“Oh, just shut up,” I said wearily.
“I’ll miss you when I’m away,” he said. “For what it’s worth. I always do.” I didn’t say anything to that, just stared up at the ceiling. He flicked at my hair. “The good news is that by the time I’m back, you may actually have some hair again.”
“I’ll shave it all off the second you’re in town.”
“That’ll show me.” He put his arm out and I moved into its embrace, resting my head on his shoulder. “Seriously, Rickie. Move forward. You’ll be happier if you do.”
“When did you get so preachy?”
He sighed and I could feel his chest move under my ear. “Someday you’re going to realize that when people give you advice, they’re not doing it to piss you off. They’re trying to help you.”
“I don’t need anyone’s help.”
“Says the girl who sponges off her parents.”
There was a pause. “That was mean,” I said and moved off of him.
He shrugged. “The truth hurts.”
“I had to move back in with them and you know it. Because of Noah.”
“That was years ago, Rickie.”
“You try taking care of a baby, see how easy it is.”
“He’s not a baby anymore.”
“You can’t possibly know what it’s been like for me,” I said, sitting up, my voice rising. “You’ve never taken care of anything, not even a fish. You don’t even have a fucking plant in this place.”
He regarded me calmly, his arms lying quietly at his sides. “Nope,” he said. “I don’t. Because I’ve made a choice not to be responsible for anything other than myself.”
“How wonderful for you,” I said. “How great that you don’t ever have to care about anyone other than yourself.”
“Yeah, it’s nice,” he said and laughed.
“God!” I said, half furious, half wanting to laugh too. “I kind of hate you.”
“I kind of hate you too.”
It occurred to me that that was the closest thing to “I love you” Ryan and I were ever likely to say to each other.
It was the last time I saw him before he left the country again.
18.
For the winter school break, we all left town—Mom, Dad, Mel, her kids, Noah, and me—to go to my mother’s oceanfront condo in Laguna.
My mom had been an only child and her parents had died fairly young, leaving her a lot of money, but she didn’t throw it around much. If you thought about it, you knew she was rich because she and Dad had a good-sized house in a nice neighborhood and could afford to support me and Noah without any difficulty, but she never wore expensive clothes or jewelry or anything flashy. Her one huge indulgence was this beach condo, which was big enough to fit us all, so long as Noah bunked with Nicole and Cameron, and Melanie and I shared the third bedroom. In the past, Mel’s family would just come down for a couple of days at Christmas and stay at a nearby resort hotel, but things were different this year with her and Gabriel separated, so she and the kids were joining us for the whole first half of break. After Christmas, Gabriel would get the kids.
We spent a lot of that vacation walking on the beach, Melanie and I, letting the kids run ahead of us, talking and sometimes just being quiet together. It was fairly cold out there that time of year, and we had to wrap up in scarves and hats and gloves, but the kids never wanted to wear more than a sweatshirt and often had bare feet on the cold sand. “They run hotter than we do,” Mel said.
It was during a mile-long walk along the deserted beach—just the two of us that time, because the kids were back at the condo helping my mother decorate the small Christmas tree we had just lugged up to the apartment—that I finally told Melanie I was going back to school after the holidays. “Just at SMC, but I can apply to UCLA after I’ve done a couple of semesters there. I can take three full-credit courses and still be out in time to pick up Noah from school.”
“Oh, Rickie, that’s wonderful!” She threw her arms around me. “I didn’t want to nag you about it, but I’m so glad. Did you tell Dad and Laurel yet?”
I kicked at a rock. “I can’t bear to. Mom’ll be way too happy about it.”
She stepped back. “Is that such an awful thing? Making her happy?”
“I just can’t stand the way she always has to be right about everything.”
“I don’t understand why you’re so hard on her, Rickie. Do you have any idea how lucky you are to have a mother like her? She’s generous and kind and smart and she’s taken care of you and Noah without ever even criticizing you for—” She stopped.
“For being an idiot?” I filled in for her. “For having a kid when I was too young?” I dug my heel deep into the sand. “You just don’t know what it’s like, Mel. You have a different relationship with her than I do. She respects you. She doesn’t respect me.”
Melanie was silent. We started walking again. “Don’t get mad at me,” she said finally in a small voice that I had to strain to hear above the ocean noise. “But respect is a two-way street. Maybe if you were more respectful toward her…” She trailed off.
“Whatever,” I said. “Not in the mood for a lecture, okay?”
“Okay,” she said. We turned around and headed back down the beach.
I had made the decision to go back to school a couple of weeks earlier, on the night Ryan called me from the airport to say good-bye. I’d said, “Call me when you get back.”
“Change something before then,” he’d said. “Surprise me.”
As I looked around the bedroom I’d lived in for all but nine months of my entire life, it struck me that that wasn’t a bad idea.
Besides, if Andrew Fulton ever asked me again what my plans for the future were, I wanted a better answer than “I don’t know.”
* * *
On Christmas Day the kids got way too many presents and my mother made way too big a ham. Both were Allen family traditions.
Mom gave me a few gift cards to different stores—“I didn’t dare pick anything out for you,” she said—but she’d gotten Melanie a beautiful necklace. “It’s from that jewelry designer in Bergamot Station you love so much,” she told her, which made me wonder how many conversations she and Melanie had about things they loved when I wasn’t around. Maybe I just tuned them out.
My big gift for Noah was a baseball bat and mitt. A couple of weeks earlier he had gone rooting for a stick of gum in my messenger bag and discovered the form that Coach Andrew had given me about the T-ball league. “Hey!” he said, shaking it at me. “You never told me about this!”
“Oh, sorry. I forgot.” It wasn’t a lie. I had forgotten about it. But I also hadn’t really wanted to show it to him in the first place. It had been a convenient lapse of memory.
“Where’d you get it?”
“Coach Andrew. He’s coaching one of the teams and thought you’d be interested.”
“I want to do it.”
“It’s a pretty big commitment, Noey. And you haven’t played a lot of baseball in the past.”
“I want to do it.”
“I’ll look into it,” I said with a sigh. I knew exactly how this would play out: he’d be all excited and enthusiastic ahead of time then he’d go to the first practice, which wouldn’t be anything like he’d imagined. He would hate all the hard work and running and would complain about fake injuries and exaggerated exhaustion. After that, I’d have to coax and beg and yell at him just to get him to go to the practices. He’d freak out at having to play in a real game, but the coach would insist he “get on out there,” and there I’d be on the sidelines, watching the son I loved mess up every time he was on the field and be jeered at by the kids on both teams.
I knew all this because I’d signed Noah up for an AYSO team the year before and that was exactly what had happened until I just stopped taking him to the practices and games altogether, thus imparting to my son the invaluable lesson that he should quit whenever things got tough.
“Tell him I
want to do it,” Noah said stubbornly.
What could I do? I surrendered. “Okay.”
I had managed to busy myself in other parts of the house when Andrew had come to work with Noah the last couple of weeks before break. I’d stay upstairs while Noah answered the door and just call down my greetings and later my good-bye like I was too busy to come down at all. It just seemed… easier.
That pizza party had made something very clear to me: Andrew was perfectly happy with his present romantic situation. It just felt simpler now to avoid him than to keep reminding myself how cute and nice and funny and unavailable he was.
So when Noah said he wanted to play T-ball, I sent Andrew a short e-mail about it.
“Great,” he wrote back. “I look forward to seeing you both at practices and games.”
So much for avoiding him.
Anyway, Christmas Day I gave Noah the T-ball gear and he was pretty excited about it, which was probably the first time he had ever shown pleasure in getting some kind of athletic equipment. The rest of his gifts from me and the other members of the family were more traditionally Noah-ish: lots of books, lots of computer and video games, and a chemistry kit from my father, who said he’d help him use it.
I gave Dad a two-year subscription to Wine Lovers magazine and I gave Mom a state-of-the-art meat thermometer that worked remotely so you left part of it in the meat and carried around the digital readout. “Now you don’t have to worry about when to take out the turkey,” I said.
“Thank you.” She gave me a big hug. I hugged her back. It was Christmas, after all.
Melanie nudged me. “Don’t you have another present to give your mother?” she said archly. I stared at her blankly. “Tell her your news,” she said. “It’s the perfect holiday gift.”
“What news is that?” Mom asked.
“I’m pregnant again!” I said gaily.
For a moment, her jaw dropped open. Then I saw that patented steely Laurel Allen “I can deal with this; I can deal with anything they throw at me” look come across her face as she drew herself up into battle stance. But before she could actually say anything, Melanie broke in. “Shut up, Rickie! She’s not pregnant,” she told my mom. “She’s going back to college after the break—she’s enrolled and everything.”
My mother put her hand to her heart. “Oh, thank god,” she said.
“Overreact much?” I said.
“Shut up, Rickie,” Mel said again.
When all the gifts had been unwrapped, my mother said she had another Christmas present for both Mel and me but we’d have to wait to get it. “A friend of mine was raving about how good her masseuse is, so I scheduled her to come to the house and give both you girls a rubdown after we get back to town.”
“You’ll have one, too, won’t you?” Melanie asked.
Mom shook her head. “It’s not my kind of thing.”
“She’d have to relax for an hour,” I said. “She’d probably explode.”
“I’m capable of relaxing,” Mom snapped.
I rolled my eyes.
“You’re welcome,” she added pointedly.
The next day Gabriel came to pick up the kids and ended up staying with us at the beach for most of the afternoon. He had brought extravagant and wonderful gifts for everyone. Mine was a portable photo printer that connected to your cell phone. He insisted on running out to pick up lunch, coming back with bags and bags of take-out Mexican food—way too much for the number of people, but the kids were beyond excited as they unpacked it all and tore open the containers of quesadillas, tacos, and nachos. Noah was especially happy because Gabriel had remembered to get corn tortillas instead of flour, so it was all gluten-free and for once he could eat everything his cousins could.
I was just relieved Gabriel hadn’t brought Sherri with him. That would have killed Melanie.
She was pretty tense at the beginning of his visit but became visibly more relaxed as the day went on. The thing about Gabriel was that he was always so much fun to be around. Even with all their history, Melanie couldn’t help laughing at his stories and smiling at his compliments, which somehow managed to be both over-the-top and oddly sincere. He gave her the most gorgeous Hermès purse I’d ever seen. (I went online later to check out the price and my slight shame at doing so didn’t reduce my awe at the fifteen-hundred-dollar price tag.) You could tell Mel loved it and that it was killing her that she loved it as she unwrapped and looked at it.
She had framed a beautiful photo of their two kids for him, and he hugged her close after he’d opened it, dropping a kiss on the top of her head so gently that I’m not sure she even felt it.
When he took all the kids for a walk on the beach, I pulled Melanie aside to see how she was holding up. “I’m good,” she said in a reasonably steady voice. “I really think I’m past the worst of this, Rickie. I think I can be with him now and not care all that much.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “You took a Xanax, didn’t you?”
“Only a half of one.”
Later, when I was saying good-bye to Gabriel, I said, “It’s not the same around here without you.” I didn’t even say it in a bitter, look-what-you’ve-done way; it was just a statement that we both knew was true and sad. Then I left so he and Melanie could say good-bye alone.
When she came back in, she walked swiftly and silently past all of us, straight to the room we shared. She closed the door. I left her alone for a while and then I knocked and went in. She was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and listening to some melancholy song on her iPod, which was plugged into the clock/stereo dock.
I came in and sat on the edge of the other twin bed. I didn’t say anything, just waited for her to speak, which she eventually did.
“He broke up with Sherri.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Or she broke up with him but he’s saying he did it.”
“Either way, it’s got to feel good.”
“It’s better,” she said. “Good is an overstatement.”
“Does it change anything for you?”
She shook her head. Then she nodded. Then she shrugged and shook her head again. “Oh, lord, I don’t know,” she said wearily. “I’d forgive him if I could, Rickie. But I can’t. What he did hurt me so much.”
“Maybe you don’t need to actually forgive him,” I said. “Maybe you can still be mad he did what he did but give him another chance anyway.”
“He’d cheat on me again.”
“You really think so?”
“I’ll get older and my body will deteriorate and there’ll be a new pretty young actress with perfect boobs and he’ll cheat on me again.”
“Maybe not. Now that he knows what a huge price he’d pay for something like that.”
“And anyway, I won’t trust him anymore so I’ll be waiting for him to cheat on me whether or not he actually does. And that alone will make me miserable and ruin everything.”
I couldn’t argue with that, so I just lay down and listened to her funereal music until I realized it was way past Noah’s bedtime and he was still up watching TV.
We came back to the LA house the day before New Year’s Eve. My mother threw an annual New Year’s Day open house party, and so the next couple of days were a whirlwind of food shopping and cooking and cleaning. Her temper, never particularly slow to rise, got sharper with every passing hour, until she was yelling at everyone who crossed her path to “stop wasting time and at least help me get this house in shape!” The house looked clean enough to me, so I just stayed out of her way.
On New Year’s Eve, just another day of party preparation as far as my mother was concerned, she came across some cooked chicken that she had asked Noah to cut up for her that he had left out on the counter. “How long has this been out?” she asked, carrying the bowl of chicken pieces into the family room where the rest of us were watching East Coast coverage of the countdown. It was past eight and the party in Times Square was in full swing. “Noah, do you know?”
; He shook his head, eyes on the TV. “I don’t remember.”
“The chicken feels warm,” Mom said. “I don’t know if I can use it now.”
“I’m sure it’s fine,” I said. “Just stick it in the fridge.”
“I can’t risk giving my guests food poisoning.”
“Worse that happens is they lose a pound or two. It’s all good.”
She wasn’t amused. “You need to teach your son to finish what he begins. Wouldn’t kill you to remember that, either.”
“Why are you yelling at me?” I said. “I didn’t do anything.”
“That’s just the point. You don’t do anything. I could use a lot more help right around now but all you do is sit around all day, staring at your computer or the TV set.”
“Fine,” I said. “What do you want me to do? Just tell me and I’ll do it.”
She shook the bowl of chicken at me. “That tone isn’t helpful.”
“I’m just asking you what you want—”
“Some help!” she said, her voice rising. “I just told you!”
“What kind of help? I’m willing to do whatever you want, but you have to be more specific.”
“You know what I’d love?” she said. “For once I’d love for someone to do something around here without being pissy about it.” She turned on her heel and left the family room.
“Did you see that?” I asked Melanie. “You always think I start things but that was all her.”
“She’s just on edge because of the party. She gets this way every year.”
“And yet somehow she never takes it out on you.”
“She’s nicer to me because I’m not her daughter. That’s just how it works. You’re more patient with Cameron than you are with Noah, and I’m the opposite. It’s the distance—you don’t care so much when it’s not your kid, so things don’t annoy you as much.”
I considered that then shook my head. “I think she just hates me.”
“You think Grandma hates you?” Noah said, looking up from the TV.
Rats, he was listening. “Not really. I was just saying that.”
“Do you hate me?”
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