Measure of Love

by Melissa Ford

  Measure of Love

  Rachel has made a new life from scratch with her ex-husband, but can they survive the wedding plans?

  It may be her second time getting married, but Rachel Goldman is definitely navigating a sticky relationship with her former—and soon-to-be-again—mother-in-law. Plus she’s in a tug of war with the editor of her upcoming book on divorce who is begging her to keep her happy new relationship with her ex, Adam, on the down low. How can Rachel do that when her society-obsessed mother-in-law is eager to get a featured story in the wedding section of the New York Times? Throw in a sister-in-law-to-be who’s navigating her own upcoming nuptials as well as a friend who not only doesn’t want to get married but is possibly having an affair. Rachel finds herself with too many pots simmering on a very familiar stove.

  ———

  “Measure of Love should be required reading for anyone considering marriage, and considering marriage as Melissa Ford does should be required of those of us who are already married. Hilarious and heartbreaking, reassuringly neurotic and grounded in down-to-earth prose, Measure of Love is a thoroughly wise, heart-gripping, modern love story. Before you write (or dust off) your vows, or decide to live unmarried until death do you part, vow to read Measure of Love; its deceptively simple message—to re-fall in love over and over again—will stay with you happily ever after.”

  —Suzy Becker, author of One Good Egg

  “In this winsome novel, Melissa Ford manages to capture both the unbearable fragility of life and the reliable solidity of love. May we all learn the lesson of Melissa’s Rachel: that we can be scarred and scared, and yet still be open to the redeeming beauty life sends our way.”

  —Stacy Morrison, author of Falling Apart in One Piece

  Praise for Life from Scratch

  The prequel to Measure of Love

  “. . . characters I can relate to, who make me laugh out loud and hungry for dinner.”

  —Mary Alice, co-star of Food Network’s Ace of Cakes

  “All journeys worthy of anything begin with wine and end with a meal. Life from Scratch does just that, adding heart and laughter to the recipe.”

  —Stephanie Klein, author of Straight Up and Dirty and Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp

  “A thoughtful, sensitive examination of the choices that give shape to our lives.”

  —Sarah Pekkanen, author of The Opposite of Me

  Measure of Love

  by

  Melissa Ford

  Bell Bridge Books

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Bell Bridge Books

  PO BOX 300921

  Memphis, TN 38130

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-303-0

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-282-8

  Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

  Copyright © 2013 by Melissa Ford

  Life from Scratch (excerpt) © 2010 by Melissa Ford

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers.

  Visit our websites – www.BelleBooks.com and www.BellBridgeBooks.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover design: Debra Dixon

  Interior design: Hank Smith

  Photo credits:

  Cover photo (manipulated) © Kati Molin | Dreamstime.com

  :Elm:02:

  Dedication

  For Josh

  I would marry you over and over and over again (though let’s just stay married forever in the first place)

  Chapter One

  I ROLL OVER in bed and let my hand rest on one of the creases in the sheet, a tiny mountain that my fingers curl over like the legs of a giant. I am alone, so it doesn’t matter if I gather all the blankets over my body or grab the second pillow on the other side of the bed. This is one of those benefits of being single, Rachel, my body purrs silently.

  Wait. Except that I’m not.

  My brain slowly swims closer to consciousness, taking in the fact that light is streaming in through the uncurtained windows. I am wearing a T-shirt—several sizes too big—that advertises some pizza place in the Hamptons as well as a pair of cotton briefs that I picked up three-to-the-pack at a warehouse savings store that looked semi-sexy in the packaging but not so much in actuality on my body. The other side of the bed has a small dip in the mattress, the memory of the body that occupied the space minutes ago. And there is water running from the bathroom shower head, a light sound like paper tearing.

  I open my eyes and look around the room, still half-expecting to see my familiar loft apartment, but instead find myself staring at a door. With a knob. And luxurious-by-New-York-standards plaster walls as opposed to the screen I used to wrap around my bed to create the illusion of a room. The closet door is half open, exposing the bins that line the wall holding the yoga pants I prefer to wear while I cook or write. On the floor, kicked casually into the corner of the room, is a pair of men’s jeans and size 11 lace-up black oxfords. Remnants of the pre-sex shedding of clothes.

  The water in the bathroom turns off, and the sound is replaced by some off-key whistling. The sort of mindless whistling one does when they’re excited for the day, when they’re actually happy that they have a functioning alarm clock. It’s a whistle I’m currently familiar with because I’ve done it myself as recently as yesterday morning, making my way through a few bars of “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” while I made toast. I didn’t mean to do it; I just suddenly realized that the sound that resembled something off a Wham! album performed by birds was coming out of my pursed lips. Which is a long way to admit that, at this moment, my life is okay. Actually, it’s better than okay. It’s pretty damn good.

  Recently, my agent, Erika Ledbetter from Rooks, LTD (Rooks knows Books!) sold my non-fiction proposal for a small advance to a mid-size publisher. The money isn’t enough to live on—the dresses at the Oscars cost more than the whole of my advance—but that is somewhat meaningless. It’s what the check represents: that someone cares enough to invest in me. After a post-divorce year of having to emotionally invest in myself out of necessity due to a lack of partner (not counting the hot Spaniard I dated for a few months), it feels good for someone to step forward and find me desirable. I finished the manuscript for my self-help divorce book, The Divorced Girl’s Guide to Starting Your Life from Scratch, and now I’m in that anticipatory period between completion and the book reaching the reader’s hands. Which means that along with the bliss, I’m spending a lot of time chewing Tums.

  Ads on my blog, some freelance articles, and dropping the need to pay rent after moving in here have meant that for the time being, I’m still a non-graphic artist. I’m not quite ready to call myself a writer, but at least I haven’t yet returned to the New York Public Library to design brochures for another ten years. I still cook in the morning and write in the afternoon, or vice versa. And this fact alone contributes enormously to that morning whistling feeling. It’s easy to be excited about my day when I no longer have to go to my mind-numbing job.

  Though the biggest reason for the morning whistling sessions is that I’m in love.

  Not the sort of love
where you’re half-throwing up as you get ready for the date, wondering what every single word spoken means. Not the sort of love where you mark down on your calendar how often you have sex so you can reflect on it and try to deduce how the guy feels about you from the frequency of bed sex vs. sofa sex. No, it’s the calm sort of love that comes at the end of a long road, the sort where you half-smile when he slips his hand into yours in the movie theater, and you think about how lucky you two are that you’ve found each other in this world with seven billion people and millions of missteps knocking your paths out of orbit. The fact that any two people can find each other and fall in love is a bit of a miracle.

  And to find the same person and fall in love a second time defies even those enormous odds which are usually used to discuss your chance of being hit by lightning.

  Adam Goldman, my ex-husband and once-again boyfriend, comes out of the bathroom, rubbing his brown hair into spikes with one towel while another is wrapped casually around his waist. He leans against the dresser and smiles at me.

  “That’s my shirt again,” he tells me.

  “Is it?” I yawn, plucking it away from my body so I can examine the pizza graphic with little red circles for pepperoni. “It was dark last night when I grabbed it out of the drawer. In my defense, I bought you this T-shirt maybe ten years ago when we were visiting your parents at their beach house.”

  “Ten years?” Adam says dryly. “How is that possible when I just started dating you this year, Ms. Goldman?”

  “I have no idea, Mr. Goldman,” I answer. “You’re the teacher. Why don’t you write out one of those theorems and figure out how it’s possible.”

  “I teach English,” Adam points out, grabbing a pair of boxers and a white T-shirt out of his top drawer. “I don’t do math. And right now, I teach summer school.”

  Not being a lawyer suits Adam even more than not being a graphic designer suits me. Being rid of that life has reverted him back to how he was during my graduate school days when I first met him, back when all he wanted to do was hurry through all of his law school reading so he could have a half hour with Nathaniel Hawthorne. He spends an extraordinary amount of hours preparing his lesson plans, teaching ninth grade English, and then grading papers into the late hours of the night. But it’s a different sort of time and a different sort of stress. He no longer storms into our apartment, releasing the eleven hours of tension that comes from doing something you despise for half your day. Instead, he likes me to sit on the sofa next to him while he corrects commas with his red pen, my legs casually dangling across his lap while I type a blog post on my computer.

  See, it’s a whistling sort of life.

  I watch him get ready, thinking about how we would have never reached this moment if we hadn’t divorced. Divorce, for us, was like an earthquake; a devastating event that destroyed everything on the fault line. But in the time afterward, what is rebuilt feels stronger and more stable than what existed prior to the loss. Please don’t get me wrong; I would have rather never experienced the denouement of our first relationship nor the year apart. But since I can’t change the past and can only move forward, looking for the silver linings to process that time period, I instead marvel at the ease in which we communicate, the way he makes time for me, and the way I feel safe and self-sufficient within our relationship.

  We both, it turns out, needed to find ourselves again.

  A few weeks into dating again, after those initial evenings where he admired my roasted chicken, and I complimented him on the sociology project he created for his students trying to refute or prove Pangloss’s theory in Candide, after we got past the careful skirting around of discussing the photographs I left in the apartment or the hours he kept at work, Adam took out a spiral notebook and shyly asked if we could define some things.

  “A friend of mine at work got married this year, and they sort of had this . . . contract thing they talked about at their wedding,” Adam told me, avoiding looking at me directly.

  “Like a ketubah?” I asked, pointing to a random wall as if I expected to see our Jewish marriage contract still framed and on display as decorative art.

  “No, it was different. They wrote it before they got married. It was all the promises they made to each other about their relationship. Just to make sure they were on the same page with everything.”

  “You want to write something like that?” I asked, my heart pounding so loudly that it made my head feel as if it were stuck inside a drum at a rock concert.

  Adam shrugged and started doodling a little three-dimensional box in the corner of the page. I sat down on the sofa and listed my first request for our relationship: more spontaneous trips. Without saying anything, Adam jotted it down on the first line of the page and then added another sentence immediately after it. Take a class together every once in a while.

  It was the fact that he was suggesting this exercise and not me; that he was the one concerned about the state of our relationship that clued me in to how much he had changed over the year.

  From my place on the bed, I can see the edge of the contract we wrote up peeking out from behind the mirror frame. After we wrote it, we signed it, and Adam ripped it out of the notebook. It seemed official since we had just said in not so many words that we were truly going to try again. We both agreed that we didn’t want to frame it, didn’t want others to see it, and I was expressly forbidden from blogging about it.

  In the end, Adam pulled the mirror back in our bedroom and sloppily taped it to the back side. We know it’s there, and while a little bit of the jagged spiral-ripped edge of the paper is visible, no one else seems to notice it when they pass through our bedroom. Every time I look in the mirror, I am mindful of all the promises we made to each other that night, all reflected back at me in addition to my image.

  Adam returns to the bedroom in socked feet, still hunting for his shoes and finding them in the corner of the room. He sits down on the floor to tie them while I consider my sleep-tangled hair in the mirror and wonder if I should cover up my grey. At first I think Adam is looking at my reflection, but I follow his gaze to the sliver of exposed paper. He raises his eyebrows at me but doesn’t say a word.

  He pops up, grabbing his overstuffed backpack and impishly plopping a Yankees cap over his clean hair, something I never understood. Baseball caps, in my world, are for bad hair days. Adam never has a bad hair day. He’s charmed in the looks department, always appearing neat even when his hair is tousled, perpetually slim regardless of what he eats, an easy smile that covers up his uneven lower teeth. (The family rumor is that he threw such a fit when the dentist tried to fit him for braces that his parents gave up and left his teeth misaligned.)

  He bends down to kiss me, and I keep my lips firmly locked, mindful of the fact that I haven’t brushed my teeth yet and he has.

  “Cooking class tonight at six?” he asks. As part of our contract, I’ve signed us both up for a couple’s cooking class at a boutique cooking school in our neighborhood. For the last five weeks, we’ve made dinner together with four other couples under the guidance of our teacher, a former chef turned cooking school owner. Each couple prepares their food at their station, and then we all sit down for a group meal to discuss the lesson. So far, Adam has cheerfully burned a steak, butchered a meatloaf, and scrambled dozens of eggs—all in the name of love. I know he’d much rather be watching baseball on television or reading a book, but since becoming a teacher, Adam has become a lot more easy-going and agreeable. Plus, it means that dinner is taken care of at least once a week, and I can get a blog post out of it to boot.

  “I’ll be ready at 5:30, and we can walk over,” I agree.

  Adam pauses in the doorway and turns around to look at me, still in bed. He leans his head in the doorjamb, knocking his baseball cap askew. “I’ll see you tonight. I love you, Rachel.”

  “I love you too,” I say back, wonde
ring the source of the tenderness as he walks back across the room to give me a second kiss. His hand finds my face, and he strokes my cheek gently, as if he can’t see my messy hair and sleep-crusted eyes.

  Chapter Two

  ———

  How did this happen?

  After swearing off the existence of romantic love, absolutely certain that it’s just a plot device developed by rom-com writers, as similarly fantastical as vampires, werewolves, and zombies (scratch that, zombies are totally real), how did I end up in a committed relationship again . . . with my ex-husband?

  Yes, I’m back together with Adam.

  I actually know exactly how this happened, and it all goes back to a day early on after we got together when he showed up at 7 p.m. I wasn’t ready to go out since a 7 p.m. in Adam’s world is a little before 9 p.m. in mine. My experience with Adam up until that point was that he was always late, always giving his time to something other than me. So I was still in yoga pants. With my hair in a ponytail. And no make-up. And chocolate pudding in the corners of my mouth. I thought I had about two more hours to make myself presentable before he’d show.

  But the buzzer went off in my apartment, and a few moments later, he was outside my door holding a roll of white butcher paper that he had attached to a wire hanger. “I made this,” he told me, holding out his creation. “You told me that the white screen you use to photograph dishes for your blog got tomato sauce on it, so I borrowed some paper from the art room at the school and attached it to this wire hanger to make you a new screen. For your blog.”

  For your blog.

  Can you imagine anything more romantic than having someone notice what brings you happiness and then, instead of just supporting you in enjoying it by watching from the sidelines, jumps into that happiness by making you a white screen?