Skinny Bitch in Love

by Kim Barnouin

  I still wasn’t sold on Duncan.

  Ping. Text from Zach.

  My sister’s seen the light, right?

  I texted back. Not quite.

  And I know way more about you than I should, too.

  Chapter 13

  Once again, way too early in the morning, the drilling from The Silver Fucking Steer woke me up. What was the point in knowing the owner if you couldn’t get him to stop the jackhammering before a normal human hour?

  I was slogging into the kitchen to make a strong pot of tea when the buzzer rang.

  Zach.

  Really? I looked like hell. And why was he coming over at eight something in the morning anyway? I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and check myself out. I didn’t look half bad, though my hair was kind of wild, and I didn’t have on a stitch of makeup.

  I opened the front door and then headed into the kitchen to start the tea.

  He knocked then came in. And did not look happy. “Jolie announced this morning that she’s still planning to marry Doofus, and if our dad won’t pay for it, they’ll just get married on the beach and have the reception in the new studio apartment they found yesterday.”

  “Zach, I—”

  “You and Sara did a great job yesterday,” he interrupted, staring at me like he wanted to throttle me. “Thanks a lot, Clem. She’s definitely not going to college in the fall—all because she got an audition for a pathetic walk-on role. Not even the part—just an audition.”

  I’d seen Zach a little pissed before, but he was seriously upset. “Zach, I did everything you asked me to do. Showed her my crummy apartment—and thanks for that, by the way. Had her watch me slave over a hot stove for a home business you’re sure doesn’t even cover my rent. And then we took her on the open call so she’d be turned off to the un-glam side of acting, and she gets the callback—not Sara.”

  He dropped down in a chair. “Do you have coffee? I need coffee.”

  I made him coffee. Gave him one of my tropical fruit scones to calm him down.

  “God, this is good,” he said.

  I smiled. “Zach, I totally expected Jolie to run back to Daddy Dearest and beg to go to UCLA. But she surprised me on a number of levels.”

  “She’s eighteen. She’s impressionable. Everything is ‘amazing and cool.’ You should have told her how hard it all is, shown her that.”

  “Zach, my life is fine. Sorry.”

  He stared at me. “Really. You like living in this dump? You like not being able to get hired in any of the restaurants you used to love eating in? You like having to tack up signs for your ‘business’ on streetlamps? Come on. And don’t tell me you like baking cookies all night.”

  Okay, whoa. He actually air-quoted the word business.

  “First of all, yeah, I do like baking all night. And my Skinny Bitch business is as legitimate as yours—so don’t you ever air quote that word around me again. And this place is not a dump.” Though it kind of was.

  He stalked into the living room and faced the windows, looking out on his own “business” and the made-me-want-to-vomit dead deer sign.

  “You have nothing to say?” I asked. Like an apology.

  He turned around. “I asked you to help me. And you did the opposite.”

  “You know, Zach, I realized how messed up it was of you to ask me to show my life and my best friend’s life as a way to dissuade your sister from our pathetic existences, but I got it, okay? Being twenty-six and trying to make it in L.A. isn’t all fun and games. And she’s eighteen and wearing her own cheap rings as her engagement ring. I get it. But you’re insulting me and the way I live.”

  “This isn’t about you. It’s about my sister.”

  “No, it’s about me. If the way I live is so pathetic, I’m surprised you’re even interested in me.”

  “Clem, I don’t have the energy for this, okay? I spent the past hour telling my sister she’d better not marry that kid and her telling me to mind my own fucking business. And now I’ve got a code violation in the space for wanting to enlarge the kitchen. So cut me a break.”

  “You know what? I won’t. I don’t cut breaks to people who claim to like who I am, to be impressed with who I am, but then show the opposite. And tell your fucking workers to stop drilling before nine a.m. or I’ll call the complaint bureau again.”

  “Go ahead,” he said and slammed out.

  On Friday night my tiny apartment ended up full of people stuffing their faces with my baking mistakes—oddly shaped cookies and a cake I managed to flatten half of by accident because I was upset about Zach. Like I had time to screw up a gluten-free chocolate cake with lemon vanilla glaze. I had four big orders for Saturday morning and too much on my mind. Like Zach, who, yeah, was worried about his kid half sister screwing up her life, but who’d totally insulted me—and I hadn’t heard from him since he huffed out this morning.

  And like Sara, who’d texted me an hour ago from the women’s restroom at Vinettos to report that Duncan had given her the “It’s Not You, It’s Me” speech and that he liked her but wasn’t ready to commit and wanted to be up front about that, and did that mean she shouldn’t sleep with him tonight if she wanted to.

  And like my dad, who my mom had said on the phone earlier was bored out of his mind and maybe I could come up to visit this weekend and bring that fun roommate of mine who’d always made my dad laugh.

  And then my sister and her fiancé had stopped by on their way to dinner on my block, and then Sara and Duncan stopped up so Sara could get a jacket because she was freezing, supposedly, and then Ty and Seamus stopped up because they were on the way to the movies and smelled something amazing coming from my windows, which couldn’t possibly be true. And that was how I ended up having something of an impromptu party.

  My sister and her fiancé—who did kind of look like Elmer Fudd—were sitting on the red velvet couch, each having a slice of my half-flattened chocolate cake.

  “So you going home this weekend to cheer up Dad?” Elizabeth asked. “I can’t because Doug and I have long-standing plans with my future in-laws to see a show.”

  “This cake is fantastic, Clementine,” her fiancé said. I’d almost expected him to say “This wake ih wantastic, Wemenwine.”

  “Thanks, Doug. There are lots of mistake cookies, too, if you have room after that. And I’m thinking about it,” I told my sister. “I can make my deliveries early since everything opens at the crack of dawn, and I don’t have any personal chef clients this weekend.” I was about to ask Sara if she wanted to go with me when I got a brainstorm. The ole two birdies with one stone idea. I’d make my dad happy—and Sara.

  “Hey, Sara and Duncan, what do you think of holding our next cooking class tomorrow at my parents’ farm up in Bluff Valley? We can cook from what we harvest.”

  “Dad would love that,” Elizabeth said. “He’ll take over the class.”

  “I love it,” Sara said. As I knew she would. A chance to get Duncan to herself for the day.

  “Um, not overnight, though, right?” Duncan asked, glancing at Sara and then at me. Uneasily.

  “Just for the day,” I said. “Though there’s room if anyone wants to stay the night.”

  “Eva on the farm,” Sara said. “Are we ready for that? Is anyone ready for that?”

  “I haven’t asked her yet, but I’m sure she’ll be into it.”

  Two minutes later I got the news that Eva would be very into it.

  The road trip was on. Eva had some monstrous SUV, so she offered to pick everyone up and do the driving. The thought of being in a car with Eva for three hours there and three hours back at first had Sara insisting we should drive up ourselves, but then she realized that one car meant that if everyone wanted to stay the night, Duncan would have to also.

  When Eva pulled up at nine thirty, Duncan was in the passenger seat.

  “Duncan, come sit in the back with me so Clem can give Eva directions,” Sara said.

  “Oh, that’s all right
,” Eva said. “I have GPS.”

  “Bitch,” Sara muttered, and I couldn’t help laughing.

  We spent the next three hours listening to Eva talk about her husband who’d dumped the “skank” and was working overtime to prove he’d be faithful from now on.

  “So he’s moving back in to your place?” Duncan asked. “That’s great. At least someone’s love life is—” He clammed up fast, as though remembering that the recipient of his It’s Not You, It’s Me crap was sitting in the backseat.

  And squeezing the banana she’d been eating. Letting it go, she mouthed to me. Letting. It. Go.

  Eva reapplied her gooey tinted lip balm, her red lips flashing at me in the rearview mirror. “He still thinks we should live separately, though, not rush back into anything because he’d hate to hurt me again. Isn’t that sweet?”

  “I guess,” Sara said. “It just all sounds so complicated, you know?”

  “Love is complicated,” Eva said. “Anyone who says it’s supposed to be easy is an idiot.”

  “Guess that means I’m no idiot,” Sara whispered to me. “If I don’t survive the day, bury me in your parents’ backyard.”

  “What?” Eva asked, peering at us in the rearview mirror.

  “Nothing,” Sara said. “Just singing to the radio.”

  I stared out the window at the trees and the wide-open spaces that meant we were nearing Bluff Valley. Was love—if that’s what this thing between me and Zach was heading for—supposed to be this complicated? So complicated that every other day you thought it was over?

  “Holy shit, it’s a real farm,” Eva said as she pulled up the long dirt drive to the white house surrounded by gray wood fencing, weathered red barns, and acres of land. “Look at all those rows of corn. Is that a tractor?”

  “Forget the tractor,” Sara said. “Check out that mutant bunny!”

  “That’s Trevor,” I said. “Get too close and he’ll attack.”

  Duncan eyed the super-sized rabbit, whose long ears dragged on the ground. “Really?”

  “Just messing with you,” I said. “But see that little sheep?” I pointed where a family of sheep were grazing in one of the penned-in fields. “Get too close to her and her dad—the big one—will charge you like a bull.”

  “Ravaged by petting zoo animals,” Eva said. “Charming.”

  My parents, their dogs beside them, came out to meet us. My dad, in his wheelchair, looked good—still frail, but he had great color in his cheeks, and he was happy, I could see. In his element. A captive audience to lecture about farm life and growing crops and cooking from the land. His favorite subjects.

  After twenty minutes in the living room—with introductions and iced tea and Eva thrilled to see from family photos dotting the room that I really did have Bellatrix Lestrange hair and zero curves as a gangly fourteen-year-old—my mother handed everyone a basket.

  “To the fields,” my father said. “We’re making Harvest Pizza today.”

  Harvest Pizza meant anything that was ready to be pulled up or plucked went on top of the vegan mozzarella cheese. Luckily, I remembered to tell everyone to wear their crappiest shoes.

  Eva wore bright red Hunter rain boots. “The air is amazing up here. I’m gonna tell Derek that we should plan a weekend at a B&B up here in farm country. Just us and nature.”

  “It does wonders for the head,” my father said, wheeling beside us on the wood planks my mother had built for him. He stopped alongside a tangle of eggplant dangling amid white and purple flowers and gave a mini lecture about how eggplant was a fruit, not a vegetable, and classified as a berry. Duncan was actually taking notes in his Moleskine notebook, thrilling my father to no end.

  “A berry!” Duncan said. “I had no clue.”

  “Do I want a boyfriend who’d geek out over eggplant anyway?” Sara whispered. “I hate that I do,” she added, making a face.

  Duncan had already moved along to the zucchini, full of questions for my father. I was hoping that the more nerd notes Duncan took, the more relieved Sara would be that he Just Wasn’t That Into Her. But I caught her watching him constantly, laughing at the not-all-that-funny jokes he made. She had it bad for the guy.

  Once our baskets were full of eggplant and zucchini and mushrooms and onions and spinach, we headed back to the kitchen. I let my dad run the class, which seemed to make him very happy. I went into the living room and stared out the window. Trevor was sleeping in his pen, his giant ears lying against the ground.

  “What’s the matter, Clementine?” my mom asked, putting her arm around me.

  I leaned my head against her shoulder for a second. “Nothing. Just some stupid guy trouble.”

  “That good-looking one who paid for our rooms at the Mayfair?”

  “Yeah, that one.”

  “He has instant points in my book,” my mom said.

  “I know. Mine, too. But he gets them taken away a lot.”

  She smiled. “Most people do.”

  I wondered what he was doing right now. Yelling at Jolie, probably. Telling Rufus to get a job. Offering him a job and getting turned down. Telling Jolie that proved his point that they were too immature for marriage.

  Thinking about the French heartbreaker, Vivienne.

  “I hope things work out the way you want,” my mother said. She kissed the top of my head. “Your dad’s really happy you came up and brought your class. He’s in his element.”

  We listened to my father explaining how not to over-knead the dough for the pizza crust, which was made from organic whole wheat flour and water. Eva was asking if she could throw hers up in the air like they did in pizza joints in movies. My dad said sure, and a second later, everyone was laughing.

  “Ah, the joy of risk,” my dad said. “You try to catch it, and it sometimes ends up on your head or the floor. No worries. Just make a new one.”

  I headed back in the kitchen, almost surprised to see how much Sara, Eva, and Duncan had learned from my classes. They knew how to slice zucchini. How to properly peel an onion. How to mince garlic. How to make an incredible tomato sauce from scratch. After brushing the round dough with olive oil and layering on shredded vegan mozzarella, they topped the pizzas with the sliced vegetables.

  Duncan slid each gorgeous, colorful pizza into the oven. “So we’re heading back tonight, right?” He glanced at me, then at his watch.

  “Or we could all stay overnight,” Sara said, looking around at everyone. Her gaze stopped on Duncan and she smiled. “How often do any of us get to spend a night in the country?”

  Okay, I had no idea what was going to happen between these two. But I realized that Sara had the confidence to go for what she wanted. The old Sara would have let it go. But here she was, giving it her all. She deserved applause.

  “The roosters wake up at four thirty in the morning,” my dad said. “But you’re all welcome to stay.”

  “I need to get back, actually,” Duncan said. “I, uh, have early plans tomorrow morning.”

  “Doing what?” Eva asked.

  Sara was staring at him. Very unhappily.

  “Uh, I’m running a 5K in Palisades Park.”

  “I didn’t know you were into running,” Sara said. Clearly not believing a word.

  “Yeah, well, I am,” he said, taking a sip of the home-brewed beer my father handed to everyone.

  Shit.

  “Omigod, is something going on between you two?” Eva asked, staring from Duncan to Sara. “There is!”

  “Or was,” Sara muttered. “Whatever.”

  “Sara, I told you—I was honest about everything yesterday,” Duncan said.

  “I said, whatever, Duncan. No big deal. If you want to go, we’ll go.”

  “I said I need to go.”

  The oven timer dinged. Saved by Harvest Pizza. My father ignored the tension in the room and assigned Duncan the job of removing the pizzas and placing them on the table. The pizzas looked and smelled great. My dad sliced them up and told everyone to dig in.
>
  “We’re not having class on Tuesday, right?” Duncan asked me, slice of pizza halfway to his mouth. “This is in lieu, right?”

  “Right,” Sara snapped. She walked out of the room, and I followed her into the hall. “He sucks. I lost seventeen pounds for this? To be treated the same fucking way? I thought things would be different.”

  “Dating sucks no matter what you look like. Zach hates me because we managed to charm his sister with our twentysomething-girlsish lives.”

  “He’s mad at you? Really?”

  “Yeah, he’s furious. Jolie really plans to get married, too.”

  “That’s not your fault, Clem.”

  “I know. But his plan backfired and he’s all upset.”

  “So I could lose fifteen more pounds and look like you and I’ll still be standing in a hallway pissed at my boyfriend?”

  I smiled. “Yeah.”

  “I’m eating an entire pizza myself,” she said and led the way back into the kitchen.

  As Eva continued to comment on every photo of me and on how different Elizabeth looked from me and Kale—style-wise—Duncan kept asking my father question after question about farm life. At first I thought Duncan was trying to keep the convo from steering back to his love life, but I could tell he was totally into every detail my father was saying about leeks. He even had the little Moleskine notebook out again. My dad was in the middle of telling the story of the freak storm of ’98 when my phone rang. Zach.

  About damned time I thought, surprised at how much I wanted him to call. How much I wanted to hear his voice. Hear him say he was sorry, that everything had come out all wrong—even if it really hadn’t.

  I stepped out the back door in front of the rabbit’s pen. “Hey.”

  “Hey. Look, I’m stuck up at my dad’s ranch dealing with Jolie’s mess, but I wanted to say I’m sorry. I was an asshole. I just really care about Jolie and I got freaked out. I didn’t mean to take it out on you.”