Minus Me

by Mameve Medwed

  At last, she returns to the kitchen. “If you hand me that pot, I’ll put it away,” she offers.

  He doesn’t answer, only bisects his loaf of bread with a violent karate chop of his knife.

  “Not that way,” Megan cautions Juliette, who is assembling a Bunyan. “Onions first.”

  Juliette strikes her forehead. “You’d figure by now I could have got the hang of it.”

  Does Sam roll his eyes? Or is it her imagination? But when Juliette drops the sandwich spreader on the linoleum tiles and doesn’t rinse it off before sticking it into the jar of mayonnaise, Sam does roll his eyes—and then some. “Jesus!” he exclaims. He grabs it from her, shoves the spreader into a pot of water already boiling on the burner, and throws the whole jar of mayonnaise into the trash.

  “My bad,” Juliette apologizes.

  “Please go out front and clear the tables,” Sam demands. “Can you at least manage that?”

  As soon as she leaves, Megan shakes her head. “Not that it is any of my business …”

  “I know,” Sam replies.

  “You’re too nice,” Megan remonstrates.

  Sam shrugs.

  Now Sam turns toward Annie. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  Her chest balloons with hope, then deflates with dread. “If you want.”

  “I’ll go help Juliette,” Megan offers. “I’m sure she can use an extra couple of hands.”

  The instant the door swings shut, Sam, with no preamble, declares, “I want you to fire Juliette.”

  “Whoa,” Annie says. “Maybe you could explain what this is all about.”

  “Nothing to explain. Even without your being here a full day, not to mention the last weeks, you must have noticed what a terrible employee she is.”

  “You’ve had more than two weeks of her incompetence. Why now?”

  “As you pointed out, the combi can take over a lot of kitchen chores. Besides, you’re back.” He straightens the napkin holder. “Or so it seems.”

  Annie notes the lack of gratitude for her return or any expressed hope that she’ll stay. His tacked-on or so it seems sounds both snarky and unfair. Well, she too can play the snarky game. “You want me to do your dirty work for you?”

  “She’s a single mother with a little kid. A sweet child …”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “It’s hard to kick someone when they’re down.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  He steps back and bumps into the combi. He rubs his elbow. “I’ve already got a job lined up for her in a nursing home. Ray’s sister-in-law’s brother-in-law. She won’t like it as much …”

  “I bet.”

  “Though the chores will be more basic.”

  “Than pouring coffee and spreading mayonnaise?”

  “And she can bring Isabel. Will you do it or not?”

  * * *

  In the front room, Annie spots Juliette lounging at the table with the lumber-jacketed habitués. “A refill?” asks Remi Arsenault, dangling the coffeepot over Juliette’s cup. Ray Beaulieu passes her a plate of pastries.

  Annie taps Juliette on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” she says, “Could I have a word with you?”

  “I guess …” Juliette dunks a doughnut into her mug, then licks it. She looks up. “It’s Annie, right?”

  Annie nods.

  She points to the plate. “Do you want a maple glazed? They’re real good. Still warm …”

  “Not now.” She takes Juliette’s elbow. “Let’s step outside.”

  “It’s wicked freezing out there.”

  Annie considers, then dismisses the bathroom as undignified for conducting serious business. “We can sit in my car,” she offers.

  * * *

  In the parking lot, the two of them pile into the front. Annie turns on the heat to full blast. She can see deep ridges in the asphalt where Maine Moose Movers unloaded their truck and then drove off, considerably lighter than when they arrived. “So, Juliette …” she begins, aiming for a casual tone.

  “Hey, now I get it,” Juliette cuts in. “You’re Sam’s wife, the one who left him.”

  “Hardly. I went to New York. To visit my mother.”

  “Yeah, right, he was that pissed you were gone.” She leans closer to Annie, within whisper’s length. “Hey, are you two still …?”

  “Very much so.”

  “Can’t hurt to ask, right? For a middle-aged dude, he’s pretty hot.” She switches on the radio dial and spins through the stations. “Too bad you don’t have satellite.”

  Annie reaches over. She twists the knob to off.

  “It’s only news anyhow.” Juliette digs in her purse. She brings out a lipstick. “So, you think he was just being nice to me?”

  “He is nice.”

  “Since I mostly know scumbags who only want you-know-what, it’s kind of hard to decide when a non-scumbag is just a good person treating you with respect”—she angles the rearview mirror toward her chin, smudging the glass—“or whether there’s something more.”

  “What made you imagine there might be something more?”

  “Besides being nice? He’s real amazing with Isabel. He’s even coming to her birthday party next week. He’s bringing cupcakes.”

  “He likes kids,” Annie confides with a pang.

  Juliette’s eyes move to Annie’s stomach. “How come you and Sam don’t have any?”

  “That’s a rather personal question.”

  “Just wondering. Me, any dude just looks at me and I get pregnant.”

  The pang grows stronger. Annie adopts her sternest schoolmarm voice. “Juliette, let’s get to the point of this conversation. There’s a reason I needed to talk to you.”

  Juliette draws a Cupid’s bow on her lips. “I know. You’re going to fire me.”

  Annie’s mouth opens in astonishment. “How did you …? Why would you …?”

  “Because I suck at this job. A no-brainer. If you ask me, Sam’s got way too big of a good heart to tell me, so he wants you to do his dirty work for him. Men,” she spits out.

  “Men,” Annie echoes.

  “I expected him to sack me that last time I screwed up all those orders. I was pretty much cool with it, because once I left the job, Sam wouldn’t be my boss; he’d be fair game. I mean, how would I know that you, the wife, could be coming back?”

  Annie is starting to feel sorry for Juliette. Been there, done that, she’s tempted to confess to her fellow sufferer. Instead she says, “Sam talked to one of the customers about a position for you in a nursing home.”

  “Yuck. Bedpans and stuff? Old people? No way. I’ve already found myself a job, cocktail waitress down at Gabe’s. Better salary, and I hear the tips are totally awesome.”

  Annie bends forward. She clutches the steering wheel to keep from laughing. Wait till she tells Sam. She stops. Not that she tells Sam anything these days.

  “Anyhow,” Juliette adds, her hand on the door handle. “Nice meeting you. What the hell … who’ll miss me if I take the rest of the day off.” Halfway out, she turns to Annie. “And if by any chance …”

  “Don’t even think about it,” Annie says.

  * * *

  “All done,” Annie reports when she returns to the kitchen.

  “So fast?” Sam asks.

  “She’s already landed another job: cocktail waitress at Gabe’s.”

  “That dive? I guess no good deed goes unpunished.”

  She tries to read his face—is he relieved? Sad? “Is that all you have to say?”

  “Thanks.”

  “Actually, firing her wasn’t that hard.”

  Pressing her advantage, Annie turns herself into the anti-Juliette, a whirling dervish of efficiency, arranging silverware, sorting the spices, refilling the salt and pepper holders. “It’s been quite a day,” she says.

  “I suppose.” He doesn’t look up.

  She taps a drum roll against the oven door.

  He looks up.<
br />
  “I take it you approve of the combi?” she asks.

  “It’s fine.”

  “I supposed as much,” she persists. “The second I saw it, I knew.”

  Is she mistaken, or does he almost smile?

  Could it be that Sam is only mad at her, not infatuated with someone else? Does she sense a thawing? She leans against the counter, alternately exultant and confused. If she dares to assume that the combi-sized obstacle of Juliette has been knocked down, there still remains a slalom’s worth of other hurdles rising up to block her path.

  Sam steps away. His mouth takes a sudden downward twist. His eyes don’t meet hers but stay pasted to the shelf of condiments. “And just who went along with you to help you pick the combi out?” he asks.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  It’s Thursday. Annie has already spent three sleepless nights in solitary confinement on her side of the bed. Now she waits for Ursula to arrive for tea. While Ambrose is holding office hours, Ursula wants to visit her daughter, whom she hasn’t seen once since they returned to Passamaquoddy. “You know what it’s like when you first fall in love,” she explained, coy as a teenager.

  The last thing Annie needs right now is to discuss love with her mother.

  Or the lack of it.

  Does Thursday count as the end of the week? she wonders. Dr. Revere could call her today with the results of the test. Or tomorrow. Perhaps he’s the kind of compassionate man of medicine who might even contact an increasingly impatient patient over the weekend. So far, she’s managed to keep the lingering prospect of fertility reports at bay. Given the impasse between her and Sam, what’s even the point?

  For a nanosecond on the vast spectrum of time and on the not-so-vast-and-now-shrinking spectrum of her marriage, she thought everything was going to be all right. Once Juliette was eliminated as number-one perpetrator of crimes against a lawful wife, hope surged. But if Annie’s suspicions about Sam were eased, Sam’s resentment and doubts about her obviously remain unchanged.

  On the surface, her defense appears to be, in Juliette’s words, a no-brainer; she has only to stand up and shout, But there is nobody else; there never has been. I am innocent of your accusations. She can’t because, if she is innocent of one thing, she is guilty of so many others. Not that he will even let her plead her case.

  She thinks back seventeen years to their wedding day. The details are still fresh, etched into high relief. The morning before they were married, they struggled for hours over the precise wording of their vows.

  “We will always tell each other the truth,” Annie promised. “No matter how painful, or hurtful, or embarrassing, or how big or how small.”

  Sam laughed. “Do we have to sign with our blood?”

  “I don’t want to be like my mother. I’m serious.”

  Now Annie checks her watch. Ursula is already twenty minutes late. Surprise, surprise.

  She has time.

  Upstairs, she pulls open the closet door. The first thing that draws her eye is the shopping bag of packages meant for Isabel. Notwithstanding the innocent birthday-party explanation, they’re still a kind of affront, which does not say much for her character. Well, Annie is quick to admit that hers is a character studded with flaws.

  She forces her gaze from the presents. She fetches the step stool. On the top shelf, she finds the box tied with the streamers from her bridal bouquet; the ribbons are yellowed and brittle, the lid dusty. She should have wrapped the contents in archival tissue and sealed them in plastic. An endless list of shoulds.

  She remembers the photos she and Sam arranged in the white album embossed with wedding bells. Together, they lingered over each one. Snapshot after snapshot of the two of them, barefoot on the beach, her wearing an ivory Mexican wedding dress she’d ordered from a catalog, Sam in a matching guayabera. That morning she’d picked wildflowers and woven them through her hair. She’d fashioned a daisy chain for Sam, which he’d slung around his neck. Ursula had been appalled at such makeshift informality; Sam’s parents, puzzled.

  Now she brings the box to the bed. She unties the ribbons, lifts the lid. It’s all there, the invitations they hand-addressed in their best Palmer method script, using fountain pens with a mixture of blue and green ink the color of the sea; the dried Queen Anne’s lace and baby’s breath; the flat rocks they picked; the shells that decorated the picnic tables; the bird whistles they gave their guests; the pipe-cleaner bride and groom that crowned the lopsided cake, assembled—crooked layer by crooked layer—by a first-year culinary student. She studies the photos. Have two people ever looked happier, more certain of the future?

  Toward the back of the album, tucked into a satin pocket, she finds the vows. Her handwriting, even with the ink faded, appears more vigorous than it does now. Two decades ago, she pressed her pen hard against the paper to form emphatic sentences; the letters at the ends of her words curled upward in optimistic swirls. She unfolds the page:

  I promise always to tell the truth, to open my heart and soul to you. I believe there is nothing we cannot confide in each other. I promise to let you in on my innermost fears and feelings, secrets and dreams. I promise to grow along with you, to be willing to face change together as we both change, keeping our relationship alive and exciting and honest. And finally, I promise to love you in good times and in bad, with all I have to give and all that I am, in the only way I know how—completely and truly and forever.

  She reads the words again. She remembers how the Doughboys fled to Florida without leaving the recipe for the Bunyan, astonishing Sam. “It was a contract,” he protested. “A binding document.”

  “I’ll never let you down. Scout’s honor,” she swore with a three-fingered salute.

  Now the doorbell rings. Ursula. Suddenly Annie realizes she looks like hell. Ever since her first day back, her whole carefully calibrated New York appearance has taken a downhill dive, along with any prospects for reconciliation. She pushes her tangled hair behind her ears. It’s too late for a comb. She sticks the box back in the closet and hurries to the bottom of the stairs.

  “So sorry, darling,” Ursula apologizes, swanning in, a whirl of fur and cashmere and pearls and a tartan shawl—her interpretation of country attire. “I had to make Ambrose lunch.”

  “Really?” Annie asks. She hangs up her mother’s coat and fetches a mug of tea from the kitchen.

  Ursula flinches at the choice of the mug over a proper cup and saucer. “Well, yes, I ordered scads of yummies from Zabar’s—how did we ever survive before FedEx? Nevertheless, I needed to assemble everything. Then add a billet doux to the little brown bag. Ambrose, in case you want to know—”

  “Would it matter if I didn’t?”

  “—is turning out to be quite the ardent swain. We are happy as clams. I have finally, at long last, got something right.”

  Annie looks at her mother and feels a stab of affection for the woman whose larger-than-life quality, always an embarrassment, has allowed her daughter to live. She’s grateful for Ursula’s problem-solving abilities and her thick everybody-who’s-anybody Rolodex, enhanced by big fat checks. Without her mother’s car and driver, she would never have seen Dr. Revere. Or made it back to Passamaquoddy in time. She stops. In time for what?

  Now Ursula extolls Ambrose’s virtues, their life together, her plans to renovate the house, Ambrose’s thoughtful attempts to erase any trace of his dead wife and Ursula’s insistence that he keep one small portrait (though not in a prominent place), she is feeling that secure. “I’m not at all jealous of his past,” she adds.

  “Very evolved of you, Ursula,” says Annie.

  Ursula gives her daughter an appraising look. “And what about you?” She takes in Annie’s default dowdiness, her unkempt hair. Ursula’s no fool. “The reason we rushed home in the first place?”

  “False alarm. The new employee, pretty and young, did seem to have her sights on Sam, but he took no notice of her.”

  “Because he is so in love with you,�
�� her mother pronounces from her own Cupid-saturated pedestal.

  “Not exactly.”

  Ursula leans forward. She puts down her mug. “What is the matter, darling?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Very much something, if you ask me. Just tell your mother, Arabella. Out with it.”

  Annie comes out with it. She catalogs Sam’s distance, the bifurcated marital bed, his anger at her abandonment, how she thought the combi might be the way back to his heart only to have her hopes dashed by his suspicions of a lover in New York. “Imagine, me with a lover!” she exclaims.

  “Imagine,” Ursula concurs. “I’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous.”

  Should she mention her single New York fling as a single nineteen-year-old? No matter. She plows ahead, talking about the agony of waiting for the fertility report, and how either way it’s something she can’t share with Sam. She describes her loneliness, the loneliness of carrying secrets.

  Ursula shifts to the sofa. She takes Annie in her arms. Annie smells French perfume and Italian soap embellished with a tang of smoked salmon left over from Ambrose’s lunch. Ursula strokes her hair, “Darling, darling,” she soothes. She hands Annie a lace-hemmed linen handkerchief, so inadequate for even a single snuffle that Ursula hurries into the bathroom for more generous supplies. She passes Annie a wad of Kleenex, then extracts one tissue for herself; she daubs at her own eyes, which brim with a few select diamonds of tears, not the waterfall cascading down Annie’s face and splattering her mother’s Clan MacDougall–clad chest.

  For a long while, Annie lies against her mother’s breast. It’s amazing how perfectly she fits here. How comforted and protected she feels. Has her mother ever held her like this before?

  “There, there,” Ursula croons.

  Annie nuzzles closer. “Oh, Mother, how did I ever get myself into such a mess?”

  Ursula’s head springs up, dislodging her daughter.

  “What?” Annie asks.