The Accidental Book Club

by Jennifer Scott

  Dorothy tried to corral her frizzy graying hair behind one ear. Jean noticed a small hole in the armpit of her dress when she lifted her arm. Newly divorced and left with five out-of-control boys to wrangle, Dorothy was doing good to just get dressed in the mornings. Some meetings, Jean thought, Dorothy looked as if she might nod off right there at the table. “Ugh, don’t mention his name. And, technically, Elan dumped me.”

  The door opened again and May came in, and not long after, so did Janet, reminding Jean of a doe the way she practically tiptoed into the room, looking apologetic, round-eyed, and afraid.

  “Hey, Dot, I saw Elan and his stripper at the furniture store—did I tell you that?” Loretta called from the other room.

  May, licking her thumb, which she’d accidentally pressed into a cheesecake bite while uncovering it, gave Jean a quick sideways hug, then headed straight toward the dining room. “What were you looking for at the furniture store, Loretta? Something for your reading room?”

  “Oh, you know, that damn recliner of Chuck’s has crapped out again. The man’s killed more chairs than shoes—I can tell you that much. I should have asked Elan’s stripper if she was shopping for a new pole,” she called to Dorothy.

  “You know, Dorothy, you should really see about going to the rally with us on Saturday . . . ,” Mitzi was saying, but Dorothy had plopped into a chair and was patting the back of her hair distractedly. Tired, Jean thought. She just looked so tired.

  “More power to her. If she’s stupid enough to think he won’t cheat on her after he cheated on me with her, she deserves what she gets,” Dorothy said.

  May returned to the kitchen and surveyed the counter. “Oooh, that casserole looks delicious. What’s in it?”

  “That’s cowboy casserole,” someone—Jean couldn’t determine who—shouted from the dining room, and she heard scrapes of wood on the floor as they made their way toward the food.

  “Come in, come in,” Jean said to poor, hovering Janet. Then she set out the plates as everyone else busied themselves with catching up while pulling plastic wrap off dishes, rummaging for serving spoons, and pouring wine.

  As she always did, Jean took a moment to lean back against the counter and just listen. The house was far too quiet with Wayne gone, but it seemed she never noticed until it was full again. Wayne had liked to entertain. Back when the kids were young and they felt like they had all the time in the world, they put off having parties, but when they did have one, it was a party—so loud everyone had to shout to be heard. Wayne’s laughter carried the party to success.

  She probably wouldn’t be able to handle a party without Wayne’s laughter now. She’d passed up the few invitations she’d been offered since he died. But this . . . This was a close second. This was the kind of party she could control, rather than a party that would take control of her. That was what she needed more than anything in her life right now. She’d been out of control for so long—everything had been out of her control. This felt good.

  If two years ago someone had told Jean that a day would come when her only thought would be whether the roasted red peppers would be a good enough addition to the macaroni and cheese, she never would have believed it.

  Jean pulled the macaroni and cheese out of the oven and added it to the buffet, and the ladies began loading up their plates, the conversation slowly and naturally turning toward the book, as it always did.

  “I didn’t want this one to end,” Janet practically whispered over her plate, which had teeny mounds of food on it, more like samplings than actual portions. Jean had noticed this about Janet, who was so heavy, most of her bottom fell over the sides of the dining room chairs, her ankles often looking spotty and blue underneath the cuffs of her pants as she stood up to leave. “What a realistic look at love.”

  Dorothy made a noise. “In my experience, a realistic look at love is when your husband of thirty years follows his doohickey to a woman who uses the word whatevs in every sentence.”

  “Not every man is like that. You got a bad one is all,” May said. “I agree with Janet. I thought this was realistic. And . . . pretty.”

  “Pretty? How is mental illness pretty?” Mitzi asked, jumping right in, as always.

  May shrugged, her delicate shoulders pushing up her spirals. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s the writing that’s pretty. It seemed like it had something more to say. I keep wondering what I would have done if I were Madeleine.”

  “I didn’t realize that a marriage plot was an actual term,” Loretta said. “I just thought it was a good title.”

  Mitzi nodded. “A literary term, right? I didn’t know that, either.”

  “I’m pretty sure it was a term used in the 1800s, because it was a kind of new idea back then,” Janet said. “I think maybe the title was supposed to be a double entendre.” She stumbled over the ending of the word and immediately ducked down to her plate again.

  Jean took a sip of wine. “It was nice to read a meaty romance,” she said. “I guess you can call it a romance?”

  “Beats me. I don’t write ’em; I just love reading ’em,” Loretta said.

  “Well, I think so,” Mitzi said. “If a marriage plot is literally about the plot, and the plot is about marriage, then isn’t it romance?”

  “Not in my marriage, it wasn’t,” Dorothy grumbled. “And that sentence made my brain hurt, Mitzi.”

  “Mine too,” Loretta said.

  May nodded. “We may be overthinking things. More wine!”

  “Either way, I would read more of this guy’s books,” Jean said.

  “Hey, Jean, why didn’t we ever read Middlesex?” Dorothy asked. “I think we may be the only book club in the world that didn’t.”

  “And it has Loretta’s favorite word right there in the title,” May said.

  “What? Middle? Absolutely! I love the word middle. Especially when the other words are fireman and sexy cowboy,” Loretta said, and held her wineglass up, toast-style. May giggled and clinked her glass against Loretta’s.

  “Well, I wouldn’t read more,” Dorothy said. “I didn’t like it.”

  “Oh, Dot, you just didn’t like it because you’re burned by romance right now,” Mitzi said. Mitzi had a way of speaking bluntly to Dorothy, and sometimes Jean thought she was right on the edge of rude. But Dorothy didn’t seem to mind. Our friendship is honest, she’d been known to say. As honest as a slap in the face.

  Dorothy shook her head. “I didn’t like Madeleine. I thought she was . . . I don’t know. Annoying.”

  Mitzi reached over and patted Dorothy’s hand. “She’s young. You’re going to find any young girl annoying right now. And for good reason.”

  “Absolutely,” Jean agreed. “You’ll come back to romance. When you’ve gotten some distance.” Like me, she almost added, but knew that wouldn’t be the truth. She still had to read romance as an outsider. She still had to skim over the more tender scenes, the scenes that made her think too hard about Wayne.

  “Oh, Dorothy, I almost forgot,” Mitzi said, changing the subject. “My neighbor is convinced that your oldest son, Leonard, is the one who stole the hood ornament off his vintage Mercedes. He is seven shades of pissed. You’re probably going to have the cops on your doorstep soon. Just a heads-up.”

  Dorothy groaned. “Just what I need—more cops. Those boys . . .”

  “Send them to church. A good pastor will turn them around,” Mitzi said. “Send them to my church. I’ll turn them around.”

  “Let me at ’em. I’ll take care of ’em,” Loretta offered. “God, this wine is good, Jeanie.”

  “You’ll forgive me if I don’t want you defiling my Leonard,” Dorothy said.

  Loretta faked indignation. “Well, I never!”

  “Oh, yes, you have!” Mitzi and May said together, and everyone, including Loretta, burst into laughter.

  Jean placed her plate
on the table and eased into her chair. She cleared her throat. “Okay, okay, before we get too sidetracked, we need to discuss our next read. Any suggestions?”

  Everyone looked at one another, munching, eyes wide. Jean always asked for suggestions but rarely got them. “All right,” Jean said. “I printed out this list.” She held up the list and waved it around, then looked at it again. “I was wondering about R. Sebastian Thackeray’s newest one. Blame, I think it’s called?”

  “Oh, I’ve heard good things about that one,” Loretta said around a bite of Dorothy’s famous tabouleh salad. “Everyone’s raving.”

  “Not everyone. I heard some feminist groups have been giving him grief over it,” Janet said.

  “Eh, everyone knows feminists are always looking for something to be pissed off about,” Mitzi said.

  Dorothy rolled her eyes. “Oh, goodness, don’t get her started on the feminists.”

  “But we liked that one of his that we read last fall. What was it called?” May asked.

  “Something about crime lines,” Dorothy said. “It was pretty good. He can write.”

  “No Crime in Timelines,” Jean corrected. “And yes, we all liked it, which was why I thought—”

  The phone rang, interrupting her. Since Wayne died, her phone didn’t ring very often. Only the book club members ever called, really. Or the occasional telemarketer.

  She excused herself from the table and rushed to the kitchen to answer it.

  “Jean?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Curt.”

  Jean blinked. As long as it had been since anyone had called her, her son-in-law Curt had never called her in the seventeen years since he’d married her daughter, Laura, and whisked her away to the other side of the state. “Yes, yes, how are you?”

  “Uh, not good. I’m afraid there’s a little problem.”

  “A problem? What kind of problem?” Jean laid the book list on the counter.

  “It’s Laura. She’s in the hospital. I think maybe you should come.”

  TWO

  Jean hadn’t seen her son-in-law in ages, and she almost didn’t recognize him as the graying man pacing the hospital corridor in a suit and tie, a cell phone plastered to his ear.

  She stood in front of him, her purse looped over one wrist. With her other hand, she pushed the purse into her stomach uncomfortably, trying to suppress the jittery feeling that she needed to Do Something. He glanced at her, held up one finger, and continued talking, turning to pace away from her.

  She waited patiently, standing as straight as she could to stretch out her back. It had ached for a rest stop near Columbia, but she’d insisted on pushing through, driving the four hours to St. Louis without stopping until she pulled into the hospital parking lot.

  Jean had never been a fan of road trips, and she and Wayne had felt like they were in the way the few times they’d invited themselves to Laura and Curt’s house (Laura had extended the invitation only twice), so she was not used to the drive. And she was especially unused to the drive alone, without Wayne behind the wheel cracking jokes and singing that infernal Willie Nelson song. Her unfamiliarity, combined with her worried and hurried pace and her refusal to stop, had set her back to aching something fierce. She was far too old for tests of endurance.

  Curt came back a few seconds later, stuffing his phone into his pants pocket.

  “She’s sleeping it off now,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder at the room behind him. “She’s been out for a while. Bailey’s on her way. Neighbor’s bringing her, even though I told her to have Bailey call instead. The last thing she needs is to be a part of this.”

  “What should I do?” Jean asked. The sterile scent and faint beeping emanating from somewhere unidentifiable on the ward threatened to tug her memory back to an awful place of unsuccessful treatments, shed tears, and eventual surrender to the inevitable. She had not been in a hospital since they had decided to take Wayne home to fight his final losing battle. She did not miss the depressing corridors, the grim-faced people. “Can I see her? Where is she?”

  He turned in a slow circle, as if looking for someone to answer her questions, then scratched the back of his neck and cocked his head at her. “Listen, Jean. There’s something you may not know,” he said. “Laura is an alcoholic. I need you to understand that.”

  Jean tried to give a reassuring smile, tried to nod as if this were something she had a firm grasp on, but she was still reeling from the short rundown he’d given her on the phone. Her daughter was in the hospital with alcohol poisoning. On a Tuesday afternoon. She’d gone to work—which was what her daughter did best, work—and had proceeded to cause some sort of scene. They’d threatened to call the police if she didn’t vacate the premises and, hours later, during which time Laura had been God-knew-where doing God-knew-what, her friend found her, sprawled facedown on the front lawn, car keys still clutched in her hand. What in God’s name was understandable about that?

  “You told me on the phone she was drunk,” Jean answered, as if this settled everything.

  He shook his head. “Drunk and then some. But today . . . this . . . This is nothing unusual. Your daughter has a drinking problem. It’s gotten worse since we split, but it’s been going on for—”

  “What do you mean, since you split?”

  He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket nervously, glanced at it as if he didn’t know how it had gotten into his hand, and then shoved it back into his pocket. “She didn’t tell you,” he said. A statement, not a question. Jean shook her head. “Of course not,” he mumbled, then took a deep breath and let it out through pursed lips. “I left her about a month ago. I couldn’t take the drinking anymore. It got to be too much. And Bailey’s just been impossible to deal with.” He shook his head, wiped his hand up and down over his face a few times, and sighed; then he took another deep breath. “Laura’s going to have to go to rehab. There’s just no way around it. She’s been telling me for a year that she’ll quit when she’s ready, but she’s too far in to do it on her own now. She’ll never be ready. She’s going to kill herself. Or someone else.”

  Jean blinked. “For a year,” she said, trying to maintain a sense of poise, to not look like she’d been made a fool of by her daughter all this time. After Laura landed that big job of hers five or six years ago, she hardly spoke to her family at all. Kenneth never heard from his sister. Wayne and Jean received only the rare phone call, and they saw Bailey only intermittently. Laura always seemed to have an excuse for why they couldn’t come home for Christmas. Things are crazy at work, Mom. I’m barely going to get time for Christmas here with Bailey and Curt. I can’t possibly get to Kansas City. We’ll just have to ship gifts again, she would say. To hear Laura talk about it, Bailey hadn’t had a birthday party since she was ten. Wayne’s funeral was the first time Jean had seen Laura in well over a year, and here it had been another two years, and she hadn’t seen her since. But to not know her daughter well enough to know that she was struggling with booze so much so as to have ended up in the hospital felt like a failing somehow. She should have visited without invitation. She should have invited Laura and her family more often. She should have called more often. She was ashamed.

  “And Bailey will be with you?” she asked. “While Laura’s . . . away?”

  He rolled his eyes. “She won’t want to, but yes. She’ll have no choice. I’ll write down my apartment address for you. And I’ll let you know where we decide to put Laura.”

  “Put Laura,” Jean said, realizing she was only repeating again. It was just that she felt so very knocked down by this news, so very confused and unsure of how things could have gotten this out of control without her even knowing about it. “Like a dog needing a home.” The words were out of her mouth, sounding sharp in the hallway, before she’d barely formed the thought in her head.

  He held out a hand. “I didn’t mean it lik
e . . . I just meant I’d let you know what rehab she’d be staying in. This is hard, Jean. I want you to know that. This isn’t easy for me at all. I love . . .” He paused, swallowed, his eyes suddenly looking very bloodshot and swimmy. “I love them both. But I can’t say I love my family, because for the longest time I’ve had no family. Maybe it’s my fault too—I don’t know.”

  “Well, she had a reason to drink, I would imagine,” Jean said, trying to offer sympathy, but also hoping for an explanation. She realized her words might have come off as blame, and maybe that was what she was looking for. If Curt had done something to cause this, then maybe she hadn’t done it. “Something must have been wrong.”

  He looked up at her sharply, and though she didn’t know Curt well enough to guess what anger looked like on him, she thought maybe that was what she was seeing in the pinched creases on his temples. She pulled herself up taller, scrunched her purse tighter into her stomach, and lifted her chin. She certainly didn’t feel as strong as she used to be, but she wasn’t one to back down when cornered, either.

  “There was a lot wrong,” Curt answered. “But if you’re asking if I did something to her, like cheat on her or hurt her in some way, the answer is no. I’ve been devoted to her. Longer than most men would be. Longer than she’s been devoted to me.”

  “I wasn’t asking that,” Jean said, though, of course, she had been.

  “Most of what was wrong was she was so married to her job and her booze and her projects, she didn’t have time to be married to me,” he said. He stared at his shoes for a moment, then suddenly stood up straight and gestured toward the room, stepping aside. “You might as well go in. But don’t expect to have a conversation with her or anything. Already tried. Didn’t go well.”

  Jean took a couple of steps forward, suddenly feeling very sorry for her son-in-law with his stooped shoulders and the way his pants seemed to hang on his hips as if he’d recently lost a significant amount of weight. Sadness and regret seemed to envelop him. She couldn’t help but call to mind his and Laura’s wedding day, the way he followed Laura around, skimming her lower back with his fingertips or clutching her hand like a dazed child, laughing at all her jokes, brushing his knuckles along her chin adoringly. He was so utterly bulldozed by Laura, Jean was sure if she looked closely, she’d see hearts in his eyes. He might have followed the girl anywhere; he just must have never expected to have to follow her here.