All Adults Here by Emma Straub

All Adults Here by Emma Straub

Author:Emma Straub [Straub, Emma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-05-04T00:00:00+00:00


Chapter 22

Lady Date

Porter picked up Rachel before dinner—there was no reason for them both to drive.

“You be the designated driver on the way there, and I’ll be the designated driver on the way back,” Rachel said, as she slid into Porter’s passenger seat. “Or maybe we can find someone drunk and drive them home, too, instead of just wasting our sobriety on each other. Like the Guardian Angels of Dutchess County.”

Porter wanted to take Rachel to The Yellow Owl, a farm-to-table restaurant in Tivoli that was a few years old. It was one of a dozen or so places that catered to the Brooklyn escapees and the food photographers, meaning it had kale and crudo and expensive bowls of ragout. The inside of the restaurant was so dark and the space in between the tables so narrow that Rachel and Porter bumped into nearly every table on their way to their own, like Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

“That was harrowing,” Rachel said, once they were seated. A trio of tea lights sat in the middle of the small table. She picked up the menu and scanned it quickly. “I’m having the pasta. All I want is pasta, three meals a day.”

“It’s good. They use my cheese for their ravioli.” Porter gnawed on a breadstick. She watched Rachel rub her belly in time to the song playing on the stereo. “Raviolo. It’s just one giant ravioli. It’s kind of weird, I don’t know.”

“Have you heard from your husband?”

Rachel rolled her eyes. “Yes. I was going to text you, but then it just seemed too pathetic and sad. He keeps calling me. Writing me these huge, long emails. It’s like he was addicted to sex and now he’s addicted to apologizing. He showed up the other day too.”

“Showed up where?”

“At my house. It was like something out of a Julia Roberts movie from the nineties. You know the one I mean, where she has to learn how to swim in order to get away from her abusive husband? Like he’s following me. Which he is. I mean, he knew where to find me, obviously, but also obviously, I wasn’t responding to him and had no interest in seeing him.” Rachel took one of the breadsticks and crunched it between her back teeth. “This is good.”

“Did you talk to him?” At the next table, a couple was on a date. They looked maybe twenty-five and were holding hands over the middle of the table, tea lights be damned. Porter wondered what they had done right that she and Rachel had so clearly done wrong.

“No, I wasn’t home, thank god. He got my mother, which is, like, his worst nightmare. Even when he and I were on good terms, she was his kryptonite. Now, forget it. You have never seen a more satisfied angry person than a woman who’s been waiting her whole life to be a grandmother.” Rachel laughed. “She told him to take a long walk off a short pier. I don’t know, he cried.



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