I stumbled into the bathroom in my high heels and locked the door behind me. There were mirrors all over the textured cement walls, a gigantic bathtub, and one of those Japanese toilets with buttons and dials all over it. I unzipped my purse and dug out on my cell phone, terrified that I wouldn’t be able to get a signal with all that cement all over the place.
“We’re dancin’—after midnight—you and meeee…”
“Hello?”
“Jerry,” I whispered into the phone, curled up in the corner between the tub and the locked bathroom door. “Jerry, you’ve got to come get me.”
“Fee? I can’t hear you. Speak up.”
“Jerry. I’m at the Omni Hotel, okay? In DC. You’ve got to come get me now.”
“The Omni Hotel? Why are you there? I thought you and Madison were going to be—”
“Listen, I’m calling you from the bathroom, okay? I don’t have a lot of time. I’m in a hotel room with C. J. Anastasio, and he’s doing dance routines in his underwear out in the living room. Please come get me.”
“What?” Jerry laughed. “Seriously, Fee, where are you? I can get you if you want. Just let me jump in the shower real quick and I’ll be right over. I stink. I was on the treadmill for the whole second half of Lost.”
“No. I don’t care if you stink. Come get me now. I’m in room 602, okay? At the Omni. In Northwest.”
“With C. J. Anastasio? Is Kim Basinger there, too? Man, you and I could have a hell of a night on our hands.”
“I’m not kidding, Jerry. Madison ran off and left me for Quentin Tarantino. Don’t even stop to pee, okay? Just get in the car.”
Jerry laughed again. “Yes, ma’am. And hey, no funny business with C. J. Tell him I’ll tie him up with those L.A. Gear shoelaces if he touches you.” Over the phone I could hear the creak of the front door opening. “Okay, I’m on my way. You want me to stop and pick up Vin Diesel so we can both kick his ass?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Antonia’s hand bumped against mine as we both dipped our slices of bread into the bowl of bruschetta that sat in the middle of the table. Beside me Jerry was looking a little annoyed; the music in the restaurant was turned up several notches too loud, and Jerry didn’t like having to raise his voice to be heard. He did it all day long at work.
“I could hardly believe it,” he was saying to Carl, Antonia’s husband. “Here Madison’s supposedly taking her to some club called Schadenfreude or something—”
“Angst,” I corrected.
“—and she calls me and tells me she’s alone in a hotel room with C. J. Anastasio. Yeah, right. And I’m having a beer with the Dalai Lama. So I show up where she tells me to, and it turns out she actually is alone in a hotel room with C. J. Anastasio. If she hadn’t physically stopped me, I would have knocked those porcelain veneers right through the roof of his mouth.”
Carl stirred his straw around in his Coke. “She physically stopped you?”
“She grabbed me by the wrist. Lucky for her I can’t make a fist with my left hand since my motorcycle accident. Lucky for him, I mean. If he’d still been in his underwear, I probably would have tried to do it anyway.”
“Man, you’re pretty scrappy for an English teacher.”
“I’m not scrappy. What would you do if you walked in on Toni and some guy alone in a hotel room together? Shake his hand?”
Carl gave an acknowledging nod. “Shake his spine out, maybe. Like you used to be able to do in Mortal Kombat.”
Jerry nodded seriously, his arms folded against the table in front of him. “That’d be cool. I could probably do that with my left hand.”
“Oh, stop it, you two.” Antonia wiped her fingers on her napkin and crumpled it beside her plate. “That’s just what Phoebe needs, is more appearances in the tabloids.”
I finished my piece of bread and tapped Jerry on the arm. “Yours is a lot better.”
“My what?”
“Your bruschetta. This doesn’t have enough garlic.”
Antonia laced her fingers through Carl’s and sat back in her chair. “By the way, are you guys living together now?”
“Mostly,” said Jerry. “She’s hardly got anything left over at her apartment. It turns out she’s moving out just in time. Her roommate’s got some Indian guy over there twenty-four hours a day.”
“Jerry’s finally going to meet my parents,” I added. “My dad and stepmom, anyway. Madison’s bringing Rhett over tomorrow to meet everybody. It’s kind of scary, you know? Both fiancés meeting the parents at the same time.”
Carl grinned at Jerry across the table. “You intimidated, man?”
Jerry shrugged. “Kind of. I don’t think anybody looks forward to meeting their girlfriend’s father. ‘Hello, sir. I’m the guy who’s sleeping with your daughter. Nice to meet you.’ It was probably easier a hundred years ago.”
“No, I mean because of Rhett,” said Carl. “Coming up next to some celebrity guy who’s all charming and slick. I think I’d be intimidated.”
“Who says I’m not charming and slick?” asked Jerry.
Antonia giggled. “I think you’re very charming, Jerry.”
Carl grinned, letting go of Antonia’s hand and stretching his arms back behind his head. “I think you’re kind of a geek.”
“Kind of a geek?” Jerry shot him a dirty look and sat back as the waitress started setting our plates down. “Ask C. J. Anastasio. I’m a wolf in geek’s clothing.”
On the morning of the big meet-the-parents gathering, there was a layer of snow as fine as baby powder over the yard, dusting the tomato cages and the tricycle and setting a firm gentle chill along every windowsill in the old house. Pepper shook it off in a delicate oblong shape that melted almost instantly into the green tile of the kitchen floor. On the way to my father’s house, we compromised on Jerry’s Blue Öyster Cult CD after I vetoed his Stryper album.
“No heavy metal when we’re in my car,” I reminded him.
“It’s Christian heavy metal,” he insisted. “Headbanging for Jesus.”
“Forget it.”
“I think it’s kind of inspirational.”
“I think Amy Grant is inspirational, but you don’t see me foisting it on you just because I’m the one driving.”
He grimaced and slid the Blue Öyster Cult CD into the player. “Point taken.”
“Now,” I said as the music began, “there are a few things you need to know about my dad and stepmom. They’re a little odd.”
“Great. I hadn’t picked up on that from having your sister in my class.”
“Very funny. Now, about my stepmom. She’s one of the other professors in my dad’s department, and my dad left my mom for her. My mother still insists on calling her a secretary. She’s a not a secretary. She’s got a Ph.D. in English. But whatever you do, when you meet the rest of my family, don’t talk about her around my mother.”
“Okay, got it. Don’t talk about the mistress around the ex-wife.”
“Right. Now, the next thing is, my father thinks my mother is a psycho. He tries to keep it to himself, but it comes out every now and then. I don’t pay any attention to it anymore. He’s also got kind of a dirty sense of humor. Whatever you do, don’t talk about religion with my dad or my stepmom. My dad doesn’t like organized religion, and my stepmother’s got some kind of New Age spiritual thing going. If you try to listen for too long, your head explodes. So tune it out.”
Jerry slowed for a stoplight, slumping a little in his seat. “You know, we’re only ten minutes from home. I don’t mind at all if you’d rather do this some other time.”
“You’ve got to meet these people, Jer. You’re going to be related to them by this time next year.”
“My family’s so much simpler.”
“Just be thankful that the rest of my relatives won’t be there. One of my cousins is a member of the American Communist Party, and when you get him together with my born-again Christian aunt and my gay stepbrother and his partner—”
/>
Jerry held up one hand. “Stop. Just stop for now. I love you. I really want to marry you. Tell me about these people after the wedding, once it’s too late to change my mind.”
When we got to my father’s house, most of the driveway was occupied by a shiny, cherry-red pickup truck with temporary tags and a Dale Earnhardt sticker on the back window, the slanted number three. On the chrome back bumper was another sticker that said, “Protected by Smith & Wesson.”
“Whose car is that?” asked Jerry.
“I have no idea. I’ve never seen it before.”
He parked the Jetta at the curb, and we walked up to the front door. Madison let us in. She had on a short, strapless pink dress, her boobs floating out of the top like the bobbing-for-apples game at our class Halloween party.
“Phoebe!” She gave me a big hug. “You look fantastic! And this must be Jerry.”
“Nice to meet you,” he said.
“You, too!” She rose up on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek, leaving a shimmery, lopsided pink circle. “The mystery man. Finally we meet.”
Rhett had stood up from the sofa and was hovering behind Madison, one hand in his pants pocket and a can of Budweiser in the other hand. He wore normal clothes, a pair of dark-washed Levi’s and a green oxford shirt with the sleeves folded up above the elbow, instead of all the sweaters and smoking jackets they’d put him in on the show. His dark hair flopped down onto his forehead, pushed out of the way of his eyes. He looked shorter, somehow, in real life. Jerry was an inch or so taller.
“You must be Colby,” said Jerry.
“That’s me,” he said. He switched his beer can to his left hand and shook Jerry’s with his right. Beside me, I could feel Jerry shrinking back into his unfamiliar-territory mode. Rhett could see it, too. He smiled wider.
Jerry sat down on the sofa and Melody, my stepmother, sat down in a chair across from him. She wore a long emerald green skirt and a flowing top that matched, her blond hair falling all the way to her elbows. She was fifty-five years old, five years younger than my mother. If I stood close to her now I could see the silver in her hair, but she was holding out amazingly well. So was my father, who had always been a good-looking guy. It didn’t improve my mother’s opinion of either of them.
“So you’re Alexa’s English teacher,” said Melody. “It’s so nice to meet you. Alexa’s told me so much about you.”
That was unlikely. My half sister was sitting on the sofa reading a novel, the headphones of her iPod tucked into her ears. A whisper of fuzzy, unidentifiable music buzzed softly around her. She met my eyes in acknowledgement but otherwise didn’t move.
“Yeah. She’s one of my more advanced kids.”
My stepmother beamed. Rhett put his feet up on the coffee table and smiled his thousand-watt grin.
“A high-school English teacher, huh?” he said. “There’s a living.”
“I like it,” said Jerry.
“What do you teach?” asked Rhett.
Jerry gave him one of those smart-kid-talking-to-the-class-moron looks. “English,” he repeated slowly.
“I mean like what books,” Rhett tossed back, as though Jerry was the one who was an idiot.
“All kinds of books. A Separate Peace. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Right now I’ve got my eleventh-graders working in A Catcher in the Rye.”
“Oh, yeah?” asked Rhett. “That about farming?”
My stepmother coughed. Jerry turned his head a little more toward Rhett, his eyes narrowing. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “It’s about this country boy named Holden Caulfield.”
“We’re kin to some Caulfields. Say, you ever read Romeo and Juliet?”
“I think I’ve heard of it.”
“Yeah, that’s like me and Grace, right there. We’re just like them.” He winked at my sister. She smiled back at him. She actually seemed to like the guy. Madison, really, wasn’t all that picky. She liked any guy as long as he was attractive enough, and Rhett was pretty darn attractive, even without a hairstylist and professional lighting. It wasn’t that Madison was phony. She was, as I’d insisted all the way through the TV season, a loving person, and she was happy to find something she could sincerely love in any guy as long as he fit the rest of her criteria.
“That’s very romantic,” said Jerry.
“Well. It must have been so much fun for you to be on that TV show,” said my stepmother cheerfully, lacing her hands together over her knee.
“Yeah, it was great,” agreed Rhett. “Getting to go out with all those girls. None as pretty as Grace.” He grinned at my sister. “Don’t ask me how they picked ‘em, though. I told them I wasn’t going to pick no black girls, and they had one in there anyhow. Like I could have brought her home to Momma.”
Melody blinked rapidly. On the sofa beside me, Jerry stifled a laugh by taking a drink of root beer from the can. Jerry was a pretty solid Democrat, but even he would have called my stepmom a bleeding-heart liberal. This could get entertaining.
“Oh, I’m sure she was a nice woman,” she said.
“Could be. Each their own, I guess. I figured I’d let the queer guy have her.”
“Excuse me?” asked Melody. She hadn’t actually watched the show. As far as I knew, she didn’t watch TV at all. Sitcoms and comic strips confused her. She didn’t get the humor.
“Les, the Ashley guy. Queer as a three-dollar bill. You didn’t see him?”
“Um, I’m afraid not.”
“Oh, he was a fairy if ever I saw one. Hell, I’m not biased against homosexuals and such. I just made sure they didn’t try to stick us in the same trailer. You never know when one of ‘em’s going to try any funny business.”
“Well, perhaps I should finish getting dinner ready.”
Melody smiled and rose from her chair. As soon as she left the room, Alexa tugged the headphones from her ears and set her book on the coffee table.
“Hey there, Lex,” I said to her.
“Hey,” she muttered back, not looking at Jerry. Her black-dyed hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail at the base of her neck, her thin shoulders squarish under her black Linkin Park T-shirt. She was probably going to make a voodoo doll in my likeness for bringing her English teacher home to meet her parents.
“So your mom’s an English professor, huh?” Jerry asked conversationally. He craned his neck to look at the bookshelf across the room and Alexa shot me a look of wide-eyed terror. It was the shelf on which Melody kept her old ‘70s and ‘80s copies of Delta of Venus and The Joy of Sex and My Secret Garden. She supposedly kept them out in the open so her daughter would grow up with a healthy attitude toward sexuality. I understood at once, with sisterly intuition, that if Jerry saw what was on the bookshelf, Alexa would instantly vanish in a puff of humiliation.
“The good books are on the shelf in the dining room, actually,” I said, jerking on Jerry’s hand a little too firmly.
“Oh, yeah?” Jerry stood up and wandered over to the other bookshelf, and Alexa offered me a smile of pained and abject gratitude. Once again, I felt sorry for her. Every child should be entitled to have two sexually repressed parents. It was so much healthier, psychologically.
Madison plopped herself down beside me in the spot that Jerry had just vacated and handed me an envelope. “Merry Christmas,” she said.
I took the envelope from her. “A little late, aren’t you?”
“You’ll forgive me. It’s two tickets to Jamaica for Valentine’s Day. You want ‘em?”
I laughed. “Sure. You just happened to have them lying around?”
“Sort of. Colby and I were supposed to do an appearance at a resort, but they changed the schedule on us again. Now we’re going to be in Miami. I’m getting sooo sick of Florida.”
I tore the envelope open and took out the sheaf of tickets and brochures. “Hotel and everything? Why doesn’t the studio just cancel?”
“Oh, by the time they get around to it, it’ll be Easter. The flight leaves Friday aftern
oon. I know it’s kind of short notice, but I figured you wouldn’t have any other plans. So, Lexie—did you watch my show?”
“Not really,” said Alexa, politely ignoring the glare I was giving Madison. “I don’t watch TV.”
“Oh, you should have. Not even the finale? When your own big sister’s in the final four?”
“Everyone at school told me enough about it,” Alexa sneered. “They teased me nonstop. Even more than when you were in that breath-freshener commercial. Couldn’t you just get a normal job? Like be a waitress or work in a store or something?”
“You just wait, Lexie,” Madison said patiently, patting her on the knee. “I’ll bring you to the Emmys with me. I’ll take you to the spa and we’ll get massages and manicures and pedicures and anything else you want. Then you’ll have the last laugh, just like I’m having it right now.”
Alexa looked down at her stubby fingernails. “Can I get black?”
Suddenly the door swung open and along with a blast of chilly wet air came my very tall stepbrother, stepping through the doorway in his black wool coat with a scarf tossed cavalierly around his neck. “Hell-oooo!” he called.
Madison and I jumped up at once. “Pete!” we both squealed.
“No autographs,” he said, grinning. He unwound the scarf from his neck and hung it on the coat tree as a shorter, tanned guy with a black crew cut came in behind him. That was Dominic, Pete’s partner. No one had been expecting either of them. They were supposed to be somewhere around Juneau.
Melody popped her head around the entrance to the living room. “Pete? Is that you?”
“Yes, indeedy.” He and Dominic made their way around the living room, giving out hugs and shaking hands. Pete had that clean-cut minister look about him, with dark combed-over hair and a squared-off jaw, and an earnest look in his eyes, appealing yet authoritative. He had a great tan from all the time he spent around the equator, and wore stylish flat-front khakis with a navy blue sweater and a striped tie. Dominic had on baggy cargo pants and a rugby shirt. He was about five foot four, and although he was thirty years old, he looked like he was eighteen.
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