Wildcat by Amelia Morris

Author:Amelia Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

39

It took resolve, fortitude, and long-term planning, but she’d done it. She’d packed a day bag full of everything she would need for herself and Hank and was now driving at a slow crawl on the 10 West to the Getty Center, her favorite museum in Los Angeles. Each time Hank cried, she took the steering wheel with her left hand and reached around with her right, stretching her torso and arm to their limits, and tried to place a pacifier in his mouth.

She listened to the country station for the majority of the one-hour trip. One song in particular—“Raise ’Em Up”—embarrassingly made her eyes fill with tears. Even the blatant references to the Christian male god Leanne had come so much to resent weren’t jarring enough to keep her from imagining Hank growing up, becoming angular and inaccessible. Her tiny baby! Wearing underwear and getting haircuts!

Anytime the bad review popped into her head (bland!) she counteracted it by reminding herself that she was going to be on NPR—on the popular Saturday-morning food show Full Plate. At a previous ad agency job, James had trained spokespeople on how to interact with the media and had been encouraging Leanne to practice for the interview by speaking aloud about her book.

And so during each radio commercial, she turned down the volume and talked to herself: “Thanks for having me! And yes, I started my blog back in 2009. It began as a simple outlet. I was frustrated with my writing career, and I didn’t know how to cook. I was simply hungry and tired of eating heated-up, previously frozen pizza bites.”

It had been at least two years since she’d been to the Getty, but once there, she remembered everything: the parking structure, the white futuristic tram ride to the top, and the way the doors opened and people spilled out into an expansive green space. She found the building, grounds, and blue sky itself to be the art, with the indoor exhibitions always a letdown in comparison.

Hank seemed to feel the same way. He leaned forward in his stroller, wanting out out out. He was officially nine months old and horribly, intensely committed to learning how to walk. Even though it was ninety degrees outside, she made sure to dress him in long pants since anytime he was not in the stroller, he was crawling toward the closest bench or chair, which he would use to pull himself up to a stand, and then he’d bob triumphantly before falling again.

She was taking an unsustainable number of photos with her phone—the entire time formulating an Instagram post and caption that would do the work of showing how beautiful her life was and also: “Did you know my book is officially in the world today? #linkinprofile.” So that when she pulled her phone from her pocket to take another one of Hank as he crawled across the pristine, manicured circular lawn, she saw she had five new text messages.

Hey! It’s Mona.

Julianna gave me your number.

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