A month ago, last week, even, I wouldn’t have thought twice about going out in that ratty old shirt. I laugh to myself in the empty apartment. Come to think of it, it’s hard to imagine what Judd sees in me, when I often go out looking like a bag person.
A thought whispers through my brain. Maybe he doesn’t see anything in you, Ruth. Maybe this isn’t a date. Maybe it’s just a friendly invitation. Maybe he feels sorry for you.
I shake my head. You know what? Even if that’s the case, so what? I’m going.
Good for you, Ruthie. You go, girl. This last thought isn’t my voice. It’s Charlie’s.
For a brief moment, I think about Charlie and his Easter plans, what they might include. Up until eighteen months ago, his plans were my plans, meaning he spent every holiday with the Davenports. I wonder where he’ll be tomorrow. Is his wife’s family local? Will he go to her parents’ house? Will he and his new wife host? More likely, what with the new baby. Will his wife be the perfect little hostess? I’d like to imagine that she can’t cook a lick and that Charlie will think of me fondly when he tucks into his meal of dry, overcooked ham and mushy green-bean casserole.
I can’t do everything, but I sure can cook.
I force myself to stop thinking about Charlie and his wife and their Easter. I have to break the habit of obsessing over them. Might as well stop today, on this day of new beginnings.
I grab my purse and my list, then head out.
I generally avoid Target for shopping excursions. I don’t like the place. Not because they don’t carry everything in the world a person might need—they do. But it’s all those moms, pushing their carts with two, three, four kids clinging to them or sitting in the cart, or scurrying through the aisles. They unknowingly taunt me. They remind me of my inadequacies. Occasionally, I’ll see a mother completely snap, berating her kids for their behavior, rolling her eyes, painting on a long-suffering expression as though she would give anything to be relieved of her burden. I want to shout at her. I want to tell her to appreciate what she has, to count her blessings, to thank her lucky stars for that burden.
Mostly, I shop at Vons. Much more eclectic patrons. But this morning, I’m going to brave Target. Their prices on hair dye are much better.
The elevator descends toward the parking garage. It opens on the floor below mine, and the doors open, revealing Judd standing on the threshold. Surprise renders me speechless. Judd sees me and smiles, and I quickly smile back. His hair is still damp from a recent shower, and his eyes twinkle.
“Well, good morning!” he says brightly. “What a lovely surprise. You weren’t coming down to cancel our date, were you?”
I shake my head. “No, I’m on my way out. To Target. I’m making pies for Easter, and I need some ingredients.” I don’t mention the dye. Hopefully, tonight he won’t notice that my hair is a different shade than it was this morning. Charlie never noticed my hair when I had it done. Rachel complains that Sam doesn’t notice hers, either. That would be one male trait I wouldn’t mind Judd having.
He steps onto the elevator, bringing with him the scent of soap and a subtle masculine cologne. His proximity makes me almost dizzy, and I tell myself to calm down.
“I’m heading to the store myself,” he says. “Thought I might get a few nibbles for this evening.” The elevator continues its course. “Anything you don’t eat?”
“I’m pretty easy to please,” I tell him, then groan inwardly at my choice of phrase. “I mean, I’m not a vegan or a vegetarian or paleo or Atkins. I eat pretty much everything.”
“Wonderful,” he says and winks. “I’m not too keen on all those restrictions. Makes something that’s supposed to be pleasurable too damn complicated.”
“I agree.”
“I thought prosciutto, cheese, maybe some olives. To go with the wine?”
“Sounds lovely.”
The doors slide open at ground level. Judd walks me to my car.
“I made lasagna. I mean, I made one for my sister, and I made an extra one to freeze. I could bring it, but that might be too . . . much . . . with everything else?”
He smiles down at me, and I force myself to meet his eyes, which is one of the most difficult things I’ve done in recent times. My cheeks flame, but I don’t look away.
“Why don’t you save it,” he says. “For next time.”
I nod and get into my car. He closes the door for me, like the gentleman he is, then mouths the words See you tonight.
I exit the garage with a smile on my face. If I could get through that encounter, Target is going to be a piece of cake.
SIXTY-SEVEN
SHADOW
All my humans are awake, and they all seem excited. If they had tails, they’d be wagging them. There is a hum of energy in the house that only I can hear and feel, and my nose sniffs the smell of happy.
My nose also smells the smell of dirt on Little Male, and he is the tail-waggingest of all of my humans.
I can also smell the cat. I can’t see it. I go to the window, then back to my bed, then to the food-smelling room, then back to the window. But I don’t see the cat. But I know it’s somewhere out there.
Little Female is on the couch watching the big screen on the wall. Little Male runs from the food-smelling room and goes up the stairs. I hear my master and mistress laughing in the food-smelling room. They smell like something else. They smell like clean, but under that, a very human musky scent that doesn’t wash off. I smell that on them sometimes, mostly when there’s darkness outside and all my humans are upstairs. Their laughing makes me happy.
The big screen on the wall goes dark, and Little Female jumps off the couch and goes fast into the food-smelling room. Then she comes out holding my mistress’s small screen, not the very small one and not the medium one that she makes tapping sounds on. Little Female is smiling and that makes me happy, too. She goes up the stairs just as Little Male comes down. She stops and says something to him, but I don’t understand the words. But what she says makes him happy. Then she goes up to the place I’m not allowed, and he comes down and goes out the front door.
I trot to the window so I can see where my little human has gone. I hope he hasn’t gone too far, because then I can’t protect him.
But I see him on the grass outside the window. He has that thing on him, a human toy that’s full of smells from other humans, and Little Male talks to the toy and smiles. Then Little Male goes to the big long green thing that isn’t a tree and isn’t a plant but goes all the way to the sidewalk. I watch Little Male. He has happy face. His toy has happy face, too, but even I know that the toy isn’t real like a dog.
My nose catches the scent of the cat, and I look across the wide black strip to the sidewalk on the other side. At first, I don’t see anything, but then there is movement and my eyes that see near and far focus on the movement and the movement is the cat.
My tail wags, but not a happy wag. It almost hurts me. And the whine starts deep inside my throat and comes out as a bark, loud in my own ears. No humans hear me. If they did, they might tell me, “Quiet, Shadow,” but my master and mistress are still in the food-smelling room, talking and laughing, and Little Female is upstairs and Little Male is outside and can’t hear me through the window. I bark again, then whine, then put my paw on the glass.
The cat is looking at me from where it sits. I don’t know how cats see, if they can see like dogs, but it definitely knows I’m here. Maybe it can smell me. It swishes its tail, then stretches its mouth open, like I do when I’m tired or just waking up. Then it meows. And I can hear it even through the window, even from inside my house, and the sound makes my ears flat. It’s the worst sound I’ve ever heard, and I want it to stop. But the cat keeps going. Meow meow meow.
The cat and its meow is like an itch I can’t reach with my paws, and it’s making me upset. Then it starts to move toward me, slowly. It stops at the grass in front of my house. And meows again.
I have to stop that sound.
SIXTY-EIGHT
JONAH
“Marco, look! A monarch! Isn’t it so pretty?”
The hedge is the best place for looking for bugs. I don’t know what kind of plant it is, but it’s got big bright-pink flowers on it, and the bees and butterflies like to get the pollen from the big yellow stamens in the middle of them. My teacher, Mrs. Hartnett, said that stamen was a very big word for a kindergartner to know, but I told her that I only know it ’cause of the insects who gather the pollen. Mrs. Hartnett is a girl, but she likes hearing about bugs. Maybe ’cause we’re just talking about them, not looking at real ones.
Anyways, the hedge has lots of bugs in it. Some of ’em hide from the sun, and some of ’em like the sun, like the black-and-yellow garden spider, or Argiope aurantia. The baby spiders leave their egg sacs in springtime, but they’re hard to see until they’re all grown-up. I prob’ly won’t see them till summer, but I still look for them, just in case.
The monarch is sitting on one of the flowers just above my head. I watch it as it opens and closes its wings, like it’s stretching or getting ready to fly. I get as close to it as I can. I don’t want to scare it or make it fly away. Its antennae twitches, then it rubs its legs together. I like monarchs. There’s a Little Einsteins episode about them, how they migrate to South America and, like, all the trees in this forest are covered with them. I think that would be so neat, to see them like that, but when I asked Mommy and Daddy if I could go to South America to see them, they kind of laughed and said maybe when I was a grown-up.
The monarch flaps its wings and suddenly it’s floating up and up and up, above the hedge and over into the Martins’ yard.
I look over to the sidewalk and see Gigi sitting there. She’s watching me, almost like she’s curious.
“Hi, Gigi,” I call to her. She swishes her tail and I turn back to the hedge.
The leaves of the hedge are real green. Mommy says Mr. Escalante feeds the hedge real good food to make it healthy and stuff. He used to use this thing with a really sharp blade and a loud buzzing motor to trim the hedge, but I told Mommy that would kill lots of bugs, or at least, scare ’em away, and she kind of looked at me funny when I said that, but the next time Mr. Escalante came, she talked to him, and now he trims the hedge with clippers, which is much better.
I walk along the hedge toward the house. I look up at the window and see Shadow. I wave to him, but he’s not looking at me—he’s looking at Gigi for sure. He barks and paws at the window, then whines and barks some more. Lucky he’s not out here, ’cause he would definitely scare the bugs.
Closer up to the house, I see some bugs that look like ants with wings, and I know that those are termites, and I also know that Mommy and Daddy don’t like termites because they eat the house. Well, the wood of the house, and Daddy says that’s not good for the structure. I don’t know how they could eat the whole house, though. That would take like a million trillion gazillion termites.
Anyway, I’m okay with termites, ’cause they’re bugs, after all, but not as interesting as other ones, so I keep going. Marco seems interested, too.
As I’m walking along, I see something a little ways away on the outside of the hedge, kind of in the middle. It’s kind of shimmery, and the closer I get, I squint my eyes really tight.
It can’t be. No way, olay.
If that is what I think it is, this might just be the best day ever, even better than winning the spring egg hunt and bringing home Marco.
“No offense, Marco. But just wait till you see this.”
SIXTY-NINE
EDEN
I’m FaceTiming with Carlee and Ava. The screen on Mom’s iPad is split three ways, with Carlee and Ava’s faces on either side and my face in a smaller box on the bottom. I made sure to change out of my nightie and into my yellow shirt and Juicy vest so I’d look cool, because Ava and Carlee always look cool when we FaceTime. I closed my door all the way so that Mom and Dad can’t hear my conversation. Not that I’m going to say anything bad, but I don’t know what my friends are going to say. Not everyone has a curse jar.
“We’re having Easter here,” I tell them after Carlee asks us what we’re doing on the holiday. “Just us and my Aunt Ruth.”
“We’re here, too,” Carlee says. “My cousins are coming. There’s going to be like twenty-five people here. My mom’s totally freaking out, like, yelling at us to stay out of her way and make sure our rooms are clean. Mine’s totally clean already, but she keeps coming in and throwing stuff at me, like ‘put this away’ and ‘clean up this mess.’ Total dragola.”
“We’re going to Mammoth,” Ava announces. She smiling like she thinks it’s totally beast to be going away, and I guess it kind of is.
“When are you going?” I ask.
“We’re getting up at, like, five o’clock tomorrow morning and driving up. We’re going to have Easter dinner at this totally swaggy club where they put your napkins in your lap for you.”
“That sounds beast,” I say, and Ava nods.
“Totally,” Carlee agrees.
“Hey, guys, you wanna come over for a playdate today? Mom said it was okay as long as we don’t make a mess.”
My friends don’t answer. They kind of start to look uncomfortable. “What?” I ask.
Carlee bites her lip and looks down and Ava makes a weird face—not exactly mean, but close.
“Um . . .” She frowns. “Is your little brother going to be home?”
“Well, yeah, but he’s not going to be playing with us or anything.”
“Are you sure?” Ava asks, and now she does sound mean. “Because he seems like he really likes you, Eden. Like, yesterday, when he totally hugged you in front of all of us. Even Ryan thought it was totally creepy.”
My heart goes all thumpy in my chest and I feel sick to my stomach, like when I watched Dad clean a fish last summer and pull out the guts. Only it feels like my guts are being pulled out.
“What—” I clear my throat so I don’t sound so croaky. “What did Ryan say?”
“Just that he was glad he didn’t have a geeky little brother like yours.”
Carlee looks like she wants to say something, but she doesn’t.
“Is that true, Carlee?”
She looks down again, then kind of nods.
“We don’t want to come over if your stupid little brother is going to be there hanging all over you, do we, Carlee?”
My head hurts. I know why. Because my best friends are totally bagging on my little brother, and I feel like I should defend him, say something about how cool he is, how he gave me more than half of his cookies-and-cream eggs and that he’s totally funny, and cute and sweet, but at the same time, I’m so mad that he’s embarrassed me, and that because of him, Ryan thinks I’m a loser, and I don’t want my friends to think I’m a loser.
My door slams open. “Hey, Eden!” Jonah’s voice makes me jerk my head around. And I wish, not for the first time, that I had a lock on my door so no one, especially my little brother, could come in if I didn’t want them to. Jonah’s all fidgety, totally hyper, probably excited to see me. “You gotta see this, Eden! It’s amazing! Come on!”
I turn back to the iPad screen. Ava is smiling that nasty smile of hers. “Speak of the devil,” she says. “Widdle baby bwother wants his big sistew.”
All of a sudden I feel like I’m gonna explode.
“Get out of here, Jonah!” I scream. “Why don’t you just go play in the street!”
When I turn toward my door, Jonah is gone and I get that sick feeling again.
“Wow, you told him, didn’t you?” Ava says and giggles madly. I’m relieved, but at the same time, I want to punch her in the face. “You got that from me, didn’t you, Eden?”
I don’t answer. Carlee has that same weird look on her face.
“We could probably come over for a little while, couldn’t we, Carlee? As long as he won’t be a problem.”
Carlee nods but still doesn’t look in the camera.
“He won’t be,” I tell them. “I promise.”
SEVENTY
SAMUEL
I’m still buzzing from the sex, can’t wipe the smile from my face. I’m glad my kids are too young to suspect anything, although I know Eden’s close. Still, Rachel and I were helped this morning by spring break and all its perks. I know there will come a time, and soon, when we will have to be more circumspect. But not yet, thankfully.
I finish my toast, then set my plate in the sink. My plan is to get some paperwork done before I start helping Rachel with the chores, but when I look out the window and see how glorious the weather is—bright-blue sky, not a cloud in sight—I reconsider. Maybe I’ll go outside and hunt bugs with Jonah. I know my son would love that, and I can always do paperwork another time. I smile to myself. Good decision.
As I head for the stairs, Rachel calls to me from the garage, and I freeze.
There is no mistaking the tone of her voice. Stern voice, is what the kids call it. She uses it on me occasionally, when I leave my socks on the floor, or when I’ve had a few too many beers and gotten overly vociferous about the Lakers.
She is calling to me from the garage. I know exactly what has inspired her stern voice. My euphoria vanishes instantly.
The jacket.
I pretend not to hear her. My thoughts race. How could I have been so stupid, leaving it by the washing machine? That was definitely a bad decision. I stuffed it into my dry cleaning bag last night, made a mental note to take it to the cleaner’s today. But I should have anticipated Rachel getting a jump on laundry. It’s the first thing she does when readying the house for visitors, even if it’s only Ruth. She throws in tablecloths and guest towels, even though they’re already clean; she worries that accumulated cupboard dust has made the linens dull and will inspire sneezing fits. It’s one of her slightly bizarre rituals that I choose to ignore. But now . . .
Shadow starts barking from the living room window. Rachel’s voice cuts above the din.
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