But that’s just it. I like the flowers just fine; they’re pretty, and they please people and give them an excuse to drop in. Sometimes the flowers even make us some money. But make no mistake: I’m here for the community. I love the people who seem to gravitate here, hanging out telling their stories, laughing, eating, juggling oranges, drinking tea, polishing their toenails, practicing their marriage proposals or their job interviews, writing books, writing notes to people they love—and I don’t much care whether they need a bouquet or not. I’ve turned the back room into kind of a salon for them—I put in thick lavender carpet, painted the walls white, strung some fairy lights, and bought a soft, squishy rose-colored sectional sofa and a wicker desk, some beanbag chairs, candles, bookshelves, and about a million pillows.
Naturally people started showing up—Lola, my neighbor and Blix’s old best friend, comes in to knit several times a week; a guy named Ernst brings his laptop and works on his screenplay there because he says the vibe is so good for his characters’ dialogue; Christine sits cross-legged on the floor and writes letters to her old boyfriend who doesn’t want to take her back (we’re waiting for a match for her to show up and get her to leave this old BF alone)—and then there are a group of three high school girls who regularly come bounding in with such panache and swagger that Kat and I have taken to calling them the Amazings.
Kat, a former accounting major who only took the job if I promised to stop using the word universe in her presence, at first didn’t see the point of my little back room salon.
She was all like, “Aren’t we a flower business? This back room side hustle you’ve got going on will not pay the bills. It’s what my grandmother would have said was just frippery.”
I hugged her. “That’s it! Frippery is the perfect name for it.” And I painted a little sign, THE FRIPPERY, for over the archway. It matches the words on our frosted glass front door—BEST BUDS painted with little vines and buds weaving through the gold letters.
“But can’t we at least suggest that people make a purchase every once in a while?” she whined, and I said, “It’s all going to work out fine as long as people are having fun; it always does.” Which she said was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard a business owner say.
But you know what? It has worked out just fine.
Anyway, Kat is now a believer, and she even permits me to point out the accomplishments of the universe once or twice a month now. This is because I fixed her up with the UPS guy one slow afternoon. Of course, it wasn’t me fixing her up; it was the U, that word that we do not utter. Whenever he was around, she was covered in sparkles, and he was just the same. Now that she’s in love, she’s less irritated by all the wacky talk about energy and spirits. Love does that to people, I notice. Improves their outlook on life.
“By the way,” she says, as I’m heading into the Frippery to fluff the pillows, “did you happen to see a woman and a little girl out there when you came in?”
I’ve been studying myself in the mirror to see if I can detect any signs of first-day pregnancy, but I come back out. “Scads of them. Women and baby girls everywhere you look.”
“No. This is a middle-sized girl, maybe seven or eight. They were looking for you.”
“Nope.”
“I told them you’d be in later, and they said maybe they’d go get some breakfast. They flew in from England last night, and the mom looked like she could really use some caffeine. I sent them to Yolk.”
“England’s a long way to come for a bouquet of roses,” I say.
“Maybe your reputation as a matchmaker is now international.”
I wave her off. “The important question of the day is: Do you think I could really be pregnant?”
“You really could be pregnant.”
“Huh. And I suppose Patrick would eventually get used to the idea, wouldn’t he? I mean, he wouldn’t leave me or anything.”
She stares at me. “Good heavens, what’s happened to you? You’re the one who’d be telling somebody else that hell yes, everything’s going to work out! I can just hear you now: ‘It’s life, it’s meant to be, it’s’”—she makes a face—“‘the universe doing what it does so well!’”
“I know, I know. It’s just that I want this so badly. I’ve never wanted anything this much. It makes me scared I won’t get it.”
She rolls her eyes. “Did you talk to Toaster Blix about it?”
“Didn’t have a chance this morning,” I say. I once made the mistake of telling Kat how I sense Blix’s presence near her old temperamental toaster, an appliance that insists on throwing bread at me on a regular basis. And how, in times of trouble, I can simply go stand near the toaster and feel her energy there. Kat, of course, finds this hilarious.
“Well, go into the Frippery then and see if you can summon her from the dead. She’ll set you straight. Remind you who you are.”
CHAPTER FOUR
TESSA
It takes all her willpower, but Tessa Farrell makes a point of not checking her cell phone all the way through breakfast, even though it’s been vibrating in her bag the whole time she and Fritzie have been in the restaurant. (If you can refer to this too-precious little sliver of real estate as a restaurant—it’s called Yolk, according to the name burned into the piece of wood over the door. If you want to be technically correct, Tessa thinks, this place is actually closer to being a pretentious little closet that somehow got crammed with six tables.)
It’s Richard, of course. The phone. Sending erotic messages and texts, then trying to follow up with a phone call to say dirty things in her ear and make her laugh. And although she’d give anything just now to hear his liquid, chocolaty baritone transmitted through the transatlantic satellites, she won’t allow herself that.
Good God. How has this happened to her? This stupid aching need. She hasn’t ever had one moment of sentimentality her whole life, and now she can’t think of anything besides how much she loves Richard and how much she wants to be in bed with him. It’s beyond ridiculous. She always thought that the whole business of falling in love was merely a hoax perpetrated by the movie industry to get people to feel bad about their own dull lives. Or, worse, propaganda to get people to consign their lives to perpetuating the species. She’d lived her whole life resisting all of that rubbish.
And now it’s all she can do to keep from running out into the street and throwing herself in the path of the nearest Uber, making the driver take her to the airport, so she can catch a plane and fling herself into Richard’s arms. Richard, who last time they were together stopped her anxious yammering on about something by simply leaning over her and smiling and saying, “Will you fucking shut up and kiss me?”
She wants so much to talk to him that her head throbs with the need for his voice, but Fritzie is watching her closely, and Fritzie hates when she’s absorbed with the phone or with Richard. She has an eight-year-old’s razor-sharp instinct for sniffing out a rival for attention, and so she despises Richard. She puts her hands over her ears at the mention of his name, and over the past few months, whenever Tessa would leave Fritzie with a sitter so that she and Richard could have a date, Fritzie would scream bloody murder and then do some horrible thing. Once she threw out the new lacy thong Tessa had guiltily bought for herself, casually tossed it right in the dumpster, laughing. Another time she poured Tessa’s perfume down the sink—Chanel No. 5, which Richard had given Tessa for their one-month anniversary. When he gave it to her, he said she reminded him of Coco Chanel, and for a whole week he called her his Coco.
Tessa sighs and regards her plate of golden-yolked eggs and the multigrain toast, buttered so precisely to the edges that it looks almost surgical. Fritzie, slouching in her chair, is pushing her food around the plate. She won’t eat. She knows her mother wants her to eat.
Outside the window, all of Brooklyn—weird, crowded, hot, overcast, Augusty Brooklyn—tramps by. So different from their home in San Francisco.
And oh so different from where
Richard is—gone away on a year-long fellowship to teach poetry in Rome, living in a little pensione over a tavern. She doesn’t even really know what a pensione is, because she’s not the sort of woman people invite to pensiones, but he wants her to come. He wants her. That’s what all these texts are about. He wants her. In the fever dream of the last months, kissing in doorways, making love in the shower with the water running so Fritzie couldn’t hear them, they’d worked out a plan to be together. She was meant to be already on her way there. Instead, she’s in the overcrowded, godforsaken Northeast, barely able to breathe, and since he’s been out of her sight, everything between them feels to her as though it could fall apart at any moment. All her plans, so carefully stacked up in her head, are like dinner plates that have all started to wobble at once.
“You know, I think you’re supposed to be talking to me,” Fritzie says, leaning on her hand with her elbow propped on the table. She’s exhausted from the flight, a red-eye that got them into JFK at midnight, New York time. That would have been bad enough, but they were still on England time, so it felt like it was five a.m. They caught the flight after taking a train to Heathrow from the countryside, where they’d been staying with Tessa’s mother, Helaine. Plan A had been that the visit would go so well that Helaine would be thrilled to keep Fritzie for the school year and allow Tessa to go to Rome—but Helaine had been horrified at the idea. The whole visit had unraveled rather suddenly and there’d been a terrible row, and Tessa and Fritzie had left in a huff.
So that meant Plan B: New York. And the guy she hadn’t talked to in nine years.
By the time the plane landed at Kennedy and they’d checked into the Hyatt, Fritzie was too keyed up to sleep. Jumping on the bed and turning the lights on and off. This morning her eyes are puffy and the skin underneath them looks smudged, and her straight brown hair, always tangled, is truly a wild bloody mess, and her personality has gone to hell besides. She screeched when Tessa had tried to comb her hair, cried when she had to brush her teeth. So, fine. Tessa is just going to try to get through the day. Today and then the next day and the next, and by then, maybe by then she’ll have scoped everything out, decided how to proceed.
“Gaia’s mum says that mealtimes are very valuable times to be together, because that’s when you can teach me about life,” Fritzie says.
Tessa has heard enough about Gaia’s perfect mom to last her entire lifetime, and she particularly isn’t having any of it right now. She says, “Well, when I figure out life, you’ll be the first to know. Now finish your eggs.”
Fritzie sits up straighter and makes her eyes go round. “You always say that people should just eat what their stomachs tell them to eat and they don’t have to finish the food on their plate just because some people think wasting is a bad thing. You said that. And now you’re telling me I have to finish my eggs. So which is it?”
Tessa feels her jaw aching. “Fritzie. Please. Just stop.”
“Stop whaaaaat? What am I doing?”
“Stop being so bloody ornery.” She puts her fingers on her temples. Fritzie slumps back in her chair, chewing on a lock of her hair, and swinging her legs against the table leg, and watches the cook and the waitress, who are flirting with each other.
When Tessa feels calmer, she smiles and says the thing the counselor said she should reiterate often: “Listen, Fritzie, we’re on the same side, you and I. We’re both tired, but let’s try to have a good day, all right?”
Fritzie picks up a spoon and tries to get it to stick onto her nose, her newest obsession ever since she’d seen it done on YouTube.
“Why did you have me anyway?” she says in a dangerous voice, and as soon as she starts to talk, the spoon falls to the floor with a clatter. The waitress looks over, startled.
“Well. I wanted you,” Tessa says slowly. Which is not altogether precisely true. Fritzie was actually the product of a drunken night, a little mistaken encounter really—and actually Tessa was forty at the time and stupidly didn’t think she could get pregnant, and then—oops!—there Fritzie was, thumping around in her uterus a few months later like she owned the place.
Fritzie is shaking her head. “Nuh-uh. I heard Grandmum telling Pearl that you had me by accident, and that you thought it was going to be fun raising a kid, but now you think it’s too hard and you don’t like it anymore.” She doesn’t look at Tessa while she says this, simply keeps rearranging the flatware, moving it all around. “It’s okay if that’s what you think,” she says, thrusting her chin out. “I don’t care.” Her fingernails are dirty, her face has a smear of jelly on it, and there’s something sticky tangled in her hair.
“That is not true,” Tessa says. “I love you very, very much!” She feels her blood pounding in her head. It’s horrifying, the things her mum says. And within earshot of a child! In the thick of the fight, Helaine accused her of being the worst mother in the world. And, who knows, maybe she is. It certainly doesn’t come easily for her. She loves Fritzie, she does, but she’s just no good at handling everything.
Motherhood has so many stipulations and rules, and so many people with opinions about how you’re doing. Even before Richard came along, she had trouble paying attention to everything. She gets caught up in her own projects—the maths problems she loves to work on, and her grad students she needs to advise, and she forgets stuff. Like dinnertime. How is it that there have to be three meals made and served every damn day—seven days a week? Who made that the norm? Life has become a series of commands she is required by law to say: Eat your food, do your homework, be quieter, get away from the stove, stop talking, hurry up, not that channel, take a bath, go to bed.
And Fritzie seems smarter and tougher every year. Only eight years old—and already her huge saucer eyes are exhibiting a wounded, blaming expression that Tessa finds alarming. Has she somehow caused this in her child? Has she already ruined her? Not given her a proper family?
“Tell me about my bio-daddy,” she’d demanded one night, and Tessa had had to take a deep breath. Him. What was she supposed to say?
“Well,” she said slowly, “as you might imagine, he was very handsome, and he was younger than I was, and so charming.”
“Why isn’t he with us then?”
“I knew him for just two nights. And that was it between us. We went our separate ways.”
“Two nights? Why didn’t he want to stay with me?”
“Well, he didn’t know about you.”
“How come he didn’t know about me?”
“Because I didn’t tell him.”
“Why didn’t you tell him?”
Tessa found herself launching into the biological explanation about sperm and eggs, how it was the woman’s job to carry the fetus, (they had a tiresome, protracted moment about the weirdness of the word fetus) and that the man can escape scot-free, never knowing what his contribution was. In fact, men needed to be told. Women had to tell them.
Fritzie was bouncing on the bed on her butt. “Why didn’t you tell him you had a fetus?”
How to go into this? “Because it wasn’t that kind of thing. It wasn’t a forever thing. It was just two very, very lovely nights.”
She stopped talking then because Fritzie had gotten mad.
“He should know about me! Why didn’t you tell him? He might want to know me! Did you ever think of that?”
No. Actually, Tessa hadn’t ever thought of that. But when Helaine said she wouldn’t keep Fritzie, the idea of sending her to her father seemed like a plausible plan. Why not? He’d been a nice guy. She’d been friends—or acquaintances, really—with his sister. Elizabeth. They were good people. Maybe he would like to know his kid. Just for a while. Not forever or anything.
She just wants a bit of time off. That’s all she’s asking for. One little tiny academic year away from responsibility. Richard wants her to come, but the place he has is small, he says. Too cramped. It’s no place for a child. Tessa knows that what he means is that he isn’t interested in being a father fig
ure to Fritzie. And she doesn’t blame him. She can’t imagine him becoming a proper stepfather, and, even worse, she can’t imagine herself worrying about Fritzie in some Italian pensione.
Still, it’s a crazy plan. One of her craziest. She’d been so sure Helaine would want to keep Fritzie that she’d gone ahead and taken a sabbatical at work and arranged for one of her grad students to live in their flat.
And then . . . no. Just no.
Fritzie is standing up, tracing the ring from the water glass around and around on the table, sliding packets of Truvia into the wetness and soaking them.
“So what are we going to do now?” she says, her voice pitched perfectly into a whine that shreds Tessa’s nerve endings. “Are we going back to that place to see if the matchmaker is there yet?”
“No, I don’t think so.” They’d come from a little shop, a florist. Where his girlfriend worked apparently. Elizabeth had told her that. Elizabeth, whom she’d reached—amazingly enough—from her mum’s house after the row. She’d made it sound all casual . . . Is he still in Brooklyn? Still doing art? She didn’t mention the kid.
And as soon as she’d gotten off the call, she’d booked the plane tickets to New York. She had to pay the highest possible fare for such late notice, of course. But it was worth it, to sweep out of Helaine’s house with no further explanation. And now here they were, on their way to finding him. She had his cell phone number, but she should do it in person. And maybe it would be best, she’d decided, to see the matchmaker girlfriend first. Pave the way, you know.
A Happy Catastrophe Page 4
