Around the Bend

by Shirley Jump

  He shrugged. “That’s okay. I mean, I’ve heard about those kind of arrangements, but never—”

  “It is not that kind of arrangement!” I forced myself to lower my voice when several people turned to stare. “I never knew he had another wife.”

  “Until after he—”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh.” His eyes grew rounder. “That must have been horrible.”

  “You know, this isn’t my favorite topic of conversation. I came down here to give Harvey to you or Vinny or whoever’s in charge because I don’t want a dog, I don’t want to go to the Dog-Gone-Good Show and I don’t want—”

  And then I was crying again.

  “Hey, hey,” Matt said, coming closer to me, taking my arm. “It’s okay. It’ll work out. Come on, let me buy you some coffee.”

  “But what about the show and Susan and—”

  “I think you need a cup of coffee more than any of those things need to be handled.” Still holding my arm, he gently led me out of the room, through a back door in the ballroom. Immediately, the crazy zoo behind us was silenced. Five minutes later, we’d left the building by a side entrance that kept us far from the registration fray.

  As I thought of all the questions I needed to ask Susan—questions I still wasn’t a hundred-percent sure I wanted to know the answers to—I wondered if it might be less painful to just take a bath in gravy and offer myself up as a lobby sacrifice.

  nine

  I don’t know what kind of man I expected a dog agent to be, but it wasn’t Matt Shay.

  “Hey, Matt, you escaping again?” the redheaded, statuesque waitress said as she led us to a booth in the back of a diner named The NightOwl. Situated down the street from the Grand Resort Hotel and Convention Center hosting the Dog-Gone-Good Show, it was one of those retro buildings made to look like an old-fashioned railroad dining car.

  Most of the customers were males over the age of sixty, debating sports stats along with the talking heads on ESPN, which played on every TV in the diner except for one in the back running cartoons. No children were watching Tom and Jerry, but one middle-aged guy was, sitting to the right of the set and laughing as if Tom the cat had the comedic ability of Robin Williams.

  “Thanks, Lucille,” Matt said as he slid into the booth. The waitress didn’t bat an eye at Harvey, who slipped onto the seat beside Matt and promptly fell asleep, apparently tuckered out from watching me do all the driving. “Bring me some high-octane coffee and for my guest…” He looked to me.

  “A cup of the same. Leave plenty of room for cream, please.”

  “Good,” he said, smiling, after Lucille left.

  I realigned the salt and pepper, putting them squarely against the silver napkin holder. “What’s good?”

  “You’re not one of those cappuccino women.”

  “What’s a cappuccino woman?”

  “You know, the kind that goes into Starbucks and orders a coffee like she’s picking out a car? Tall, noncaf, nonfat, venti mocha with a double sugar-free caramel shot.” Matt rolled his eyes. “Get a damned coffee, not a short story.”

  I laughed. “I can honestly say that I am probably the only person on the planet who has never stepped foot in a Starbucks.”

  He put out his hand and shook mine again. “Meet the only other one.”

  I laughed again. At this rate, it was becoming a habit. “What’s good here?” I asked, feeling a wave of guilt that I was laughing when my life was such a shambles. I was a widow, for God’s sake. I shouldn’t be laughing at another man’s jokes.

  I jerked a menu out of the metal holder and scanned the diner’s offerings, instead of the man across from me. My stomach rumbled, which reminded me I hadn’t eaten in hours, not since we’d done that live-action version of A Baby Story with Norm and Rita.

  And Susan. Oh, no, I’d ditched her, without a thought.

  “Everything’s good here. Willhemina, the owner, makes everything from scratch, the way her mother and her mother’s mother taught her. Which means this isn’t the kind of place where you watch your calories or your cholesterol.” Matt’s gaze ran over my face. “You worried about Susan?”

  “Yeah.” I put the menu to the side and glanced out the window. “I shouldn’t have left her there.”

  He flipped out a cell phone, punched in a number, then waited as the call connected. “Jerry. Look for a tall blonde in a black minidress and—”

  “Red shoes with rhinestones,” I supplied.

  “Red shoes with rhinestones.” He paused. “I should have known you’d find her before I could get past the word blonde.” Matt chuckled, a nice, hearty male sound. “Tell her Penny and I are grabbing a bite to eat and we’ll be back.” He paused, laughed some more. “Okay. Sounds good.” He closed the phone and tucked it back into his pocket.

  “What sounds good?”

  “Jerry offered, out of the kindness of his heart, I’m sure, to keep Susan entertained. He’s got a weakness for blondes.” Matt grinned. “I have a feeling you won’t see Susan for a while. Jerry’ll whisk her off on a tour of the city or something.”

  Relief settled over my shoulders, displacing the heavy weight of worry. For a while, I could forget about Dave’s other wife. Have a meal and a conversation and pretend everything was fine. For now. “Thanks.”

  He shrugged. “Hey, we’re a full-service agency.”

  I laughed again, then thanked Lucille as she deposited two cups of coffee before us, along with a generous handful of creamers.

  “Where’s Vinny?” I asked, laying my napkin on my lap and smoothing it into place.

  “Harvey’s trainer? Oh, he usually doesn’t do these kinds of things. He’s not good in a crowd.”

  “But isn’t he the one who takes Harvey onstage?”

  “Yeah, when we can get him sufficiently liquored up and convinced he won’t die.” At my knitted brow, Matt leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Vinny has a bit of stage fright.”

  “But he’ll be fine at the Dog-Gone-Good, right?” Suddenly, I wanted Harvey to succeed, to do as well as he had in the past. The part of me that still loved Dave knew he had loved that stupid dog, and had invested a lot in his success.

  “Yeah, I’m sure he will.” But Matt didn’t sound so confident. “Vinny’ll get over his little problem between now and Tuesday.”

  “Little problem?”

  “He, ah, breaks out in hives whenever he has to get near a stage. He had a bad experience with Rin Tin Tin the second six months ago and ever since then, he gets a little nervous.”

  “A little?”

  “Okay, a lot. And the hives are…well, they’re more like facial explosions. The makeup artist on Letterman had to use a paint sprayer to cover them.”

  That sounded like a lot more than a small problem. I fiddled with my silverware, aligning it, one bottom edge perfectly against the other. “Can’t you do it?”

  Matt shook his head. “Harvey’s particular about who he listens to. Apparently I’m not on his friends-and-family list.”

  “But he likes you so much.”

  “Harvey likes everyone. He doesn’t obey everyone, though. He’s a star, so he tends to be temperamental.”

  I slid a piece of ice into my mouth and toyed with it, before crunching the cube and swallowing. My dentist would have been appalled, but I figured if the worst thing I did right now was start chewing ice, then I’d take the tsk-tsk from Dr. Diehl.

  Harvey had awakened and slid under the table, then up onto the vinyl seat beside me. He wagged his tail, prancing on the seat and watching me expectantly, probably thinking I had a few Beggin’ Strips in my purse. “Sit, Harvey,” I said. He did, tamping his enthusiasm a bit.

  “Have you tried working with him?” Matt asked.

  “Me? No, no. Not at all.”

  “He likes you.” Matt gestured toward the dog with his fork. “And he seems to behave for you, too.”

  I thought of the car ride and how Harvey had tapped out his age, or at leas
t what I presumed was his age. How he’d sat when I’d told him to, stayed when I asked him to. Not to mention that whole thing with waving hello. Was he listening to me? “Are you suggesting what I think you are?”

  Matt grinned, the kind of smile that normally would have had me thinking he liked me, that there was something more than a conversation about a dog going on here. “Only if you’re considering it.”

  “No. No, no, no. I will not go onstage with the dog.”

  “It’s an easy job. Harvey does all the work.”

  At that, Harvey let out a yip of agreement, then did his turnaround dance on the seat.

  I hadn’t driven all this way to end up onstage with a dog I didn’t even want. I was here for answers, not my shot—or rather Harvey’s shot—at fifteen minutes of fame. “I’m an accountant, for God’s sake.”

  Matt grinned. “All the more reason to step out of your comfort zone.”

  I dug in my purse, found a few ones and threw them at the table, then rose. “You don’t understand. This entire trip has been out of my comfort zone. My marriage, it turns out, wasn’t even on the same planet as my comfort zone. I’m not taking that dog onto a stage or in front of a camera or anywhere else for that matter. You’re his agent, you deal with him.”

  Then I turned and walked out of the diner, leaving Harvey the Wonder Dog, and his wonder agent, behind. I’d done half of what I came here to do.

  The easy half, my mind whispered. Dealing with Annie—and who she was or wasn’t—was going to be a lot harder than leaving a dog in a diner.

  “There you are!” Susan exclaimed, coming up to me the second I hit the sidewalk. She was trailed by a man about five years younger than she, who was all puppy-dog eyes and clear infatuation with the statuesque, busty blonde. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  “And I was on my way to find you. We need to—”

  Before I could say “go home,” Susan grabbed my arm, her eyes bright with excitement, and dropped a bombshell in my lap. “I found Annie,” Susan said. “And you’ll never believe what I learned about her.”

  ten

  Susan hadn’t really found Annie, per se, she’d found Betty Williams, a friend of Annie’s, who had seen us with Harvey and gone up to Susan to ask where Dave was, which then somehow led into a conversation about Annie. I didn’t hear all of Susan’s convoluted explanation of how the conversation had come around to the third woman in Dave’s life, but it was something that had involved fall foliage, then Benzes, then who was the cuter ER doc.

  “What did Betty finally tell you?” I asked. “About Annie, not the probability of George Clooney returning to the cast.”

  “That Annie lives in Cleveland, which really isn’t all that much of a drive from here and—” at this, Susan drew in a breath “—that she has five kids.”

  Kids.

  The word slapped me, dropped into my gut with a sense of unfairness, of loss. That was supposed to be our next step, a baby to fill that empty bedroom at the top of the stairs. As I had for fifteen years, I’d put it off, figuring there’d be time. Time for me to get over my parenthood phobia, time for Dave and me to talk, for me to tell him the truth about how I felt about the baby issue.

  Time, it seemed, had had the last laugh. “Dave had children?”

  “Well, Betty didn’t say that exactly. She just said Annie had five kids.” Susan’s gaze softened and I wondered if she had been struck cold hearing that word, too. “That could mean anything, Penny.”

  Five seconds ago, I had been planning on grabbing Susan and hopping in the Benz, heading back to Newton without stopping for hitchhikers, blown tires, emergency births or anything else. But the new information opened a window in me, a window that was both painful—

  And curious.

  Despite how my heart constricted like a rubber band had been tied across it, I wanted to know more. “Did she say if Annie was his wife?”

  Susan’s attention dipped into her purse as she looked for a tube of red lipstick and a little mirror. “I think we need to go see her,” Susan said, avoiding the question as she smeared the tube across her lips, turning them from faintly pink to shocking crimson.

  Something lurked beneath the surface of that L’Oréal, I was sure of it. But Susan had already replaced the tube and turned guileless eyes on me. “Shall we get Harvey registered for the show?”

  “I left him with Matt, his doggy agent. I’ve done my part.”

  Susan reached out and took my arm, her grasp firm. “You don’t honestly mean to leave Dave’s dog here, do you?”

  “That was my plan.”

  “Since when?” Susan put her other fist on her hip. “I thought we were down here to get to know Dave through Harvey. And his people.”

  “I’ve done enough of that,” I said, lying through my teeth.

  “Uh-huh. We know almost nothing more than when we started out. There has to be something else.”

  My nonchecked list already told me that. I rubbed at my neck, trying to ease the building tension. “On top of that, Matt wants me to take Harvey trotting around the ring for the show. He says Vinny gets stage fright and Harvey will only work with certain people and—”

  “That’s a wonderful idea!” Susan exclaimed, now pumping my arm up and down, using my extremities to emphasize her point. Two women passing by with We Love the Smokies shopping bags stopped and stared. Behind them, a slower-moving group of seniors was making its way down the sidewalk.

  “It’s a terrible idea. For one, I have no training in this and for another—” Well, I couldn’t think of another just now, but I would.

  “You should do it, Penny. It’ll help you stop being so—” She cut herself off and bit that perfect red lip.

  “So what?”

  “Well…” Susan paused, her gaze darting away, then back as if this was such a scandalous thing to say she had to make sure the entire busload of seniors with their red Merry Manor Retirement Home sweatshirts didn’t overhear. “You are a little uptight.”

  “I am not.”

  Susan just arched a brow. Apparently taking a fifteen-hour car trip with me had made her an expert on my personality.

  “Why don’t you march Harvey around?” I asked her.

  “Because that dog won’t listen to me. Why do you think I gave him to you?”

  Thinking back, I realized Susan had hardly interacted with Harvey the whole time we’d been together. It was as if she were afraid of the dog, or maybe vice versa. If anything, I was sure the heels put him off. Little dog like that, tall spiky things near his paws…it had to look bad from his perspective. “I can’t, Susan. And I won’t.”

  “Not even for Dave?”

  “Why the hell should I do anything for Dave?” The Merry Manor crowd turned around, making no secret of their staring. I lowered my voice and whispered the words again.

  “Because you used to love him, just like me, and he would have wanted Harvey to strut his stuff.”

  “Dave is—” I still couldn’t speak the word, not without it choking up my throat “—gone, and he wouldn’t know if Harvey strutted or not.”

  “Yeah, but you’d know and you’d feel bad.”

  Susan was presuming an awful lot.

  “I can’t talk about this now. I can’t decide right now.” I ran a hand through my hair, trying to make sense of the thousands of thoughts going through my head. I needed some time to regroup. Get my bearings.

  “Listen, why don’t we stay here tonight?” Susan smiled. “Everything always looks better in the morning.”

  For once, I couldn’t argue with Susan. After the long day, the exhausting drive through the night, I wanted nothing more than a good night’s sleep and a bit of distance between all of this and me. “All right. Just one night. Then we either go to Cleveland or back home.”

  Susan hesitated only a second before nodding. Second thoughts or simply her not paying attention? “Right. And while we’re here, you’ll think about letting your hair down a little?” />
  “I think I already did that.”

  Susan snorted a little in disbelief. “I know your personality, Penny. I see it in my lawyer and the man who does my taxes and that career counselor who tried so damned hard to convince me that I could be a flight attendant. I mean, could you see me in one of those ugly uniforms, handing out peanuts?”

  Actually, I could, but I kept that to myself.

  “You have everything in your life so tightly controlled, that one step outside the gate has you worried that the whole ball of wax will come crashing down. I mean, you have wet wipes in your glove compartment for eating French fries.”

  Susan made it sound like a felony. “I don’t like the Benz to get dirty.”

  “You stopped me from putting salt on my fries, in case the salt sprayed. It’s salt, Penny, not mud.” She shook her head, then went on. “You can live dangerously and everything will be as it was in the morning.”

  “How can you say that after the week we just went through?” I turned away from her, willing the stupid tears that kept springing to my eyes to take a permanent vacation. “Nothing will ever be the same again.”

  “That’s what’s so wonderful,” Susan said, pumping my arm again, like an oil rig that had hit a big cache of crude. “We can change. Do something different. Try a new life.”

  “I don’t want to try a new life. I liked mine just the way it was.”

  Confusion knit Susan’s brows together. “Then why did you marry Dave? I mean, he was all about change. About doing something different every day.”

  And then I knew. I knew what had gone wrong; I knew why my husband had needed another wife, another life.

  Because I represented sameness. Ironing on Tuesdays, scrambled eggs on Sunday. Sex on Wednesdays and Fridays, a kiss goodbye in the morning, a hug hello at night. Lasagna on Sunday—

  God, I had been a walking, talking stuck record. Who the heck wanted that when they could have a shiny new iPod, one that came with bigger breasts and better shoes?

  What made me think that returning to my old way of living wouldn’t net me the same result? Assuming, that was, that I moved on someday, considered another relationship.