Hope in a Jar

by Beth Harbison

  Just like always.

  “It sounds like you did the right thing,” Olivia said through a yawn. She looked at the clock on her mantel. This one was quiet, informative, not the brightly colored, loud Bulova she had at the office. It whispered that it was one-thirty A.M.

  No wonder Olivia was so tired. She was never up at this hour.

  “Now why don’t you go and get some sleep?” she said, standing up and hoping to shepherd her mother into the spare bedroom. “I’m sure things will look better”—she paused—“or at least more optimistic in the morning.”

  “Oh, I barely sleep anymore,” Caroline said, waving a hand at the notion. Her hands looked old, Olivia noted. Crepey. She had age spots. Her face had aged, too, of course, and in much the same way.

  For a long, long, long time Caroline had somehow managed to maintain youthful, fiery-haired Maureen O’Hara looks. People had commented on how attractive she was throughout Olivia’s entire high school and college career and beyond.

  Had she suddenly aged, or was Olivia only now noticing? How long had her hair been so brittle? Had those lines appeared on her face all at once or just a few with each passing year?

  “One of the perks of getting older,” Caroline went on. “So what do you say you and I get up and have breakfast at the Plaza in the morning before we go to New Jersey to see Aunt Cassandra?”

  “Whoa whoa whoa.” Olivia was awake now. Wide awake. She’d rather go to Hades to see Lucifer himself than trek to New Jersey for a visit with Aunt Cassandra. The old hen. “Before we what?”

  Caroline clicked her tongue against her teeth. “I know you’re not that fond of Aunt Cassandra, but she’s going to hear I’m back and if I don’t go and hold my head high she’s going to hear about this from someone and gloat. We can’t have that.”

  “Why can’t we have that? We never see her.”

  “Because I will know she’s gloating and I just can’t stand that, that’s why.”

  Aunt Cassandra was Olivia’s father’s much-older sister, but she felt like a distant relative. And she was also one of the most unpleasant people Olivia had ever met in her life.

  And she’d met lots of people at this point.

  “Mom, she’s got to be close to ninety now. She’s probably not paying as much attention to the society pages as she is to the obituaries. As long as she doesn’t see you there, you should be all right.”

  Caroline shook her head. “I’ve already called her and told her we were coming. I’m nipping this one in the bud. And I’m telling you, the old bird is as sharp as a tack. She knew who I was before I even said, and we haven’t talked in more than a decade. Can you imagine?”

  Olivia could imagine. That was just the sort of person Cassandra Pelham was. Held on tenaciously to everything, whether it was a memory of someone else’s humiliation, the purse strings to the family fortune (such as it was), or, apparently, life itself. “Well, I’m sorry, Mom, but I can’t go. I have plans.”

  “Plans?” Her mother looked at her sharply. She had a bit of the old Cassandra spirit herself. “What plans? You didn’t mention anything like that before.”

  “I didn’t have time.” Olivia was irked. Less than four hours and her mother was already driving her nuts. Worse than that, she was driving Olivia to have to choose the lesser of two evils. She hated that.

  “Tomorrow’s my twentieth high school reunion. I’m going down to D.C.”

  Caroline frowned. “Didn’t you graduate from high school in California? Or was that college?”

  “No, it was high school, Mom”—Olivia’s jaw felt tight—“but only because we moved there halfway through senior year. I spent the rest of the time at Churchill in Potomac, remember?”

  Caroline’s expression darkened. “Of course I remember.”

  She should.

  “Though I barely ever saw you.” Caroline pursed her lips. “You used to hang around with that Denty girl all the time, eating meals at their house, sleeping over—”

  “I’m going to bed.” Olivia was through being patient and indulgent. “If I’m gone when you wake up, help yourself to whatever you want in the kitchen and make sure you lock the door when you leave. I’ll leave a spare for you.”

  “Shall I send your regards to Aunt Cassandra?” Caroline asked, either to jab her point home or to attempt a joke to lighten the mood.

  But it was too late for Olivia to bother trying to figure out which it was.

  It was just time to end this conversation and go to bed.

  “Good night, Mom.”

  “Good night, honey.” This time the voice was not joking. It was just small, and tired. And maybe a little bit defeated.

  Four

  Go from dull to darling.

  —from “ That Gal” by Benefit

  Allie was certain she didn’t want Kevin back.

  Her eyes were a little puffy from wallowing in self-pity, her skin was pale from too little sleep, and her expression wore the horror of facing her twentieth high school reunion alone like a Halloween mask, but at least she had confidence that she’d done the right thing about Kevin.

  So . . . there was that.

  But the class reunion still hung over her head like one of those swinging blades from a James Bond movie, and the prospect of going without her arm prop (Kevin could hardly be called “arm candy” even before he turned out to be such a jerk) just seemed dismal.

  “I don’t want to do this,” she said to herself over coffee. It was the first of many times she’d say the same thing that day. “I don’t want to go to this stupid reunion.”

  Really, what was the point? She didn’t want to go at all. She didn’t want to see anyone, she didn’t want to be seen by anyone, she didn’t want to get dressed up, go out, drive downtown, try to find a place to park, haul her considerable butt into the building, and find the room where the people responsible for ninety percent of her most miserable days and nights were.

  She didn’t want to do this.

  “I don’t want to do this,” she said to Noah on the phone shortly after noon. “Don’t make me.”

  “Do what?”

  “The reunion.”

  “Whoa, I’m not making you do that.”

  She groaned. “Then why am I going?”

  “I don’t know. Because you secretly want to go?”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Because you’re dying to know what everyone looks like right now and how successful, or not, they are.”

  It was completely true. “But that’s just mild curiosity. You can report back to me.”

  “That’s true.”

  “No it’s not, you’re terrible at reporting things back.”

  He laughed. “And here comes the Reagan story again.”

  “You stood next to him at a urinal, for God’s sake, Noah! It seems like you would have remembered at least a pertinent detail or two.”

  “I was ten! He wasn’t even the president yet.”

  “He was the governor. He was an actor. Don’t tell me you didn’t see Bedtime for Bonzo at some point in your youth. Anyone else with any sense would have looked—”

  “How many times are we going to have this conversation?”

  She gave a laugh. “As many times as it takes for you to either remember something or pretend to remember something.”

  “This is stupid.”

  “Fine. Meet me at the Tastee Diner in Bethesda at seven instead of the reunion and I’ll never make you tell the Reagan story again.”

  “That actually sounds really good,” he said, a little wistfully. “Even though I don’t believe you about not talking about the story again.”

  She leaped on that. “Then let’s go!”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can!”

  “No,” he said firmly. “I really can’t.”

  “Noah, you’re acting like you don’t have any control over this. It’s just a stupid reunion. If you don’t want to go, and I don’t want to go, then why the
hell are we going? Let’s get some beer, go over to Hains Point to watch the airplanes take off, and sit and bitch about the people we remember instead of going and talking to them.”

  He hesitated, longer than someone who disagreed with her should have. “I see the appeal, there, Al, I really do, but I’ve committed to going tonight. Tori wants me to take her and I said I would.”

  Allie heard the sound of a record scraping backward in her head. “Tori? Who the hell is that?”

  “You know. Tori. The woman I’ve been seeing.”

  “I do not know.” But wait—Did she? Noah had mentioned he was seeing someone a while back, but she hadn’t heard him mention her again.

  He gave a short laugh. “Well, I guess you’ll see at the reunion.”

  “Oh, come on, Noah. Who is she? Where did you meet her?” What does she look like?

  “We met through work, and I told you this already, I’m sure.”

  Allie wasn’t sure enough to disagree with that. “And she wants you to take her to the reunion as a date? How pitiful.”

  “Not completely. She went there, too.”

  “She did?” Tori, Tori, Tori. Allie concentrated but no Tori came to mind. Rather than admit she was that oblivious to others around her, though, she simply said, “Then, good, you have a date. You don’t need me to go.”

  “Fine.” He let out a long pent-up breath. “Go to Hains Point and raise a Bud for me. Just make sure you take a cab.”

  She frowned, and adjusted her grip on the phone. “So you’re saying I’m off the hook? I really don’t have to go?”

  “Not as far as I’m concerned.”

  “But you’re still going to the stupid thing.”

  “Yup.”

  She sighed. Noah had never been manipulative, but if he were, this would have been one of his better tricks. But he wasn’t, which meant that he really wanted her to be there but he didn’t want to be a pushy asshole about it.

  Like Allie would have been.

  Besides, she was kind of curious to get a look at this Tori person. Noah never dated anyone for long, so this might be her only chance to meet one of his girlfriends.

  So she relented. “Okay, fine. Fine. I’m going.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “This better not suck.”

  There was a smile in his voice. “I know.”

  They hung up and Allie set about trying to figure out what she was going to wear now that she was actually going to the stupid reunion.

  It was funny, but up until this moment she hadn’t really planned on going. Yeah, when Kevin was around they’d talked about it, she’d RSVP’d, but in the back of her mind, she’d thought that RSVP’ing—especially with guest—was better than just being one of those lost or forgotten classmates.

  And going with guest gave her the perfect excuse to leave early, with that guest, without looking like she’d bailed.

  Now she was going without guest and she had just about five hours to get herself together and actually go.

  First she needed to lose that damn fifteen pounds.

  She went to the mirror and stood looking at herself, trying to be objective.

  Okay, there was no way to drop fifteen unsightly pounds in the next five hours. Unless, as one of her high school classmates might have suggested twenty years ago, she cut off her head.

  And even then, didn’t the human head only weigh like eight pounds, according to that kid in Jerry Maguire?

  So that was no help.

  But the new makeup she’d gotten really did look good. No one was going to mistake her for a movie star, God knew, but she looked pretty good, given the circumstances.

  At least it wasn’t so bad that she’d have to hide under a paper grocery bag or something.

  The phone rang and she welcomed the interruption. “Tell me you’ve changed your mind,” she said, certain it was Noah. For God’s sake, the fact that she’d even thought of hiding under a grocery bag was probably a sign she shouldn’t go, right? “Let’s not do it at all. We’ll run away, what do you say?”

  The awkward pause that followed told her it wasn’t. She looked at the handset to try to read the caller ID but the number was gone and instead it showed talk and a running timer.

  “Isn’t . . . I mean I’m not sure that’s practical,” Kevin’s bewildered voice said. “Not that I’m complaining. Far from it—”

  “I thought you were someone else,” Allie said, without patience. Just hearing his voice, even those brief few words, brought back the full force of his betrayal.

  Bodies, sweat, tongues, skin . . . the asshole.

  And he thought she’d forgiven him?

  “Who?” he challenged.

  “None of your business, Kevin. Did you call for some reason or just to question me about my private life?”

  “A week ago you wouldn’t have said that.”

  She gave a single, mirthless laugh. “What a difference a slut makes.”

  He took a pained breath. “Charlotte isn’t a slut—”

  “I meant you.” Oh, God. Her name was Charlotte. She had a name. Now she was real. “And her. How dare you defend either one of you to me!”

  “It just . . . happened. I swear it’s never happened before . . .”

  Never happened before. That hadn’t even occurred to her. As he blathered on with his meaningless nonapology, Allie thought back on the past few weeks. Maybe it had happened before. Perhaps even more than once. Had there been another time when he’d come home before her? Behaved strangely? Smelled of perfume . . . or worse?

  “. . . and I promise you it will never happen again, if you’ll just give me another chance.”

  Allie frowned and shifted her weight, considering the intent of his words, though not his proposal. “If I’ll just give you another chance. Hm. What if I don’t?”

  “I . . . don’t follow.”

  “You said it will never happen again if I’ll just give you another chance. What if I don’t?” she challenged. “Do you and Charlotte have a relationship of some sort? If I won’t let you come back—and by the way I won’t so this is all hypothetical—does that mean things will go on with her?”

  “Allie, don’t try to argue the case. We can get tied up in semantics all night—”

  “Funny, until recently I didn’t know you liked being tied up in anything.”

  He was silent for a moment before saying, “That’s not fair.”

  “No. It wasn’t.” She couldn’t breathe. She didn’t want to be having this conversation. “It wasn’t pretty, either. Jerry Garcia is probably spinning in his grave. He’s probably just a blur.”

  She didn’t want to be living this reality. The betrayal was bad enough, but to now be in charge of the choice to be alone at thirty-eight years old had its own difficulties.

  It would have been so easy just to say okay, come on back. They could pop some popcorn, watch Lost on DVD, talk about their days and their coworkers and their plans for the future.

  But she couldn’t forget what had happened. She couldn’t forget that maybe it wasn’t the first time. Maybe it already wasn’t the last time. Who knew?

  Allie didn’t.

  Allie never would, because she would never again feel like she could believe anything that Kevin said to her.

  It was a terrible feeling.

  “What color is the sky, Kevin?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “The sky. What color is the sky?”

  “Green,” he said, which was a mistake because on some level she had been giving him one last chance to tell an absolute truth and it didn’t matter that he was being sarcastic. “What the hell do you mean, ‘What color is the sky?’ I’m trying to talk to you about the rest of our lives, Allison. This isn’t the time for flippancy.”

  No, it wasn’t. And yet, when she’d asked him one half-assed question, when she’d handed him the opportunity to give her one indisputable truth, he hadn’t done it. In fact, he’d done the opposite. It didn’t matter
that he was kidding.

  If he was kidding.

  See? She didn’t know.

  “Kevin,” she said, trying hard to stop the quaver in her voice. “There is no rest of our lives. Not together.”

  “But we had plans!” He wasn’t pleading, though on paper it might have looked like he was. No, he was complaining. Had she inconvenienced him by being mad? “You can’t let one little indiscretion ruin all of that!”

  “I can’t let one little—” She caught her breath at the sheer injustice of it all. “You’re trying to say this is my responsibility?” She bit her lip, trying not to cry because this so did not deserve her tears. The anger was so much more appropriate than crying and was infinitely stronger.

  But.

  Even on the heels of an explosively stupid statement like that, she wanted to forgive.

  Not because he deserved it, because God knew he didn’t, but because it would have been easier.

  She just couldn’t.

  “Allie,” he soothed, using the voice that had carried her through everything from work mishaps to late-night panic attacks. “Come on. This is me you’re talking to. Don’t do this.”

  “I didn’t do this,” she said, steadying her trembling voice as much as she could. “I. Didn’t. Do. This.” She sniffed, but held her head high, knowing what she had to do. “You did this.” She swallowed. “I’ll be gone for a few hours tonight. You can come then and get your stuff out of here. Anything you leave behind is going to the Purple Heart.”

  That was good. She felt good about it. It was perfectly fair to offer him five hours to come in, with whatever friends—or girlfriends—he could muster and pack his four suits, twenty-five T-shirts, thirteen pairs of underpants, seven pairs of pants, drawer full of mismatched socks, razor, Thicker Hair shampoo, and Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. CD. Maybe the coffeemaker. They’d bought that together, but he drank more coffee than she did.

  She wouldn’t begrudge him that.

  She’d begrudge him the years he’d taken from her, the dignity, the confidence, but not the coffeemaker.

  “Should I leave the key?”