Otherwise Engaged

by Lindsey Palmer

  After hopping out of the truck, my mom pulls me into a viselike hug and sniffs at my unwashed hair. “Are you smelling my hair?” I ask.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. But have you heard of this fantastic invention called dry shampoo?” She can’t see me rolling my eyes. “Say hi and bye to John.”

  I reach into the truck and awkwardly shake John’s hand. “You girls have fun,” he says. “Shop till you drop!”

  “We will!” My mom blows kisses until he’s out of sight.

  “I thought we were doing brunch,” I say. “I researched the best waffle spot.”

  “Oh, I’m off waffles,” my mom says. “Do you know how much sugar and fat whipped cream has?”

  “Yes, Mom, whipped cream is literally only sugar and fat.”

  “We can grab green juices on the way to our appointment.”

  “Appointment?”

  “To pick out wedding invitations.” She sounds impatient, but I’m certain she never mentioned this. My stomach’s growls turn from hungry to distressed.

  “Mom, I’m really not in the mood.”

  “Then get yourself in the mood.” She tugs at my arm and thrusts us into oncoming traffic.

  Our destination is a high-end stationery shop. The back room features a round table filled with couples: The women look dressed for an Upper East Side charity luncheon, the men for a golf outing, and the sole gay couple wears matching head-to-toe Ralph Lauren. It’s my worst-nightmare desert island scenario. The store manager looks like a forty-year-old sorority girl, underfed and over-Botoxed. After inviting my mother and me to sit, she launches into a speech about invitations being the foyer (French pronunciation) to your wedding experience, your first opportunity to broadcast to loved ones the tone of your marriage-to-be.

  I’m anxious to ditch this nonsense even before she passes around cards that I recognize as my old coworker Melinda Lowe’s designs. A woman in pearls and a headband coos at the details, and I’m reluctant to admit that they are sort of pretty. My mother raises a hand. “Do you have any beachy patterns?”

  “Sure, we have nautical themes, seashells, yachting. Here.” She hands us a stack of samples. They’re the Mercedes-Benz of invitations, gilded and embossed and embroidered, layered with silk and jewels and velveteen ribbon.

  “How much do these cost?” I ask. The woman beside me glares, as if I just demanded that we all go around and state our salaries. As it turns out, the prices could pass for salaries.

  “Mom,” I whisper, “I can print out my own invitations at Staples. You do remember I’m unemployed, right?”

  “Come on, Molly. I’ll pay, my treat—it’ll be my wedding gift. Feel how thick the paper stock is. They won’t even stay up on people’s fridges! Imagine what Joe and Barb will say!”

  “Is that why you want me to have fancy invitations? To annoy Gabe’s parents?”

  “Honey, I’m just having fun. Look, they’re passing around a bottle of bubbly.”

  “Mom,” I whine. “Please can we get out of here?” This comes out louder than I intended, and I feel people’s eyes on me. Everyone here is awful, with their square-tipped manicures and designer watches, exchanging private glances and politely sipping Prosecco. The room’s walls seem to be closing in on me, and I start to hyperventilate. I have to bolt. On my way out, I accidentally knock over a tall display of scrapbooks, which I don’t bother picking up. With a pit in my stomach, I understand that it’s me who’s the awful one.

  My mother is on my tail. She finds me on the sidewalk. “Molly, honestly. We couldn’t even stick around for one glass of wine?”

  It’s a relief to be back in the fresh air. “How about bagels?”

  My mom looks resigned. “Sure, whatever you want.”

  I feel better after eating. I’m calm enough to politely decline my mom’s offer to go gown shopping at Kleinfeld. (The Bella So gown goes unmentioned; I’ve shoved it to the back of both my closet and my mind.)

  “What’s Gabe up to today?” It’s the second time she’s asked.

  “He’s still in San Francisco, remember?”

  “Oh right.” It’s her very-concerned voice, and she won’t stop nodding.

  I take a deep breath, attempting to rise above my annoyance. “Let’s visit Leo,” I say.

  • • •

  As we walk through Lenox Hill’s double doors and the antiseptic smell hits my nostrils, I realize what a bad idea this is. Leo is at work; I would kill him if he foisted our mom upon me at my job—that is, back when I had a job. I decide to stall, whisking us down to the cafeteria.

  A funny thing happens when we sit down with our coffees and chocolate-chip cookie to split: I swear I see my father at the next table. It’s as if the photo of him that I studied for hours as a child has come to life—the one where he’s hunched over and cradling a cup of coffee, contemplative in a way that always made me hope he was thinking of me. It takes me a moment to realize it’s actually my brother sitting there, looking like he’s aged a decade in the past two months. His eyes hang heavy and his hair is our father’s gray-flecked curls.

  “Leo?”

  “I’m on my break,” he says, startling like he’s been caught. He doesn’t ask why we’re there. I notice he’s not wearing his white coat, and he notices me noticing.

  “We didn’t want to disturb you,” says my mom, beckoning him to our table. “We just popped in to say hi.”

  Leo joins us, and our mom pats his back absentmindedly. “How was dinner?” he asks.

  “Leo, it’s two p.m.,” I say.

  “Right, sorry. Long shift.”

  “Refill?” I shake my empty coffee cup.

  Leo and I get in line behind a pack of nurses. As my brother broods, I think about how no matter how well you know someone, they’re also kind of a stranger. But one thing I know about Leo is that if I just wait patiently, he’ll eventually let me in on what’s going on. It takes about four minutes.

  “Lana’s away,” he says. “At rehab. It’s one of the best facilities in the country.”

  I nod, feeling my limbs turn to putty. It’s a relief, in a way, to get confirmation of what’s long been lurking at the edges of my awareness. Now that Lana’s pill problem is a fact, I’m forced to face my feelings. Poor Lana. Maybe she was reaching out to me, that day I got fired. Maybe she was trying to ask for help, and instead I played along, treating the afternoon like a debaucherous game, and never speaking a word about it afterward. How shitty of me. My insides thrum as I think of Lana idling alone in their big, empty apartment while Leo’s practically been living at the hospital. Leo. What must he be going through? I can barely look at his ragged face. “How are you doing?” I ask.

  Leo shrugs. “I’m relegated to desk duty, for one. Someone stole my DEA number and used a fake name to fill prescriptions out in Staten Island. Painkillers, naturally.” He looks exhausted. His tone goes official: “The hospital is conducting an investigation into my role in the matter.”

  “Oh, Leo.” I place a palm on his shoulder, considering the two bombshells he just dropped—their weight, their seriousness, and hold on … their connection? Would Lana do that—steal from Leo, deceive him, and jeopardize his whole career?

  “It wasn’t Lana,” Leo says, reading my mind. “You know what kind of saleswoman she is. I’m sure she had no problem charming however many doctors into writing her legit prescriptions, upping her dosage, anything she asked for.”

  “Good point,” I say quickly.

  “Anyway, I knew about the OxyContin. I just had no idea it’d gotten so out of hand.” Leo shakes his head. “But she was in so much pain. I’m a doctor, for god’s sake. I must be the world’s biggest dumbass.”

  Leo looks so distressed. A tempest of fury erupts inside of me. It’s one thing for Lana to abuse her own body. But to wreak havoc on her marriage, to deceive and hurt her husband, my brother—how cruel. It suddenly seems obvious: Of course Lana swiped Leo’s DEA number. People are selfish and untrustworthy, no matter how wel
l you think you know them. After slaving away for years to become a doctor, Leo’s only mistake was getting close enough to Lana to give her the opportunity to take it all away from him.

  “How could she betray you like this?” I blurt out. The nurse beside us winces and Leo’s eyes go wide, and I realize my volume. I’m upset about more than Lana, of course. I’m picturing Gabe on the talk show couch with Talia; I hear in my question an echo of Gabe’s accusation of me.

  “Opioids are something fierce, Molly.” Leo’s voice is reedy and sad.

  “So, what’ll happen to you?”

  “I don’t know,” Leo says. “For now, I wait. I’m trying to take it one day at a time.” I hear how the language of addiction and recovery has already permeated his vocabulary. He might as well add that it’ll be a long road ahead.

  “Please don’t tell Mom, okay? I’ll have to share about Lana eventually. But hopefully not the other stuff.”

  “Of course. Tell me if there’s anything I can do.”

  “Actually, there is something.” I’m anticipating an errand, or a letter to the hospital vouching for Leo’s integrity. But instead, my brother holds out a card for the rehab clinic. “Lana’s allowed to get letters. I’m having trouble writing. She could use a friend right now.”

  The card feels toxic in my hand. What could I possibly write to Lana—hate mail? “Sure, no problem,” I say.

  When we return to the table, my mother remarks, “It’s about time. I thought you’d been paged for a surgery and brought Molly in to assist.”

  Leo’s laugh is halfhearted; ordinarily he’d make a dig about my lack of fine motor skills, which was apparent even on the softball field two decades ago.

  We start chatting about wedding planning, which for once feels like the most innocuous topic. When Leo says he better get back to the floor, my mother pulls him into a hug. “I’m here for you always,” she says, holding on tightly. “You know that, right?” It’s as if she knows.

  “Call me,” I tell Leo.

  “I’ll see you next week, right? At Gabe’s book party.” Right, that.

  Chapter 25

  GABE APPEARS IN the bedroom holding two beers. He’s back from California, and I’m packing for my girls’ getaway. “Hi,” I say.

  “Hi.” His smile is sweet, inviting, maybe apologetic.

  I can’t help it—despite my anger, despite everything, I still feel twinges of love, of lust. Gabe hands me a beer and flops onto the bed. The casualness of the gestures has me choking back tears. “Thanks.”

  “So, who all’s going upstate?” he asks. Am I going crazy? I wonder. Are things somehow fine between us?

  “Sam and Kirsten and me.”

  “Not Lana?”

  I look at him sharply, confused, before it occurs to me that he doesn’t know that Lana is in rehab. At one time, it felt like everything I knew was also known by Gabe, all of our thoughts permeable, transferred to each other as if through osmosis. But our boundaries have gone rigid. “No, not Lana,” I say, zipping my suitcase shut.

  Side by side, Gabe and I brush our teeth and then slip into bed. It’s like a shadow dance version of our relationship, flimsy and delicate, our love a low hum, barely discernable. Obviously, we need to talk. But Gabe seems exhausted from his trip; within two minutes, he’s snoring.

  I, on the other hand, am wired. After much tossing and turning, I get up, thinking maybe I’ll write to Lana. I pull out the notebook Kirsten gave me for my birthday, its cover plastered in trite commands: Be the change you want! Say Namaste all day! Float on the wings of hope! Trust the power of positive thought! I half-heartedly mine them for inspiration, then sigh and crack the spine.

  “Dear Lana,” I begin. I try out a casual, breezy approach, but after a few lines, I decide it’s all wrong and flip the page. Next, I go for serious, but soon I abandon that version, too. I attempt half a dozen more notes, my tone at first furious, then forgiving, then formal, then flippant, then funny. Each version is genuine, in its way, even as they all sound fake, too.

  I think about Lana. I wonder what her room is like in rehab, whether she’s homesick, and what withdrawal feels like. I turn to a blank page and dash off a new note. It’s simple: just wishing her well and saying I’m thinking of her. Before I can second-guess myself, I tear out the page, seal it in an envelope, and press on two starfish stamps left over from the save-the-date debacle. The design is pretty, Creamsicle-colored creatures sprawled onto sand, which I know Lana will appreciate. For the moment, this feels like enough.

  When I slip back into bed, Gabe gravitates toward me in his sleep. I drink in his scent and his warmth and the snug fit of his limbs cocooned around mine. “My Molly-moo,” he says, the words thick on his tongue. I’ve never known Gabe to sleep-talk, but his eyes are still shut when he starts kissing me. Despite all my reservations, I succumb to his touch. How strange it is to be in bed together, our bodies bare, in the most intimate of intertwinings, and yet still to feel so far apart. Maybe this is a détente. Maybe Gabe has let go of his anger at me. Maybe he’s forgiven me, and hoped I’ve forgiven him too. And maybe I have. I sense Gabe climbing toward climax and, setting aside all the maybes, I give in to it, too. For a moment, I feel close again to Gabe.

  Then he seizes the covers, his body twitches, and he lets out a loud fart. Soon, he’s snoring again. My warm glow dwindles, replaced by an image from The POV photo montage: Gabe and Talia on a bench, taking in the sunset. Wait. I bolt upright. Gabe said the segment was a last-minute slot-in. The POV is taped live, in the morning. Was it a sunrise? No, I distinctly remember the sun bleeding out over the Pacific. Was it a green screen, the golden hour digitally inserted? No, it was definitely the real thing. So, was it a sunset from the night before? How long had Gabe known about the segment? Did he lie about it? And if so, what’s the significance? Does it even matter? Suddenly spent, I collapse back into my pillow. Whatever game Gabe and I are playing, I feel like I’ve forgotten the rules and lost count of the score.

  Needing a break from my thoughts, I reach for my phone. I open my email. There in my inbox is the one name I realize I want to see.

  He can sometimes feel like a figment of my imagination. Practically living off the grid, like some kind of monk. A flicker from a faraway world. A mirage. When I emailed him last week, part of me felt I may as well have been beaming my message into outer space.

  But, of course, Charlie Ashbury is real, flesh and blood. He even gets intermittent Wi-Fi out in the boonies of upstate New York. His reply is just two lines:

  Hang in there, pardner. Remember Pizza Palace?

  And then an address.

  • • •

  Pizza Palace. All these years later, I can still conjure up the salty tang of the four-cheese pie, and the beeps and bells of the pinball machine. Charlie worked there after school, and even before we were dating, I would go in and order a jumbo Coke just for an excuse to sit there spying on him. Charlie never seemed to notice the commotion or even his customers. He’d just stand around behind the counter in an ill-fitting visor, staring broodingly at something I could never spot, until the manager hollered at him to snap out of it and get back to work.

  One day we were down by the lake, halfway through a twelve-pack of beer, when Charlie remembered his shift. We walked back across town, Charlie cracking me up reciting the daily specials, his speech all slurry. I wasn’t so surprised when, hours before he was supposed to close up, he appeared at my house. He claimed a customer had gotten in his face about the wrong change, so Charlie pressed a slice into the guy’s face. It was meant to be funny. But Charlie hadn’t realized how hot the pizza would be, or that it would leave pepperoni-shaped burns on the guy’s cheek. Charlie was fired; he was lucky he didn’t get sued.

  With no job, Charlie was broke, so for weeks afterward, I bought his lunch. I didn’t mind, though. The whole Pizza Palace incident seemed absurd to me. Charlie’s position was that he’d given that customer a good story to tell, which was worth a few min
or burns, and I agreed.

  Now, I click on the email reply window. I type, “Should I put in an application at Sandals ’n Such?” That’s where Charlie eventually got hired after Pizza Palace, fitting old women’s feet into ergonomically correct footwear.

  I think about how, half a lifetime later, I too got fired after attacking someone—Summer Rose Lee, a name that still strikes me as fake. Thanks to me, she too has a good story to tell. But now, at age thirty, I find this rationalization much less convincing than I did back at age fifteen. I decide to take Charlie’s advice: to hang in there. I erase my response, I put down my phone, and I kiss the cheek of my sleeping fiancé.

  I don’t fall asleep, though—I’m alert all night.

  • • •

  Sam’s honk is right on time, and loud enough to wake the whole block. I assume Gabe is just pretending to sleep through it, but I sneak out without disturbing him, guiltily relieved to skip a goodbye.

  Kirsten has made a playlist for the drive, half dedicated to Sam (“O-o-h child,” “I got you, babe,” “Be my baby”), and half to me (“Chapel of Love,” “White wedding,” “Wouldn’t it be nice”); I can’t help noticing the baby songs are better than the marriage ones. Sam’s bowling-ball belly doesn’t stop her from driving eighty miles per hour and careening between lanes like we’re being chased. Still, I find it relaxing to sit back and listen as she describes all the bizarre things going on with her body—the varicose veins dribbling down her calves, the twice-daily nosebleeds, the cystic acne on her butt. This last detail horrifies even Kirsten, who usually speaks of pregnancy as a holy rite.

  The rustic cabins sounded charming when Kirsten first described them. But now, in the fading light of a bleak March day, the bunk beds, the lack of electricity, and the diverse array of creepy-crawlers I spot sharing our space are less appealing. The three of us stay silent as the campground manager walks us the quarter-mile to the outhouses, hands us each a roll of biodegradable toilet paper, and claims its scratchiness is all part of the fun of roughing it. Back in the cabin, I can tell Kirsten is gearing up for a pep talk. Sam plops onto a mattress, which wheezes dramatically under her weight, then Kirsten and I seat ourselves on either side of her, and the bed springs sound like they might give out. Sam emits a noise that’s either laughter or the start of a nervous breakdown. It gets us all giggling.