Happy Birthday: A Novel

“I pretty much wrecked my marriage in order to build my career,” she confessed ruefully, but with her usual honesty about herself. “Although I was married to the wrong man. It never really worked. He’s a wonderful person, but we were much too different. He admits now that I scared him to death. He wanted more children, and now I wish I’d had them. But I wanted to build an empire, and I did. You sacrifice a lot for that, and I’m not sure it’s worth it. I love my work, and I still have a good time doing it, but that’s not all there is. It’s taken me this long to figure that out,” Valerie said with a candor and openness that impressed Jack.

“Yeah, me too,” Jack admitted. “Life isn’t just about having fun. Or that’s all you wind up with. A lot of good-time Charlies hanging around to cash in on you, and a lot of very pretty empty-headed girls who’re there for a free ride. That gets old. Maybe I did myself a favor on my birthday when I threw my back out. The two weeks I spent in bed feeling sorry for myself gave me time to think.”

“I’ve thought about it a lot in recent years, but by now I don’t know what else to do,” Valerie said quietly. “My marriage has been over for twenty-three years. April’s all grown up and doesn’t need me. Now all I’ve got left is work, and it’s what I do best.” Jack looked at her thoughtfully as she said it. What she said made sense to him too.

“I think what you need in your life now, Valerie, is football,” he teased her again. “We’ll get you a total immersion course in Miami next month. In exchange, you can teach me how to set a table.” But even though he was being playful with her about it, he had enormous respect for the career she had built. Hers was a name that absolutely everybody knew. She was truly the world authority on gracious living. There wasn’t a girl in America who planned her wedding without one of Valerie’s books. It was easy to pooh-pooh it, but she was an industry unto herself. She was a business, a star, an icon, and a legend all her own, just as he was and had been. In their own way, they were both in the Hall of Fame, but in the end, they had both figured out that as exciting as it could be at times, it just wasn’t enough. Pat had figured that out when they split up and he married Maddie, and went on to have more kids with a woman whose greatest joy in life was their family and marriage. They talked about things the way he and Valerie never had. Most of Valerie’s decisions had been unilateral based on what was good for her career. At the time, it had been heady stuff. It was too late to go back and turn it around, and she wasn’t sorry she’d done it. But some of the sacrifices she’d made, and the choices, no longer made quite as much sense.

Jack Adams was in a similar situation to hers. He had opted for a lifetime of fun, and he didn’t regret it, but at fifty, there was no one important in his life, except his son. And he had never slowed down long enough to marry again and have more children. He had told himself he would one day, and the women he went out with were young enough that he could still marry and have more kids. Lots of men had second families at his age and older, particularly successful ones. But he wished that he had done it when he was younger. When he saw his ex-wife’s three other boys, he knew that somewhere along the line, he had blown it. It was hard to play catch-up at fifty. And even harder at Valerie’s age. One day you woke up and you were alone, and you wondered how it had happened. In Valerie and Jack’s case, they both knew how it had.

“Would you do it differently if you had it to do all over again?” he asked her, and she thought about it before she answered.

“Maybe. Maybe not. I probably should have tried harder to stay married, but Pat and I didn’t want the same things. He wanted an academic life and I didn’t. I didn’t care about medieval history, or his tenure at the university, or his students. I was much too interested in my own career and where it was going. I was on an express train all by myself. I didn’t even notice that no one else was on it, and I probably didn’t care back then, although I do now. I’d like someone on that train with me, and it’s not going quite as fast. It’s going at a good clip, but there’s room for someone else on board. There never was before. Probably what I regret most now is that I didn’t put any time and effort into finding someone else after Pat. I was too busy. But one day you wake up, and you’re all by yourself, and there’s no one in the station wanting to get on the train anymore. You’ve been flying by too fast. I don’t want to end up alone one day, when I’m really old, but it could happen. I didn’t stop at enough stations and let anyone else on board before now. And by the time you figure that out, it’s probably too late to change it. You have a life, a show, a career everyone envies, a history, but if you’re all alone, I’m not sure the accomplishments mean that much.”