hundred pages in, it hadn't.
He put the book down across his chest and sighed, watching it heave up and down.
This was what he hated the most since Pauline left. He was all alone with a few hours before he fell asleep. And the hours dragged on.
What Charles felt after everything, more so than betrayal and embarrassment and confusion, was loneliness.
When she left, he felt alone twice over; as a husband, as a father.
He didn't have a big family, and while he had friends - from Princeton, from publishing, from growing up in New York City - so much of his life with his daughters was tied to Pauline. Her family, her mom friends - the other women at school who, he knew, were now gossiping about his family nonstop.
He avoided them as best he could, mindful that he didn't want the girls' life to change all that much. Playdates were made and kept, but he wouldn't really engage. When they asked sympathetically, "So, have you heard from Pauline?" he would usually lie and say he had. Or try and change the subject.
But he was now suddenly navigating a whole new world and he realized quickly how unprepared he was for it all. He suddenly felt like he did in elementary school, when he was so shy he struggled to make friends. It always took him a while to connect with people, and he wished now he had a wider net of people to rely on.
Charles's best friend was probably Bob. But was he going to do, send Bob a photo of his girls? Talk to him about homework trouble? Ask him how to braid hair? They were business friends. He'd never found parenthood to be a subject that came up with his other friends, mostly men who, like Charles, left a lot of the parenting up to their wives.
How backwards it all was, he realized. In that realization he got a partial glimmer into why Pauline left and, when he thought about it, he felt awful.
Charles never fully immersed into fatherhood because he had work, and because he never really had to. Pauline was the one in charge of book reports, of permission slips, of breakfast, lunch and dinner. His role up until she left was the fun stuff - trips, bedtime stories, pillow forts, an Easter bunny costume, once, a few years ago.
He didn't think he was a bad father. But when it was suddenly just him he had to step up and be both parents. It stressed him out, and he would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night just to remember he was still alone, and then he couldn't go back to sleep while he thought about what he'd forgotten to do the day before - forgot to pack a snack in Nicole's lunch bag, and she left her science textbook at home but he couldn't get it to her in time.
It was, at times, more than he thought he could handle.
He thought about getting a nanny, but it felt like just another change for the girls to get used to. He made do with their after-school babysitter - a high school girl from their block who was great with Nicole and Bianca and looked after them after school and some nights he worked late.
There were the two times she couldn't babysit. Two nights he ended talking to Liza, who the girls loved and who he loved talking to.
And he knew that was a problem. Since Pauline left, his daily rhythm left him with little time to think about his loneliness. But it snuck up on him most nights before he went to bed.
There were two times since Pauline left that sleep came easily to him: The nights he ended talking with Liza.
Over the last few weeks he'd been hung up over this thought:
How could he only feel comfortable talking to his 26-year-old employee, who he barely knew? Was he some creepy old man?
The girls did want to send those photos to her, he reminded himself. He didn't bring her up around them - but was very happy when they continued to talk about her. Liza Miller had left a big impression on the Brooks family, when they needed it the most.
He could go back and forth like this for hours, torturing himself for towing the line with a junior employee while reasoning that they were simply friends and it was harmless. In either scenario he got to think of Liza, so it was a win-win.
Sometimes the good things happen when you least expect them, he reminded himself. And then he went to sleep.
