The Accidental Book Club

by Jennifer Scott

  She went around the house and through the back door, the one right off the living room, and was immediately struck by how much cooler the house felt compared to the outside. But her relief was short-lived, when she was struck with something else.

  At first it didn’t make sense what she was seeing. At first the best her brain could do was articulate the words, That shouldn’t be happening! but it took a few seconds for the rest of her to catch up on what was going on.

  Bailey was lounging across the couch on her back, one leg dangling toward the floor, her right hand holding a book above her head. In her left hand, she absentmindedly swung something around and around in lazy circles.

  Jean’s eyes darted to the end table.

  The glasses. They were gone.

  Bailey was swinging Wayne’s glasses around in circles.

  “What are you doing?” Jean barked, aware of how she sounded, but unable to control herself. The scent of the mower still lingered in her nose. The vision of his gloved hands holding hers still rolled around in her gut. And now this insolent granddaughter of theirs had moved his glasses from where they’d sat for more than two years undisturbed, and was waving them around as idly as if they were a toy.

  Bailey turned her head, a curious expression on her face. She stopped swinging the glasses, which hung loosely from her fingers now. “What? I’m reading. And I gotta tell you, this stuff is—”

  Jean pointed. “Those,” she said. “They’re not for playing.”

  Bailey looked curiously at the glasses. “I wasn’t playing with them. I had them on because I was getting a headache and Father of the Year forgot to pack mine, but old Gramps was even blinder than I am.”

  “Put them down,” Jean said, her voice gruff, and louder than she wanted it to be. “They aren’t supposed to be moved. Put them back.”

  Bailey’s eyes went wide and then narrowed into little slits, the look Jean knew best on her granddaughter. “Okay. Whatever. What’s your problem? It’s not like he’s going to need them or anything.”

  Jean’s hands clenched into fists. Sweat rolled down over one eyelid. “And stop doing that. Stop saying things like that.” She stormed over to where Bailey was lying down and snatched the glasses out of her hand. “He was a wonderful man, and you may not disrespect him in this house.”

  Bailey sat up, the book closing in her lap. “Whoa. How did I disrespect a dead dude?”

  “By doing that,” Jean said, pointing, as if tracking the words in the air. “By calling him the dead dude and Zombie Grandpa and saying that he kicked the bucket and took a dirt nap and all the other things you say and do to impress yourself. It’s not impressive. It’s disrespectful. And it . . .” She stopped, pressed her lips together. Hurts, she was about to finish. And it hurts. But a lump had suddenly appeared in her throat, and she could feel the metal of his frames burning into her hand, could feel the sweat from her palms making them slick.

  She couldn’t put them back on the end table. Not now. They’d been moved. They’d been moved, and he hadn’t come in asking where they were. He hadn’t needed to put them on to read a scene out of his favorite Preston and Child book. Bailey had been playing with his glasses, and nobody had noticed because he wasn’t around to care.

  In the meantime, Bailey had pulled herself to standing. “This place sucks,” she said. “I can’t wait to leave.”

  Jean said nothing, the fight drained out of her, as Bailey walked around the couch and sped past her, up to the kitchen, the book she’d been reading tucked into the crook of her arm.

  “Oh, good, you’re up. This is gonna be a real treat,” Jean heard Bailey say when she got to the kitchen. Jean shuffled a few steps to the side and peered up the stairs, where she saw Laura, a glass of water sweating in her hand, her back to Jean.

  “Good morning to you too, sunshine,” Laura responded in her usual flat voice.

  “Morning? It’s, like, one. When are we going home? I want to go home. You have to take me home,” Bailey said, her voice ratcheting up with every word. Jean recognized the same hysteria coming on that seemed to happen between Laura and Bailey every day at about this time. She didn’t want it. She wanted to put her hands over her ears and tune it out.

  “Bailey, I’ve told you. We’ll go home soon, okay? Can I not be sick for a while?”

  “But you’re not sick! You embarrassed yourself in front of everyone, and now you’re acting like it’s all some big terminal illness that made you do it, but it’s not. You’re hungover. Tonight you’ll feel great, just in time to drink again. Don’t think everyone in this house doesn’t know it.”

  Jean blinked, hearing Bailey voice her own thoughts, her own worries.

  “Don’t talk to me that way,” Laura warned. “I’m not your grandmother. You won’t get away with it.”

  “Oh! And speaking of. She’s nuts. Just went ballistic on me over a pair of stupid glasses. This place is so messed up! This is abuse. It’s got to be abuse to keep me here.”

  “Nobody’s abusing you.” Now Laura’s voice was edging upward, and Jean’s head started to pound with every syllable. “You’re so spoiled.”

  “Oh, really, Mom? Spoiled like a CEO’s daughter, or spoiled like someone else’s baby? Because you know I was switched at birth!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know! You know what I’m talking about!”

  Jean started up the stairs, but by the time she got to the top, Bailey was already storming out of the room and to her bedroom. Jean heard a few steps and then a slam, a sound she had gotten used to.

  Laura shook her head, rubbing her temples with a thumb and forefinger. “What did you do?” she asked Jean when she finally looked up again.

  “I told her to put down your father’s glasses,” Jean said defiantly, her hand still shaking around the glasses. How would she bear to look at that table ever again without them there?

  Laura rolled her eyes. “Really? All this over Dad’s glasses? It’s so morbid, you know, the way you hang on to his stuff like he’s coming back.”

  “Yes, you’ve told me.”

  “Can’t you just leave well enough alone with her? Can’t you just . . . focus on the living people in this house, Mom? It’s like you’re living with a ghost, and he’s your only friend in the world.”

  Jean opened her mouth to protest, but then snapped it shut again when she realized the only thing that might have come out of it were the words, You have no idea how right you are. “It’s my house,” she finally said.

  “Oh, okay, so now I get it. We’ve worn out our welcome. You want us gone. Very nice. Glad to know I have someplace to come home to when I’m sick.”

  “That’s not what I meant at all. You know that. You can always come here, sick or not.”

  Laura nodded, unconvinced. “No. Kenny is always welcome here. But Laura. Oh, well, we don’t have to worry about her, because she’s got it all together, man. She can handle whatever is thrown her way.”

  “I never said that.”

  “You didn’t have to. Every move you made, my whole life, has said it for you. Why do you think I drink, Mom? Because it’s the only time I get to just be Laura, not Laura the Perfect.”

  “We never expected you to be perfect.”

  “There is no more we! You need to come to grips with that, Mom! He’s gone, and my daughter is upstairs, angry because his glasses were more important to you than she is.”

  For a moment, Jean simply gawked at her daughter, almost unable to believe what had just come out of the woman’s mouth. What about you? Jean wanted to ask. What part of this is your fault? I wasn’t the one drinking. I wasn’t the one who got her so angry in the first place!

  But what came out of her mouth might have been even more surprising. “What is your plan?”

  “What?”

  Jean curled her fingers t
ighter around the glasses. “What is your plan? When do you go back to work? When do you get . . . better?”

  Laura blinked a few times, her mouth hanging wide-open. “You want me out,” she said. “Very nice. I guess I know how you feel now. Okay. Okay. You want to creep around here in your little shrine to the Great Wayne God, then fine.”

  “No, of course not,” Jean said. “I want you to get back to your life.” But it was useless. Talking to Laura had become useless. Talking to Bailey had become useless. Every bit of the situation seemed useless. Plus, she wasn’t sure if maybe Laura was right. Maybe she had made this a shrine to Wayne, without even thinking about it. Maybe as he faded away from her, she only tried to hang on to him tighter—so tightly it was all anyone else could see.

  Laura refilled her glass under the faucet and stomped up the stairs—just as Bailey had done a few minutes before—and Jean was alone.

  At first she stood in the silent kitchen, listening to ice crash into place in the freezer and the mumbling of TV voices upstairs. But after a while she too trudged up the stairs and shut her bedroom door.

  Her legs felt so heavy. Her eyes felt heavy. Her stomach, her breasts, everything felt as if it were being pulled to the ground. She hadn’t felt this way since right after Wayne died.

  Jean walked to his dresser, which she’d emptied of his T-shirts and boxer shorts and socks long ago. She’d stored her sweaters there, but then had spent last winter chronically cold because she couldn’t find the strength to open his dresser and take a sweater out.

  But the top drawer she’d opened many times. Three times a day for the first month, twice a day for the second month, once a day for the third and fourth months. Once a week for the fifth. And then she’d . . . stopped.

  She opened it now and peered down at the contents inside. Wayne’s wallet, including snapshots of both kids, of Bailey at age seven, of Wayne and Jean at a flower show, a snapshot of Jean holding a diapered chimp. She’d had that one taken at a festival down on the riverfront; Wayne had loved it, had always joked that it was a photo of the two of them together. She opened the wallet, lifted it to her nose and closed her eyes, smelled the leather. She rifled past his driver’s license and his credit cards (all canceled now, of course), his voter registration card. She pulled out the yellowed newspaper clipping he’d kept in there—his mother’s obituary—then refolded it and put it back.

  She touched his wedding ring, the pinkie ring she’d given him for their first Christmas and he’d never worn, the rosary with the wooden beads his grandmother had given him as an infant. She picked up his autographed DiMaggio baseball, the one he was so proud of, and turned it around in her hand, inspecting the signature. She remembered when her father had suggested that the signature was a fake how angry Wayne had gotten, how they had almost come to blows. She laid the ball back in the drawer and picked up his bartending book that she’d kept because he’d sketched so many notes in it and she didn’t want to forget his handwriting. She flipped through the pages, looking at nothing, but seeing it all—oranges, triple sec, great Christmas cocktail, try this at Jean’s birthday party, no to the vodka, too sweet.

  Handkerchiefs, watches, coins, his handwritten wedding vows, the wristband he’d worn at the hospital when Laura was born, a lifetime of memories and treasures, a person’s life boiled down to just enough to fit in a top dresser drawer.

  Jean’s Crying Time drawer.

  In the beginning when she felt like she was drowning in grief, her therapist gave her permission to cry, but only during specific times.

  It’s healthy to grieve, he’d said, but it’s unhealthy to grieve too much. Schedule crying times, say, noon to one, every day, you will think about him and cry your eyes out. But by one-oh-one, your eyes have to be dry and you have to be moving on. Understand? Give yourself a few times a day these first few weeks, and we’ll pare it back later.

  And so she did. During the days, she gathered up Wayne’s everyday things and took them to Goodwill. She packed his clothes in boxes and stuffed his shoes in garbage bags and gave away his CDs to friends and donated his coats to charity. She erased him from the house, dry-eyed all the while. And then she put the small treasures—the things she wanted to keep, that she thought he would want her to keep—into his top dresser drawer, and she would touch them and smell them and curl up with them and cry with all she had.

  Three times a day for the first month.

  Two times a day, which didn’t seem like nearly enough, for the second month.

  One time a day for the third month.

  And so on, until one day she realized she’d forgotten to have a Crying Time for several weeks. And the realization felt like betrayal so fierce, she raced upstairs and tried to force one out. And then got to laughing when she thought of what Wayne would have thought, seeing her writhing around on their bed, clutching his old DiMaggio baseball and making gaggy whining noises meant to instigate tears.

  And that had been the end of Jean’s Crying Time.

  Until today.

  FIFTEEN

  Jean felt like it was cheating to use packaged tikka masala sauce. She waved her spatula over the bubbling pan and sniffed. It smelled just like what they used to get at the Indian restaurant down the street. She would choose the vegetable korma, and Wayne would pick something called chili chicken, and they would stuff themselves with garlic onion naan. But all of that had been handmade—you could see the chefs in the back, working cooktops directly behind the buffet table. No packaged tikka masala there.

  Using prepackaged food really went against Jean’s desire to be “chefy,” as Loretta liked to put it. But she couldn’t help it. She didn’t know the first thing about Indian cooking, and it was impossible to try to learn new things in the house as it was now.

  Fortunately, Laura hadn’t left the house, hadn’t had a drink in five days. She had showered and was coming out of her room more. Unfortunately, her mood hadn’t improved any, and it seemed to Jean that Laura and Bailey couldn’t be in the same room together for five minutes without one or both of them blowing up. And both of them ignoring her, except to sneer at her or roll their eyes at something she’d said or huff angrily over something she’d done.

  “Why do you let them treat you like that? Tell them to get out,” Kenneth had said on the phone last night.

  “They don’t have anywhere to go. Laura says she can’t keep up with the house without Curt.”

  “She’s forty, Mom. That’s her problem. You have your own house to deal with. Tell her not to let the door hit her on the way out.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  He’d sighed. “I know. You’re too kind for your own good. Dad always said it, and he was right.”

  She’d forgotten about that, about how Wayne had told her that strays and hard cases could sniff her out like a dog on a rotten sandwich. It had frustrated him, how Jean would be treated by someone she was helping, but at the same time, he’d said, it only made him love her more.

  She’d felt tears prick the corners of her eyelids and had only barely held them off, promising herself that later she would remember those words during her Crying Time. And trying not to think about the fact that she was back to a twice-daily Crying Time.

  “When are you getting out?” Kenneth had asked her next.

  Jean had hesitated. “I’m kept pretty busy here. I have the book club.”

  “That’s not getting out. You can’t sit in that house babysitting those two and not ever have a life of your own, Mom. You have to be active.”

  “We’ve been meeting here. It’s been enough.”

  “What about Loretta?”

  “She’s been around.” Which was normally the truth, but even Loretta hadn’t been over as much as usual. The tension in the air made it too unpleasant. She’d told Jean, I feel like any minute a frying pan’s gonna crash down on my head. Not that Jean could blame
her—she felt that very way herself more times than not, as if she were creeping around her own house surrounded by broken glass and hoping not to get cut. “I’m fine, Kenneth. I really am.”

  But as she put the lid back on the tikka masala, she wasn’t so sure she was fine. She felt jumpy and anxious and like at any moment, everything could explode. And she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t be the one doing the exploding.

  “Gross. What’s that nas-assty smell?” Bailey asked, schlumping into the kitchen, still in her pajamas. Ever since she’d suddenly stopped spending her days at the pool, Bailey had barely had reason to wake up in the morning, it seemed, just like her mom.

  “It’s Indian food,” Jean said, turning back the heat. “Have you ever had it?”

  “Why would I eat something that smells like that?” She opened the pantry and pulled out a Pop-Tart, in which, it seemed to Jean, the girl ate her weight daily.

  “You should try new things,” Jean said. “You might be surprised what you like.”

  Bailey took a huge bite out of her Pop-Tart. “You should try minding our own business,” she said around the food in her mouth. “That would be new.”

  Jean clamped her mouth shut, bracing herself against her granddaughter’s hurtful words. She didn’t understand what it was that made Bailey talk to her like that. She had never done anything to hurt her. Kenneth’s words rang in her head—You are too kind for your own good—followed by Wayne’s voice, urging her on: Don’t let her talk to you that way. Say something!

  “And you should try some manners,” Jean said before she could stop herself. “That would be new too.”

  Bailey’s eyes grew wide with surprise, but before she could react, there was a knock at the door, followed by the door opening.

  “Knock, knock!” Loretta called, coming in. She rounded the corner, her brow creased. “Indian food? I thought we were all going Flavian Munney aphrodisiac themed.” She held up a small silver bucket, one Jean recognized as Chuck’s beer bucket that he would fill with ice and beer bottles while outside cleaning the fish he’d caught that morning. “Oysters!” Loretta proclaimed.