The Boyfriend

by Abigail Barnette

  El-Mudad, however, had no experience at all with Valerie besides meeting her at Christmas. That had been the first time his hackles had been raised over her, and Neil had followed it up with his sudden need to contact Valerie immediately after learning of her wedding. Of course, his fears would be at maximum alert.

  Neil continued, telling a story that had stunned me the first time I’d heard it. While Valerie had been pregnant with Emma, Neil had slept with an employee at his father’s company. He’d felt guilty and told Valerie only weeks before Emma was born, and though they’d tried, the relationship couldn’t be salvaged.

  “We were a disaster together,” Neil said. “That’s not an excuse. There was no excuse for cheating on her. For hurting her. We wouldn’t have worked out. We both know that. But the way it ended between us...with a child we had to raise together...”

  “I can’t believe what I’m hearing.” El-Mudad shook his head. “You knew how Bijou broke my heart. I’ve cried to you both about it. You didn’t think that this would be information I would have liked to know?”

  “It never crossed my mind,” I admitted. “It happened before I knew Neil. Shit, it happened before I was born. Yeah, it made me feel bad for Valerie, but I never thought it had anything to with me. So I didn’t realize it would have anything to do with you.”

  “I thought perhaps I should have said something,” Neil said softly. “I considered telling you, but I wasn’t certain if it would hurt you to hear it right after the divorce. Then time went by and it felt as though I’d waited too long.”

  “And you didn’t want to tell me because you didn’t want me to look at you any differently.” El-Mudad wasn’t going to let Neil gloss past that. “I don’t doubt your concern for my feelings. But I wasn’t your only concern.”

  “Would it have made a difference? Knowing? Would you be here now if you’d known?” Neil’s words punched a ragged hole into my heart. Was this a breakup? Was El-Mudad leaving us?

  No. No, that couldn’t happen. We’d only just started to spend real time together. To live our lives normally together. We’d just gotten back from Venice. Less than twenty-four hours before, El-Mudad and I had curled up in bed on a jet over the Atlantic, talking about how much we missed Neil and couldn’t wait to be with him.

  It couldn’t be over now.

  I’m not ready.

  El-Mudad looked between the two of us, then down at the tabletop. “No. No, it wouldn’t have made a difference. And I wish you could have trusted me enough to tell me.”

  “I swear, nothing will ever happen between me and Valerie—or anyone else—for as long as we’re together,” Neil said, reaching for El-Mudad’s hand. El-Mudad let him take it, and my lungs finally remembered how to work.

  “And I hope that will be forever,” Neil added.

  El-Mudad lifted Neil’s hand to his lips. “I hope so, as well. But we can’t have any more secrets. Not ones like that. Not ones that will hurt us.”

  My muscles went weak with relief. Despite how foolish I probably looked, I put my head down on the table.

  “Jet lag catching up with you, darling?” Neil asked gently.

  I shook my head. Or, more accurately, rocked my forehead back and forth on the table. The glass felt cool and nice. “I don’t like fighting. That was seriously scary.”

  “It was uncharted territory.” El-Mudad put his hand on my back and rubbed soothing circles. “But we sailed through it, didn’t we?”

  “Remember when we had our first fight, Sophie?” Neil asked. And of course, I hadn’t forgotten. But I let him tell the story to El-Mudad. “We fought about work. It seemed so important at the time and seems so inconsequential now. I was cutting up something, a pepper, I think. I was so angry, I didn’t realize I was bleeding profusely and splashing it everywhere.”

  My stomach turned over. “Oh my god, you don’t have to take me back there.”

  “That was also the first time I told you that I loved you,” he reminded me.

  I lifted my head just enough to make eye contact with him. “Then maybe for this first fight, we should all tell each other that.”

  El-Mudad pushed his chair back and rose. He put his arms out for a hug. “I think that’s a brilliant idea.”

  We all embraced there in the kitchen, wordlessly holding each other tight. We’d been ready to start a new chapter with El-Mudad. I just hadn’t realized that starting a new chapter would mean rereading parts of the old ones.

  * * * *

  We usually had Sunday dinner at our house because Neil liked to cook, and we had the bigger kitchen. The guesthouse was hardly a cottage; though the kitchen was smaller than ours, it was still bigger than any house I’d ever been in. Well, at least before I’d started seeing Neil. When Mom said she wanted to host the next one, I’d accepted, on the condition that our house guest was also invited. She hadn’t looked thrilled about it, but she’d insisted that El-Mudad was always welcome.

  We piled into my Jaguar, the “family car.” El-Mudad sat in the passenger seat and Olivia and I in the back as Neil drove us the short distance to the house.

  “Why can’t we take the golf cart?” Olivia asked for the thousandth time.

  “Because it’s too cold.” Repeating that same answer over and over hadn’t gotten through to her, yet. I don’t know why I’d thought it would now.

  “I want the golf cart!” Olivia shouted, slamming her upper body and head back on her car seat.

  Mom had referred to this stage as being a “threenager.” I felt the comparison was particularly unfair to teenagers.

  “Olivia,” Neil said sternly, his eyes darting to hers in the rearview mirror. “If you plan to fight the entire time we’re at Rebecca’s, we can take you back to the house.”

  “Mariposa isn’t home!” she challenged him.

  “No, but I could stay with you,” El-Mudad warned. “And I could watch football on every television in the house.”

  That was enough to scare her straight, for the moment.

  Olivia had become more willful since Christmas. I wondered if she resented us for leaving her with Valerie for so long. But that had been weeks ago, and surely three-year-olds didn’t hold grudges that long?

  We pulled into the driveway and parked in front of the attached garage instead of in it, due to Mom’s fear of carbon monoxide poisoning. She’d heard once about some guy who’d turned his car on to warm it up before work, then he’d slipped and hit his head and his whole family suffocated from the exhaust. I wasn’t sure if it had actually happened or if it was apocryphal, but irrational fear caused by rumor or the local news had been handed down for generations of Scaife women.

  Neil made a big show of ringing the doorbell and waiting. The intercom beeped and Mom said, “The door’s unlocked. As it should be.”

  He shot me a dark look and I held up my hands in baffled defense. “What? I didn’t say it.”

  El-Mudad opened the door and held it for us with a long-suffering sigh. We left our coats and boots in the back hallway.

  “Come on in!” Mom yelled from the kitchen. “Dinner isn’t quite ready, yet.”

  “Brace yourself,” Neil warned El-Mudad, and I subtly elbowed him in the side.

  “Guess who’s here!” Olivia shouted.

  “Who?” Mom called back, pretending to be surprised.

  Olivia took off at a full run, skidding to a stop just inside the kitchen, her arms open wide. “It’s Olivia!”

  “It is?” Mom feigned shock. As I entered, she put down her spoon and opened her arms for a hug. Olivia launched herself at Mom, and I smiled to myself. The kid could be a monster, but she was at least a demonstratively loving monster.

  Mom straightened and gave us an uncomfortable smile. “Sophie. Neil. El-Mudad. What a full house we’ll have tonight.”

  “More to love,” I said, then wondered if that sounded too weird.

  “Thank you for inviting me,” he said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t bring anything—“

  �
��What should you bring?” Tony asked, appearing in the doorway. He put his hand out and shook Neil’s, then El-Mudad’s. “Neil keeps the cupboards stocked for us. We don’t need anything.”

  “I’m going to miss that when we move,” Mom said. “Although, I do sometimes get a craving to go grocery shopping.”

  “You’re a sick person, Mom.” As guilty as I sometimes felt about our extravagant lifestyle, having groceries delivered was something I would never apologize for. “There’s no reason we couldn’t send the delivery service to you somewhere else.”

  “No, no, we’re not fishing for money,” Tony said firmly.

  “I would never accuse you of that.” And besides, we had more than enough money that keeping my Mom comfortable was just the sensible thing to do. She’d raised me on practically nothing. It was my turn to support her.

  “Can I get a cookie?” Olivia asked Mom, who shook her head.

  “Not until after dinner.” She quickly added, “If your Afi says it’s all right.”

  Olivia looked doubtfully at Neil. “What if Sophie says it’s all right?”

  I stifled my laugh. I didn’t want to encourage her. But the kid could find a loophole in anything. “Why don’t you go with Afi and Tony and El-Mudad. I’m going to help my Mom in the kitchen.”

  “Okay,” Olivia said, happily scampering to the door. She stopped herself by grabbing the frame and turned. “I’m going to go help my mom in the kitchen, too. I help my mom in the kitchen all of the whole time.”

  Ouch.

  Every now and then, Olivia did ask about her mother and father. I’d thought “Where are they?” and “When will they come see me?” would have been the hardest questions to answer, but a recent, “Who are they?” had broken my heart. Now, she’d taken to occasionally mentioning them as part of an elaborate fantasy life we weren’t privy to. The child therapist she saw once a month had told us this was normal and we shouldn’t discourage it, but something being normal and healthy didn’t make it any easier to swallow.

  “Do you?” Neil asked, forcing a smile.

  “Oh yes, all of the whole time,” Olivia repeated happily. She wasn’t in mourning, really. She was struggling to process the abstract construct of a mother and father. “I do cooking. On the stove.”

  “Well, at Rebecca’s house, we don’t play with the stove,” Mom said smoothly, as though nothing were amiss with Olivia’s statement.

  “Okay!” Olivia agreed before moving on her way.

  Neil cleared his throat and said, “Is there anything I can help with, Rebecca?”

  “No, go sit down. Have a man chat while Sophie and I get this on the table,” she said, her gold bangles jingling as she waved her hand.

  “A man chat?” Tony asked with a fond shake of his head. “Pregame is on. You like football, right, El-Mudad?”

  “I think you may have your football and my football confused,” he said as they exited to the living room.

  Mom watched until the door swung shut behind them. “Your friend’s been here for a while.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s trying to find a place in New York,” I said, as though I hadn’t told her that several times already.

  She made a closed-mouth grimace. “I bet he’d have better luck if he ever left the house.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You found him out, Mom. He’s mooching off of us. I already told you, he has way more money than we do.”

  “I didn’t say anything about money.” She took a pot off the stove and maneuvered it to the sink, emptying out penne into a strainer. “Can you give those sausages a shake?”

  Slices of Italian sausage roasted in a skillet. Chunks of various colored peppers and onions sweated along beside them.

  “Are we sautéing these or—“

  “No, they’re not supposed to get mushy. If they get mushy, they won’t be like Ma’s.” She drew the “a” sound out in a long, nasally impression of Tony.

  I quirked my mouth and pushed the contents of the skillet around with a wooden spoon. “You know, I find it interesting that you have such a problem with Neil all the time, and now you’re dealing with the mother-in-law from hell...”

  “Are you calling me a mother-in-law from hell?” Mom demanded. She blew a strand of long blonde bangs from her face. “I am nothing like Tony’s mother. And I don’t have a problem with Neil. When have I ever had a problem with Neil?”

  “Three times a day since you met him,” I said without hesitation. The oven beeped.

  “That’s the bread. Hang on.” She shooed me out of the way and retrieved a split loaf of glistening garlic bread from the oven. It wasn’t the store-bought freezer kind.

  “I distinctly remember eating Tombstone pizzas and mac and cheese almost every night growing up,” I observed.

  “I distinctly remember the state paying for our groceries, so I couldn’t exactly afford to go all out,” she reminded me. She lifted the oven door with her foot and bumped it closed with her hip. “You have to stop offering to do stuff financially for Tony and me. It makes him feel terrible.”

  “Well, it makes me feel terrible that you think I shouldn’t help you,” I countered. “Especially, when I have the means to do it.”

  Mom put the bread down and moved the skillet off the burner before clicking the gas off. She wiped her hands on her apron, then put them on my shoulders. “You have helped me, Sophie. Look at the life I have. I didn’t have to move back in with grandma after the fire. I don’t have to work my shitty old job for one-percent raises every other year. I’m not giving up Friday nights to patient sit for extra cash. This house is better than anything I could have ever gotten on my own.”

  “Well, I don’t know if you’ve seen my place, but extremely same.” I went to the cupboard for serving bowl, standing on my tiptoes to reach it. “The difference between me and you guys is that I’m not tangled in my own bootstraps. I’m grateful for what I have, and I have enough to share. You and Tony both need to start seeing it that way. Otherwise, I’m going to be insulted.”

  “Be insulted,” she said breezily, taking the bowl from my hands. “I’m sure it won’t be the only time.”

  “Mom. Seriously.” I blew out a long breath. “You realize that I could buy you a house with the interest Neil’s bank accounts accrue in a single day?”

  “I’m sure you could,” she said, scraping the sausage and peppers into the bowl. “But we can buy a house on our own. We can afford it. Tony has tons of money saved up since his former employer paid room and board and vision and dental.”

  “Okay, right there! Why was it okay for us to compensate him with that for his job, but not to just outright to give it to him as a member of the family?” I demanded.

  Mom stopped and looked up. “You think of him as a member of the family?”

  “Well, I mean.” Yikes. Honest emotion with my mother could be intensely uncomfortable. It always had been. I’d always been torn between hating to hear “I love you” and desperately craving her love. Talking openly about me feeling some sort of attachment for the person she was marrying? I didn’t know if I could cope with that. “He’s marrying you, right? So, he would be a part of the family. But also, we liked him when he was driving for us. It’s not like he’s some total stranger. And we were still giving him those things.”

  “You were paying him those things. And you were paying well because the two of you are apparently a lot to put up with.” She raised an eyebrow at me, and I felt like I was shrinking.

  I lifted my chin and dispelled those feelings. “You know, he did sign a non-disclosure agreement while he was working for us. He probably shouldn’t be talking to you about what he put up with.”

  “He hasn’t told me any specifics.” She took out a platter and a big knife for the bread. “But he was on twenty-four hour call?”

  “Okay, guilty. But not unheard of.” I took the platter she handed to me and headed for the door to the dining room.

  “And everyone knows people get up to hanky-panky in
the back of limos,” she said in a scolding sing-song.

  “Well, I hope it puts your mind at ease to know we don’t have a limo.” My face was so hot, I wondered if I was going into early menopause or something.

  She followed with the peppers and deposited them on the set table, as well. Olivia’s high chair already stood between two seats. I mentally constructed a seating arrangement. Tony would sit at the head of the table—it just made sense, since he was the “man of the house”—and the two seats on either side of the high chair were clearly for us. Which left Mom and El-Mudad on the other side. She was going to sit next to him and judge him and transfer her judgy looks to me all through the meal. Fantastic.

  I followed her back to the kitchen. “Hey, can I ask you something real quick?”

  “Sure.” She transferred the pasta from a strainer into serving bowl.

  “Please give El-Mudad a chance.” I waited for her to look up, with the exact expression of hardened dislike that I’d expected. “He’s really important to us, Mom. He’s a good friend, and his daughters are wonderful, and he was there for me through everything I went through with Neil... I just don’t understand why you’re so against him.”

  “I’m not against him,” she said, practically an automated response. “And I don’t mind him coming here for family dinner. You know I love your friends. And that’s plural. Friends. How long has it been since you’ve seen Holli and Deja? They don’t come around anymore.”

  “They just had a baby,” I protested. “And I saw Deja before the holidays. They have to go to all the family shit they used to skip. It’s part of having a kid.”

  “I know what having a baby is, Sophie Anne,” Mom snapped. “I’m just concerned. You and Holli were very close, but now you’re too busy to have them out for dinner?”