The Smart One and the Pretty One

by Claire Lazebnik

  “I’d like that,” Lauren said.

  “You should practice playing poker until then,” he said, and she couldn’t tell if he meant it as a joke or not. “So I don’t keep beating you so easily.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I do,” he said. “It would be more fun with a challenging opponent.”

  “Well, then, I’ll try to improve my skills,” Lauren said. “For your sake.”

  “Hope to see you next week then,” he said and walked off, toward his mother’s chair. He sat down on the stool next to her. She opened her eyes briefly and managed a smile before closing them again. For a moment or two, Lauren just stood there watching Daniel watch his mother absorb the poison that would make her sicker for now and probably wouldn’t ever cure her.

  Chapter 6

  Ava wasn’t the kind of boss who kept track of how many personal calls her assistant made on any given day or whether he was five minutes late coming back from his lunch break or anything like that, but right now her door was open and she could hear him talking on the phone, and it felt like the call had been going on forever. She was dying for a cup of coffee. She could have buzzed in and interrupted him at any time, of course, but a cup of coffee didn’t seem important enough to make him hang up—just important enough to make her aware he had been on the phone for at least half an hour.

  Finally, she called out, “Jeremy? Got a sec?”

  He immediately stuck his head around the doorway, phone clasped against his chest. “Sorry, Ava. I’m right here. What do you need?”

  “I’d love a cup of coffee when you get a chance. No rush.”

  “Sure. I’ll get it right now.” He held the phone up. “Can you talk? It’s your sister.”

  “My sister? Is that who you’ve been talking to all this time?”

  “Um, yeah?” he said uncertainly.

  “Oh. Okay. Could you please shut the door, too?” As the door swung shut, she picked up the phone. “Lauren? What were you talking poor Jeremy’s ear off about?”

  “I was just saying thank-you to him.”

  “For what?”

  “For tracking down Russell’s address.”

  Ava sank into her desk chair. “Oh, God, Lauren. Tell me you didn’t tell my assistant about that stupid, stupid contract.”

  “Of course I didn’t. I just said that you and I were curious about an old friend and he offered to see if he could get any information about him online. Is Jeremy gay, by the way? He’s cute enough to be. And he’s just so darn sweet. But I can’t quite tell.”

  “Hold on a second,” Ava said. “I’ll ask him. Or maybe I’ll just speculate on the phone about it really loudly so he can hear me.”

  “It’s a perfectly reasonable question,” Lauren said. “Don’t get all huffy. I just thought the subject might have come up. He might have mentioned a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend. Either one would answer my question.”

  “Jeremy and I have a professional relationship, Lauren, which means I don’t ask him questions about his personal life, and I don’t expect him to hunt down men’s addresses because my sister thinks I need a date.”

  “You should,” Lauren said. “He’s very good at it. He sent me all of Russell’s contact info within a few hours.”

  “Did you tell him what it was for?”

  “Not exactly. Anyway, forget that for now. I was calling to ask you something.”

  “What?”

  “Would it be okay if I came to stay with you for a little while?”

  Ava blinked a couple of times. Then she said, “Excuse me?”

  “Hey, you’re the one who keeps saying, ‘Only losers live with their parents.’”

  “What did Dad do this time?” Ava asked wearily. She settled against the back of her chair and crossed her legs.

  “He won’t stop lecturing me,” Lauren said. “And not for the reasons you’d think. I mean, the guy should be lecturing me about finding a job and getting out of debt, right?”

  “That’s certainly why I would lecture you.”

  “I know! But guess what Dad’s deal is. He thinks I should go to dental hygienist school. Seriously. Last night, I was trying to watch TV and he turns it off and says, ‘I’ve been thinking. You’re never going to be the kind of professional success your sister is—’”

  “Oh, God,” Ava said with loyal disgust, but deep down she felt a small rush of pleasure at hearing that her emotionally withholding father viewed her as the family success.

  “It’s not like it’s the first time he’s pointed out how much smarter you are than me. Anyway, then he says, ‘So I’ve been thinking about it and you need to acquire some skills that will ultimately bring you in contact with the right kind of men. You’ll never make money, so you better marry it.’”

  “That’s a little harsh.”

  “No kidding. Then he says, ‘I’ve figured it out. You have nice thin fingers, so I think you’d make a decent dental hygienist. And dentists earn good money while working much more regular hours than doctors.’ Which I guess means better husband material. Anyway, he even said he’d pay for the whole thing.”

  “That’s kind of nice of him.”

  Lauren snorted. “Oh, please. Can you imagine me as a dental hygienist? Or even married to a dentist? Could the man know me any less? Anyway, you know how he is—if he gets an idea about something, that’s it, that’s the solution, nothing else will work. He’s figured out my future and he’s damned if I’m going to mess up his plans by, say, finding another job as a clothing buyer and actually doing what I like. He’s been researching dental schools on the Internet. I mean dental hygienist school—apparently I’m not smart enough to become an actual dentist.” She paused. “Or maybe no girl is—I’m not sure if it’s personal or sexist. Or which would be worse.”

  “Tell him you don’t want to do it.”

  “I intend to,” Lauren said, “but he’s not going to take it well. That’s why I need an escape route.”

  “So either I let you move in with me or you have to become a dental hygienist?” Ava said.

  “Exactly.”

  “You do have those nice thin fingers.”

  “Yeah,” Lauren said. “And they’re just itching to do a dance inside some stranger’s mouth.” She shuddered audibly. “Ew.”

  “Ew,” Ava agreed.

  “So can I? Please?”

  “Let me think for a sec.” Ava chewed on the side of her thumb, trying to do the calculations in her head. Company in the evening might actually be nice. But Lauren could be messy. And it meant she’d have no privacy. But then again she had nothing to be private about. Out loud, she said, “You’d have to sleep on the living room sofa—I’m not sharing the bedroom.”

  Lauren squealed with delight. “Oh, thank you, A! This is going to be great.”

  “Hold on.” Ava had thought of something else. “You can’t move all your stuff in—I don’t have room.” The UPS truck had visited their parents’ house and deposited so many boxes of clothing and accessories that Nancy had insisted Lauren move most of them to the garage without unpacking them. “Just take what you need. No, better yet—take what I would need under similar circumstances.”

  “How about we compromise somewhere in the middle?”

  “It’s a small apartment,” Ava said.

  “We’ll be so cozy there.”

  Ava didn’t answer.

  Lauren moved in on Friday. When Ava got home from work that night, Lauren had a pan of brownies baking in the oven, and they agreed that brownies could count as dinner when topped with vanilla frozen yogurt, which, Ava pointed out, provided both calcium and protein.

  They made up a bed for Lauren on the sofa and she curled up happily under a fleece blanket, claiming it was far more comfortable than any bed she had slept on in recent memory. Ava felt happy as she got ready for bed that night. It was nice to have someone to say good night to.

  But a few hours later, when she was woken up by voices in the next room and grog
gily came out to investigate, only to find an instantly contrite Lauren watching TV—“Sorry, didn’t realize it was too loud”—she felt a little less serene and optimistic about the whole arrangement and wondered instead how long it was likely to last.

  The Braverman bat mitzvah started at ten the next morning. At nine-thirty Ava was showered and dressed and ready to go, but Lauren was only just getting out of the shower. As Lauren emerged from the apartment’s only bathroom wrapped in one towel and drying her curly hair with another, she stopped at the sight of Ava and said, “That’s what you’re wearing?”

  Ava looked down at her dress, which was green and belted and unstained, and said, “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s a party, Ava. Don’t you want to look a little more”—she searched for a moment—“like you’re going to a party? Wear something that you wouldn’t wear to work? Maybe put your hair up?”

  “It’s a party that everyone I work for or with will be at,” Ava said. “It’s basically a day of work with catered food and some dancing.” She sorted through her small box of jewelry and extracted a pearl choker that her grandmother had passed down to her on her twenty-first birthday.

  “But it’s still an excuse to dress up and wow people.” Lauren took her clothes into the bathroom but left the door open so Ava could hear her. “Why do you always dress like you’re fifty years old?”

  “I don’t,” Ava said, but she dropped the pearls back in the box with a slightly guilty start. “I dress like a lawyer. Anyway, I’m not like you. I don’t think getting dressed up is fun. I think it’s a pain.”

  “Come on,” Lauren said. She emerged from the bathroom in a pair of blue and white striped boy-short underpants and an off-white lace-trimmed camisole. The two undergarments didn’t match at all, but somehow they looked right together anyway. “You’re a girl, aren’t you? Every girl likes to get dressed up for a party.”

  “Not me,” Ava said. “It’s a chore. Like cleaning the bathroom.”

  “The problem is you don’t have the kind of clothes that make getting dressed up fun,” Lauren said. She pulled a dress off its hanger and tugged it over her head. It slipped right into place. It was a dark blue that wasn’t quite navy and it had a deep V-neck that showed off just the right amount of the lace trim on her camisole. She instantly looked smashing and very stylish. “Let me loan you something.”

  “It’s ‘lend.’ ‘Loan’ is a noun.”

  “Miss English Major. Seriously, A, I have a dress that would look so great on you—” She started to sort through the hangers.

  “No, thanks,” Ava said. “I’m perfectly happy with how I look.”

  “Really?” Lauren said in a tone of utter disbelief. “Well, wait until you see this.”

  “Forget it. I don’t have time to get changed, anyway. Hurry up.”

  Lauren crouched down and sorted through some shoeboxes she had stacked on the floor of Ava’s closet, seized on one with a shout of joy, and extracted from it a pair of silver high-heeled sandals. “There you are, my beauties!” She jumped to her feet, clutching them to her chest.

  “Please tell me you’re not hugging your shoes,” Ava said.

  “I love these shoes.”

  “How can you love a pair of shoes?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Lauren stopped in the act of pulling the shoes on to stare at her, balancing unsteadily on one leg. “I mean, are you insane?”

  “Oh, I’m the insane one because I’m not having a love affair with my footwear?”

  “It’s so sad,” Lauren said. She twisted her leg so she could prop one foot up on Ava’s bed and do the strap. “There should be some sort of intervention for people like you—”

  “People like me?” Ava said. “I’m not the one who’s in debt because I can’t say no to a pair of shiny sandals. Come on, Lauren, hurry up.”

  “Just let me put on some makeup and I’ll be ready to go.” She went into the bathroom and spent what felt like an eon to Ava brushing and smoothing and clinking while Ava paced outside the door, impatiently glancing at her watch. “Want me to do you?” Lauren called after a few minutes.

  “No, I’m fine,” said Ava. “I just want to get going.”

  “Almost done,” Lauren said. When she emerged a few minutes later, she had arranged her hair in Pre-Raphaelite curls down her back, with just the front pieces pulled back and twisted together and then pinned so they merged with the rest. Her skin looked flawless, and her eyes were now smoky and dramatic. She did look very beautiful, and as Lauren checked her reflection one last time, Ava deliberately moved out of the mirror’s sightline, knowing that a side-by-side comparison wasn’t likely to increase her self-confidence as she headed off to try to be social.

  “That was endless,” Lauren said to Ava as they emerged from the temple sanctuary into the foyer at the end of the two-hour bat mitzvah service. “Would it be wrong to thank God that our family isn’t religious?”

  “Maybe not wrong,” Ava said, “but certainly confusing.”

  “Ooh, this’ll help.” Lauren snagged two little Dixie cups off of the table where the rabbi had just blessed the wine. She handed one to Ava and took a sip, then made an awful face. “Oh, good Lord, it’s grape juice.” She put her cup back down on the table and hailed a waiter going by with a tray of filled wineglasses. “Is that the real thing?”

  “Pinot Noir,” he assured her.

  “Hallelujah!”

  “Hey, you are religious!” Ava said.

  “What do you know—I’ve been born again.” Lauren swiped two glasses off the tray and handed one to Ava. As she drank, she turned to study the crowded room. “So are you going to introduce me to people? Are there any cute guys at your firm?”

  “Some.” Ava leaned toward Lauren and lowered her voice. “There’s this one guy who all the women think is gorgeous. Peter Rogers. He’s over by the bar. Do you see him? He’s wearing the red tie and talking to that bald guy.”

  Lauren casually sipped at her wineglass as she swiveled just enough to see the guy Ava meant by looking out of the corner of her eyes. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Totally hot. What’s his story?”

  “He’s new,” Ava said. “I don’t know much about him.”

  “Have you spoken to him?”

  “Yeah. I asked him to press the fourth-floor button on the elevator once. It was a real moment.”

  “Let’s go,” Lauren said, moving in his direction.

  “Wait.” Ava grabbed her by the arm. “You can’t just go walking up to him for no reason.”

  “Sure I can.” Lauren shook her off and kept moving.

  Ava pursued her. “Seriously, Lauren, I have to face him every day and if you—”

  “You really have to learn to relax,” Lauren said and walked right up to Peter Rogers and the bald guy. “Hi!” she said brightly, and they returned the greeting with equal warmth. “So here’s a question for you—”

  “Yes?” the older man said with an expectant smile.

  “I was reading the Bible back during the ceremony and now I’m doing a survey, trying to see how many people know the answer to a simple biblical question. Ready?” They nodded. “Okay. Today’s question is ‘Who slew Cain?’”

  “Abel, of course,” Peter Rogers said.

  “Careful.” The older man winked at Lauren. “You’ve got to get up earlier in the day to trick me. No one slew Cain—Cain slew Abel.”

  “Oh, right,” Peter said. “The mark of Cain.”

  “They don’t have to get up early in the day to trick you,” the other man said with a fond smile.

  “Apparently not.” He gave a good-natured shrug.

  “Everyone falls for it,” Lauren said. “Except for you.” She nodded toward the bald guy, who smiled, pleased. “It’s just this weird thing—you ask people who slew Abel and they’ll say Cain, but if you ask them who slew Cain, they’ll say Abel.” She had read about that somewhere but hadn’t remembered where—just one of those random interesting facts that
had stuck in her memory. It wasn’t the first time she had used it as a conversation starter.

  “It’s kind of sad for Abel,” said Ava with a slightly nervous laugh. “Don’t you think?”

  “It’s the curse of having siblings,” Lauren said. “You’re always judged by their behavior. She’s my sister,” she informed the men, gesturing at Ava.

  “So I assumed,” the older man said. “The resemblance is striking. Are you twins?”

  They both shook their heads and Lauren said, “Nope, she’s older.”

  “You’re at the firm, right?” Peter said to Ava. “I know we’ve met, but I’m terrible with names. Please forgive me. I’m Peter.”

  “Nothing to forgive. I’m Ava. This is my sister, Lauren.”

  “And I’m Tom,” the older man said.

  “Are you at the firm too?” Lauren asked him.

  “No,” he said cheerfully. “Just here for the free drinks.” Up close he was clearly younger than his balding head and slightly stooped shoulders made him appear from a distance—closer to forty than to fifty.

  “He’s here with me,” Peter added, with a proudly defiant tilt to his chin.

  “Ah,” Lauren said with a nod and raised her glass to her lips—but not without first shooting a very quick, very surreptitious, and very amused look at Ava, who returned it with equal amusement and a sheepish shrug.

  “Next time you ask a cute guy to push an elevator button for you, check out his sexual orientation first,” Lauren said after Tom and Peter had left them to go in search of food. The trays of smoked salmon sandwiches and chicken sates followed a path that bypassed their corner, and the men were getting hungry.

  “Yeah,” Ava said. “I’ll do that. ‘Fourth floor, and are you gay or straight?’”

  “That’s rude,” Lauren said. “You should say, ‘Fourth floor, please. And are you gay or straight?’”

  A waiter came by with a tray that had some empty glasses on it and told them it was time to find their table and sit down for lunch in the big hall.

  “Hold on,” Lauren said as the young man started to move away. “I need your advice.”