Time of My Life A Novel

by Scotch, Allison Winn

• ISBN13: 9780307408587
• ISBN10: 0307408582
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-08-04
• Publisher: Crown

Summary

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Jillian Westfield has a life straight out of the women's magazines she obsessively reads. She's got the modern-print rugs of Metropolitan Home, the elegant meals from Gourmet, and the clutter-free closets out of Real Simple. With her investment-banker husband behind the wheel and her cherubic eighteen-month-old in the backseat, hers could be the family in the magazines' Range Rover ads. Yet somehow all of the how-to magazine stories in the world can't seem to fix her faltering marriage or stop her from asking "What if?" Then one morning Jillian wakes up seven years in the past. She's back in her Manhattan apartment. She's back in her fast-paced job. And she's still with Jackson, the ex-boyfriend, and star of her what-if fantasies. Armed with twenty-twenty hindsight, she's free to choose all over again. She can reconnect to the mother who abandoned her, she can use ad campaigns from her future to wow her clients, and she can fix the fights that doomed her relationship with Jackson. Or can she?

Author Biography

ALLISON WINN SCOTCH is the author of the novel The Department of Lost and Found. She is also a magazine writer whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including Parents, Glamour, Redbook, and Shape. She lives in New York with her husband and two children.


From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpts

Chapter One

Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding.

Somewhere in the tunnels of my left ear, I hear my car alerting me to the fact that my door is open. I take vague notice of my brain accepting the message, then I quickly ignore it. The dinging, to which I am now immune, as if someone were pinching me on my arm over and over again until that same spot becomes numb, continues.

I run my hands over the cool wood of the steering wheel, then onto the buttery leather seat below, flicking my hands underneath the sweat-basted backs of my thighs. The brochure to this car— the one that was filled with a couple who so closely resembled Barbie and Ken that my daughter actually pointed to them and said, “Barbie,” which my husband and I applauded to the point of revelry (such that people in the dealership craned their necks to see if we’d been given a free car or something), because my daugh- ter’s vocabulary consisted of, to date, approximately seventeen words, so “Barbie” was another milestone—actually made you believe that if you bought the car, you could also buy the life. As if on the weekends, we’d be careening down sides of mountains or hurtling through white-water-filled rivers or picnicking in a dewy, crisply green meadow at sunset with a field of sunflowers just behind us.

Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding.

Mama.

More.

Dog.

Dada.

No.

Yes.

Kiss.

Milk.

Ball.

Up.

Balloon.

Hi.

Bottle.

Cup.

Bye.

Down.

Sleep.

I run the list of Katie’s words over in my mind. I have them down cold, of course, because I was the mother who knew these things. I was the mother who dutifully jotted down every milestone (“4 months, 3 weeks: Katie rolled over today! Far ahead of the 6-month target!”), who nursed her until her first birthday exactly, per the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendation (“I’m so sad to give it up,” I told friends as wrinkles washed across my forehead to note my air of sincerity), and who, as I have mentioned, tallied up Katie’s vocabulary to ensure that she was on track to fulfill her potential. Seventeen words. A gasp ahead of other eighteen-month-olds.

And now, we also had “Barbie.”

Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Splat.

My eyes whip over to the upper corner of the windshield, where mildew-colored bird shit slowly oozes down. Great, I think. Just fucking great. There’s never any bird shit in the goddamn brochure. I inhale and try to release the stress, as my Pilates teacher had taught me to do every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings from 10:00 to 11:00, after my nanny had arrived, and just before I went to the grocery store to pick up ingredients for dinner. I feel the air fill my chest, and it expands like a helium balloon.

I count to five and try not to gag. It’s hard, after all, to clear my mind when the scent of fetid milk is wafting from the backseat. On the way home from a playdate yesterday, Katie had dumped her sippy cup on her head, for apparently no reason whatsoever, and since I’d already exhausted myself pretending to dote on the kids at this seemingly never-ending excruciatingly boring playdate, during which all the moms discussed diaper changes and nanny problems and potential preschool applications, I opted not to clean her car seat. Fuck it, I told myself, as I pulled my darling daughter and her crisp near-black curls from her saturated seat and called her a “silly willy” for dousing herself despite knowing better. Just fuck it.

And so I did. Which is why my Range Rover, which should have still smelled like a fine blend of lemon cleaner and shoe polish, now reeked like petrified puke.

The bird shit is snaking its way into the crack between the windshiel

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Excerpted from Time of My Life: A Novel by Allison Winn Scotch
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