My Favorite Mistake

by Beth Kendrick

  “Well, no, but—”

  “Then it’s settled. You’re coming home with us.” She smiled at the baby on her hip. “This is Rachel. She’s eleven months.”

  Rachel opened her mouth, gave me a gummy pink smile, and squealed. I was never sure how to act around babies, but I smiled and squeezed her tiny hand, which she reciprocated by waving a plump fist and announcing “Bye-bye!”

  “And the little terror back there is Eli. He’s five.”

  “No, Mama! Rex!” piped up a voice from her skirtfolds.

  “Oh, excuse me. I forgot, honey. Faith, please allow me to introduce my son, Rex.”

  Rex, né Eli, was a pale little boy with thick dark hair and luminous black eyes. He clutched a small Kmart bag in one hand.

  “Hi, Rex. I’m Faith.” I knelt down to shake his hand, and he greeted me with the solemnity of a CEO meeting a new administrative assistant.

  “Hello.” His handshake was firm and perfunctory, very professional for a five-year-old wearing grass-stained jeans.

  “Why is your hair so red?” he wanted to know.

  Leah shushed him with a single raised eyebrow. “Come on, now. Everyone back to the car. Forward, march.”

  Rex hup-two-threed to a teal Camry parked a few spaces away, and Leah turned to me.

  “Are you all right? You look like you’ve been crying.”

  “I’m fine, really,” I told her.

  She looked at me for another long moment. “We’ll talk about it later. Here, help me get the kids strapped in, and then you can follow us in your car.” She smiled ruefully. “By the way, we’re hoping the ‘Rex’ thing is just a phase. I don’t know what goes on in that kid’s head. One day he just showed up at preschool and announced that he would no longer answer to Eli, only to Rex. So the teacher figured what the heck, except now half the boys in his class want to be called Rex, too.”

  Leah opened the passenger side door with her free hand, laughing at my stunned expression. “You’re back in Minnesota. No one locks their car doors here.”

  She leaned in to strap Rachel into a car seat while I wrestled with Rex’s seat belt, then walked around to the driver’s seat and started the car. A soothing, syrupy version of “Little April Showers” drifted out of the stereo speakers. This was the consummate family sedan, complete with little baggies of goldfish crackers in the ashtray and Wee Sing audiotapes in the glove compartment.

  “I’m starving, Mama!” Rex cried from the backseat.

  “We’ll eat as soon as we get home. I hope you like fish sticks and macaroni and cheese, Faith.”

  “What’s not to like?”

  Leah and Rex sang along with the tape deck, and Rachel clapped her hands and gurgled with laughter. No one was paying any attention to me, but I was full of the nervous, eager hope of a stray dog suddenly adopted.

  5

  I’m going to be a deejay when I grow up,” Rex announced through a mouthful of bright orange macaroni. “I will spin the wheels of steel. My name will be DJ Question Mark.”

  I swallowed the broccoli I was chewing. “A fascinating career. What made you choose that name?”

  “It sounds mysterious.” He scraped up the last bite of his macaroni and donated it to the Goldbergs’ mixed-breed retriever. The dog licked up the pasta in a frenzy of snuffling and tail-wagging.

  “Hans Gruber! No!” Leah’s command came too late, and the caramel-colored dog sat back down and panted up at Rex with the plaintive eyes of a famine victim. “Eli, I already fed him dinner. Don’t give him anything else.”

  “Rex, Mama!”

  Leah rolled her eyes and wiped the baby’s mouth with a damp napkin. “I beg your pardon, Rex. All right, I believe it’s almost bedtime for the lights of my life. Stan, would you do the honors?”

  “Of course.” Stan Goldberg was wiry and good-looking in a tax-attorney sort of way, with a seemingly endless supply of patience and good humor. He rounded up the children with promises of lightning-fast baths and a dramatic reading of Where the Wild Things Are. Rex bestowed orange-tinted kisses on Leah’s cheek, and then three-quarters of the Goldberg family retreated up the stairs in a fading hubbub of laughter and high-pitched chatter about the importance of question marks.

  Leah and I were left with the remnants of dinner. The kitchen was small and warm, with clean white walls decorated by Rex’s drawings, tan tiles on the floor, and a large glass patio door. I caught my reflection between the Yu-Gi-Oh decals plastered all over the window. I looked like a photographed negative of myself, dark and shifty against all these crisp white lines.

  “Thank you so much for dinner. The least I can do is the dishes.” I rose from my chair and started gathering up glasses and plates.

  “Thanks.” Leah leaned forward and rubbed the back of her neck with both hands. “I’m exhausted. Rachel got me up at five-thirty this morning, and we didn’t get a nap.”

  The kitchen counter bore testament to this. It was cluttered with pacifiers, shattered graham crackers, and half-empty plastic juice cups. As I carried a handful of forks to the dishwasher I noticed a cactus parked between a huge, motherly fern and a sturdy aloe plant. Leah obviously had a green thumb, even with prickly, arid things imported from the desert.

  I felt more at home here than I’d felt in any apartment or hotel room in my adult life. As I ran my hands under a stream of hot water, a dam overflowed somewhere inside me, but I honestly wasn’t sure if I was jealous or just longing for this kind of kitchen, for the kind of a family life I’d never had.

  “Stan’s great,” I told her. “Your whole family’s great. You’re really lucky.”

  “I know.” She smiled. “When I left for Berkeley, I never thought I’d come back, but then I met Stan, and it turned out his family is from St. Paul. Once I got pregnant with Eli, it was all over. Our parents were dying to get their hands on my firstborn, and since everyone was here in Minnesota…” She shrugged. “It seemed like a sign. So we moved back, and Stan opened the bakery down on Second Street, and now we don’t have to drive to Minneapolis to get good challah.”

  “Wait. You guys own a bakery?”

  She laughed, her brown curls bouncing against the faded blue denim of her shirtdress. “Yeah. My mother was shocked, too. I’m a part-time baker with two kids and a semi-checkered past. Who knew?”

  “I’m ready to adopt Eli right now.” I redoubled my efforts to scrub the stubborn fish stick residue off the plates.

  “Well, you’re welcome to take him off our hands any time, and I do mean any time. He can be a handful, and—” She broke off as I leaned over to grab a bottle of dish soap. “Faith Geary, is that a tattoo?”

  I immediately tugged down the hem of my tank top, which had gapped up from the waistband of my skirt.

  “Um…sort of.” I wrenched at the back of the shirt again.

  “Well, shuck my corn. What is it?”

  “It’s a little red heart.” This was, at least, part of the truth, and I did not want to provide further details.

  Leah’s eyebrows practically reached her hairline as she grinned at me. “No offense, but you turned out nothing like what I would have expected. You were always kind of the Tori Amos sister, and Skye was the Tori Spelling. Do you know what I mean?”

  Sadly, I did.

  “You were always so quiet and shy…”

  I bit back a laugh.

  “…and you were always just so together.”

  This time I did laugh. I couldn’t help it.

  “You were! You were like this cute little English professor, with those colored dividers in your notebooks and your shirts buttoned all the way up to the collar, telling Skye to do her homework. You were nine going on forty-five. And don’t give me that look, you know it’s true. I figured that you would have graduated first in your class, married that guy Flynn, and become a Sunday school teacher with five kids by now.”

  The bubble of mirth in my throat soured and sank into my stomach, where it settled like a lead bullet.

>   But Leah was on a roll. “And now look at your life. It turned out to be so exciting! Skye says you live in L.A. and travel all over the world. You got a tattoo, you still have all that gorgeous hair, and you obviously eat nothing but tofu and salad. You’re a walking, talking, local-girl-makes-good story.”

  I swallowed hard and tried to smile.

  “To think I had you pegged as a nice little introvert married to some stoic Minnesota boy.” She shook her head. “And Skye, who I was sure would take off for Hollywood after high school, is still living here, wearing her sorority girl outfits and running a bar into the ground. So I guess it just goes to show you…”

  To my utter mortification, I burst into tears for the second time in two hours.

  Leah was out of her chair and across the kitchen faster than I had imagined possible. She enveloped me in her soft, secure arms, the same maternal strength I remembered from childhood.

  The feel of her collarbone under my cheek reminded me that first of all, I hadn’t seen this woman in ten years, and second of all, I was getting snot all over the Talbots ensemble. I tried to squirm away.

  “Faith. I am so, so sorry. I apologize.”

  I covered my eyes. “No, it wasn’t you. I just…remember how I was sleeping in the parking lot?”

  She nodded and waited.

  “Well.” I took a ragged breath and sat down. “Remember that guy Flynn?”

  She nodded again.

  “I saw him tonight for the first time in years. And it did not go well.” I rubbed my forehead with my palm.

  “Oh boy. I heard you left town after graduation, but I never did get the whole story on what happened with Flynn. I assumed that it was just a high school sweetheart thing—that you guys just grew up and grew apart.”

  I twisted my hands together in my lap—a lover’s knot with chipped pink polish and sunburned knuckles. “Not exactly.” I exhaled slowly. “He wanted to get married, so I took off to L.A.”

  “I’ll make some tea.” She picked up a blue kettle and filled it at the sink. “So is that still a problem?”

  “Flynn and I had a very intense relationship,” I said, drained, defeated and yet somehow unable to abort this archeological dig through my interpersonal failings with the one potential friend I had in Lindbrook. “It went way beyond the high school sweetheart thing.”

  She smiled. “I guess you were elementary school sweethearts, too. Middle school sweethearts.”

  “Hell, we were in the same kindergarten class. And he was always hanging out with my family because he didn’t have one.”

  She tilted her head to one side. “He didn’t have a family? But I think I remember meeting his mother at Wendy Drake’s wedding.”

  “Well, I mean, yes, he has a family, obviously, but his mom was a single parent. She worked constantly—and I do mean constantly—so mostly he stayed with his grandparents. It was all very Charlotte Brontë.”

  She nodded.

  “His grandparents lived right up the road from us, and they were nice, but sort of staid and stodgy. That’s why he started coming over to our house. Even though my family was a mess, at least there was always something interesting going on. My mom and my sister sort of adopted him. We were best friends until we hit high school, and then we were crazy in love, too.” I paused. “Emphasis on the ‘crazy.’ It was like every emotion we had was magnified to the tenth power.” I propped my chin in my hand. “Who knew it would all eventually lead to a nervous breakdown at Kmart?”

  Leah looked puzzled. “I’m not quite getting the Kmart connection. So you broke up with him. That was ten years ago. You guys were teenagers. Of course you broke up. Probably much healthier in the long run than getting married when you were clueless, penniless, and eighteen years old.”

  She rummaged in a cupboard for mugs.

  “You don’t understand. This was all right after my father left the family. And my heart was broken and I wanted to leave, too. I was dying to get out of here and go live somewhere exciting and exotic. And Flynn knew this, but he asked me to marry him anyway. He gave me an ultimatum—get married or break up. Just to hold on to me, you know, to keep me here. We didn’t even know where my father was at this point, if he was dead or alive or what.” I sighed. “So I said no, and Flynn said he didn’t ever want to see me again, and that’s when I took up with the bass player at The Penalty Box.”

  “Oh yes, the infamous bass player.” She laughed. “I heard all about that and I wasn’t even in the state at the time. Well, so he proposed and you left him. So what?”

  “We had sex for the first time the night before.”

  She turned to face me. “Hmmm.”

  I stared at the floor. “Exactly. I was just so upset. When I needed him the most, he wasn’t there for me. We did it, and then all of sudden, he’s in my face, demanding a lifetime commitment while we’re watching my parents’ marriage implode. He was trying to force me into the whole white-picket-fence cliché, which was—and still is, mind you—beyond terrifying.”

  “So you wisely said no.”

  “And when I did, he wouldn’t even look at me. We turned everything inside out. All that intensity. Raging, hormone-addled, adolescent intensity. I flipped out and left for California.”

  Leah fished two tea bags out of a blue ceramic canister. “Cut the guy some slack. He was only seventeen. Seventeen-year-old males are not known for their emotional maturity.”

  “Neither are seventeen-year-old females. The bass player was the last straw for me and Flynn. I never called. I never wrote. He never called. He never wrote.”

  “I have to ask. What happened with the bass player?”

  “Hank?” I tried to smile. “Oh, I got exactly what I deserved on that front. Once we got to L.A., he took up with another redheaded groupie, nabbed all the furniture and my crappy gold-plated jewelry, and I never heard from him again.”

  “Let the wild rumpus start!” Rex streaked across the kitchen floor, soaking wet and stark naked. He left a trail of bath water behind him on the tan tile floor.

  “Stop running, you’ll slip!” Leah yelled.

  Gleeful and giggling, Rex scampered into the family room, where Hans Gruber started to bark.

  “Excuse me for one moment, please.” She stood up, marched into the family room, and returned a few moments later with the drenched desperado slung over her shoulder. After relegating Rex to the bathtub, she returned to the kitchen and handed me a mug of tea.

  “Well, welcome back to the least exotic place on earth. How long are you staying?”

  I wrapped my fingers around the cup and waited for the warmth to seep into my hands. “Hard to say.” I’d given her the CliffsNotes version of Skye’s money troubles, leaving out a few minor details, such as the pregnancy. “Until Skye sorts her life out or Flynn has me killed, whichever comes first.”

  She looked incredulous. “Why is he still holding a grudge?”

  I shrugged. “Why do men do anything?”

  “Point taken.” She sipped her tea. “You know, I used to be mystified by males. Then I got married.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I just try not to ask too many questions.” She winked. “The answers are too frightening. But one thing I have figured out is that men are just as sensitive as women. But they refuse to acknowledge it, even to themselves. Look at this from Flynn’s point of view. He slept with you. He proposed. Men really hate to put it out there. And when they do put it out there and then get trampled, they don’t usually deal with it very well.”

  “Yeah, but a decade later? It’s time to forgive and forget.” Riiight. Just like I had.

  Leah put her hand up. “Hey, don’t tell me. The two of you need to sit down and talk it out.”

  “Easier said than done.” I practically gnashed my teeth. “I tried to start the ‘dialogue of healing,’ as Oprah would have it, today. But somehow, we ended up having a fight about hockey instead.”

  “Yeah, that’ll happen.” She nodded as if thi
s were a totally normal occurrence.

  I fought the urge to bang my head against the wall. “He picked a fight and then refused to talk. I was sweet as pie and he just stonewalled like there was no tomorrow.”

  She looked at me. “You were sweet as pie?”

  “I was!” I insisted. “What happened to the man? He never used to be like that. I’m going bankrupt over this stupid bar, and Skye’s hooking up with the biggest no-hoper I’ve ever seen, and then Flynn looks at me like I’m something a stray cat threw up…” I trailed off and watched the wisps of steam rising from my tea. “Okay, I’m done with the pity party.”

  She smiled. “Well, if you two are going to work together, then you’ll have to straighten this out sooner or later, right?”

  I swallowed. “I guess.”

  “Postponing it is not going to make it any easier. If I were you, I’d go talk to him immediately. Start fresh.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Right.”

  She shrugged. “Why not?”

  “Because the last time we started fresh, he told me to get the hell out and I ended up fleeing in disgrace and taking a nap in a parking lot.”

  “Well, things can only go uphill from there.” Leah stood up, looking very resolute. “Come on. I’ll walk you to your car.”

  “Did you not hear my story about the hockey argument? I can’t go back there!”

  She gazed levelly at me and folded her arms. “Not with that attitude, you can’t.”

  “Oh, God. Don’t tell me you’ve turned into one of those horrible power-of-positive-thinking people?”

  She grinned, the same grin that Rex had. “It’s my cross to bear. Now move it, my little chickadee. You’re about to learn how to deal with a spurned Minnesota Man.”

  6

  When I pulled up in front of the Roof Rat for the second time in twelve hours, the steamy July night was swarming with mosquitoes. Stale cigarette smoke and jukebox twangs escaped into the darkness every time someone opened the front door. The digital clock on the wall of the First National Bank announced that it was 10:13. The locals were just warming up.