An Ex to Grind

by Jane Heller

“It’s true. I’ve been mulling this over for the past few days and now I’m sure about it.”

  “Sure about what?” Weezie said, still confused.

  “I’m going to find Leah, talk to her, and help her win him back,” I reiterated. “It’s the only way I can really make amends to him.”

  “Very generous of you,” said Nards, regarding me with new respect. He had always been the pontificator. I never expected him to look up to me as his shining moral example.

  “He was generous to me once,” I said. “It’s time I returned the favor.”

  We discussed how I might accomplish bringing together two people who no longer trusted each other. We all agreed that hiring Desiree to help with the matchmaking wasn’t an option. I was done with her, besides which I wasn’t in a position to hire anybody now that I was jobless.

  “We’re strategizers,” said Weezie. “We’ll come up with something by the end of the weekend.”

  But we never did.

  On Monday morning, I brought Buster over to Dan’s, afraid he’d be home, afraid he wouldn’t be. True to his word, he’d made himself scarce. It was Isa who answered the door and explained that he was out running errands, then driving to a meeting at L.I.U.

  “As for her, she cleared out of here and took all her things,” she added, referring to Leah. “No more marriage.”

  “Is Dan very depressed?” I asked, sickened by this latest irony. I’d told Ricardo that Mr. Swain was so depressed that he needed Leah to care for him. Now Mr. Swain really was depressed and needed Leah to care for him. What had I done? And how could I have done it?

  “He is, chérie. He keeps her picture on the dresser in the bedroom.”

  “He always did hang on to his glory days, those times when he was happiest,” I said. “Keeping a picture of her proves he still loves her.”

  “If he still loves her, then why is she gone?”

  I sighed. “He’s convinced that she wasn’t honest with him about why she was living here. He thinks she was part of my plan. He thinks she tricked him too.”

  “But she didn’t know anything about your plan. I took those pictures of her personal items behind her back. I could show them to him, so he could see for himself that she was innocent in all this.”

  I considered the idea, because it would probably help Leah’s cause, but I ultimately rejected it. Dan was upset enough that I’d hired Desiree to trick him. He’d go ballistic if he found out about Isa’s involvement and would surely fire her. I couldn’t let that happen. She had Reggie to feed. No small thing. Literally.

  I went into the bedroom and looked at Leah’s photograph. It was a color shot of her with Buster, which surprised me. (I’d expected a picture of her alone, the breeze blowing through her mink coat hair.) She was down on the floor with him, her face cheek to cheek with his, and she was beaming. I had no emotional attachment to her, obviously, but even I couldn’t help but be moved by her obvious affection for my dog.

  “Isn’t that a nice picture?” Isa said, coming into the room behind me. “She was crazy about Buster, and Dan loved that about her.”

  No, I didn’t know Leah, but if she was crazy about Buster, she couldn’t be all bad.

  As was my custom now, I stopped over at Mrs. Thornberg’s before heading back downtown. She had just spent over an hour wrestling with her TV remote—it needed new batteries and she couldn’t pry the battery door open, not with a fingernail or a bobby pin or even a key—so I was glad I came. Thanks to my Swiss army knife, I was able to solve the problem in time for her to watch Larry King later that night.

  “What’s the latest?” she said as we sat in her kitchen munching on dill pickles. I felt so at home that I didn’t even notice their smell anymore. Same with the mothballs. And I was relieved that her dentures were holding up well enough for her to keep biting into them. (The pickles, not the mothballs.)

  “I’m taking your advice and throwing myself into getting Dan and Leah back together,” I announced.

  “I gave you that advice?”

  “You told me that if I loved Dan, I should want to see him happy, even if it wasn’t with me.”

  “Glad you listened.”

  “I listen to everything you say.”

  She clucked with pleasure. “Most young people today think we seniors—such a stupid word—don’t know what we’re talking about. Like we all have Alzheimer’s or something. Some of us still have our marbles, you know?”

  “I do know. And I’m taking your advice, as I said. The question is: How do I get Dan to let Leah back into his life? And how do I get Leah to forgive Dan for not trusting her? How do I even get them to tolerate being in each other’s company for five minutes, not to mention decide to go through with their wedding after all?”

  “That’s a tough one,” she acknowledged, “but not insurmountable.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. Mr. Thornberg and I had a tiff before we got married and we ended up together,” she said.

  “What was the tiff about, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Remember when I told you he was a tightwad?”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “Yes.”

  “I wasn’t kidding. He gave me an engagement ring with a diamond the size of a pea. No, half a pea. His parents were big shots in the brassiere business. I thought, They couldn’t afford better?”

  “What did you do?”

  “I gave the ring back to him. I thought money was everything then, because I was such an ignorant, willful girl. I accused him of being a cheapskate, and he accused me of being a gold digger. We were both sorry, naturally, but were too pigheaded to admit it. Such fools.”

  “So you broke up, and the engagement was off?”

  “Yes. And it took Mr. Thornberg’s brother, Harry, to bring us back together. I didn’t think it was possible, because nobody was speaking to anybody at that point.”

  “How did Harry get you and Mr. Thornberg to kiss and make up?”

  She scratched her chin, as if to jog her memory. I noticed she had a single hair there. A whisker. “Harry knew we shared a love of music.”

  “Classical?”

  “No, dance music. The jitterbug. There was a band that was popular in that era—the Jack Gordon Band, I think they were called—and we used to dance to their records. So Harry bought each of us their latest hit. He told me that mine was a gift from his brother, who was ‘too remorseful’ to give it to me himself, and he told his brother that his was a gift from me, because I was ‘too remorseful’ to give it to him myself. On top of that, he finagled it so we both showed up at this dance hall where the band was playing. Well, given that we each thought the other was apologizing, we fell right into the trap and got back together. The rest, as they say, is history.”

  “I’m trying to figure out what the lesson is here.”

  “The lesson is this: if you want them back together, you’ve got to appeal to their mutual interest in something.”

  I shrugged. “Dan likes football, but I don’t even know Leah, let alone what she’s interested in.”

  “You’re not a dummy. You’ll think of it.”

  “I feel like a dummy these days. I don’t have a job and nobody will hire me and the Heartbreak Hotel is starting to look like a palace compared to living out of my car.”

  “I thought you were moving in next door once he starts coaching. Isn’t that what you said?”

  “He offered. I haven’t decided.”

  She put down her pickle and went for her purse. After rummaging around for her wallet, she pulled it out and handed me a roll of bills.

  “Take it,” she said. “It’s all the cash I’ve got on me.”

  “Oh, no,” I protested. “I couldn’t.”

  “Fine,” she said, continuing to shove the money at me. “Call it a loan if it’ll make you feel like Miss Businesswoman.”

  I didn’t take it. I couldn’t believe she’d even offered it. I was the one who was always handing out cash, or so it see
med. “I’m very touched,” I said. “More than you’ll ever know. But I’ll be okay. Once I get my self-respect back and can look at myself in the mirror without flinching, the career stuff will fall into place.”

  Mrs. Thornberg patted my head. “You’re my good girl. You’ll find a way to make things right between the lovebirds. But in the meantime, my bad arm is killing me. I think I strained it trying to get the batteries into that remote. Could you help me clean my refrigerator?”

  I helped her clean her refrigerator. I helped her reorganize her pantry. I helped her wash her kitchen floor. And as I did, she reminisced about the story she’d just told me, about Harry bridging the gap between her and Mr. Thornberg and getting them to the altar.

  “Remember,” she said. “He appealed to our common interest in something and then put us at the same place at the same time. That’s what did it.”

  As I alphabetized her spices and scrubbed her fridge and mopped her floor, I wondered how I could replicate her brother-in-law’s feat. It wasn’t until I got home and started thinking about Evan—about how I missed him and wished he were there to guide me—that an idea broke through.

  Chapter

  30

  I didn’t know where Leah lived, so I looked her address up in the phone book. Not listed. Then I called information to get her phone number. Unpublished. Apparently, she was yet another single woman who didn’t want to be hassled by perverts. I couldn’t blame her there, but I’d hoped to speak to her in the privacy of her apartment.

  Moving on to Plan B, I was heartened that her veterinary practice was listed in the phone book. I guess she wasn’t worried about perverts as long as they had pets.

  On a Tuesday afternoon, I walked through the door of Purcell Veterinary Medicine, which was located in the East Eighties. I did not go there empty-handed.

  “May I help you?” asked a young, sort of effeminate male receptionist, who sat behind a glass partition that he pulled open after I’d tapped on it a couple of times.

  “I’m here to see Dr. Purcell,” I said.

  The receptionist, whose name tag identified him as Adam, gave me a puzzled look, probably because I was not accompanied by an animal. The office was packed with them, most of them dogs and cats, along with a ferret and the usual parakeet or two. “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No,” I said.

  “She’s completely booked,” he said.

  “No need to try to squeeze me in,” I said. “I’m fine with waiting until Dr. Purcell is finished at the end of the day. There’s a personal matter I’d like to discuss with her.”

  “Oh?” Adam seemed intrigued. “Can I get your name?”

  “Sissy.”

  He recoiled as if I’d slapped him. “That could be construed as a hate crime in this state.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said, not wanting my goodwill mission to get off to a bad start. “I’m not gay bashing you. I’m telling you my name. It’s Sissy. Sissy Swain.” Hey, it wasn’t my fault that everybody in Dan’s family called his sister Susanna that. Maybe it was an Oklahoma thing. And yes, I was hoping that pretending to be related to Dan would get me an audience with Leah. I was sure she wasn’t interested in seeing me.

  “I’ll let the doctor know you’re here,” said Adam, who got up in a huff and closed the glass window with more attitude than was necessary.

  I took a seat between a woman with her snarly Doberman pinscher and a man with his even snarlier German shepherd. I wasn’t a masochist, but we were talking about a full house, and seating was at a premium.

  At some point, Adam motioned me over and said, “Dr. Purcell has agreed to meet with you, but only because she knows you’ve traveled a long way.”

  “I appreciate that,” I told him, putting a little southern twang on the sentence. It was probable that she’d throw me out once she realized I wasn’t Dan’s sister, but I was willing to chance it. The first step was to wedge my foot in the door.

  I endured the growling, teeth-baring, generally unsociable temperaments of the dogs to my left and right for well over an hour. After they’d been treated by Leah and sent home with their owners, after all the patients had been treated by Leah and sent home with their owners, Adam escorted me from the waiting room into her office, closed the door behind him, and left me alone with her.

  When I entered, she was standing beside a bookcase, flipping through a heavy volume, her back to me. Even in her white lab coat, her lustrous hair piled haphazardly on top of her head, she was a babe. I cleared my throat to make my presence known.

  She turned to face me and began to sputter. If smoke really came out of people’s ears, it would have come out of hers. “You? Adam told me it was Dan’s…You? How could you use his—”

  “Leah,” I said. “Please calm down.” Like I would have calmed down if I were in her shoes. I would have slugged me.

  “You pretended to be Dan’s sister!” She slammed the reference book onto her desk. We both jumped when it went bang!

  “I didn’t think you’d let me in otherwise,” I said, speaking in a soft voice so as not to excite her further. “I had to find a way to talk to you.”

  “Talk to me? You tried to steal Dan away from me! Why should I let you in here?”

  “Because you’re a nice person,” I said. “Dan always bragged about how nice you are. You’re the one he loves, Leah. I should never have tried to come between you.”

  “Then why did you?” she demanded. “And why did you play that dirty trick on him? It’s disgraceful how you hired Desiree so you could cheat him out of the money.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “What I did is disgraceful and I’ll regret it for the rest of my life. But my poor judgment doesn’t have to ruin your chances with him.”

  “You say that, now that he’s rejected both of us.” She sank down in her desk chair, utterly depleted, as if the positive spirit he had found so inspiring had been drained out of her.

  “I want to undo the damage I caused,” I said, sitting opposite her. “I want to help you and Dan get back together.”

  “Oh, spare me.”

  “I mean it, Leah. I want him to be happy, and you make him happy.”

  She turned her head away, biting her lip. “Even if I believed you, it’ll never happen. He thinks I was partners with you. He thinks I’m just as dishonest as you are.”

  “No, he doesn’t,” I lied. I had promised myself I was finished with the lying and the scheming and the conniving, but the sort of lying I was currently doing was benevolent lying. Its purpose was to help two decent, well-intentioned individuals find true love. That couldn’t be bad, right? “I spoke to him and told him everything and he understands now. He doesn’t think we were partners anymore. He knows I duped you the same way I duped him.”

  She looked at me, her eyes filling with hope. “He doesn’t blame me?”

  “No. He still wants to marry you, Leah. He’s so sorry he ever doubted you.”

  She arched one of her perfectly plucked eyebrows at me. “Then why hasn’t he called?”

  “Because he’s too ashamed. He thinks you’d never hear him out.”

  “He should be ashamed,” she said with a pout. “He hurt me so much the way he tossed me onto the street. And now he can’t even pick up the phone and tell me he’s sorry?”

  “Sad, isn’t it? I was married to the guy for thirteen years. He has wonderful qualities, but he’s a little macho, you know? He’s dying to apologize to you, to make things right with you, to marry you in Oklahoma if you’ll still have him. He’s just too proud to walk in here with his tail between his legs and beg.”

  “So he sent you?” she said skeptically.

  “Yes, because I’m the one who’s responsible for this whole mess,” I lied some more. “After I told him he was wrong to punish you for my mistake, he asked me to be his emissary. He said I owed him a favor and I do.” I held up the package I’d brought with me. “He insisted that I give you this.”

  “What
is it?” she said, eyeing it as if it were about to detonate.

  “Something that celebrates a mutual interest of yours—a love you both share.”

  I reached across her desk and handed her the package. She unwrapped it carefully and looked perplexed when she saw what it was.

  “An oil painting?” she said.

  “Of Buster,” I said. “Dan had it commissioned for you as a wedding present. He knows how important Buster is to you, to both of you, so he thought it would be the ideal gift.”

  She studied the painting for a minute or two. “It’s really, really beautiful,” she said finally, smiling for the first time since I’d arrived. I was encouraged. I was really, really encouraged.

  “Do you see the way the dog has ventured into the sea? How he’s swimming along without a care in the world?” I pointed out. “Buster is afraid of the water. He sticks his toe in it and runs for dry land. So the symbolism here is that the dog in the painting is willing to take a risk, which is what Dan hoped you would do by flying off to Minco to marry him.”

  As she glanced up at me, a single tear rolled down her cheek. “I can’t believe he had an artist paint this for me. Nobody’s ever painted anything just for me. It really resonates.”

  “That’s wonderful,” I said, “but has it convinced you to forgive him? Will you let go of your pain and loss and suffering and accept his gift as an invitation to venture into the sea of life with him?” I know, I know. I even made myself nauseated. But hyper-bole or not, my spiel was working. I could tell. Harry Thornberg had nothing on me.

  “How can I not forgive him after this?” she said, gazing at the gift Evan had intended for me. “A painting of Buster. It just proves how well he knows me.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, now that he’s shown remorse for how he treated me, maybe we do have a future after all.”

  “Oh, Leah. I’m so thrilled to hear that.” I clapped for joy until I saw her grab the phone and start dialing. “What are you doing?”

  “Calling Dan,” she said. “He made the first move. Now it’s my turn.”

  “No!” I snatched the phone out of her hand and placed it back in its cradle. “I mean, it’s not a good idea.”