by Phoebe Fox
“Come here,” Kendall said. He leaned forward and snagged one end of the damp towel, pulling me toward him on the sofa until I stood touching his knees. He gave a tug on the towel, but I didn’t move.
“No, seriously,” I said. “I just want to talk.”
He pulled again on the towel, but I met him with just as much resistance. He started to grin, yanking harder, and I felt a reluctant smile creep across my face too. Our tug-of-war continued, more playfully now, until I abruptly dropped my end of the towel and Kendall smacked himself in the face with his own arm. I couldn’t help laughing.
“Ow! Minx.” He looped his arm around my knees and swept them out from beneath me, sending me landing hard on his lap. His arms came around me and he pulled me to him for a kiss.
I lost myself in it for just a moment, the softness of his mouth, the warmth, the closeness with him that made something relax in my belly. I was overthinking. Not for the first time (not for the hundredth, if I were honest), I cursed Michael. He’d left me suspicious and mistrustful. Closed off to someone who’d never given me any reason to doubt him. Who, in fact, wanted to move our relationship forward. My heart swelled at the thought.
I reached up a hand and touched Kendall’s cheek. “I think I’m ready to talk about moving in together.”
“Okay,” he agreed. “But I’m going to use sign language.” He ran his hands down my sides, and lower, and it felt so good to have his touch on me, his gaze on me, to have a little bit of time with him when he wasn’t rushed or exhausted.
“I miss you,” I said softly, resting my forehead against his, looking directly at him.
“I’m right here.” Kendall reached over to turn the TV off—although I couldn’t miss his hitting the record button on the DVR first. And then, finally, he turned his attention completely on me, and talking didn’t seem so important after all.
six
February is when southwest Florida flaunts everything it’s got. It brings out the heavy artillery: bougainvillea so richly, luridly magenta it hurts your eyes; lush purple jacaranda blooms that war with the explosive red-orange of poinciana; yellow tabebuia playing a subtle counterpoint to all the blowsy color of the show-offs. Orange blossoms send their sweet perfume drifting into every secret crevice, and the sky is a blue so clear and vivid it makes your heart beat faster just to look at it.
I wasn’t surprised to see Stu’s Jeep sitting in my parents’ driveway as Sasha and I pulled in that Sunday afternoon. My family—which had unofficially included Sasha since we’d met in third grade—had had Sunday dinner together for as long as I could remember, and when tourists and snowbirds clogged local traffic and crowded the beaches during season, we’d gotten into the habit of coming early enough to swim in my parents’ blissfully uncrowded canal-front swimming pool.
Stu was rummaging around in the back of the vehicle when I pulled my car in next to his. He looked up and gave an upward jerk of his head in acknowledgment, then slammed his rear door shut and walked over to open mine for me, staring right past me and making a show of ogling Sasha’s chest as she reached into the back for her beach bag. “Ladies...good to see you. Sash, hope you don’t have the girls bound too tightly in that teeny-weeny bikini.”
“Nope, letting them breathe, Stuvie. Thought I might grant them their freedom later on if we had the pool to ourselves. Whoops, too bad.”
“Pretend I’m not even here...”
Stu and Sasha had had a relationship of mutual harmless sexual harassment practically ever since they met, when an eight-year-old Sasha gleefully pantsed the six-year-old Stu as he leaned over on the patio to put on his water wings. It was a sick thing, but it seemed to work for them.
“Sis, how’s it shaking?”
“Mellow like Jell-O, my bro.”
“Where’s the Master of the Universe?” That was what he called Kendall.
“Working.”
“On a Sunday?”
I shrugged. “Busy season.”
Stu held out an arm toward Sasha as they both came around the front of the car. “It’d be my pleasure to escort inside a fine piece of tail such as yourself, little lady.”
She tucked her arm in his. “How kind. Do try to keep it in your pants.”
Stu shook his head mournfully. “Mind always in the gutter, this one.”
My mother was waiting at the door when we rounded the corner, and Stu kissed her on the cheek before skirting by her and disappearing into the house. I joined Sasha in the doorway.
“Hi, Mrs. Ogden,” Sasha said in the obsequious tone reserved for my parents alone.
Mom hugged her. “Hello, honey. Look how thin and toned you’re looking! Brook Lyn, why don’t you join Sasha’s gym and have her show you some of her workout moves?”
“Are you kidding, Mom? She’s had me pumping iron for months now—can’t you tell?”
I kept walking into the house, past her baffled search for my fictional new muscles. There was no point answering the question seriously. No matter what I offered up, it was never enough. When I opened my counseling practice she’d reminded me how much more money I could command if I’d finished my graduate psych degree. When I’d proudly brought her and Dad over to see my house the day I’d closed on it, she’d spent the whole tour pointing out everything that needed to be repaired, and not a conversation had gone by in the last year that she didn’t ask about the money I still owed her and my dad from my forfeited wedding deposits.
Outside on the lanai Stu was already in the pool, the puddles of water sloshed over the sides attesting to a recent cannonball. My dad sat under the overhang at a patio table, a newspaper spread between his hands, and his glasses resting on his nose with the sunglass lenses flipped up like big plastic eyelashes. He looked up when he heard the slider open, and a smile branded his face.
“Hey, there’s my girl!” He lifted the paper a few inches. “Not as good as Friday’s edition,” he said. “That article of yours was a humdinger.”
“Thanks, Dad.” I swung over for a kiss, then dropped into the chair opposite his, plunking my beach bag down on the concrete. “What’s the news?”
He folded up the paper and set it on the table, jerking a thumb toward a headline. “Another six months on the new overpass. Your mother and I don’t think they’ll finish it before next season.”
I made a sympathetic face. “That’s a shame. We needed it this year.”
“Don’t I know it? I don’t know what’s worse—the seasonal traffic or the awful construction. Just a mess.”
Even though my family had never lived anywhere else but Fort Myers, we discussed the traffic problems every season as though they were a fresh vexation.
“Bombs away!”
A shout at the sliding glass doors caught our attention, and Sasha barreled by in a streak of tan skin and yellow bikini, dropping her bags en route to leaping into the pool with all the grace of a bullfrog. She’d have landed right on Stu’s head if he hadn’t ducked under the water just before she hit the surface with a wince-inducing slap.
“Hey, you kids...take it easy,” Dad called out mildly. “You know your mother doesn’t like water outside the pool, Stu.”
“Sorry, Mr. Ogden,” Sasha said primly as Stu surfaced, lifting her into his arms. “You got faster,” she said to my brother.
“And you got fatter.” He groaned as he picked her up higher and hurled her into the deep end.
“Stu!” My mother suddenly stood at the sliding glass doors like a Valkyrie. “You apologize to Sasha! And stop sloshing water over the edges—you know I hate that.”
“Sorry, Sash.”
“Sorry, Mrs. Ogden,” put in my brown-nosing best friend.
And just that quickly we were all collectively twelve years old again.
After twenty minutes or so of our loud horseplay, my dad excused himself to his garage workshop to get back
to his latest project—rebuilding the cabinetry he had ripped down in the kitchen, leaving a series of gaping maws lining its walls. Mom had disappeared after her last admonition from the sliders, and after a while I decided to go in and see if she needed help with dinner.
As I came into the ravaged kitchen my dad had been renovating for months, I found Mom standing at the makeshift plywood counter, rolling the last of a slaughterhouse’s worth of lunch meat into a spiral and adding it to a platter already heaped with mountains of cubed cheese, cut-up carrots and radishes and broccoli, and an array of olives.
I carefully shut the slider behind me. “Geez, Mom, you go rob a tailgate party?”
She looked up at me, her eyebrows furrowing. “What? We’re having casual dinner tonight.”
“No, no, this looks great.” I reached for a jar of pickles and started forking them onto the platter.
“How’s that house of yours—have you gotten any work done on it?” she asked.
I was gratified for once to have the right answer: “Sasha came over a couple weeks ago and we peeled off the old paper in the dining room. I’m going to patch the walls and get it painted.”
Mom’s face brightened and she gave me a pleased smile that warmed me despite myself. “That Sasha! She’s a good friend.”
“The best,” I said honestly.
Mom sighed as she rolled another piece of prosciutto into a neat, tight cylinder. “I wish that girl could find someone who appreciated her. Like your Kendall.”
It took me a moment to realize that Mom wasn’t suggesting I pass Kendall along to Sasha as more deserving of him. I wanted to blurt out that he had asked me to move in with him, that our relationship was getting serious, that the man she was talking about in such glowing terms had picked me.
But, “I don’t think Kendall’s her type,” was all I said. “Too...traditional.” By which I meant he didn’t ride a motorcycle or own an arsenal of firearms or work in a job that started at ten p.m. and didn’t finish until dawn. Sasha liked them edgy.
My column was the proverbial elephant in the room. I hadn’t heard a word from my mother about it. I knew better than to ask, but some masochistic inner voice took control of my tongue.
“So,” I said. “Did you read my article?”
My mom didn’t look at me. “I did. After your father told me about it.”
I heard the subtext: I should have told her myself. And probably she was right, but I’d long since stopped running to my mom for the approval I already knew wasn’t coming.
And yet... “What did you think?”
She concentrated on the meat she was rolling, reaching for two more slices before speaking into the silence that had already told me the answer. “I just... I hate to see you publicize what happened to you.”
“That’s not what the column is about,” I said tightly.
“Isn’t it?”
I set the pickle jar back down on the plywood, the fork clattering beside it. “I’m going to get us some sodas.”
“Don’t be angry—I’m just worried about you. I don’t want you to be defined by what that awful Michael did to you.”
My chest grew tight, the way it always did at the simple mention of his name. Still. “Mom, please.”
“What? He was a bad bet, and I told you that from the beginning.”
“I know you did.” Ad nauseam.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish. Look where you are now. I told you someone better would come along, and Kendall’s nothing at all like Mich—”
“Can we not talk about it?”
My mother’s lips tightened and she shoved a cylinder of ham into place with unnecessary vigor. “Brook, it’s been nearly a year. At some point you have to stop wallowing in this dramatic grieving phase. You’re not the only person who ever got left at the altar.”
I gripped the plywood so hard I felt splinters pierce my palms. “I didn’t get left at the altar,” I forced out through a clenched jaw.
“Exactly. It could have been worse. So you lost a few deposits here and there. You’ll pay them back. Move on.”
That would certainly be a lot easier if she didn’t constantly remind me about them. “I have moved on, Mom. I’m not ‘wallowing’ in anything. That’s why I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Okay?” It was all I could do to keep my tone level and my voice down, but I could still hear the fury in it.
So, apparently, could my mother. Her expression had gone wounded and hurt, and I felt a familiar mixture of guilt and remorse wash through me. “Fine. I won’t take an interest in your life.”
“Mom...” The expected words flew to my tongue from years of practice: I’m sorry. But for some reason I couldn’t push them out. “Let’s forget it, okay?”
She gave an exasperated sigh. “Fine. Bring out the drinks.” She picked up the platter and left me in the kitchen. I pried my fingers off the plywood, surprised they weren’t cramped permanently into claws.
Out in the garage, Dad stood at his worktable, a circular saw screaming and sawdust coating his sweaty skin like coconut sprinkles.
When he saw me he shut off the saw and lifted his safety goggles, their shape outlined on his face by the pale particles.
“Hey, beautiful. What’s up?”
He looked so crazy and familiar and dear I had an urge to hug him, but instead I headed over to the garage fridge in the corner to get the drinks. “Dinner’s ready. You want to take a break?”
He shook his head and indicated the piece of wood in front of him. “Nah. I’m gonna work on through. Your mother will divorce me if I don’t get her some cabinets back up pretty soon.” My dad’s whole face crinkled up when he smiled. “How ’bout you bring me some leftovers later on.”
“You got it, Dad.” I blew him a kiss and went back out to the lanai, where Mom was already sitting down with Stu and Sasha, both of them wrapped in towels to keep the dreaded water from dripping onto Mom’s patio. In the pool area.
“I was just telling the kids about my big news,” Mom said as I sat down and distributed the drinks. “Your mom’s going back into the theater!”
“No kidding,” I said flatly. I was still smarting too much to work up the enthusiasm she wanted.
I knew my mom had acted—years ago, before I was born. It was how I was born, actually. She met my dad while she was doing an amateur local production called A Sand Bar Named Desire. Dad, a mechanical engineer, had been hired to create a moving onstage tour bus prop for the “I’ve Always Relied on the Kindness of Snowbirds” number.
Whenever Mom told the story of their backstage courtship—which she hadn’t in years, thank God—she waggled her eyebrows and tacked on at the end: “But engineers do it in perpetual motion...” And she and Dad always used to laugh in a way that no child could ever be comfortable with.
Their “showmance” not only survived closing night; it survived my mom skipping her period the next month. Since she’d never made it to New York to pursue her “big dream,” she named me for the prettiest-sounding place she found on a map of the area.
“Brook Lyn!” My wrist stung from her slap. “For goodness’ sake, use a plate.”
Mom was the only person in my life who always called me by my full given name.
“So,” I said as I reached for a plate and started to load up, “what’s the show—One Flew Over the Seagull’s Nest?”
“Ha, ha—you’re very funny, Miss Smarty-Pants. For your information it’s a real play—a classic. The Lion in Winter. And you are looking at Queen Eleanor herself.”
“Wow! Good for you, Mrs. Ogden,” Sasha gushed.
“Mom spends the whole play imprisoned in her own castle,” Stu put in.
She made a sound between a snort and a hmpf. “Yes, I was perfect for it.”
“So when does it open? I bet you’ll be great,” said Sasha the suck-up.
<
br /> Mom leaned back with a smile, enjoying the attention. “We had the first read-through last Wednesday. The cast is superb—top-notch, even though it’s a non-Equity production”—translation: community theater—“and the gentleman who plays Henry has acted on Broadway!” She pronounced it with the accent on the second syllable—BroadWAY—like she was a 1940s film actress. “We open March fifteenth—the Ides.”
My mother didn’t always talk like this. She was in full theatrical mode. Over the years she’d told us about her acting days from time to time, and I could tell she missed it. I never saw her perform, because she quit when I was born. Dad always said she had been amazing—but Dad thought everything about Mom was amazing, and always had.
“Okay, Liz Taylor,” my brother said, poking Mom playfully in the side, where he knew she was fiercely ticklish. “We’re all coming on opening night, and we’re sitting in the front row with enough flowers to make a float, and we’re gonna hoot and holler and do the wave when you come onstage.” He reached over and pawed up a handful of rolled salami.
Mom rapped his hand with the back of her fork.
“Ow!”
“Bedford Stuyvesant Ogden! Your manners.”
“It’s finger food, Ma!” But he picked up the tongs and gingerly transported the meat to his plate.
“And you will do no such thing. You children will dress nicely—no jeans—and behave yourselves, please.”
I rolled my eyes. “Mom, we’re adults. We understand how to comport ourselves in public places.”
“It’s the theater, and you have to show respect for the art form. Do you know I’ve actually seen Floridians attend the theater in shorts?” She made an expression as if she’d said “grilling and eating babies.”
“Oh, I agree. My parents took us to shows in New York every year when our family would go up, and Mom always taught us to look nice and be respectful.” Guess who said that?
“Whatever. We’re coming, and we’ll be good—I promise,” Stu said. “We’ll even make Dad wear a tie.”
