How Lucky You Are (9781455518548)

by Kusek Lewis, Kristyn

  We’re nearly to the front door when a familiar voice calls my name. “Waverly! Waverly, over here!”

  I turn and see Gary, my accountant, dressed in exercise gear and holding a coffee and a muffin.

  Hmmm.

  “Larry! Hey, man! I haven’t seen you in years!” Gary says. I actually hired Gary after Larry met him playing flag football in a local league. They do that sort of half handshake, half slapping-each-other-five thing that men do. My heart is beating double-time. Larry doesn’t exactly know about how much time Gary and I have spent together lately.

  Before I can think of a way to steer the conversation so that Gary doesn’t rat on me, he nudges me with the hand that’s holding his coffee and says, “Waverly, congratulations! I’d say that if business keeps up like this, you won’t have a thing to worry about with that house loan.”

  I feel Larry’s head snap toward me.

  Damn it, Gary.

  He must realize what he’s just done, because his eyes widen and the next thing I know, he’s nodding good-bye and telling Larry that they should grab a beer sometime as he hurries away from us.

  “House loan?” Larry says.

  It’s like a force field just went up between us. I can’t look at him. I can’t, I can’t.

  “Waverly.”

  I feel like a child. I am a child.

  Ten, twenty seconds pass.

  I take a deep breath. “Let’s go back to my office and talk.”

  He has his fingers steepled, watching me explain. It’s a gesture he never makes. He looks too serious. Too brooding. Not like himself at all. Right now I need laid-back Larry. Hands-behind-his-head, leaned-back-in-his-chair Larry. Feet-tapping-out-some-old-classic-rock-tune Larry.

  I’ve told him about everything and he hasn’t said a word. In fact, he’s hardly moved. “I kept thinking that if I could just get a handle on things, then you would never have to worry about any of it,” I say, coming to a close. I force myself to smile, but I can tell by the way that it feels that it’s an unconvincing one. “And now, everything looks like it’s going to work out! So there really wasn’t any need for you to know. Plus, you had all of that stuff going on with your work. I didn’t want to burden you with any of this.”

  I stand there for what seems like a year, shuffling my feet from side to side and playing with the edge of my dishrag, which I’ve pulled out of my back pocket. Randy is right. It really is like my security blanket.

  “How much credit card debt is there?” Larry says.

  Oh God. That’s the first thing he has to say? After everything I just told him?

  I look down at my feet. “About twenty-seven thousand dollars.”

  “Twenty-seven?” Larry gasps.

  “Well, it’s not like I racked it up because I was out buying new handbags!” I yelp. “It was all for business costs. Believe it or not, running this place is expensive.”

  “Believe it or not,” Larry says, mocking me. “I understand that. I grew up one of seven kids, with parents who ran a hardware store, Waverly. Do you think I don’t know what it’s like to own your own business?” He runs his hands through his hair and looks at me. “I know it’s not easy, but Jesus, why didn’t you say anything? We could have lost our house?”

  “No. I don’t think so. Not now. I’ll be able to get caught up on the loan,” I say.

  “Holy shit,” he says, remembering something. “Is this why the cable got cut off when you were in Florida?”

  I close my eyes. “Yes.” Damn it. “But I’m handling everything now. Things like that won’t happen again.”

  “Waverly, that’s what you’re not getting here—whether or not you can handle it isn’t what I’m concerned about. What really bothers me is that you didn’t think you needed to tell me. Shit, you can’t be honest with me after ten years, Waverly?”

  I feel like I’m an inch tall. Less than that. I feel smaller than whatever is smaller than a flea. I feel like nothing. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know why…” I shake my head.

  “I could’ve helped you.”

  “I didn’t want your help.”

  “You needed it.”

  I turn away from him. He’s right. I know he’s right. “I’m sorry.”

  “Stop saying you’re sorry, Waverly,” he says. “Tell me why you lied to me.”

  I almost never notice the noise at work—the banging of pots and pans, the whirring motor of my mixer, the faint din of the customers in front, dishes hitting the sink, faucets running, my younger employees cackling to each other, Jeannette singing, Randy laughing and calling out orders. Now, in the quiet, in the vibrating hum of this moment where I need to have an answer, I feel like I can pick each individual sound out of the cacophonous roar that accompanies me every day. I turn back around to face him. He’s staring at me, waiting.

  “I wanted to be able to handle it myself.”

  “That’s not an answer. Why did you lie to me?”

  “Because I wanted to be able to handle it myself!” I shriek. “Because I felt like a fucking loser, Larry! Because I was ashamed of myself. I am ashamed of myself!”

  “I just don’t understand that at all. You’re hardly the first business owner to have a bad year. I don’t know what it has to do with why you lied to me. I should be the person you confide in, Waverly. That’s what I’m here for.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t think you do,” he says. He gets up from my desk. “This is bad.”

  Over the past year, when I’ve pictured what it would be like if and when Larry found out about all of this, I’ve assumed that he would be furious. There would be screaming and finger-pointing, doors slamming, marching out the door. But this—his quiet disappointment—is worse. I knew he would be angry with me, but it stupidly never occurred to me that he would feel so let down.

  “Larry, I just didn’t want you to know that I couldn’t do this myself,” I say softly. “You know how much pride I take in my work. I didn’t want to have to ask for help.”

  He taps his fingers along the edge of my desk before he speaks. “That’s the thing, though, Waverly. There’s nothing wrong with asking for help. Needing someone doesn’t make you weak. I thought you knew that.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say again.

  “Maybe this is why you’ve been focusing so much on Amy and Kate,” he says. He’s not even looking at me. He’s picked up a pencil off of my desk and is twirling it in one hand. It drops, he picks it back up. Over and over.

  “What do you mean?” I say.

  Finally, he looks at me. “Maybe you’ve been obsessing about your friends not so much because you want to help them but because you want to avoid your own problems.”

  I rear back, shocked that he could say such a thing, but before I can think of how to respond, he stands and heads for the door. I know deep down that to some extent, he’s probably right.

  “You should get back out there,” he says, digging his keys out of his pocket. He brushes past me and shouts good-bye to Randy.

  I stand in the threshold of my office for several minutes after the screen door that he left through has sprung shut, watching the messy commotion of the kitchen. Then I wipe my hands on my rag and head back out to the front of the store, where music is playing and everyone is high on sugar, and it’s all because of me.

  I wedge myself behind the cash register, telling Jeannette that I’ll take it from here. “How can I help you?” I say to the next person in line.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  A week later, I’m sitting in the diner where Amy and I have agreed to meet for lunch. I haven’t seen her since she spent the night, and our phone calls have been stunted, to say the least. She doesn’t call me now—I only call her—and every time I ask her how she’s doing, she says in an uncharacteristically clipped way that she’s fine, and then she asks me how work is going, and then the next thing you know, she’s hanging up, saying she has to run off somewhere. I’m starting to understand, on many leve
ls, how frustrating it is to worry over someone who doesn’t want your help.

  This is a standing date, something that makes Amy’s no-show status especially suspect. Every spring, I take a week off from work and we kick off my vacation with lunch at Paulsen’s, a rusty old soda shop that has been on Main Street since the 1940s. Amy always spends the first ten minutes of every lunch chiding me for never actually going anywhere during my time off. I can hear her now: “You don’t have kids! Please, on behalf of all of us who do, go somewhere! Brazil, Ireland…hell, at least go to Miami—somewhere where you can stay out all night and sleep all day.” She can’t understand how much I look forward to just sticking around the house with no agenda. I catch up on my cookbook reading and revisit favorite recipes. If I feel like it, I eat fried chicken for breakfast, don’t brush my teeth until noon, and watch Seinfeld reruns after my afternoon nap. It’s just puttering around, but at the end of the week, I’m convinced that I feel better than I ever could if I spent the week blowing my retirement fund on five-star spa treatments, something that Kate once tried to convince me to do.

  For obvious reasons, this year is not one in which I should be taking a vacation, even if it’s just to laze around the house. When I mentioned to Amy on the phone a few days ago that I was skipping this year’s break, I asked if she would still meet me for lunch. I knew that I was guilting her into it, but I need to see her to know she’s okay.

  I lean forward in my stool to get another look at the line of people snaking out the front door of the diner. Still no sign of Amy. I turn my phone over in my hand to check the time. I’ve been waiting almost twenty minutes and I’ve called her four times. My heart feels like it’s beating a little faster with each minute that passes. Is she late because she’s just late? Is she standing me up because she’s irritated with me? Or is it something worse?

  The woman sitting next to me at the counter is maybe twenty. The color that she’s chosen to dye her yellow-blond hair reminds me of the banana cream pie that I sell in the summertime. She’s engrossed in an Us Weekly story about a B-movie actress explaining “How I Finally Lost the Weight!” I hesitate before interrupting her.

  “Um, excuse me.” I lean toward her. She’s just taken a huge gulp of chocolate milk shake and she smiles sheepishly, holding up one finger while she swallows.

  “I’m sorry.” I wince sweetly. “But could I ask your opinion? How many times would you call a friend who’s supposed to meet you for lunch before you accept that you’ve been stood up?”

  “Ohhh,” the girl says, looking up at the ceiling while she yanks under her shirt at her bra strap. “Um, I guess it depends on the friend? How well do you know…him?” She raises her eyebrows and leans in conspiratorially. “How many times have you called?”

  “Four.”

  She cringes. “I don’t think he’s coming,” she says, like she’s breaking bad news.

  “Oh, it’s not a date,” I correct her.

  She nods at me, a pitying, sympathizing, “we can both pretend that it’s not a date if that will make you feel better” kind of nod.

  “Really, it’s just my girlfriend,” I say. I don’t know why I feel compelled to explain myself to a kid; a kid who will eventually hopefully learn that she doesn’t need to wear so much eyeliner. “She’s been going through a tough time,” I continue. “And the last time that she didn’t show up somewhere it was because something bad happened, so I’m just worried that—” The girl’s eyes are glazing over. “Never mind. I’m sorry I interrupted you.”

  “It’s okay.” She shrugs and touches her hand to my arm. Her fake nails are as cold and hard as coins. “We’ve all been there.” She nods gravely.

  I nod back. It isn’t worth it to try to convince her that I’m telling the truth. I look down at my phone and will it to ring. It’s 12:36. I’ll give Amy until 12:40 to walk into the crowded restaurant, and if she doesn’t, I will drive to her house.

  I consider calling Larry or Kate to ask their opinion, but I don’t want to bother Kate, who has enough on her mind, and Larry’s not really an option. When I got home from the bakery on the night after my confession, buzzed from two glasses of champagne from the bottle that the staff had surprised me with, I’d slipped into bed next to him and crumpled against his side, waking him with my sobs that I was sorry. “You need to decide what you want,” he said. He didn’t put his arm around me to comfort me. He didn’t even turn over.

  “I’m so sorry that I disappointed you,” I gulped out, wiping my nose with my fist.

  “Stop worrying about how you might have disappointed me, Waverly,” he said with a clarity that made it immediately obvious that he actually hadn’t been sleeping at all when I crawled into bed. “What you need to figure out is what you even want from me. Because if you can’t confide in me, if you don’t need me, than I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

  “I love you,” I said.

  “Figure it out,” he replied.

  I’ve been tiptoeing around him since. Work has been so busy that I’ve been using it as an excuse to stay away from the house and avoid the big sit-down that I know we need to have. On the rare occasions that we’ve both been home and awake, our interaction has consisted of nothing but small talk—how was your day and blah, blah, blah. He doesn’t want to talk to me. I’ve made a point to mention the progress I’ve been making on my bills (“Made a payment to the house lender today…I think I might be able to get my rent check in early next month…”), as if it might make up for my mistakes.

  I take a sip of my soda and peer toward the front door again, where the amoeba of hungry lunch-goers seems to have doubled. They stand in an unorganized mass along the wall, their eyes darting from table to table, looking for almost-empty plates, wallets being pulled out of pockets, any sign that they might get seated soon. Business obviously isn’t hurting here, I think, wishing that I could stand up and announce to the crowd that they ought to try the excellent bakery down the road that was mentioned in the New York Times last Sunday.

  The waitress behind the counter passes by, locking her eyes on me and then looking at the laminated menu she slapped in front of me when I sat down. I know that look—it’s the “if you’re not going to order, make room for someone who will” look. I flip the menu over to scan the entrees. A BLT had been on my mind all morning, but now the thought of it makes my stomach turn. We had said 12:15, hadn’t we?

  I look at my phone again: 12:39. Close enough.

  I slide a few dollars across the counter to pay for my soda and hop off of the stool, avoiding my neighbor’s sympathetic smile and the waitress’s eye roll as I turn to walk out the door.

  Amy will never forgive me for freaking out if it’s just a simple misunderstanding. On the drive over, I call her twice more, bringing the tally up to six calls in thirty minutes. God, I hope that that’s all that this is, a simple misunderstanding.

  When I arrive at her house, I stand on the concrete landing of her front porch and jingle my keys in my fist, trying to stop the loop of horror scenes that have been rolling through my mind ever since I left the diner. I ring the doorbell three times. Nobody answers. Please, God, just let her be okay.

  I try to peer through the sheer curtains that line the windows on either side of the door but I can’t make anything out. I turn and look at the houses across the street. All of the garage doors are closed. There are no cars in the driveways. A soggy stack of newspapers, as limp as wilted lettuce, lies piled at the end of one of them. I could be turning naked cartwheels across Amy’s front lawn and nobody would notice. Maybe this kind of quiet is the very reason why some people move to neighborhoods like this, but to me, it’s eerie. The houses look so flawless from the outside; hedges trimmed so carefully that it’s as if they’ve all been given the same standard, military-issue buzz cuts, the front doors gussied up with wreaths and welcome mats. I wonder who Amy’s neighbors are; what they do, where they’re from, how they spend their evenings when they return home at the end of the d
ay—what they think of the young family across the street.

  I’m just about to give up and walk around the house to the backyard, where I might be able to get a better view inside from the sliding glass door beside the kitchen, when I hear a noise on the other side of the door, like the doorknob jangling.

  “Amy?” I knock excitedly on the door. “Ame, is that you?” I try to look through the windows again but still can’t make anything out. The doorknob jiggles again from the inside of the house. “Amy?”

  “I can’t open,” a small voice says from the other side of the door.

  Emma!

  “Emma, honey? Is that you?” My heartbeat quickens, a tap-tap-tap that matches the impatient rhythm of my fist knocking against the door.

  The doorknob jiggles again.

  “Emma? It’s Waverly.”

  “Aunt Wave-uh-lee?” Emma squeaks.

  “Emma, where’s your mommy? Is your mommy there?” I wait for a reply. One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi, I count, trying to keep myself calm so that I won’t frighten her. “Emma, sweetie? Is your daddy there? Are you by yourself? Is there a grown-up there who can open the door?”

  “Mommy’s upstairs,” the girl says. Relief floods over me as if it’s been dumped on my head from a bucket over the door. Dammit, Amy. Did she just forget? I punch the doorbell several times in a row. “Emma, can you get your mommy to come to the door?”

  “Mommy?”

  “Yes, honey. Get your mommy to come to the door. Can you do that?”

  “No!”

  Shit. This is definitely not the time to play games. “Emma, come on. Now, get your mommy.”

  “No. Mommy’s sleeping.”

  I freeze with my hand on the doorknob. Sleeping? While Emma’s awake? No way. That alone tells me that my intuition is dead-on. Something’s wrong. I step back and lift the doormat, hoping to find a spare key, and then do the same with the potted plants on either side of the door. No luck. I dial Amy’s home number on my cell phone and hear the muffled ring inside the house.