by Libby Klein
“I know what texting is,” Aunt Ginny said, giving me a severe look. “I don’t live under a rock. I have a Droid. I am up on stuff, you know.”
“Oh.” I stifled a giggle. “I didn’t realize you were up on stuff. I beg your pardon. What do you need an alibi for?”
And since bad luck stalks me like a weird ex-boyfriend, just when I was finally about to wheedle some info out of Aunt Ginny, a loud crash sounded from the kitchen and a gray blur thundered through the sunroom with his ears pinned back. Figaro skidded to a halt at my feet, then serenely began to lick his paw. Nothing to see here folks. Move along.
I prodded him with one foot. “What did you do?”
Figaro looked at me mid-lick like, Who? Me? I’ve been here the whole time. But somebody better go check the kitchen before Aunt Ginny does.
“I’ll just go see what Figaro has gotten into.” I sighed with one last look to the poster cat for innocence.
As I left the room. Aunt Ginny was leaning down to him and I could hear her say, “Listen, buddy. You and I are gonna be friends, but if you make a mess in my house I’m gonna hang you by your tail from the chandelier. Got it?”
Figaro responded with a soulful mrow, which I took as agreement to the terms and conditions of surrender.
The kitchen hadn’t changed since I was in elementary school. The room was covered with faded wallpaper in country blue with pink flowers. The walls were peppered with grapevine wreaths and wooden plaques of cows and pigs and ducks wearing frilly bows. I searched for signs of Figaro’s latest achievement. There on the floor in the corner by the refrigerator was a decorative birdhouse in the shape of a cat face with feathers glued to the hole that was its mouth. A couple wet feathers were lying a few feet away. You didn’t have to be Nancy Drew to solve this mystery. I put the offending decoration on the counter, planning to glue it back together later, and spotted a business card from Rosalind Carson of the Department of Youth and Family Services, lying next to the phone. What was that all about?
I walked out of the kitchen in time to see Aunt Ginny wrapping a yellow scarf around her hair Katharine Hepburn–style, preparing to go out.
“Where are you going?”
“You’ll be busy catching up with your girlfriends and tonight is my pottery class!”
“Oh. Okay. Well, I guess we’ll talk after pottery then. Before you go, I was wondering why you have a business card from a social worker.”
Aunt Ginny picked up her purse and keys and put on her Jackie O sunglasses. “Well, that’s what I need to talk to you about. She wants to meet with you.”
“Meet with me? About what?”
“She thinks I’m crazy and wants to put me in a home. You girls have fun tonight. Don’t wait up.”
Then she eyed Figaro, made a gesture like she was hanging herself and let her tongue fall out of her mouth.
Figaro’s ears flattened against his head.
And with that she was out the door with the scent of White Shoulders wafting in her wake.
Chapter 4
I drove over the bridge into Wildwood and down to Morey’s Pier. Passing a few boarded-up shops and game stalls, I would have been tempted to play a water gun horserace if I wasn’t short on time and full of anxiety over what new bomb Sawyer wanted to drop on me at dinner.
The aroma of sausage and peppers mingled with whatever deep-fried funnel-cake-battered treats were being made at the moment. I stopped short when I saw a sign for deep-fried peanut butter cups. The little voice inside my head whispered seductively, Where have you been my whole life? One small, two-thousand-calorie beauty wouldn’t kill me, would it? But someone calling my name snapped me out of it.
“Poppy!”
I turned to see Sawyer, waving her manicured blue nails madly at me from under the MACK’S PIZZA neon sign. I ran over, yes, I said ran, a sight sure to traumatize me if it were ever caught on video, with my arms outstretched to give Sawyer a hug. “Hi! Omigosh! I can’t believe you’re here!”
“I know,” I said out of breath. “I can’t believe it either.” I held her away from me and took a long look at her. Sawyer was stunning. With her perfect tan she looked gorgeous in a sapphire blue one-shoulder top, white summer capris, and gold gladiator sandals. “You look fantastic, I hate you!” We both giggled, and she hugged me again.
“I have a surprise for you; please don’t be ma-ad,” Sawyer trilled.
Oh, sweet Jesus, please don’t be Barbie and Amber. My blood pressure couldn’t take it.
“Here’s hoping for Colin Firth in a tuxedo!” I held up my fingers crossed to hide my nerves.
Sawyer giggled and took a step to the right and flung her arms out in a tada! move—and there, grinning and waving from the back table, were two of our closest friends from high school, Kim and Connie.
Relieved, I let out my breath. “Oh, thank God.”
“I thought we could have a little pre-reunion tonight.” She gave me a big superstar grin. “This is going to be awesome.”
“Sure. That was sweet of you, Sawyer. Thank you . . .” I said, thinking, Aaaaaand they’re already astonished at how big my thighs are....
“I’m so glad you don’t mind. They were really excited to see you again.”
“No, I definitely don’t mind. I was nervous you were luring me here to tell me something horrible.”
Sawyer’s face turned scarlet and she let out a nervous laugh. “What? No. Not horrible.”
“Wait. What do you mean not horrible?” I think I’m going to be sick.
Sawyer wouldn’t look at me. “Well, I mean, we’re all going to tell you together. Later.”
She took off for the back of the Pepto-Bismol-colored pizza parlor where she thought there was less chance that I would make a scene. I tromped behind her with a scowl on my face and nausea rising. I was heading right into an ambush.
I was assaulted by the scents of tomato, oregano, and garlic being propelled around the room by the numerous white ceiling fans. Maybe I could rally enough to force down a slice . . . or three.
Once we joined the other girls at the bright pink booth there were hugs all around and we each commented on how well we all looked and how no one had aged a day since graduation and other delusional fantasies. A waitress came over to take our order—four birch beers and a large white pizza with extra garlic. I wasn’t kissing anyone, so what did I care?
As we began to relax and catch up, I took a good look at each one of them thinking how great their hair looked and how mine resembled a lazy bird’s nest. They were wearing cute little outfits and had carefully applied makeup. I had a mystery stain on my T-shirt and a zit on my chin. Maybe I’d let myself go a tad. It had been a rough decade, sue me.
I snogged into my birch beer and realized in horror it was Diet Coke. I tried to catch the eye of the waitress, but she had mastered the art of looking around without making eye contact in an Oh, good, no one needs me, time to sneak a cigarette out back kind of way. I realized Connie was asking me something about my trip so I smiled and nodded.
Connie was always a bit of a tomboy. She preferred jeans and running shoes to dresses and pumps. She played the tuba in the marching band and was a proud member of the AV club. It didn’t take long for the bullies to zero in on Connie as one of their prime victims. They spread ugly rumors about why she didn’t shower in the girls’ locker room. But Connie was tough. She didn’t let them get to her. She fought back.
One day Connie brought chocolate-covered grasshoppers to school to pass out to all the bullies. And like the city of Troy to the Trojan horse, they took the bait. No one ever said bullies were smart. Now she was married with a family of her own, and in an ironic twist of fate, our resident tomboy had two of the prissiest girly-girls you’d ever meet.
Shaking the sense that something dreadful was yet to be revealed, I focused on her as she brought us up to speed on her life. Then again, any person whose life involved more than flipping channels had my attention.
“I almost didn�
��t make it out of the house.” Connie dug through her purse—pulling out assorted barrettes, two magical fairy princess dolls, and one Cinderella sock with a hole in the toe—before finding her cell phone. “I’m sorry, but I need to check for emergency texts from Mike. He was relieved from his shift at the jail late, so I had to drop Sabrina at ballet by six and then the drawbridge coming into Wildwood was up.”
Another waitress walked by with a tray of drinks for the next table over.
“Excuse me.” I tried to get her attention to bring me my birch beer, but she fled like I was an empty lot on the wrong side of Wildwood. My throat was a desert—was there no mercy here?
“How are Mike and the girls?”
“They’re good.” Connie shifted uneasily. “Sabrina is fifteen now and takes dance and gymnastics twice a week and has cheerleading practice every day after school. Emmilee is seven and collects ponies, Disney Princesses, and refuses to wear anything that doesn’t have polka dots. It can be so . . . tiring.” She ran her hand through her pixie-cut, chocolate-brown hair and let out a tired sigh.
I would love to have two children. Instead I have two chins and a cat.
I tried to keep the tone light to put Connie at ease, and suppressed my psychic pain like I was stuffing in a giant cannoli. “Gee. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. I feel like I need to go lie down.”
Connie laughed nervously. “They keep me busy, that’s for sure. It’s all so . . . exhausting, though.”
I looked around the table and noticed that none of the girls would make eye contact with me. Something was up. I knew it. What were they hiding from me?
“Sabrina made assistant captain of the cheerleaders at Caper High this year.” Auntie Kim tried to keep the conversation going as she filled me in on more of her adopted niece’s accomplishments. Kim has never given in to “the oppressiveness of conventional marriage.” But she and her boyfriend, Rick, and their iguana, Betsy, have been living together happily for fourteen years. No children. Unless you count Betsy. Which, despite her reindeer-antler-wearing presence on their family Christmas card, I didn’t. But then that’s probably why she indulges Connie’s girls every chance she gets.
“Oh, good for her!” Sawyer chimed in just as our pizza arrived.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” I said to the waitress, who now reeked of nicotine, “I think you brought me a Diet Coke by mistake.”
“You think or you know?” she snapped at me.
“I know it’s Diet Coke and I want a birch beer, please.”
“Okay. Then you should have asked for that in the first place.” With a shrug, she seized the Diet Coke, muttering about tourists under her breath.
I turned back to Connie. “Is Emmilee going to take dance and gymnastics like her big sister?” I asked, trying to be interested in a subject that cut my heart out with a blunt Swiss army knife.
Connie, who had just feigned exhaustion with “it all,” now very energetically launched into a spiel about what her youngest was doing, and I smiled. Truthfully, she was the kind of mom I would like to have had or been.
I grinned at Connie’s machine-gun download and tried to stay focused before turning my attention to Kim.
Kim was the counterbalance here, our free-spirited wild child. She’d had a patch of her head shaved over one ear to show off her row of piercings and her right shoulder was tattooed in full color vines with flowers and hummingbirds down to her wrist. A blue streak adorned her otherwise dirty blond curly hair.
The waitress, Dame Smokarella, was over by the pizza ovens talking to her coworkers without a care in the world. I tried to mentally command her to bring me a drink, any drink, heck I’d take the Diet Coke back! She kept right on flirting with the cook, who was all T-shirt and tattoos.
There was a break in the conversation about the kids, then Sawyer leaned in and whispered, “I have a confession to make, girls.”
Here it is. This must be the secret they’ve all been acting so squirrely about. Lord, give me strength.
“I’ve been cyberstalking Kurt on Facebook, and he’s been bragging about coming to our reunion with Tonia Lipinski.”
What? If that’s the big secret I’m disappointed I wasted so much anxiety on it.
Kim pounded her fist on the Formica tabletop. “What? Tonia Lipinski? That low-class pole-dancing tramp?”
Kim failed Mr. Shellington’s third-period Diplomacy class.
Mack’s other patrons were starting to stare at us. Some had slices of pizza held midair. A mother of three small boys shot us a wrecking-ball kind of look. Our waitress looked back at our table and I seized the chance to mouth, “Soda, pleeeeease.”
Connie, the voice of reason, asked, “Do you think he’s just going with her so he can be there to see you?”
Sawyer calmed down. “Well . . . I don’t know. I feel ridiculous assuming he’s even thinking about me.”
“Of course he’s thinking about you,” Kim said, slapping her hand on the Formica table and sending her greasy paper plate flying. “He knows he lost the best thing he ever had when you kicked his sorry butt out.”
One of the boys, who looked to be about four, piped up. “Daddy’s butt is sorry too, right, Mommy? You said so. . . .” and the woman gave Kim a pointed look before quickly shoving the boys out to the boardwalk.
“Coming home early from work to find him with the waitress from the Boiler Room on my grandmother’s antique quilt was the final straw. I had put up with his stumbling in at two a.m., covered in stripper glitter and cheap beer, late-night phone call hang-ups, and finding a leopard-print thong behind my Snoopy cookie jar. That was the moment I knew Kurt was beyond help and my marriage was over.”
I remembered the night well. Sawyer didn’t scream or cry. Just walked into the bedroom, locked the door, and called me. While Kurt was pounding on the door trying to explain how “this isn’t what it looks like,” Sawyer was throwing his things out the bedroom window. The next day she turned the shop over to her assistant, filed for divorce, and drove down to Waterford to stay with John and me for a few days.
I was dying for that birch beer, but darned if that waitress wasn’t up front petting the inked tiger on the cook’s arm.
I started wishing that tiger would jump off his bicep and bite her right on the . . .
“But I’m not sure how I’ll react to being in the same room with Kurt and another woman. I’m so glad I’ll have youse guys there for support. Especially you, Poppy.”
“What? Oh, of course. That’s what friends are for.” That and not judging you for how much raw cookie dough you can eat in one sitting.
“Enough stalling. Let’s talk about this.” Kim pulled an embossed envelope out of her bag and laid it on the table. There was a filigree-monogrammed B in the corner. “What is she up to?”
We all pulled matching envelopes out and placed them on the table.
“It can’t be any good, that’s for sure,” Connie said.
“Maybe she sent it to everyone,” Sawyer added thoughtfully.
“I called some of the girls from marching band and none of them got one,” Connie replied.
“I asked Skooter and Bobo at the garage and they didn’t get one either.” Kim looked at each one of us skeptically.
“Maybe she only sent one to the people they were mean to,” I said, then added, “No, that can’t be it. Just about everyone would have received one.”
“Well, I think she wants to apologize. It was a long time ago and I bet she regrets that she and Amber were so hurtful when we were kids,” Sawyer offered.
“I think you’re out of your mind is what I think,” Kim replied. “If she wanted to apologize she could have done it in the note. Not ask us to meet her in person in C wing at nine o’clock during the reunion.”
Connie’s nose wrinkled. “And why so secretive? She wants to apologize but doesn’t want anyone else to know she’s doing it? That’s weird.”
“Well, one thing is for sure,” Sawyer added. “I’m not going
without you guys.”
“Agreed. We stick together and watch each other’s backs. If I know Barbie and Amber, it’s a plot to humiliate us.” I put my envelope back in my purse and the girls followed suit.
There was a long pause while Connie and Kim both looked at Sawyer as if they were waiting for something. I felt a nagging fear begin at the back of my neck.
Kim finally broke the silence.
“So, um, have you ever heard anything from Tim after all these years?”
I felt my breath catch at the mention of Tim’s name, and my heart started beating a little faster. I remembered the night I called Tim and told him that I had made a colossal mistake and now I was pregnant. He asked me if I loved the guy. I told him the truth. John was like a brother to me; there were no romantic feelings on either side. It was one drunken blur. At first Tim said we could work it out. He would drop out of cooking school, get his job back as a busboy at Seasons, and help me raise the baby. I realized right there that I loved him too much to let him put more of his life on hold for me. Not to mention how much it would hurt John to not be involved in raising his own child. I couldn’t do that to either of them. So I told Tim it was over. I would always love him, but he needed to move on. It pains me to admit that he didn’t put up a fight.
“Not a peep. I guess he went his way and I went mine.”
“Haven’t you even Googled him to see if he got fat or rich or married?” Sawyer asked, surprised. “It’s not a big deal. Lots of people do it.”
“Well, okay, once.” Once, twice, seventy-five times. What difference does it make? “But I didn’t find anything. There are a lot of Tim Maxwells.”
“What do you think you’ll do if you run into him at the reunion?” Kim’s eyes darted from me to Sawyer and back to me again. Connie leaned forward in her seat like she was afraid she would miss my answer.
Probably pretend I don’t speak English and limp away like the gargoyle I’ve become. “I don’t have to worry about that. Tim won’t be at the reunion.” I wiped my mouth with my napkin. “He graduated the year before us.”