Floorboards creak behind me. “Mama?”
I keep my eyes shut, breathing so deeply I nearly hyperventilate.
“Ma-ma!” Starr climbs up onto the bed and flings herself over my shoulder, her hair tickling my face. “I know you’re awake!” I grunt when she scrambles over me, bony little elbows and knees landing where they will as she turns on the bedside lamp. Great. Now I’m bruised and blinded.
“Honest to God, Starr!” I shield my eyes, blinking in the glare. “Did you get into the Diet Cokes?”
She vigorously shakes her head. “I just can’t sleep. Guess I’m overwrought.”
Her word of the week, ever since she heard somebody say it on some TV show. Last week’s was evocative. I kid you not. Can you imagine what she’d be like if I’d started shoving flashcards in her face when she was six weeks old?
“C’n I look at this?”
I yelp as a fifty-pound something whaps me in the arm. “What?” I peer at the weapon, which turns out to be an abandoned Martha Stewart Weddings. Starr knows she doesn’t have carte blanche to look at everything that comes into the house, not since the day she walked in with one of my Nora Roberts books and asked, “Mama, what’s he cupped her mean?”
That freethinking, I’m not.
“Yes, that’s fine,” I say, entertaining a sanguine hope that she’ll haul her find back to her room. Instead, I nearly bite my tongue when she yanks my extra pillow out from underneath my head and wads it up against the headboard.
“Uh, Starr? You’re doing this in here because…?”
“’Cause there’s no monster in here.” Damn. I have really got to get rid of that thing. She pushes her glasses farther up onto the bridge of her tiny nose. “Oh, this is a pretty dress.”
This from the kid who screamed bloody murder when I tried to get her to wear a dress to somebody’s wedding last year. I squint at the picture, giving in to the inevitable. Never again will I take for granted the luxury of going to sleep when I’m tired. “Yes, it is,” I say on a yawn.
She skootches closer to me, smelling like watermelon shampoo. “It looks like fun, getting married.”
“It can be, I suppose.”
“Will I get married when I grow up?”
“Maybe. That’s not something anybody can predict.”
After a minute or so critiquing a spread on wedding cakes that cost more than my first year of college, she says, “Why’s Tina so sad?”
Not what I was expecting. But then, that pretty much describes my life these days. “She’s got a lot on her mind right now.”
“Like what?”
“Grown-up stuff, Twink. Nothing that would make sense to you.”
“Mama. I’m not a baby, geez.”
I stifle a chuckle. This kid was never a baby. A memory surfaces from several weeks before her fourth birthday, of Starr with her head in her hands, moaning, “Why am I still three?”
“I know you’re not, sweetie pie. But you’re not a grown-up, either. And I am—” maybe if I say it with enough conviction, I’ll believe it “—so I get to make the decisions about what you need, or don’t need, to know.”
“That is so lame.”
“And you so have to deal with it.”
She slams shut the magazine, her sharp little eyes meeting my bleary ones.
“You weren’t married to my daddy, were you?”
I have long since given up trying to figure out my daughter’s thought progressions. Fortunately, I’m too pooped to flinch. “No, baby. I wasn’t.”
“How come?”
You know, I always swore I’d never put her off, never dismiss her questions. But for some reason, I’d always pictured her being older and me being awake. And that I’d have answers that actually made sense. To at least one of us. Why is life so freaking messy?
I pull her into my arms. “Would you be really mad at me if I told you I can’t answer your question right now, but I promise I will one day?”
“Why can’t you tell me now?”
Why couldn’t I have had a kid content to ask me why the sky’s blue? Or, since we live in New York, snot-colored?
“Because, baby, I just can’t.”
“Like you can’t about Tina?”
“Kinda, yeah.”
“Well, that just blows,” she says, and I’m sorry, I can’t help it. I burst out laughing.
Starr’s bottom lip starts to tremble. “It’s not funny.”
I hug her harder, trying to tamp down the chuckles. Underneath that so-cool-I-rule exterior is a very sensitive little girl. “I know it’s not, honey. And I’m not laughing at you. But honestly—where did you hear that?”
“Jason. He says it all the time. He says some other stuff, too, but he told me I can’t say those words, ’cause you’d burn his butt.”
I crack up all over again.
Of course, the next time I see Jason, he is so dead.
“Ohmigod! Ellie Levine!”
Ten days have passed. I’m standing in a crush of bodies at a new deli close to work—I’d given my old one the heave-ho the day I saw a cockroach the size of the Hindenburg taking a stroll through the potato salad—when I hear the voice. I crane my neck, but even in four-inch heels all I see are chests and arms.
“Ellie! It’s me! Mari!”
My mouth drops open. Ohmigod, is right. Mariposa Estevez, my best friend from college. We fall into each other’s arms—much to the annoyance of the hundred or so people in our immediate vicinity—as I wonder how I managed to lose touch with somebody I thought would always be close.
Of course, then I remember. Daniel. Who happened at a time in my life when I hadn’t yet figured out there’s a difference between installing a man as the center of my universe and letting everybody else spin right out of my orbit.
“Girl,” Mari says with a huge smile. “You are looking good!”
She is nothing if not kind.
The tall, thin product of a French mother and a black Cuban father, the woman in front of me, the woman fully aware that every straight man in the place is gawking at her, the woman radiating some out-of-this-world perfume she probably didn’t rub on her wrists from a magazine strip, is unbelievably gorgeous. Skin a perfect golden milky color, huge dark gold eyes, God-given below-the-shoulder ringlets, full lips shimmering in some right-this-minute burgundy that would make me look like my great-aunt Esther three weeks after her funeral. She is wearing a coat that, swear to God, looks like it’s made out of rags, thigh high black leather boots with five inch spike heels that scream dominatrix (but classy), a striped miniskirt and a tiny, olive-green cashmere sweater that on anyone else would look like moldy cheese.
“So are you!” I say, thinking, Why is it so hard to hate nice people?
“Numbah fawty-three!” booms from behind the counter.
I check my number. Seventy-five.
“I can’t believe we lost track of each other!” she says, beaming. “How are you doing? What are you doing?”
“Seventh Avenue,” I hedge. “You?”
Mari rattles off a major designer name. As in, not just first tier, but on the right hand of God. “But I’m thinking of moving on. It’s all about keeping your options open, you know? Listen, I’m running like three years behind here—” she grins “—but we have got to get together for drinks…shit, hold on…”
She pivots to the man behind her and says at the top of her voice, “You got some kinda affliction that makes you grab women’s butts or what? And don’t even think about giving me some sorry-assed story about how crowded it is in here. You don’t see me with my hand on your balls, do you?” Then, muttering “Jerk,” she turns back to me, fishing for something in her pocketbook. Gucci. This year’s. The girl is doing well. “Are you uptown or down?”
“Oh, um, actually…neither. But here’s my cell…” I pretend to rummage through my purse. “Damn. I must’ve left my card case at work.”
“Not a problem.” She pulls out a second card, scribbles my cell num
ber on it. “I’ve gotta couple evenings free next week. Will that work for you?”
“Uh, sure.”
“I’ll call you, I swear!” she says, slithering through the crowd, undoubtedly leaving a plethora of hard-ons in her wake.
“Sixty-fowah?” I hear. “Sixty-five? Yo, sixty-five?”
My bag rings. My arms squeezed so close to my ribs I’m about to suffocate in my cleavage, I somehow get my phone from my purse, while number sixty-six—presumably—and one of the guys behind the counter are having a major set-to about exactly how fresh the tuna salad is. Guy sounds like nothing’s gonna do it for him short of the fish swimming up the Hudson that morning, then taking a taxi over from the 42nd Street pier.
“Hey,” comes the faint, pitiful voice through the phone after I say hello. “It’s me.”
I now understand what they mean by “her heart leaped into her throat.”
“Tina?” I press the phone harder to my ear, stuffing my index finger in the other one. “I can’t hear you very well—where are you?”
“Home,” I barely hear as “Seventy-five!” booms right in front of me. Jesus. How’d it get to be my number so fast? I wave my hand; a round-faced, white-shirted man beckons to me with a gruff, “Okay, sweetheart, what’ll it be?”
“Hang on,” I say into the phone, then: “Liverwurst on whole wheat, mayo on the side, lettuce, pickle.” Back into the phone: “We’ve got a crappy connection, I can’t hear you—”
“We just ran outta whole wheat, you wan’ white, rye or pumpernickel?”
It’s not even noon, for God’s sake, how can they be out of whole wheat already? “Rye. No seeds—”
“Oh, God, Ellie—I’m so sorry…”
“About…what?”
“I couldn’t go through with it.” By now, she’s sobbing. “I just got too scared.”
My stomach drops. “What are you talking about?”
“What do you think?” I can hear her now, boy. Hell, half the people on either side of me can hear her now. “I got rid of the baby! I went by myself, and just…did it.”
“Here ya go, sweetheart,” the deli man says, handing me a white bag emblazoned with hieroglyphics over the glass case. “Pay at the register. Number eighty-t’ree!”
Ten people surge in front of me, shoving me into the minuscule air pocket left in their wake. I tell Tina to hang on a sec as I peer inside the bag, noting a suspiciously dark image through the butcher paper and nothing that even remotely resembles a container of mayo. Which means either there isn’t any or it’s slathered on the bread thicker than Anna Nicole’s makeup.
Just a mite too preoccupied to assert my usual snarky self, however, I elbow my way through the hordes and over to the register, grabbing a Dasani, a bag of chips and a Hershey’s bar to round out my meal. Juggling the bag, my purse, my now-extracted wallet and the phone, which is too damn small to wedge between my shoulder and my ear, I finally say, “You went alone?”
“Yeah, it was okay, I took a taxi home after.”
The dark-haired hottie on the register gives me a total that could feed a family of six in his country of origin for a week; I swipe my Visa and say, quietly, “You okay?”
The silence on the other end slices right through to my soul. “You’re not mad?”
Frankly, I don’t what I am. And God knows, I don’t know what to say. I do know, however, that she didn’t call just to give me the news.
I sign the slip and say, “I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”
I told Gretta, our new bookkeeper—Angelique did indeed throw in the towel, the end of last week—I had a family emergency and to tell Nikky to call me on my cell if she needed to get in touch with me. So far, she hasn’t. Which actually might break the tension as Tina and I sit here on her king-size bed in her aqua-and-peach pseudo-Southwest style bedroom, watching Ricki Lake and sharing my mayonnaise-drenched liverwurst on pumpernickel. I gave her my whole chocolate bar, though. I think she needs it more than I do.
More than anything, I want to ask her what she’s planning to tell Luke. Who stopped by last night to show me the itty-bitty pair of athletic shoes he found. The day before that, a toy elephant nearly as large as a real one. Well, a baby one, anyway.
The people at the clinic told Tina since she had it done so early, she should be basically okay by this evening, just to take it easy for a day or so.
But there’s “okay” and then there’s “okay.” I’ve finally sorted out my feelings at least enough to know that I’m feeling sick about the whole thing, but I can’t tell what’s going on inside Tina’s head. Which, as I said, is totally unlike her, since at any given moment her emotions hover a good foot outside her body. Rather than really talking, she’s instead providing running commentary about the bozos on today’s show. Something about fat girls who slimmed down and then slept with men who hadn’t given them the time of day when they were heavy. Without bothering to reveal their true identities, of course.
“Jesus,” Tina says, finishing off the chocolate bar and licking her fingers while I find myself wondering how, exactly, they get these losers to come on the show to begin with? I mean, didn’t these guys kinda wonder what’s up when they get the call from the Ricki Lake people? “You really have to wonder why the women thought these turkeys were so hot to begin with, don’t you? I mean, is this mullets-on-parade or what?”
And unfortunately, they weren’t all on the men.
“Holy shit!” Tina lands a sideways punch on my upper arm. “Is that Emily Laker? It is! Ohmigod, I don’t believe it!”
“Where?” I say, squinting at the TV and rubbing my arm.
“The blonde, all the way over on the right! In that blue leather miniskirt!”
“You’re nuts, that’s not Emily—”
“The hell it’s not! Look, look—see? She’s still got that scar on her upper lip from when Rosario Cruz punched her in the face in the ninth grade!”
I swing my legs off the bed to go get a closer look, only to let out a gasp. “Ohmigod—you’re right! Then…wait a minute, you don’t think…”
“And here’s the boy who wouldn’t give you the time of day back in Richmond Hill High…Andy Fratelli!”
Tina and I shriek with laughter as Big Bad Andy Fratelli saunters on stage. There’s a not-so-little pooch underneath his T-shirt, and his forehead stretches a little farther back than it used to (which in his case isn’t a totally bad thing), but his grin is just as clueless as ever. Until Emily—who easily weighed three hundred pounds in high school and who now has the slut look nailed—reveals her true identity. I swear, I can see Andy’s balls shrink from here.
“Guess he missed the scar, huh?” Tina says, nearly choking because she’s laughing so hard.
“Like he was looking at her face!”
We both dissolve, our giggles escalating into howls as Emily reads poor, dumb Andy up one side and down the other. Until I realize Tina’s laughter has turned into uncontrollable sobs.
I stab the power button on the remote and crawl onto the bed beside her, taking her in my arms. She’s incoherent and in-consolable by now, keening a nonstop litany of “Ifuckedup, Ifuckedup, Ifuckedup…” My insides cramp; I don’t know what to say. I wish I could somehow take her tangled confusion and regret and recriminations and straighten it all out for her. I wish I had some answers. Any answers. All I know right now is that she’s in pain. She doesn’t get another chance to change her mind.
She can’t go get the baby back.
“I want Luke,” she says, her face wet against my sweater. “I can’t stand this, I’ve got to tell him.”
I freeze. Now she wants to tell him?
“Please,” she says, her watery, black-rimmed eyes beseeching, “you’ve got to call him, tell him to come home—”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I say. “Not until you’re a little calmer. Besides, he’ll be home soon, anyway—”
“No, I’ve got to do it now, before I change my mind, before I ch
icken out.” A tsunami of remorse floods the room. “He’ll be furious, he’ll hate me, I know it, but I can’t face him with this on my conscience.”
The urge to vanish is nearly overwhelming.
Especially when I hear the clunk of the front door deadbolt.
chapter 7
If I’d had a drop of sense, I’d be long gone. But something—guilt?—keeps me glued to the edge of Tina’s sofa while Luke and she talk in their bedroom. At this point, I’m not so much afraid that he’ll be angry—that’s a given—as I am that he’ll never forgive either one of us.
Except then I remember that I didn’t know she was going to do this. Yes, I knew she was thinking about it, but as far as I knew, she’d changed her mind.
And maybe she had. Because Tina’s my friend, because I don’t want to give in to the insidious doubt gnawing at my stomach lining, I refuse to believe she’d planned it this way all along. That, rather than dealing with my less than supportive reaction to her original plan, she lied to me. And to her husband.
After what seems like hours, I finally hear the bedroom door open, then click softly shut. My heart pounds as I hear Luke’s rubber-soled footfalls on the wooden floor as he comes down the hall. I look up, swallowing nonexistent spit, my insides caving at his wrecked expression.
“Is…is she okay?” I tentatively prod, as you might a snake to see if it’s really dead. As opposed to getting the hell out of there.
His gaze drifts out the window, one hand cupping the back of his neck. “I guess. Or she will be, eventually. I told her to try and get some sleep.” Dark, perplexed eyes meet mine, and I think, okay…here it comes. “What I don’t get is why she called you instead of me.”
Oh, God. This must be one of those low simmer mads, that he’s too angry to even let it out. I swallow again. “I guess…it’s just one of those woman things, you know? Maybe…she felt better having me be with her first. But I swear,” I quickly added, “I hadn’t been here an hour before she started asking for you. In fact, I was about to call you when you walked in.”
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