Welcome to Temptation/Bet Me

by Jennifer Crusie

  Somebody knocked on the door, and when Min opened it, Bonnie was standing there in her chenille robe holding a teapot. “I made cocoa,” she said, and Min felt the tears start. “Oh, baby,” Bonnie said and came in, putting her arm around Min, balancing the cocoa pot in her other hand. “Come on. We just need to talk about it.”

  “I thought I was so smart,” Min said, fighting to keep her voice steady. She took a shuddery breath. “I kept thinking I had it all under control.”

  “I thought you did pretty well,” Bonnie said, putting the cocoa pot down on the sewing machine table. She took a cup out of each pocket, and Min laughed at her through her tears.

  “Where’s Roger?” Min said. “I don’t—”

  “He’s asleep downstairs,” Bonnie said, picking up the pot. “He’s worried about you, but it gets to be midnight and he clonks right out for a solid eight hours.”

  Min laughed again and then sniffed. “If I’d had any brains, I’d have grabbed Roger that first night.”

  “Roger would bore you to tears,” Bonnie said, handing her a filled cup. “Just like I’d have shoved Cal under a bus by now.”

  “You would have?” Min sniffed again.

  “Oh, please, that master of the universe act?” Bonnie said. “That’s one scared man you’ve got there. I don’t have the time for that. I want kids, I don’t want to marry one.”

  “He’s a good guy, Bon.” Min sipped her cocoa and began to feel better.

  “I know,” Bonnie said. “And some day he’ll grow up and be a good man. In the meantime, he broke your heart so I’m mad at him.”

  “No, he didn’t,” Min said. “He tried not to be with me.”

  “No, he didn’t.” Bonnie sat down next to her on the couch with her own cup. “He had every opportunity in the world to get away from you and he passed up every one of them to be with you.”

  “That’s because he couldn’t charm me,” Min said. “It wasn’t—”

  “Oh, stop being such a baby,” Bonnie said, and Min jerked her head up and startled Elvis. “Well, listen to yourself. You’re miserable, but it’s not his fault and it’s not your fault. Well, screw that.”

  “Bonnie” Min said, scandalized.

  “What do you want, Min?” Bonnie said. “If life were a fairy tale, if there truly was a happy ending, what would you want?”

  “I’d want Cal,” Min said, feeling ashamed even as she said it. “I know that’s—”

  “Don’t,” Bonnie said, holding up her hand. “Why do you want him?”

  “Oh, because he was fun,” Min said, smiling as she blinked the tears away because she was so shallow. “He was so much fun, Bonnie. And he made me feel wonderful. I was never fat when I was with Cal.”

  “You’re never fat when you’re with Liza and me,” Bonnie said.

  “I know,” Min said. “He was almost like you except I couldn’t trust him and he really turned me on.”

  “Maybe that’s why he turned you on,” Bonnie said. “Somebody you couldn’t handle.”

  “Yeah.” Min let her head drop back against the couch. “He was exciting. I never knew what was coming next. And neither did he. We fed off each other. What dummies we were.”

  “I wouldn’t rush to use the past tense,” Bonnie said. “So back to the fairy tale. Tell me your happily ever after.”

  “I don’t have one,” Min said. “Which is why I’ll never get one.”

  “Mine,” Bonnie said, “is that I marry Roger, and we have four kids. We live in a nice house in one of the suburbs with good schools, but not one where everybody wears plaid.”

  “Makes sense,” Min said, and sipped her cocoa again.

  “I’m a stay-at-home mom,” Bonnie said, “but I do keep a few clients, my favorite clients, and I watch their portfolios like a hawk so I don’t lose my edge. And word gets out, and as the kids get older, I add to my client list because there are so many people who are dying to get me.”

  “That’s not a fairy tale,” Min said, putting her cocoa cup down. “That can all happen.”

  “And our house,” Bonnie said, as if she hadn’t heard, “becomes the place everybody comes home to, for the holidays and everybody’s birthdays, everybody comes to us. And we have these big dinners and everybody sits around the table and we’re family by choice. And you and Liza and Cal and Tony are all godparents to our kids, and every time there’s a big school thing, you all come out and cheer our kids on—”

  “I’ll be there,” Min said, trying not to cry.

  “—and none of us will ever be alone because we’ll have each other,” Bonnie said. “You’re going to like my grandchildren, Min. We’re going to take them shoe shopping.”

  “Oh, Bonnie,” Min said and put her head down on the couch cushion and howled, while Bonnie stroked her hair and drank her chocolate.

  When Min had subsided to a few gasping, shuddering sobs, Bonnie said calmly, “Now you.”

  “I can’t,” Min said.

  “Well, you’re gonna,” Bonnie said. “It starts with Cal, right?”

  “Why?” Min sat up and wiped her face with the back of her hand. “Why does it always have to start with some guy?”

  “Because it’s a fairy tale,” Bonnie said. “It all starts with the prince. Or if you’re Shanna, with the princess, but still. It starts with the big risk. You’re all alone sitting on a tuffet, on in your case, an Aeron, and this guy rides up and there it is, your whole future right there before you—”

  “What if he’s the wrong one?” Min said. “Accepting for the moment, which I don’t, that the whole thing starts with the prince, how do you tell the prince from—”

  “The beast?” Bonnie said. “Honey, they’re all beasts.”

  “Roger isn’t,” Min said.

  “Oh, please,” Bonnie said. “He’s down there snoring like a bear now,” and Min laughed in spite of her tears. “You really think Cal’s a mistake?”

  Min swallowed. “Well, logically—”

  “Do not make me dump my cocoa on you,” Bonnie said.

  “I don’t have anything else to go on,” Min said. “How am I supposed to know?”

  “Tell me your fairy tale,” Bonnie said. “It’s just between you and me, nobody else will ever know. If you could have anything you wanted, no explanations, no logic, just anything you—”

  “Cal,” Min said. “I know that’s stup—”

  “Stop it,” Bonnie said. “God, you can’t even dream without qualifiers. Tell me your fairy tale.”

  Min felt the tears start again, and she gathered Elvis up and petted him to distract herself. “It’s Cal. And he loves me, so much that he can’t stand it, as much as I love him. And, uh,” she gulped back tears, “we, uh, we find this great house, here in the city, maybe on this street, one of the old bungalows like the one my grandma used to live in. I’d like that. With a yard so Elvis could stalk things. And maybe a dog, because I like dogs.”

  Bonnie nodded, and Min sniffed again.

  “And I keep working because I like my work, and so does Cal because he loves what he does.” She sighed. “And sometimes he calls me up and says, ‘Minnie, I’ve been thinking about you, meet me at home in twenty minutes’ and I do and we make love and it’s wonderful, right in the middle of the day . . .” She stopped to sniff and Bonnie nodded.

  “And sometimes we go to Emilio’s, we meet all you guys at Emilio’s, like every Wednesday, we all meet, and we laugh and catch up on what’s happening, and when you and Roger have your kids, Emilio adds more tables, and he and his wife and kids eat, too, and Brian serves us, and sometimes we go out to your house . . .”

  Bonnie smiled and nodded.

  “. . . and the guys watch the game and hoot and moan, and you and I and Liza and Emilio’s wife sit out in the kitchen and eat chocolate and talk about all the things we’ve done and they’ve done and laugh. . . .” Min took another deep breath and realized she was still crying.

  “And then Cal and I go home,” she said, her
voice breaking, “and it’s just the two of us, and we laugh some more and hold each other and eat and make love and watch dumb movies and just . . . be with each other. We just feel good because we’re with each other.” She wiped her eyes again. “That’s all I’d need. The two of us, talking and cooking and laughing. It’s so simple.”

  She took a deep shuddering breath and met Bonnie’s eyes. “I can have that, can’t I?”

  “Yes,” Bonnie said.

  “But only if Cal is who I need him to be,” Min said.

  Bonnie nodded.

  “So I just have to trust that he’s who I think he is and not who he thinks he is,” Min said.

  “Big gamble,” Bonnie said.

  “Do you ever wonder what happened after the happily ever after?” Min said. “After the wedding was over and the townspeople went home, and they finished opening all the stuff that was monogrammed with a gold crown? Because the story’s over then. All the questing and the courting and the trauma. From then on it’s just sitting around the castle, polishing all the toasters they got for wedding gifts.”

  “That would pretty much depend on the prince,” Bonnie said. “I can see David polishing a lot of toasters.”

  Min laughed in spite of herself.

  “But Tony would hot wire them all together and calibrate them so they’d shoot toast at varying intervals,” Bonnie said and Min laughed harder.

  “And Cal would bet on it,” Min said, smiling and crying at the same time now, “but only after he’d seen Tony shoot the toasters a thousand times and calculated the odds.”

  “And Roger would put out stakes and yellow tape so that nobody got hit by flying bread,” Bonnie said with affection.

  “And Liza would figure out how to make the whole thing pay,” Min said. “And you’d make sure Tony bought the bread at cost and invested the profits wisely.”

  “And you’d look at the whole thing and gauge the risk and tell us what we’d missed,” Bonnie said.

  “You know this toaster thing might be worth looking into,” Min said. “Tony’s nuts, but his ideas are always good.”

  Bonnie nodded.

  Min bit her lip and swallowed more tears. “I want the fairy tale.”

  “Okay,” Bonnie said. “Now all you have to do is figure out how.”

  “Yeah,” Min said. “I can do that. I just have to think it out.” She looked at Bonnie. “Are you going to dump cocoa on me?”

  “No,” Bonnie said. “The only illogical thing you have to do is believe. After that, you need brains.”

  “Oh, good,” Min said. “Brains, I got. Leap of faith, taken. Plan, still in the works.”

  Bonnie nodded again. “Can you sleep now?”

  “Uh huh,” Min said, tearing up again. “Why can’t I stop crying?”

  “When was the last time you cried?” Bonnie said.

  “I can’t remember,” Min said.

  “When was the last time you cared enough to cry?” Bonnie said.

  “I can’t remember that, either,” Min said, appalled.

  “So you’ve got some catching up to do,” Bonnie said, standing up. “I have to go downstairs and sleep with a bear.”

  Min gave her a watery grin. “Do not expect me to feel sorry for you because you’ve got Roger.”

  “I don’t,” Bonnie said airily. “I expect you to envy me beyond measure.”

  “I do,” Min said, thinking of the man she’d left enraged in the moonlight. “But I want Cal.”

  Cal didn’t call, and that was all right, Min told herself, because she’d see him at the rehearsal dinner since he hadn’t called to cancel, plus she didn’t have time to think about him with the wedding only four days away, especially since she found herself fielding a dozen calls a day from her increasingly frantic sister, and anyway she was better off without him as a distraction.

  She missed him.

  Sunday, she kept telling herself, on Sunday this will all be over, Diana will be married, and I can fix my own life then. The only part she wasn’t sure about was the “Diana will be married,” but since Diana was insistent that her romance was a fairy tale, there wasn’t much Min could do besides hold her hand, make supportive noises, and listen. So she propped Diana up, went to the If Dinner on Thursday night and brought the rest of the hand-packed quarts of ice cream that Cal had given her, told Liza there was no need to apologize for making Cal sing since their fight had been inevitable, and tried to figure out a way to make things right without actually talking to him or seeing him.

  But on Saturday morning, she had to go to baseball for Harry, so she put on her newest sandals—clear plastic mules with French heels and cherries on the toes—and got to the park a couple of minutes after the game started. She found a seat to one side, trying to stay inconspicuous and wave to Harry at the same time, but Bink saw her and motioned her up. Min smiled at her and then realized that the man sitting next to her wasn’t just a miscellaneous father, he was Reynolds. Cynthie was on Bink’s other side, wedged in next to another parent, which meant Min was going to be stuck sitting beside Reynolds. This has to be payback for something, she thought, and climbed to the top and sat down.

  “So how we doing?” she asked him.

  “These kids can’t play,” Reynolds said, shaking his head. “No discipline.”

  “Well, you know, they’re eight,” Min said.

  “Discipline starts young,” Reynolds said, looking at her with contempt, and Min thought, There goes our chance at bonding.

  Down on the field, Bentley bobbled a catch and the ball rolled over to Harry, who picked it up and threw it in the general direction of a base he thought might be appropriate.

  “Oh, God, Harry,” Reynolds said loudly.

  Min saw Cal off to one side of the field and felt her stomach lurch. Ridiculous, she told herself and swallowed hard. He spread his arms out at Harry as if to say, What? and Harry shrugged and crouched down again. Cal shook his head but Min could tell from the set of his shoulders that he wasn’t mad. When he turned around he was grinning, and then he caught sight of her and his grin vanished, and she felt the rejection in the pit of her stomach.

  Oh, ouch, she thought and looked away to the dugout where Tony was eating a hot dog and shaking his head, and Liza was sitting next to him with her chin on her hand. Down at the bottom of the bleachers, Bonnie was keeping some kind of tally for Roger who would use it to explain to the kids later the importance of something or other. Lucky kids, she thought and wished she were down there with Bonnie, or with Liza, or better yet, shoe shopping somewhere. Anywhere but here, looking at what she couldn’t have. Or didn’t have the guts to go after. Same thing, really.

  Throughout the rest of the game, Reynolds continued to express his disgust at the general ineptness of the team in general, winning no friends among the parents in the bleachers, and making an already jittery Min long to hit him with something. Bink grew more and more owl-like, and Min wondered why she put up with him. I’d have left his ass a long time ago.

  Down on the field, Harry came up to bat. He looked up at them, and Min waved to him, smiling. He pounded his bat on the ground a couple of times and then put it on his shoulder, dead serious. And when the pitch came, he missed it by a mile.

  “Come on, Harry,” Reynolds yelled. “You can do better than that. You’re not trying.”

  Shut up, Reynolds, Min thought.

  Down on the field, Harry’s shoulders hunched a little, and up in the bleachers, Bink grew even stiller.

  Harry fanned the next one, too, and Reynolds yelled, “Concentrate, Harrison! You can’t swing at anything like a dummy. Think,” and Min saw Cal look up at his brother, his face set.

  Might want to ease back on that, Reynolds, Min thought, and then Harry stiffened up and swung at a pitch that was so bad it didn’t even cross the plate, and Reynolds stood up and yelled, “Harry, that was stupid, damn it, can’t you do anything right?,” and Harry froze, his little shoulders rigid, and Cal left the field, coming straight
for his brother, murder in his eyes.

  “No, no,” Min said, panicking as Cal hit the bleachers. She stood up and stepped in front of Reynolds and hit him hard on the arm with her fist.

  “Hey!” Reynolds said, grabbing his arm.

  “You miserable excuse for a parent,” she said to him under her breath. “You do not humiliate your kid like that.” She raised her voice and yelled, “Harry is really smart, he’s always smart,” and then she whispered, “But you are the dumbest son of a bitch I have ever seen in my life.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Reynolds said, outraged.

  “It’s not my pardon you need, you miserable butthead,” Min whispered, leaning closer. “It’s your kid’s, the one you just humiliated in front of all his friends, and if you think that made you look good to anybody here, your head really is up your butt.”

  “You’re out of line,” Reynolds said, but he looked wary now, darting a glance at the other parents, who were clearly not amused. He shook his head, trying for bluster. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “Well, for starters, she’s the woman who just saved your ass,” Cal said from behind her. “Because I was going to throw it off the bleachers until she got in my way.”

  “You,” Reynolds said, looking past Min. “Like you could do anything about it. You can’t even coach these kids—”

  “Oh, give it up,” Min said. “You know you screwed up, and the best you can do is blame your brother?”