The second night I turned sleeplessly under the blanket tucked hotel-tight against the mattress, the basement dampness touching the sheets with a clammy humidity. Finally I sat up and wiggled my feet into my slippers, rising up from the bed’s squeaky protests, and pulled on my bathrobe. The upstairs light framed the closed basement door in a dim halo. As I shuffled up the stairs, I could hear Jerry still awake in the living room, the TV turned down low. I microwaved a cup of water and dropped a chamomile teabag into it, tapped in a teaspoon of sugar, and peeked out into the living room as I walked back over to the basement stairs.
Jerry was lying on the sofa in a gray T-shirt and plaid PJ pants, a few inches of his hairy stomach visible between the two, his cheeks sandpapery with stubble. His gray-blue eyes looked oddly pale in the reflected light from the TV. One of the sofa pillows was tucked between his head and his arm; open on the floor was a bag of swirly red-and-white Starlight mints, one of which was tucked into his cheek. He flicked it down with his tongue, and I could hear it clicking against his teeth as he sucked on it. I hesitated, then stepped into the space between the kitchen and living room, leaning my shoulder against the wall.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He glanced over at me and for a moment his eyes went back to their regular color. It was the first thing I’d said to him in two days that I didn’t have to say.
“I’m not getting drunk,” he said.
“I know.”
“I mean that’s what I’m doing. There’s no verb for it. There ought to be.” He shifted the Starlight mint to his other cheek. “You don’t eat, you can say you’re dieting. You don’t spend money, you can say you’re saving, and if you stop jerking off, you can say you’re abstaining. There’s no verb for not drinking. Language fucks up sometimes.”
I looked at him strangely. He never talked like that; if he wasn’t making a point of the fact he wasn’t drinking, I might have suspected he was drunk.
“Well, I’m glad you’re not drinking, anyway,” I said.
“Cool.” He dropped the mint down into his mouth and clicked it against his teeth again. “Funny, huh? I know a hundred ways to say I’m getting drunk and none to say I’m not. Maybe that’s our version of how the Eskimos have a hundred words for snow. Cultural priorities. They probably don’t have any word for saying it’s hot outside.”
For a long moment I stared at him watchfully, then glanced over at the TV. “What are you watching?”
“Lord of the Flies.”
“Again? It’s eleven o’clock. There’s probably something good on regular TV.”
“There’s booze commercials. This movie’s safe. It’s on my list.”
“Your list?”
“Yeah, my mental list of movies where nobody’s drinking. Now’s not the time for me to trip over a Miller Lite commercial. I’ve already got my car keys in the icemaker.”
I set my cup down on the side table and sat down beside him on the sofa, rubbing his thigh with my full hand. “You want me to come upstairs with you?”
“No. I’m not trying to make you feel guilty.”
“It doesn’t sound like you’re doing very well. I don’t want to make things any harder for you.”
“It’s not on you. It’s my problem. God’s problem. Whatever. Anyway, I’m doing fine.” With a flick of his index finger he gestured to the bag of mints on the floor. “It’s hard to imagine how a beer would taste when your mouth tastes like these things. You ought to see what I can do to a jar of pickles when it gets like this.”
I slid my hand up his arm and rubbed his shoulder in circles. “I don’t know what to tell you, Jer.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything. Getting drunk wouldn’t change anything, anyway. All it would do is convince you I’m even less worth your while. That’s not my goal.” He sat up and clicked off the TV, then folded his hands against his face, his elbows balanced on his thighs. “See you in the morning.”
“Are you going to bed?”
“Yeah.”
“You want to get your keys out of the icemaker first?”
“No, it’s too early. The bars don’t close until two. I’ll defrost it in the morning.” He stood up and kissed the top of my head. “I love you. Sleep tight.”
“Jerry…I’ll come to bed with you, okay? I don’t like sleeping alone, either.”
“I’m fine sleeping alone. I’ve done it my whole life.”
I tucked my arms, folded, close against my body. “You don’t even want me to come to bed with you?”
He sighed and turned at the foot of the stairs. “If you get in bed with me, either we’ll end up making love and cluttering up the problem, or else we won’t make love because of what’s going on and we’ll both just end up feeling even more alone.”
“Not necessarily. If we’re just next to each other, at least, we won’t be as lonely.”
He smirked. “That’s exactly what got me into this mess. I think it might do me some good to have a good goddamn dose of lonely.” Alexa called the next afternoon, almost the moment I got off work. From the background noise, I could tell she was on the school bus. Her hesitant whisper was barely audible over the din.
“Are you mad at me?” she asked, in answer to my “hello.”
I sighed as I hurried through the parking lot to my car. “No, but it wasn’t really your place to meddle. It’s between me and Jerry, Lex. We’re grown-ups. We can handle it ourselves.”
“He’s being pathetic, Phoebe. He had this picture on his desk of you and him in some restaurant, and now it’s just gone. He couldn’t have done anything that bad. I mean, he’s Mr. Sullivan. What did he do, correct your grammar? Or, like, make some really bad puns? Because he does that sometimes, but I mean, it’s nothing to dump him over.”
“Honestly, it’s really not your business, okay? I can handle my own relationship. I don’t need advice from a girl who’s never even had a boyfriend.”
“Well, neither have you. Not a decent one, anyway. Dad said you and Madison were in a contest to see who could bring home the biggest loser. She’s totally got you this time, Fee, but boy, you had us all going for a while.”
I fumbled in my purse for my keys. “Alexa…you’re really starting to get on my nerves.”
“So, are you guys all patched up now?”
“No. I’m thinking about my options. And they’re my options, all right? So stop trying to involve yourself. It isn’t going to make any difference one way or another.”
“Whatever. If a guy was totally puppy-dogging over me, I wouldn’t just sit around torturing him. He’s so nice, Phoebe. He’s really boring, and he’s not all that cute, but he totally thinks the universe revolves around you. To be perfectly honest, I’m going to think you’re the world’s biggest dork if you dump him. And it’s not just me, either. There’s a whole group of freshmen who’ve started a petition that you should get back together.”
“Oh, well, make sure you turn that in. Every vote counts.”
“Fine, dump him if you want. I swear, you and Madison. She’s madly in love with a total freak and you’re ditching the nicest guy you’ve ever hooked up with. Were you guys, like, Siamese twins connected at the brain or something? Where you each only got half when they separated you?”
I threw my purse forcefully onto the passenger seat. “Hey, watch it. Show a little respect. Who came to your rescue when you and your little friends screwed up your rat-liberation attempt?”
“Mr. Sullivan did. You see what I mean? I’m totally not speaking to you until you kiss and make up. So there.”
She clicked off her phone and left me standing in the parking lot with the silent phone against my ear, the wind rippling in my skirt. Alexa was naive if she thought her temper tantrum could make any difference at all in how I weighed my options. My mind was already made up. Now all I had to do was wait for Jerry to come home, and then break the news.
Jerry came home from work with flowers. He’d done the same thing the day
before. Today, instead of chickening out and laying them on the table, he stood across from me in the kitchen, holding them out to me. I looked at him for a few seconds, my arms crossed, before I took them.
“How was your day?” he asked guardedly.
“Fine.”
He bit his lip. “Do you want to go out to dinner?”
“No. I want to talk to you.”
“All right,” he said, perking up.
“If there’s anything else you need to come clean with, now’s the time to do it. I don’t want to find out a month from now that you’ve got herpes or slept with somebody else’s wife.”
He shook his head quickly. “You’ve got all my dirt.”
My eyes drifted past him, out the window, to that orderly yard with its stacked chairs and tomato cages and garden hose rolled up neatly against the garage. “There’s nothing okay about what you did,” I told him. “Either the lying or the thing you did to get arrested in the first place.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t know. If you knew, you wouldn’t be comparing it to Burger King and making it clear enough that you could have kept doing it forever if you hadn’t gotten caught.”
Tapping the counter with the backs of his fingers, he looked down at the floor, his skin turning pink beneath his thinning hair. “I don’t know what else I can tell you, Fee.”
“But I’m going to let it go anyway.”
He looked up at me. “You are?”
“Yeah. I’m going to forget that you did that, and I expect you never even to think about doing anything like it again. Deal?”
He put his hand against the counter and laughed in relief, just once, that kidlike delighted sound that I’d loved from the first time I’d heard it. “Deal. I can’t even begin to tell you how much I appreciate that.”
“Don’t screw up,” I warned him.
Shaking his head, he put his arms around me and squeezed me so hard that I couldn’t draw a breath. “I won’t.”
Toward the middle of March I got a call from Madison, on a Sunday evening while Jerry and I were snuggled up on the sofa watching The Producers for the third time. We’d come home from church around noon and had lunch and then spent most of the afternoon making love, which was pretty much all we did on Sundays, besides watch movies. Jerry claimed to have a strong conviction about Sunday being a day of rest, which might have been true but also seemed like a pretty convenient excuse to avoid the mall and spend the day enjoying his favorite hobbies.
“It’s going to be on March twentieth,” Madison said emphatically. I could practically see her sitting on the edge of a bed in a hotel somewhere, her free hand chopping the air on every other word. “At Cottonwood Farms Plantation in Fowler’s Creek, Georgia.”
“Hold on a second.” I gestured for Jerry’s notebook and pen and he passed them to me. “Okay. Is that sweeps week?”
“No, but my network’s having a ratings battle with one of the other networks for the day-before-Easter prime-time slot. It’s a tight competition, but hopefully we’ll win it.”
“Oh, really? What’s the other network running?”
“The Passion of the Christ. Hopefully we can knock it down to the number-two spot if we do enough promotion. Oh, and I got a commercial with one of the show’s sponsors, but I have to get married before they can release it.”
“What? Why?”
“Because it’s for Afterglow Disposable Freshening Towelettes. Obviously they can’t put my face on the product if everyone knows I’m not married.”
“Why not? You had sex with the guy on national TV.”
“That’s beside the point. And there’s another thing I need to talk to you about, too, just real quick.”
“Are you seriously doing a commercial for those things? Boy, I remember when you used to laugh about the women in the Massengill ads in Mom’s magazines. Are you going to have to be, like, a spokesperson for them?”
“I don’t know. Listen, Phoebe—”
“That’s just totally funny. You know what they’re missing, though? Like, one of those easy-release adhesives on the back, so you can stick them to the sheets. I mean, the waterproof backing is nice and all, but they shift all over the place. They’d sell like crazy if they made a sticky version. I mean, you know. ‘Cause I mean, we’ve got a dark blue duvet cover, and—”
“Phoebe. Stop it for a minute. I need to talk to you about my wedding. Listen, you can’t tell them that you’re my twin, okay? Just say sister.”
“I can’t?”
“No. You just can’t. I mean, it’s one thing for Colby to know, but if everyone else finds out how old I really am, I’ll be screwed for good. I’ve got a career to think about, okay? Do this for me. I’ve worked way too hard to come all this way and lose everything just because I’m almost thirty. I’m on the cover of Modern Bride this month, Fee. The cover.”
“But they’ll figure it out anyway. All they have to do is go to our high-school yearbook, for one thing. That’s practically the first thing they check.”
“I’m Madison in the high-school yearbook, though. Just do this for me, okay? All I need is one good acting job and then it doesn’t matter what they find out. Please, Phoebe. I’m the closest I’ve ever been.”
I sighed and tickled Pepper with my toe. “Okay.”
The studio called us a week before the wedding to give us all the details—the name of our hotel, the schedule of events, the date and time we needed to report for duty. The day before the welcome reception I picked Jerry up after work and we set off for Blacksburg, a single suitcase and an overnight bag in the back of the Jetta and our dress clothes hanging in their dry-cleaning plastic from the little hook above the back window. We stayed at a Days Inn overnight and the next morning got back on the interstate to Atlanta, still a day’s drive away.
“You’d think they’d fly us down there,” I complained. “They fly out a zillion people from California and won’t pay for two measly tickets for us. I’m her twin, for goodness’ sake.”
“They don’t know that.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. I guess I’d better not let that slip. The last thing I need is my picture in People with the word ‘Before’ over it.”
“Don’t be down on yourself. I keep telling you, I think you’re better looking. You’ve—” He stopped short.
“I’ve what?”
“Never mind.”
“No, tell me. What were you going to say?”
He cleared his throat. “You’ve got a nicer ass.”
I laughed. “Oh, well, thanks. I guess I’ll just take the compliment and not ask why you were looking at my sister’s butt.”
“Your sister doesn’t have a butt. She needs a good home-cooked meal. I’d be afraid I’d snap her in half.”
“Okay, you can stop right there.”
“Sorry.” He moved over to the left lane, ducking to look in the side mirror. “What’s this event we’re supposed to be at tonight?”
“It’s just some kind of reception. Madison said something about feeding everybody so they can get the lighting right and have people get to know each other so the real wedding reception tomorrow will look more natural. You know how usually people are wandering around in circles because they don’t know anybody there.”
“I guess. I hate parties like that.”
“I know you do. When we have ours, it’ll be small, okay? Like fifty people.”
“I was thinking more like twenty.”
“See, the problem with twenty is that four of them would be my parents and stepparents, and since they all hate each other except for my stepfather, that’s kind of a small group to have to mingle without setting off World War Three.”
“Oh, for crying out loud.”
“Look, I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do about it. And then there’ll be Rhett, if he’s still around. You’ve seen what he’s like at family gatherings. Imagine what he’d be like with an open bar. We need more people so we can blend h
im in.”
“Since when are we having an open bar?”
“My dad’ll want one. He’d be afraid people would think he was cheap if he didn’t.”
“Do you think you could bring up the fact that the groom is a recovering alcoholic?”
“Do you want me to?”
“Not particularly.”
“I didn’t think so. Why, do you think it would be a problem for you?”
“No, but I can’t guarantee it won’t make me cranky to be around all that booze when I can’t drink any.”
“That’s fine. I can explain it to him. I don’t want you getting cranky at your own wedding.”
He sighed grouchily, glowering out at the road. “We ought to just elope.”
“No kidding. It would certainly make things less complicated.”
“Okey-dokey.” He checked his right-side mirror and shifted over one lane at a time. “Let’s go do it.”
“Go do what?” I laughed. “Elope?”
“Yeah, sure. We’re in Tennessee. It’s like Vegas. You can get married whenever you want.”
“You’re not serious, are you?”
“I’m completely serious. I mean, I’ll do any kind of wedding you want. Big church wedding, little church wedding, skydiving with a minister, I don’t care. I’m just telling you, we can get off two exits from here and be married by dinnertime. By a minister. Probably a Southern Baptist, but I mean, we’re in Tennessee. God will forgive us.”
I looked out at the road and then over at Jerry, his blue-gray eyes jumping back and forth between me and the car in front of us. He raised his eyebrows at me and bit his lip. “You want to?”
I smiled and nodded at him. “Yeah, okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Jerry and I stopped at the Welcome Center to pick up brochures for every wedding chapel in the state and then dropped by the Sevier County Courthouse to get the license. He stuck it in the glove compartment, and we drove all over the city of Gatlinburg, looking for just the right place to sign the thing.
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