I dump the bags I carried in and step in front of James as Emilio moves down another step, the two of them locked in a death stare. Emilio scoots me gently to the side, hands on the outer edges of my shoulders. I’m positive he’s gearing up to kick James’s ass. I’m about to dive between them again when Emilio thrusts out his open palm.
“Pleasure to meet you, James,” Emilio says. “I’m Emilio Masters.”
James, straight-faced, takes Emilio’s offered hand. “Pleasure is mine.”
Emilio tilts his head, assessing James, but the tension leaks from the room.
“If you’ll excuse me, James, I need to get changed.” Emilio lifts the lapel of his suit coat. “As you can see, I came directly from work.”
“What do you do, Emilio?” Lisa asks. The hairs on the back of my neck bristle up. Stupid as it may seem, I don’t want her talking to him.
I am comforted by the lack of interest Emilio gives her. “I’m a therapist.”
“Physical?” she asks.
He grins. “Mental health.”
“Thought so,” Lisa smirks.
Emilio matches it. “You’re psychic?”
“Hardly,” she says. “I could almost smell the trunk-load of issues clinging to you from a mile away.”
“You’ve known many therapists, have you?” Emilio asks. I want to leap in the air and fist pump. He’s got her number down.
James’s eyebrows lift. “Therapist, huh?”
Emilio relaxes on the step, one foot kicked out, his hand slipping into the front pocket of his slacks. It’s his brainiac stance. Or he wants them to notice his Italian shoes. In this case, I know it’s the first option. “That’s right.”
“It’s how we met,” I blurt. Why I tell them, I don’t know. No one needs to know, but being in the room with James, I feel vulnerable, as if he knows anyway. True to the James I always knew, when he glances my way, there is a hint of amusement around his lips from fleshing out one of my secrets, but he doesn’t say a word.
But Paul does, of course. “Fascinating!” He sits up on his knees, leaning over the back of the couch. “You’re the keeper of Jonesy’s secrets, are you?”
“Jonesy?” Emilio’s eyes swing toward me, but I focus my red hot glare on Paul. He’s doing what he’s always done: stir the shit.
“Grace Jones,” Paul says, by way of explanation. He shrugs innocently. “You didn’t mention The Band, Gracie?”
“Shut up,” I hiss.
“I expect this is one of Grace’s many layers. Thank you for illuminating it,” Emilio says, with a projector beam smile, radiating in my direction. “I always think I know everything about her, but then I realize I may not know all of her little details yet, and that’s what keeps relationships exciting—constant discovery.”
Muscles twitch across James’s jaw line. Emilio is testing the outer limits of a tolerance I’ve never seen in James before.
And Emilio is just showing off. There’s sooo much he hasn’t discovered, and never will if it’s solely up to me, but no one in this room needs to know that—especially Emilio. It’s got nothing to do with him, but everything to do with the promise I made to myself when I left home. I made an oath to leave behind everything that made me weak and never speak of it again.
“How about,” Eve says softly from the corner of the room, “we all agree to get along, best we can, for the week. Gada wanted us all here, so I think we should all try to put the past behind us, along with any differences that might surface now. We’re all adults here. We can be polite for a week.”
“And if we can’t,” Lisa says from over one shoulder, as she makes her way back toward the basement steps, “Gracie Jones brought us a shrink to help figure everything out.”
“Those are all your childhood friends?” Emilio asks after we haul all of his junk upstairs. “I can’t imagine you being friends with any of them, and I find it slightly odd that you’ve never mentioned them.”
“We all knew each other a long time ago. Who I was to them isn’t who I am now.” I sit down on the edge of Gada’s unmade bed (she’d forgive me this one time, I think) and a waft of lemon verbena pushes up from the sheets. I adjust my shoulders beneath the shoulder pads in my blouse.
Gada never met Emilio. I never told him, but from the moment I told her that he was a therapist, she decided she didn’t like him. Gada felt all therapists were either nuts themselves, or scam artists. I thought that when she met him, she’d feel differently, but she never did.
Emilio opens one of his suitcases and takes out a pair of pressed pants. He opens Gada’s closets, pushing her clothes back to make room for his things. Fishing out a hanger, he slips his pants meticulously over the lower, straight edge.
“I’m curious why they haven’t come up in any of our sessions?” he says. His shrink voice seeps out as he hangs his pants in the closet. “It sounds like they were pretty important people in your past.”
I sigh. I don’t want this to turn into one of those Emilio-figures-out-Grace moments. “They haven’t come up because I don’t think of them anymore. Lisa was my best friend and she slept with James. He got her pregnant.” The words spill out as hot and fast as a bathroom run after eating at Nico’s Chinese Bar & Grill, down the street. “Paul is James’s brother, so there’s really no reason for him to talk to me, and Eve—the lumberjack—I think she’s upset because she had no idea what went down and I never said goodbye before I left here.”
“Wow,” Emilio says. He comes to the bed, sits down beside me, and takes my hand in his. It’s more sympathy than he showed after hearing that Gada had passed. To be fair, I held it together a lot better then, and now, I feel like the corporate shell I’ve been wearing is beginning to crack. Emilio rubs my knuckles under his thumb. “So, there’s been a lot of repression, denial, and avoidance.”
Jeezus, I don’t want to have a session right now.
“It’s been seven years,” I say, pulling my hand away and standing up. “It’s not avoidance, because I’m here. I don’t deny any of it ever happened—I just don’t like chewing on it over and over. And like Eve said, I’d like to keep the past behind us. That’s not repression, it’s releasing what was. I think that’s pretty healthy.”
“Mmm,” Emilio says with a twitch of a smile. Healthy or not, I think he’s going to let it go for a few reasons. One: there’s a bed beneath him. Two: at some point, I think he wants to lie in it with me. Three: he’s the jealous type and doesn’t like that there are four ghosts from my past downstairs who know more than he does about me. And four: Emilio can dig up these issues at any moment and drag me into a full blown session, because that’s what he loves to do.
“Grace!” Paul shouts up the stairs. “You and what’s-his-name should come down here! We’re all ordering groceries for the week!”
Emilio and I come down the stairs, with Emilio trying to walk beside me, arm around my shoulders at first, but the walls are just too narrow for that. The only way it would work is if Emilio was holding me close and whispering things in my ear that would make me press even closer to his ribs, but that’s not Emilio’s style. He’s the rigid, I’m-supporting-you-by-holding-you-up kind of guy, not the PDA-loving, we-have-secrets-together, whisper-in-your-ear kind of guy. After a few awkward steps, he lets go of my rotator cuff and we walk down single file.
Everyone is in the kitchen. Lisa, tapping a pen against her lips, pours over a grocery flier she must’ve fished out of the mail that Mrs. Riley brought over.
Eve has turned a junk mail envelope over and takes dictation for a list that is already pretty sizeable. She’s the only one who doesn’t look up when we enter.
“Since we’re not supposed to leave the house, we’re going to try to get Creeger’s Market to deliver,” Paul explains. “We’re going to split the bill between everyone who’s eating.”
James has one shoulder on the wall. His eyes follow me, and from where I stop, at the edge of the table in the center of the kitchen, I can see him out of the c
orner of my eye.
“You’re taking this whole not-leaving-the-house mandate pretty seriously, aren’t you?” Emilio says. His arm drapes across my shoulders, weighing me down as if I’m carrying a man off a battlefield. He must be noticing James too. “Who’s going to know if you leave? Besides, I can’t believe that you can’t go out for groceries. I’m sure the will isn’t that unreasonable.”
Lisa looks up, the pen dangling from her teeth. She gives Emilio a long look before plucking it out. “Sharles, the lawyer, said we are supposed to stay put for one week. This is only day two, and I don’t think anyone here is going to play the odds and walk away from whatever legacy Gada wanted us to have. You can do whatever you want. Go ahead and leave whenever you feel like it. The rest of us want to honor the wishes of an old lady we all loved.”
I clench my teeth as Emilio rubs hard little circles with his thumb on my shoulder blade. I count backward from ten, hoping I don’t launch myself across the table at Lisa when I hit one.
“You’re correct, I have no stake in this will,” Emilio says smoothly, ignoring the insult. “Which means I’m free to come and go as I please.”
“That’s right, you are!” Lisa clicks the end of the pen excitedly. “The grocery store is just up the street. You could take Gada’s car and grab this stuff. It would save us about fifty bucks on delivery. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve got three kids and I’d rather save the cash.”
“Three?” Eve says. Lisa turns to her, ready for a fight, but Eve flashes a genuine smile. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” Lisa says. She melts as much as Lisa would ever melt, but stiffens up again as she turns her gaze back to me and Emilio. “Do you two want to look at the list? We made a menu and I itemized the ingredients we need from whatever I couldn’t find on Gada’s shelves. And somebody needs to clean out the fridge.”
I can already see that she’s expecting me to do all the dirty work, but I square my shoulders and keep my cool, just as I have when one of my employees have gotten snarly with me. I step forward and take the list from her.
“We’ll need fat-free cheese and those fat-free cookies,” I murmur to Emilio. “And margarine.”
“Margarine sucks,” Lisa says. “If you want butter, you should trust the cow. That other shit is terrible for you.”
I fight my lip from creeping up into a snarl. “If you’ve read any of the latest studies—”
Lisa rolls her eyes. “If you had three kids like I do, you’d know there isn’t time to read anything.”
“We aren’t married yet,” I say stiffly, but in the back of my mind, I’m thinking about how that didn’t stop Lisa from almost having a kid that should’ve been mine. God, I really thought I was over this crap. I hand the list to Emilio. “Do you want to do this? You don’t have to.”
“No, but it would save fifty bucks on delivery charges,” Lisa adds in a sticky voice.
Emilio plucks it from my fingers and plants a kiss on the top of my head. I can tell he’s not crazy about being our delivery boy, but he’s going to prove to everybody here that he’s the best man in the room. I could just as easily pick up the delivery fee, but that would only get Lisa barking about how I have money and she doesn’t and yada, yada, yada. I don’t want to hear it.
“Did your grandmother have a car I can use?” Emilio asks.
“We’re from the other side of the tracks, not a third-world country,” Lisa says.
“Be nice for once, Lisa,” Paul says. “The guy’s offering to go and save you fifty bucks.”
“Not just me,” she says.
I grab Gada’s keys from the hook by the back door and point Emilio beyond the rackety, old basketball hoop on a pole to the garage. He kisses me on the mouth before he leaves, a little longer than what’s comfortable. I’m sure he’s not happy when I pull away first.
Five minutes later, and after five different versions of directions of how to get out of the subdivision and to the grocery store, Emilio backs out Gada’s pale, yellow Reliant. I wonder if he’ll ever find his way back.
As James’s smirk deepens what used to be the charming dimple in his cheek, I wonder if that was exactly his thought too.
“Look what I found,” Paul says before any of us can sneak away from the kitchen. He holds up a finger for us to stay, before going into the living room and returning with a stack of Gada’s albums. They shake the table when he drops them, one flopping open to the first page.
I remember the book before I even look inside it. Gada liked to keep records of everything. She made it a point to photograph just about every second of my childhood. This book is from the year The Band began. Fourth grade. We thought we were such badasses in our jumpsuits and Farrah Fawcett haircuts.
The next book is out of order and a huge leap ahead. Seventh grade—the year James and I really noticed each other. The year that social status depended on the designer label plastered to our butts. Lisa wore hers like skin.
“Look at that makeup,” Eve said, pointing to one of the Kodak instant photos stuck beneath the yellowing, plastic sheath on the page. “You’ve got it up to your eyebrows. I told you it wasn’t a good look.”
In the picture, Lisa, Eve and I are smashed together, our arms looped around each other’s shoulders. Eve, in the middle, looks gorgeous, as always. Lisa and I are like her Oompa Loompa bookends. Our faces are a funny orange, coated in the wrong shade of foundation that Lisa lifted from her mom’s makeup stash. We thought we were the bomb.
We hover over the album, laughing over Gada’s mastery of the Kodak. We used to congregate in the basement, watching MTV music videos and playing Life, and sometimes Gada would come down and snap pictures of us. We’d stand around, waving and blowing on the photo, watching it develop before our eyes, and then Gada would grab a marker and write our names on the bottom, as if we’d all have amnesia someday and forget who we were. There are pictures of all of us making goofy faces, one of me re-enacting my prized role as Anne Frank from my school play, and a companion shot of James, leaning off the couch, mesmerized. It’s almost embarrassing to look at them now.
We flip through the books filled with snapshots of our lives. The day Michael Jackson’s Thriller first aired—I remember that moment in the same way Gada would recall where she was the day President Kennedy was shot. There are photos of birthdays, badminton games at the net strung across our front yard, street hockey (whatever team James was on always won), basketball games and four-square in the driveway behind the house and in front of the garage.
“Here’s an oldie and a goodie,” Eve says, hefting in another album and dumping it onto the table. She opens it up and there we are—frozen smiles in poufy, thrift-shop dresses and second-hand suits, posed out front for a Homecoming picture.
“I remember that,” James says. His eyes spark devilishly in my direction. “It was the first dance Gada let me take you to, and you were totally freaked out about your eyebrows.”
Lisa laughs, nods. “It was because I waxed them for her,” she says, turning to point at me. “Your brow puffed up so bad, you looked like a caveman!”
“I remember that!” Eve chirps. “Those welts!”
“Funny,” I say sourly, but it’s not Homecoming pictures that turn my stomach to acid. I stand up straight and move away from the edge of the table, rubbing my lower back. I paste a grin on my face as if I’m just trying to work out an ache and that I’m okay with what’s in that book. But I’m so not.
Most of these albums are filled with proof of our deep friendship, but in one of them, there are pictures Gada took of Lisa and I hanging out after Lisa’s abortion. It’s only a matter of time before someone lugs in that album and no one else knows about the week that Gada and I spent nursing Lisa back to health. Lisa looks somber and hollow in every shot. Some of the pictures capture how heartbroken I was that my best friend—the one who told me all about her period when she got it first, and every detail of how it felt when she lost her virginity to Donny Ve
levis during his night clerking shift at Creeger’s—wouldn’t confide in me about who the father was.
Gada, however, had told Lisa that it was okay to keep it to herself at the time, that it didn’t matter anymore. Maybe that’s why Lisa eventually decided to tell Gada who the father really was.
It’s the one time I believe Gada was wrong. What wasn’t supposed to matter changed the course of all our lives. And no matter how much I try to forget it, it still matters.
Paul brings in another album, and the second he opens it up, I lean over and snatch away the book, snapping it shut. Lisa’s eyes jump to mine. I’m sure she knows why.
“This one’s kind of dull at the end,” I say, looking away. I’m not protecting Lisa; I’m protecting myself. I can’t stand to think of all the pages full of smiling snapshots that led us to where we are now. “These are just the pics of me packing up for college.”
The room goes quiet, James running his fingernail in a groove on the table.
“That was a tough time, when you left,” Eve says.
Damn, I don’t want to go down this road. Not when we’ve all agreed to be civil to each other.
“It sucked ass,” Paul adds.
James’s eyes are on me.
Lisa pushes away from the table. “Anybody hungry? I wonder if Gada’s kept the old snack cupboard stocked.”
She crosses the room to the cupboard near the fridge, the one that Gada always filled with shoestring licorice, hard candy, and rolled-down bags of chips. Lisa swings it open and lights up with a smile as she pulls out two bags of the thin licorice. We all used to fight over it.
“Wonder if she’s still got all that liquor I watered down up in this cabinet,” Paul says, flipping open the cupboard over the stove. He used to sneak Gada’s booze on random occasions when she was out back gardening and left us in the house. He worked his way through her whole dusty-bottled collection, replacing the missing shots with water. Gada wasn’t a drinker, so I don’t know that she ever noticed.
1985: Careless Whisper (Love in the 80s #6) Page 5