“Woman,” Anthony corrected. “I think you’re a really pretty woman. I’m simply not looking for that right now.”
“Looking for what?” Shelly rested her chin in the palm of her hand and studied Anthony.
“You know what I mean. For that.” He nodded significantly at her other hand, the one that had been on his groin. “I’m not looking for that,” he repeated.
“Ohmygod,” she said, sitting back. “You all take everything so seriously.”
“Who is we all? Men?”
“Your generation. I dated a guy your age—what are you again, like forty-five?”
“Thirty-nine!”
“Whatever. This guy was forty-five. Forty-six, maybe. Divorced. Just like you.”
“I’m not divorced,” he said. He had, in fact, been honest with Joy about that part. It was just everything else he’d held back on. He wished he could walk the summer backward, all the way to the day the Le Baron broke down and the Jeep pulled up beside him. If he had to do it all over again he’d tell the truth right from the beginning.
She shrugged: same difference. “He had a couple of kids, I don’t know, two, maybe three, I’m not sure, I never met them. Anyway, everything was Let’s talk about where this is going, Shelly, or I need to know what you’re thinking about, Shelly. It was exhausting. I was just in it for some good sex, and also he had this amazing apartment on the Upper West Side, and this was when I was living with a completely psycho roommate down in the East Village in a total shithole. I would have slept with almost anyone to get out of that place.”
Anthony winced. He felt six hundred years old. He missed Joy: he wanted Joy.
“I said, Why’s everything have to be so serious?” Shelly continued, either ignoring or missing his wince. “I mean, the places he took me to! Atla. Fairfax. Le Coucou. I kept asking him, Why can’t we just keep going out to these amazing dinners and fucking?” She paused. “Actually,” she said pensively, “the sex was just okay, if you want to know the truth.”
“I don’t need to know the truth,” said Anthony.
“But seriously, the dinners and the apartment were amazing.” She was lost for a moment in a glassy-eyed reverie, and then she snapped out of it and turned her laser gaze on Anthony. Anthony flinched. “Everyone is too serious about everything these days,” she said. “I just don’t get it. So you copied a couple of paragraphs from some book by some dead writer nobody’s ever heard of. Does the world have to end?” Her gaze shifted, and she indicated the shot glasses in front of Anthony. “You going to do these or not?”
“Not,” said Anthony. “Definitely not.”
“Well, I’m not going to waste two shots of Herradura.” She lifted the glasses, one by one, and tipped them into her mouth. Then Shelly Salazar smacked her lips together, held out her hand, and said, “Goodbye, Anthony Puckett. It has been a pleasure working with you.”
“Goodbye, Shelly,” Anthony said. “Thank you for everything.”
“When you change your mind about that thing with your dad,” she said, “which I know for a fact you will, you pick up your phone and you call me immediately. Okay?”
“I’m pretty sure I won’t,” said Anthony. “But if I do, I will.”
Shelly Salazar slid off the barstool and straightened the skirt of her dress and left the bar. Anthony turned to watch her go; a slight wobble on her super-high heels was the only indication that anything had gone on in that bar, anything at all.
Chapter 32
Lu
www.DinnerByDad.com
Did I ever tell you about the first meal I made for Jacqui? We’d been dating for three weeks and four days. She was in law school, stressed and exhausted and beautiful. I invited her to my apartment. I sent my roommates out for the night. That part was easy. I cleaned the bathroom! That part was hard. But I was halfway in love with Jacqui already, so I took my toothbrush and I went at the sink with it until the residue of four post-college young men was eradicated.
I went to the store. I bought spaghetti, cheese. I bought a new toothbrush, because the one I’d used to clean was my only one. Lettuce for a salad. It was iceberg! That’s how little I knew, back then. I had sauce in my fridge. When I got home and opened the jar I saw a bit of mold furred on the inside of the lid. I went back to the store. I got a new jar of sauce. This was before it was easy to find good sauce in a jar. I’m sure there were some, but I didn’t know enough to look for them. I think I bought Prego.
I started cooking. My mom called. I told her what I was doing. She said, “Whatever you do, do not serve that woman powdered cheese. I raised you better than that. Grate it fresh.”
I said nothing.
She said, “Leo? Do you hear me? Buy a good block of Parmesan.”
I went back to the store. I bought a good block of Parmesan. I bought a grater. At this point my grocery budget for the week was gone, maybe even for the month. The cheese was really expensive. I started grating. I grated the first layer of my third finger along with the cheese. I threw out the cheese, all of it, because I couldn’t tell where the cheese ended and my finger skin began. I went back to the powdered cheese. I poured it into a little bowl I found in the back of the cupboard, hoping it looked classier that way. It didn’t.
My finger kept bleeding. Did we have Band-Aids in that apartment? I’ll let you guess.
I served the woman who became the love of my life the most boring, most predictable, least homemade meal there is with a hunk of toilet paper wrapped around my finger and held there with a piece of duct tape. When Jacqui ate every bit of that meal and asked for seconds, I knew I loved her. When she heaped the powdered cheese on and gamely used the back of her fork to flatten a cheese ball, I knew I loved her more.
Flash forward. Tonight I am serving my taco salad with vegetables I grew myself in my backyard garden. I might make a summer cocktail to go with it: something with tequila and jalapeño. (Recipes to follow.)
I learned to cook as my gift to Jacqui and our family. This is what I could do for them to make all of us happier and healthier and give us all a reason to come together. You can do it too, readers. It doesn’t have to be hard. But it does have to be better.
When Maggie was finished at Joy Bombs and ready to help Lu, she toted the boys off to the beach, taking extra care with their sunscreen. Due to Sebastian’s near miss earlier in the summer, they were under a strict no-swimming order when Lu wasn’t there. But they could build sandcastles, run footraces, play tic-tac-toe in the sand.
Lu was trying to figure out how best to photograph the tequila cocktail when the doorbell rang. She started, then took cover behind the living room curtain so she could peer out at the driveway without being seen. Shit: it was Nancy.
“Lu! Yoo-hoo! Lu!” Nancy rang the doorbell and knocked at the same time. Nancy was the only person Lu knew who actually said, “Yoo-hoo!” with a straight face.
Lu watched the doorknob turn slowly; she was cursing herself for not locking it, but Lu had confirmed that Nancy had an extra key, and she definitely had enough gall to use it, so it was hopeless either way. She took a sharp left turn and tiptoed quickly up the stairs, bringing her laptop with her. She needed to save everything she’d been working on and keep it out of Nancy’s sight.
Nancy pushed open the door.
“Just a sec!” called Lu. “Just coming down!” She ran down the stairs and threw herself in front of the door, blocking Nancy from entering. She’d left some of the cocktail fixings out on the counter; she didn’t think Nancy was going to be on board with the idea of day drinking, especially if Jeremy had told Nancy about their fight.
Nancy peered around her, trying to see what Lu was keeping her from. “Jeremy said you might need some extra help, so I thought I’d stop by. I would have come yesterday but I had an engagement.”
“Extra help?” Lu wondered if Nancy came in, Lu could shuttle the cocktail glasses into the sink before Nancy had a chance to see them.
“He said you’ve been worn out la
tely.” So he’d told her something. Nancy smiled conspiratorially. “Ooooh, maybe you’re pregnant!”
“Definitely not,” said Lu. Definitely not.
“Soon, I’m sure.”
“Here’s hoping.” Lu manufactured her own smile and plastered it to her face. “Chase has been having nightmares, that’s all. I haven’t been sleeping well.”
Nancy’s face fell. “Oh. Well, soon enough, I’m sure.” Lu wasn’t quite sure how she’d gotten caught up in this third-child conspiracy. Two children had always seemed exactly right to Lu: one for each hand. Maybe that was because she had grown up in a small family, while Jeremy had two brothers. Whatever the reason, he was gung-ho to go for the bigger family. He always said “go for,” like a new baby was a tricky soccer shot. It was easier for Jeremy to talk like that because if a new baby came along he’d be mainly watching from the sidelines while Lu ran up and down the field.
“Where are the boys?” Nancy bobbed and weaved; there was a second when Lu thought she was going to duck right under her arms to get past her.
“They’re upstairs.”
“Maybe I’ll just come in and say hi.”
“Oh, gosh, I wish you could, but they’re napping!”
Nancy looked at her shrewdly and said, “Chase doesn’t nap.”
“Not at home, he doesn’t,” said Lu. “But something about the salt air here, all the sun—he gets really wiped out. I was just checking on them, they’re out like a couple of lights.”
“Call me when they wake up,” said Nancy. “Maybe I’ll come back.”
“That would be so great,” said Lu. “They’d love it.”
She hustled Nancy out the front door and made her way back to the kitchen. Before returning to the cocktail scene she checked her email. She had seventy-eight new messages, one of which said, Invitation! in the subject heading. Lu got a little fluttery feeling in her stomach just as she used to as a girl when she got asked to a birthday party.
She read the email, then reread it. She was invited to Sapor!, one of the biggest food blogging conferences in the country. Sapor! was huge; it was the conference that had launched a thousand bloggers. It would take place over five days. In San Francisco! Not only was Lu invited, she was invited to be a panelist. The topic of her panel: “Infusing Your Blog with Real-Life Stories.”
She would be speaking on the third day, though she was invited and encouraged to attend for all five. How was she going to manufacture a five-day trip? She couldn’t call it a girls’ trip. She didn’t have enough friends to go on girls’ trips, and anyway girls’ trips of more than two nights were frivolous, everybody knew that.
Equally pressing, how was she going to present herself as a stay-at-home dad in front of a live audience? Necessity being the mother of invention, she’d have to figure it out. Later.
I’d love to, she wrote back. Thank you so much for the invitation.
A text came in: Jeremy.
Mom says you were acting funny. Everything OK?
How perfect that Nancy had gone right to Jeremy with news of Lu’s erratic behavior. Nancy probably suspected Lu of something trite, like an affair. Normally this would have bothered Lu, but just now, with the invitation in front of her, she didn’t care.
Everything’s great, she texted back. Couldn’t be better.
Chapter 33
Joy
It didn’t take long to find it. Some simple googling. Of course, the Times article came up right away, followed by more articles in other papers: the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe. (“Carbon Copy.” “Hometown Boy Humbled.”) And more besides that, in industry publications. Publishers Weekly. Shelf Awareness. Writer’s Digest. All Joy needed, of course, was the first one; no mistaking Anthony in the photo.
She tracked down Anthony’s wife via her Facebook page, a public page that linked her art to a studio in the South End of Boston. Willing herself to close the browser, and unable to do so, Joy stared for a long, long time at Cassie’s photo. Both her hair and her shirt were silky. She looked like a model for an expensive skin care regimen, an advertisement for not eating. She looked like someone who would run fast in the other direction if she saw a whoopie pie.
Joy had never felt so short, so brown, so curly and curvy, so well fed—so wrong about everything.
On the publisher’s website there was an author bio that nobody had had the sense to pull: Anthony Puckett lives outside of Boston with his wife and their young son.
Son? thought Joy.
Joy’s phone rang a lot the next morning. The seventh time that day and she didn’t pick up, but the eighth time, she did. She was on her bike by then; she’d ridden as fast as she could, as far as she could.
“What?” she said aggressively. Anthony Puckett lives outside of Boston with his wife . . .
“Listen, Joy. It’s me.”
With his wife and their young son.
“I know.”
“Can we talk? Can I come over?”
Anthony Puckett had never told Joy Sousa about his young son.
“I’m not home.”
Anthony Puckett had stood with Joy and looked at a poster of his own father and pretended not to know him.
“Where are you?”
“I’m out.”
“Out where?”
She sighed. “Not that it’s any of your business, Anthony Puckett, but I’m on a bike ride.”
“Where? I’ll meet you.”
“I’m halfway around the island. You’ll never catch me.”
“So wait for me.”
She huffed and sighed again. “I don’t know if I want to see you. I’m pretty sure I don’t.”
“But I want to explain things to you. Where are you really? You can’t avoid me forever.”
“I bet I can.”
“You can’t.”
“I’m at the end of Corn Neck Road,” she said finally.
“At the lighthouse? At Settlers’ Rock? Where?”
“Fine,” she said. “We may as well do this now.” This was the Portuguese side of her talking, a lifetime of brawling brothers who poured their emotions out like milk from a pitcher. “I’m at the parking lot before the lighthouse.” She had leaned her bike against the sign that said Welcome to the Block Island National Wildlife Refuge and was standing with her arms folded, looking out at the Sound.
The parking lot was almost full, but nobody was around. Everybody must be walking out along the rocks to the lighthouse.
When she saw the Le Baron coming down the road she walked closer to the water. Let him come to her.
“Hey,” Anthony said as he approached her, wobbling over the stones that covered the beach. His gray T-shirt had a stain on the front of it, and his hair was blowing in the breeze off the Sound. Joy tried to fixate on the T-shirt and not on the hair; she used to love seeing Anthony’s hair messy like that. Used to: it was already in the past. She wished her heart could hurry up and be finished breaking so it could start to repair.
She pointed toward the lighthouse and said, “Did you know that in 1831 a schooner wrecked on Sandy Point here?”
“No.” If Anthony was taken aback by the unexpected history lesson, he didn’t show it. “I didn’t. Joy—”
“The ship was called Warrior. Can you imagine it? Twenty-one people died. Not too far from where we’re standing now.”
“No . . .”
“Do you even know how Block Island got its name?”
“I guess I don’t.” He didn’t seem to be getting the extent of her anger.
“Typical,” she spat. “Most people who come here don’t bother to find out. This island was charted by the Dutch explorer Adriaen Block. Did you know that the Narragansett tribe first called it ‘Manisses’?”
“I didn’t.”
“That name translates to ‘Island of the Little God.’”
“Okay. That’s very interesting, Joy—” He put a hand out as though to touch her, or calm her, but she backed away.<
br />
“And, yeah, the sunsets are amazing and the beaches are fun and the cocktails are really good, but you people, you people who come and then leave again, you don’t realize that there’s a whole history here. You don’t realize that you leave your messes behind for the rest of us to clean up. You come from outside, and you change what’s here, and then you leave again, like it’s nothing.”
This time Anthony didn’t respond. After a beat, Joy continued. “So let me get this straight. According to the New York Times, and many other publications, which I found with the help of my favorite search engine, you have a son.”
Anthony nodded. “He’s four. His name is Max.”
“And your father is the guy with the gigantic display in the window of Island Bound Books, am I correct about that? Leonard Puckett?” When they’d stood in front of the poster he’d asked her if she’d read anything by that guy.
“Correct,” said Anthony.
“And. Furthermore. You yourself are an author, not some freelance journalist. Only, your second book, for which you got paid, like, a bazillion dollars, got yanked before publication because you plagiarized part of it. And you got caught.”
He nodded. “Such a tiny part, though,” he said. “It wasn’t even a—it was such a—I mean, most of the book was . . .”
“Uh-huh.” Joy crossed her arms over her chest. Her heart was beating so hard she could feel it slamming into her hand. “I should have known,” she said. “That it was all too good to be true. That you were too good to be true.”
“But I’m not too good to be true,” he said. He sounded desperate now. He raked his hands through his hair. “I’m here, I’m me, I’m the guy you’ve spent the better part of the summer with. It’s still me, Joy. If I could just explain to you, if I could just tell you, it was all such a mistake, one stupid move that got blown way out of propor—”
She cut him off. “You are the biggest bullshitter I have ever met in my life, Anthony Jones.” He winced. “Puckett, I mean!” she corrected. “Anthony Puckett. Basically everything you ever told me was a lie. One big fat stupid lie.”
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