What Happens in Suburbia… (Red Dress Ink Novels)

by Wendy Markham

  I look around for a suitable weapon. Mace, meat cleaver, andiron…

  No, no and no.

  What I do see, lying on top of a nearby box, is the hacked-off couch leg. It’ll have to do in a pinch. I grab it.

  Telling myself that Jack is going to feel mighty guilty if I’m raped by a masked intruder, I hold my breath and turn the knob. If attacked, in lieu of bopping him over the head with this small stump of fine, polished wood, I suppose I can always release my breath, which is guaranteed to send a would-be rapist running for the hills.

  But it isn’t a masked rapist.

  It’s Angelina Jolie.

  Or at least, a very convincing look-alike in gi-normous movie-star sunglasses, a tight white T-shirt and black yoga pants that you need to be super toned to wear because they show every bulge. (She has none, of course.)

  “Oh, you are home! I was just about to leave.”

  “We’re home,” I say jovially, and pat my bed head self-consciously.

  “Welcome to the neighborhood. I’m Cornelia Gates Fairchild.”

  Huh. That is some name, don’t you think?

  “Tracey Candell,” I return, after considering—and dismissing—the insertion of Spadolini. Somehow it doesn’t flow the way her name does. “Do you live on the street?”

  “Two doors down. This is for you.” She hands me a Saran-wrapped loaf, which, let me tell you, is a heck of a lot heavier than it looks. “It’s organic-gluten-free-quinoa-millet-and-buckwheat.”

  It’s what?

  “Thank you!” I say, as if it’s exactly what I was hoping for, trying hard not to breathe foul oral fumes in her direction. “That’s so sweet of you.”

  “You’re welcome. Do you have kids?” she asks, and I see her trying to sneak a peek over my shoulder at the interior of the house.

  “Oh…no. Do you?”

  “Four.”

  Four kids? I never would have—

  “Pippa is five, Henry is three, Louisa is two and Aubrey is two weeks.”

  Two weeks?

  Okay, there is no way this woman gave birth A) to four children, and B) two weeks ago. I guess little Aubrey is adopted. I bet they all are. Maybe she’s got a Benetton family like Angelina Jolie.

  Wait…is she Angelina?

  Hard to tell. She really might be.

  She could be using an alias, for herself and the kids. Laying low in the suburbs, away from the paparazzi glare.

  Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if she were Angelina Jolie, and we could be buds? Raphael would be all over that. I bet he wouldn’t think the suburbs are bourgeois then. He and Donatello would be house hunting here faster than you can say Perez Hilton.

  “Do you want to come in for coffee?” I may be a little starstruck myself, and thus willing to overlook the fact that I have no coffee.

  “Decaf?”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, thanks,” she says, “I’m nursing. And anyway, I should be going. My husband and I want to get our tennis match in before the baby wakes up.”

  So let me get this straight. She’s nursing, so she did give birth, yet is without bulges a mere fortnight later, plays tennis and obviously has a babysitter. I hate her.

  Unless she’s Angelina Jolie, in which case I can’t help but want to befriend her.

  “What’s your husband’s name?” she asks me.

  “Jack.”

  “Uh-huh. What does Jack do?”

  “He’s in advertising,” I say, and can’t bring myself to return the questions about her husband. It’s not that I don’t care what his name is (she could be using an alias for Brad), or that I don’t care what he does—although if he’s not Brad I don’t care what he does—but that seems like an odd question to ask someone you just met.

  “Oh, advertising,” she says, and I can’t tell what, exactly, she means by the oh. Her tone isn’t dismissive, but she doesn’t seem overly impressed, either.

  Not that I care whether she’s impressed by Jack’s job. Though I suppose I could have mentioned he’s a vice president now. After all, I’m really proud of him and I feel bad that his promotion kind of got lost in the shuffle.

  Meanwhile, Cornelia/Angelina is surely going to ask what I do, and I’m positive she’ll be doubly unimpressed when I tell her.

  But she doesn’t ask. She just says, “My husband, Whitney, is a financial analyst.”

  “Oh, financial analyst,” I say. Leave it to me to somehow come off sounding both impressed and fascinated.

  “Do you do yoga?” she asks doubtfully, eyeing my sweats as though making sure they aren’t concealing a sylphlike physique. “No.”

  “You should start! We have the best new instructor down at Modern Buddha. You should come to the beginners’ class. You should check with the studio, but I think it’s Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at eleven.”

  “A.M.?” I ask, thinking she’s just delivered an awful lot of shoulds.

  She laughs. “Of course, a.m.”

  “The thing is…I work.”

  “You do?”

  I nod.

  “Where?”

  “The city.”

  “You’re going to commute?”

  “That’s the plan.” I try to sound flip.

  Cornelia/Angelina all but wrinkles her nose and neglects to ask what it is that I do for a living. She just says, “Well, I really do have to get going,” in a perfectly polite way, but managing to sound as if I’m trying to keep her here.

  “Thanks for the bread,” I say, because anything in loaf form tends to look like bread, though I wonder if something that’s organic-gluten-free-quinoa-millet-and-buckwheat does, indeed, qualify as bread.

  “Enjoy.”

  With a wave, she’s off to tennis.

  Jack is waiting at the top of the stairs in his underwear. “Well? Who was it?”

  “Well, at first I thought it might be Angelina Jolie, but now I’m not so sure.”

  Mildly nonplussed, Jack asks, “Huh?”

  “She brought us this as a welcome to the neighborhood.”

  “What is it? Bread?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, that was nice. Our first friend.”

  “I guess so.”

  Suddenly, I desperately miss Raphael, and Kate, and Buckley and…

  Actually, not Mitch.

  Not yet, anyway. But at this rate, you never know.

  “By the way…” Jack holds up something that looks like a long, metal rod.

  “What is that?”

  “The towel bar from the bathroom.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “It was loose. I tried to fix it.”

  “Good job,” I crack, and he scowls.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Can you put it back on?”

  “No, it snapped off. We’ll have to get a new one.”

  “Put it on the list.” We started making a list this morning of items we need from the hardware store. It seems there are quite a few things around here that need tweaking, replacement or repair. I can’t help but wonder how we’re going to do all this…and who’s going to do it.

  Looking at unkempt Jack standing there holding a broken towel bar, I have a hard time picturing him transforming himself into a savvy do-it-yourselfer anytime in the near future.

  I hate to say it…and I won’t, aloud…but Bob may have been right.

  We two crazy kids may have gotten more than we bargained for.

  CHAPTER 12

  Do you know how long it takes to unpack and settle into a house (as opposed to an apartment)?

  I’ll let you know…someday. I hope. Possibly this year, but I wouldn’t bank on it. It’s taking Jack and me forever to put away our clothes and work our way through the boxes of household stuff, figuring out where stuff should go.

  The thing is, with a house, you know you’re going to be there forever, so you want to do everything right.

  I figured by now we’d have had a chance to explore our new hometown, and I really wanted
to go to the Memorial Day parade they were having today. But the weather’s been a washout, and I haven’t left the house since we arrived here on Friday, other than a quick run to the nearest grocery store for kitchen staples like bread, milk and Little Debbies.

  Remember that loaf-brick-thing Cornelia/Angelina dropped off the other day? It wasn’t edible. It was dense and had a seedy texture and a weird flavor, like fermented sprouts or something. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was trying to poison us.

  Come to think of it, I don’t know better. Maybe I should have saved the evidence for a forensic team. Unfortunately, it’s somewhere in one of the billion trash bags we’ve filled and dumped at the curb over the last forty-eight hours.

  Jack has gone back and forth to the hardware store countless times since Saturday morning. He has also managed to crack a ceramic bathroom tile trying to replace the towel bar, fall off a ladder, sit on a bag filled with lightbulbs and bend the hinge on a kitchen-cabinet door while trying to make it close more tightly.

  Now it doesn’t close at all.

  The one thing I really need him to fix—the couch leg—is the one thing he doesn’t want to touch.

  He said he wants to wait a bit and see if the moving company is going to pay for it, since we put in a claim. On our own, we can’t afford to hire a professional furniture repairman, much less buy a new couch.

  Considering Jack’s overall domestic klutziness, I guess it’s better that he won’t even attempt a temporary fix.

  I’ve been trying to overlook what a disaster he’s been around the house so far; I figure he’s probably just stressed out and overtired.

  Personally, I’m just anxious to get through all the mundane tasks, like putting up plastic shower-curtain liners on rings that keep unpopping, and start with the fun stuff, like the painting and decorating and planting my garden. I picked up a bunch of seed packets in the supermarket yesterday: more tomatoes, of course…a few varieties. Also eggplant, cucumber and peppers, basil and dill, zinnias and bachelor buttons and forget-me-nots. All the same kind of stuff my mother has growing in her garden.

  I keep looking longingly out the window at the spot where I’m going to plant the seeds, just as soon as I have a chance. Hopefully next weekend. I’m itching to get my fingers into the dirt.

  I guess it’s good, in a way, that I’ve been too busy to dwell on the possibility of my getting fired when I show up for work tomorrow. But it’s definitely been lingering in the back of my mind, and so has my mother’s health. She claimed she was feeling better when I spoke to her yesterday, but I wouldn’t expect her to tell me if she wasn’t.

  She mostly wanted to talk about the house, and I promised I’d bring pictures when we go up to visit. I also reminded her that we have plenty of room for houseguests, so she and my father will have to come down soon.

  “We’d love to,” she said, but when I pressed her for a date, she was noncommittal.

  My parents aren’t big on travel. In fact, they’ve only visited me in New York once, for the engagement party Wilma threw for me and Jack. I know they weren’t thrilled with Manhattan, but I think they’ll like to see me settled in a real house, in a beautiful little town like Glenhaven Park (though of course they’d be happier if it were Brookside).

  In any case, it’s been an exhausting long weekend and I’m glad we got an extra day to work on the house.

  When my cell phone vibrates in my back pocket after dark on Monday night, I’m plugged into my iPod, listening to a good, satisfyingly loud and pounding Kanye West tune, in the midst of lining the shelves of the linen closet with contact paper I cut to size.

  At least, I thought I cut it to size.

  Either the contact paper shrunk or the shelves expanded. I didn’t find out until I had peeled off the backing. Now it’s stuck to everything but the shelf, and I’m not in the mood to answer my phone.

  It’s probably Kate again.

  She called me about an hour ago, crying about Billy, who decided to take off for the Hamptons for the remainder of the long weekend, without her. She asked if I could come over.

  Either she forgot that I moved, or she expected me to jump on the next train. When I told her I couldn’t, she seemed miffed. Then she poured out her heart, leaving me feel utterly helpless. There’s just not much I can do from here. I did my best to be a supportive friend and not badmouth Billy, but let me tell you, the whole conversation sucked the life out of me.

  Or I suppose it could be Latisha calling again, too. She’s checked in several times over the weekend to talk about the layoffs. She kept her job, but a bunch of people in her department are gone, as well as just about everyone in mine.

  Crosby Courts included. Seeing her axed would have thrilled me not so long ago, but not anymore.

  Crosby’s demise is like a death knell for my own job security.

  It’s ironic that I would have given just about anything to get out of Blair Barnett just a few short months ago. But things have changed. This isn’t how I want it to end—on their terms, not my own. This isn’t when I want it to end—when we have a mortgage, a car and a house that needs more work than we ever anticipated.

  Jack and I can really use my salary now that we’re home owners, and I don’t know what we’ll do if we lose it.

  The phone stops ringing. Good.

  When it starts up again a minute later, I sigh, turn off the iPod and pop the headphones out of my ears. I have to answer it.

  After all, it could be Jack. He had to go out to pick up Taco Bell for us for a late dinner because the only take-out place in town that delivers is the pizza parlor—which, by the way, isn’t great. We already tried it. The delivery took over an hour—unheard of in the city—and the pizza arrived cold.

  What if something terrible happened to Jack?

  Or what if he can’t remember whether I wanted the Chalupa Supreme or the Gordita Supreme? He kept getting mixed up. At this point, I’m so famished I’ll gladly take both, plus a Chili Cheese Nachos BellGrande.

  Checking the caller-ID window on my phone, I see that it says UNKNOWN.

  So it’s not Jack.

  What if it’s the hospital emergency room? Would that come up UNKNOWN?

  I have no idea, and I hope I never find out.

  Heart pounding, I say, “Hello?”

  “Tracey? It’s Mary Beth.”

  “Oh! Hi.” Thank God. “What’s up?”

  The contact paper just got stuck in my hair, and I tug gingerly at it. Ouch.

  “I’m at the hospital emergency room.”

  “What!” I instantly feel sick to my stomach. “What happened? Is it Ma?”

  “She fainted and Pop called an ambulance.”

  An ambulance. Oh my God oh my God oh my God…

  “What’s wrong with her?” I ask Mary Beth, pacing along the hall, contact paper dangling from my head and now stuck to my iPod earbuds as well.

  “She’s okay now. They don’t know what happened. They’re running some tests.”

  “Is she conscious?”

  “Of course she’s conscious. She was only unconscious for a minute.”

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “She doesn’t know I’m calling you. You know how she doesn’t like anyone to make a fuss over her, and she hates doctors, so she just wants to get out of here. She keeps telling them to let her go home because she left a pot of minestrone on the stove.”

  Yeah, that’s my mother. But thank God it sounds like she’s okay—for now.

  Still…something has to be seriously wrong for her to pass out, right?

  I stop pacing and lean against the wall, feeling weak and worried.

  Naturally, the contact paper sticks to the wall as well as to my hair and the headphones.

  Damn, damn, damn.

  I give it a hard yank, then cry out in pain as a big chunk of hair rips out of my skull.

  “Tracey, my God, get ahold of yourself,” says Mary Beth, who obviously thinks I’m screaming in agony abo
ut my mother. “I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Well, I’ve got to come up there.” Now the contact paper is stuck to my sleeve.

  “That’s a good idea. Come up next weekend. By then—”

  “Next weekend! I was thinking Jack and I could be there by morning if we leave now.”

  “Tracey, it’s not an emergency.”

  “She’s in the emergency room. How is that not an emergency?”

  “I just thought you should know. I didn’t want to worry you…”

  Sure she did. If you don’t want to worry someone, you don’t call them until you have something conclusive to say. Something other than that Ma is lying on a gurney drawing her last breath, for all I know.

  “I just don’t think you should drop everything and come. That’ll scare Ma. She’ll think she’s dying and nobody’s telling her.”

  “Is she dying and nobody’s telling her?” Or me?

  “No! I just told you, I’m sure she’ll be fine. I’m sure it was just a hot flash. I’ve been telling her she needs to do something about her hormone levels.”

  Did I mention Mary Beth isn’t a gynecologist?

  “Who else is at the hospital with you?” I ask, hoping to get one of my brothers on the phone.

  “Just Pop and Stefania.”

  Stefania is there? Why?

  Fighting an unreasonable wave of envy, I remind myself that this isn’t about Stefania taking my place in the family. This is about my mother, in the hospital.

  I open my mouth and a sob escapes.

  “Tracey, don’t worry. She’s okay. I shouldn’t have called you.”

  “No, I’m glad you did.” I sniffle.

  “Listen, I have to get back in there.”

  “Let me know what the tests show, okay? Promise?”

  Mary Beth promises, and we hang up.

  I make my way forlornly through the empty house, trying to unstick the contact paper, longing for familiarity and finding none. To hell with the new house and the fresh start.

  All I want right now is to go home. Home to Brookside.

  I want my mommy.

  I don’t sleep at all Monday night.

  Mary Beth called back to say that the tests were inconclusive and they have to do more, but they let my mother go home from the hospital. I fought the urge to call her there.