A Good Mother

her.” A pause and then, “Did she have the baby?”
“Um, yes, yes she did.” There had been an office-wide email announcement from Jonathan, Abby’s closest—and maybe only—friend in the office. Will doesn’t know what to make of Jonathan, the only out gay guy in their office whose acidic takedowns—of prosecutors, his own colleagues, and the cruel absurdities of the work they do—he finds simultaneously hilarious and terrifying, knowing he could be next. Not Abby, though. There is a tie between those two, held fast and twisted hard, Will’s heard, by what happened in Rayshon Marbury’s case.
“A boy or a girl?”
With some effort, Will summons the image Jonathan had attached: a red squished-up face and a tuft of yellow hair. Measurements had been provided, as well as the baby’s name, none of which Will recalls. He doesn’t know Abby, only of her. She was gone on maternity leave when he started. Not that he would say any of this; Luz is not likely to appreciate that he is new. But only to this job, he reminds himself. It isn’t as if he hasn’t got more experience under harsher conditions than many of the attorneys who are now his colleagues.
“I don’t remember,” he admits.
Luz has turned back to the wall, continuing to read aloud. “University of Oklahoma Law School. Summa cum laude.” She pronounces it “summer cum loud.”
Will feels his face flush, says, “That’s just a Latin phrase. They put it there to make it look fancy.”
“What does it mean?” She turns, looking at him curiously.
She has eyes a man could drown in. Out of nowhere, Will is reminded of that phrase from The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Not a compliment, the words had been a warning to the protagonist from his friend. Beware, Charles, of this loose and depraved woman: Sarah Woodruff. Will had read the novel for a class called Male Images of Women, taken only to fulfill his English requirement, never expecting that what he read would ignite a passion for reading British literature that continued to the present day.
Will’s wife, Meredith, liked to tease him about it—the collection of thick dusty books he insisted on taking from move to move; evidence of his otherwise undetectable sensitive side, she said. And she was right; he did hide it. But he identified with those male protagonists: their good taste and gallantry; their quests for self-discovery and elevation of romantic love. Meredith herself did not care much for these kinds of books, her taste ran more to Jackie Collins and Danielle Steele.
Will snaps back to the present. He’s thinking too much, wandering around like a man hoping to get lost. The odd combination of cheesiness and high culture he confronts daily in LA is dislocating—the muscle guys and boob-tube-top girls on the Venice Beach boardwalk, the coastal-born Ivy League elites who surround him at work. For the first time in his life, Will doesn’t fit. And neither does Meredith, who comes home every day from teaching second grade at an elite private prep school with yet another breathless story about the squad of blonde moms who arrive to scoop up their children at pickup time, with their Uggs, and Juicy Couture outfits; their lifted, plumped, and lineless skin. Meredith’s country-girl cluelessness makes him feel embarrassed, then ashamed of feeling embarrassed. The last thing he wants is a wife with $300 yoga pants and a body sculpted by a plastic surgeon. He feels Luz’s eyes on him as she waits for an answer.
“It doesn’t mean much of anything,” he says curtly. “Just that I did well at school.”
Luz has moved now, back to his desk, picking up a framed picture of Will and Meredith on their honeymoon in Hawaii, both of them in bathing suits and leis, holding piña coladas as they sat on lounge chairs by the hotel pool. She puts it back down. “Did the army pay for all that school?”
“They did.”
“After you became a lieutenant?”
“A captain. And did three years of active duty. Never deployed, though.” Will feels the class chasm opening. Luz’s husband would never have been a captain. Had he lived, the guy was staying where he was, an enlisted man.
Will’s trajectory was different. The son of a military man, Will had applied himself with a cold fury to everything the army threw at him: forget basic training, he’d run eighteen miles wearing a sixty-pound backpack and spent days alone in the woods, sleep-deprived and without food, to complete the infamous Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape program. When he felt weak or afraid he took care to hide it, just like his novels.
Luz looks at the framed photograph again, then back at Will. “When you smile like that, you look like one of those actors.” She snaps her fingers. “The one in—what was it—X-Men?”
Will flushes. He got this all the time. Neither of his parents was particularly attractive, yet somehow he had ended up resembling a guy on a movie poster: square jaw, gray eyes, perfectly chiseled features. At six feet two inches, he is broad-shouldered with a six-pack that, embarrassingly, he does not have to do much to maintain.
Luz takes in his look, then says, “You hate it when people tell you that, huh?”
“Yeah,” he says flatly, “I do.”
As far back as he could remember, boys on the various bases where Will and his family had lived had taunted him: Adam Levine, Justin Timberlake, name-your-boy-band frontman. Everyone should have your problems, his mother told him once, but Will had looked at his father and seen in his face what he already knew to be true. It was far better in the military—and, Will found, life in general—to be rugged than beautiful.
“Men have told me my whole life that I’m beautiful.” Luz shrugs. “It’s so expected it doesn’t even mean anything to me anymore, you know?”
Will nods, trying not to show that her statement, delivered in a matter-of-fact manner devoid of any self-effacing disclaimer, makes him uncomfortable. What woman just outright said things like that? None he’d ever