The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel

by Dawson, Maddie

  He doesn’t answer. He’s wincing at Soapie, who is now right up next to Helen’s living room window snipping away.

  “Wasn’t she going to start today?” Rosie says.

  “Well,” he says. Soapie waves in triumph from the peony bushes and starts making her way back. “Oh God,” Tony says. “She’s got five of the biggest flowers.”

  “I got greedy,” says Soapie. “I have got to stop being awful, you know that?” She looks at Rosie’s face. “Yes, I see you agree. Let me just get these inside before the cops get here. Tony, you were no help at all. None.”

  “Be sure you tell that to the cops,” he says, and the three of them go inside, and Rosie says, “Really, where is Mrs. Lamb?”

  “Oh, we changed our minds about having her,” says Soapie. “Find me a vase, will you? I think the big green one is under the sink.”

  “What do you mean, you changed your mind?” Rosie digs out the vase and puts it on the counter.

  Soapie starts arranging the flowers one by one without looking over at Rosie. “Oh, she called me last night and started making up rules and drawing up schedules and talking about bedtime and the four food groups and all the cultural outings we’d take. I don’t need her to take me on cultural outings, and I certainly don’t need anybody telling me when I have to go to bed at night or what I’m supposed to be eating.”

  “But what—?”

  “Tony can stay, it turns out. And we’re fine, except that he appears to be kind of a coward when it comes to getting flowers. But we’ll work on it.”

  Rosie turns and looks at him, and he ducks his head and smiles. “It’s all good,” he says. “Today she fell, but we got her right up and she was fine, and then we went and got her prescription filled, and she took her medicine.”

  “But how long are you planning to stay?” Rosie asks him in dismay. “I thought it was all settled—”

  “Don’t start this,” says Soapie. “I’m fine, and you know it.”

  “I have to go,” says Rosie. She feels so heavy, it’s as though one of those x-ray dental aprons has been put on her chest, and she’s staggering under the weight of it.

  “No scenes, no scenes,” says Soapie. “Make Jonathan stop every couple of hours so you can stretch your legs, and drink lots of water, and call every now and then so I’ll at least know you’re alive.”

  “Soapie, I—”

  “No!” her grandmother yells. “I told you no. I can’t and I won’t. Just go now. Get out!”

  Soapie stalks out of the kitchen, waving her arms in the air like she’s trying to bat away spiderwebs. Rosie feels her eyes stinging with tears.

  “She makes me so crazy,” she whispers. “Why can’t she just hug me and act like she’s going to miss me?”

  “She’s just upset,” Tony says. “She’s already missing you so much.”

  “Then why can’t she show it like other people?”

  “You know why,” he says, like he knows anything about them at all, like even one minute of their history would make sense to him.

  “You seem to get along with her pretty well!” she says accusingly.

  But he just smiles. “Other people’s old people are always easier. That’s all. She doesn’t love me.”

  Two days later, on moving day, Jonathan gets up early and gets ready to head out to pick up the U-Haul truck. She calls out to him, “So how many movers did you hire? And when are they getting here?”

  “No movers. I got our friends to help,” he calls from the bedroom.

  She feels her blood stop cold in her veins. She hauls herself over to the bedroom door and stands there glaring at him so hard that she hopes his eyeballs fall out of his head when he sees how mad she is. “What?” she says. “You are not calling in our friends. Don’t you even know how they make fun of us? The whole day is going to be how first we didn’t have the wedding we said we were going to have, and now we didn’t hire movers?”

  “But they’re already coming,” he says. “They didn’t mind at all. And who cares if they make fun of us? We’re funny.”

  “Jonathan, you are so freaking unconscious all the time! What is the matter with you?”

  “Oh my God, Rosie,” he says, and starts laughing very hard. “Is this going to end up being the red-boots-and-wedding conversation again?”

  She is too mad even to speak.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he says, and his eyes are rounded in amazement that he has to explain these facts to her. “Friends help each other move. It’s a time-honored thing. Beer and pizza. Laughing together. Don’t you know these guys would be insulted if I didn’t ask for their help?”

  “Trust me. They would not be insulted.”

  Greta and Joe arrive first, and when they’re still crossing the yard below, Rosie sees that Greta is dressed in a white sundress and sandals and carrying a tray of iced coffees—not at all like somebody who’s planning on putting in a day of packing and carrying boxes. “Just think of this,” Joe says loudly when they get upstairs. “This is the last time we climb up here. Brings sort of a tear to the eye.”

  “Well, you mean maybe after today it’s the last trip you make up these stairs,” says Jonathan. “You’ve got a few up-and-down trips to make today, old man.” He claps Joe on the shoulder. “We’ve got all these boxes and all this furniture to load on the truck.”

  “You’re kidding me, man,” says Joe, and he laughs. “I’m already wiped out. How are we supposed to get all this shit down these stairs?”

  “Also,” says Greta, “sorry, but we’ve got a soccer parents’ meeting to get to this afternoon. If you don’t get there on time, you get assigned all the worst jobs for the whole next season.”

  The other four come in then, trailed by Jonathan’s younger brother, Patrick, a quiet guy in his twenties who always gets dragged into helping.

  “Did you guys know we’re s’posed to pack all this crap on the truck?” says Joe. He pushes his expensive sunglasses up on his head.

  “As always, there’ll be beer and pizza at the end of it for you,” says Jonathan. “Play your cards right, and it’ll have bacon and pepperoni. No expense spared!”

  Hinton, Suzanne’s husband, a scientist who always seems to be in the middle of complex calculations, says, “I don’t think I’ve worked for beer and pizza for quite a while.”

  “Jesus. Not only is there the queen-sized bed and the foldout couch, but there are three dressers, a desk, and boxes and boxes and boxes of these crazy goddamned fragile teacups,” says Joe, who’s been walking around the apartment, peeking into rooms. “You’re trusting us with these precious teacups?”

  “I am,” says Jonathan. “What choice do I have?”

  Patrick, who weighs about a hundred pounds and still has acne and plays in a rock band, who has been restlessly bouncing from one foot to another and cracking his knuckles, says, “Come on, man. You and I can do this by ourselves. It’s okay.” He grabs one end of the kitchen table, and Jonathan reaches over and picks up the other end.

  “Rosie,” he says, “when you order the pizza, see if you can get them to add some testosterone to it for these guys.”

  Rosie scowls at him. How could he not know that his friends are all in their adult lives now, the world where men prove their manhood by hiring others to do the inconvenient tasks? He’s clung to his grad student existence as though it were an ethical stance.

  Lynn’s cell phone rings then and she gets embroiled in a feisty conversation with Brittany, her high-school-age daughter, who wants to spend the day alone with her boyfriend.

  “Speaking of testosterone,” says Greg.

  “Yeah, send that guy over here,” says Joe. “In the interest of keeping him from getting Brittany in trouble, of course.”

  “Wow. Do they still even call it ‘getting in trouble’?” asks Hinton.

  “Shut up,” growls Greg. “That’s my daughter you’re talking about. And because you have boys, you think you get a free pass from all this stuff?”


  “Like hell I do. Only Jonathan gets a free pass, because he managed to keep himself unhitched,” says Hinton, and then looks embarrassed. “Sorry, Rosie. I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Don’t look at me,” Rosie says. “I managed to stay unhitched, too.”

  “Close call, though, last week, huh?” says Greg. “That’s the closest you guys’ve come, right?”

  “Yeah, what was up with that?” says Hinton. “We were all invited to a wedding, and then suddenly we weren’t?”

  “Hinty!” says Suzanne. “I told you. We’re not going to talk about that today. If they didn’t want to get married, it’s none of our business. They’re fine the way they are.”

  “It’s okay,” Rosie says. “There were some teacups in Texas that needed to be looked at, so Jonathan had to go.”

  “Yeah, you know how it is, Hinty, when you’ve just got to see some teacups,” says Joe. “You just have to. We’ve all been there.”

  Rosie can feel them all exchanging their amused glances. How Rosie and Jonathan Don’t Throw a Wedding.

  Joe clears his throat and says, “Married or not, the main thing you need to be thankful for is that you don’t have any kids. No kids is what keeps you two young. You’re going to outlive us all.”

  Greta claps her hands. “Enough of this! I’ve made the dinner reservation for us all at Christopher Martin’s for seven. Do you think that’s going to give you enough time?”

  Jonathan, back from loading the table onto the truck, doesn’t look worried in the least. “If we can get some manpower out of these wusses, it’ll be great,” he says. He turns to Patrick. “Okay, bro. Let’s do it. Grab the other end of this couch, will you. You other guys, why don’t you sit down and fan yourselves for a while.”

  Patrick comes over and takes one end of the couch, and Jonathan takes the other, and then Greg sighs and grabs a part of it, too, and Joe and Hinton take the pile of cushions, and they all start bumping down the stairs, barking at one another and grumbling and groaning. When they get down to the street, they confer on how to load the things into the truck, and then Joe takes over, pointing and directing. And then they’re all laughing and shoving one another and they’re back to the regular guy thing, and Rosie knows that Greta and Joe won’t end up going to the soccer parents’ preseason meeting, and that the guys will move this whole household—teacups, tables, beds, and all of it—to the truck and get soused on beer and filled up with pizza in the process, and at some point Joe will hurt his bad knee and Greg, who’s overweight, will nearly pass out from heat exhaustion, but none of it will matter because they love Jonathan, and tonight they’ll all go to dinner at Christopher Martin’s and drink too much and propose toasts and tell stories about how tough it is to be parents these days, and they’ll be sloppy and sentimental about how much they’ll all miss Rosie and Jonathan, and then forever after this will be another story that they tell, shaking their heads as they add to the legend of Rosie and Jonathan, this mythical couple who live in some kind of odd world, bumbling along but having things work out anyway. This one will be “The Day That Rosie and Jonathan Had to Be Told That Everybody Gets Old.”

  It’s nearly one in the morning by the time Jonathan and Rosie get back to the apartment, to finish up and get the truck.

  Joe and Greta have dropped them off, and given them tearful good-byes on the sidewalk, and then they clomp upstairs, Rosie banging around with the crutches, Jonathan in the middle of a long, meandering, whispered monologue about how he’d describe his current state: slightly buzzy but not too inebriated to get on the road and head out. He’s made clear from the beginning that they have to get going in the middle of the night so they can miss the New York City traffic, which he imagines will be awful, even on Sunday morning.

  “I shouldn’t have had anything to drink since I’m not going to get any sleep,” he says. “But saying good-bye to friends. The only way to do that is to be drunk.”

  “I think we should sleep a bit,” she says. Her arms and legs feel so heavy they can barely move.

  “No can do.”

  “But my foot hurts, and my head hurts.”

  “Rosie. The next few days are going to be hard enough, but if we get behind schedule right from the beginning, it’s just going to be worse. You can prop your foot up on the dash with a bag of ice. And take some ibuprofen. You’ll be fine.” He looks around. “Look at all this crap that didn’t get taken away. Jesus. There are bags of garbage everywhere.” He reaches over and turns on the kitchen light, and the bulb burns out with an explosion that makes her jump.

  “Oh, holy Christ! Did you see that? The fucking oven didn’t get cleaned,” he says.

  “Sssh. We can do it now.”

  “But why didn’t you get it done earlier? Your friends could have helped you.”

  “You saw how people were dressed here today. Nobody came here to clean ovens. I still can’t even believe you got those guys to carry all that stuff.”

  “Nah, they were always gonna help me. They’re my buds.”

  “I know, but didn’t you see how mad at you they were?”

  “Here’s a little secret, Rosie: people are like puppy dogs. They can’t stay mad.” He laughs a little. “Puppy dogs. Ask them tomorrow, and they’ll say that today was the best day of their lives.”

  She stares at him. “Wow. God, I can’t get over how you just skate through life. Nothing bad ever happens to you,” she says. “You always get forgiven, don’t you? By the way, did you call your mom?”

  “What is this? I called her on Thursday.”

  “But she wanted to see you. Was she mad that you didn’t come?”

  “She’s used to me,” he says. “I say it again: puppy dogs. Clearly you don’t have your friends and family trained the way mine are.” He laughs.

  “I never even tried to train them,” she says. “It’s despicable.” But maybe he doesn’t hear that last part, because he’s knelt down next to the oven and is peering inside at all its caked-on splotches.

  He sits back on his heels and puts on his German accent. Sort of a Hogan’s Heroes thing he does from time to time, to great laughter from his friends. “Dis black mark iss number two thirty-seven, the Turkey Catastrophe of five years ago,” he says. “And over here ve have the Cherry Pie Disaster, number three forty-five. Date still unknown. Fräulein, I am so very sorry, but ve cannot let you destroy the past by cleaning this oven. No. Nein.”

  “But I think we have to clean it. We need the security deposit back.”

  “No. No. Cannot be done. Against the rules of scientific discovery.” He closes the door and comes over to her. “We’re not doing it, babe. Come on. Let’s go.” He smells like garlic and beer and sweat. She feels a sudden sweep of anger, with her breath fluttery in her chest. She might be in danger of throwing up.

  “Nobody ever holds you to anything,” she says, pulling away from him. She looks back at the oven. “You’ve decided we’re not cleaning this oven, and so if I want the security deposit back, too bad. Because you don’t really care. You can really walk away from this, can’t you—leave this apartment in this appalling state, and not—” Her voice is getting higher.

  He laughs and looks around. “What are you talking about? This is not exactly appalling. Appalling would be if we had left dead bodies in the closets.” He goes over to the closet and opens it to show her there’s no such thing. She watches his expression, the flourish of his hand, the hooded look of his eyes, and then she swallows and just says it.

  “Listen, I don’t think I’m going with you. I can’t.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “I’m not going to California.” Her hairline feels suddenly freezing cold, as though it, too, is surprised by this news. She balls her hands into fists so they won’t start to tremble in front of him.

  “Aha! But you have to. Your stuff is on the truck. Or did you forget that?”

  “It’s toward the back end of the truck. The stuff I need,
at least. I can take it out.”

  “Oh, come off it, Rosie. You’re being dramatic.”

  “I’m sorry. But I can’t.”

  “Goddamn it, woman, it’s nearly two in the morning, and I want to get to Pennsylvania before we have to stop again. Just get over whatever this is, and we’ll solve it in the truck.”

  “Take me to Soapie’s,” she says, and now she’s shocked to see that she’s actually calm. She’s really doing this. It’s the right thing.

  He stands there with his hands at his sides, and then he sighs. “Look, is it the oven? Because I swear I’ll pay you your portion of the security deposit, if it means that much to you.”

  “No.”

  “Well, then what is it? We can’t clean the damn thing right now, even if we wanted to, because there’s no light in this kitchen. And the stores are all closed, so we can’t go buy a lightbulb. So get over yourself, and let’s hit the road. It’s been a long day.”

  She sighs. “No. I’m not going.”

  “What the fuck, Rosie?” He goes into the bathroom and closes the door. She hears the water running, the fan going on. She folds her arms across her chest and stares out the window at the streetlight. Breathe. Deep, deep breaths. Then after a while the toilet flushes, and he comes out and stands in front of her. “What if we compromise?” he says heavily. “We’ll go spend the night at Soapie’s and then leave in the morning. Okay? That what you want?”

  “No.”

  “Come on,” he says. “I don’t know what my crime is, but won’t you give a guy a chance to say he’s sorry?”

  “But you’re not sorry,” she says calmly.

  “But this is madness! Because I know you. In exactly two days you’re going to call me and say, ‘Ohhh, Jonathan, I’ve made a mistake, and can’t you come back and get me?’ And the truth is, I won’t be able to, because there’s a deadline on turning in this truck, and if I turn around because you’ve got some bug up your ass, then I’ve got to pay a lot more money. And I’ll have had to drive through Pennsylvania three times.” His voice is rising, and he stops himself, closes his eyes for a moment, and then pats the air with his hands. “I’m sorry,” he says softly. “Getting mad at you is not going to help matters, I know. But the fact is, Rosie, we don’t have a lot of money. So even if you decide to come much later, it’s going to be hard to get the airfare together to fly you out there.”