Driving Lessons: A Novel by Zoe Fishman

away briefly.
    “Yes, yes,” I replied, pulling him closer. “Come here.”
    And so, we did it, on the kitchen counter, in the middle of the afternoon. With his forehead pressed to my sweaty clavicle afterward, my head was quiet, finally—if just for a moment.
     
    H ello, Mona. This is the eighth message I have left for you. Under normal circumstances I would panic that you were dead, but since I saw you on Gchat this morning, I know that is not the case. Do you hate me? Seriously. This is getting ridiculous. Oh Christ, here comes another ladybug. I’m killing it now, can you hear me squooshing it? Anyway, for the love of God, call me back! Please?”
    I hung up and sighed heavily, from worry about both the state of my relationship with Mona and our home’s apparent ladybug infestation. I was killing them by what felt like the hundreds, and still, there they were.
    “Fuck it,” I announced, removing myself from the bedroom and entering what we called the office but was really a storage space for the boxes of books we had yet to unpack, which now, at over a month and a half of living here, was officially unacceptable. I eyed the empty bookcase and grabbed a pair of scissors from the desk drawer, slicing through the biggest box’s tape with gusto.
    Out came my self-help library, Josh’s math textbooks, dictionaries of various mono- and bilingual varieties, my thesaurus from high school with my maiden name scrawled in black marker along the pages’ edges, and an old deck of tarot cards with their accompanying guide. I had spent hours with Mona in my early twenties releasing questions into the universe and assembling the cards in various formations that would reveal the answers. These questions almost always pertained to the guys we were dating, or more likely, sleeping with in the hopes of actually dating.
    “Why can’t I talk to Josh about my baby issues?” I asked aloud, fanning the cards facedown in front of me. I plucked one from the left-hand side and turned it over. A frazzled woman screaming with her head in her hands looked up at me. Nine of Swords. Or in layman’s terms: fear, guilt, and doubt.
    Bingo. When we had first talked about having kids, before we were married, it had been a no-brainer. Of course we’ll have them. At least two, maybe three. As the clock ticked on and loomed larger in the process, I had become less enthusiastic, always claiming that work was too busy, that as soon as I got through the next makeup season’s launch, I would go off my birth control.
    Josh, remarkably, had never expressed impatience with me—probably because he was just as overwhelmed by the idea of raising said kids in our version of New York. But now that we were here, in Farmwood, with no excuses other than my as-yet-undeveloped need to “find myself,” it was a different story. I didn’t want to let him down, and so, despite the raging inferno of doubt within me, I had thrown out my trusty pack of pills. I just hoped, secretly, that my eggs were as shy as I was about the prospect of procreation.
    I gathered the deck back together, re-bound the cards, and placed them reluctantly on the shelf. If I let myself, I could spend all afternoon asking questions I already knew the answers to.
    I opened the next box and smiled, recognizing all of my photo albums. Pictures fluttered out of them like sparrows as I pulled them out and piled them on the floor. I opened one to a page of Mona and me on vacation in South Beach. Oh, how young we were! Our moon faces with their caterpillar eyebrows smiled up at me, and I touched Mona’s wild, dark hair with my finger, remembering the trip.
    We were twenty-three, no, maybe twenty-five—yes, twenty-five, because we had gotten our tattoos here, at a dirty shop off the main drag. I remembered it like it was yesterday.
    We’d spent a day at the beach tanning in the way only twenty-five-year-olds can tan, angling our towels to follow the curve of the sun as the morning turned into