Knowing that the question was hypothetical, Simpy began to wash his right front leg. Indifferent. “But wait, Simp. There’s more.”
Simpson stopped grooming momentarily and looked at me with his owl-eyes. I buried my head in his delicious, almost-cinnamon-smelling fur. Very soothing. “I want to have a relationship. I don’t want to be an old lady who writes dirty books and pours coffee for the rest of my life. I don’t want to acquire a parrot to talk to after you’re gone.” Simpy licked my thumb with his sandpapery tongue. “So I just have to fake it, right?” Simpy squirmed, and I set him down on the floor. He curled up in the meatloaf position on top of my feet. I looked at my hands, wondering how soon they would resemble Ella’s, with prominent veins and papery skin. I wasn’t getting any younger, and my options for happiness were limited. I pictured myself sitting in restaurants at tables for one for the rest of my life, ordering the small plate version of the featured entrees. I vowed to try harder with Theo. Because what woman in her right mind wouldn’t want to have a guy like him?
Simpson, obviously bored with the entire subject, slowly shut his eyes and went to sleep, laying his adorable head down on my right instep. I rubbed my eyes and groaned.
CHAPTER NINE
As I was making a venti latte, my phone vibrated in the pocket of my apron. I served the latte to the harried-looking young mom, her two toddlers wailing at being strapped tightly into their twin stroller, screaming “OUT, OUT, OUT!” at the top of their tiny, little lungs. Both the mom and I couldn’t wait for her to get out of there. As she wheeled them furiously out of the store, spilling her latte on her wrist, I wondered if she would slap them as she unstrapped them from one piece of equipment and restrapped them into another for the car ride home. For a second, I wanted to run after that woman and hug her.
I pulled my phone out of my apron. There it was, the text from Mom:
Sunday. The brunch. Diana and Bryan. Be there at eleven. No need to bring anything but a good attitude.
They were coming to town for sure. I replaced the phone in my pocket. My neck muscles seized up. I bit my lip. I needed a quick break to get my shit together. I told Joe I felt sick, which was not a lie, and I nearly ran out through the back to the parking lot. Fresh air. Not. It was a humid seventy-five degrees out there, but I gulped a few lungfuls of the saturated air anyway.
The pulse in my temples was banging like a metronome. I leaned against the wall, rubbing my palms against the brick, and imagined what Sunday might be like.
Diana, looking aglow, her bulge attractively set off by some designer skin-tight top, still lithe, still gorgeous. Bryan, with his great cheekbones and kind eyes, hovering over her. Mom, smiling and beaming, serving spicy Bloody Marys.
Or, and I grinned evilly, this: Diana, her belly bulging, two double chins and jiggly thighs, reaches for her tenth canapé, as Mom and Bryan look on with concern—her excessive weight gain was both unexpected and out of character. Twins had been ruled out, so why was D so fat???
I felt so much better. Keeping the image of a fat and miserable Diana in my head, I went back inside to finish my shift.
I was wiping the counters when Gail breezed through the door, cool and collected in peach linen slacks and a white silk top, nary a drop of perspiration anywhere on her body. She glided up to the counter, and I grinned at her. “You never break a sweat, do you? Meanwhile, we minions toil away making ridiculous, boiling hot coffee combos, sweat dripping down into our underwear. How do you do it?”
Gail waved my question away with a manicured hand. Orange Sherbet, I think that color was called. Her nails always coordinated with her clothes. “One iced coffee, STAT. And Beck, clinical strength antiperspirant works wonders. You might want to visit the drug store. But forget sweat for a moment. I just got a call from Rick. He has tickets to the Gathering Dusk concert on Saturday night. I don’t know how he managed it—it’s been sold out for months. Great seats, too. The man is amazing. Anyway, put it on your calendar. I know you don’t actually have a calendar . . .”
I interrupted her with a huge sigh. “Shitballs. Remember who is in town for a family intervention? For Mother’s Day, no less. I told you this, but of course, you have much more important things on your mind.”
I shoved her iced coffee towards her. “I am to show up ready to embrace Diana, clap Bryan on the back, and let bygones be bygones. Hey, where can I get a legal firearm in this town?”
My comment drew stares from the customer standing behind Gail. He shifted uncomfortably in his wingtips and cleared his throat.
Gail glanced behind her. “Be quiet. Call me tonight.” She grabbed her coffee and a napkin and turned to go, waving her orange manicure at the guy behind her. “Don’t worry—she’s just a barista with a grudge, but she wouldn’t ever kill anyone!”
And with that, she floated out. I gave the guy a free Flat White. He didn’t even smile. He will probably start going to Saxby’s from now on.
Bob was sitting on my front steps when I got home, her knees scabbier than usual, her tee shirt ripped on the right shoulder. I sat down on the steps beside her and pulled on the torn sleeve. “Did you have a run-in with a bear?”
Bob grimaced. “I hit a rock on my scooter and fell off. My scooter got bent up, and Gran says she can’t fix it. So now I don’t have anything to ride around on, and the rest of the summer won’t be any fun at all. And Hallie has her new cool one. So we won’t be able to ride around together.”
She leaned her head on my shoulder, and I put my arm around her. “You can always come visit me. We can draw pictures and play games.”
“Well, being with you is fun. But you work all the time, and that’s when I ride my scooter.”
This child. “Honey, I bet we can find someone who can fix your scooter. A handyman or someone.”
I had never in my entire life known a person who made a living as a handyman, but right that second I determined that I would find one. “I will call my boyfriend, Theo. I bet he could fix it—or if not, know somebody who could. Come on upstairs. I think I have ice cream sandwiches in the freezer.”
Settled onto my sofa with a dishtowel in her lap for protection and licking the drips off the edges of her ice cream sandwich, Bob looked content. “I hope your boyfriend can fix it. I didn’t know you had a boyfriend. His name is Theo? Have I ever seen him? Does he have a cat? Is he handsome, like my dad? Are you going to marry him?”
“Whoa, Bob! Too many questions! But here goes: No, I am not ready to marry him. We just met this summer. Yes, his name is Theo—short for Theodore, I guess. And he is very nice. He does not have a cat.”
Bob smiled through her ice cream mustache. “You didn’t say if he is handsome.”
I pictured Theo in one of his coordinated outfits. “Well. Let’s see. Theo is tall. He has light brown hair.” I was stumped. “I would have to say this: He is not handsome like a movie star, no. But he is nice looking.”
Bob savored the last bite of her treat, wiped her mouth with the towel, then draped it over her head. No explanation. “What does that mean, ‘nice looking’? Does that mean he is nice to people and smiles at them? Or does it mean that he isn’t ugly or anything?” She pulled the towel down over her eyes. Again, no explanation.
“Bob, you ask very intelligent questions. I have to think about this.” I pulled the towel up so I could see Bob’s eyes. “Are you hiding?”
She giggled. “I saw Mr. Havens mowing his lawn this afternoon, and he had a rag draped over his head, kind of like this. He told me it keeps him cooler. I am just testing. But what about your boyfriend? Tell me what he is like.”
I sat back against the throw pillows. I considered this. There was certainly a lack of sexual chemistry there. We had not progressed beyond kissing. And the kissing was, at best, lukewarm. I marveled at my own lack of enthusiasm.
“I guess I maybe shouldn’t call Theo my boyfriend, yet. He is a v
ery nice man that I am dating. We don’t know each other that well. But I bet he could fix your scooter.”
Bob looked skeptical. “Your heart didn’t pop like popcorn when you met him? If it didn’t, then he shouldn’t be your boyfriend.”
Good heavens. “Bob, you are one of the wisest women I know. You are right in many ways. The closest I ever came to popcorn was when I met my former boyfriend, Bryan. My sister is married to that man, though.” Shit. I was spilling my guts to an eight-year-old.
Bob sat upright and pulled the towel off her head. “Oh, no! That’s terrible!”
I had already jumped off the deep end here, so I figured I had to keep going. “It all happened a long time ago. I’m fine. You don’t need to be worried.”
She looked totally worried. Her eyes widened, and she put her grubby hands over her heart. “Your sister? Married your boyfriend? But why?”
This was the perfect end to a fucktacular day. How could I distill my disastrous romantic history down to a story fit for a precocious eight-year-old? How could I protect her, already maimed emotionally by her own family situation?
I did my best to deflect. “Bob, you know that life is very complicated. My family isn’t perfect. He and I didn’t agree on a lot of things. After we broke up, he started to love my sister. It was just all mixed up. You know how that is. Your mom and dad loved each other, but there were so many problems that they had to face. Your dad was gone overseas so much, and your mom was so sad and took drugs in order to deal with things. They just couldn’t make their relationship work out. But they had you, and they both love you.”
Bob twisted the towel into a tight roll. She seemed to pull inwards. Even her freckles seemed to dim. It was a whisper: “My mom doesn’t love me. She loves drugs.”
We were very still. I watched Bob wring the towel, helpless. My platitudes were ridiculous here. This child seemed desperately in need of a love story with a happy ending. So I manufactured one, right on the spot. “Bob. You know what? I bet you’re wrong about your mother. If your dad loved her, she can’t be a bad person, right? She’s just sick. Drugs make people sick. Your father is going to come home, and he will be just fine. And you, your dad, and your gran are going to live right across the street from me. And maybe your mom will get better and come, too.”
Bob threw the towel on the floor. She leaned towards me, glaring, dry-eyed. “My mother will never get better. She is a selfish witch. We are not going to have her live with us. Ever. You are wrong about that.”
We sat quietly as my heart shattered.
▷◁
Just as the afternoon waned, as I sat on my sofa brooding about lost loves and twisting my hair, there was a knock on my door. I schlepped over and peered out the peephole. There stood Theo, in a grass green polo shirt and madras Bermudas, holding in one hand a bottle of what looked like merlot, in the other a bunch of bright orange Gerbera daisies. He looked a little delicious, in spite of my previous judgments. I gave myself a tiny little mental pep talk about not judging books and covers, and I swung the door wide.
“Hi, Beck! It’s going to be a beautiful evening. I love it right before it starts to get dark, don’t you? I know I wasn’t invited,” and he held out the bottle and flowers sheepishly, “but I thought you might enjoy some wine and conversation. Oh, and flowers.”
I curtsied, motioning him in. “This is just exactly what I need right now.” I sniffed the daisies, which had no odor whatsoever. “Let me go get a vase and some wineglasses.” Feeling nobler than I have in a while, and really wanting to give Theo the full benefit of all the doubts in my head, I kissed him. A breezy kiss, but it took him by surprise, and he fell back a step, then beamed. He marched behind me into the kitchen.
“Let me get this open so it can breathe. Corkscrew?” He set the bottle down and opened my junk drawer.
“No, no, not there. Just a sec.” I pulled the corkscrew out of my implement crock. “Here you go.”
The flowers looked beautiful in the turquoise vase that Bryan brought me home from one of his business trips. Bryan. I stopped myself from comparing Theo to Bryan. Okay. I tried.
We sat down on the sofa, twirling our wine. It was delish. I perhaps should have restrained myself from gulping down half of my glass all at once. Theo’s eyes widened.
“Hard day?”
I wanted to swig down the rest of the merlot, but I set my glass down on the coffee table and took a deep breath. “You might say that. Let’s see—where do I begin? With the imminent arrival of my horrid, selfish, and evil pregnant sister, whom I am expected to hug and kiss this Saturday evening, or the little child from across the street who has been abandoned by her druggie mother, left with her sweet but frail great-grandma, and who fully expects her father to die in the Middle East, where he is deployed to some secret location to fight Muslim terrorists?”
Theo set his glass down. His face sagged. “My God. Go on.”
It all came out in a rush. “I haven’t told you about my bitch younger sister, Diana. Diana, the beautiful and self-involved. Oh, yeah. She married my former boyfriend. Not just a casual boyfriend—we had lived together for years.”
Theo gasped. “She broke you two up?” Lines of concern formed across his forehead.
“Well, no. We had broken up. But still. There are the unwritten rules. Sisters don’t touch one another’s property—present or former.”
He nodded. But I could tell by the baffled look in his eyes that he had no idea about this very important unwritten rule.
“Now she’s pregnant, and despite the fact that she crapped all over me, my mother expects me to forgive and forget, for the sake of the baby and the family.” Hell and damnation—I drank the rest of my wine in one swallow and poured myself a second glass.
Theo swallowed. He looked deeply into his glass of wine, and then back at me. He shrugged, tilted back his glass, draining it as well. He grabbed the bottle away from me, filled his glass, and held the wine bottle up to the light. “We are going to need at least two more bottles of this.”
Right then and there, I began to appreciate Theo.
“Can you tell me exactly what happened? You know, so I can hate your sister, too. And get up to speed on the unwritten rule.” He winked.
I told him the whole sorry story. He sat, rapt, nodding in all the right places, keeping his mouth shut. When I ended with, “And that is why I despise her,” Theo ran a hand through his hair, shifted in his seat, and then stood up slowly. As he walked towards the bathroom, he said, “I held it in until you finished. I will return to digest all of this with you.”
I watched his orange shirt disappear down the hall, his sandals flapping. Theo was calm, quiet, and deliberate, all things that I was not at the moment. Or anytime, really. I listened to his muffled tinkling—endearing, really— and wished that I were in love with Theo. I wondered for the millionth time what was wrong with me.
“I like that soap you have in the bathroom. It smells like flowers.” His face was so kind, but in that bland, Theo-ish way. He picked up the bottle of Chardonnay that we had finished after we polished off the merlot. “Empty.”
He ambled into the kitchen, and I heard him depositing the empty bottle in the trash, carefully, so it wouldn’t clank into the merlot bottle and shatter. He rustled around in there for a few minutes and emerged, carrying two glasses of ice water. “We don’t need to get any drunker,” (I was so not drunk) “so I brought some water. We need to stay hydrated.” (I mentioned Theo’s obsession with hydration already, right?)
I was too weak to argue, so I took the ice water and glugged some down. Theo drank his entire glass while standing, made the “time out” sign with his hands, and went back for a refill. Then he settled back down on the sofa beside me, rubbed my shoulders, and offered up a solution.
“I think that if I went with you to this brunch thing, it might be helpful. You know, moral supp
ort.”
Backup. Yes. “Oh, Theo. This isn’t your problem.” But I said this with very little conviction.
He patted my shoulder. “I know. But think about it. If I’m there, first off, you won’t seem like the poor, injured party, all alone and sad. And second, with me there, maybe everybody will be on their best behavior. You know how that is.”
I did. Awkward. But there are times when awkward is good. I imagined Mom, passing around tiny biscuits filled with strawberry cream cheese, her face set in a paralyzing smile. Bryan would be over-polite, enthusiastically cramming the biscuits down his throat, despite the fact that he hates cream cheese. D would patronize Theo, treat me like dirt, and run her hands all over Bryan, but she would keep her insults to a minimum, because THEO.
“Theo, it just isn’t right to put you in the center of all of this. But my God, having you there would be so helpful.” I tried to smile, but it came out as a grimace.
“Then it’s settled. But we still haven’t talked about the little girl.” Theo glanced out the window.
It was my turn to get up and pace. I did three laps around the living room, my hydrated guts churning.
“This little girl. She hates her mom? Do you want to sit down and tell me about it?”
I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to breach Bob’s trust. I went over to the window and looked over at Ella Bowers’ porch, Bob’s broken scooter lying on the cement floor, as if someone had carelessly thrown it up there. Bob was nowhere to be seen. “Theo, are you handy at all? Do you think you could fix a broken scooter?”
Theo got up and came over to stand beside me at the window. “That one over there? Is it the little girl’s? I might. Should we go over and have a look?”
What the hell. “Sure. I have some tools.”
I got the toolbox I kept under my bed. Theo tried to hold my hand as we walked through the front yard, but I pulled away. Then I thought better of it and reached out to him, but the moment had passed. Awkward.
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