Frito squirms to get down; after a second or two of clashing wills and some kitty cussing, Starr finally concedes. “So how come you don’t know how to cook?” she says as the cat stalks off, his fur all spiked like a punk rocker.
“Hey. I cook.” As if to prove my point, I stir the sauce. “I put stuff in pots, you get hot meals. Besides,” I say before she can poke holes in my theory, “you don’t cook either.”
“Hello? I’m five? I’m not allowed to touch the stove?”
I have no comeback for this.
“When’s Luke coming back?”
“I don’t know, baby.” My stomach’s jumped at her question, but I don’t let on. He’s been gone most of the past couple of weeks, overseeing the plumbing installation for some corporation’s new headquarters in New Paltz. I dump half a package of dry pasta in the boiling water. “This week sometime, maybe.”
She nods, then wanders out of the kitchen. Frito jumps up onto the microwave stand to stare at me. This is his thing. Staring. For hours. At me.
Now with Starr, he’s cuddly and purry. Me, he stares at. With barely tempered disgust. Why, I have no idea. I feed the damn thing. Change his litter pan. I even went out and bought him this cushy little faux sheepskin-lined bed. Which he never sleeps in. Forked over nearly three hundred bucks to the vet when the stupid animal scarfed down a length of thread with a needle attached to it. And still, after a month, he stares. Oh, and if I try to pet him? He flinches. I’m good for food and a clean pan, but God forbid I should touch him.
So maybe I’m not exactly a cat person. Especially cats who could give Freddy Krueger a run for his money. But I’m doing my best here. Why doesn’t he get that?
And while I’m thinking this, the damn thing jumps off the stand straight at my chest, shaving five years off my life and knocking over a half-full can of Diet Coke I’d left there earlier. I watch in helpless rage as soda spatters all over the floor I’d just washed. Okay, so maybe I hadn’t just washed it, but it was a helluva lot cleaner than it is now.
“Stupid cat!” I yell, but all I get is this smug, yellow-eyed glare that clearly says, “Hey. It wasn’t me who left the can there, was it?”
By the time I finish cleaning up the mess, the sun has shifted, the glow from only minutes before all but gone.
Just like the glow from my earlier contentment.
As the last of the peachy color fades from the walls, I toss the Coke-soaked paper towels into the garbage and sigh. Aside from still missing Leo like crazy, it’s not as if this past month has been horrible or anything. On the whole, I have nothing to complain about. I might miss going into the city, but I sure don’t miss Nicole Katz. And while I’m still no threat to Emeril in the cooking department, I’m proud to say that—thanks to Luke—I can now change out the inner workings of a toilet, stop a leaky faucet and do minor electrical repairs without batting an eye. Or frying myself. But here I am, once again feeling…unsettled. As though I’m marking time.
Do all stay-at-home moms go through this, feeling as though they’re treading water in the middle of the ocean, having no idea where the nearest land is? Or is this just me, being weird?
Maybe I don’t want to know the answer to that.
But seriously, how did Frances do it, with six boys? And Liv, who’s still in the middle of it? She finally had her baby last week, by emergency C-section. Since her husband couldn’t take that much time off, and since no other family members were available for various reasons, I volunteered to take up the slack. So suddenly I had a houseful of boys during the day. Yes, I know, there were only two, but two boys in a house is a house full of boys. How can two measly little kids manage to be in fifty places at once? I don’t get this.
Just as I don’t get why I’m stewing over something that’s not even the real problem, and I damn well know it. It’s not being home full-time, or being a mother full-time, that I feel so unsettled about. It’s this whole Luke and Tina business that’s got me ready to scream.
The spaghetti’s done; I carefully upend the full pot over the colander in the sink, wishing I could somehow steam my brain open. Up until a few weeks ago, our roles were more or less clearly defined. But now I have no idea how I’m supposed to act, what I’m supposed to feel—or let myself feel—what I’m supposed to think. It was easy—well, maybe not easy, but predetermined at least—when Tina (who I keep thinking I should call, but what would I say?) was in the picture. I simply ignored my attraction to Luke. Stuck my fingers in my ears whenever it tried to jump up and down and get my attention. And for the most part, it worked. Not all that hard when despite Tina’s assertion otherwise, it’s one-sided. Maybe I can’t help what, or how, I feel about somebody, but I sure as hell can choose what to do about it. Up to this point, my control over my emotions has relied heavily on a combination of denial, never being alone with the man and keeping busy.
Since the first two of those are obviously shot to hell, I’m left with number three.
At least there’s Heather’s wedding. Otherwise known as The Circus. Even with Tina officially out of the wedding party (her decision), we’re up to fifteen attendants now. Fifteen. I swear she’s dragging ’em off the street. But besides needing the work (since picking through the trash for aluminum cans doesn’t appeal) if this doesn’t take my mind off the Great Luke Dilemma, nothing will.
Except I wonder…and then what?
Yes, things are peaceful (relatively) and on an even keel (for which I should be grateful), but why do I feel as though I’m in the eye of the storm? That for all the changes and upheavals I’ve been through in the past few months, I ain’t seen nothin’ yet?
“Is dinner ready?”
“Yeah, sweetie,” I say to my kid. She comes to the table and slips into her chair—she’s finally tall enough not to have to step up on the rung first—her expression resolute. I’ve really got to learn how to cook. As in, chopping and measuring and all that fun stuff. However, I no sooner set her milk and bowl of spaghetti in front of her than the doorbell rings. Her eyes light up.
“Maybe it’s Luke!” she says, bolting from her chair and streaking down the hall to the door.
But I can tell, through the sheer-curtained glass pane, it’s not Luke. Starr undoes the three locks with a dexterity a concert pianist would envy and yanks open the heavy door, only to let out a moan of disappointment.
“Hi…honey,” Jennifer says to my kid with an expression not unlike Starr’s when she had to eat those stewed tomatoes. Her linen jumper is wrinkled just enough to prove no polyester was used in the making of this garment; her white T-shirt is the finest gauge cotton Stuart’s money could buy; her clunky Mary Janes are hideously trendy. “Guess you were expecting someone else, huh?” Then she turns her stiff smile on me. And opens her arms.
Just as I notice the mountain of classy taupe luggage stacked behind her.
Uh, God? You and I need to have a serious talk.
I desperately want to believe I’m dreaming, but I’ve pinched myself three times already and all I have to show for it are a trio of red welts on my arm.
And my sister, sitting at my kitchen table.
Where she obviously plans on staying for a while.
My sister, who wanted nothing more to do with this house, this borough, this family, has moved back in. And I have six pieces of Gucci luggage in my foyer to prove it.
“Only temporarily,” she says, sipping from a bottle of Dasani. I offered her dinner, but I guess canned Hunts spaghetti sauce isn’t high on her list, either. Quelle surprise. “Until Stuart finds another job.”
Starr is sitting at my side, shoveling in her spaghetti, silently taking this all in. Probably better than I am.
“And where is Stuart again?” I ask.
“Chicago. Uh…excuse me,” Jen says, then sneezes loud enough to stun Hackensack. “But he’s off to Indianapolis tomorrow—” her smile fades “—then Lansing.”
Lansing? Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
Seems they had
to sell the house after all, before they lost it. The good news was, a buyer snatched up the property within forty-eight hours of their putting it on the market, proving that somebody still has money out there. The bad news was, the new owner wanted to take immediate possession. Not being in any position to argue, my sister and brother-in-law agreed. So, while Stuart is doing the grand tour of the Midwest in search of a new job, my sister is—dare I say it?—homeless.
Or she was until she remembered she could suck it up and come back here.
Not that sucking up’s one of Jen’s strong points, but I imagine she’ll improve with practice. We all do.
“Where’s your furniture?” We’re talking a five-thousand-square-foot house. Or so I hear. I’ve never actually seen it (and now I guess I won’t). Gee, you could wander around for hours and never see the person you were living with. Which might account for the longevity of my sister’s marriage.
Long, heavily coated lashes drift down onto pale, perfectly made-up cheeks, followed by a despondent sigh. “We were able to store some of it in Stuart’s parents’ garage, since they’re down to three cars now—”
Don’t say it, Ellie.
“—but we had to sell the rest.” Another sneeze. “At a loss, as you can imagine.”
The resultant silence, in which I try desperately—well, maybe not desperately—to drum up a smidgen of sympathy for the obviously distraught blonde in front of me, is shattered by my daughter’s slurping up the last of her spaghetti. Delicately blowing her nose into a tissue, Jennifer looks at Starr, whose gaze is nailed to her aunt.
“Don’t you know it’s rude to stare, little girl?”
“Sorry,” she says, not moving.
“And don’t you ever smile?”
“When there’s something to smile about, sure.”
God, I love this kid.
Jen and Starr glare at each other for several seconds, then Jen swings her attention back to me. Her eyes are beginning to get kinda puffy.
“I suppose you’re wondering why I didn’t simply find an apartment or go to a hotel while we’re waiting—”
You might say.
“—but Stuart thought it made more sense to set aside the proceeds from the sale of the house and furniture so we can start over once he finds a new position.” She sneezes again, then says stuffily around her tissue, “What’s the sense of wasting it on rent when I can live here for free?”
Of course, what Stuart didn’t take into account when he came up with this amusing little plan was that living under the same roof with my sister for more than, oh, twenty minutes might well drive me to hire a hit man.
Then again, maybe he did.
Frito picks that moment to meander back into the kitchen, all pigeon-toed macho swagger. Cat and sister catch sight of each other at the same time; they both freeze, their expressions equally horrified.
“Ohmigod! Ohmigod!” Jennifer shrieks, grabbing a napkin and holding it over her nose. “No wonder I’m sneezing! I can’t have a cat in the house! You know I’m allergic!”
Ah, yes. Now I remember. We couldn’t have any pets because both my grandmother and Jennifer were dander-in-tolerant. For the first time since this cat’s taken up residence, a surge of genuine affection sweeps through me.
“Well, since you didn’t exactly clear your stay with management,” I say as the cat yawns, stretches, then begins to slowly, torturously head in Jennifer’s direction, “there wasn’t a whole lot I could do, was there?”
About two feet from my sister, Frito decides to sit down and do the bath routine. But not before I catch what I swear is a wink.
Jen, however, hasn’t so much as twitched a muscle. The slightest nudge, she’d topple over and shatter.
“Jen? He’s not a dinosaur. Not moving won’t trick him into thinking you’re not there.”
This apparently prompts the woman to leap from her chair and scream, “Get him out of here! Get him out of here! Get him out of here!” whilst flailing her arms enthusiastically about and hopping up and down as though stomping grapes.
Frito glances up from his bath, apparently finding this all highly entertaining. As do I. And Starr, who’s not even trying to suppress the giggles.
Lest you think me cruel and unfeeling, however, let me relate a particular incident from several years back, when I was eight and Jen twelve.
Our parents had left her to baby-sit while they ran a few errands. Jen locked herself into the bathroom—our only bathroom, remember—to take a bath. Where she stayed for two hours. And I had to do Number Two. A fact of which I apprised her, to no avail. And I’d been expressly forbidden to set foot outside the house by myself, so I couldn’t go next door to Leo’s and Nana’s or the Scardinares. And when our parents returned to find me sobbing hysterically because I’d messed my pants, Jen insisted she never heard me ask to get in.
Granted, my parents didn’t believe her for a second, so it wasn’t as if she got away with it. But her punishment at my parents’ hands—an apology (insincere) and having to clean the toilet every day for a solid month—didn’t go nearly far enough, in my opinion, to negate the pain and humiliation to which I’d been subjected.
Nor did it stop her continued torture of me, via methods increasingly nefarious, for the rest of the years we spent under the same roof. Ergo, I am totally enjoying her misery. I have been waiting many, many years for this.
The cat yawns again, then somehow curls his lip, a shard of light glancing off his snaggletooth. He takes a leisurely survey of the room, then refocuses on the yelping, possessed person in our kitchen. Finally, after due deliberation, he once again hauls himself off his fat haunches and continues his journey. By now, Jen is backed up against the counter and shrieking her head off. Unperturbed, Frito swerves to swipe up against her shins. Jen looks at me, terror shining in her now reddened eyes, and says, in a very small voice, “Please?”
I sigh. It was a sweet moment, but we all know how fleeting those are.
I scoop up the cat; Jen heaves a huge sigh of relief. Of course, she has no idea there’s half a can of tuna in it for this rumbling furbag in my arms.
Oh, yeah, he and I are compadres now, boy.
Sagging against the sink, Jennifer sneezes, three times in rapid succession. My conscience twinges.
“Starr, honey—maybe you should take Frito to your room for a bit.” When child and cat are gone, Jennifer says, “I don’t subbose you could fide someplace else for himb to stay while I’m here?”
I said twinges. Not goes over to the other side.
“Jen, moving back in was your idea. And I suppose, when it comes down to it, this is still your home. If you want to stay here, fine. But I’m not turning my life, or my daughter’s, upside down for you. The cat stays.”
Her chin lifts, making her nearly swollen shut eyes look even slittier. “I can’t believe,” she says, blowing her nose, “that you’d choose that hideous creature over your own sister.”
“I’m not. I’m choosing my kid over my sister.” I cross my arms, feeling close to victory for the first time since Starr opened the door to Jennifer earlier this evening. “If that’s a problem, you can dip into that nice little capital gain you and Stuart have just realized and go to a hotel.”
She sniffs. Twice. “Where’s the nearest all-night drugstore?”
Not exactly the words I’d hoped to hear.
“Over on Atlantic Avenue,” I say.
Like I said, God. Serious talk. So pencil me in.
chapter 17
The cat got tuna, anyway. Hey, he gave it his best shot, right? And I have to say, it’s nice to know somebody around here is looking out for my best interests.
Damn thing still won’t let me pet him, though. Miserable beast.
The next morning, Starr and I left Jennifer making strange thumping noises in Leo’s old room (I don’t want to know) and went over to the Gomezes’, since it occurred to me this new baby’s nearly ten days old and I haven’t given her a present yet. All I h
ad to do was wrap it, though, since—after the third girlfriend gave birth within as many months a couple years ago—I finally realized how much time and energy could be saved by simply buying baby gifts in bulk every year or so. The first time I plunked a half dozen white sleepers with little androgynous creatures scampering about and as many teething rattles at the Macy’s checkout, the saleswoman looked at my stash, then at me, and asked if it was hard getting enough sleep with sextuplets.
Liv is fully dressed but reclining on the sofa in the living room, the baby observing the world from her little bouncy chair on the floor. Starr plops down cross-legged on the floor to watch her, elbows on knees and chin in hands, whereupon Erik, the three-year-old, begins regaling us with a minute-by-minute account of everything the baby’s done since they all got up that morning. Definitely an argument for stopping after one kid.
Blissfully ignorant that half the babies born in Queens in recent years have cut their teeth on this very model of teething ring, Liv oohs and ahhs over the gift, then thanks me for at least the tenth time for taking the two older boys off her hands after little Dani’s birth.
“Oh, please,” I say, “fuhgetabout it, it was no big deal.”
Really, the tic in my left eye is hardly even noticeable anymore.
Still, here I am on her floor, tickling the baby’s chubby tummy and making all those idiotic sounds people make at babies. Barely visible over chubby cheeks, slate-blue eyes stare back at me, unimpressed. Between the cat and this kid, I’m batting zero.
“Did I have that much hair?” Starr asks.
“Much” is an understatement. This poor kid looks like she’s wearing a cheapo Dracula wig—black, stiff and dangerously flammable.
“Remember the pictures in your baby book? You were so bald I had to tape a bow to your head so people would know you were a girl.”
That gets a priceless look, as Liv says, “So, I see you have company.”
This is like saying Attila the Hun’s evil sister dropped by for a visit. But since Starr is sitting here, I simply say, “My sister. Jennifer.”
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