The Accidental Book Club

by Jennifer Scott

  She plopped onto the couch and began reading, slipping over the words like an icy highway.

  Blanche’s daughter, Trina, was a disgusting mound of a thing, wrapped in a stereotypical fat-girl jolly shell. Blanche could scarcely look at the girl without wanting to overdose the pain of her failure away. Instead, she threw snack cakes at Trina like a zookeeper to a gorilla, and owned the blame for what she’d done to contribute to the death of expectations of humanity . . .

  Truth be told, Jean hadn’t finished the book because she hadn’t really cared for it. It was offensive, difficult to swallow. How had it been getting so many rave reviews?

  But it was not like Jean to abandon a book. She was not the type to give up entirely. She had a book club discussion to lead, and how could she lead a discussion without having read the book, no matter how disgusting it was?

  She remained there until afternoon came and the sun bore down on her hard through the floor-to-ceiling windows and the shadows coming off the trees were long and dark.

  She remembered reading her first Thackeray novel with Wayne. Kenneth had just left for college. She and Wayne were fresh empty nesters, and Jean had been gutted with loneliness. Even though she’d never been the “playing type” of mother, and she’d never quite felt in her own skin around her children, she’d enjoyed the noise and confusion of having them around. She’d worn her right to complain about children’s craziness like a badge. In some ways, it was the only way she could relate to those other moms.

  Right around the same time, Thackeray had written Blood Boy, a novel about a boy who went to college with stars in his eyes and the deeply felt convictions that only the young can truly hang on to with any real grasp, but had committed suicide by jumping from his third-floor dorm room. It was a mystery—not a whodunit, but a whydunit. Toward the end, the parents learned that their son had never had stars in his eyes but that they had only seen him that way. They’d missed all the warning signals; though he’d laid clues around like Easter eggs, they’d never picked them up, not a single one. By that point in the story, Jean was sobbing so hysterically, Wayne had to take over and read from there.

  Jean would never forget Wayne’s soothing voice intoning the last lines: Of all the lessons Rita learned, the harshest, and sweetest, was that sometimes we see our children with the critical eye only, for who we want them to become, rather than who they actually are. But those are the children of our memories, the perfect ones, and she would rather live with a perfect lie than die with the terrifying truth on her tongue. Wayne had closed the book with a soft whump and had laid it on the table. Jean had turned sideways on the couch, laid her head on his lap, and cried and cried, unsure which children she had sent out into her world—the perfect lies or the imperfect truths—but completely certain that they were both doomed regardless.

  Wayne had stroked her hair.

  And he had proclaimed Thackeray to be the greatest writer of all time. A real sage, he’d called him. A prophet. Someone with convictions to admire.

  And an asshole of the highest order.

  It had been a shocking enough proclamation to bring Jean to giggles. She still smiled at the memory of her writhing around on his lap, laughing until she was breathless, her face still slicked with tears as he poked into her sides, quoting Thackeray lines in a bored, uppity voice.

  “Can I eat?” Jean heard, and nearly dropped her book, ripped out of her memory. In her haste to read, she’d forgotten all about Bailey, who now stood on the living room steps, her hair funky and frizzed out to one side, a handprint pressed into her cheek.

  Jean nodded. “Of course you can. I . . . I totally forg . . .” She trailed off. Something told her it wouldn’t be a good idea to tell Bailey that she’d been forgotten. “I lost track of time.” She held up the book and grinned sheepishly. “Book club assignment and I haven’t done my homework.”

  Bailey took a couple more steps down, scratching at one thigh absently. “You have a book club?”

  “Yes, I started it when Wayne . . . when your grandfather . . . when . . .”

  “When he croaked? You can say it around me. I’m not four. I get the whole circle of life thing. Hakuna matata and all that.”

  Jean pressed her lips together. When he croaked. She had never, not once, considered Wayne’s death that way. Something about putting it so brashly felt like rocks pelting her skin. Frogs croaked. Bugs croaked. Great men . . . loves of lives . . . did not do something so trivial as croak.

  “Anyway, we meet again soon,” Jean said, trying to paste on a smile, knowing that today was not the best day to engage her granddaughter in a course of manners.

  “Oh, great, so I’ll have even less privacy than I already do. I can’t wait,” Bailey said.

  “We won’t invade. We’ll be too busy talking about the book. It’s called Blame, and it’s about parenting, and honestly I’m kind of surprised by how he—”

  “Yeah, I really just wanted some food,” Bailey interrupted.

  The girl turned on her heel and stomped back up the stairs, and soon Jean could hear her mumbling expletives to herself while rummaging through the pantry. Jean wasn’t sure whether she should go up and help out or just let Bailey fend for herself. She wasn’t used to this; neither of her kids had been so rude. At least . . . not that she knew of.

  “Help yourself to anything you want,” she called as cheerfully as she could. “I’ll be . . . I’ll be right back.”

  She replaced the bookmark and put the book on the end table, careful not to disturb Wayne’s glasses, which still sat there after all this time, and walked outside through the back door.

  It was only June, but the heat was already oppressive, and Jean found herself lunging for the long shadows of the trees, as she picked her way next door to Loretta’s house. She let herself in without knocking, as she’d always done.

  Chuck was snoozing in his recliner, so Jean tiptoed through the house, not calling out Loretta’s name until she’d gotten upstairs.

  “In the lounge,” Loretta called back. “Just me and Flavian.”

  Jean knew exactly whom Loretta was talking about—Flavian Munney, the hunky main character in a long-standing series of steamy romance novels that Chuck and Wayne had jokingly called “librarian porn” way back when Loretta began reading them. Loretta used to joke back then that she was doing research, but since Chuck retired, she’d increasingly joked that it was more like reading a history book about events that she knew were true because they’d once happened in her lifetime, but were now as outdated as rotary dial telephones and The Brady Bunch.

  After Chuck retired, and their only daughter, Wendy, moved to Rhode Island to live near her new husband’s family, Loretta gutted Wendy’s bedroom and made it into a room she liked to call La Ladies’ Lounge. It was heavy on Pepto-Bismol pink and swoopy fabric, and was dominated by a crystal chandelier meant for a room three times its size. She even bought an antique lounge, the kind that does not collapse and looks like a 1950s starlet in feathered, high-heeled house slippers and a gauzy gown should be draped across it. She placed the lounge right next to the bay window, which overlooked the southwest corner of Jean’s house and the wooded area beyond.

  It was in this room that Loretta fed her love affair with a fictional character that she insisted looked like the guy who mixed the paint at Home Depot. Once every so often, Loretta would make the book club read a Flavian Munney book. Everyone—including Jean—complained loudly about it. The books were cheesy and predictable. But the Flavian Munney discussions were some of the best to be had. Hilarious and interesting, and sometimes, once the wine got flowing and confessions were made, shocking. It was during one of the Flavian Munney meetings that they learned that Loretta and Chuck hadn’t had sex in two years and that Mitzi and her husband, Paul, once did it in a stairwell in a casino hotel. You know there were cameras in there, she’d hissed over her wineglass. Thank God it wasn
’t my face they were looking at! And they’d all burst into scandalized laughter, even Janet, whose hands shook around her wineglass afterward. It was at the same meeting that Dorothy told them about her impending divorce, and how, when she found out that her husband had been cheating on her, she’d gone to a bar and tried to go home with someone, but the only taker had terrible body odor. Since she couldn’t make herself forgive her standards when it came to personal hygiene, she’d gone to a motel room alone and had cried herself to sleep. And then, just as the tone had gone sober as they all felt for poor Dorothy, May had spoken up: Last weekend I totally went home with a guy who was missing his two front teeth, and even Dorothy giggled, and so did Jean, although she knew it was a lie. It was a beautiful, sweet lie.

  Jean could have used a Flavian Munney discussion right now.

  “New one?” Jean asked, sitting on the white couch that took up most of the wall on the other side of La Lounge.

  Loretta held up the cover, which featured a nearly naked man holding a belt between two hands, his biceps taught with strain. “Whipped into Shape,” she purred. “Flavian’s hopped on the bondage bandwagon.”

  “Hmm, sounds frightening. Does Chuck know about this?”

  “Who needs to handcuff Chuck? He doesn’t move.”

  “How will Flavian hold his paint cans and that belt at the same time?” Jean asked, motioning toward the cover.

  “You don’t want to know,” Loretta said, raising her eyebrows, and they chuckled. “I’m guessing you aren’t here to talk about Flavian,” she added after a beat. “How’s the kid?”

  Jean sighed, leaned her head back against the chair. “She’s so . . . angry. My God, Loretta, I don’t know what they’ve done to this kid, but she’s just . . . I can’t have the book club anymore. Not with her there.”

  Loretta swung her legs around front and sat up. “Of course you can. She’s fifteen, not five.”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Even better. What’s she gonna do, exactly?”

  “That’s the thing,” Jean said. “I don’t know. I don’t know her. But to hear her dad talk, she could do just about anything. I don’t want her to humiliate me in front of—”

  “In front of who? Me? Not possible.” She snapped the book closed and placed it, cover side down, on the end of the lounge. “You know that. Need I remind you of the thong incident of last December?”

  “No, not in front of you, of course. In front of Mitzi,” Jean said. Jean loved Mitzi—they all did—but sometimes they feared her more than befriended her. There was nobody in this world more fiercely loyal to her friends . . . and nobody more fiercely, and openly, judgmental of them. She claimed she judged out of love, and the most frustrating part was that they believed her. Sometimes it was both wonderful and horrible to have a friend love you so fiercely.

  Loretta thought about it, nodded. “Okay, well, I could see that. But really, Mitzi’s best friend is Dorothy, and there are no kids in this world worse than her kids. So Mitzi must be able to separate apples from trees, you know what I mean?”

  “That’s the thing,” Jean said, smacking her leg. “I’m not her mother. And I don’t know what has happened with her mother, but it can’t be good, because this child is so pissed off. And I don’t feel like I can mother her. Not right away. Who am I to tell her what to do? Last time I saw her, she was still wearing footie pajamas.”

  Loretta stood and held her hand out for Jean to take. “The hell you can’t mother her. They didn’t ship her to you for poops and giggles. They sent her here because she needs a kick in the ass. And you, my friend, are the kicker. You’ll keep the book club, and that’s all there is to it. You need that book club, and we both know it. If you’re going to keep your sanity right now, you aren’t going to keep it by holing yourself up with depressing memories and loneliness.”

  Jean wasn’t surprised to hear Loretta defend the club’s existence so mightily. The book club had been Loretta’s idea from the start. She’d nudged Jean into it just a few weeks after Wayne died.

  “To hell with cookies and milk,” Loretta had grumbled, shoving her way into Jean’s cavernous kitchen where Jean had been busy packing up some of his belongings for donation. Loretta parked herself on a stool at the island. “You need something with a little testosterone. Glasses?”

  Jean pulled two highball glasses down from the cabinet and rinsed the dust out of them. Loretta splashed a couple inches of brown liquid into each and held one up, toast-style. “He was a hell of a guy, Jeanie,” she said somberly, and took a long sip from her glass.

  Jean had immediately felt that inward melting feeling again. She didn’t want to drink. She didn’t want to do anything. She didn’t even want to miss him. She just wanted him back. But Loretta gave the glass a small shove, and Jean picked it up and studied it.

  “More than you know,” she said. She tossed back some of the liquid and grimaced as it went down. “But he’s gone now.” She felt herself wanting to cry, but tamped it down by tipping the glass up again and having another drink. “These look great,” she said, wiggling two fingers under the plastic wrap that covered the brownie plate.

  “My insane aunt Helen’s recipe,” Loretta said, draining her glass. “You know, the one who always tries to show people her third nipple? Crazier than a loon, but, good Molly, can that woman cook.”

  “Maybe it’s the nipple,” Jean suggested as she handed Loretta a brownie.

  “Could very well be.”

  The two of them bit in. They gobbled up one, and then another, and a third each, washing them down with more slugs of whiskey. Jean found herself feeling very loose—perilously so, as if she might bend in half or say something upsetting or go on a thinking spree that could be very dangerous. She sank onto a stool across from Loretta, crossed her arms on the counter, and laid her head on them.

  “Kids made it home okay?” Loretta asked.

  “Kenny got in last night. He called.” Good old Kenny, Jean thought. God bless him. While her older child, Laura, had practically left skid marks in Jean’s driveway, so eager to get back to St. Louis, to get back to work, Jean’s younger child, Kenneth, had stayed on for weeks, working remotely on his laptop during the day, helping Jean sort out the paperwork and the lawn mowing and the grief by night. Jean had finally been forced by guilt and by an overwhelming desire for alone time to send him home, to get back to his wife, his job, his life. She’d needed time to think. To process. To cry without feeling on show. Kenny had called the minute his plane touched down in California. Laura hadn’t even called to check in. For all Jean knew, her daughter never made it home at all. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

  “They doing okay with everything?” Loretta had asked.

  Jean turned her face down so that her nose hovered just above the counter. She could smell the whiskey on her breath when she spoke. “Kenny’s had a bit of a hard time with it, but you know Laura.” Loretta made a noise of affirmation, but neither of them finished the thought—Laura didn’t have a hard time with much of anything, it seemed. Or maybe, Jean wondered, Laura had a hard time with so many things, this wasn’t noticeable. Jean changed the subject. “Oh, Loretta, I hope Wayne knew how much I loved him,” she muttered, her voice echoey to her own ears.

  “Of course he did,” Loretta responded. Loretta’s hair was dyed as jet-black as an oil slick, her cheeks just as powdered and her lips just as red as the day she retired from the car dealership eleven years prior. Her hands showed more veins; the skin of her arms sagged a little. But otherwise she might have never aged a day since Jean met her. Loretta dropped another dollop of whiskey into Jean’s glass and inched it toward her.

  Jean wiped the corners of her eyes. “I’m just thinking about all the times we fought. Stupid fights that meant nothing. Now they seem so huge, and I hope he wasn’t thinking of those things at the end. Because they’re all that I can think a
bout now. I can’t help it.”

  Loretta patted Jean’s hand. “That’ll pass,” she said. She bent to look Jean directly in the eyes. “It will.”

  They got up and moved into the living room, a room Jean had scarcely been able to force herself to enter. Wayne’s eyeglasses still sat atop a folded newspaper on the end table next to his armchair, where he had had a habit of leaving them when he wasn’t wearing them. Jean doubted she’d ever touch them. How could she move them? The date on the newspaper might grab her eye, startle her back to the day they’d learned about the cancer. Or worse, the first day he’d been too sick to put on his glasses.

  Jean had eased herself onto the couch, on the opposite end of where Loretta was sitting. She felt like she was uncharacteristically sprawling, and she was miserable, the chocolate slugging uncomfortably in her stomach as her eyes dragged toward the end table, and found a balled-up pair of black socks tucked underneath it. She’d missed those all this time. How had she missed them?

  Loretta leaned forward and touched the spines of a couple of books stacked on the coffee table, pushing them around to read the titles. “Goodness, you read a lot. You ever been in a book club?” she asked.

  “Not officially,” she answered, though, of course, she was thinking of her nightly reading ritual with Wayne, and how that had felt like a club of sorts. They’d been doing it since the children were small—at first reading picture books aloud to Laura and Kenny, the whole family draped over one another in the living room, the kids’ heads fresh-smelling with shampoo. But Jean and Wayne had continued it after the kids had outgrown bedtime stories, choosing their own books, books that interested and expanded both of them. It became a private book club, just the two of them, holding their stories close to their hearts, reading and discussing with feeling, sometimes grieving together over endings or laughing so hard they had to stop reading to wipe their eyes. Wayne’s favorites had always been the philosophical novels—Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain being his all-time favorite. Jean had loved the quirky popular novels. They’d both chuckled over Then We Came to the End and had both cried over The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Jean had cherished those moments together. She missed them so much, the thought of cracking open a book without him left her a little panicky.