Page 12 of The Launch

Carrie pulls Christina into her lap and, without batting an eye, lifts the hem of her own homemade dress and uses it like a rag to wipe off her daughter’s hands. “See?” she says to the other women. “One of the other beautiful things about not having spent hundreds of dollars on a high fashion dress!” She plants a kiss on her daughter’s cheek, wipes both of Christina’s eyes with the heels of her hands, and then sets the little girl back on the ground and gives her a loving pat on the bottom. “Go play, lovey,” she says.

Jo watches in amazement as Christina, tears now almost a memory, runs right back into the fray of children.

“She’s so easy,” Jo says in wonder. Kate is way more high-strung than that, and once the tears start to flow, it’s nearly impossible to stanch them. Sometimes Jo feels like the worst mother in the world because she can’t always figure out how to soothe or redirect her own children when they need it.

Carrie shrugs and knocks back the last of her Madras. “She can definitely be a pill.” Her eyes flicker over to Jude, who is still knitting away, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it was her twins who had pushed Christina into the sprinkler and started the tears in the first place. “But for the most part, she’s pretty angelic. Her brother is much more of a rough-and-tumble kid, believe me.”

“Boys tend to be, I think,” Jo says, thinking of the way that Jimmy likes to take things apart without asking and then attempt to put them together again—with varying degrees of success.

“I’ll second that,” Barbie agrees. “Though I don’t have any girls, so I can’t really compare raising one to the other. But I can say that I never jumped out of a tree as a kid, and on more than one occasion I’ve seen Heath and Henry attempting to climb branches and catapult themselves onto the grass. Three and four year olds!” she says, shaking her head. She looks down at sleeping Huck. “I can only hope that this little monster is Mommy’s calm and easy one.”

“What are your girls like, Jude?” Jo asks, pulling Jude away from her knitting again.

Jude smiles wanly as she pushes her glasses up her nose again. “They’re pretty easy. Mostly they just entertain each other and come to me when they’re hungry, if I’m honest.” Jude sets her knitting on the table and pushes herself to standing. She’s a tall, lean woman with mousy blonde hair, and her glasses hide a pair of brown eyes that look like melted chocolate. “Carrie, would you mind if I slipped in and got a refill of juice? I’m still a bit thirsty, and I need to use your powder room.”

“Oh, go ahead, honey.Mi casa es su casaand all that jazz.” She waves a hand at the house and turns back to watch the children as they start a rowdy game of Red Rover.

Jude walks through the sliding door and into the house just as Jo remembers that she brought a recipe card with her for Barbie, but left it in her purse in the living room. “I’ll be right back,” she says, though the other women are already deep in conversation about when they’ll be asked to sit for formal family photos for the NASA press kit.

Once inside the air-conditioned house, Jo takes a moment to wander around. The hallway is lined with black-and-white candid photographs that must have been taken by a professional photographer, but they seem to capture Carrie and her husband Jay and the kids in the most natural of poses. Jo is envious of the way the pictures appear artsy and not staged, like her own familyphotos. She desperately wants to be as comfortable and as sure in her own skin as the smiling woman in these photos is.

The front room, where her purse is sitting on the couch, is filled with yellow suede furniture—With children? Jo thinks—and a huge, state-of-the-art stereo system is set up next to a bookshelf that’s covered in hundreds of books and equally as many albums. She walks over and looks at the spines of the novels and the vinyl, pullingPlease Please Meby the Beatles from the stacks. It’s brand new and fresh off the press, and Jo has been wanting to purchase it for herself. There’s just something about the Fab Four that turns her into a teenager again, and she loves listening to them sing.

She puts the record back and finds the recipe card for Barbie in her purse, which she presses to her chest as she walks back through the kitchen.

“Oh!” Jo stops in her tracks. “Jude,” she says, fanning herself with the recipe card unnecessarily. “I forgot you were in here. I have a recipe that I was going to give to Barbie,” she says, holding up the card with her neat handwriting on it, as if this will allow Jude to see the directions for making Beef Burgundy over Noodles. “Don’t you think the nicknames we’ve all got are cute?” she rambles on, slipping the card into the front pocket of her skirt. “People have always called me Jo, but it feels like we’re all getting to know each other much more quickly. In fact, if someone calls me Josephine, I assume we’re pretty much strangers—” Jo cuts herself off here as she realizes that, for the entirety of her chattering, Jude has been standing there with a bottle of vodka in one hand, poised to pour it into her glass. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Jo says, backing away and sliding open the door to the patio. She walks directly to the picnic table and sits down again, the laughter of the other women drowning out the thoughts in her head.

Jo slips the recipe to Barbie as she heads over to the children to hold a stick for limbo at one point, and then she moves the sprinkler to another part of the yard so that Carrie’s lawn won’t drown in a puddle of water. But all the while, she’s glancing back at Jude, quiet knit-purl Jude, who is smiling to herself and drinking her juice with vodka.

Jo is unsure what to make of Jude as she blithely sips her secret cocktail, but before she knows it, they’re all consulting their watches and moaning about needing to get dinner on the table in this heat.

Jo gathers Jimmy, Nancy, and Kate, and heads home to put her meatloaf in the oven.

“Can you come out after the kids are in bed?” Frankie is asking as Jo listens. The phone is wedged between Jo’s shoulder and her ear as she turns Kate around by the shoulders and points wordlessly towards the bathroom so that Kate will wash her hands before dinner.

“Uhhhh,” Jo says, spinning around in the kitchen and reaching for a bottle of milk that’s sitting on the counter. As she tries to walk to the table, she realizes that in all of her turning and twisting and reaching, the long, coiled phone cord has wound itself around her torso. She rolls her eyes and repeats all of her steps backwards until she’s free of the cord. “I’m not sure, Frankie.” Jimmy and Nancy pull out their chairs and sit down just as Bill comes in the side door and sets down his briefcase. “I might be able to. Can I call you back?”

Frankie exhales, and Jo can tell that she’s smoking. Perhaps she’s sitting on her lanai with a glass of wine and a French for Beginners book. “Sure,” Frankie says. “You can call me. But Ithink it would do you some good to get out of the house and take a walk. Spin it to Bill like that: just tell him that we’re a couple of gals who want to walk off our middle-aged chub after dinner.”

Jo nearly laughs out loud; she’s thirty-two, and there’s no way that Frankie is any older than she is. In her mind, they’re far from middle age. “Okay, I’ll throw that against the wall and see if it sticks. Listen, I need to get dinner served. I’ll call you after.”

She hangs up the phone and turns to Bill with a forced smile. “Hi, honey,” Jo says, walking over to him and leaning in for a kiss. “How was the day?”

“Can’t complain.” Bill loosens his tie and slips it over his head. He sets it on the counter, walks over to the fridge, and takes out a beer. “How about you?”

Jo is making tracks back and forth across the kitchen as she brings the meatloaf, a bowl of mashed potatoes, and another bowl of green snap peas to the table. She sets each thing down efficiently, pointing to Kate’s chair so that her youngest will sit rather than fling herself at Bill, as she loves to do.

“We went over to Carrie and Jay’s house,” she says, then remembers that Bill doesn’t know all the ladies as well as she does. “I mean Caroline’s house. The Reeds have a lovely home.” She sits down and unfolds her napkin, keeping her eye on her daughters as she does this to make sure that they’re watching. Jo knows she isn’t the most fashionable or the most wildly exotic woman on the planet, but she does know her manners, and it’s her goal to teach them to her daughters by example. Once she sees that they’ve both put napkins on their laps, she looks back at Bill. “The kids all played in the sprinkler, and we sat in the shade and had lemonade.”

She isn’t sure why the lie trips off her tongue the way it does, but Jo fills her plate and avoids looking directly at her husband. Bill has never minded her having a drink here or there, but something about sitting around all afternoon andhaving cocktails with the new neighbor ladies feels…decadent. And unlike something Jo would do. And yet she’d enjoyed it—immensely. The drink had loosened her up a bit, and the company was good. Catching Jude pouring herself more vodka was still tickling at the back of her brain, but there was no way she wanted to bother Bill with idle gossip like that when she was still trying to make friends with these women.

“Sounds nice. I’m glad you’re fraternizing with the other hens,” Bill says as he forks a big bite of meatloaf into his mouth. He smiles at his children. “And how about you hedgehogs? Have you been up to anything good today?”

Kate, never one to hold her tongue, nearly bounces out of her seat now that she’s been given permission to speak up. “Daddy,” she says breathlessly. “Today at the Reeds we jumped in a sprinkler. And then Hope and Faith pushed Christina down and Christina CRIED. Can you believe that? And no one even got in trouble. If Nancy pushed me into the sprinkler, she would get in trouble, right?” Her eyes are wide as she watches her father’s face for a response.

Bill looks at Jo as he takes a pull from his bottle of beer. “Help me out here.”

“Christina is Carrie and Jay’s little girl, and Hope and Faith are the Majors’ twins.” Jo cuts her meatloaf with a knife, then switches her fork to her right hand and takes a bite. “But I’m sure that Mrs. Majors talked to her girls when they got home, and hopefully it was a lesson for them to be kinder to their friends,” she says pointedly, ending the gossip session with a stern look at Kate. “Why don’t you tell Daddy about the books we got at the library on our way home from the post office?” she prompts.

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