by Jane Heller
“You’re dear to him too, Miss Stern. But I do think he’ll be fine, once he adjusts to our new situation. The fact that he and I are going to family counseling should help.”
“Counseling? When I had suggested therapy for Fischer during the school year, Penelope gave me the impression that you weren’t a fan of it.”
“I wasn’t, but that was before.” She paused. “As I said, your priorities change when you’ve been through what I have. Since Bob’s arrest and my decision to divorce him, I’ve had to reevaluate every aspect of my life, including the way I’ve raised Fischer. And what I’ve concluded is that I’ve been a selfish woman. I intend to do things differently from now on.”
“I’m glad to hear that, really I am, but how will you be able to support yourself and Fischer, even if you do scale back your lifestyle? Are you planning to work?”
She laughed. “I said I’ve been a selfish woman, not a stupid one. I didn’t fritter away all of Bob’s money on clothes and lunches and cosmetic surgery. I kept some for a rainy day, believe me.”
I believed her. Apparently, Gretchen Levin wasn’t the complete airhead I’d thought she was. I was about to ask her if Olga would be staying on after she and Fischer moved to Connecticut, but then the caregiver herself opened the front door, her young charge waddling along beside her.
Fischer broke out into a huge grin when he saw me and chugged into my arms.
“How’s my graduate?” I said, wrapping him in a hug. “You doing okay, honey?”
He nodded but kept his head buried in my arms.
“I brought your diploma,” I said, rocking him. “Your mommy can buy a nice frame for it and hang it up in your room.” I didn’t add that I had removed the what-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up testimonial in which he had aspired to being just like his dad.
“I won’t be living in my same room,” he said, finally coming up for air.
“Then you can hang it in your room in Connecticut,” I suggested. “I bet it’s pretty up there, Fischer, with all those trees and lakes and biking trails. Will you let me come for a visit sometime?”
I had hoped that by inviting myself to his house, I would be giving him a sense of continuity, a sense that I, unlike his father, was not abandoning him. But instead of reassuring him, my question made him cry. As he had never cried during the entire school year, I was terribly shaken by his tears.
“What is it, honey?” I said, rubbing his arm, choking back my own tears. No matter how successfully Gretchen Levin rehabilitated herself, Fischer had a tough road ahead of him. It wasn’t going to be fun being the only kid in class with a jailbird for a father.
“I just wish…”
“Wish what?”
“That it was the last day of school all over again, only this time, Miss Dibble wouldn’t make us leave because of the gas leak.”
The gas leak. Right. I wiped away his tears, but what I wanted to wipe away was the memory of his father in handcuffs, the fact that a day that should have been his proudest was his cruelest. “Nothing can take that day away from you, Fischer. Nothing and nobody. You finished preschool. You learned everything you were supposed to learn. You’re all ready for kindergarten just like the other children.”
“But we never finished the song. Miss Dibble made us stop in the middle.”
“So you don’t feel like you really graduated, is that it?”
“Kind of.”
“Well, that’s a snap to fix.” I took his hands in mine. “How about if you and I sing the whole song for your mommy and Olga?”
“The whole song the whole way through. No stopping.”
“You got it.”
We sang the whole song the whole way through. When we were done, Gretchen and Olga clapped and Fischer beamed.
Hold this picture in your mind, I told myself. Remember it the next time you think your job is drudgery, the next time you’re bored in the classroom, the next time you long for a career that’s glamorous. Remember that you made it possible for a little boy with an uncertain future to feel as if he accomplished something.
Nothing small about that blessing.
Bill’s kids came for Memorial Day weekend—a quickie visit as they had to get home to Virginia to finish their school term in mid-June. Since there wasn’t time for a major excursion outside the city, they stayed at Bill’s apartment and took day trips—to a Yankees game in the Bronx, to Sherwood Island State Park in Connecticut, to the South Street Seaport in lower Manhattan.
I’d asked them if they wanted to pal around, just the three of them, but they insisted I join them for every activity. “You’re practically part of the family,” said Peter, the older boy. “You’re like Dad’s wife,” his younger brother Michael chimed in.
Michael’s comment provoked nervous giggles. It’s always a little awkward when people speak of you as if you’re married even though you and your partner haven’t discussed getting married.
Which brings me to the night that Bill and I did discuss getting married. Peter and Michael had gone to bed, and I was about to head back to my apartment for the night. I didn’t feel comfortable staying at Bill’s when his sons were there, didn’t think it was appropriate for their father and me to sleep together during their visits. Bill didn’t understand why.
“Because we’re not married,” I explained as we stood in the lobby of his building. “Call me old-fashioned, but I’d rather your sons view me as a role model, not as some woman who’s having sex with their old man.”
“The two aren’t mutually exclusive,” said Bill. “You can be a role model and have sex with their old man. Besides, they must have figured out that you have sex with their old man. They’re not babies.”
“Yes, but I don’t have sex with their old man when they’re right in the next room and can hear everything.”
“But you would if we were married?”
“I guess so. Quietly.”
“Look, why don’t we get married then.”
“Just so we can have sex when your kids are in the next room?”
“Nancy. I’m asking you to marry me. I’m sorry this isn’t a more romantic setting, but if you say yes, we’ll find a romantic setting for the wedding. The important point is that I love you.”
“I love you too, but marriage is a big step, Bill. There’s a lot to consider.”
“Like what?”
“Your job. Are you going to stay on at Denham as their private security investigator?”
“I plan to, yes.”
“So I’d have to worry about you constantly, worry that you were chasing after criminals.”
“That’s better than having to worry about me chasing after women, isn’t it? And don’t forget the discount Denham gives me. You’d be swimming in jewelry.”
“Just what I’ve always wanted. Where would we live?”
“At my place for now. There isn’t enough room at yours for the boys.”
“Speaking of whom, how would they react to our getting married?”
“They love you, Nancy. They loved you the first minute they saw you. Like father, like sons.”
“They’re great kids and we did have an instant rapport. I wonder how they’d feel if you and I had kids of our own though.”
“I can’t speak for them, but I’m all for it.”
“You don’t have a problem with starting a whole new family?”
“Nope.”
“You’re sure you want more children?”
“I’m sure.”
I didn’t say anything. I had run out of questions, conditions, obstacles. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t think of a single reason why I shouldn’t marry Bill Harris. Yes, we had known each other for barely a year, but what a year it had been. We had fallen in love believing we were two other people. We had stayed in love after finding out we weren’t who we’d claimed to be. And we had held fast to our love even in the face of robbers, murderers, and Space Mud.
“This is it then?” I asked after a few seconds. “This
is the proposal?”
“This is it,” said Bill. “The moment of truth.”
“Something’s missing,” I said. “I didn’t picture it this way, with the two of us standing in the lobby of your building like two people deciding what movie to see.”
“How about if only one of us is standing?”
“Bill.”
He got down on the floor and perched himself on bended knee, assuming The Position, all six-foot-four inches of him. People were staring at him. “Is this better?”
“Much.”
He smiled. “Will you marry me, Nancy Stern? Will you go from being my wrong number to being my wife?”
“I will.” As Bill got up to embrace me, I said a silent thank-you to the other Nancy Stern, without whom my transition from wrong number to wife would not have been possible.
We told Peter and Michael our news the next morning. They said, “Cool.” I told my parents shortly after that. They said, “When?” I told Janice later that morning, after she’d come home from a night at Stan’s. She said, “Courage.”
“Courage?” I said. I’d thought it was an odd response, even for Janice.
“You’ll need it,” she said. “Bill’s as good as they get, but he’s still a man. Men require courage on our part, Nance.”
“Things aren’t going well with Stan, is that it?” I asked.
“They’re going fine with Stan,” she said, “but the neuroses are starting to reveal themselves.”
I smiled to myself. “In what way?”
“He never empties the dishwasher. He loads it, is a whiz at organizing what goes where and how to fit it all in, squirts the liquid Cascade in the little compartment, closes the door, and pushes Start. But empty it when it’s finished? Not a chance, even if he’s hungry and there are no clean dishes in the kitchen cabinets. He’ll go out and buy paper plates before he’ll empty the dishwasher.”
“You’ve discussed this with him?”
“Sure, but he’s in denial about it. He thinks it’s my problem.”
“I don’t mean to take his side against you, Janice, but maybe it isn’t a problem at all. Maybe it’s just an eccentricity. You can live with an eccentricity much easier than you can live with a problem, you know?”
“Well, that’s a switch: You giving me advice about men. Who’d have predicted it. You were the innocent little fawn, remember?”
“I remember. Boy, that feels like a long time ago, doesn’t it?”
“It does.” There was a bittersweet note in her voice, as if she thought she might be losing me, losing her best friend. “So have you and Bill set a date for the wedding?”
“Not yet, but there’s one detail that is set. You’re going to be my maid of honor. At least, I hope you will, Janice.”
“I’d be crushed if you picked someone else. Of course, I’d rather be your matron of honor, but Stan’s dragging his feet.”
“Dragging his feet? You met him a month ago.”
“Which means he’s had thirty days to consider my proposal.”
“You asked him to marry you on your first date? Just like you did with Gary, the nutritionist-sociopath?”
“You betcha.”
“What are you going to do if he says yes?”
“Marry the guy.”
“Oh, Janice. Do you love Stan?”
“Sure, why not?”
“I’m serious. Do you love him or are you settling? I’d hate to see you marry a man simply because he’s willing to marry you. You’re better than that. You deserve better. Don’t you realize that?”
She laughed. “When you were the innocent little fawn, you weren’t so blunt.”
“But you don’t mind, do you?”
“I don’t mind.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Bill and I decided to get married over Labor Day weekend. The question was: Where? Everyone had an opinion. When we went to Maryland, so I could meet Bill’s parents, the consensus was that we should have the wedding there. When we went to Pennsylvania, so we could spend time with my parents, the consensus was that we should have the wedding there. When we went to the New Jersey shore, so we could stay with Janice and Stan for a few days, the consensus was that we should have the wedding there.
The matter was settled when we went to Block Island, Rhode Island, so we could get away by ourselves. After four idyllic days there, we knew without a doubt where we would be married.
A charming island only seven miles long and three-and-a-half miles wide, “the Block,” as it’s often called, is a throwback to another era. Less precious than Nantucket, less celebrity-studded than Martha’s Vineyard, it has no golf courses, no fancy restaurants, no gated estates. What it does have are spectacular beaches, verdant, rolling hills, anchorages dotted with sailboats, and weathered, shingled houses that have withstood their share of nor’easters. It’s a salty place where the lobsters really are “just caught,” a nature-lover’s paradise, the coast of Maine without the long car ride. Neither Bill nor I had ever been there before, but from the instant we stepped off the ferry from Point Judith, we felt as if we’d found our romantic haven.
During our four days on Block Island, we scouted locations for the wedding, eventually narrowing the candidates down to two. There was the grand old Spring House, where we were staying, a Victorian hotel with wide verandas and sweeping lawns, both with views of the Atlantic; and the Sea Breeze Inn, a cluster of rustic cottages nestled in a meadow of wildflowers that peeked out over the ocean.
“You know what?” I said. “We can choose both. Let’s have the wedding at the Spring House and spend our wedding night and honeymoon at the Sea Breeze.”
“Great minds think alike,” said Bill. “I was going to suggest the same thing.”
There were details to work out, obviously, but by the end of the long weekend, we’d worked them out. We would have the ceremony on the lawn of the Spring House, cocktails on the seaside veranda, and dinner in the enclosed sunroom. After the party, our guests would stay at the hotel, while Bill and I would move over to the Sea Breeze—specifically, to Cottage #10, the most private of the inn’s accommodations and the one boasting the best view. Tucked away at the rear of the property, it was a cozy spot with a bedroom, a living room, and a porch facing the water and meadow. Basic. Beautiful. Perfect.
Everything was arranged—the food, the ferry reservations, even the justice of the peace. I was marrying the man I loved on an island I loved with the people I loved around me. Was I happy? Floating was more like it.
When we got back to New York, I thought of nothing but the wedding, aided and abetted in my obsession by Janice, who had plenty of free time, having broken up with Stan.
“He didn’t want to get married?” I asked as we stood in the Wedding Books section of Barnes & Noble one Sunday afternoon.
Now that she was back in circulation, she was delighted to accompany me to her favorite haunt.
“He did want to get married. I didn’t,” she said, surprising me. “I didn’t love him, Nance. I knew it the second he proposed.”
“The second he accepted your proposal, you mean.”
“Exactly. I would have been settling if I married him. You were right about holding out for the one and only, so that’s what I’m going to do.”
“I’m really glad, Janice. I’m sure the breakup is painful, but you’ll look back on it and realize it was for the best.”
“Yup. In the meantime, there’s a cute guy over there in Cookbooks. Stan couldn’t cook to save his life.”
Before I could stop her, she was off on another adventure. Or misadventure, depending.
Lucky me, I thought. I’m off the market. I have Bill. Forever.
I was whistling my way toward the end of the summer, the picture of contentment, shopping for my wedding dress, writing thank-you notes to people who sent us wedding gifts, packing up my clothes and books and odds and ends in preparation for the official move to Bill’s apartment.
I was cleaning out the
kitchen, emptying all the drawers and sorting their contents into either Save or Chuck cartons, when I finally tackled what I always called the junk drawer. You know, the one you stuff with coupons and batteries and ads for things you mean to buy but don’t. As I rummaged through the drawer, throwing away practically every item in it, I came upon a letter…a letter I had, apparently, never gotten around to opening…a letter that was badly stained as a result of its close proximity to a leaky packet of soy sauce, the kind that comes with takeout Chinese dinners along with the duck sauce and the hot mustard.
Yuck, I thought as I examined the sticky envelope which, by the way, was crawling with ants.
I giggled. The paper was discolored, but I could easily make out the return address (Denham and Villier) and the postmark (New York City, December eleventh of the previous year).
So it was from Bill!
I laughed again as I realized that the probable reason I hadn’t opened it was that I had just met and fallen in love with him. I’d been so consumed with our budding romance then, so consumed with the fear that he’d find out I wasn’t the other Nancy Stern, that it was a miracle I hadn’t tossed everything I owned into the junk drawer.
But this letter can’t be from Bill, I reminded myself with a start. He didn’t know who I really was on December eleventh. He didn’t learn the truth about me until Christmas Eve, after Nancy was murdered. He didn’t even know my name.
I tore open the hopelessly browned envelope and lifted out the letter, which was handwritten on Denham and Villier’s once-creamy stationery.
“Dear Nancy,” it read. “As you’ve heard, we have an old friend in common: Joan Geisinger.”
I put down the letter.
It was for her, not me! Bill had mailed the other Nancy Stern a letter, it had been deposited in my mailbox, and I’d forgotten to give it to her! But why had he written to her when he had already met me? Why had he written to her when he had thought she was me, or vice versa? It didn’t make sense.
I picked up the letter and continued reading.
“As Joan told you in her note, I moved to New York recently to become the manager of the Denham and Villier store on Fifth Avenue. She suggested that I contact you when I got to town, so you and I could have dinner some night. I tried calling you—she did too—but you’re not listed in the phone book. Hence the letters from both of us.”