Page 15 of Everyone Is Lying to You

“Do the two of you still hike together?”

“No,” she says flatly, and heads outside while balancing two plates like a waitress.

Once we’re out on the balcony she shovels fries into her mouth and then polishes off the burger in about three minutes before turning back to the martini and starting to pick at the nachos. I don’t match her speed, but I’m pretty hungry myself and dive in with relish.

“It’s nice to be away from my kids,” she finally says.

“Do you miss them?” I ask.

“Every other second, but it’s still nice. There should be a German word for the phantom cries you hear when you aren’t with your kids.”

“Or the relief you feel when a kid cries and you realize it isn’t yours…something likeNichtmeinkinder.” I don’t realize I’ve been storing up these quips for years, just waiting to tell her. Maybe she’s been doing the same.

“Oh my gosh, I love that one!Nichtmeinkinder!”

I love that she loves it. “It’s so crazy. I can’t wait to get away from my kids and then the second I’m on the airplane I’m scrolling my phone looking at pictures of them,” I say.

“Same,” she laughs.

“And you have twice as many as I do. More, actually.”

“Gray always wanted a big family.”

It’s the second time she’s mentioned her husband with a grimace.

“What about you? Is that what you wanted?”

“For a long time, I wanted what Gray wanted.” She takes a sip of the martini and stares at the sun as it kisses the horizon. “But not so much anymore.”

“No?”

“No,” she replies, and says nothing else.

“Tell me about your kids,” I finally say.

The joy returns to her face. “I’m surprised at how beautiful and messy motherhood has been and how much it has reshaped my identity,” she says.

“That sounds like one of your captions.”

She cringes. “You’re right. It’s hard to turn it off sometimes.”

“Do you write them? The captions?”

“Some of them. A lot of them are scheduled way in advance but I look over everything. I’m hands on. Always checking that we’re on brand.”

It’s a reminder that she isn’t just the housewife frolicking in the field with the barefoot children or the mother baking bread in the kitchen and then drying the linens on the line. She studied finance and management in college. She’s a brand.

“Okay, how about this,” Bex starts over. “You know that scene in the Harry Potter books where Ron is reading Harry his tea leaves to tell him his future?”

I nod. I’d grown up obsessed with the Harry Potter books but Bex had never read them. I’d brought a couple to college as comfort reads and she devoured them.

She keeps going. “Okay, so Ron is predicting the future to Harry and he says, ‘You’re going to suffer…but be very happy.’ That’s how I feel about having kids sometimes.”

It’s so perfect that I want to cry.

“So tell me about your kids. Really,” I press her.

“They’re wonderful. I mean also hard and a lot, but mostly wonderful. They’re all so different. I guess I kind of thought they would all be more or less the same. But they are all exactly who they were when they came out of my body.”

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