The Accidental Book Club

by Jennifer Scott

  Noah’s eyes went huge, the book going slack at his side. “What the fuck? Are you kidding me?”

  “I told you to give it back,” Bailey said, marching over and pulling the book out of his hand.

  She walked home, her nose buried in the book the whole way. But she wasn’t reading the words. She couldn’t through the remorseful tears that streamed down her face. So much for friendship. So much for lavender gowns.

  The real kicker was that she hated the stupid book. It was called Blame, and it was written by some nitwit with about ten names. She’d found it on the end table in the living room and had picked it up out of curiosity. She knew it was the book her grandmother’s book club had been talking about at the last meeting.

  About three paragraphs in, she was already pissed. Blanche sat on the toilet, smoking a cigarette, gazing through the doorway at the doughy arm of her last trick, which had slipped through the sheets and pointed toward the overturned gin bottle on the floor. When she was done with her cigarette, she knew she’d crawl to that bottle and drink the dregs, no matter that her most recent “partner” made her stomach churn with revulsion, no matter that his lips had last suckled it. She knew she would do it, and as pathetically as her mother had done. She knew this precisely because it was what her mother had done. She would be powerless to do anything else.

  This Thackeray idiot had no idea what he was even talking about.

  Yet she couldn’t stop reading.

  She came home, stripped out of her clothes, put on her pajamas, and propped her back against two pillows and read.

  By night’s end, she’d finished the book.

  And had begun to formulate a plan.

  FOURTEEN

  Jean stood outside the shed, trying to work up the courage to go inside. Summer had elbowed spring out of the way over the course of just days, and had pushed its way in fully, the sun strong, making everything look bleached and suffering, and she felt sweat rolling down the small of her back, beneath the flannel shirt she’d always worn to do yard work.

  It was something they’d done together, yard work. Wayne would fire up the riding mower and swoop circles around the property while she dug holes along the sides of the house and patted plants and seeds and roots and bulbs in little puddle-shaped gardens. They would water together, spread mulch together, and stand back with their hands on their hips to admire their work together.

  At the end of the day, it had almost felt as intimate to Jean as making love. Everything about them matched. Their muscles ached the same; their eyes and cheekbones and noses wore matching shades of sunburn. Even the grime under their fingernails, up their forearms, and caked with sweat in the creases of their wrists and necks and elbows looked like twin sets. They panted and perspired and stood over the sink and gulped water together. And afterward, they felt good together.

  They would shower together, wrap themselves in robes. Jean would make them a light dinner, then fix them both tea, and they would recline in the living room, watching a baseball game or reading, or, when the kids still lived at home, playing a game of Monopoly, their hands brushing against each other, both of them feeling so comfortable, feeling ownership of their home, their lives, more than ever.

  Feeling like this, this was the place where they belonged.

  Jean hadn’t done yard work since the diagnosis.

  At first she’d told herself that it was because she was too busy, running Wayne to doctor appointments and chemo treatments, buying his meds, keeping up with his needs. And then after the appointments stopped and the running out to do anything stopped and Wayne’s whole existence resided in the bed in the dining room where Jean and the home nurse could keep track of him, she told herself she didn’t have time because caring for him was too cumbersome. And then in those final weeks, those final morphine-haze days, she told herself that she couldn’t possibly go anywhere, because the moments when Wayne was lucid and recognized her were far too precious to miss.

  And then there had been the funeral, the people, Kenneth staying on. She was too busy again. And then too horrified by the depth and scope of her loneliness to even think about digging in the dirt.

  She hired a kid down the street to mow the lawn. She let the annuals die and the perennials become strangled by weeds. She told the kid to mow over the puddle-shaped flower beds. She let it all go.

  But those Knock Out roses. Wayne’s Knock Outs. They still lived on. They flourished! They didn’t mind the weeds; they didn’t suffocate; they didn’t shrivel with thirst. They grew. And when Jean had noticed them the other day, when she’d picked a rose and sniffed it, she’d felt guilty.

  Wayne loved those roses. Maybe he was sending her a message with them.

  A bird squalled at her repeatedly from a branch hanging over the shed. She looked up, tried to find it, tried to spot the nest it was protecting, but she couldn’t. She went back to staring at the shed door. Wayne’s shed. It hadn’t been open since he last opened it. It would smell like those intimate gardening days. It would remind her of him, and the very thought nearly made her nauseated with dread, but she knew she had to go in there.

  It wasn’t just the roses. It was Bailey too. And Laura.

  Neither of their situations seemed to be improving at all. Laura still stayed locked in her bedroom most of the day, screaming into the phone, watching daytime talk shows at earsplitting volume, and barely eating. She would creep downstairs in the evening, looking pale and sickly and so thin, her joints stuck out. She wasn’t showering. She wasn’t moving forward. She wasn’t speaking to Jean. And other than to scream, she wasn’t speaking to Bailey.

  But in the evenings she would leave, wrapped up in too-big button-downs and paint-stained sweatpants, only to come home half an hour later, saying nothing about where she’d been and sinking right back into the darkened TV-saturated bedroom for the rest of the night. Sometimes Jean could hear her laugh at the TV late into the night. She suspected that Laura’s nightly treks had been to buy alcohol, but she was too afraid to say anything. Laura had been so volatile. Not to mention, when did you stop stepping into your kids’ lives?

  And then there was Bailey, who did way too much speaking, only not to Jean specifically, and never with anything pleasant or positive. She’d been spending a lot of time down at the swimming pool, and though Jean acted as if she were excited that Bailey had found a friend, she had begun to suspect that Bailey might be doing things that could get her into trouble. Or, even more likely, things to get the poor lifeguard in trouble.

  She worried about what having Bailey’s mother in the house might do to the child. She had already been so angry; Laura’s presence only seemed to make it worse. Once, Jean had even walked past Bailey’s not-quite-closed bedroom door and seen Bailey sitting on her bed, her knees pulled up, her arms wrapped around them tightly, biting herself repeatedly on the wrists, on the legs, leaving welts, inspecting them, and biting herself again. Jean had also noticed that same children’s book open on the bed next to her. Was it healthy for a girl Bailey’s age to be so attached to a book intended for a toddler? Jean didn’t know.

  Both of them were in such pain, and Jean could do nothing about it. And she couldn’t help but think that Wayne would be expecting her to do something. But what? What would he expect her to do?

  The feeling was so hopeless, as if she suddenly couldn’t feel him anymore. As if he were further away from her than ever before. What did it mean when you suddenly lost a presence that may have been there only in your imagination anyway? Had she been closer to him, had she been a better wife, maybe she would still be able to feel his presence; maybe she would know what he would do. Maybe he would tell her.

  The very thought made her feel so frantic, all she could think about were the rosebushes and the yard that desperately needed gardening.

  But standing in front of the closed shed doors, she didn’t know how she would ever reach out and pull th
em open. The effort seemed so massive, so impossible.

  Slowly, she extended her hand and touched the padlock, her fingers initially jumping back involuntarily, as if she’d received an electric shock. But she knew that was all in her mind and she forced them to curl around the lock, then took a deep breath and stabbed the key into it before she could talk herself out of it. You’re being silly, Jean, she told herself.

  The lock opened easily, as if it had been only a weekend since it had last been opened, rather than years, and she tugged it off the door handle, the reverberations of the movement all up and down the metal door a familiar music. She let out a breath—not realizing that she’d been holding it until she started to feel dizzy—and twisted the door handle, then pulled the door open with a squeak.

  “Oh, God. Wayne,” she said when the smell of the shed greeted her. It was amazing what parts of the brain could be awakened by scent alone. She’d first experienced this when she’d found an old shaving cream can in the bathroom cabinet two months after he’d died. She’d pulled off the lid, buckled to the floor, and cried, lifting the can to her nose over and over again, imagining the rough red spots on Wayne’s neck, just above his collar, when they’d go out somewhere special. Imagining him humming along to the radio while he shaved.

  She felt like falling to the floor now. The grass clippings, the lawn mower, the oil, the gasoline. Those were the aroma of their daily life together. Those were the smell of happy weekends, of the future, of hopes and of making their two lives a life together—one weekend, one chore, one flower at a time.

  Somehow she managed to move her legs forward, sucking in a breath and trying to shake the grief from her brain. You can miss him forever, her therapist had told her, back in those early days after his death. But you can’t mourn him forever. But sometimes it felt as if she would.

  She stepped forward, one step, two, running her fingers along the fender of Wayne’s riding mower. She should have sold it by now—the kid who mowed her lawn used his own mower—but she could never bring herself to it. Wayne had loved that thing.

  Her hands tried to trick her into believing that it still felt warm under her fingers, as if he’d just finished using it, but she knew better. Besides, she wasn’t in the shed for the old mower anyway. She moved beyond the mower to the shelves along the far wall, the ones that held watering cans and terra-cotta pots and hardened bags of dirt and fertilizer and plant food and . . .

  There they were. Her gardening gloves, the ends of their fingers stained deep brown. They were lying right in the palms of Wayne’s gardening gloves, the fingers of each looking almost intertwined as if he were holding her hands in his.

  Jean let out a croak and reached for them, the tips of her fingers barely brushing against the fabric of the gloves, barely whisking past his. To touch those gloves would feel too much like touching his hand again. She would be crushed under the weight of memory.

  Instead, she backed out of the shed, leaving the gloves, and the mower, right where they were. She stumbled over the lip of the doorway and fell backward onto her hands and butt, the jolt of pain in her wrist breaking the spell, at least enough for her to glance around, to see if anyone had witnessed her fall.

  But nobody was around. Just the damn bird, which continued to shriek above her.

  “Oh, shut up, you,” she said, trying again (and failing again) to spot the bird in the tree. “Haven’t you ever seen someone do yard work before?”

  But as she pulled herself up to standing and brushed off the back of her jeans, Jean knew that she would be doing no yard work. Not today, maybe not ever again. She couldn’t separate those gloves. And she couldn’t buy new ones, either. This was what her life had been reduced to—everything so rooted in meaning and memory, she was unable to complete even the smallest task. If she was being honest with herself, she would admit that she didn’t even care for capers or macaroni and cheese with feta and roasted red peppers—she liked them just because they were one of the few things in this world that represented absolutely nothing to her.

  She closed the shed door and locked it, feeling emptied. Feeling as if all the work she’d done had been reversed.

  She headed back to the house, sweat beading on her forehead and upper lip now. She needed a cold drink. And then maybe she’d lie down. But as she crossed the yard, she saw light glint off the windshield of a familiar car turning slowly into her driveway. She changed course and went around the house to the front, just as the car rolled to a stop.

  “Hello!” Mitzi called through the driver’s side window as she geared the car into park.

  “Hi there,” Jean said. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “Lunch break.” Mitzi got out of her car, the door opening with a creak. Her skirt stuck to the sweat on her legs, and she brushed at it impatiently. “So hot. Thought I’d drop by for a quick visit.” She glanced at her watch as she said this. “My usual lunch date is otherwise occupied.”

  “Court?” Jean asked.

  “Meeting with a principal,” Mitzi said. “Apparently Russell has been engaging in some less-than-savory activities in the school parking lot during lunch shift. Always something.”

  “Poor Dorothy,” Jean said. “It really is, isn’t it?” For all of us, she wanted to finish. Whether we like it or not. Whether we can even handle it or not.

  Mitzi ducked her head to look into Jean’s eyes. “You okay? You seem a little off.”

  Jean tried on a wobbly smile. She could hear the bird, still shrieking in the backyard. “It’s just the heat,” she said. “I’ve been . . . doing yard work.”

  But Mitzi shook her head. “Nice try, but I’m not buying it. I know you. There’s something more. Spill. Is it Bailey?”

  Jean sagged back against Mitzi’s car. The heat beat down on the metal, and she could feel it sear through her clothes, but she didn’t make a move to pull away. “It’s Bailey, it’s Laura, it’s Wayne, it’s everything,” she said. “Been a rough few weeks, I suppose.”

  Mitzi leaned back next to Jean. “Wayne? What about him?”

  Jean hesitated, still unsure about how much to let Mitzi in. She sighed. “It’s so silly, after all this time, isn’t it? I should be used to it. I should be able to touch the damn gloves.”

  Mitzi shook her head again, confused. “Gloves? I’m not following.”

  Jean offered Mitzi another smile. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I suppose I’m just a little bit down right now with all that’s going on with Laura and Bailey. I just wish Wayne was here to help me out. I miss him. I don’t think I’ll ever stop missing him.”

  “Ah,” Mitzi said. She checked her watch again. “I get that. I would be lost without Frank. And, of course, without a little help from my local pharmaceutical friends.” Jean gave her a quizzical look, and Mitzi laughed. “I don’t mean drugs. I mean . . . drugs. Antidepressants. Might help you too.”

  Jean knew it was rude to act so shocked, but she truly was. This was Mitzi—the one they were all afraid would judge them. She had to remind herself to close her mouth.

  “Well, it’s not that big of a deal,” Mitzi said.

  “No, no, of course it isn’t,” Jean said. “It’s just that I had no idea. You seem so happy and put together.”

  “I am happy,” Mitzi said. “I’m very happy. But nobody is put together. We’re sure all expected to act like it, though, aren’t we? It’s kind of ridiculous if you think about it. Nobody admitting their weaknesses, everybody taking so much responsibility for everything. Life is stressful. It’s terrible the way we boil everything down to should and shouldn’t. I do it more than most. You should vote for this person or that person. You should make your decisions based on this moral code or that one. You should be just like me. When I say it out loud like that, it’s all so obnoxious.”

  “It’s not obnoxious,” Jean said, and then she and Mitzi locked eyes, and both of them let out b
reathy laughs. “Okay, it can occasionally be a little obnoxious.”

  “I’m a jerk, I know. But I don’t mean to be. It’s sort of like that Thackeray book. The whole book was about being trapped by your mistakes and blah blah blah. But you know what he got wrong?”

  Jean rolled her eyes. “So many things.”

  “Dorothy couldn’t think more polar opposite of the way I think if she tried, but she’s still my best friend and I love her and none of that other stuff matters. She accepts that I’m a jerk, and I accept that she does everything exactly how I wouldn’t. That’s what he got wrong. Human connection. But tell that to my gut when I’m lying awake at night, stressing about whether I’ve done the right things in my life.”

  “Me and you both,” Jean said. She wiped the sweat that was rolling down her temples. “Would you like to come inside? Much cooler in there. I’ll get you something cold to drink.”

  Mitzi looked at her watch again and grimaced. “Nope. I’ve got to get back to the salt mines.” She stood up straight and patted her backside. “Besides, my buns are about half-baked by now anyway. You sure you’re gonna be okay? I can call in sick. Say I got a bad chicken sandwich undercooked by a bleeding heart free-range freak.” She grinned and winked.

  “Actually,” Jean said, “I’m feeling a little better.” And she was. Certainly not great, but a little better. She could still feel a little twist in her heart with the memory of Wayne’s gardening gloves. She could still feel the anxiety over what would happen with Laura and Bailey. But in a way she felt lighter too. Not because Mitzi, the most put-together woman in the group, had a weakness. But because Mitzi, the most put-together woman in the group, had a weakness and had shared it with her.

  She stood in the driveway and waved good-bye as Mitzi pulled down the street. The sun pounded into the top of her head, and she could feel sweat bead on her lower back and slide down into her waistband. She really could think of doing not much else besides grabbing a cold glass of water and lying down for a few minutes to shake this terrible afternoon.