Baby proof

'Oh, she did, did she?' I say, wondering whether Annie thought she was helping me out-or whether she was sabotaging me-when she passed this information along. Then I consider saying that Richard is not my boyfriend, but I'm not so sure I want Ben to have this information. It depends on whether he's with someone, which of course, I don't know. Apparently Annie's gossip only flows in one direction. Regardless of her intent, I feel on the verge of writing her off.

'So where'd you go with ol' Richard?' Ben says. 'And I do mean old.'

'Are you drunk?' I deflect. I do not want to tell him where I was.

'Maybe,' he says. 'I had to celebrate my ex-wife's birthday, after all.'

'With Tucker?' I say, proving that, unlike Ben, I don't need five or six beers to ask immature, incendiary questions.

Ben says, 'That depends on where you went with Richard?'

'Well, you either were with her on my birthday, or you weren't,' I say.

'I was, in fact,' he says.

'Fantastic,' I say, marveling at how one person can take me from happy to agitated in seconds. In fact, I am suddenly angry enough to consider revising my stance on Richard. Maybe I'll have sex with him a few more times. In any event, I am going to wear my ring tomorrow to work.

Ben says nothing, so I say, 'How did you and your girl celebrate my big day?'

'That's for me and Tucker to know,' Ben says. 'Just like, apparently, it's for you and old Richard to know the secret spot of your special celebration.'

The 'me and Tucker' is a knife in my chest. The pain is so sharp, in fact, that I blurt out, 'Richard took me to Lake Como. The Villa d'Este to be exact. It was magnificent.'

I hear a click and realize my drunk ex-husband just hung up on me, beating me to it by seconds.

The next morning I roll into work, turn on my computer, and promptly Google Tucker Janssen, complete with two ss. She is all I've thought about since about four a.m., first in the form of a disturbingly graphic dream, and then in my wide-awake, paranoid, and thoroughly pissed-off state. I am dismayed when I get six hits, but not nearly as upset as I am when I click on the first listing and pull up her grinning mug and an article in her hometown (Naperville, Illinois-I knew she was Midwestern) newspaper. The caption reads: HOMETOWN GIRL TURNED HARVARD MED STUDENT SAVES DYING MAN. The article is four years old-which means she's no longer a medical student. She's a full-fledged, practicing doctor. I scan the article and read her quote: 'I've actually known CPR since junior high, so I didn't really apply any new skills. But the incident did lead to my decision to practice emergency medicine.'

My heart drops as I grab the phone and hit my speed-dial button for Jess at work.

She answers on speaker phone with a jovial hello.

'Take me off speaker,' I say with the urgency I feel.

I hear a rustle of her picking up the phone and then, 'What's going on?'

'She's a doctor, Jess.'

'What?' Jess says.

'I re-Googled her. She's an ER doctor.'

'Tucker?' Jess says.

'Yes,' I say, blinking back tears.

I hear Jess clicking away on her keyboard. Then she says, 'Where are you seeing this?'

'Put two ss in Janssen,' I say. 'Like your sperm donor, Ian.'

I hear more clicking and then, 'Ohhh. Yeah. Here it is… Yeah, this is pretty unfortunate…'

I wait for something more, some pep talk about how being an editor is just as noble as practicing emergency medicine. She might be saving lives, but I'm enriching healthy lives.

Jess comes up with something else. Something better. 'This doesn't prove jack. It doesn't prove they're dating. And it certainly doesn't prove that she's any good in bed.'

'I need to know, Jess,' I say, thinking of my conversation with Ben last night. 'I need to know what's going on there.'

'Okay,' Jess says. 'Did you try Googling their names together? In a joint search? It always pulls up married or engaged couples.'

'Jesus! You think they could be engaged?'

'No. Calm down. I'm just saying… hold on… gimme a sec here to run this thing…' There is more clicking, then silence. Then I hear Jess whisper, 'Well, fuck me.'

'What?' I say. 'What did you get?'

'I got a hit,' she says.

'With Benjamin or Ben?' I say.

'Ben,' she says. 'You're not going to like it.'

My hands shake as I type Ben Davenport in quotes next to Tucker Janssen, two ss. Sure enough, I get a hit, too. The Chicago marathon results. Their time is the same: 3:42:55. Impressive, especially for a woman. So she's a doctor and an athlete. But by far the worst part about this discovery is that their time is the same. Which means that they held hands across the finish line, something Ben always told me we would do together. So now I have a complete picture: I know they trained together, flew to Chicago together, visited her family in her apple-pie hometown together, gutted out a marathon together, and finished together, hand in hand. This is vastly more significant than the Villa d'Este. Jess knows it too, which I gauge by her uncharacteristic silence. It takes an awful lot to defeat Jess, especially when it comes to my honor. But she is defeated now.

'And to think,' I say. 'This is just what we can pull up on Google.'

'Yeah,' Jess says sadly. 'We'd better not run another search with the word baby, huh?'

twenty-three

That afternoon, my father comes into the city to have lunch with me at the Mayrose Diner. He offered to take me somewhere nicer, but on the heels of the Villa d'Este, I'm in more of a laminated-menu mood than a cloth- napkin mood. We sit in our booth and make small talk about Italy. I tell him he needs to add Lake Como to his list of things to see before he dies.

'I don't have such a list,' he says, transferring his onion, lettuce, and tomato from the side of his plate to his burger.

'You need to have one,' I say.

He gives me a look as if he's considering this. That's when I tell him about my Google search. His face twists up in sympathy. 'I'm sorry, kiddo,' he says.

'Yeah,' I say. 'A bummer, isn't it?'

'I guess it's time to really let Ben go,' he says. 'You don't want to become as bitter as your old man.'

I reach out and pat his hand. 'Dad, you aren't bitter,' I say. But as soon as the words are out, I realize that his happy routine could be just that. Maybe he still misses my mother. It strikes me that she is the sort of person who, if you are unfortunate enough to fall for, you might never be able to stop loving.

He nods and says, 'In some ways I am… But it's too late for me to change. You, on the other hand, have your whole life ahead of you… So what about this fellow Richard? Sounds pretty serious if he's taking you to Italy?'

I shake my head. It feels a bit funny to admit to my father that I went to Italy with a man I'm not serious about, but I still say, 'I don't think that's going to work out actually.'

'Why's that? Does he want kids, too?'

I'm not sure whether this is a joke or not, but I laugh and then dab at my lips with my napkin. 'No. He doesn't, actually. In that sense, he's perfect for me.'

My dad tries again. 'So what's the problem?'