by Elise Sax
After taking Bridget to her house, I went home. Bird Gonzalez, the owner of the local beauty shop was there, giving my grandmother her rinse and set in the kitchen, while the pedicurist was going at Grandma’s heels with a vengeance and working up a sweat. There was a spread on the table of a whole assortment of Mexican food. My stomach growled, and I got a plate and sat down.
“This looks good,” I said, scooping an enchilada onto my plate. “New place?” I asked my grandmother.
“No, Bird brought it.”
“New diet?” I asked Bird.
She shook her head as she put a roller in my grandmother’s hair. “I’m taking a break from diets.”
I dropped my fork in surprise. “You’re what?” Bird had gone from one diet to another ever since I had known her. She had drafted me into most of them, but they had all ended in failure for me. Since moving to Cannes, I had taken up my grandmother’s bad eating habits, and I just couldn’t seem to get back onto the healthy train.
“My nutritionist says I have diet fatigue,” Bird explained.
“I think I have that, too,” I said, taking a bite of the enchilada.
“She says that my body doesn’t know which way’s up. It’s confusing carbs with protein. I’m all out of whack. So, I’m taking a break. If I can’t fit into my pants, though, I’m going to kill that nutritionist.” She waved a comb in my direction to highlight her point.
“I don’t blame you,” I said, tugging at my waistband. It was tight. I scooped another enchilada onto my plate.
“You better take it easy with that,” Bird warned me. “You’ve got a wedding dress to fit into next month.”
“I’m not having a big wedding,” I said, but of course, that wasn’t true. If only half of Grandma’s friends came, there would be most of the town showing up to my wedding.
“Well, you can’t go naked, can you? Definitely not after eating enchiladas.”
She had a point. I was supposed to be on a bride diet. I was supposed to be eating broccoli and drinking protein shakes. I was supposed to be getting body hair removed, too. I probably needed fake eyelashes.
I was coming around to the idea of spending my entire life with Spencer, but why did we have to have a party where I was the center of attention?
“Gladie already has a wedding dress, and it fits her perfectly, no matter how many enchiladas she eats,” my grandmother announced.
“I do?” I asked.
“Yes. It’s my grandmother’s dress. It’s been perfectly preserved and you’ll be gorgeous in it. She liked enchiladas, too.”
If my grandmother said it was true, then it was true. She had a way of knowing things that couldn’t be known, and a wise person never doubted her. I felt a wave of relief. Spencer was always beautifully dressed in Armani, so I knew he would be kicking it at the wedding. Now, with me wearing an antique wedding dress, he wouldn’t show me up.
“The flowers and music are arranged, too,” Grandma explained. “We only have one problem.”
“Not the hair and makeup,” Bird said, finishing rolling my grandmother’s hair. “I’m taking care of that. You’re going to look like a Grecian goddess.”
That sounded good. Grecian goddesses had good hair and long eyelashes.
“What problem?” I asked Grandma, even though I didn’t want to know because the whole idea of a wedding was giving me hives.
“The mayor wants to do the service,” she sighed.
We all moaned in unison. The mayor was the dumbest man alive, who couldn’t string two sentences together.
“I wish I could get you Mayor Fletcher, who did your parents’ wedding,” she continued. “He was a poet, but he’s dead.”
I flinched, as I remembered the box in the attic. It had my father’s name on it. My grandmother couldn’t have known it was there, or she would have opened it long ago. I didn’t want to get her hopes up or upset her, so I decided to keep it a secret for the moment until I knew more. Maybe there was nothing of his in the box, anyway.
“That was delicious, Bird. Thank you,” I said, washing my plate in the sink.
“It’s your once in a lifetime chance at eating my enchiladas. As soon as my body stops being fatigued, I’ve got my eye on a diet meal prep delivery company.”
I took the stairs two at a time to the attic. The box was still on the folding table, waiting for me. For some reason, I peeked out of the window, as if I was worried that Spencer would know what I was doing. Not that I was doing anything wrong, although it did feel like I was invading my father’s privacy.
My father. I hadn’t had a lot of time with him in my life, and I didn’t know much about him. My memories of him were few and far between. I remembered one afternoon when he let me ride on his motorcycle with him. Grandma hated his motorcycle and made him promise that he would never allow me on it. But on that beautiful summer day, he broke his promise and treated me to a beautiful and perfect ride along the mountain roads with a stop at the end for Rocky Road ice cream. I closed my eyes and tried to recall what we talked about, but all I could remember was his wide smile and twinkling eyes and the way he looked at me as if he really liked me. Loved me.
It was just like how Spencer looked at me, but without the obvious picturing me naked thing that Spencer did more often than not.
I peeked through the attic window at the house across the street. The workers were sitting on the front lawn, eating their lunch. Spencer was nowhere to be seen, and I figured he had gone to work at the police station.
With a deep breath to gather my courage, I sat at the table and opened the box. “There’s probably nothing in here,” I told myself to stem my hopes. But I was wrong. The box was full of my father.
On top was a framed photo of him with my mother when they were very young. They were standing by a tree, and his arms were around her. Happy. I put the picture down on the table and dove into the box, again. I came out with a handful of report cards. I opened one from Cannes High School.
Math: D-. History: F. Physical Education: C. Biology: D-. French: F. English: A+.
It was like reading my own report cards except for the A in English. Jonathan is a very popular student, and he spends most of his time socializing instead of paying attention in class. It’s a shame that he’s wasting his potential, one of the teachers commented. Yep, it sounded familiar.
I put the report cards down next to the picture and pulled out some paper from the box. “Unpaid traffic tickets. Geez, Dad, you were worse than me,” I said out loud. There were seven tickets, five for speeding and two for running stop signs. One of them caught my eye because it was dated on the last day of his life. “Going seventy in a thirty-five mile zone,” I read. For the first time since he died, I wondered if he deserved to have a fatal accident. He was obviously reckless and thumbed his nose at authority. But to have gotten a speeding ticket the day of his accident was too much to bear. Didn’t he care that his death would destroy the lives of the ones he loved? His family was never the same, again after his death, and he seemed to have tossed away his life without a second thought.
I put the tickets aside and dug deep into the box, taking out a handful of notebooks. I recognized them, immediately. They were my father’s poems, the building blocks that eventually became his three published works. His handwriting was dreadful, but I managed to make out most of it.
One of the notebooks was different. It wasn’t poetry, but rather some kind of journal. Short notes, doodles, and lists were scribbled all through it. Then, in my father’s usual chicken scratch, there was a story about “Fart Boy,” a cute children’s story about an outcast boy.
A tear fell down my cheek, and I wiped it away. The story was proof of the potential my father had had and lost to a horrible accident. If he had lived, he might have had a new career writing for children.
Maybe, I thought, he was writing Fart Boy for his daughter.
Flipping through the notebook, I came to the last page. There were a series of three bullet-pointed n
otes that he had written.
Motorcycle accident.
Injuries too great to identify the body.
Man runs away to a new life, leaving his family behind.
I read through the notes twice to make sure that I had read them right. They weren’t poetry. They weren’t more children’s fiction. They were notes for a plan. A horrible plan.
I saw stars, and the room spun around. The notebook fell from my fingers to the floor, and I gripped the table for support and to hold on to consciousness. It felt like I had been hit in the gut. I was faced with a reality that I had never contemplated in my wildest imagination. Not even when I was a lonely little girl missing my father and praying to God to make him return.
But here was the truth in black and white.
My father had faked his death.
My father was alive.
CHAPTER 3
A little lie never hurt anybody, dolly. And there’s a lot of lies in love. Sure, there’s a lot of truth, too, but a lot of lies, as well. As a matchmaker, you’re going to have to navigate the lies and figure out which you’re going to let fly and which you’re going to nip in the bud. Weigh the lies and figure out which ones do some good and which ones don’t. Remember that the matchmaker’s first rule is: “Do no harm, unless you need to.” Or some fakakta thing like that.
Lesson 123, Matchmaking advice from your
Grandma Zelda
I needed to tell my grandmother that her son was really alive.
I couldn’t tell my grandmother that her son was really alive until I knew for sure.
But she would want to know.
But she would be hurt if it wound up not being true.
No way could I keep this secret.
I had to keep this secret.
I realized that I was standing up and spinning around like a top each time I had an opposing thought. I was my own presidential debate, debating both sides of the issue.
As much as I wanted to run around the house, screaming, “my father’s alive!”, I forced myself to be patient. I would have to find out for sure if my father was alive or dead before I said a word to my grandmother. There was no way I was going to traumatize her, and that’s exactly what I would do if I said something, gave her hope, and it turned out that he was dead. So, I had to be patient until I got to the bottom of things.
Unfortunately, patience wasn’t my strong suit.
It took four hours for me to discover that everything about my life was a lie. By the time I returned downstairs, Spencer had returned and was in the kitchen, drinking orange juice out of the jug. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand when he saw me and arched an eyebrow in a gesture so predatory that I looked down to make sure I wasn’t naked.
“There you are,” he said, putting the orange juice back in the fridge. “Call me crazy, but I was starting to think you were hiding from me.”
“Crazy,” I said and looked at my shoes. “Why would I hide from you? I love you and am going to marry you.”
I looked up to see him smirk his little smirk. “Just because we’re getting married doesn’t mean we have to stop doing the one-eyed monkey.”
“What’s the one-eyed monkey?”
He approached me, his eyes never leaving mine, his smirk planted on his face, like a neon sign announcing his virility and determination. Slowly, he slipped his arms around me and pulled me in close. His cologne was intoxicating, spinning me into a cloud of desire. Spencer was in amazing shape, hard and muscular and big like the man of young girls’ fantasies. And old women’s fantasies, too, I would have bet money on it.
He walked forward, pushing me back until I was against the kitchen wall. One of his hands moved to the place on the wall above my head, and his other hand touched me on my hoochie mama over my pants. It was like I was Kansas in 1880, and he was staking his homestead claim.
I was totally ready to let him settle in and build on me.
The thing he was doing with his eyes, the look that lasered into my brain and down through my body into my humming pelvis, was now over. Instead, he was focused on my neck, trailing light kisses from my collar bone, up to my ear.
I shuddered. My insides were hot, molten lava, turning my organs into mush, and I wondered vaguely if my spleen would work after Spencer was done with me in my grandmother’s kitchen.
And I also wondered what a spleen did.
Who cared? I was being thoroughly seduced by a man who had written the encyclopedia of seduction from A to Z, and he also knew a ton about anatomy. So, anything besides the here and now was totally uninteresting to me.
“While you’ve been hiding, I’ve been planning,” he breathed into my ear, his hot breath ironically sending shivers through me. He wasn’t totally unaffected, either. His hard body was getting harder by the second, a screaming siren that Spencer was raring to go, and I was the one he was raring to go with.
“A new couch? Wallpaper?”
“No. But we’re going couch shopping this week. I’m talking about another kind of planning. What I’m going to do with you.” He punctuated his statement with a gentle bite on my earlobe.
“Oh,” I sighed. “What are you going to do with me?” I asked because I really wanted to know, even though more than a small part of me wanted him to throw me onto the kitchen table and screw me like a light bulb, even if my grandmother was somewhere in the house and could walk in at any moment.
“I was thinking that there’s a place up in the mountains where they break away and there’s a large meadow with thick, lush grass. I’m going to take you there at sunset on a warm evening,” he breathed into my ear. “And as the stars fill the sky, I’m going to lay you down in that lush grass and strip you naked slowly.”
He paused dramatically. I slapped his back. “Then what?” I urged. “What happens when I’m naked in the grass? Will you be naked, too?”
His hand worked its magic lower down, while he leaned in, his mouth touching my ear. “Naked. Ready. Focused on giving you pleasure.”
“That’s a good thing to focus on,” I breathed, my eyes closed, and my body squirming against him. With each word, he was driving me closer to a drooling mass of hormones, two inches from a rockin’ orgasm.
“I’ll glide my hands down the inside of your thighs, separating your legs,” he continued. “Finally, thankfully, I’ll touch you here.” Spencer’s fingers pressed between my legs to illustrate exactly where he would touch me. “And find that spot that makes you purr like a kitten.”
“A kitten? I purr like a kitten?”
“Yes. You purr like a pussy. So, I’ll lean over you, gripping your ass in my hands and lifting you to my mouth. To my tongue.”
Yowza. Spencer did words really good. And words were the worst things he did. He did other things really, really, really good. I started to drool, thinking about those things.
My leg raised and wrapped around his hip, as if by magic, like I was Pinocchio with strings, and Spencer was pulling them. I was torn between wanting to hear the rest of his plans for me and wanting to beg him to take me upstairs and ravage me like a romance novel from the 1980s.
But it turned out I didn’t get either of my choices because this was my grandmother’s house, and even in its quietest moments, it was Grand Central.
“We’re coming in, dolly,” Grandma announced from the hallway. “Have to do it now before you get naked.”
“You were about to get naked?” Spencer asked me, like he was the one-million-and-one person to shop at a store, one person too late for the million-shopper grand prize.
“Oh, yeah,” I told him. “Very naked.”
His face dropped in obvious disappointment, and he stepped back away from me, adjusting his designer tie, and straightening his designer suit. I had just enough time to wipe the drool from my chin before my grandmother walked into the kitchen with a couple people following her, carrying bakery boxes.
“Cake tasting,” Grandma announced.
“Cake tasting,” I breathed
, watching them put the boxes down on the table. It was the only good thing about having a wedding, as far as I could tell, and it was the only thing that could compete with getting naked with Spencer.
“Hello,” one of the women said. She was a tiny little old lady, wearing a pink smock, and she sounded like Minnie Mouse when she spoke. “I’m Sandy, your nuptial sugar specialist from Cannes Cakes. I’m honored to be part of your happily ever after celebration.”
She took my hand in hers, and she shed real tears, making me uncomfortable. I hadn’t shed any tears about my happily ever after celebration.
“Sandy is the best cake baker in the southwest,” Grandma told me. “She’s a miracle worker with Heath bars and milk chocolate.”
“That sounds really good, doesn’t it?” I asked Spencer. He tried to drum up his usual smirk, but he was still wearing his I’ve-been-cockblocked face.
Sandy and her assistant opened the cake boxes and arranged seven beautiful, little round cakes on my grandmother’s table. I drooled even more than I did when Spencer talked dirty to me. I slumped onto a chair, and Spencer got us plates.
Grandma, Spencer, and I went through the seven cakes, tasting each one and then tasting them again. And again. I loved all of them except for the one with raspberry. Why did people insist on putting fruit in sweets? There’s no place for that kind of insanity in this world.
“I like cake number five best, but number two is a close second,” Spencer said, licking the frosting from his fork.
“Two is raspberry,” I told Spencer, nonplussed. “You didn’t taste the raspberry?”
“Okay, number five,” he said.
Number five was good, but I didn’t want to miss out on one, three, four, six, and seven. “Can we have more than one cake?” I asked, taking the last bite of number six.
“That sounds like a good idea,” Grandma said with her mouth full of number three.