Free Oh! You Pretty Things by Shanna Mahin Page A

crunching numbers and, every few months, hopping on a plane to follow a tour. I arranged his travel for months before we met in person. After I got him a suite at the Majestic in Cannes, four days before the start of the MIDEC music conference—a feat of uncanny skill—he sent a huge basket of white hydrangeas and roses, with a FedExed note in what turned out to be his own handwriting.
    You are spectacular
, it read.
    And in that moment, the scent of flowers perfuming the air around my tan burlap cubicle, I believed him.
    In the weeks that followed, Robbie needed a lot of travel arranging. He started asking for his itineraries to be delivered to his office, by me specifically, and he always timed it so he could take me to lunch. Never anywhere fancy—Phillipe’s for French dip, or one of the nameless places on Olvera Street for enchiladas and beer. I told him things I’d never told anyone. I even told him about Trent Whitford.
    He told me about his marriage to a Korean woman he’d met in Seoul, about their two young children and the fact that they hadn’t had sex since his daughter was born. We spent a week in New York, a crazy montage of whirling autumn leaves and brown paper cones filled with roasted chestnuts and an abbreviated
Pretty Woman
moment where I tried on clothing in a SoHo boutique. We chased a lost dog in Central Park, then took a cab to Brooklyn to find its frantic owner, who plied us with lumpy, hand-crocheted hats that we wore nonstop for the rest of the trip.
    When we returned to Los Angeles, Robbie came clean to his wife. We moved into his partner’s beach apartment, where I’d pack him gourmet lunches with ingredients we shopped for together at the Bristol Farms on Rosecrans. He sent me a case of professionally cellared 1973 René Lalou champagne after we had it at Patina and I said it tasted like sex and flowers.
    Seon-Yeong and the kids moved to San Francisco to be closer to her family, and Robbie asked me to marry him, cracking open a tiny velvet box at the Ivy, just two days after his divorce was finalized.
    Of course I said yes.
    We postponed a honeymoon in favor of setting up our new life in San Francisco to be near his kids. Suddenly, I was a suburban housewife and part-time stepmom.
    The only thing I knew about being a stepmom was what I’d learned from Gloria, who, of course, wasn’t my stepmother, but it seemed like a good enough place to start. I read bedtime stories and created elaborate craft projects involving glue sticks and construction paper, pipe cleaners and googly eyes. I cooked child-friendly meals from scratch: spaghetti with hand-rolled pasta and tender, melting meatballs with three kinds of ground meat (veal, pork, and beef) and slow-simmered sauce with San Marzano tomatoes and fresh herbs; macaroni and cheese with a velvety béchamel with freshly grated nutmeg and four cheeses—Gruyère, Parmigiano-Reggiano, Fontina, and Vermont white cheddar; French toast with thick-cut slices of challah bread, stuffed with cream cheese and Bonne Maman strawberry preserves and dunked in a rich cream-and-egg bath perfumed with Madagascar vanilla and freshly grated orange zest.
    Seon-Yeong didn’t hide the fact that she wanted Robbie back. He scoffed for the first few months. He scoffed for almost a year. Then I started catching glimpses of the truth behind his sea-green eyes: I’d been a mistake.
    Our parting was amicable enough; the only hiccup came when the mediator paused with her pen above the box on the dissolution form about money. Since Robbie had sold his shares in the record company after we’d married, there was a huge amount of joint property and we hadn’t even thought about a prenup.
    â€œYou’re not taking anything?” the mediator asked me. “I’m not even sure the judge will sign this.”
    I’m nobody’s idea of a martyr, but that money wasn’t mine. I didn’t want to punish