The Hypnotist's Love Story by Liane Moriarty Page B

“Or we’ll justorder him a pizza or whatever. Don’t stress. Oh, and he’ll bring along a DVD to watch.”
    So, what, should she give the child a sliver off each of their pork medallions? Should she rush out and buy him a lamb chop? But there wasn’t time. She was seeing two clients that afternoon and the first one was due in five minutes.
    All she had to drink was champagne and wine. She needed Coke, or lemonade, or at the very least, juice. She had strawberries in liqueur and King Island cream for dessert, entirely inappropriate for a child.
    He’d expect ice cream. Cake. Cupcakes? Too childish? She mustn’t insult him by treating him like a little kid. Good Lord. She needed hours to prepare for this. She needed to ring her friend Madeline, who was the expert on all things children; to text Julia, who would tell her she was being an idiot; to e-mail her friend Carmel in New York, who would order her a book on Amazon with a title like
The Secret to Positive Step-Mothering
; to Google “eight-year-old boys and how to talk to them without appearing desperate to be their mother.”
    When she and Patrick had talked about her meeting Jack for the first time, they’d agreed that it would be during the
day,
not at night; probably a trip to the aquarium. Some sort of activity to keep the pressure off. She had planned to make funny, interesting, seemingly off-the-cuff (but actually carefully scripted) remarks about fish that would appeal to an eight-year-old boy.
    She felt a chill as she remembered something else:
Her DVD player wasn’t working.
The poor motherless child would be bored out of his mind.
    Games! They’d have to play games. Did children still play board games? Or should they just sit around and talk? But what about?
    For a moment she actually felt close to tears.
    She needed to reframe this problem in a more positive light.
    Ellen, he’s a kid, not the queen of England or the president of the United States.
    Well, that wasn’t at all helpful because, actually, Ellen would be more comfortable meeting the queen or the president. The queen reminded herof her grandmother, whom she missed every day, and President Obama seemed like a jovial, chatty sort of fellow. Ellen was an only child who had grown up around adults, and her job brought her into contact with new people all the time. She wasn’t shy, and although she had a tendency for self-loathing (working on this was an ongoing self-improvement project), she didn’t really feel socially inferior to anyone.
    Except children. Yes, truthfully, she felt inferior to children.
    They were their own species with their own language and culture. They seemed so full of self-confidence these days. When she’d gone to the shops today after the pool, a little girl whom Ellen wouldn’t have thought had been more than eight went gliding by, chatting away into a pink mobile phone. She was wearing a fur-lined hooded coat, her face was painted like a tiger and she was gliding because her sneakers appeared to have tiny wheels magically hidden in the soles. Not only that, her shoes had flashing pink lights along the side. Ellen had stared, full of wonder, at this exotic tiger princess on her invisible skates.
    A few of her friends had babies, but babies were easy. You could cuddle them, and make them laugh just by tickling their palms or blowing raspberries into their soft, sweet necks. Oh, she adored babies, but kids …
    Actually, in spite of the fact that she was in her midthirties, many of her friends of similar age were childless. “You girls all think you’ve got forever,” her mother said. “You do realize that you’re born with all the eggs you’re going to get? Not that I’m in any rush to be turned into a wrinkly, gray-haired old granny.” A clipped laugh.
    OK, so Ellen didn’t have much experience dealing with children. But it had to be more than that causing this sense of panic. She peeled back the layers of her consciousness with brutal efficiency to