“What is going on?” I snap. “Are you my lawyer or my stylist? And who the hell is representing Brett, and why does he have your last name?”
“Let’s go,” he says, with a sigh.
In the car, when he’s not looking, I take my hair down out of the ponytail and let it air-dry into loose waves.
• • •
When we pull up at the address, I’m confused to realize we’re at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
“What are we doing here?” I ask.
“The mediation is in a hotel conference room,” he tells me. “Oftentimes, law offices create an environment of hostility, and the purpose of this mediation is to step outside of the traditional realm and encourage open lines of communication so both parties can come to a mutually agreeable arrangement without litigation.”
“We didn’t meet at a Hilton last time,” I say, but that’s silly, because the last time was kind of a joke anyway, and he’s tired of my questions and doesn’t say anything in response.
I follow Thames to the conference room and stop outside the entrance to take a breath. Brett is probably behind those doors, I think, and I want to be strong.
“Whenever you’re ready,” Thames says.
“We could be here awhile,” I say. I’m hesitating to enter, and he thinks it’s nervousness, and it probably is, partly. But mainly I’m preparing my preemptive strike. If on top of everything else he’s done, Brett wants to make a bone of contention out of my baby, he’s at least going to know what I think of the whole idea, and the complete disgrace of a human being who hatched the idea. Complete, utter, and total disgrace. This phrase inspires me, I take it as a battle cry, and in the ten seconds or so that I stand there working myself up into a terrible fury, I seize on this assessment of the situation as the right and proper one and commit wholeheartedly to bursting in on him with both barrels blazing.
As I shove the door open I sing out in full voice: “You are a complete, utter, and total dis—!”
I never get it all out, because I’m not prepared for what’s on the other side. Brett. Ginny. Bill. Streamers. Trish. Scott. The photographer from Sears. Nick. Brooke. Balloons. Friends from high school. Friends from college. Presents. Smiles. And … it’s a baby shower?
I turn around to say something to Tommy Thames, but he’s not there anymore. He’s vanished back to wherever such odd angels of smoke and kindness reside.
Brett steps forward. “Surprise,” he says, with a soft smile.
Tears start to blur my eyes.
“I’m an idiot,” he goes on.
“He is,” Scott says.
“Complete, utter, and total,” Trish agrees, punching Brett hard on the shoulder. “Ow,” he says.
“But he planned this whole thing,” Trish continues, “so we’re giving him another shot.” She squeezes her brother’s shoulder and smiles at him sweetly.
My guard is still slightly up. “What about Heather?” I ask.
“A mistake. It didn’t even go very far. I know you probably don’t care, but she and I never … you know. I couldn’t. She wasn’t you. No one is. No one ever will be. Anyway, I ended things on New Year’s Eve.”
“I hear that’s a popular night for it,” I say without thinking. “You ended it, or she ended it?” I kind of have to ask.
“I ended it,” he says. “Me. And then she proceeded to prank-call me for the next five hours. I’m not kidding. And now she’s talking trash about me around school. Which I don’t even mind, because it’s just karma coming back to kick me in the ass.”
“Well.” I sniff. “I’d say something about your terrible taste in women, but—”
“Listen,” he says. “I’m going to say one last thing about Heather, and then I promise not to mention her again.”
“What?” I ask. “She was great.”
“What? Boy, you are—”
“Listen,” Brett cuts me off. “Before I dumped her and she became a bunny-boiler, she was great. Funny. Attractive. Nice. Smart …”
“Keep it up,” I practically snarl.
“But I still didn’t want to be with her. Didn’t want to be having dinner with her when I knew I’d rather be having dinner with you. Didn’t want to kiss her, and definitely didn’t want to sleep with her, even though she was undeniably hot—”
“Okay, I get it,” I say.
“The point is that it wasn’t Heather. It was me. Or, rather, you and me.”
I start to soften again.
“I love you,” he says, like it’s a confession and he hasn’t been to church in a few decades. “I love you, and I love that baby.”
Tears are streaming down my face now. I can’t stop them.
“I know it’s probably early for a baby shower, but we wanted to get a jump on things,” he goes on, clearly nervous. “And I’m not assuming anything about us here. I just wanted to do this for you. We did. Your family.”
“You didn’t call me back,” I accuse Trish, taking a napkin discreetly from a table.
“I was protecting us both, because I wouldn’t have been able to keep this a secret,” she says, with a shrug. “Besides, I knew you’d forgive me. And by the way, Brett here got our loan back on track.”
“What, did he go and whack Rex’s mother?” I ask. “No,” she replies. “Brett and your father had some angel investor for his underwear.”
“Wonder Armour,” Brett corrects.
“And they showed him our business plan and redirected the funds to Paw Prints,” Trish says. “So if and when you’re ready to do this, we have the funding to launch the pilot.”
I’m kind of amazed. This is a bit of sensory overload. I look around at all of our friends, at Bill and Ginny. At Trish and Kimmy, who I’ve desperately wanted to get to know better but haven’t been able to with the situation as it’s been. Is that an engagement ring on Kimmy’s finger? Oh, the Fosters. I’ve missed them so much. It hasn’t even been that long and it feels like an eternity. I look over at Scott, who has his arm around … April? The photographer from Sears? What the hell have I missed?
“She makes it all make sense,” Scott says to me, and then winks and adds, “She’s twisted in all the right ways.”
“Layla,” Brett says, and he holds out what looks like a contract. For a moment, I recoil. Is he trying to trick me with a shower into giving him joint custody of my baby?
“You’ve been a member of the family for years,” he says. “This just makes it official.”
I look down at what he’s presenting me and see that the papers have nothing to do with the baby. They’re adoption papers? For me?
“All you have to do is sign,” Brett says.
I’m stunned enough now that the tears stop. It’s so overwhelming that I just open my mouth, hoping something intelligible will fall out. But nothing does. I’m stone-cold stunned.
“Of course, if you sign those papers,” he goes on, “we will officially be brother and sister. And we can’t be married or have a romantic relationship again. And that’s okay with me if that’s what you really want, because all I want to do right now is make you happy. But if you might consider the other way you can rejoin our family …”
I take a step forward, and he meets me the rest of the way. We connect at the lips and I can feel everyone staring at us, sort of holding their breath, until Trish says, “Ugh, I HATE it when straight couples make out in public,” and the whole place erupts in laughter and applause. Tension gone.
“I’m so sorry,” Brett says.
“I know,” I say.
“I love you,” he adds. “We can fix this.”
“I want to,” I reply.
“We’re having a baby,” he says, with a smile.
“I know,” I say.
“So I’ll stop acting like one.”
“Promise?”
He kisses me again and I take that to mean Yes.
“We love you,” I hear Ginny say, and I finally take a moment to look around at everyone there. Ginny and Bill,
and just behind them, smiling, too, is my father.
“Nick and I have agreed to joint custody of you,” Bill says, and Ginny nudges him.
“I didn’t sign those papers,” I tease.
“Can I steal you away for a minute?” Brett asks.
Of course the answer is yes.
He takes my hand and walks me outside by the pool to a small garden in the back of the hotel. He points to a large rock that seems to be wedged into the soil, standing up. “Remember when I took you to that graveyard?” he asks.
“You mean with my dad?” I ask. “Of course.” My heart is beating a million miles an hour.
“I’m thinking kind of the same thing here. That’s my headstone right there. The old me. The stupid me.”
I shake my head in disbelief. “Brett—”
“No. Let me finish. What I did … it’s inexcusable. I made a terrible mistake, and now I realize this me is me without you. The me I never want to know again. I was scared to be a grown-up,” he says. “I’m not scared anymore.” He kicks some dirt onto the rock and kisses me.
We kiss again and then reenter the party, where I take everyone in. This messed-up, mixed-up collection of misfits and miscreants is my family. They’re the most insufferable, maddening, unpredictable, irreplaceable, glorious bunch of yahoos I’ve ever known. God help me if I ever come close to losing any of them again.
I’m truly happy, and though that’s no great accomplishment, you can’t believe how strange and lovely it feels. It’s been … I can’t even remember when I last felt weightless, without envy and spite and anger and the whole messy stew of emotions that bubble up inside when you’re losing something important to you.
I’ll tell you just how happy I am. I actually catch myself singing quietly aloud as my dad picks up his guitar and begins to play “Layla.” Brett kisses me and joins in. It’s a great song, even though its backstory, about Clapton stealing Pattie Boyd from George Harrison and all, is a little seedy. But was it all Clapton’s fault? I mean, a lot of people still think, and a court found, that Harrison stole “My Sweet Lord” from the Chiffons’ song “He’s So Fine,” so maybe he had it coming.
brett
The buzz around campus is that there’s a new graduate assistant in the English department and she’s smokin’ hot ….
Okay, kidding. But I just hate happy endings.
Read on for an excerpt from Caprice Crane’s
With a Little Luck
Let a smile be your umbrella, and you’ll end up with a face full of rain.
—GEORGE CARLIN
Chapter One
In this life, you could grow old sitting around waiting to get lucky.
That didn’t come out right. What I meant is that waiting to accidentally run into Richard Branson in line to buy a burger at the very moment he’s desperately looking for a new Executive Vice President of Adventure and Party Planning (“You’ll just have to do,” he says as he whisks you away in the limo), or waiting for that falling safe to just miss hitting you before it smashes through the sidewalk and plummets into a sewer tunnel, or waiting for a wealthy, athletic, artistic, wise, unpretentious, multilingual, manly, sensitive contradiction of impossible handsomeness to lean over and say, “Excuse me—I believe I left my stethoscope here on the way to the children’s hospital” … Well, let’s just agree you’re going to be waiting awhile.
Me? I don’t tempt fate. I don’t dare destiny.
I may talk about hitting the lottery, but the truth is I never play because deep inside—on some level that’s so far down it’s beneath where I keep the memory of the time I walked in on my parents showering—I know there’s no such thing as luck.
But I also have learned that believing there’s no such thing as luck is very unlucky. Like, the worst. Beyond stealing someone’s lucky four-leaf clover. (I know someone who did that and died. Seriously. Three years after doing it, he had a heart attack. And his great-granddaughter never forgave him—but I guess in some perverse way she got justice.)
If that sounds like a contradiction, I suppose maybe it is. But maybe not. Maybe I just don’t believe in good luck. Bad luck—particularly of the sort arising from ignoring intuition and superstitions—that’s another thing altogether.
The history of superstition is also a history of timing. We’ll never know whether a lone sober Trojan looked across the courtyard on that fateful night and said, “I don’t like the look of that horse thing. Bad luck.” But if he or she had, the protest would have fallen on deaf ears: The masses were completely tickled pink by the offering. History has shown that it pays to be suspicious of large, seemingly useless gifts from one’s sworn enemy. And that includes your aunt’s sketchy second husband.
Consider: If the captain of the Titanic had pulled out his tin bullhorn and announced, “Someone in first class just threw a shoe into a mirror and broke it, so I’ve got a bad feeling about this route—let’s slow down and head south,” then as a purely scientific matter, superstition would have saved that ship. I’m just saying.
And if I had only listened to my intuition—that socially acceptable term for what is really superstition—I’d never have followed Emily Ottinger through that third yellow light (I swear it was still yellow) on the way to the mall and never would have ended up wrapping my mom’s new Audi around Mr. Pitrelli’s pickup truck when I was sixteen. Mean, old, grouchy, kid-hating Mr. Pitrelli, I might add.
One moment follows another. Next comes from previous. So you have to stay on your toes. Protect yourself. Listen to that little voice inside you that says, “Don’t do that! You won’t like the consequences.” Look at all the stuff that’s happened to you along the twisting road of your life—good and bad. Still think that all those seemingly disconnected, random events that have no interrelation, not even a simple correlation, have absolutely nothing to do with those best-laid plans crashing and burning in the face of your destiny? Tell my dad that. In a career spent chasing the elusive lucky score, he’s come up empty more times than a fashion model’s lunchbox.
Better yet, tell my mom that. She was the one unlucky enough to end up married to him.
I know that by now you’re thinking I sound like I know the score. But I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. I may know the score, but half the time I’m not sure I know the teams or even what game we’re playing.
Most of the time, I feel like a total fraud. Like I have no idea how I’ve made it this far without the world figuring out that I have no idea what I’m doing or that I’m relying on some sign or the fact that I glanced at the clock at 11:11 or the fact that Paul McCartney’s “With a Little Luck” was playing on the radio when my alarm woke me up to give me a little extra confidence that “we can make this whole damn thing work out.” This “whole damn thing” being my life.
You’d think admitting to feeling like a fraud is the kind of thing that would qualify as an innermost thought. The very kind of thing that gives rise to the term “innermost thoughts,” in fact—because they’re born and live and die inside you, never seeing the light of day (unless you’re the type who regularly drunk-dials an ex and starts a horrifyingly ill-advised confession with, “You know, I’ve never told anybody this before, but …”). You’d think someone with any semblance of self-awareness or a good enough filter or enough Real World: Miamis under her belt would know better by now than to confess these types of things to another living breathing person. But you’d be wrong.
Here I am in this outward cloak of certainty covering extreme self-doubt, walking into Game Night with a bottle of chilled champagne and an outfit that says, “I’m definitely stylish but comfortable enough in my own skin that I don’t have to try that hard.” What I’m really thinking is that I tried really hard to look like I’m not trying hard; in fact, trying to look like you didn’t try hard is downright exhausting. Mind you, I’m not feeling terribly stylish. Especially since it’s raining. Rain is never good luck. Just ask my hair. I feel pretty good about myself, though—a
ll things being relative. Me feeling good about myself means my up-three-pounds, down-three-pounds existence was leaning toward the down side this morning, I don’t have a golf-ball-sized zit screaming for attention on my cheek, and amazingly enough, tonight’s rain hair doesn’t have me looking like a brunette, Caucasian, female version of Don King. Definitely a good sign.
It’s hard enough being a normal girl these days. Sure, I’ve just described a few wacky characteristics, but I’m not talking mentality here—I’m talking normal as in “not enhanced.” More and more, everywhere I turn there’s some girl, some naturally beautiful girl, who is determined to turn herself into a Barbie doll. It’s frightening. Plus, with global warming and the sun getting hotter and hotter, isn’t there a good chance that one day all of these gals will just start to melt? I vowed to myself that I will grow old gracefully—granted, I’m only twenty-eight years old, so I’m gonna reserve the right to change my mind at some point, but for now, I’ll stick with what I’ve got.
Which, mind you, is pretty okay on most days. I have medium brown hair that’s a couple of inches below my shoulders. I put highlights and lowlights in to make it a little more exciting, but the only thing that really does is set me back a couple hundred bucks every few weeks. I have brown eyes that are fairly boring, and I’ve been told I have a “perfect” nose, but I don’t even know what that means. That said, nothing else about me is “perfect,” so I’ll take it. My teeth are straight (thanks, Dr. Edelstein!), and I have dimples when I smile, which I hate. Anyway, that’s me. Nothing spectacular, but I did manage to have the cutest boyfriend in school in the sixth grade, so I’m not entirely hopeless.
I walk into the party behind a guy who is wearing a T-shirt that says “Everybody Dies.” Oh, and that’s not the best part. See, the i in “Dies” is shaped like a gun, and it’s pointing upward, toward his face. Heartwarming. Hang on, it gets better. As he closes the door behind us, this dude’s small black umbrella pops open and blooms in front of him. Then he spins around to close it, and the umbrella catches my favorite sweater and claws a huge hole in it. It seems to be happening in slow motion, the umbrella opening, my eyes widening, the menacing tip moving toward me like a sword thrust. This is suddenly like the shittiest version of The Three Musketeers ever. And, yes, I’ve seen the one with Charlie Sheen.
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