Page 50 of Just Not That Into Billionaires

She says, “So this is what it would be like.”

“What?” I ask, as though I don’t know what she’s talking about, as though I didn’t have that same thought. I like her by my side, but I know better than to let this feel too real.

“Us. If we were really married,” she says. “And we walk Spencer and meet people we know and we have little exchanges. And they invite us over.”

“Well, we are a married couple,” I say.

“You know what I mean. A real one.”

“We are a real one. In the eyes of these people. In the eyes of the IRS.”

“Whatever you say, Poshface,” she says.

“Seriously, I can’t even begin to imagine the kind of tax trouble you’re in, filing single all these years.”

“Wait, what?”

“Tax trouble. The IRS.”

“But I didn’t know!”

“Ignorance is never a valid defense for breaking a law,” I say.

She looks at me alarmed. “You think I’m in tax trouble?”

“You’ve been filing as single,” I inform her.

She has the good sense to look alarmed. “Shit. A lot of trouble?”

“You need to fix it, let’s just say.”

“How?” she asks. “Ten years of tax trouble that I need to fix?”

“Get a good accountant.”

“Right,” she says. “Okay.”

I cringe inwardly, imagining what kind of accountant she’d dig up. Francine may not be capable of identifying a good accountant. She’ll get a shitty accountant if she gets one at all. Maybe she’ll just apply her famous wishful thinking. Nobody’s said “boo” for a decade about it, after all.

I imagine informing her that I’ve got it under control. I’d tell her I’ll handle it, and she’d be standing there with this grateful gaze, eyes full of energy. Things like taxes are hard for her, and I’d imagine she doesn’t get a lot of competent help out there for the endless binds she gets herself into.

She’d be so relieved.

This weird feeling of weightlessness flows through me and I look away. I suppose I still have some of that in me—that gullible, dim-witted kid who’d do anything for her. That kid isn’t running the show anymore, though. Thoughts like this are sad artifacts, I tell myself, only useful in reminding me of how far I’ve come.

All Francine wants is a divorce. That’s all she wants from me, now.

Spencer’s come back around, panting. It’s time. I put his leash back on and we head out back onto the sunny walk.

She really could end up in trouble. It really is mind-blowing that she didn’t know. And god how she’ll bungle it, trying to get out of it.

I could put people on it. I could.

The braid-haired twin sisters who sell tiny paintings off a bench near the dog run entrance call out to Spencer. Spencer is one of their favorites, though I imagine it all might have started because one of them might have been a favorite of James’s. James was a fierce and idiosyncratic thinker who always went for the nose-ring beauties. With a painful hit of sadness, I flash on him flirting with a woman at a falafel stand, Spencer as his partner in crime.

The woman who I always think of as the leader of the two asks how Spencer’s doing.

“He’s great,” I say, willing her to not say anything more, because I don’t need Francine in my business now. Missing James is hard enough without having her playact compassion and make me feel worse. Having Francine in the mix will just confuse everything.

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