How Lucky You Are (9781455518548)

by Kusek Lewis, Kristyn

  I glance at the older women crowded behind Kate. They seem to be busy inspecting the fruit salad. “I don’t know,” I say. “To be honest, it’s not me that I’m worried about. It’s Amy. I just don’t know how she deals with him. Do you think she sees it? What happened to him? And why doesn’t she ever say anything about it? It’s starting to piss me off.”

  “I’ll tell you what happened,” Kate says, now pouring a stream of sugar from a glass canister into her coffee. “The life they chose is what happened. I mean, house in a cul-de-sac, minivan in the driveway, and potluck dinners with the neighbors where the conversation revolves around American Idol?” She makes a face like she’s talking about the contents of a dumpster. “I love Amy—you know I do—but that kind of life would make me an asshole, too.”

  “Kate, come on. I know that you and Amy have different tastes, but be nice.”

  “I’ll say.” Kate chuckles. She starts to say more but then stops herself, waving the thought away. “Anyway, there’s no excuse for how he acted. He was a dick last night, no question about it. A total dick.”

  “But he wasn’t always.”

  “Waverly, you give people too much credit. I mean, listen,” she says, leaning closer to the counter. “I know that my husband isn’t perfect—hell, trying to talk to him about something other than the campaign is like, I don’t know, trying to talk to him about my period—but if you ask me, Amy settled. She wanted the fucking fairy tale. The white picket fence, the doctor husband, the kid, the whole thing. And she got it. It’s just too bad that Prince Charming turned out to be such a fucking dud.”

  Say how you really feel, Kate. Whenever she talks like this, my mother’s voice starts ringing in my ears: “Mean-spirited people are just jealous people.”

  “By the way,” Kate says. “Did you notice that Mike was still wearing that same bomber jacket he’s probably had since 1994? I mean, a bomber jacket?”

  “Wait a second!” one of the elderly customers says, taking off her red-framed reading glasses and stepping closer to Kate. “You’re Brendan Berkshire’s wife!”

  Kate glances at me, raising her right eyebrow in the same subtle way that she used to in high school when her mother would peek her head into Kate’s room while we were pretending to study to remind Kate about a Daughters of the American Revolution luncheon. Then she turns to the two women and her face softens. She smiles wide, her veneered Chiclet teeth gleaming. It’s like watching a magic act, a transformation with the flip of a cape, the snap of a finger.

  “Why, yes. I’m afraid I am,” she says, extending her hand. I notice how Kate expertly folds her fingers around the woman’s palm, letting go just as soon as they make contact. It’s a warm and practiced gesture—not intrusive, not cold, just right. “How nice to meet you. May I ask your name?”

  “I am Ruby Sampson,” the woman declares, looking up at Kate. “And this is my friend Roberta Jenkins.”

  “Ms. Sampson and Ms. Jenkins, I am delighted to meet you,” Kate says. “Now, I can’t help but mention that I overheard you two talking. I have to tell you, both types of quiche are wonderful, but I prefer the ham and Gruyère.”

  “Then that’s what we’ll have,” the woman says to me, keeping her eyes on Kate. She’s drinking her in, taking in the flawless hairstyle, the glowing complexion, the tasteful pearls. I watch Kate pretend not to notice like I have so many times before. Sometimes it’s as if she can’t get down the block without people stopping to gawk at her. It’s like she lives inside of a shampoo commercial.

  After the women walk off with their plates, chattering about their brush with the future First Lady of Virginia (“She’s even more stunning in person!”), Kate rolls her eyes. “All in a day’s work,” she says. “Speaking of, I better run. Brendan’s staff acts like I’ve been off sleeping with the enemy when I’m late.”

  “Okay,” I say. “See you.”

  She turns to leave and then stops herself. “Are you going to say something to Amy about Mike?”

  I shrug.

  “Because you could, you know. It wouldn’t be out of line at this point. He ruined your dinner.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know. We’ll see.”

  “I’m just saying.” She flips her cape over her shoulder, a dramatic gesture that she can actually pull off. If Town & Country ever decided to run a comic strip, she’d be the perfect superhero. She waves as she exits, and the wind rushes in when she pushes the door open. It’s cold and clean and a part of me wishes that I could follow Kate out. My customers are in sweats and heavy sweaters, their hair unbrushed, lazy Saturday, the week peeling off of them. Oh, to sit and read the morning paper. To look up over a cup of coffee and say to the person across the table, “So what do you want to do today?” To not dodge calls from your landlord, to not fret over the stack of overdue credit card bills on your desk, to not be a broke thief who steals from your boyfriend—your boyfriend who is blissfully unaware that any of this is going on and would want to help you if you could just abandon your pride and tell him.

  I watch Kate zoom out of her parking space in front of the bakery. I understand that she’s exhausted—I really do—but she’s also about to be greeted by applause, probably a standing ovation. I would so trade places with her today, maybe just to see the look on her face when I showed her the dwindling numbers on my spreadsheets.

  I glance at the clock—nine more hours. I need to finish the cupcake order, call my suppliers about next week’s deliveries, check over the menus for next week’s specials, look over the staff schedule, and—let’s not forget—attend to the customers who are actually here.

  “Waverly!” a voice yells behind me, snapping me away from my to-dos. It’s Javier, one of the dishwashers. “¡No agua caliente!” No hot water. Jesus Christ. Perfect.

  “No agua? Okay.” Fuck. I stuff my rag into my pocket. “I’ll be right there.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Back when I was teaching, Sunday afternoons were reserved for grading papers. To make it less of a chore, I often took my work to the Dubliner, an Irish pub on Capitol Hill, where I’d mark them up against the backdrop of other customers screaming, “Bad call!” and “How could he miss that?” to the Redskins game on the television in the corner.

  On one particular Sunday during my third year of teaching I discovered that I could tune out the broadcast football game but not the sound of someone rapping his knuckles in absentminded rhythm against the oak bar. I kept trying to ignore it—focusing on my work and bites of the corned beef sandwich I’d ordered—but the noise just seemed to get louder and more insistent. It was driving me insane, not least of all because I couldn’t figure out what song it was—“Honky Tonk Woman?” No, wait…“Copacabana?” I apparently got so lost in trying to figure it out that I didn’t immediately notice when the guy finally stopped. I looked down the bar and our eyes met. He turned up his palms and shrugged sheepishly.

  “‘Looking out My Back Door,’” he said across the bar.

  I wrinkled my brow.

  “The song.” He tapped his knuckles against the bar a couple of times. “‘Looking out My Back Door.’ CCR. Creedence Clearwater Revival?”

  “Oh, right,” I said, wondering how he knew I’d been paying attention.

  “You were nodding your head along with the rhythm,” he said before I could ask. “You know the song, right?” He started to sing. “Doo, doo, doo, looking out my…” His voice trailed off.

  It was a quiet afternoon in the pub. In fact, we were the only two people sitting at the bar aside from a tweedy middle-aged couple at the other end who were busy examining a city guidebook.

  He stood up and walked over, then pulled out the stool next to me. He swung one leg around it, sitting down like a cowboy mounting a horse.

  He leaned forward and rested his forearms on the bar, his pint in one hand. “Sorry about that.” He smiled. He had a nice smile. Wavy hair that could stand to be cut. Reddish stubble. He was scruffy, almost like he’d had a rough
night the night before, but it was a good kind of shabby. Most of the men in Washington were so neatly pressed. “Can I buy you a drink to make up for interrupting whatever it is you’re working on?” He pointed down to the paper I was grading.

  “Um.” I looked at my glass. It was still three-quarters full.

  “I’ll buy your lunch.” He pointed to my plate.

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that,” I said. I should have been working harder to get him to leave—the stack of papers I needed to grade before seven a.m. the next day was several inches thick—but I found myself enjoying the distraction.

  “Nope, I insist,” he said, taking a sip of his thick, dark beer. When he pulled his glass away, it left a foamy mustache on the stubble above his lip. “So what are you working on?” He pointed at my work.

  “Grading papers. I teach high school English.” I tugged at the worn long-sleeved T-shirt I was wearing, a relic from the back of my closet, and wished, as I often did, that I was more like Kate and Amy, the kind of women who actually looked in the mirror before they left the house. My cosmetics of choice were Chap Stick (the black one) and a tube of mascara that I used on special occasions. I’d never had a haircut at the kind of salon that required an actual appointment. I didn’t own a hair dryer. I tucked my feet beneath my barstool to hide my mud-stained running shoes.

  “Ah,” he said. “So Stephen Barton is a fan of corned beef?”

  “What?” I had no idea why he knew the name of one of my sophomores until I looked down and realized that my sandwich had been dripping all over the poor kid’s essay about A Farewell to Arms. “Oh, fuck!” I reached for the napkin in my lap to swipe at the brown splats on the paper and knocked my beer over in the process, sending a pool of Guinness splashing over the carefully typed essay. I leapt for the stack of other students’ papers, snatching them just before the puddle washed out three classes’ worth of homework.

  “Well.” I looked over at the guy and laughed. “I guess Steve’s getting an A.”

  He laughed back. He had a genuine laugh, the kind that you could tell was often employed. I smoothed my hair, wishing that I’d bothered to wash it that morning.

  “So what’s your name?” I said, putting out my hand. I wasn’t accustomed to introducing myself to strangers, but he seemed harmless enough.

  “I’m Larry,” he said. His handshake was firm—always a good sign of a good man, according to my father. “And yours?”

  “Waverly.”

  “Cool name,” he said.

  “Thanks. It’s British. My mom was a bit of an anglophile.”

  We talked easily and at length. It got dark outside, and then it started to rain, and before I knew it, we had exchanged numbers and he was paying a cabdriver to get me home safely.

  Over the next few weeks, we quickly became buddies. When the school day ended, I’d take the Metro to the museum and he’d give me the “Larry Tackett tour of American history.” While the memory is still sweetly vivid, I have to confess that I was always way more excited about seeing the museum’s pop culture holdings—Archie Bunker’s chair, the prosthetic breasts that Dustin Hoffman wore for Tootsie—than I was about the patriotic relics that Larry is so enamored with. On the weekends, we wandered through the farmers’ stands at Eastern Market, where I introduced him to broccoli rabe and jicama. We saw obscure bands at the 9:30 Club, where he taught me more than I ever needed to know about Swedish garage rock. We shared more pints and late nights at the Dubliner. Three weeks in, he finally kissed me as we stood on the sidewalk outside the bar.

  One Sunday, I took him out to Maple Hill to meet Babci. He sat in the room that’s now our living room, looking like an elephant balanced on her bitsy chintz chair, and told her stories I hadn’t heard yet about his family back in Minnesota. Six brothers and sisters, all older, seventeen nieces and nephews, parents who ran the hardware store that had been in his family for three generations. Babci’s smile emerged from between her chubby cheeks, like a knife cutting through bread dough. Her eyes slid toward me. I fell in love with him that day.

  She died the next year. As difficult as it was to say good-bye to her, she was ready. She’d told me as much. Her life had been full and difficult—she left Warsaw during World War Two with my grandfather, who, despite being Catholic, was a Nazi target because he was educated—actually, a professor—and therefore considered a threat. She’d witnessed his death after a long battle with emphysema, had endured the death of my mother, her one and only child. She told me to move into her house and to make it my own—and gave me her blessing to have Larry move in, too. So that’s what I did. I was twenty-six.

  When Babci died, I officially became an orphan, with no living blood relatives. Larry, with his family large enough to fill a movie theater, became mine. Our early days of living together are some of my favorite memories. I’d get home from teaching in the afternoon, cook something wonderful for dinner, and then we’d have these long, decadent weeknight dates, perched on the stools at the kitchen island and talking late into the night. In the morning, he brought coffee up to me while I showered. On Saturdays, we played our music loud and barbecued in the courtyard out back. We played house.

  I wish that I’d appreciated that time together while we had it. Now I leave too early in the morning for him to bring me coffee. At night, we both often work late.

  This year marks our ten-year anniversary, and referencing my “boyfriend” in daily conversation is starting to feel like something I should have outgrown by now, like using the word awesome (which I do) or shopping at Old Navy (which I also do). I’ve made an art out of fending off the “When are you guys going to finally get married?” question with a shrug and a wave of my hand and a lame joke about a ring being wasted on me when it would just get covered in batter every day, but the truth is that I’m thirty-five, and as hard as I try not to be that kind of woman, I can’t help my eyes from slipping toward the left ring fingers of my customers when they pay for their coffees, can’t help but gaze at the ponytailed young moms juggling their diaper bags when they come in after preschool pickups, can’t help but wish—just a little bit—that that was me.

  So why isn’t it? Good question. Larry is my best friend. We finish each other’s sentences and support each other during hard times and do everything that any romantic comedy would tell you that successful couples are supposed to do. We talk about making it official, and those talks always end when I change the subject, sometimes throwing in a “Why rock the boat when things are fine as they are?” for good measure. While all six of his brothers and sisters are married, and his mother makes no secret of her wish that we would follow suit, Larry is frankly ambivalent about the whole thing—he says that if I want to do it, he will, but he doesn’t feel like we need a license from the Virginia court system to build a life together. And that’s the thing—we’ve already built a life together, and it’s a good life. But is it perfect? Is this it, in both the it and It senses of the word? And shouldn’t I know the answer to that question already, in the way that both Kate and Amy say that they “knew” about Brendan and Mike within days of meeting them?

  I can no longer fool myself into believing that we’re simply a cool, modern couple who don’t need to follow the conventional rules to be fully committed, and the worst part about all of it is that I know that I’m the one holding us back. But if I tell Larry that I want to get married, I will probably also need to tell him about the true extent of my money problems, and who knows how he’ll react to the fact that I’ve been keeping secrets from him for the first time in our very long, very honest, and very open relationship.

  I suppose that if I saw a therapist, she would tell me that I’m afraid of commitment, or that the loss of my parents makes me afraid of loving somebody that much again because I might someday lose him, too. There’s a good reason why I’ve never seen a therapist. I don’t need to pay someone to tell me what I already know.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  On Sunday morning, Amy meets me at
Fort Hunt Park for a jog. I’ve decided not to bring up Mike’s behavior from the other night. I’m just not in the mood. After losing hot water at the bakery yesterday, my day got even more exciting: We became short staffed when one of my employees cut himself slicing tomatoes and had to leave to get stitches, the mother of the bride of the lemon-coconut-cupcake bridal shower flipped out when I delivered the cupcakes, telling me that she’d ordered plain lemon—no coconut—even though I had an email record of her order, and just when I was about to turn the “Open” sign on the front door to “Closed,” the toddler accompanying our last customer of the day vomited all over the floor in front of the cash register. It seems to be a rule of my business that the last customer of the day is always, without fail, the most high maintenance. Anyway, my point is that when I arrive in the parking lot and pull in next to Amy’s minivan, I am still exhausted from the day before, and bringing up the whole Mike thing isn’t anything I want to deal with right now. In fact, I hope that Amy will just be Amy and do all of the talking during our run. I need to zone out.

  She’s stretching when I meet her at the trail where we typically start, and singing to herself. “Hey!” She smiles when she sees me. “You won’t believe what song I heard on the radio on the way over here!”

  “What?”

  “I’ll give you a hint: ‘I’m the king of the world!’” she bellows.

  “Oh, geez. Don’t remind me.” Back when we were living in the apartments, the neighbors who lived above us incessantly played “My Heart Will Go On,” that Celine Dion song from Titanic. Being twenty-two, we proceeded to do the mature thing and respond by blasting the most irritating songs that we could think of—everything from “The Macarena” to “Cotton-Eyed Joe.”

  “Are you ready?” she says, jumping up and down to keep herself warm. Or maybe just because she’s Amy and is prone to spontaneous jumping.

  I nod and we start to trudge along. Once upon a time, Amy and I were both dedicated runners—our weekends often revolved around local road races and we ran the Marine Corps Marathon together twice—but now our jogs are more about chatting than anything else.