Wishful Thinking Read Online Free PDF

not just one parent, but two.
    It takes a village
, she thought. She could fit her village into a telephone booth. Her mind flashed to Julien’s face that morning when she’d told him she couldn’t come to his guitarrecital. She’d hated having to tell him, again, that she couldn’t be there; she hated saying Mommy can’t come, Mommy has to work, Mommy wishes she could, but she can’t.
    Jennifer gave her head a little shake and pinched herself. “Stop it!” she said out loud. She needed a laugh. Jennifer began to compose an e-mail to Vinita. She counted her lucky stars every day that the two of them had ended up living in the same neighborhood in New York (their kids even went to the same public school), though with Vinita raising three daughters under the age of ten and running her pediatrics practice in the West Village, too, the two women provided each other with moral support more than anything.
    Somewhere there is a woman,
Jennifer typed,
who woke up this morning before her children did, practiced ashtanga yoga while standing on her head in a sweat lodge, showered and shaved her legs, prepared gluten-free pumpkin pancakes to usher in the fall season, and got her children and herself to school and to work on time. I, on the other hand, woke up in a sofa bed with an empty bottle of white wine rolling around under it, fed my kids breakfast bars on the train, and got to work so late I almost missed a meeting I didn’t even know was happening.
    That, of course, was the least of her morning’s drama. Jennifer thought about losing her phone, the bizarre way she’d gotten it back, and the message from the woman who had returned it to her.
In addition to the usual failures,
she typed,
which include the fact that I am missing Julien’s guitar recital today (again), I lost my phone last night and got it back with a weird message about some kind of miracle app.
Jennifer paused, eyeing her phone on her desk.
Call me?
    She hit SEND . She picked up her phone.
An app
, the voice had said. She should look for it. If nothing else, it would be a diverting way to procrastinate. She’d just begun scrolling through the apps on her phone, however, when there was a knock at her door. Tim.
    “How’d it go?” he asked, poking his head in.
    “Alicia Richardson may be working here soon,” Jennifer said, “though it isn’t for sure yet.”
    “Am I going to have to be her assistant too?” Tim asked, his voice rising. “Remember what Bill said when he started? That I was going to have to ‘expand’ to assist you both? I can’t just keep ‘expanding’! I’m a human being, not a rubber band!”
    Jennifer chose not to respond, and Tim, chastened, switched back to business mode. “I came to check in with you about your schedule,” he said. “What do you have today?”
    “Let me look,” Jennifer answered. She launched her calendar on her phone. And when she did, an unfamiliar screen appeared, filling the surface of her phone with a dark blue, velvety, starry sky. Jennifer blinked, caught in a cognitive double take.
Is this it?
she wondered. As well trained and habituated as a hamster when it came to navigating new apps, she was about to tap her screen, when, against the midnight-blue background, a sparkling wand appeared. Bright and white, it was very like the wand that the plump, grandmotherly fairy godmother in
Cinderella
wielded. Mesmerized, Jennifer stared as the wand began to move. Gracefully, at an almost leisurely pace, it spelled out the words
Wishful Thinking
. Below them materialized the most alluring tagline Jennifer had ever seen in her life:
An App for Women Who Need to Be in More Than One Place at the Same Time
.
    This was it, Jennifer thought. Wishful Thinking was the miraculous app Dr. Diane Sexton had taken the liberty of installing on her phone.
    She was about to flip it around, show the screen to Tim, and relate the whole story. But something stopped her.
    “Give me a minute?” she asked, looking up at