“I’ll get you a drink. I get an employee discount.” Before Jill could stop her, she’d crossed to the refrigerator case and removed a can of Diet Coke.
“No, really, Mom, I’ve already drunk my daily quota.”
“Nonsense. My treat.” She returned to the dreadlocked kid’s station, scanned the can herself, and then scanned a laminated card. “I have an account,” she explained to Jill. “If you buy things in the store, they keep track and deduct the cost from your paycheck. Discounted cost, of course.” She strode down an aisle and Jill followed, unnerved by the certainty of her mother’s steps. Not that her mother had ever minced or teetered when she walked, but there was a purposefulness in her gait today, as if she were training to hike the Appalachian Trail from end to end.
At the back of the store, she slid her laminated card into a slot and pushed open a door marked “Employees Only.”
“The staff room is pretty shabby,” she warned Jill as they walked past some shelves full of inventory and into a room that was, indeed, shabby. “After I’ve been here a while, I’ll ask Francine if I can put up some posters, maybe bring in a plant or two to liven the place up.”
Jill had no idea who Francine was. Another person half her mother’s age to whom her mother had to answer, probably. The more pertinent part of her mother’s statement was after a while. How long a while was she planning to work here?
Jill surveyed the dreary little lounge. Lockers lined one wall; a countertop with cabinets above and below, reminiscent of the cabinets in Jill’s dentist’s office, lined another. A microwave oven, its window smeared with ancient splatters of food, stood on the counter, beside it an empty coffee maker. A minifridge sat on the floor.
“There are no windows here,” she pointed out. “Plants need sunlight.”
“So I’ll get some plastic plants,” her mother said. She popped open the can of Diet Coke and placed it on a small, round Formica-topped table. “Sit. Drink.” She dropped onto one of the chairs at the table and gestured to another chair for Jill. “You look worried. That’s not like you, Jill. You’re my one child who never worries.”
“I always worry,” Jill retorted, then took a sip of soda to steady her nerves. “Doug’s the one who never worries. He’s rich, he’s successful, and he’s got Brooke hanging off his arm.”
“He’s got twins,” Jill’s mother said, as if that was a cause for chronic panic.
“Okay, so I’m worried,” Jill said. “The inn where we’re having Abbie’s bat mitzvah reception is trying to rip us off.”
“They all do that,” her mother muttered.
“I wanted to call you for advice, but I couldn’t.” Jill wondered if her mother could hear the resentment underlining her tone. “You were here, at work.”
“Oh, you don’t need advice from me,” her mother said. “You’re my rock, Jill. You’re the one I depend on. The idea of you coming to me for advice . . . . That’s crazy.”
Maybe it was crazy, but it was also true. Jill could be a rock as long as the rest of the family stood on terra firma. But if they were drifting out to sea, what good was a rock? A rock would only sink.
She felt the pressure of tears at the back of her eyes and blinked furiously. She would not cry in front of her mother. Crying was Melissa’s job, not Jill’s.
Dad’s dying, she longed to say. Or, more accurately, We’re all dying. The Bendel family is dying. Instead, she said, “How is it going to work if you and Dad aren’t together at Abbie’s bat mitzvah?”
“What has to work?” her mother replied. “It’s not like your father and I can’t stand each other. We were married a long time. We can get along.”
“Don’t you miss him? Aren’t you lonely?”
“Lonely?” Her mother shrugged. “Who’s got time? I’m working, learning. Today’s my first day on the register. Nobody’s promising anything, but if things work out they may teach me how to run the one-hour photo machines. Just as a back-up, though. That wouldn’t be my primary job. They’ve got two ladies who work there, Gina and Brandi with an i. That’s her real name, B-R-A-N-D-I. Who would do that to a child, give her the name of a hooker? But she seems nice enough. A little stand-offish, both of them. They think they’re special because they run the film department.” Jill’s mother shook her head. “I’m talking too much. Tell me, how’s everything with you? How are the kids?”
“The kids are fine,” Jill said, not wanting to waste what little time she had on trivial matters. “Mom . . . Okay, so you’re not lonely. What about Dad? What if he’s lonely?”
Stupid move. Her mother straightened in her chair and her smile vanished. “He’s going to have to figure out how to fix that himself. I’m done living my life around him. He’s a big boy. He’s lonely? Let him pick up a phone and call a friend.”
“What if the friend he calls is a woman?” Jill asked.
“We’re separated. If he wants to call a woman, he can call a woman.”
“That wouldn’t bother you?”
“He isn’t living his life around me, either.” Another shrug, this one a bit more emphatic.
“You haven’t . . .” Jill swallowed. “You aren’t seeing another man, are you? That guy Bernie—” She gestured in the direction of the store, where she’d met the effusive older man.
Her mother laughed. “Bernie is a character, isn’t he? He’s married. And full of baloney, and he’s old. I’m not seeing him. I’m not seeing anyone. If I wanted a man in my life, I’d stay with your father.”
“Don’t you want—I mean, what about sex?”
Her mother laughed louder. “Sex? If I miss it, I’ll start worrying about it. Right now, I’m not worried.”
That was cryptic. “It’s a normal, healthy part of life, Mom.”
“I’m sixty-four. I’m not the same person I was thirty years ago.” She rested her folded hands on the table. Jill tried not to wince at the sight of that unadorned ring finger. “Now, my girlfriends? Them I miss. I don’t have time for coffee with them anymore. No time to put together fundraisers for B’nai Torah, or to visit patients at the hospital. No time for a game of bridge on a Wednesday afternoon. But sex?” She held her hands palm up, as if to say sex was nothing, it was empty.
Unsure what to think, Jill drank some soda. Its blessedly familiar taste would have soothed her if soothing her were at all possible. She hadn’t discussed sex with her mother since she’d gotten her period at the age of eleven and her mother had explained the mechanics to her, making them sound generally awful. That thing he uses to pee with goes where? Yuck!
So her mother didn’t miss her father and didn’t want a boyfriend. At that rate, if Jill said, “Dad is dying,” her mother would likely say, “Poor guy. I’ll say a prayer for him next time I can free up a few minutes.”
“Mom,” Jill said, opting for honesty, “we all want you to get back together.”
“Who’s we?”
“Melissa and Doug and me. Gordon, too. Abbie and Noah. I’m guessing Brooke, too. The twins are probably too young to care.”
“Change is hard,” her mother said gently. Jill realized her mother was giving her advice, after all. “If this separation doesn’t work out, we’ll get back together. So far, it’s working out.”
“For you,” Jill conceded. “What about the rest of us?”
Her mother sighed. “That’s the point, sweetie. I’m done living my life for the rest of you.” For a moment she looked wistful, even lost. How could a woman who’d spent her whole life living for her family make such an abrupt U-turn? Shouldn’t she have whiplash?
Then she smiled, a brighter smile than Jill could recall seeing on her mother’s face in a long time. “I should get back out to the store. But listen, you and Abbie should come to dinner. I’ve got my new apartment set up now. We could have a girls’ night, just the three of us.”
Jill didn’t want a girls’ night with her mother. A family night with both her parents would satisfy her just fine.
“I’ll s
chedule an early night off,” her mother said. “I’ll make a pot roast. Abbie loves my pot roast. Call me when you can figure out a good day for you and her. I’ve really got to go. This isn’t my break time.” She hurried toward the door, where she waited for Jill to join her.
Jill contemplated leaving the can of soda behind, but her willpower failed her. Clasping its cold, damp surface, she rose from the table and followed her mother out of the room.
“And don’t you worry about Abbie’s bat mitzvah,” her mother added as they strode past a shelf stacked with four-packs of toilet paper en route to the door back into the store. “Your father and I will be fine. Just tell the folks at that fancy inn you booked that they’d better not try to cheat you.”
“Right.” As if anything in life—getting a fair price per plate or getting your parents back together—could be accomplished just by telling someone something.
Chapter Eleven
Melissa couldn’t get into it. Luc was enthusiastically doing his thing, but her mind-body disconnect kept her from responding to his efforts. Her body should have been in ecstasy, but her mind was in the courtroom, where that son of a bitch O’Leary had played the judge like Itzhak Perlman playing a Stradivarius.
O’Leary hadn’t been the original opposing lawyer. The counterfeiters had started out with Melvin Woo, a small, solemn attorney who lapsed into Cantonese when he conferred with his client. That they spoke a language she didn’t understand had irked her. It had also irked Judge Montoya, a fact Melissa had seen as good news for her client. All the legal strategies in the world weren’t as effective as having an opposing attorney who rubbed the judge the wrong way.
But Melvin Woo had disappeared that morning—what was supposed to be the first day of the trial—and Aidan O’Leary had appeared in his place, tall, confident and smiling like a quarterback who’d scored the winning touchdown, even though in fact he’d only just walked onto the field. And Judge Montoya, who, Melissa knew for a fact, was a huge fan of designer handbags and therefore should have been in Melissa’s pocket, looked instead as if she wanted to be in O’Leary’s pants. A continuance? No problem. If O’Leary had asked Montoya to strip off her robe and do a pole dance, she probably would have complied. With a smile.
Luc was pumping harder, his lean, muscular body rocking hers with an intensity that signaled he was nearing his peak. Melissa closed her eyes and moaned to encourage him. The sooner he finished, the sooner she could get some sleep.
Not that she expected to sleep when her mind was gridlocked with intersecting thoughts. Not just about the trial, not just about O’Leary, but about her sister. Jill had sounded awful on the phone. Well, not exactly awful, but not like herself. She was supposed to be the together one, not the panicky one.
Melissa sensed that the reason Jill was freaking out was because their parents’ marriage was falling apart. And Melissa couldn’t blame her sister, because she was freaking out, too. And she was doubly freaking out because Jill was the Bendel sibling who was supposed to put things back together, not fall apart herself.
If Jill couldn’t fix the rift between their parents, why couldn’t Doug? He was the oldest. The doctor. The hot-shot. Why couldn’t he just step up and get the job done?
Luc shuddered and groaned, and Melissa remembered to shudder and groan, too. She rarely had to fake it with him, but it wasn’t his fault that she was distracted by concern about her sister and fury with Big Irish Aidan. If she could give Luc the satisfaction of thinking he’d satisfied her, she’d do it. He was such a nice guy, after all, and so handsome, plus he wasn’t a lawyer. For that alone, she owed him a fake-O.
She still didn’t know if he was The One, if she was in love, if this thing was going to last. She felt more or less comfortable with him, but whenever she talked to him about buying a bigger apartment, he acted as if it was all her decision. Which it was, but that implied that he wasn’t anywhere near ready to discuss sharing an apartment with her. Plus, he didn’t have any money to chip in toward the exorbitant purchase prices Kathy the Realtor kept quoting her. He did get big tips, but nobody could afford a New York apartment—or even half an apartment, since Melissa would be paying for the other half—on tips.
Wasn’t the housing market supposed to be in a slump? Shouldn’t prices be plummeting? In Manhattan, plummeting prices meant a million dollars might buy you two baths instead of one and a half.
Luc groaned again, and Melissa sighed and gave her hips a helpful wiggle. Luc propped himself on his arms and smiled down at her, evidently quite pleased with himself. She managed to smile back at him, and reached up to brush a floppy lock of hair off his face. His hair was so impeccably styled, it looked great even when it was mussed from sex. He’d cut and shaped her hair to look good after sex, too—or at least he assured her it looked good after sex. She wasn’t in the habit of leaping out of bed and sprinting over to the mirror to check out her appearance immediately after.
“You hungry?” he asked as he rolled off her.
It occurred to her that he was in her home, which made her the hostess and therefore the person who should be offering food. Did his question mean he wanted to think of her home as his home, too? If so, why was he so passive whenever she talked about real estate?
She wasn’t hungry at all—she’d stayed late at the office, working until seven-thirty, and one of the other associates also working late had ordered too much Chinese, so Melissa had wound up consuming half a tub of leftover lo mein at her desk. “There’s some cheese in the fridge,” she offered Luc. “Cheddar—the kind you like, with the red wax.”
“Great.” He swung out of bed and crossed to the kitchen alcove at the opposite end of the room. Her vantage point gave her an excellent view of his broad, naked back, and she admired it in an objective way. He had a fine physique and an utterly sublime tush. She bet Aidan O’Leary’s tush wasn’t so sublime.
Christ. Why was she thinking about O’Leary? She ought to be thinking about Jill and the inn trying to rip her off. She ought to be thinking about her mother, drudging away for minimum wage at the kind of store where people bought stuff they didn’t need because they wanted to make use of some discount coupons they’d cut out of the newspaper. For crying out loud, Melissa ought to be thinking about the gorgeous, sexy, bare-ass man pulling a brick of cheddar cheese out of her fridge.
“So, guess who made an appointment for me to rescue her from her hair today,” he called over his gorgeous, sexy shoulder as, back still to her, he sliced the cheese into domino-size chunks and pared away the wax rind.
Eager to shove notions of O’Leary’s butt out of her head, she actually put some thought into guessing. “Someone from show-biz? Or politics?”
Luc shook his head. “Someone from Massachusetts.”
Jill? No, she would have told Melissa when she’d called her earlier that day. Their mother? What would she be doing with a two-hundred-fifty-dollar haircut when the only people who’d see her were those coupon-clutching bargain hunters?
“Your sister-in-law. Dr. Doug’s wife.”
“Brooke?” Why would she travel all the way to New York for a haircut? Surely she could spend just as much money, and a lot less time, patronizing a Newbury Street salon in Boston.
“We talked hair that weekend at your sister’s house,” Luc told her. “She asked for some suggestions, and I gave her a few ideas. I figured she’d just take them to her stylist and see what he could do. I didn’t expect her to make an appointment to travel to New York just to get a more dimensional coloring.”
How many stylists actually thought about dimensional coloring? Luc was one of the very few. For that reason alone, people might be willing to travel two hundred miles for the privilege of having him work on their hair.
Still, the notion of Brooke coming to New York for a hair appointment with Lucas Brondo of Nouvelle disconcerted Melissa. “Could you pour me a glass of wine while you’re up?” she asked.
“The white?” He pulled a green bottle from her
fridge, removed the cork and filled the goblet that had been balanced upside-down on the drying rack beside the sink. He carried it and a plate of cheese and crackers to the bed, then hopped on beside her and handed her the glass. She thought briefly of cautioning him not to spill cracker crumbs onto the sheets but decided such a comment would make her seem shrewish and petty. The guy had brought her a glass of chardonnay, after all. And he’d just made love to her skillfully enough that she’d had no trouble convincingly faking an orgasm.
She sipped the cold, dry wine and settled back into the heap of pillows propped against her headboard. “So Brooke’s coming to New York?”
“Next Tuesday.”
“Funny that she didn’t call me, given that you and I are . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence, because she wasn’t exactly sure what she and Luc were. “Not that Brooke and I are the closest of sisters-in-law,” she continued. “I always feel as if there’s a barrier separating us. She’s kind of aloof.”
Luc shrugged. Melissa wondered whether that meant he agreed, disagreed or had no opinion.
“She’s coming to New York. The least she could do is let me know,” Melissa continued, deciding after brief consideration that she was mildly pissed. Brooke didn’t merit becoming severely pissed over. “What are you going to do with her hair?”
“I’ll see what she wants,” he said, then popped a Wheat Thin topped with a slab of cheese into his mouth.
Melissa tried to figure out what she found so troubling about this. Luc worked on women, and a few men, all day long. He gave them what they wanted, just as he gave Melissa what she wanted. Melissa wasn’t jealous. She was pleased about his success. It meant he earned more, which in turn meant he might eventually want to go in on the purchase of an apartment with her, if their relationship was fated to last. It also meant that her family might not act so subtly disapproving about her being involved with a hair stylist—a beauty professional, a grooming expert, a tress artiste. His level of achievement would reflect well on her.
Goodbye To All That Page 13
