We said our good-byes and I knew I’d hear from her again soon, the minute Peter remembered something else he just had to make someone do for him.
I slipped the florist list back into the file and turned to open the mail, which had arrived in my absence. I whipped each piece open with the opener and sorted quickly: action items, junk, file. File, file, file. Junk. Payment. Invoice returned to sender, must investigate what happened there . . .
My phone buzzed in my pocket for a text. I looked down the hall to see if Angela was approaching. No, I could hear her bellowing into her phone. I looked out the door. No visitors and no appointments due.
It was Drew. I also noticed an earlier text I’d missed. I’d muted my phone completely at Dr. Tom’s.
Where were you this morning? From Drew.
What’s wrong? I thumbed back, wincing at the soft beeping of each key. I should have asked Drew how to shut that off.
I was feeling sick.
Shit. Poor kid. Sick how? Are you still sick? Do you need me to come get you?
stomach hurt. okay now. just wondered why you didn’t answer.
I exhaled. I’m sorry. I had to shut my phone off for a meeting and forgot to turn it back on.
I called work and you didn’t answer.
It was an offsite meeting.
Gotta go to class. Bye.
“Patricia!”
Angela startled the phone out of my hands.
“I do not pay you to be on Facebook, or whatever you’re doing.”
My head remained bent toward my phone, which seemed unharmed on my desk, landing as it had on the large paper calendar. It had landed smack on next Monday. The beginning of spring break. The beginning of the Big Clean.
“Did you hear me?” Angela barked.
I smacked my hands flat on the desk and pushed myself up to stand. I met her eyes. “That was my son, who sent me a text because he wasn’t feeling well. I know this is inconvenient for you, but I do have actual living, breathing children who at times need my care and attention, even when it’s not quitting time. He’s fine now, actually, and in the time I’ve been back at work, I’ve opened and sorted all the mail, responded to all the new e-mail, and dealt with Peter Mason about the centerpieces for the fund-raiser. All while sipping a smoothie instead of eating actual food.”
Angela stepped as close to me as the tall reception desk would allow. “I will allow for that little tirade because it’s out of character, and because you managed to do so much work this morning. Besides, training a replacement is a hassle. But you are on notice.”
“What kind of notice?”
“In this economy, plenty of people would do your job happily and not talk back.”
I watched her retreat to her office, and for the next few minutes, I entertained a delicious fantasy of tackling her scrawny ass, grabbing a fistful of her hair, and bashing her face into the closest hard surface I could find.
Maybe that’s a question they should have put on their psychological evaluation form. How often do you have homicidal fantasies about your boss? Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Often, Always. Choose one.
Chapter 22
On Sunday morning my eyes popped open earlier than usual, and I felt giddy, like I did as a kid when we once went to SeaWorld and had to start driving before dawn. I made my bed as usual, but decided to have breakfast on the road so I wouldn’t have to wash dishes.
I felt more energetic than I had all week, despite that I’d gotten up extra early. I supposed it was a thrill having someplace to finally go. My thoughts also kept wandering to Seth, and what he looked like these days. I’d be seeing him Monday for the first time since he came to Mother’s funeral. I’d been in a fog back then, and now I could barely remember what he looked like. The last time I’d seen him before that we’d hugged, giddy, minutes after graduation. My funny graduation hat had fallen off backward, and he’d bent to pick it up for me.
Seth and my roommate of the time, Rebecca, had dated in high school. We ended up hanging out as a trio some nights when he’d stop by on his way home from a night class, or they’d bump into me in the dining hall. Rebecca never seemed to mind including me, though we’d been randomly assigned as roommates and our friendship seemed born of necessity more than anything. They struck me as a comfortable old married couple, laughing at in-jokes and relaxing with that easy physical intimacy that must come from knowing someone for years. She’d be sitting next to him and throw her legs over his, and he’d cup her knee in his hand. And it wasn’t sexual, or it didn’t seem to be. Comfortable. I looked at them and dreamed of having a boyfriend like that, a connection like that.
They broke up, quite suddenly, near the end of sophomore year. He showed up at our door with blue hollows under his red eyes asking for her, saying he needed to talk to her. She’d gone home early for the weekend, I told him. She’d left a note saying she’d be back Sunday night.
It was a balmy spring night and stuffy in the dorms. I had our windows thrown open and a box fan braced on the sill to get some air moving. I asked him what was wrong and he bit his lip.
I convinced him to come in, and he sat on our little college-issue sofa, upholstered in nubbly orange fabric. He put his head in his hands, gripping his forehead like he had to hold it together with his hands alone. I sat across the room in my desk chair, not knowing what to say, wondering why I’d invited him in.
Then he just started talking. About how she’d broken up with him at a picnic the day before. That they’d been sitting on the blanket, leaning against a tree, and he was playing with her hair and she was tucked up under his arm and he was just thinking about how long he should wait before asking her to marry him. How young was too young, how long of an engagement she would want, whether he could borrow money from his dad for a ring.
And she sat up abruptly and said, “I have to tell you something.”
Seth said he thought she was going to say she was pregnant—that she’d forgotten a pill—and he felt both fear and elation at the idea. Then she said, “I don’t think I love you anymore.”
He leaped up from the blanket like it was on fire and stared at her. And she started talking about how the passion had gone out of it for her, and she’d known him so long she felt stifled, never having discovered who she is without him.
In one of the only times he looked up from the floor that whole time, Seth said, “It was like something she read from a script.”
As she kept talking he started to wonder how long she’d been planning this, whether the previous night when they had sex in his apartment she’d already known that would be the last time.
He asked her if there was someone else and that made her furious, he said; she started screaming at him about how dare he accuse her of cheating, only he said that’s not what he meant, he just wanted to know if she liked someone else, is all . . .
That felt staged, too, Seth told me. How far she’d flown off the handle. It was unlike her to be so sensitive.
I let him talk for hours. I didn’t say much. I opened a bottle of vodka Rebecca had left, and we mixed it with Dr Pepper.
The conversation wandered from there. Seth started talking about how it was always like this with him, that important people left him all the time. He talked about his dad who, after his parents’ divorce, seemed content to ply him with money and trips to the movies but never any actual parenting.
He looked so broken that I sat on the couch next to him and touched his knee carefully, like I might approach a dog I didn’t know. He shocked me by snatching up my hand and clutching it there on his knee, while with his opposite hand he roughly rubbed his face.
“Fuck,” he said quietly, with no heat. Then he turned to me and looked me in the eye. I hadn’t seen his eyes so clearly before; he was much taller than me and we rarely had occasion to be so close. He had long, long lashes and his eyes were a pale blue. “I�
�m just doing my best. Why isn’t that ever enough?”
That’s when he leaned close to my face.
I didn’t understand what was happening at first, then I did, and I closed my eyes. The first contact was like a buzzing jolt that made me jerk backward.
He slid away from me down the couch. “Sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have . . . Sorry. I guess I’m . . .”
“. . . drunk,” I finished for him.
He got up and made as if to go, but he was wobbling all over and I insisted he stay on the couch. I had a loft bed way up high on the other side of the room, after all. He seemed dubious and indeed pained to stay in our room without his girlfriend, but when he couldn’t manage to even put on his jacket correctly, he nodded that maybe he’d better sleep it off.
I retreated to my loft in my unsexy floral cotton jammies and wondered why my heart was hammering so hard. I couldn’t sort out even for myself what was going on. Did I jerk back because I didn’t want to be kissed? No, that didn’t seem right. I liked his lips on mine very much, however briefly. Did I do it out of loyalty to my random-assignment roommate? That seemed less plausible yet. After all, she’d broken his heart. Fear of getting caught? We had left the door open, though the couch was not visible from the doorway.
I went to bed in a riot of confusion and lay awake for long, silent hours. Seth passed out almost immediately.
He was gone by morning, leaving a scribbled note that said only: “Thanks.”
I held my breath for Rebecca’s return, suspecting that someone in the dorm would have spotted Seth leaving our room in the morning and report that to my roommate. Would she be angry? Even though she’d dumped him? Anger was always like kryptonite to me. Even unjustified anger rendered me pathetically helpless as I scrambled to get back into good stead with the offended party.
Rebecca was distracted upon her return, hardly seeming to notice my presence. I wondered if this was the silent treatment, and when I could take it no longer, I cleared my throat and said, “Um, Rebecca? I wanted to tell you . . .”
“Oh,” she said, waving her hand like she was batting away a fly. “Seth explained it to me. Thanks for letting him stay over when he’d had too much to drink. The last thing he needs is a DUI.”
“So you don’t mind?”
“Why would I care if he slept on the sofa? It’s not like you fucked him, right?” She laughed. “Ha, I can just see that. Mary Granger, sex kitten, seducing poor brokenhearted Seth.” She shook her head, smirking. “Though I shouldn’t joke. It wasn’t fair of me to do that to him. I just had some kind of commitment freakout, you know? I’ve already taken it all back.”
“Took what all back?”
“Breaking up. That would be stupid, wouldn’t it? To drop such a terrific guy for basically no reason?”
“Yeah,” I’d replied. “Stupid.” And I’d gone to bed with a headache for the rest of the day, skipping all my classes.
Rebecca never did marry him. He told me in the first shared-birthday phone call the November after graduation—which shocked me like bad wiring when I answered the phone, having not heard from him since school—that they’d broken up because he was going to grad school in California. He’d reported this to me in a matter-of-fact way, the same tone he used to explain his off-campus apartment and his part-time job. He’d asked about me and I’d told him I’d gotten promoted at my bookstore job and was trying to decide about grad school myself.
“So happy birthday to us,” he’d said warmly.
“Happy birthday,” I’d replied. “It was good to hear from you.”
As I hung up, I realized that “good” was an understatement, that I felt like a light had gone out when I flipped my phone shut. But he was all the way in California, which might as well have been Mars.
The phone calls continued yearly, and then postcards began arriving. He moved several times, trying to find a city where he felt most at home, he said.
Once on our joint birthday, I’d opened a bottle of wine by myself and was a few glasses into it when the phone rang. When Harry Met Sally had been on, and a half-eaten chocolate bar was in my hand.
I was feeling unusually verbose and told him a goofy story about someone coming into the bookstore asking for a reference on how to start his own escort service and because I could think of nothing else to do, I took the man seriously and guided him to the “small business” section.
He laughed and my stomach swooshed like I’d been on a merry-go-round. In the pause, a thought formed in my head and I prepared to announce it: I miss you between calls. Once a year isn’t enough.
Then he said, “Hey, I have some news. My girlfriend and I are moving back to Michigan.”
Instead of speaking, I picked up my wineglass and took a long, deep swallow.
My car wound through the streets of suburban Lansing to the brick-and-siding condo owned by Ellen and Dad. Well, really Ellen. It had been her late husband’s and was not so unlike my own town house.
I was the first to arrive, not surprisingly. I looked at my watch and noticed I was a full hour earlier than I was supposed to arrive. I’d been so eager to get out of my place for a change I’d gone and been early to the point of being incredibly rude.
But there I was. In fact, I could already see where Ellen had parted the curtains in the front window and noticed me sitting there.
My dad opened the front door and I did a double take. Was he wearing a cardigan? Like Mr. Rogers?
He saw me notice. “Hi, Peaches. It gets a little chilly in here sometimes.” He pulled me into a hug and then guided me through the door. “They say it’s going to warm up today, though, finally.”
In their foyer, I glanced around. Even more country knickknacks had invaded since I’d last been here, at Christmas. More dried flowers, and wicker, and embroidered cutesy things on the walls. But it was all meticulous, all the level surfaces neat. Everything dust free. Much like my neighbor Harriet.
“Ellen is just putting on her face,” he explained. Normally she’d be embracing me, too, drawling and squealing.
“Sorry I’m early,” I said.
“Oh, Peaches, you’re family. There’s no early or late. You can be here anytime.”
I didn’t bother correcting him that I was not really Ellen’s family, and she might not feel the same. A hostess doesn’t like the guests to see her without her face on, or without the table set, family or not. Stepfamily or not.
We settled in the living area, where I had a view over the dining room table to the wooded back lot shared by all the condos. I was struck by how little of my mother there was here, and how that was insult and relief at once. She felt erased in this household, yet I don’t think I could have stood to see framed photographs everywhere, or to eat off their wedding china.
The first holiday after the fire had been Thanksgiving and we’d gone out to eat. The following month Christmas dinner took place here. Ellen twittered about in an apron and chattered to fill every dead space. The rest of us sank into wine-soaked silence, clutching her tasteful stemware with whimsical wine charms labeling each one of our glasses as our own.
Now it was Easter, years after the fire, and I still could not get comfortable in a holiday without Mom. Having no children of my own to squeal over eggs or chocolate rabbits, honestly I’d just as soon skip the whole damn thing.
Dad and I made excruciating small talk until Ellen emerged, her silver hair swept back from her smooth, powdered face, her lipstick as ever applied neatly, never bleeding into the cracks around her lips. Large silver hoops peeked out from beneath her chin-length haircut. “Mary, darlin’!” She swept over to me and I rose to greet her, pressing my cheek lightly to hers, having to dust some of her makeup off me when we parted.
The doorbell rang, and we all exchanged tight smiles.
Here we go.
Trish came in wearing an ill-fitting f
loral dress made from a shiny fabric in a bright turquoise that pulled tightly across her bosom and her middle.
“You look lovely!” exclaimed Ellen, clearly lying, pressing her cheek to Trish, bending to squeeze Jack, and straightening in time to see Drew slope in after them, toting a bag of things, probably toys for Jack. “Well!” she cried, eyes wide, faking delight when actually she was probably alarmed. “Look who’s here!”
I hid my face behind my hand while I smiled. It seemed that no one had warned her about Drew’s punk rock transformation. At Trish’s house I’d run across a picture of Drew that couldn’t have been very old; only a year or two ago, he’d looked like any ordinary kid with mousy brown hair, braces, and blue jeans.
My dad reached out to hug Trish, but she stiffened so visibly, and narrowed her eyes, that he dropped his arms and cleared his throat, reaching down to ruffle Jack’s hair.
Then there was immediately a welcome bustle of hanging coats, and small talk about the drive, and then Ellen flitted around offering drinks. By the time she vanished to her kitchen to glaze the ham, we were arrayed about the living room holding beverages as neatly as if we’d been dolls in her own personal dollhouse.
Jack had buried his nose in a Magic Tree House book, and the rest of us adults and one uncomfortable teenager stared at one another with rigid grins until Trish said, “Oh, for the love of God, stop smiling, everybody.”
We tittered uncomfortably, and all tried not to stare at Trish. I wondered how on earth she ever managed to hold an Easter egg hunt at her house. I’d think she’d be afraid to hide eggs in there for fear you’d never find them again. That would be quite the smell.
Then Dad went ahead and asked, “So did the Easter bunny visit your house today?”
“There is no Easter bunny,” Jack intoned into the pages of his book.
“Well, aren’t you all grown up, now? Practically a man,” my dad continued, undaunted. Trish was drumming her fingers on the overstuffed arm of the plush chair she was sitting in, gaze on the floor.
My dad said, “Did you hunt for eggs?”
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