“Poor Dad—you’ll have to deal with your upset fiancée!” Ally singsonged. “Or maybe you’ll just finish your carbs-free stuffing first. And it’s not delicious—it’s absolutely disgusting!”
He looked at Ally with the honest confusion of someone who had no idea what the hell she was talking about. “Ally, is something wrong?”
“Is something wrong?” she repeated.
“Yes, is something wrong?” he asked, his blue eyes, recently lifted (well, the eyelids), flashing concern at his eldest daughter.
“Why would anything be wrong?” Ally retorted.
“Well, for starters, you just snapped at me and practically accused me of acting like my upset fiancée was a nuisance to me. As though I would be more interested in my meal than in making sure she was all right.”
“That is what I think, Dad,” Ally said. “But that wouldn’t make ‘something wrong.’ That’s just the status quo.”
Sarah and I were volleying our gazes back and forth from our father to Ally. It’s what we thought too, but neither of us had ever said it aloud.
He wiped his mouth with his napkin, then stood up. “Well, Ally, you would be wrong, honey. Quite wrong,” he added as he headed out of the dining room. “Giselle, sweetie?” he called out, running up the staircase.
“Oh, and happy birthday, Ally!” Ally called after him. “I can’t believe I forgot to say happy birthday to my own daughter even after Sarah reminded me this morning! But you’re still wrong, honey—I’m a very sensitive person!”
Giselle’s mother looked at Ally like she was crazy. “The person who should be getting some respect around here is your father, young lady,” she snapped at Ally. “That man is a godsend.”
Ally chuckled, and June scooped up the toddler and harrumphed out of the room.
“I think I’ll skip the Zone birthday cake, if you guys don’t mind,” Ally said. “I’d really like to just get the hell out of here.”
“Why don’t you and Sarah come have drinks with me and Zoe?” Daniel asked. “My treat.”
“Thanks, Daniel,” Ally said, “but I’ve got a hot date. I might as well be unfashionably early.”
I winked at Ally; after some doing, she’d finally convinced Rupert Jones to give her a second chance.
“Sarah, this is the big meet-the-parents, right?” I asked.
She nodded. “I’m a nervous wreck!”
“Good luck to both of you,” Zoe said. “Happy Thanksgiving.”
And suddenly it was just Daniel, me and a lot of food left at the table.
“Ally was right about the stuffing,” Daniel whispered. “It isn’t delicious at all.”
I laughed. “I’m glad you’re here, Daniel,” I said, squeezing his hand. “Things can get pretty tense around here.”
“Why don’t you go untense things,” he suggested. “I’ll wait right here. I promise not to eat all the stuffing or whatever’s in that bowl,” he added, pointing at what I was pretty sure was solid tofu.
“You mean with my father?”
He nodded.
Knock. Don’t knock. Knock. Don’t knock.
I knocked.
Giselle opened the door. “Your dad’s tucking in Madeline,” she said.
“Actually, it was you I wanted to see,” I said. “I promised Ally I’d walk Mary Jane for her before I left, and I was wondering if you’d like to come with me.”
Five minutes later, Giselle and I were walking down Park Avenue, Mary Jane scampering ahead of us and sniffing every tree plot.
For a moment, walking with Giselle felt so natural. During the six or seven weeks of our budding friendship, we’d taken so many walks together.
Mary Jane lifted a leg and the two of us stopped. “I don’t really know what to say, Giselle.”
“You don’t have to say anything, Zoe. I know it’s going to take time. And I also know you may never forgive me. I hope you do. But I won’t expect it.”
“That’s the key word,” I said. “Expecting. My whole life I expected my father to leave my mother, leave us. It was like living in a constant state of worry. And then he leaves after twenty-five years—for you. Do you have any idea how weird that was for me?”
She nodded and her eyes filled with tears. “I can imagine, Zoe.”
“Just when I started to think commitment meant something, boom. It’s a joke.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I never trusted in commitment,” I explained. “But then Charlie came along and I started to think it could mean something. And then, boom, my parents’ marriage falls apart. Twenty-five years down the drain.”
She nodded. “But you know, I don’t think it’s so much a matter of being able or not able to commit, but of being with the right person. Something stopped you from saying yes to Charlie, and I’m not so sure it had anything to do with your father.”
“Maybe, maybe not. It doesn’t really matter anymore.”
“Yes or no, Zoe,” she said. “It doesn’t matter because from the looks of things tonight, you are with the right guy. If you’d said yes to Charlie, you wouldn’t have been free for Daniel. It’s as if something inside you kept saying, ‘Don’t stop here. This isn’t the end of the road.’”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Mary Jane scampered along, and we resumed walking. “One day, Zoe, I hope we can be friends again. I realize it may never happen, and we might never get past the truce you’re willing to agree to, but I really hope so.”
“Well, I guess if I want my father in my life, I need to accept that the two of you love each other and are getting married. It’s what my mother—”
Interesting. I’d been about to say that it was what my mother needed to accept so that she could move on. I hadn’t realized that I was as blocked as she was, that I was holding on to something very heavy that wasn’t mine.
I took a deep breath and added that thought to the five hundred others swirling around my mind. For the past couple of weeks, ever since I’d spoken to Sarah’s boss on the telephone, I’d been writing the article for Wow Woman in my head. Every time I thought I knew exactly what I wanted to say, a but came to me and I had to amend what I’d mentally written. Dating, romance, love, marriage. People trying to have relationships with other people. Why was it so hard?
“Can you just tell me one thing, Giselle?” I asked, and she nodded. “What the hell do you see in my father? Why are you in love with him? I mean, I spent my life waiting for him to leave us for another family. Why would you trust him?”
“That’s a good question,” she said. “And I guess it’s not about trusting him so much as trusting, period. I’ve been left, Zoe. You know that. My father left my mother when I was very young. Madeline’s father wasn’t even there to leave. But I do trust your father. I trust him because I love him. And I love him because he makes me feel incredibly happy. When I’m with him, I’m the most peaceful I’ve ever been in my life. I feel the most me. And I feel the most hope. Does that make sense to you?”
The Snoopy dance.
“It’s like how I feel about Daniel,” I said in so low a voice I wasn’t even sure I said it aloud.
“I could tell, you know,” she said. “I saw it in the way you look at him, how comfortable you are with him. And I saw it in him too. Where is he, anyway?”
“He’s waiting for me at the apartment. I left him in front of the tuxedo bulletin board and the wedding cake bulletin board.”
“Why don’t you go save him,” Giselle said. “I’ll finish walking Mary Jane.”
“You sure?” I asked.
She took the wad of newspaper and plastic bag and crammed them in her jacket pocket. “So I’ll see you at the engagement party on New Year’s Eve?”
I nodded. “Let’s just hope you don’t see my mother there.”
She smiled. “Zoe, I don’t know your mom very well, but I have a feeling there was a lot of symbolism in her giving back her wedding ring—and on Thanksgiving, no less.�
��
I looked at her and realized she was right. My mother was done fighting.
And it was time for me to stop too.
“For someone who untensed things, you sure do look tense,” Daniel said as he unlocked the door to his Upper West Side apartment. “I think I know what you need. Have a seat in the living room. I’ll be right there.”
As he disappeared into his tiny kitchen and began making quite a racket with bottles, glasses and plates and the sounds of a knife hitting a cutting board, I sat down on the red velvet sofa and realized I was beginning to trust that he did indeed know what I needed. “I’m in your hands,” I said.
He poked his head through the kitchen doorway and shot me a grin and wiggled his eyebrows à la Groucho Marx, just as he’d done when I’d arrived in New York almost two months ago.
“You have to hand it to your mom, Zoe,” Daniel said as the whoosh of a cork popped. “She knows how to make an entrance, a speech and an exit in less than five minutes.”
“Drama’s her specialty,” I agreed, checking out Daniel’s digs. His apartment was a one-bedroom in a brownstone off Columbus Avenue. Guy-furnished, but nice, very Crate & Barrel and Pottery Barn, with a lot of individual touches. He liked the color red.
“Voilà,” he said, carrying a silver tray into the living room. There was a bottle of wine, cheese and crackers and a tiny pumpkin pie. “For someone who just had Thanksgiving dinner, I’m starving.”
I laughed. “Me too. I’ve been hungry for almost two months now.”
“Open up,” he said, waving a cheese-laden cracker in front of my lips. I opened, and he placed the cracker square on the middle of my tongue.
“Sexy,” I joked.
He smiled and popped his own cheese ’n’ cracker into his mouth, then poured us each a glass of red wine.
“To full stomachs and untensing,” he said.
“Hear, hear,” I seconded, and we clinked.
As if on cue, Murray, his mutty-looking gray tabby cat, jumped up and sprawled between us, his furry head hanging over the edge. I scratched and the cat purred. “Now there’s the definition of untensed.”
“Twist away from me,” he said, clenching and unclenching his fingers in the air. “I’ll give you my special massage.”
The moment his hands touched my neck, I tensed.
“Uh, you’re supposed to melt, Zoe. Not stiffen.”
“I guess I have a lot on my mind,” I said. “I’m glad I talked to Giselle, but the conversation left me unsettled. I’m not even close to accepting her in my life.”
“You’re not supposed to be close. Talking to her was only supposed to be a start. That’s what it’s all about, Zoe. Starts. They’re the hardest.”
I nodded and took a sip of my wine, then took my mother’s wedding ring out of my pocket and cupped it in my palm. Tiny bits of vegetable stuffing squished.
“Here,” Daniel said, “gimme.” He took the ring into the kitchen. I heard water running. “Sparkling clean,” he said, handing it back to me. “You know, I still had a better meal in the Zone than I would have had you not invited me to your family’s Thanksgiving. It would have been just me and Murray, sharing a frozen Swanson’s TV turkey dinner, just like the Fonz before Richie insisted he come to the Cunninghams’ Thanksgiving feast. That episode was on Nick At Nite last night. Did you see—”
Suddenly I was all over him. I pressed myself against him and kissed him, passionately, and after what I sensed was a second’s hesitation, he pressed me back against the couch with his body, squishing Murray, who slithered out from under me and jumped down, and took over.
“I expected you to be a talker,” I said to Daniel. I lay naked on his bed, half-covered by a sheet, staring up at the ceiling, relaxed, sated and just slightly, truly slightly, uneasy.
“I know when to shut up,” he said, turning on his side to face me. He stroked my cheek with the tip of his finger.
“I don’t know what this means,” I told him, pointing a finger from him to me. “I don’t know how I feel about anything.”
“That’s okay, Zoe,” he said, those warm brown eyes on mine. He kissed my neck and trailed a line of kisses across my collarbone. His silky hair swept against my skin. “You don’t have to know how you feel. You just have to feel.”
And as Daniel slid on top of me, the weight of him deliciously against me, I took his advice and felt.
16
Sarah
Once again, I stood in front of a full-length mirror, trying on clothes for a date with Griffen. After-Thanksgiving-dinner-dessert-to-meet-the-future-grandparents-ofmy-child meant a reasonably nice outfit. But now, not even the skirt Ally had bought me a size too big fit anymore. What was I going to wear? I slid through the clothes in the closet. I could forget about borrowing any of Ally and Zoe’s clothes; they were both skinnier than I was when I wasn’t pregnant.
Everything I owned had been flung in frustration onto the floor. I picked up my trusty stretchy long black skirt and squeezed into it. My stomach and my butt puffed out in a very unattractive way. I could forget about formfitting clothes.
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in, I’m decent!” I called, surprised that Ally and Zoe hadn’t yet left for their own respective after-Thanksgiving-dinner plans. Both my sisters had learned to knock when the door was closed, since I was self-conscious about undressing in front of them. I still wasn’t used to my rounded belly, and no one was seeing it until I got comfy with it.
“Hi, Sarah.”
I whipped around. It was Giselle.
“Uh, hi, Giselle.”
“Can I come in for a sec?” she asked.
“Of course.”
She sat down on the edge of my bed and twisted one of her wild blond curls around her finger for a moment, then let it spring away. “I’ve already talked to Zoe, and I was hoping to find both you and Ally in here. I wanted to say how sorry I am about what happened at dinner. Thanksgiving is a very special holiday, and I’m just so sorry it got ruined.”
“It wasn’t ruined, Giselle,” I said. “Really. And it certainly wasn’t your fault. And c’mon, what is Thanksgiving without family angst?”
She smiled. “Don’t I know it. You’ve gotten to know my mother, after all.”
I laughed. “She’s something.”
“She’s something, all right,” Giselle said, making a face. “You know, your dad’s told me a lot about your mother. She sounds like she was a wonderful person.”
I took a deep breath, as I always did when I was suddenly reminded of my mom. “She was. She loved Thanksgiving. She used to cook the most amazing feasts. I don’t think she’d deal well with the Zone.”
Giselle laughed. “Your dad does it to make me happy. If I can’t eat carbs, he doesn’t want to eat carbs. That’s support.”
“Is Dad okay?” I asked. “Ally gave it to him pretty good.”
“He’s fine,” she said.
“Why can’t you eat carbs?” I asked.
“Look at me.” She held out her arms on either side of her body. “I’m twenty-five pounds overweight and a big girl to begin with.”
“But you’re gorgeous,” I countered. And she was. “You look fabulous. You don’t look overweight at all. I, on the other hand—” I grimaced into the mirror “—can’t fit into any of my clothes and I have a hot date.”
“Pregnancy will do that to a gal,” she said with a gentle smile.
I whirled to face her. “How’d you know?”
“Once you’ve been pregnant yourself, you can usually tell. Plus, you can’t live with a pregnant person and not know it. Falling asleep in our most uncomfortable chair in the living room at seven-thirty at night is a dead giveaway. As is passing up coffee and all alcoholic beverages and asking Zalla if there’s any butterscotch syrup to pour on your toast.”
“Why do I crave that?” I asked. “Am I crazy?”
“I used to crave pistachio nuts,” Giselle said. “That helped me gain fifty-f
ive pounds when I was pregnant.”
“Wow. I read a typical weight gain is twenty-five to thirty, but I’ve already gained ten pounds and I’m only eleven weeks along now.”
“Sarah, I hope you know that you can always come talk to me about the pregnancy or babies or the father of the child—anything. I’ve been through quite a bit in that department. And if you don’t want your dad to know you’re pregnant, I’ll respect that.”
“Thanks, Giselle. I really appreciate that. All of it. I’m not ready to tell Dad yet. I’m not sure why, but I’m not.”
She nodded. “So for this hot date, why don’t we raid my closet? I’m sure the clothes I’ve put away as my ‘when I drop a few pounds’ outfit will fit you just fine now.”
Very much relieved, I followed Giselle like a happy puppy.
It was amazing how comfortable clothing two sizes up was. And as I waited in the living room for Griffen, who was picking me up at any minute, I didn’t have to constantly squirm and tug at the way-too-tight-around-the-ribs-and-tummy black leather jacket that Ally had bought me only six weeks ago for my birthday, because Giselle had brilliantly moved the buttons. I hadn’t even known you could do that.
Giselle had dressed me in a stretchy black knee-length skirt that didn’t pull on my tummy, a slightly loose, slightly long black cardigan sweater, and with my knee-high black leather boots, I looked both perfectly stylish and perfectly slightly pregnant.
I’d known Giselle was nice, but I hadn’t realized how nice. As she’d plucked things from the back of her closet, creating yes and no piles for me, she’d told me about Gunther, whose real name was Harold, a wanna-be rock star whose band put out a record that flopped in the U.S. but was something of a minor hit in Europe, where he’d set up shop. They’d been seeing each other for a few months when Giselle had discovered she was pregnant. Harold-Gunther denied he was the father.
“We only did it a few times,” he’d said, like a thirteen-year-old, according to Giselle, and that had been the last she’d seen or heard from him.
The Solomon Sisters Wise Up Page 21
