by Allie Larkin
Joe was already back to his studied attempt to sniff in as much outside air as possible. I gave his tail a tug. He turned to face me and pressed his cold nose against my cheek.
When we got home I asked Joe if he wanted ice cream. His ears perked up and he ran over to the fridge. “I’ve trained you well, Grasshopper,” I said, scratching behind his ear with one hand and grabbing the carton of French vanilla with the other. Joe shuffled backward and sideways on our way to the couch, keeping his eyes on the ice cream.
I only gave Joe one spoonful for every four or five of mine so he’d still have room for his kibble. I barely even tasted the ice cream. I just spooned it into my mouth and tried as hard as I could not to replay the scene at Alex’s house in my head. It was impossible. I couldn’t stop thinking about the look on his face. His eyes were wide, his forehead wrinkled. Was it shock? Was it disgust? Was he embarrassed for me? I was embarrassed for me. I’d put myself out there, as far out there as I could go, and he just stood there and let me walk away alone.
I ate until my stomach hurt and the carton was empty. I put the empty carton on the floor for Joe to lick and flopped over the couch. I hugged my knees up to my chest and Joe jumped on me and pawed at my legs like he was trying to unfold me again. When I wouldn’t budge, he jumped off the couch and ran upstairs. He came back a moment later, jumped on the couch, and dropped his red rubber bone, his favorite toy, on my head, like he was trying to be funny.
I made Joe a party hat out of newspaper and a rubber band, like my mom used to do. Joe ran around the room shaking his head, trying to get the hat off. When he finally did, he jumped up on the couch with it and ripped it to shreds. We stayed up to watch the ball drop on TV. At least I have my dog, I thought, giving him a big hug as the crowd of people in Times Square shouted, “Happy New Year!” and threw confetti.
Chapter Forty-two
A few days later, when I was coming back to the condo with empty boxes I’d snagged from the liquor store, Janie’s little silver Audi was parked in my driveway. Janie sat in the driver’s seat, wearing enormous black Jackie O sunglasses, drinking her usual frozen caramel macchiato through a straw.
I pulled up next to her. She grabbed another macchiato out of the cup holder and held it up to show me.
I flashed her a little smile and hit the garage door opener. I parked in the garage, got out of the car, and waved her in.
She jumped out of the car and did a quick jog into the garage.
“I talked to Mom when I was home after Christmas,” she said, handing me the other frozen coffee. She pushed her sunglasses up on her head.
She was wearing black leather gloves, but my hands were bare and already cold. I handed it back to her.
“Can you carry this in?” I asked. “I have to grab some boxes.” I wasn’t ready to just dive right into it.
“Sure,” she said.
I felt so clumsy, trying to stack boxes to get as many as possible in the house in one trip. Even without looking, I could feel her standing there watching me.
“Well, I’m sorry,” she said finally, gulping down some more of her drink. “She told me about the check.”
“She did?” I kicked the back door of the car closed and gestured to Jane to open the door to the kitchen for me.
“Peter made me ask her.” She balanced her drink in the crook of her arm while she opened the door.
“Really?” I pulled the boxes through the door and dumped them on the kitchen floor.
“She said it was money she’d been saving for you, over the years. So you’d have a nest egg. She said it was a nice thing. But then I asked her if maybe the timing of her giving it to you was a little too convenient. Like maybe even though she’d meant it as something nice, she used it to let you think- Oh, Van, I’m so sorry.” She handed me my drink. Her eyes were wet. “I asked her and she just got quiet. Then she asked me if I liked the hotel she picked for us in Naples. And you know her. That’s the closest she’s ever going to come to admitting she did something wrong.” She kept taking sips though the straw. “I hate to think- She shouldn’t have done that.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I mean, if you think about it, it’s a really stupid thing to complain about. Damnit, Diane gave me a huge check.”
“Don’t!” she said. “Don’t play it off like it’s okay. It’s not okay for her to treat you like that.”
“What am I going to do about it?”
“Well, don’t stay away from us,” Janie said, “for starters.” She pulled her gloves off with her teeth and dropped them on the counter.
“I already spent a lot of the money.” I felt like a little kid who couldn’t manage to save her allowance.
“Van, you deserve that money. You earned it. And regardless of how she used it, she wanted you to have it. I can’t think-I know it couldn’t have been easy.” She looked at her shoes. She had a salt stain on her left shoe, and she rubbed it up against the back of her left leg. “I’ve thought about it a lot. I mean, your mom got paid to take care of us.” She stopped looking at her shoes and looked at me. “You didn’t.”
“It’s not like I was taking care of anything. My mom did all the work.”
“You took care of me.” As soon as she said it, tears as big as marbles rolled down her face.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did. You made me brave. You made it okay to be me. To quit ballet. To be a Girl Scout. To wear a bikini. To go to Brown. To study art history.”
“You did those things,” I said.
“But I never would have. I never would have deviated from the Grand Driscoll Plan.” She laughed. “Dad didn’t want me selling Thin Mints. He wanted me dancing in some ballet troupe at Harvard.” She wrapped her arms around me and rested her chin on my shoulder. “I need you. I can’t dance for shit.”
She was so unnatural when she cursed. I laughed and hugged her back.
“You’re family,” she said.
We stepped back from each other, but she held on to my arms.
“I’m not having Easter dinner with Diane or anything,” I said.
“Okay,” she said, laughing. “I’m not either.” She started working on her shoe again. “Hey, where’s your dog?”
“He’s spending the day at the new house with Louis, the guy I’m buying the house from, so I can get some work done.”
“Pete said you were buying a house!” She leaned up against the kitchen counter and crossed her legs
I was curious as to whether or not Pete told her about his drunken night and our trips to the vet, but I wasn’t going worry about it. That was between him and Janie and I didn’t need to get in the middle of it.
“That’s fantastic,” she said. “What’s the house like?”
“It’s going to need a lot of work. It’s kind of ugly,” I said, cringing at the thought of showing Janie the sewing room with the anchors everywhere and the orange and green wall. “I’m going to have to paint and maybe get new kitchen cabinets eventually.”
“That’s so grown-up.” She wrinkled her nose at me and smiled her little-kid smile. “You’re a big old grown-up, Van.” She reached out and poked me in the ribs.
“You and Pete bought a house,” I said. “It’s no different.”
“Pete’s dad bought it for us,” she said. “We didn’t even pick it out. It just appeared.”
“Your mom basically bought my house for me.”
“No, she didn’t.” She waved the idea away with her hand. “This is big, Vannie. You have your own house.” She stood up from the counter and walked into the living room. “Can I help you pack?”
“Have you ever packed anything?” I asked. “Do you even know how to pack?”
“Teach me,” she said, shaking her head and smiling.
“Freak.” I stuck my tongue out at her and went to grab a box.
“So what are you taking?” She leaned back on her heel and surveyed the living room.
“What do you mean?”
“What’s coming with you?”
I hadn’t thought about not taking everything. I guess it didn’t make a lot of sense to take my makeshift furniture. It wasn’t worth hauling my cinder-block-and-plank bookshelves to the new house. It probably wasn’t worth taking the blue-and-white-checked couch either. I bought it at a yard sale years ago, and it sagged so badly that if you sat right in the middle, your knees ended up pressed to your chest. But I didn’t know what I’d do without the couch, and I had way too many books to leave the bookshelf behind.
“I guess it’s all coming,” I said. “I don’t have any other furniture yet.”
“Yes, you do,” Janie said, smirking.
“I do?”
“You have a whole carriage house full.” Her smile got wide and toothy.
“I couldn’t.”
“You could.” She swatted my arm. “And you should, Van. It’s your stuff.”
“It’s mostly my mom’s stuff.”
“Well, it’s more yours than it is my mom’s. You should have Nat’s stuff.”
I thought about the coffee table my mom and I made together. She painted white hearts on my cheeks and then we couldn’t wash them off. I spent the rest of the weekend with cold cream smeared all over my face. By the time we got all the paint off, my cheeks were bright red.
I wanted that coffee table, and I wanted the couch that had pizza sauce stains on every side of every cushion, and I wanted our collection of romance novels.
But I didn’t want to see Diane. I didn’t want to have to ask her for it.
Janie must have read my face, because she said, “We’ll go get it together.” She reached out and hugged me. “We’ll be a united front. She’ll have to behave.” She laughed. “Or at least we’ll have each other if she doesn’t.”
Chapter Forty-three
Louis volunteered to take Joe, and I rented a truck for the trip. Janie showed up bright and early with a travel mug of coffee in one hand and a blue leather Marc Jacobs weekend bag in the other. She was overly chipper for six AM on a Saturday, and I was about ready to shove her in the back of the truck, until she went out to her car and came back with a second travel mug full of coffee for me.
“Did you think I was going to ride in that truck with you if you didn’t have coffee?” she said, shaking her head. “I’m not crazy.”
The seats in the rental truck were too hard and too slippery, and the shocks were shot. I kept waiting for Janie to complain, but she didn’t. She just held on tight to the handle on the door and fiddled with the heater. The heater dial was broken, so it only had two settings, full blast and off. Full blast was like being in an airplane hangar with the jets on. We turned it on periodically to warm up the cab, so we could talk in between blasts.
“This was all they had left,” I said. I didn’t mention that I’d never driven anything so big before, and I was terrified any time I had to back up or turn. I didn’t think Janie needed to lose confidence in my abilities while she was stuck in a rickety death trap with me.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s part of the adventure.”
“Who are you, and what have you done with Janie?”
“Who are you, and what have you done with Van?” she said, laughing. “You’re driving a truck. Seriously.”
It started to snow just before we hit Syracuse. I turned the wipers on and they squeaked loud enough to make my teeth itch.
“From bad to worse,” Janie said, gleefully. Her stainless steel coffee mug was rattling in the cup holder.
“What’s with you?” I said. “You’re wearing jeans. You’re not complaining about the truck. You didn’t wipe the seat down with antibacterial wipes before you sat down.”
“I’m on a road trip with my best friend,” she said, smiling. “I’ve never done this kind of stuff.” She held on to her coffee mug to steady it and the rattling stopped.
“You’ve driven back and forth from Chappaqua a gazillion times,” I said.
“But alone, or with Peter, not with you. Peter never wants to stop at dive diners or weird souvenir shops, and I’m always scared to when I’m by myself. I used to watch you and Nat pack up her old Rabbit with beach chairs and the cooler and laundry baskets full of clothes instead of suitcases, and I always wished I could go with you. You came back with the best stories and those weird magnets. When we went on vacation, I was stuck in boring hotels and boring museums. We had excursions. You and Nat had adventures.”
She picked up her coffee mug and took a sip just as we hit a pothole. Half the coffee spilled in her lap.
“You’ve been christened,” I said, handing her the roll of paper towels I’d tucked next to the driver’s seat. My mom and I never left home without a roll of paper towels in the car. “You’re officially a road warrior.”
Janie laughed and mopped up the mess. She didn’t say a word about her ruined shirt or her wet jeans.
When we got to Syracuse, I took I-81 to Route 17 instead of staying on the interstate, so we could have lunch at the diner in Roscoe and drive through the Catskills, and it would feel like more of a road trip.
Chapter Forty-four
I was fine for most of the drive. Janie told me about the gondola ride in Venice and visiting the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. I confessed to her that I’d bought Joe by accident, and we laughed so hard we could barely breathe. These were the best parts of the old Janie-the way we were when we were kids-but we were building something new.
When we merged onto the Saw Mill River Parkway, I felt my heart beat in my stomach and I started to sweat, even though we hadn’t turned the heat on in ages.
“You look green, Van,” Janie said. “Are you getting carsick?”
“I think I’m getting Diane-sick.”
“Me too, a little,” she said.
“Really?”
“Don’t act so surprised. You know how she is. And you haven’t been around her much since-since Nat.” She shook her head. “She hasn’t handled it well. She’s like the same, but more so, if that makes any sense.”
It made perfect sense. My mother was Diane’s balance. Without her, it was hard to know where Diane was coming from.
“How are you supposed to handle it well?” I asked, thinking about all the times I drank too much, or cried so hard my eyes were swollen shut the next morning.
“I don’t know,” Janie said. “Maybe you’re supposed to go to one of those groups where you sit in a circle and talk about your feelings.”
“Ha,” I said. “I can see Diane sitting there, smoking like a fiend, telling everyone they should just get over it, and for God’s sake get a decent haircut!”
Janie laughed. “I can totally picture it,” she said. “Some woman is crying because her husband left her, and Mom would tell her he left because she isn’t fooling anyone with those knockoff designer shoes.”
We were so busy laughing at the idea of Diane in group therapy that we breezed through town and made it to the Driscolls’ house without any major panic attacks or breakdowns. But when we drove up the driveway and parked the truck in front of the carriage house, my stomach started doing jumping jacks.
“What if she’s in there?” I asked.
“It’ll be fine,” Janie said, but she didn’t sound confident.
“I don’t want to see her.” I looked out the window, searching for signs of her.
“Do you want me to go in first?”
“No! If you go in alone, you’re leaving me out here, and if I’m out here alone, she could come out here and you won’t- ”
“This is silly,” Janie said. “She’s not the boogeyman.” But she wasn’t in any hurry to get out of the truck either. She stayed in her seat, staring out the front window until I got out of the truck.
The snow on the stairs wasn’t shoveled, and there were footprints going up the stairs. Triangles with tiny circles following behind, punctuating each step. A set of triangles pointed up and a set pointed back down. Diane was probably gone. But she could have been in the car
riage house when it snowed, left, and come back.
I got my key out and ready to go. I could picture her having the locks changed, so I’d have to go pound on the door to the main house; but thankfully, when I slid my key into the lock and turned it, it clicked open.
I pushed the door open. The air felt thick, like the weight of Diane’s stale cigarette smoke could push us back out the door. Janie made a face.
The bathroom door was closed, and there was a sliver of light leaking out the bottom of the door. The shower was running.
“She’s here,” I said.
“Mom?” Janie said.
“Shhh!”
“Van, it’s not like we can get all this furniture out of here before she gets out of the shower. And she knows we’re coming anyway.”
“Why is she showering here?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Janie said.
“She’s your mother.”
“That doesn’t mean I understand even the slightest bit of anything she does.” Janie ran her hand along the back of the couch. “Your mom is the only one who ever did.”
There were half-drunk glasses of bourbon doing service as ashtrays, and empty Camel boxes and magazines everywhere.
I walked into my mom’s room. The bed was slept in. There was another bourbon-glass ashtray on the nightstand. I ran my hand over the indent in the bed and smoothed out the sheets. The pillowcase was spotted with mascara stains like a watercolor. Wads of tissues nested next to the pillow.
“Oh my God!” Janie yelled from the kitchen. “Look what’s on the fridge.”
I ran into the kitchen. Janie was holding up the fluorescent pink sombrero magnet. “I wondered where that ended up,” she said.
We heard the water shut off. Janie stiffened.
“It’ll be a while,” I said. “She’s got to know we’re here. And she’s not coming out until she’s done her hair.” Still, I was nervous. I mean, she was going to come out eventually. And what then? Would we fight? Would we cry? Would we have it all out? Would she tell me I couldn’t take my mom’s stuff after all? Would she ask for her money back?