“If you’re sure you want to do litigation, you don’t have to go to corporate for the second half of the summer.” He waved her into a seat across his massive desk, from his important-looking chair on the other side. “I can find some interesting projects for you here.”
He looked genuine, as if he were truly thrilled by her five-hundred-word brief, and she felt comfortable enough to tell him that Paul Billings, a junior partner, had asked her to do all kinds of ridiculous crap—proofread his memos, get Krispy Kremes from the bodega in the lobby, pick up his dry cleaning.
“That’s not your job.” Jack shook his head. “If he asks you do anything else, just tell him you’re doing stuff for me. That guy is such a fucking putz.”
It was the way he said “putz,” the way he rolled his eyes (nice eyes, that dark brown kind where the pupil bleeds into the iris). The other summers had been complaining about Billings for weeks, but when Jack definitively gave him the thumbs-down, Paul Billings became their private joke. She smiled, knowing how she looked when she smiled. At twenty-four, enough people had told her she was pretty that she figured they couldn’t all be lying.
“I really learned a lot from that last project,” Kathy said, which wasn’t true. “I think I would like to stay in litigation.” Which was true.
Jack nodded, told her about an upcoming case, asked if she wanted to discuss it over lunch. Just as Kathy was thinking about what it would be like to be out in the world with Jack Reed, she noticed the picture of the redheaded woman in a platinum frame on his desk.
That had been almost eight years ago. At the time, the redhead had been Jack’s wife. Kathy didn’t sleep with Jack until a year and a half later, when she’d joined the firm and Jack brought her in on the Ryan department store trial, when the redhead was pregnant with a child Jack hadn’t wanted, and Jack’s brother was almost dying. There’d been a challenging absence in Jack’s kiss, in his eyes, but she’d attributed it to the guilt and gruel of his life. She pretended it would abate with time. They lost the case, Jack’s brother got better, the redhead had the baby, and she and Jack broke up, got back together, and broke up again. After Jack’s divorce was final, he asked Kathy to move into the new condo he bought a mile and half down Lake Shore from the one he used to share with the redhead. For the past four years, Kathy and Jack have been driving to the office together most mornings, eating Asian takeout together most nights. On Sundays Jack has his son, and some weeks Kathy goes with them to Wrigley Field or the Lincoln Park Zoo. Some weeks she eats lunch at her parents in Rodger’s Park instead.
“He’s never going to marry you,” her father says, sipping an Old Style and fiddling around with a model airplane at the same dark wood table that had been in the kitchen since she was a kid. Only six years older than Jack, Kathy’s father, bald and shriveled, could pass for Jack’s father.
Kathy’s mother says nothing and busies herself making tuna sandwiches and coffee, despite Kathy’s offer to take them out to brunch.
“I don’t care about getting married,” Kathy says and means it.
“You’re thirty-one years old,” her father says. “You should think about those things.”
“I don’t,” Kathy says, resisting the urge to point out that marriage hadn’t made her father nice, had made her mother frumpy and complacent with frosted hair and sagging breasts. “I’m happy,” she says.
And she is. Until two weeks later when Jack gets up in the middle of surf and turf at Gibson’s. He bends down, and Kathy takes another bite of lobster, assuming he dropped his napkin on the way to the men’s room. On one knee in front of her, Jack takes her hand.
“Kath,” he says. “I was wondering if you might like to get married.”
If Jack hadn’t spent a chunk of the previous year finding a Massachusetts’ divorce lawyer for his brother, she might believe him. If he ever so much as kissed her in public, she’d think he’s sincere. She doesn’t think he is, instead assumes the whole thing is an uncharacteristically mean joke, and she wonders if she mentioned her father’s comment.
“Aren’t you supposed to have a ring when you do that?” she asks flatly.
Jack smiles; he looks good when he smiles, like men on TV who sell Viagra.
“Yeah, I’ve got one of those.” He reaches into the pocket of his suit jacket and pulls out a velvet box with a ring—a very, very big ring. More accurately, a normal-sized platinum band with a very, very big square diamond in the center.
Something surprising happens then: Kathy starts crying, sobbing actually. There are audible gasps from restaurant patrons, who stop slicing sirloin and sipping red wine to watch. The creases in Jack’s brow deepen, and he puts his hand on the thigh of her suede skirt, asks if she’s okay. Kathy nods and sniffles, reaches for the cloth napkin in her lap to wipe her nose.
“Is that a no?” Jack asks.
“No, I mean it’s not a no . . . I mean . . . I just didn’t realize how much I wanted to marry you until you asked.” As she says it, she realizes it’s true.
“If I’d known you’d fall apart, I would have done this at home. I thought it might be romantic here.”
Taking her hand, he slides the ring on her finger, and the people clap. Jack waves and grins, while Kathy feels heat on her cheeks and dabs at her eyes. The waiter clears away their plates of steak, seafood, and creamed spinach, returns with a molten chocolate cake. A lit candle glows over the hills of ice cream.
“Make a wish for a long and happy life together,” the waiter says.
Kathy and Jack exchange looks about who’s supposed to blow it out, and the small flame dances between them, the light reflected in Jack’s eyes. And she thinks that she catches something in his gaze that she hasn’t seen before, something open.
That look is still there later that night when he lays her naked on the bed, licks her body starting at the big toe of her left foot and continuing to her blond widow’s peak. It’s there the next morning when he pulls her under the sheets after she comes back from the bathroom.
“Ohmygod, I’m going to be Mrs. Reed. Just like Donna.” Kathy laughs, and Jack rolls on top of her, squashes air from her lungs, making her cough. He’s a tall man who’s put on ten pounds in the years she’s known him, not really fat, just filled out, and she likes his heaviness on her.
“You’re going to take my name?” He brushes his straight nose against her straight nose. “How very fifties of you.”
“Katherine Reed sounds like an attorney you’d trust.” Her voice is strained from his dead weight. “I’ve always thought Kathy Kreinhart was kind of ducky.”
“Okay, Mrs. Reed.” Jack rolls off of her, swats her butt. “I’m hungry. Make some eggs.”
But he makes the scrambled eggs and fresh ground coffee, brings it to her on a tray. They eat in bed and tumble around until he goes to pick up his son from the redheaded woman. While Jack takes Ryan to the Shedd Aquarium, Kathy drives out to the southern suburbs to show her mother the engagement ring.
“I never thought he would ask you.” Cupping her daughter’s hand in her own, Kathy’s mother cries and talks about places where they could have the reception. “This is a miracle.”
“Come on, Mom, it’s not as though he figured out who shot Kennedy,” Kathy says, but feels herself caught up in something, too, wonders if maybe she does want a wedding with a lacy white cake and a cover band after all.
As usual, her father is cantankerous and unhelpful. “Well if you want kids, you’ll have to do it right away,” he says without really looking up from the model airplane he’s putting together on the kitchen table. “Jack’s almost fifty.”
“It doesn’t matter how old Jack is.” Kathy’s mother perks up in a rare moment of defiance. “Kath’s got twelve good years for kids.”
Kathy starts to say that she doesn’t want kids, but doesn’t. Instead she smiles at her mother and helps chop tomatoes.
When they finish looking at fish, Jack and Ryan meet Kathy for deep-dish pizza at Carmine’s. Ac
ross from her in a red vinyl booth, Ryan nods at her the way he always nods at her, completely unfazed at the prospect she’ll be his stepmother. The boy’s complacency might be due to the handheld video game system Jack bought him—Ryan’s own engagement present. Thumbs working the buttons, he plays until the pie comes out, greasy and gooey, then burns the roof of his mouth on the volcanic layer of cheese between the sauce and crust. He cries, and for a minute Kathy hates his soft round face and red hair. Then the sensation passes, and she gives him ice from her water glass to soothe his tongue. He climbs over to her side of the booth and rests his head on her side. She looks at Jack, but the openness is gone. As he tries to catch the attention of the waiter to get more crushed red peppers, Kathy catches a flicker of the challenging blankness.
“So when is Jack marrying Blond Ponytail?” Melanie asks a month later. She and Mona aren’t having Bloody Mary brunch, but coffee in Mona’s kitchen on a Thursday night because Melanie has a literary conference in San Francisco over the next week. “Will you go to the wedding?”
“I don’t know,” Mona says. She still feels good about her exchange with Jack. “If I’m invited, I guess I’ll go.”
“I’m sure he’ll be an ass to her, too.”
Melanie is going to California with a married University of Chicago colleague she’s been sleeping with for more than a year. Mona makes no reference to the irony, though, understands her sister is trying to be nice.
“I don’t really care.”
“Ryan taking it okay?” Melanie asks.
“What’s there to take? Kathy’s lived there for years,” Mona says, but bad-mother guilt socks her in the stomach—not once has she asked Ryan’s opinion on the subject. She glances at him in the den, watching an inane cartoon where the main character appears to be a block of cheddar cheese. “He’s never complained about her.”
“Yeah, I guess Blond Ponytail’s been around his whole life.” Melanie fluffs her own red hair; she’s always been a shade less pretty than Mona.
They talk about the married professor and debate if his wife knows about Melanie. They talk about the doctor who writes a medical question-and-answer column in Mona’s paper, who Mona’s slept with a few times. They talk about their younger sister and her four brats, about their father’s retirement party next spring.
Melanie gives Mona the keys to her apartment so Mona can feed the cat and water the plants while she’s gone. “I’m just not sure this Jack remarrying thing has really hit you,” Melanie says as Mona walks her through the mirrored hall to the elevator. “Don’t hesitate to call me if you freak out.”
Kissing her sister’s milky cheek, Mona says she’ll be fine, and Melanie tells Mona not to keep the cat waiting too long. “You can cuddle up with Fido,” she says. “He’s better than a guy anyway.”
But Mona doesn’t spend much time playing with Melanie’s Siamese cat on Sunday night because she has to rewrite a horrible story by the horrible intern at work and doesn’t get to her sister’s until after dark. She’s already late to get Ryan from Jack’s, so she runs in, throws water on the plants and food in Fido’s bowl, leaving the litter box for her next visit.
Melanie’s condo is in a neighborhood Chicago Magazine has been describing as “up-and-coming” for ten years. As far as Mona can tell, it still hasn’t hit. The streets are empty and the graffiti fresh on the sides of uninviting businesses—check-cashing services and auto-parts stores—all of which are locked with rusted chain-link doors. Somewhere in the distance a car alarm warbles. She fumbles for the Mercedes keys, actually thinking it’s not a safe place to be at night, when she feels a hand on her throat, another around her middle, pinning her arms against her sides.
“I want your purse and your car keys.” The voice is male, though not particularly masculine, very young. For a full two seconds, Mona fantasizes about crashing her elbow into his ribs, wrestling him to the ground—the kind of heroism she sometimes fantasizes about when she jogs.
“Now, lady!” The man attached to the voice squeezes her tighter, and she thinks she feels metal on her throat, maybe a knife, maybe a gun, it’s hard to discern through her wool scarf and the cold of Chicago in February. If nothing else her attacker is bigger than she is.
“I can’t reach them,” she says, her own voice squeaky and high. “You’re holding my arms.”
“Smart-ass bitch,” he says, but behind her, she feels him trying to negotiate the transaction.
He takes the car keys from her fingers, yanks the leather strap of her handbag, and shoves her to the dirty, hard snow on the curb. Catching herself, she twists her wrist, the pain sharp enough that tears pop into her eyes. A spray of street salt and asphalt hits her face as her assailant drives off in her car.
It can’t be more than fifteen degrees out, but for a minute she sits on the cold concrete, studying the rip in her leather glove and the thin tributaries of blood running down her palm. Her cell phone was in her purse; she can’t even call anyone. She thinks she may have seen a pay phone a few blocks away, but when she shoves her good hand into the pocket of her long black coat looking for change, she finds Melanie’s apartment keys.
Back in Melanie’s kitchen, she calls the police and they tell her two officers are on the way. She briefly contemplates the litter box, but decides against it. Her wrist hurts, so she wraps ice in a towel, but there’s really no good way to hold it on her arm, so she takes four Advil from the bottle on top of the microwave instead. She calls Jack, who insists on coming over.
A big, burly boy cop and a big, burly girl cop arrive and sit awkwardly in the kitchen at the pearl vinyl bar stools and vintage 1940s table. Mona offers them coffee, but realizes she doesn’t know if her sister even has any coffee.
“Don’t worry about it, honey.” Boy Cop puts a fat hand on her shoulder. Studying the gun on his hip, Mona decides there’s almost no way that was what her attacker was carrying.
Girl Cop takes notes as Mona tells the story. Did Mona get a good look at the man, no. Did she see how tall he was, no. Was he Caucasion? Asian? African American? Mona’s not sure. “You haven’t really given us much to go on,” Girl Cop says, and Mona rubs her wrist.
Boy Cop asks if she’d like to go to the hospital, calls her “honey” again.
“No,” Mona says. “It’s not that bad.”
Jack arrives, tall and authoritative in a cashmere trench coat, and Boy Cop lets him in the front door.
“Are you her husband?” Boy Cop asks, and Jack simply nods. He asks them Law & Order questions, even though his job working for giant corporations has nothing to do with the criminal justice system.
“It sounds like the guy was pretty amateur,” Girl Cop says. “We’ll put out a call to body shops to be on the lookout. We’ll let you know when it turns up.”
“Keep ice on your wrist,” Boy Cop says. “Go to the hospital if it gets any worse.”
Jack walks them out, returns, and pulls out the bar stool next to Mona’s.
“You hurt your wrist?” he asks.
“It’s okay,” she says, but it does hurt, is turning red. “Where’s Ryan?”
“He’d already fallen asleep before you called,” Jack says. “I’m going out of town tomorrow; you can just use my car while I’m gone.”
“I can rent a car.”
“Yeah, but for tonight and tom—” Jack stops. “You’re holding your hand, are you sure you don’t want me to run you to the emergency room?”
“It’s fine.”
“Jesus, Mo.” Jack shakes his head, leans forward, elbows on the table. “It’s Hyde Park. What were you thinking?”
“I guess I wasn’t thinking,” she says to the table and to her bruised arm. “I’m sorry.”
“Well, I’m just glad you’re okay.” There’s something in his voice that rallies all the hurt and loss she didn’t feel in her own kitchen when he told her he was marrying Blond Ponytail.
She looks at him. Really looks at him.
For the past six years s
he’s dressed up on Sunday afternoons, but that was different, that was about her wanting him to want her, about her pride. This might be larger, might be about their life and what it means to have your existence tightly braided to someone else’s.
He looks at her.
His cell phone rings in the pocket of his coat draped across one of the stools, but he doesn’t answer, just keeps looking.
She kisses him.
He kisses back, his lips more familiar than the sound of her name.
As Mona’s fingers work the buttons of his oxford, he fiddles with the zipper on her skirt. He pulls her sweater over her head, unhooks her bra with one hand, the other in her curls. And then they’re on the ugly linoleum of Melanie’s kitchen floor, rolling around, bumping into the table and chair legs.
The last time they’d made love had been six years ago, when they’d already decided they were separating, but he hadn’t closed on his condo yet. She’d been asleep on the bed with Ryan, and Jack was looking at them when she flittered awake. “What a lovely picture,” he’d said, sitting down next to her to touch his son’s small arm, then Mona’s larger arm. Their bodies had taken over then. By that point they’d been so committed to uncommitting that they never talked about it.
And Mona wonders if they will talk about this time. When they finish, he holds her against him, and she notices subtle differences in his body. He’s heavier, grayer. There’s a scar on his lower abdomen from a hernia operation she’d only heard about.
It could be seconds or years that they lay there, nothing said. She’s uncertain of what she wants to have happen, knows only that they can’t stay on the floor forever, because her wrist hurts and the cat is licking her naked thigh, because she saw a line of ants scamper past, because he’s engaged to Kathy, who’s watching their son. She props herself on her elbows, her skin sticking to the floor.
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