The Romance Reader's Guide to Life

by Sharon Pywell

  “Her daughter is very pretty, but she could stand to lose a little weight,” he said at one point when we had fallen a bit behind the others. “She doesn’t want those pounds to hang around when she gets older.”

  “Annie is not overweight.” This was true. Annie weighed less than a full bag of groceries and was nobody’s idea of fat. “And my sister has never been vulgar,” I added. “Vulgar means ‘common’ which is not Lilly Terhune. At all.”

  “She might not be common, but she can still be vulgar,” he replied. “And her stories about Reno—all horses and barbecues and divorcée man-hating pajama parties. She describes something like a summer camp with gin fizzes and lawyers.”

  “If she was that frivolous, her divorce lawyer wouldn’t have congratulated her on how ironclad the Be Your Best paperwork was. Ricky got nothing.”

  “For that she has you to thank,” Charles said.

  “Your boyfriend doesn’t like me,” Lilly said when we got home from that outing. “Not that it matters what he thinks of me. How’s it going in the romance department with him and you?”

  “Pretty well,” I said. She’d been so busy trying to return to something like normal that a lot of my moods were passing by her unnoticed. I hoped this uncertainty I felt about Charles Helbrun and me breezed by her now. I didn’t have any other gentleman callers to compare him to. He turned every female head in the place whenever he stepped into the office. They thought I didn’t know that they asked one another why a guy who looked and walked and talked like Charles Helbrun III was dating a woman who looked and walked and talked like me. This both pleased me and made me feel bad. “He’s great,” I said. “We’re great.”

  “Amazing,” Lilly said. “In the end I’m the idiot about men and my hermit sister is the one who gets it right and snags the rich, handsome, smart guy.” She sat down, looking suddenly more like a sack of sand with a good haircut than a gay divorcée. “This is the last I’ll say of it,” she said. “Neavie, I’ve known men who made me a little nervous, but in the end Ricky was … more. I swear I didn’t know there were men like him. And when I should have seen it, I didn’t. Something about him was like a barbed hook set right through my brain, pulling me toward him. I’ll never marry again. I’m bad at it. I’ve got the very worst kind of judgment about men and I’ve got Annie to think about. So I’ve decided to stop making mistakes. No more husbands.”

  “I don’t think it works like that, Lilly. You can’t just wave a wand and make yourself different. You love men.”

  “I do,” she nodded. “Which makes the whole situation sad.” She lit a cigarette and sighed. Her mascara had raccooned around her eyes, which shone like a child’s with a high fever. “A little magic would help right now,” she said. “Or a facial.”

  LILLY

  Meat

  I moved Annie and me out of the warehouse and into our own apartment a few months after I got back from Reno. I knew Neave wasn’t happy to see us go. I said things to her like I’m a grown-up and a mother to boot. I should be on my own. I leave dishes in the sink and wet towels on the floor and it drives you nuts. Me and Annie get in the way of your social life. The truth is I wanted to live my life without Neave looking over my shoulder. I wasn’t worried about Annie because I knew Jane and Neave and my little flock of daytime babysitters would back me up any time I needed help or just wanted some leeway so I could do a little coming and going. So I moved out and I did some coming and going.

  When Neave found the bloody hunk of meat on the warehouse apartment back door I felt a kind of a thud, like something inside me had fallen off a shelf. I was really determined not to know what I knew, so I said things to her like, Some idiot’s idea of a joke, but I knew it wasn’t a joke.

  She was pretending not to be rattled, but she was. That kind of surprise can make your blood feel like you got picked up and shaken like a cocktail. When I got to the office she took me upstairs and led me to the back door. The nail was driven through a section of marbled gristle and fat. I’d never noticed how much real blood there was in a piece of meat before you cooked it. A little stream of it had run down the door and puddled at the mat.

  “I’m throwing that mat away,” Neave said. “Who would do this?”

  She pulled the bleeding meat off the nail and held it away from herself. The thing in her hands looked very much more like part of a dead animal than it looked like the main course in a good dinner. She stuffed it in the trash she’d brought out to the fire escape. “Get some bleach, will you?” she said to me. “And scrub brushes.”

  She did most of the cleanup. I was in a good suit and she hadn’t gotten dressed for work yet. But I stood and watched while she worked, the two of us there, the brush scrtchhscrtchh-ing, and the traffic just beginning to wake up and move in the street below. It was cool and sunny, a beautiful day. When she finished scouring, she took off every piece of clothing she’d had on her and stuffed it all in the trash after the meat.

  “People in the company come up and down here sometimes if I send them up to get something. People know I live here. Have we fired anybody recently who was kind of odd?”

  I said, “Everybody is kind of odd. It was probably some drunk. Somebody who got the wrong door.”

  “Lilly, the door has the company name on it.”

  “Well. When you’re drunk…” I said.

  We were not right with each other all day at work. At lunch Neave said, “You know I’m walking around looking at everybody—our own sales staff, the accountant, the coffee-shop guys in the building next to us, and I’m thinking, Was it you?”

  So when we were alone at the end of the afternoon I knew I had to do it. I told her that I’d lied when I said I had no idea who would hang the meat on the door. Neave can get real quiet and she was quiet now.

  “I’ve been seeing Ricky. I didn’t tell you because I knew what you’d say.”

  “Why would you do something that stupid?”

  Which was exactly what I thought she’d say. Neave has always had a habit of looking at things and then telling you what she sees. I said, “Just before Annie and I moved out he called and said just a drink just for old times. I said no. Then I said yes. Then I said yes again. It’s my own business, Neave. I’m a grown woman. The reason I’m telling you is that Ricky has been saying things. Sort of crazy things. And the meat, and the way it’s waiting here on the door, it’s Ricky all over. I think maybe it could be for you. From him.”

  “I haven’t seen Ricky Luhrmann since before you divorced him. Why would I even cross his mind?”

  The fact was that Neave crossed Ricky’s mind quite a bit and what he said about my sister might, conceivably, have led to this piece of meat on a door: Neave had poisoned our marriage; Neave was jealous of me; Neave did what she wanted with the company and didn’t consult me; Neave had hired a pack of lawyers to keep the company away from him though he was my legal husband and the company was legally his. Part his. The rants began to lead to the same place: she hated men.

  “I don’t know why,” I said to her. This was both the truth, and not the truth.

  Neave looked at the nail on the door. “So this is a threat?” Her face was pasty white and her lips were just two pencil-thin lines. “Break it off, Lilly. Get rid of him. Now.”

  “I can manage things, Neave. Calm him down.”

  “Lilly. Remember the night you and Annie jumped out the window.”

  “I can control him.”

  “Clearly you can’t control him,” she said.

  Then Neave said she was going to track that lunatic down and I said that would be the dumbest thing to do when Ricky was in this frame of mind. I knew him through and through, I said, which didn’t end up being accurate. Stay out of it, I told her. I’d talked Ricky Luhrmann down from all kinds of ledges and I could do it again.

  I was still stupid enough at that point to think that was the truth. I was wrong.

  Neave, I’m so sorry.

  BOPPIT

  Where We Are,
Where I Want to Go

  I’d discovered, in my time as a dog, that people don’t take you seriously if you’re a dog. They hit you with things, and abandon you, and take away your favorite stuff; but then, they do that to each other too. I was comfortable as a dog because my nature is loyal and steady and basically affectionate. It’s like Neave’s nature.

  I am Neave’s protector. As far as I know I’ll always be her protector. Sometimes I fail at it, I know. I’m not confident that I can protect her now, but it’s my job and I’m going to do it as well as I can. That’s why I was sitting on the curb outside George’s Sweetheart Market. I was there to follow her home. That’s why I was here to greet Lilly when she became Dead Lilly. I was there to get Lilly to lead me to Neave, to get Neave to see us so we can intercede, advise. Maybe, I hope, save her.

  Lilly and Neave share parts of their minds that overlap in ways they don’t see or understand. It’s this kind of powerful attachment that holds the universe together, and I am here to use it to save Neave. Their bond is very strong—flexible and porous and twisty in places where the connections are thickest. The fact that Lilly is dead is not as much of a problem as you might think. It could even be an advantage.

  If Neave is going to save herself from Lilly’s fate, she’s going to have to be more like Lilly. I know that doesn’t make perfect sense, given what Lilly’s judgment has been like, but it’s true. Lilly has to get mind-to-mind with Neave, cross over the distances between them and get in her sister’s head. Lilly is there all the time even now, of course, but I don’t mean her being in Neave’s mind as a memory. I mean in Neave’s mind as part of Neave. A grafted Lilly-Neave, a seeped-into-each-other new entity.

  Neave needs to figure out how to stand in front of three hundred salesgirls and make them want to be her. Just like Lilly can. She needs to feel powerful, sexually confident, full of authority over Ricky Luhrmann, just like Lilly did. She can’t be Neave-ish and stand there thinking about things.

  Right now Ricky Luhrmann is stronger than Neave, but he might not be stronger than the two of them together.

  That’s the plan.

  NEAVE

  I Talk to Max Luhrmann

  You aren’t held to keeping promises to a person who’s lost her mind, and I didn’t keep my promise to Lilly to stay out of her business. I went to the police to report the bloody piece of meat being hung from my door. The police said Do you know who did it? and Do you have proof? and I said not really. They said that hanging meat on a door was not a crime, and no property damage had been done, and I didn’t even really know who did it, did I? Could have been a joke, right?

  “Why would a piece of bloody steak be funny?” I asked the uniformed man behind the counter.

  He shrugged. “Could be funny.”

  The policeman saying these things wore a badge that identified him as PETZOLDT #4967. “Officer Petzoldt,” I said, “that meat is a threat. And if it isn’t a threat, let’s say it’s destruction of property.”

  “Lady, what does a nail in a door cost you? Some spackle.”

  “Let’s say it’s harassment. Let’s say I want a restraining order. Or I just want you to talk to the guy. What do I need?”

  “I can’t talk to the guy or deliver a restraining order if I got no idea where the guy is, sugar.”

  “Well, you’ll try to locate him, right?”

  The officer rocked back a bit and lifted one shoulder vaguely. No, he was not going to try to locate anybody.

  “If I find him, give you an address, will you question him?”

  “Well, yeah, but nothing’s gonna happen if we don’t have the guy to talk to.”

  I looked in my rearview mirror all the way back to the apartment that day, certain that a blue Ford had made at least three of the turns I had and then fallen out of sight. That night the telephone calls started, all to my home number, all just before dawn or a couple hours after midnight. At first I picked up the receiver and talked to the breathing thing on the other end. I addressed it as Ricky and I told it I was going to track his ass down and get him in a world of trouble if he didn’t leave us alone. More calls. When I didn’t pick up the receiver they kept ringing: twenty rings, thirty rings, forty rings. I unplugged the telephone.

  Lilly had sworn that she didn’t have a telephone number or address for him. How can that be? I’d protested. You’re meeting this man in hotel rooms but you don’t know how to call him? Didn’t she see how controlling that was? How perverse? I wasn’t entirely sure she was telling me the truth, but it looked to me that even if she did have a telephone number and address for Ricky, she wouldn’t give them to me.

  I called the last construction company he’d worked with and the foreman said he’d had to fire him months ago. He wouldn’t say why. The only Luhrmann I could track down was his brother, Max, who was listed in a university oceanography department. I wrote the number down and put it on my kitchen table. I didn’t call it.

  I took the problem to Charles. “Have you ever hired a private investigator?” I asked him.

  “Once for an accounting scam. We hired a numbers guy, a specialist who knew how to tease stuff out of cooked books. Why?”

  I told him. He shrugged. “I have no experience with that kind of problem. Are you sure her ex-husband is the one who nailed it to your door?” I said I was sure. Then I said I was 99 percent sure. I said Lilly was sure too, even if she said she wasn’t. He said, “So it’s a hunch. Maybe not true at all. Don’t take everything personally, Neave. This might not be what you suspect.”

  I protested. He suggested that maybe there was some teenage prankster in the neighborhood, some fool who’d had a few beers. “Maybe he had a crush on Lilly. Or someone in the office.”

  “A crush?”

  “You know—like an older guy’s version of the way third-grade boys show a girl they like her—they hit her. Throw things at her. Are you dealing with anybody who might have a crush on you? Maybe that’s why it was left for you.”

  I was already pretty sure that wasn’t the case. I decided not to talk any more about the problem with Charles. If Charles understood anything at all about the impulses that could be expressed in a piece of raw meat nailed to a door, he had decided to pretend that he didn’t. He was useless here. He wasn’t a stupid or inexperienced man, so this willful blindness infuriated me. In what cramped corner of his mind must a man crouch in order to see nothing?

  I drove to the university where Max Luhrmann worked. In the engineering building I threaded myself through what felt like a series of basement tunnels, following signs and arrows to “Oceanography” when I could find them nailed or glued to the cinder-block walls. I stopped a passing man and asked him if I was heading toward Max Luhrmann’s office. “The smart guy?” he asked.

  “Isn’t everybody here smart?” I asked.

  “Not like him.” He pointed left.

  When I found his office, there was no Max in it, but there were thousands of pounds of dismembered electronic equipment. I called his name but got no answer. The sign on his door listed office hours, one of which was right now. I sat down to wait. The room was beautifully cool, the light diffuse.

  Thirty minutes later I woke disoriented and frowzy, sat as upright as I could until the confusion cleared, and found myself staring directly at Max Luhrmann. He was across the desk from me, quizzical and, for just a moment before he fully registered that I was awake, curious with a touch of pleased. When he saw I was awake his face quickly shifted to something flatter, more impassive. “How long have you been staring at me?” I demanded.

  “Just for a minute. So, Neave Terhune, what brings you here?”

  I described the telephone calls, the meat on the door, the renewed relationship with Lilly, who claimed she didn’t know where Ricky Luhrmann was. “The police say they’ll help but they can’t do anything if they can’t find Ricky. So how do I find Ricky?”

  “You don’t want to find him, Neave.”

  “Bullies stand down if somebody f
aces them,” I insisted. “I’m going to face him.”

  “That’s a charmingly romantic idea, but I don’t think it actually works like that in real life.”

  “It’s a time-tested technique.”

  “Maybe in second grade it is.”

  “Ricky’s not going to hurt me,” I insisted.

  Max lifted his shirt, pulling it high enough to expose two white keloid lines running from his abdomen to his breastbone. “I bounced against a windshield trying to stop Ricky. He’d grabbed a girl’s skirt, slammed it in the car door, and tried to drag her into mutilation if not death. So you see, Ricky is entirely capable of hurting someone. Say, you, for example.”

  I looked at the gnarled lines of white scar tissue. I thought about Lilly telling me that Ricky swore the mothers in the neighborhood were afraid of Max, who was rough with the girls.

  He let his shirt drop. “It doesn’t help to stand in front of some kinds of people. It can make them more determined to run you down. If you involve anybody else, like cops, it will only escalate. Ricky escalates. Resist him, he escalates harder. He doesn’t care about rules as much as he cares about other things. Walk away from this.”

  “But Lilly…” I began.

  Max turned away from me. “I have a lot of work to do. Please shut the door on your way out.”

  I stalked back to my car telling myself that he was wrong. I had an almost animal sense that backing away from this man would be seen as a display of weakness, a dangerous admission of fear.

  I pulled the car door open. At first glance what was lying peacefully in the driver’s seat was a sleeping dog. Who would have expected a neighborhood dog to jump through the open window and fall asleep in the front seat? The idea tickled me, though, and I was smiling as I said, “Come on, you. Out you go.” The little form stayed still. I reached out a hand and stroked its head, which flopped to one side. It hung loosely from the body and now I could see that the dog’s neck had been twisted almost entirely around, snapped before the animal was arranged peacefully on my car seat with its head propped on its paws. The body was still warm. I jerked upright and scanned the street. No one in sight. A trickle of blood had run down from the dog’s muzzle and only just dried on the car seat to a purplish crust.