Read Online Point, Click, Love by Molly Shapiro - Free Book Online

know. Maybe it’s something to consider.”
    Annie had never thought about having kids in anything more than a vague, someday sort of way, but after her talk with Claudia she became obsessed with the idea. Maybe having a child on her own was exactly what she needed to do. It did seem that everything had been leading up to this—her breakup with Ben, her distaste for men, her attraction to married women with children, and, of course, her buying a huge four-bedroom house in the burbs. Maybe subconsciously she was preparing for this very thing.
    Annie was a little taken aback at how impressionable she was, how a drunken conversation with a coworker she barely knew could make her think about changing her life so drastically. But this wasn’t the first time. Annie remembered when she got the offer from Sprint and was struggling with the idea of moving tothe Midwest. She was living in New York with her parents for the summer, working part-time at her father’s law firm and spending the rest of her time going to coffee shops, museums, and half-priced Broadway shows. One beautiful sunny day she decided to take a Circle Line sightseeing cruise around the city. She ended up sitting next to a middle-aged couple from Tulsa, Oklahoma.
    “What brings you to New York?” Annie asked.
    “Visiting family,” said the woman, straightening the straw visor perched on her head. “I’m actually from here.”
    “Really? And now you live in Tulsa?” Annie was intrigued. Did New Yorkers who moved to the Midwest suddenly develop a taste for wicker headgear, pink polyester scarves, and matching tank top and shorts ensembles?
    “I left New York twenty years ago. I love it here, love visiting. But it’s so good to leave.”
    “So you like living in the middle of the country?” asked Annie.
    “Sure. It was hard at first, adjusting. I miss all the culture, the big-city feel. And I’ve never found a decent bagel. But other than that, I love all the space. I like being able to walk down the sidewalk without feeling like a salmon swimming upstream.”
    After that, Annie couldn’t walk anywhere without feeling harassed by the crowds that surrounded her. She hated riding the subway during rush hour, when she felt packed in like a sardine. She hated waiting in line at the Museum of Modern Art and having to stand next to five other people just to look at Monet’s Water Lilies . She was even annoyed by the apartment where she had grown up and lived most of her life, with its narrow galley kitchen and cluttered living room and no access to the outdoors. Within a week she made her decision to take the job at Sprint—leaving cramped New York for the wide-open Midwest.
    It appeared Annie was going to do the same thing with having a baby. After that first drink with Claudia, the two became fast friends, and Annie always took the opportunity to pepper Claudiawith questions about her kids. But Annie knew better than to cavalierly make the decision to have a baby. Everything else was reversible—where she lived, the job she took, the man she dated. Giving birth to a child was not.
    After a while Annie stopped talking about it with Claudia and began to seriously consider the idea of single motherhood.
    At first it seemed that everything about the idea was difficult and sad. She imagined waking up in the middle of the night to a crying baby, with nobody there to nudge and say: “Can you get this one?” She imagined bringing her child to school on the first day of kindergarten and having no one to stand next to arm in arm as she waved goodbye. And when her child was a teenager, who would she worry and wait up with until two o’clock in the morning?
    But then she remembered everything that Claudia had said about raising kids with her husband. According to Claudia, Steve slept right through the kids’ wailing in the middle of the night and never once got up to feed them. He skipped the first day of kindergarten because he had a meeting he couldn’t get