by Rosie Danan
“No,” he extended the vowel in emphasis. “I don’t like radishes. I’m afraid of ketchup.”
“That’s not funny. I told you a real thing.”
“I’m not joking! The sight of ketchup skeeves me out the way other people can’t look at bugs. It’s the viscosity or something.” He covered his mouth with the back of his hand. “Ugh, seriously I can’t even talk about it. It’s making my blood run cold.” He held out his forearm, where the hairs stood on end, as evidence.
“All right, but if someone dared you to eat ketchup, you could do it?”
“Why would someone dare me to eat ketchup?” He balked.
Clara shrugged. “You’re playing one of those games. Truth or dare.”
“Have you ever played truth or dare?”
“Of course I have.” She flipped her hair over her shoulder.
“Yeah . . . but I bet you only ever picked truth.”
“I’ll have you know I’ve completed many dares.”
Josh’s mouth pulled to one side. “Oh yeah? Name one.”
Despite a prolonged sip of coffee that she used to barter for time, nothing came to mind. “Well, I can’t think of any off the top of my head. It’s been a while.”
“That’s a shame.” Something bright sparked behind his eyes. “Dares are fun.”
“Fun for whom, exactly?” Why did her voice sound so breathy?
“Everyone?” A blast of charm accompanied his words.
Spoken like someone who’s never been mocked. “No, they’re fun for the person issuing the dare and various spectators. The person performing the dare feels mortified at worse and inconvenienced at best.”
“So dares are against the rules, huh?”
“Guidelines,” she said automatically before clearing her throat. “I think it’s safe to say they are now.”
A high-pitched jingle sounded from her nightstand.
Clara grabbed her cell. Crap. She forced false cheerfulness into her tone. “Hi, Mom. . . .”
Yes, everything’s fine. . . .”
Mm-hm. Just unpacking.” She glanced over her shoulder to find Josh watching her with obvious interest.
“Everett?” Clara shifted her weight from one leg to the other. “Um, no. He’s not here right now. He ran to get coffee.”
She lowered her voice. “Sure, I’ll tell him you said hello.” Clara was so not ready to confess her humiliation to her perfect mother.
“Listen, Mom, I have to go. I’ve got a pot on the stove. . . .”
Yes, I’m cooking. . . .”
Uh . . . soup. And it’s burning. . . .”
Okay. I love you too. Bye.”
Josh narrowed his eyes. “You didn’t tell your mom about Everett bailing.”
He could have at least pretended he wasn’t eavesdropping. “She’ll worry.”
“Right.”
The silence between them brimmed with awkwardness.
“So, grocery store?” Josh gestured to her abandoned mug. “I can’t drink black coffee to save my life.”
“Wait. Did you make coffee, realize you didn’t have milk, and pawn off your leftovers on me?”
A guilty grin cut across his face. “Can’t a man make a nice gesture and responsibly repurpose resources? Come on. I’ll drive.”
“All right.” She followed him into the hallway. “But I’m buying like three bottles of ketchup.”
* * *
• • •
CLARA’S EYES TRAVELED from Josh’s well-formed backside to the items currently occupying the grocery cart he’d insisted they share.
Cereal with a higher sugar content than most candy, enough frozen burritos to feed a family of five for a week, and a jumbo-sized bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos. How could a person eat all of this and still look like that? The math didn’t add up.
She glared at the lone container of nonfat yogurt in the cart, her only contribution thus far. Clara felt better when she avoided eating things with too much sugar or salt, but all the leafy green vegetables in the world wouldn’t make her look like the svelte fitness moms in this L.A. grocery store. No matter what she ate, her prodigious boobs refused to shrink. At least her posterior had caught up over the last five years to create an illusion of balance.
By the time she looked up, Josh had managed to add an outrageous flavor of toaster pastry to his haul. He seemed to navigate the store based on spontaneous whims, completely disregarding the carefully constructed layout.
Clara parked the cart beside him. “Can I ask you an impertinent question?”
He lowered the frozen waffles in his hand. “Only if I get to ask you one back.”
“I suppose that’s fair.” Why had she let her life slip so far out of control? “How do you eat so much junk food and stay so . . .” Mouthwatering, her brain supplied unhelpfully. “Trim.”
He raised a single shoulder. “I fuck a lot?”
Clara succumbed to an alarming coughing fit and had to wave off the worried glances of several concerned shoppers. It served her right for asking.
Seemingly unperturbed, Josh led the way to the produce aisle and helped himself to an unsanctioned sample of grapes. “Okay. My turn. What’s your plan here?”
Clara held up the watermelon she’d just picked out. “I thought I could make a summer salad.”
“No. Not what’s your plan for the produce. What’s your plan for L.A.?”
She adjusted her sundress to avoid meeting his eyes. “My plan pretty much blew up in my face.”
It was only a matter of time before her mother found out Everett had split and politely suggested that Clara return to the coastline of her birth. “I suppose I’ll try to lie low for a few weeks. Lick my wounds. If I’m lucky, the gossip hounds won’t sniff out my humiliation before I can slink back to New York and make my excuses.”
She shivered. If anyone from back home realized Everett Bloom hadn’t bothered to stick around long enough to give her a proper brush-off, she’d have to move to Guam to escape the satisfied snickers.
“Wait a minute.” Josh stopped walking and she had to yank the cart to a halt to avoid running into his heels. “You can’t just go back. Maybe Everett got you out here, but if your old life was so good, you wouldn’t have jumped at the first chance to leave it.”
He plopped a massive bottle of root beer into the cart sideways. That was definitely going to explode and spray everywhere when he opened it.
“I don’t buy for a second that you didn’t make contingencies.”
Clara didn’t appreciate his attempts to diagnose her within a day of making her acquaintance, but she couldn’t fully deny his argument. “I don’t think my backup plan wants to hear from me.”
Did it count as a backup plan if the plan was a person? A person who would have every right to slam her door if any Wheaton came calling. After all, some hurts don’t heal, and Clara had a suspicion this one hadn’t faded, even after a decade.
She tried to let the conversation die off, but Josh waved a pack of pretzels at her. Her grip tightened around the handle of the cart. This guy already knew enough to be incriminating.
“My aunt Jill moved out here ten years ago. She started a PR firm in Malibu, from what I could find on the Internet. I haven’t seen or spoken to her since I was in high school.” Clara diligently double-bagged her skinless chicken breast.
“You don’t have to keep in touch with blood relatives. The shared DNA works like a get-out-of-jail-free card. No way did you do something bad enough to keep her from wanting to see you.”
“I don’t know about that.” Worried for Josh’s health despite herself, Clara kept trying to sneak junk food back on the shelf when he looked away. His metabolism might defy science, but judging by some of the ingredient lists, he consumed well over the FDA’s recommendation for corn syrup. As they passed a
n endcap, she covertly positioned his bag of Cheetos behind a jumbo pack of paper towels.
“Jill moved out here because my family disowned her.”
Josh took a paper ticket from the dispenser in front of the butcher’s counter. “People still disown each other in this day and age? I thought that practice only applied to ancient dynasties.”
Clara studied the array of deli turkey. “Wheatons don’t like a scandal they can’t cover up with money or influence, and Aunt Jill released the Greenwich version of the shot heard around the world.”
After they’d ordered lunch meat, they stopped in the cleaning aisle to find items to accommodate the chores laid out in the guidelines. “So what did this lady do that was so bad? Sell a family heirloom? Oh, I know.” His eyes danced. “She wore white after Labor Day.”
Clara inspected the various brands of furniture polish. He had no idea about the scope of the scandal she’d witnessed. “You joke, but it’s not uncommon for Wheatons to donate libraries and hospital wings in order to undo the damage wrought by their poor impulse control.”
“So she . . . killed a guy?”
“What? No. She did something stupid, not illegal. Jill slept with the deputy mayor of Greenwich when she was nineteen.”
Josh grabbed both of the bottles she couldn’t decide between and tossed them into the cart. “Let me guess. The deputy mayor was married?”
“How’d you know?” Clara resumed her position behind the cart. “It probably would have blown over after a while, but when he denied the affair, she chained herself to a statue in the town center and read a bunch of love letters he’d written her over a megaphone.” She selected some detergent, an all-purpose cleaner, and several room deodorizers. “By all accounts, they were very, very raunchy.”
Josh jogged alongside the cart. “I like her already.”
The details popped in sharp contrast across her memory. The first Wheaton scandal that directly affected her. “The mayor’s office had to call the fire department to get her loose, and by that point, it was all over the local news.” Her entire class had heard about it by the next day.
Another headline that had singed her family tree. And now, like Jill, Clara had climbed out on a limb for love and met the ground face-first.
“Your aunt sounds like a badass.” Josh got in the long line to check out.
“Unfortunately, my grandfather did not agree with you.” Clara swallowed the sour taste in her mouth. “The spectacle cost him his job. I probably should have mentioned that my grandfather was the mayor at the time?”
It amazed her that a man who’d always doted upon her had turned on his own daughter. “Jill moved out to Los Angeles not long after that. My parents didn’t burn all her pictures or anything, but we don’t talk about her. It’s like she never even existed.”
Clara’s heart twisted to think of her grandmother and her parents standing by and letting a colossal void open in the middle of the family, isolating Jill enough that she’d fled. The idea of loneliness compounded by embarrassment made Clara shiver. She’d worked her whole life to avoid Jill’s fate.
From perfect report cards to her strict adherence to curfew, on paper, Clara was untouchable. She’d stayed close to home for college and then grad school, always on call to put out a fire or smooth over ruffled feathers.
But no matter how hard she tried to live up to her family’s expectations, failure seemed inevitable under the weight of her responsibility to defend and uphold the Wheaton name.
“You should reach out to her,” Josh said as they reached the conveyor belt.
Clara bit her tongue as Josh unloaded the cart willy-nilly with no regard for essential principles like grouping perishable items together to enable efficient unpacking. “I’m sure she’s busy.”
“Come on,” he said. “What harm could come from one phone call?”
chapter three
THE NEXT DAY, Clara fully expected her phone call to Jill’s office to end in disaster. Josh didn’t, couldn’t, know how deep the wounds in her family ran. Wheaton scandals ruined lives, ended marriages, dissolved businesses. What if Clara reached Jill only to find out her aunt had faded to a shell of her former self?
But for once all her worrying turned out to be for naught. After a brief albeit awkward exchange, Jill recommended they meet for lunch at a restaurant near her office. Dressed in a skirt set usually reserved for job interviews, Clara ordered a car and set out for Malibu.
She arrived to find a cheerful restaurant with a sunny patio and two full menu pages dedicated to various types of avocado toast.
After an embarrassed hug, where they each bobbed while the other weaved, Jill leaned back in her chair. “I’m so glad you called, Clara. What a nice surprise. I can’t believe how grown-up you look.”
“Thank you.” Before she’d moved away, Clara had always admired Jill for the way she conveyed a kind of effortless cool that stood out among the country club crowd in Greenwich. “I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner. Or . . . ever really.”
The word aunt stuck on her tongue. For ten years, Clara had heard the woman across from her referred to as “a blemish on the family legacy.” Jill certainly understood the consequences of thwarting familial expectations firsthand.
“Relax.” Jill waved away her apology. “I don’t blame you.” Her voice reminded Clara of honey mixed into whiskey. As if someone had warmed her vocal cords, softening the edges.
When the older woman shook out her long dark hair, Clara caught the resemblance between them. She’d always known she didn’t take after her mother. Everything about Lily Wheaton stayed neat and compact, from her manicured bob to her perfectly tailored pastel capris. If Lily was a ruler, Jill and Clara were French curves.
“You’re not mad?” Clara chewed her bottom lip.
The laughter died in Jill’s eyes and she stared at the menu for a long moment. “I may have some choice words saved up for my father, but time and space provide a lot of perspective. I’m very happy to see you in any case. Your hair’s shorter than in the pictures your mom sent me from your graduation.”
Iced tea splashed onto the tablecloth as Clara halted her glass’s progression toward her mouth. “My mother sent you pictures?” As far as she knew, her mother never put a toe out of line. Contacting Jill, a persona non grata, counted as positively reckless.
“Yeah, every couple of months for years now. Lily sends them by email after most major occasions.” Light returned to Jill’s eyes. “She’s very proud of you.”
Guilt climbed up Clara’s throat. “I was supposed to be her consolation prize, but I’ve abandoned the mantle.”
Leaving a gaping hole in her wake.
“I know what that’s like.” Jill smiled ruefully. “Somehow the men in our family tend to get away with a lot more than the women. Your mom’s weathered a lot of storms from my father and brother, and now Oliver. It can’t be easy.”
Lily didn’t know the definition of easy. At six years old, Clara had padded downstairs in her nightgown to find her mother sitting at the kitchen table, sobbing into her palm as the news of another Wheaton family scandal broke. She’d crawled into her mother’s lap and promised to be different. Vowed to never give her mother cause for concern—never cause her a moment’s heartache—and up until a few days ago, she’d faithfully fulfilled her vow.
Jill placed her hand on top of Clara’s. “You okay?”
Clara nodded, washing down the lump in her throat with her remaining iced tea. “Do you miss it? Greenwich, I mean?”
Snowflakes of carbs rained down from between Jill’s fingers as she tore her breadstick to pieces. “Sure, sometimes. I’ll never get used to warm weather on Christmas. But I’m grateful for the blank page I got out here. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but at least they belong to me. There’s a strange pride in taking full responsibility for the consequences of your actions, however
they fall.” Wiping the lenses of her sunglasses with her cloth napkin, Jill continued. “But enough about me. What brings you to Los Angeles?”
Where should she start? Most of Clara’s rationale for moving was mortifying. She struggled to select the one that made her look the least idiotic. I moved out here because I’m pushing thirty and I’ve spent my entire life in the cocoon of academia, avoiding the real world. Because I was chasing a fourteen-year-long unrequited crush. Because I could no longer bear the burden of maintaining our family’s expectations.
She decided on an abridged version of the Everett story. Thinking of his abrupt abandonment still gave her a stomachache, but at least that version of the narrative spoke of only one weakness instead of a whole tangle of them.
Sharing the embarrassing episode, even in part, further eased the burn of the rejection.
When she was done, Jill propped her elbow on the table and rested her chin in her palm. “Okay, after all that, I have to ask, what’s so special about Everett Bloom?”
That question had followed Clara from adolescence to adulthood. “Everett makes me feel safe. Growing up with him was like getting cooked in a lobster pot. We became friends when the water was still cold, and by the time it started boiling, by the time he’d turned into this knockout, I was already too comfortable with him to freak out the way I normally do around extremely attractive men.”
“Slow boil or fast, still sounds painful,” Jill said.
No counterargument sprang to mind. “We know everything about each other. Our families are friends. It’s always been simple. And I know, if I could get him to see it, to see me as someone other than his nerdy, bucktoothed neighbor, we’d be perfect. Besides, I’ve never done anything selfish or impulsive in my life. All I wanted was a taste of adventure, but instead I ended up with a false start.”
A chirp sounded from her pocket, earning their table the stink eye from a few other diners. “Excuse me.” She unlocked the screen of her cell. “Oh, for crying out loud.”
“What’s up?”
“Nothing. Sorry. It’s my new roommate. I gave him my number in case of emergency and now he won’t stop sending me selfies.” The message read, SOS we desperately need toilet paper!!! and included a photo of Josh with his mouth open in a silent scream of anguish.