And something else occurred to me in that instant: the way his forearm felt beneath my hand, even in spite of the clothes he was wearing, separating his skin from mine. Looking at him in person, it was each time surprising anew that someone who was so large in the public consciousness should be so slight. And yet, touching him, expecting fragility—no, it turned out he didn’t feel fragile at all. More like there was an indomitable strength there.
“Can I do something for you, Mona?” he said at last, tearing his gaze from the offending hand.
“Wait,” I said a second time, my voice more controlled than it had been the first time I said that word to him.
Flash back two minutes before: me standing on the stoop watching as, across the lawn, Denny was about to climb into the back of his white stretch limo.
“Wait!” I called after him, striding purposefully across the lawn, Digger in hot pursuit at my heels.
Denny stopped in front of the open door, and that’s when I landed beside him, placing my hand on his arm, which brings us back to the second “Wait.”
“Hold up, Jeeves,” Denny said to his chauffeur.
“Is his name really Jeeves?” I asked, stunned.
“Of course not,” Denny said, snorting as though I might be daft. “It’s just what I call him.”
“Why?”
“Because I can.”
I opened my mouth to object to this imperious insensitivity on his part, but I was stopped by the sound of someone else speaking.
“What’s all this fuss about?” a grating voice said.
I looked over the top of the limo to find Mrs. Parker from across the way; Nosy Parker, more like it.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Parker,” I said. “Lovely day, isn’t it?”
“What was all that screaming?” she persisted.
“It was only one scream,” I said, tamping down the sigh that was fighting to get out of me. It had hardly been a scream anyway. If it had been, wouldn’t Jack and his parents have heard us from inside and come running? Mrs. Parker had no doubt been observing us from between her curtains, as was her habit, and had come out just in time to hear my mildly raised “Wait.”
“Just one?” She was aghast. “I thought someone was being murdered out here.” She squinted her eyes, straining up on tiptoe. “Who’s that you’ve got with you?”
Not waiting for an answer, she trundled over to our side of the limo. “Dennis Springer!” She placed a hand to her chest. “As I live and breathe!”
“If you’re alive, Mrs. Parker,” Denny said cheerfully enough, “I certainly hope you’re breathing.”
“You always did have a sense of humor.” She swatted in the general direction of his arm, which I realized I was still holding on to. Immediately, I let him go.
Mrs. Parker’s eyes narrowed. “You know, you should visit your mum more often.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said gravely.
“Well, then.” She looked around as though expecting to find something. But then, not finding whatever it was she sought, she added a disappointed, “I guess if no one’s being murdered…” and trundled back around the limo and toward her house.
Denny stood almost like a soldier at attention, watching her go until she was safely inside. That’s when he burst out laughing. I couldn’t stop myself from joining in.
“‘If no one’s being murdered,’” he gasped out between laughs in what I must admit was a credible imitation of Mrs. Parker.
“Like that’s where the bar is set for conversing with the neighbors!” I gasped back, peeling off into another laugh.
When people go off into hysterical laughter together like that, it likely strikes others that the effect is disproportionate to the cause. After all, what can be so funny as to inspire all that? Especially given the subjective nature of humor, with two totally disparate people rarely finding the same things funny. But try telling that to the two people laughing their arses off?
I was nearly doubled over as I reached out and laid my hand on Denny’s forearm for support. This time, neither of us displayed shock. If anything, for the briefest of seconds it felt like the most natural thing in the world.
But then Denny said, “If you weren’t going to murder me, then what did you want?” and the moment was broken.
“Right,” I said, sobering up. “You can’t just leave without saying a proper goodbye to your mother.”
Denny climbed into the limo before regarding me once more. “Kind of defeats the purpose of having you do it, doesn’t it?”
“You can’t be that insensitive!” I cried as Digger let out a little yip.
“Hey,” Denny said, and I could almost see his eyes lighting up behind his dark sunglasses.
Thank you, I thought. He’s finally seeing the light.
“I don’t suppose I could take Digger with me,” he said hopefully.
“What?”
“It’s only, I could really use a dog.”
I scooped Digger up protectively in my arms. “No, you can’t have your parents’ dog!”
“Right, then. What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Would you care to come with me?” Not waiting for an answer, he added, “You did say I should spend more time with my family…”
I thought about it for a moment. Was he mad? Then:
“I’m not coming with you!” I was outraged, even more so when he said:
“The joke’s never as funny if you’re not the one making it, is it, Mona?”
Then, before I could say anything else, he tapped the interior roof of the limo sharply twice. “Onward, Jeeves.”
• • •
“Well, that was a long smoke,” Jack observed when I reentered the house, Digger still in my arms.
“Where’s Denny?” Edith asked, craning to look over my shoulder, as though he might be hiding back there.
“He had to leave,” I said. Had to, not wanted to or decided to. I couldn’t tell Edith that leaving was something he’d done by choice, I couldn’t hurt her that way, so instead I embellished the lie. “He was called away on some urgent business.”
“Huh,” Burt said. “But how is that possible?” He indicated an object on the sideboard. “He left his phone here.” Not waiting for an answer, Burt shrugged his own question away. Burt was never one to be bothered by the great mysteries of the universe. “Well, so long as it’s here…” He picked up the phone with a smile, studied the buttons on it. “Perhaps we should call a few people?”
“Will you marry me?”
That was what Jack had asked me that day in the travel agency.
When we’d first met on Karaoke Night at the bar, I’d told him I was working in a book shop until the right thing came along. Then, on our first real date, after kissing me goodnight at the door, he asked if I’d like to come work with him in the travel agency he’d just opened while I tried to figure out what I wanted to do. He said he was only doing that himself until the right thing came along. Of course, in his case, he already knew what that was: he wanted to be a professional musician, and he figured it was only a matter of time before he’d get his big break.
I said I wasn’t sure if working together while dating each other was such a good idea. What if one didn’t work out? What kind of impact would failure to mesh in one area have on the other?
He kissed me again and said to just think about it. He’d been working the agency alone since opening it and thought having me there with him could be fun.
On our next date, he made dinner for me at his flat. It was a proper dinner too, none of this “Look, I cooked for you! I broiled a steak!” nonsense that guys usually try to palm off, at least in my experience up to that point. It was a lasagna with vegetables and a red cream sauce that looked as though it took hours to prepare, and I knew he’d made it himself because when he excused himself to the lav at one point, I took the liberty of peeking in his trash bin. The lasagna had tasted so per
fect, just the right combination of crunchy vegetables and velvety sauce, I was sure he’d bought takeaway from some restaurant and then reheated it. But my detection efforts, rather than yielding the takeaway container I was sure I’d find, instead showed the heels of a zucchini, an eggplant, and an onion, an empty container of heavy cream, and a large empty tin of whole tomatoes. OK, so maybe his recycling habits left something to be desired, but one thing was certain: the man could really cook. Or, at the very least, he could make one killer lasagna.
By the time he returned, I was back in my seat, having poured us each another glass of wine from the lovely Barolo he’d opened.
As he cleared away the dishes he informed me, “I’m afraid I have a confession to make about tonight’s meal.”
Here it comes, I thought. He’ll tell me his mum or an aunt came by in the afternoon and made the lasagna for him to pass off as his own doing.
“The thing is,” he went on, “I can’t make pudding for shit. I don’t know what it is, but even with a clear and detailed recipe, it never comes out looking like the picture. Of course, I did think about buying something at a fancy bakery to impress you and then passing it off as my own, but then I rejected that plan. I mean, we’ve only just started seeing one another. Shouldn’t I begin as I mean to go on? And if I begin with dishonesty, even a seemingly innocent deception, where does that leave us in terms of the potential future, so…”
At this point, he flung open the freezer and removed a pint carton. “How do you feel about store-bought ice cream?” He took off the lid, revealing that a few tablespoons of the ice cream had already been consumed by someone. “I had to try it when I got it home,” he said. “I mean, I did have to make sure it was going to be good enough, didn’t I?”
A few seconds ago, he’d asked me how I felt. Of course, he’d been talking about store-bought ice cream, but how I felt right then was, well, if someone asked me to compare myself to a food item—you know, “What kind of food are you?” being something along the lines of the time someone asked Katharine Hepburn, “What kind of tree are you?”—I’d have to say I was a perfect lasagna: all crisp cleanness and velvety warmth in just the right places. Because the thing was, as I saw then, not only was this handsome man I’d met at karaoke an incredibly good cook, but he was also honest and funny.
I couldn’t quite believe my good fortune in having met him.
So when, not long after we finished off the ice cream, he pulled out an acoustic guitar, I fought and actually won the battle in terms of not letting my dismay show on my face. The thing was, over the years at school and then university, I’d dated more than one guy who fancied himself The Next Great Thing in the music department. They were all just waiting for their big break. And you know what the only other thing they all had in common was? None of them were anywhere near being great, unless you counted what was going on in their own minds. Some were downright awful, with the best of the bunch just being shades of OK.
So of course when Jack pulled out his acoustic, naturally my inward sigh said, Oh, no, here comes more of the same. As he tuned it, I resolved to suffer through however many painful songs I might be subjected to with a smile that didn’t look desperate and tried to plan ahead to encouraging things to say about it at the end—“You play a very nice C chord!”—but then I remembered what he’d said about honesty, about how he wanted to begin this thing with us as he meant to go on, and I wondered, only mildly starting to panic: How does that work? Do I tell him he sucks? That he’s not very good? Not to give up the travel agency just yet?
I was still trying to work this all out in my head when it hit me that he’d stopped tuning his guitar and was actually playing a song. It wasn’t anything I’d ever heard before—later I’d learn he wrote it himself—and as he started to sing, it was as though a lake of relief spread out inside of me, and I started to smile, so widely I fear I may have looked demented. But, in the moment, I didn’t care how I looked because, get this: Jack Springer was good!
Oh, it wasn’t like he was a candidate for The Next Great Thing. I mean, in 1983, it would have to be electric, no? But the song he played was good, even better than good, and the same could be said of his voice. Honestly, if Bob Dylan could sing and hadn’t already existed, Jack Springer could have been him. Well, and if it had been twenty years earlier.
So when he finished playing, it positively thrilled me that I could say, in all honesty, that I had liked what I heard. A few minutes later, it thrilled me to go into his bedroom with him. And the next morning, it thrilled me to say, feeling absolutely no caution about it at all anymore, that yes, I’d give it a try. Even though we were dating, I’d come work with him in his new travel agency, and I wouldn’t think any more about how one might affect the other.
• • •
“Will you marry me?”
So there we were in the office.
Turn the clock back three hours.
It was nine a.m., Jack had just put the key in the door and I’d followed him inside. It was a Thursday, which meant that no sooner had I slung my bag over the back of my chair than Mrs. Stevens came doddering in. Mrs. Stevens was a blue-haired pensioner with an enormous black leather purse that she clutched to her chest as though it might contain all the money she had in the world, which, sometimes, I suspected it did.
“I’m thinking of taking a trip,” she announced. “I’ve been saving up for it my whole life. Do you think you might help me, dear?”
“Of course, Mrs. Stevens,” I said. “Why don’t you have a seat?”
I made her a cup of tea and we began with the brochures.
First, we went through local possibilities: Dover, Bath, the Cotswolds.
“These are all so lovely,” Mrs. Stevens said, “but I do think I’d like to leave the country. You know I’ve never done that?”
I did know.
Ireland. Scotland. Wales.
“Oh, Wales!” She jiggled her purse on her knees in her excitement. “I hear they have wonderful bookstores there!”
Having been a bookseller, however briefly, I’d heard that too.
“But you know,” she said, looking a bit dismayed, “it’s still just the U.K. Do you have anything for the Continent?”
Rome. Paris. Berlin.
“Oh, I just couldn’t go to Germany,” she said. “I know it’s been years, and one shouldn’t hold a grudge, but, you know—” and here she lowered her voice to a whisper, even though Jack was the only other person in the room; for some reason, Thursday mornings were always slow “—the war.”
Prague. Bonn. Vienna.
“Oh, I do love a good Viennese torte! But I was thinking, perhaps somewhere tropical?”
The Bahamas. Bermuda. Bimini.
Might as well work the B’s all at once.
“Can you imagine me?” She put a hand to her chest. “In my bikini in Bimini?” She pronounced Bimini so that it rhymed with bikini. “What would the neighbors say when I showed them the snapshots?”
I could only guess.
“Oh, so hard to choose,” she said. “And, of course, nice as beaches are, I mean, it’s only a beach, right? I do think, if I’m going to take a trip, it should be more exotic.”
Easter Island. The Seychelles. Queensland.
That last I threw in just because I knew from past experience she liked the idea of there being a place called Queensland.
“Gives a girl hope, doesn’t it?” she liked to say.
I didn’t think that her hopes were the same as mine, but I kind of felt as though I knew what she meant.
“But these are all with tour buses,” she said, as though such a thing might be beneath her. “Do you have something more adventurous?”
African safari. A trip down the Amazon. Pony rides in Iceland.
“How about Mount Everest?” I offered. “You could do an assisted climb. You know, you might not make it all the way to the top, but it’s still there, right?”
Climbing Mount Everest was always the last resort. I could never think of anything more exotic, more adventurous, more not-England than the prospect of climbing Mount Everest.
Apparently, Mrs. Stevens couldn’t think of anything more all of those things than Everest either. We always stopped at Everest.
Which was a good thing. By that point, I was always out of brochures.
“So much to think about,” Mrs. Stevens said. “So hard to decide.”
“Well,” I said, gathering up the brochures now strewn across my desk and offering them out to her like a magician displaying a deck of cards for her to choose from, “perhaps you’d like to take a few of these home with you, give it a think?”
“Oh, could I?” she said, hopefully, gratefully.
“Of course.”
She wound up taking one of everything I had away with her in her purse. I pictured her at home, going over them all, taking great care to decide on a trip I somehow knew she’d never take. In the choice between grand adventure and the money she’d saved up, she’d always choose the safety of the cash in her purse.
And next Thursday? She’d be back at my desk again. Of course she would, since I’d inherited her from Jack when I first started working for him.
As the bell on the door signaled her safe exit, I placed my hands behind my neck. “Well, there’s three hours of my life I’ll never get back again.” Then I laughed. “But so what? She’s so sweet. And anyway, she always compliments my tea. You do realize, don’t you, that I’m the only woman in England who can’t make a proper cup of tea? I used to wonder why that is. How is it that I somehow manage to burn it? You would think that—”
“Will you marry me?”
“What?”
“I know it’s crazy,” he said, “and we haven’t known each other for very long, but I’ve never been in love before. I mean, I’ve loved other women, sure, but I’ve never been in love, not in my entire life, and now I am. With you.”
That’s when I told him that I’d never been in love before meeting him either, which wasn’t strictly true. I’d been in love exactly once before, but that hadn’t counted. Of course, I didn’t tell him that part. Why bring up something that doesn’t count? Something that amounted to no more than a mere schoolgirl crush?
The Other Brother Page 4
