by Deb Caletti
“Never mind,” Mom said. “I suppose I’m getting used to him. He’s not the worst company in the world. By the way, Dean’s coming for dinner.”
I noticed how close the words worst company in the world and Dean came to each other. The psychology books would have something to say about that. Zeus tried a different tactic. He lay down, set his chin on his paws. It was the cutest thing in the world, and I’m sure he knew it. We looked at each other, and he blinked one eye. Sometimes, I swear he winked on purpose. “It’s like he’s a person but not a person,” I said.
“Dean?” Mom said. She kept ripping lettuce.
“Zeus.” I laughed. Maybe in her most secret, honest places she hated Dean as much as we did. You couldn’t help but see what he was really like, could you? I’d always thought telling the truth to other people was hard, but maybe that was a snap compared to telling the truth to yourself. Sometimes we just refused to know what we knew.
“Where’s Juliet?” I asked.
“Doctor’s appointment.”
“For sure?” I asked.
She stopped with the lettuce. Wiped her hands on a towel. “For sure.”
“Did Hayden go with her?” Juliet couldn’t see Buddy Wilkes if Hayden were there.
“Yes, Hayden was with her. Is there some reason you’re so concerned?” Mom opened the fridge, took out a cellophane bag of mushrooms. Then she looked at me, narrowed her eyes into a question. There were little wrinkles at their corners that I’d never seen before. Those wrinkles, and the few brand-new gray hairs at her temples—they made me want to be a better daughter from here on out.
“I’m worried about—” I stopped before I said it. Buddy Wilkes. I had no real proof, not yet. I played the scene in my mind. Mom would defend Juliet; I knew that. That’s how it had been forever. Perhaps when things were too close, you just couldn’t see them. Same as when you held a piece of paper right up to your nose.
“The baby? You can say the word, Scarlet. It’s okay. We might as well get used to it. They’re seeing Dr. Crosby. Marla. Juliet didn’t want to go to old Doc Young, and I don’t blame her, even if he’s delivered every baby on this island for the last forty years.” Old Doc Young had hair coming out of his ears in surprised tufts and a little ancient car as old as he was with fluff coming out of the seats. Some people look like their dogs; old Doc Young looked like his car.
“Juliet shouldn’t be eating so much sugar,” I said. “I saw her scarf half a box of chocolate doughnuts. It’s not good. It puts her at risk for gestational diabetes.”
“You’re worried about Juliet. Oh I know, honey, me too. The idea of her going through labor … Our Juliet? Come here.” She opened her arms to me. She hugged me with the mushrooms over my shoulder, and I hugged her back and took the sympathy she was offering even if it was misdirected. “Juliet’s going to be fine. She and Hayden probably stopped at the park or something. It’s good for them to spend some time together.”
The hug and those wrinkles made me feel especially open toward her and I chanced the truth again. “She doesn’t seem to love him enough,” I said into Mom’s shoulder. He could leave, I wanted to say; that’s what I most needed to tell her, what we most needed to talk to each other about, but right then Zeus started to bark madly. He took off, his toenails skittering and sliding across the floor. He knew the sound of Hayden’s truck—he could hear it blocks away. He stood by the front door, barking and wagging and waiting, his rump turning circles of joy.
“They’re here now,” Mom said. She didn’t hear me. She let me go and went to the door.
Juliet was already inside, and she tossed her purse on the couch. “God, that was too real.”
Hayden came up behind her. He was grinning widely. He scruffed Zeus under the chin, then grabbed a handful of Juliet’s peasant blouse and pulled her backward to him. I felt a sharp pinch of want, which I quickly shoved into the recycle bin of my mind. “We heard a heartbeat.”
Mom held her hands to her mouth. “Oh my God.” Her eyes were shiny as if she might cry.
“Remember when I was in that play, The Bat? Middle school?” Juliet said. Mom nodded. Mom had moved her hands from her mouth to her own heart. “They had this big piece of metal they used as a thunder machine. It sounded like that.”
“Shoo, shoo, shoo,” Hayden demonstrated. His eyes were bright.
“Beautiful,” Mom whispered. “Really. This is a beautiful thing.”
Juliet pushed away from Hayden a little. “Kind of creepy, if you think about it. A heart inside my own body.”
“Jeez, Juliet,” I said. I hoped and hoped again that Jitter with his real beating heart couldn’t hear anything in there. He needed to know he was one hundred percent loved and wanted.
“Beautiful creepy,” Hayden said. “Fantastic creepy. Maybe not even creepy at all creepy.”
“I’m hot,” Juliet said. She lifted her hair up from her neck. “I’m going to change.”
Juliet walked upstairs as we all stood below. It was perfect, really. Juliet above us, Juliet away, us gawking and wanting more. It seemed wrong that she was taking Jitter with her. He should have been there with us instead, with me and Hayden and Mom.
Hayden looked at us. His eyes pleaded.
“Pregnant women are very emotional,” Mom said.
*
“It’s the couples who are ordering wedding invitations and who argue over everything that get me,” Mom said. Her cheeks were rosy with wine, and her voice was lively at dinner. We sat around the table, Zeus right by my chair, looking up at me. I really liked his furry chin. It was so small and serious.
“This one groom got outraged over an embossed rose. Outraged!” Mom went on. “A really ugly peach rose. He stormed out. ‘Just because your parents are paying for everything, I don’t get to exist.’”
“And they lived happily ever after,” Juliet said.
“He was not angry about the rose,” Dean Neuhaus said. He was under the impression that we would not be able to figure this out ourselves, not without his help. It was lucky we could function in the world without him.
“The in-laws’ll be at that guy’s house every night for Sunday dinner,” Hayden said.
“I know!” Mom said. “Right?” She looped pasta on her fork but the whole enterprise slipped off and she had to try again. Her bra strap was showing and she hadn’t noticed. She was enjoying herself.
“He better run for his life,” I said, though only part of me was paying attention. I kept thinking about tomorrow. Saturday. Saturday and Juliet and Buddy Wilkes’s note. I’d gotten rid of it, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. He wouldn’t have heard back from her, and maybe he would try again, then. There had to be something I could do.
“In two years, your business will be closing its doors,” Dean Neuhaus said. “Even wedding invitations will be electronic.”
“I don’t believe it,” Mom said. “You can’t tell me that. There’s something special about real paper, real ink. A message written by hand? It has an importance, permanence.”
Dean scoffed. “Shredder? Recycling …” He was counting his points on his fingers.
“What if a message is not destroyed but is saved forever in a small cedar box?” Hayden said. He really was a romantic. Who was a romantic anymore? Even his hands were romantic hands. Long, strong fingers. The kind that might carve something out of wood for his beloved, that cedar box, something everlasting.
“A letter is a gift,” Mom said. “It’s tactile. Intimate.”
“An e-mail’s about as passionate as a Post-it note,” Hayden said.
“A handwritten letter—one heart to one heart,” Mom said. They were both nodding. Juliet looked amused.
“Or to two hundred fifty, depending on who’s on the guest list,” Dean Neuhaus broke a breadstick in half. God, it must have gotten tiring being him.
“A letter means something could happen,” I said.
Hayden looked at me. “Yes. Yes.”
Mom nodd
ed. “A letter is about possibilities.” But then she blushed. Possibilities. The blush already in her cheeks now spread down her neck and into the collar of her shirt. A guilt blush from reading the contents of that note. Maybe we both should have been blushing.
“Two years, stationery stores … gone.” Dean Neuhaus made a slash in the air with his manicured hand.
“Nonsense,” Mom said. Dean Neuhaus raised his eyebrows. He was that kind of man—you were stepping out of place if you disagreed with him. “A letter is an art form,” Mom said. “Art forms tend to last. People build museums for art forms.”
“Your scrapbooks are an art form,” Juliet said. “God, I used to love watching you cut and glue and arrange. Show Hayden.”
“You did? You liked that? They’re silly maybe,” she said.
“Show him,” Juliet said. It was funny how sentimental she was about our past life suddenly. She had never seemed to care before. Before, all she wanted to do was to leave us. Now she seemed capable of getting gushy about our old microwave.
“If you want,” Mom said, but she sounded pleased. She shoved her chair back and went upstairs. I could hear the weight of her footsteps above us, the creak in the floor where her room was.
“I almost forgot. I have a present for you guys,” I said to Juliet. It was best to avoid Hayden’s eyes. They were dangerous floodwaters you might be swept into. “A belated wedding gift. Dinner, tomorrow night? Saturday night date? The Lighthouse. Romantic evening, whatever.”
“That’s really nice, Scarlet,” Hayden said. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to,” I said to Juliet. “Tomorrow? I’ll babysit, ha.”
“It’s got to be tomorrow?” Juliet said.
“We’ll take it, if you don’t want it,” Dean Neuhaus said. He chuckled to himself like he had just made a great big fat joke. We’ll, meaning Mom and him. Sometimes the word we could feel poisonous.
“I didn’t say I didn’t want it,” Juliet said. She couldn’t stand him either.
“You have a secret trust fund, girl? That’s a big gift,” Hayden said.
“A secret second job.”
“Pet Palace?”
“Did my belt buckle give me away?”
He laughed. I’d forgotten about not looking at him. And, God, I did like looking at him. “Nice to involve us in private jokes, people,” Juliet said.
“I’m not sure elopement requires a gift,” Dean Neuhaus said.
“Well, then, that decides it for sure. If elopement doesn’t require a gift. Tomorrow,” Hayden said.
“Good,” I said. Good. Settled. I set my napkin down on the table, a napkin period at the end of a dinnertime sentence.
“This is one of the first ones I did,” Mom said, as she walked back in. She looked around at us and paused; she caught the moment of something in the air, decided to dismiss it just as quickly. She hated conflict as much as I did, maybe more. She placed the book in front of Hayden, leaned over him as he opened the pages.
“Prague,” she said. “Well. You can see.”
“Wow,” he said.
“Nineteen twenties Paris. Etcetera, etcetera …” She started flipping pages.
“Wait,” he said. “Slow down.”
It could have been embarrassing, this show. I remembered the time she’d spent on these, her head bent down over pages, the glue stick in her hand. Concentration that seemed to mean a mission I couldn’t really understand and maybe wasn’t meant to. It wasn’t a mission that had anything to do with me. I hadn’t really looked at them in a long time; maybe I hadn’t really looked at them ever. It was just Mom doing an inexplicable Mom thing—listening to “Be” for the millionth time, exercising on a beach towel in front of the TV, buying a new scarf or hat, something we knew she’d never wear (and, of course, didn’t ever wear), and then later shoving it into the closet with the rejected cowboy boots and animal print leggings and lime suede skirt.
But looking at the scrapbooks again, I saw something else, something I’d never appreciated before. The pages were collages of postcards and cut-out letters and bits of things—small shells and sand glued down in swirls. A key, a stamp, a picture of a clock face or train schedule. They seemed old, made of memories, places and experiences of a long life lived. The life of an interesting person with stories and secrets. But not the person who stood above Hayden, chopsticks holding up her hair, two deep lines now on her forehead that I hadn’t noticed before, wearing an old tank top I remembered since elementary school. That person wanted things she had never gotten. I could see that now.
“I always thought they were beautiful,” Juliet said.
“Really?” Mom said.
“Paris,” Hayden read. He turned the page. “Morocco.”
“I never knew you went to Morocco,” Dean Neuhaus pouted. The idea seemed to bother him.
“Oh, I never did. Only time I’ve been out of the country was Canada,” she said.
“You never went to any of these places?” Dean Neuhaus couldn’t imagine the point. He squinted in the direction of the book, but you knew he couldn’t even see it from where he sat.
“It’s about art,” Hayden said. “It requires imagination.”
“Not that I wouldn’t love to go,” she said. “I would have loved to go.”
“Of course you would,” Hayden said. “Of course. You were raising kids. You couldn’t, is all.”
I was watching Mom’s face, so I saw what happened when she heard those words. Of course. Of course, given to you when you maybe weren’t used to of course. I don’t know if I ever realized before how important those words were—those words that meant you were completely understandable. Words that meant you were reasonable and sound and valid. It was funny how often we didn’t feel any of those things on our own. Not that we were a trembling mess and incapable—just that a lot of the time we weren’t so sure all by ourselves.
Mom looked almost stricken. The idea of actual understanding came as a shock to her. My throat closed then; I thought I could cry. Her own self, her person, the woman she was and wasn’t and wanted to be, the person who had and never had—she stood in front of us, her own story right there on her face. I hadn’t done a very good job of trying to understand her myself, and Juliet wasn’t, even now—she was just shooting her narrow eyes at Dean Neuhaus to let him know what a creep we thought he was.
I swallowed. The moment passed. Still, I felt this arrow of sorrow. Most of our parents wanted the best for us, I knew, but we also wanted the best for them. Mom showed Hayden the rest of the albums. She put on some music, and after dinner, Dean Neuhaus had his hands on Mom’s waist when we did the dishes. She left those hands there and didn’t stop him either when he patted her butt as she passed by to use the bathroom.
When he said good night at our door though, I noticed, she only offered him her cheek. And when that happened, I silently cheered for her.
Chapter Fourteen
You’re a toilet,” Jacob said.
“You’re a toilet,” Jeffrey said.
“You’re a toilet face,” Jacob said, and they both laughed so hard they held their stomachs. They sat on the sidewalk behind their mother’s Acura, hiding. Jeffrey seemed to be holding something in his hands. Fishing line, I realized. And it was tied to an old purse lying in the middle of the street. God, I hoped it wasn’t Clive Weaver who jetted out there to grab it only to have it yanked away. He was already fragile as it was; he didn’t need one more thing snatched from him.
“I don’t understand why you require me for this outing,” Juliet said as we got into Mom’s car on Saturday morning. “Mom can take you.”
“God, Juliet. You’re kidding, right? I’m going to trust Mom with fashion advice? You. You’re the one I need. Juliet, this is huge.”
“Fine,” Juliet said. But it wasn’t fine. Juliet looked stressed. She kept running her fingers through her hair and her mouth was in a tight line. “Who did you say you were going with? And where did you get money for a dres
s? Mom only paid half of mine, and this isn’t even your prom.”
I had to think fast. What name did I give? Justin? Johnathan? “Jared. Finnley. You don’t know him, I told you. He’s new this year. And I’m using my own money.”
“I can’t believe you’re going with a senior.”
“God, you make it sound like you’re surprised anyone might actually like me.” Okay, I might be surprised anyone except Reilly Ogden might like me, but it wasn’t okay for her to feel that way.
“I didn’t mean it like that. Just, you’re getting so old. Growing up. Look at those brats,” she said.
“Let’s run it over,” I said. But Juliet didn’t seem to hear me. She drove right past the purse. She was already looking at the clock in Mom’s car, and we hadn’t even gotten out of the neighborhood yet. Saturday was now officially and completely booked. Screw you, Buddy Wilkes.
“This is going to take all day,” Juliet said. She rubbed her temples.
It was impossible to understand why it was so hard to get people to do what was best for them.
“I don’t see why you won’t let me come in there with you,” Juliet said.
“No way. Uh-uh. I’m the only one who gets to see me naked.”
“Not even Jared?” She poked me in the arm. I had no idea what she was talking about until I remembered. Jared! Right!
“Ha,” I said. I had an armful of dresses. This would take a while. I made her take me onto the ferry and into Kingston where there was a mall. Now we were in this store called Vibe! and it was the kind of place I hated. High school girls with clothes so tiny they rivaled Clive Weaver’s latest favorite outfit for fabric square footage and salespeople who asked if you needed help as if your presence there was seriously imposing on their personal time. The music in there was so loud and pulsing, you could feel it like a pop-song earthquake. Shiny, overconfident clothes you could never imagine yourself wearing hung along the walls. I felt some sort of clothes-store consumer shame creeping up my insides. It was all the insincerity of high school with the added humiliation of mirrors.