by Liz Flaherty
“So what is the position I’d have if I ‘stepped down’ the way they want?” I sipped my drink.
“It would be created. Probably something like an administrative assistant.” Amanda sounded miserable, which made me feel a little better, but not much.
My daughter had been an administrative assistant in college. It had been, in her experience, like being a waitress but not getting any tips. I know this isn’t always the case, but it wasn’t a chance I wanted to take.
“Would I remain at my current level of pay?”
“No.”
Well, there went the tips. It was my turn to toss back the whiskey. My eyes didn’t water; I didn’t even blink. Amanda brought the bottles of liquor and water over and poured us both refills. She forgot about ice. I didn’t care.
“They want me to quit,” I said flatly.
“Yes, they do. The bastards.” Evidently the liquor had loosened her tongue. I was pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to refer to our corporate heads as bastards, no matter how accurate the term.
“Any incentive?” That had helped David make the decision to retire from the automobile plant, I knew. With the incentives and what they’d invested over the years added to his retirement, he and Jean lived very comfortably. Of course, David had been a vice-president. That hadn’t hurt, either.
“Yes.” She picked up the folder again and opened it. “This is what I’m authorized to offer.”
I looked at the papers, but the print was small and I couldn’t read the numbers. Besides, I wasn’t ready to consider that. “Do you have to know right now?” I asked.
“No, but soon.”
“How soon?” My voice was crisp, professional-sounding. Vin would have been impressed.
“The end of June,” she said reluctantly.
“I see,” I said coolly. “Seems fair. I give them twenty-eight years. They give me thirty days.”
I swallowed the rest of the drink without tasting it and got to my feet, although two glasses of whisky at ten-thirty in the morning made me uncertain exactly where they were. “May I keep this?” I gestured with the folder, or I meant to. I lifted the wine bottle instead. “I mean this.” I did it right that time.
“Of course.”
I offered my hand to Amanda. I didn’t feel up to any hugging or air-kissing. “I’ll be in touch,” I said, and left without a backward glance.
I tried to call Jake from the lobby of the office building, but he wasn’t home. I left a message on his machine thanking him for the evening. Then I got my overnight case from the storage locker in the corridor, stuffed the wine and the folder into it, and walked outside.
When I got out of the taxi at the airport, I still had two hours before my plane left. I carried my overnight bag into a bar and ordered scotch. Straight up.
By the time the commuter plane landed in Lewis Point, I’d imbibed more liquor than all four of the Tonsil Lake girls usually do when Vin comes home. I believe it is to my credit that I climbed into a cab rather than attempt to drive home. Or it would be to my credit if I had actually remembered that my white Camaro was at the airport. I hadn’t.
In my condo I left my expensive new suit in a pool of silk on the bedroom floor and changed into a long satin gown and matching robe. Then I got the wine out of the suitcase and sampled it—half of it being what I considered a sample. It seemed to be a nice little wine, but when I went to pour another tumblerful, I couldn’t find the bottle.
I put on my reading glasses and tried to make sense of the retirement proposal I’d brought home, but couldn’t. For a while, I sat in the living room and stared at nothing, wondering how one’s life could change so completely in such a short space of time.
The whiteness of the apartment was depressing. What had made a person like me, one who enjoyed and thrived on color, decorate her home in shades of white? The silence was as oppressive as the décor, so I finally went to bed and tried to go to sleep.
When I couldn’t get to sleep, I took a couple of sleeping pills. When they didn’t knock me out, I took a few more. Not many, just a few. I think. And then, when my heart felt as though it was going to burst through my chest, I knew I was going to die. And no one knew. There was no one to tell me they loved me, to beg me not to go. No one to say goodbye to.
So I called Vin.
Vin
If Suzanne survives, I’m going to fly to Indiana and forny kill her. Only I’m going to do it slowly. First I’ll take away all her makeup, then the hair color, then the acrylic that makes her look as though she has real nails. I’m going to tell her she can’t have any more plastic surgery because if she does her nipples are going to be in her eyebrows. I’m going to take all the snow-white caps off her teeth and hide the wax so that she has a moustache. Then I’m going to make her look in the mirror until the goddamned thing breaks and gives her seven years of shitty luck.
Oh, dear God, Andie and Jean, please call back.
Please.
Chapter Four
Andie
If I hadn’t been so damned scared, I’d have laughed when Jean met me on the sidewalk in front of Suzanne’s condo. Her hair was flat on one side, wild on the other, and she was wearing a faded red nightshirt over the ugliest orange sweatpants I’d ever seen. She was wearing slippers—those little things that look like ballet shoes—but one was pink and one was lavender.
We were all running, and we arrived at the door at the same time, banging on it and yelling Suzanne’s name.
“What are we doing? She’s not answering,” said David. “Does anyone have a key?”
“Oh,” I said, startled. “A key.” Yes, I had one, but where in the hell was it? I dumped my purse out on the porch floor and handed the key chain to David. “That one.”
David got the door open and we did a Three Stooges rendition of trying to go through it at the same time. Paul yelled, “Stay!”—sounding for all the world like Dr. Kildare would have if he’d flunked out of med school and never known Dr. Gillespie—and ran in ahead of us.
Stay, my ass. He was a firefighter, for God’s sake, not an EMT, and he wasn’t carrying an ax or wearing a helmet or anything. We trundled right along behind him.
Suzanne was in bed, looking gorgeous against silk sheets, and I thought for a near-hysterical moment that at least she’d be happy that she died looking pretty.
She couldn’t be dead. I wanted to kill her.
Paul sat on the bed beside her, laying his hand on the side of her throat. He reached for a bottle on the round bedside table and shook it, then handed it to me. “Count these. David, come around to the other side and help me lift her into a sitting position, okay?”
I poured the tiny pills into Jean’s cupped hands and we both bent our heads to count.
“Seventeen,” said Jean.
“Eighteen,” I said at the same time, and shot her a look. “For Christ’s sake, Jean, can’t you count?”
She looked back at me, her light brown eyes fatigued and frightened, then we both looked down again. There were seventeen pills.
“How many to start with?” asked Paul when I reported the number. The right number. “Come on, Suzanne, wake up.”
I held the bottle out to arm’s length and squinted. Jean picked up Suzanne’s reading glasses from the table and put them on. “Thirty,” she said.
“Good. Even if she took all thirteen tonight, which she probably didn’t, it won’t do any lasting damage. Oops, David, she’s coming your way.” Paul put his hands on Suzanne’s cheeks and yelled right in her face, “Suzanne, wake up!”
I’d never seen Richard Chamberlain do that when he played Dr. Kildare on television.
Her eyes opened momentarily and she stared fixedly at Paul. “You’re Paul Lindquist, aren’t you?” she said clearly. “Andie should have gone out with you. She wanted to, you know.” Then she closed her eyes again and her head lolled to the side.
I’m pretty sure David chuckled—sure enough to give him a look like I’d given Jean a few min
utes before. “Do we need to call 911?” I asked.
“No.” Paul smiled at me over his shoulder. “She’s going to be all right. David, you want to come around here? We’ll get her up and moving.”
She didn’t want to move at all, and the first few trips across the fluffy white carpet of her bedroom, the men were pretty much dragging her. By the third trip, she’d found her feet—at least part of the time—and Jean and I leaned on each other, too weak with relief to hold up our own weight.
On the fourth excursion, when Suzanne was beginning to protest being manhandled, Jean asked, “Should I make some coffee? They always do that on television.”
“Good idea,” said Paul. “If she doesn’t want it, we can all drink it.”
“I want,” said Suzanne in a muffled voice, “some wine, but someone hid the goddamned bottle.”
“We’ll find it,” David promised.
Paul was looking at Suzanne’s face. “We should probably move our walk into the bathroom,” he said, turning her.
But it was too late. She lost the contents of her stomach forcefully and suddenly on the puddle of turquoise silk that lay on the carpet.
“Well,” said David, turning white.
Jean hurried over to replace him at Suzanne’s side. “You make the coffee. Or if you’re going to pass out, do it on Suzanne’s bed. I’ll have Andie take pictures.”
“We’ll use them for blackmail if you ever decide you want to leave Jean for a woman who doesn’t wear ugly red nightshirts and orange sweatpants,” I said. I looked with distaste at the mess. “Since we’ve known her longest, I guess this is where we take over. David, will you call Vin and tell her Suzanne’s going to be fine…if we let her live?”
We got Suzanne into the shower, soaking ourselves in the process. Reluctantly, we cleaned up the bedroom floor, tossing the plastic bag full of soiled silk into the trash. Suzanne sat at her dressing table creaming her face.
“It’s too bad,” I muttered, scrubbing at the damp spots on the carpet, “you didn’t have a pair of Birkenstocks in this mess.”
Jean giggled first, sitting there on the floor with a rag in her hand and her half-wild hair hanging in wet strings around her face. A soft snort of laughter followed from the dressing table, and then we were all howling. Suzanne joined us on the floor and we held onto each other and laughed and held our knees together against the attacks of our weak bladders.
Paul and David ventured into the room to see if everything was all right and to offer us coffee. It was a good thing they came in, because Jean’s right knee had locked up and she had no hope of getting up on her own. I was in mid-crawl to the bed to use it for leverage to pull myself to my feet. Suzanne’s laughter had moved predictably, and in this case understandably, to tears.
“Vin wants you to call her back.” David helped Jean up and stood with his arm around her waist. “I believe the quote was, ‘I don’t give a forny fart in hell what time it is.’”
Paul drew me to my feet and held me there in the loose circle of his arms. “Maine?” he said, raising his eyebrows at me.
I nodded. “For a month. We’re going to work on that book and we’re going to be ourselves. Jean, are you going?”
She exchanged a long look with David, took a deep breath, and said, “Yes, I’m going.” She gave me an evil look. “But I’m not cooking the whole time, and I’m not cleaning up after you slugs.”
I looked over at Suzanne, still sitting on the floor, and felt a wave of emotion sweep over me. I remembered her handing me that fancy-dancey journal and coming to my house every single day after I came home from the hospital.
She and Jean had taken turns, with my children, driving me to chemo and radiation treatments. When my hair fell out, she drew on faultless eyebrows and tried to attach false lashes to my naked eyelids. She brought me a new hat every day for a week when I refused to wear a wig.
I left Paul’s arms and went over to where she sat, offering a hand to help her up. Jean came, too, her hand outstretched. I cleared my throat. “All right, you pain in the ass,” I said to Suzanne, “are you coming to Maine, too?”
She looked up, her still-beautiful face a mask of hopelessness, then her gaze moved to our hands. Jean’s with its long fingers and the wide white gold band she’d worn for nearly thirty years along with the newer etched one David had given her on their twenty-fifth anniversary. Mine with its short nails and all the tiny scars I’d gotten when I ran a restaurant. Suzanne placed her hands in ours—hers were soft and pretty and she wore rings on nearly every finger.
“Yes,” she said, “I’m coming.”
Jean
“I can’t believe you’re really going to do this, Mother.” Carrie watched as I put shorts and tank tops into my suitcase. “You can’t leave a man alone for a month. What will you do if he gets lonely and finds someone else?”
I added three cotton sweaters. “If your father’s and my relationship can’t stand a thirty-day separation, it’s not much of a relationship, is it?”
She wandered around the room, picking up bottles on my dresser and putting them down, straightening the picture frames that formed the family gallery in one corner, opening my jewelry box and sifting through its jumble.
“What if you get lonely? What will you do?”
Something in her voice put me on mother alert, and I looked over at where she stood, her arms folded under her breasts in a defensive gesture. It was a position I saw her in more and more these days.
“Well,” I said with a lightness I didn’t think I felt, “if I get lonely for your dad, I’ll just call him and get him to talk dirty to me.” I waited for her to roll her eyes in disgust. I wasn’t disappointed. “And if I get lonely for you kids, I can call or I can come ahead home. But if I get lonely in my soul,” I went on slowly, putting three pairs of short white socks in the suitcase, “I’ll have to work that out on my own.”
I waited for her to call me on it, to assert that I’d never done anything on my own in my entire life, but she didn’t. She just gave me a brooding look and said, “When are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow morning. Your dad’s taking us all to the airport. We’re going to meet Vin in Bangor and go from there. We have to ride a ferry to the island and then take a taxi. Vin doesn’t keep a car there—she says hardly anyone does.”
I closed the suitcase and hefted it off the bed, placing it beside its partner near the bedroom door. “There, that’s done. I sure hope there are a washer and dryer in the house. Going to a Laundromat on foot doesn’t sound like much fun.”
“Well.” Carrie looked down at the clock on the bedside table. “I have to pick up the kids at Kelly’s and head home. Tim will be there soon. He and Brian were playing golf with Daddy.”
I walked her to the door. “I hope you and Tim have a good time in Florida,” I said.
“Thanks.” She gave me a hug and kiss. “Call, okay?”
It made me sad that she didn’t wish me a good time, too, but Carrie was twenty-eight. It was a little late for me to work on her manners.
Still dressed in the sundress I’d worn to church that morning—I wear them because David likes them even though I don’t like my flabby arms hanging out—I wandered through the empty house. It was cleaned within an inch of its life, which it suffers every time I finish a manuscript.
The cupboards and the freezer side of the side-by-side in the kitchen were stuffed with things David could prepare for himself. All of his clothes except for the khaki shorts and polo shirt he was wearing out on the Fallen Tree Golf Course were clean, pressed, and put away.
When I couldn’t avoid it any longer, I sat down at the computer. I always had a new project on the back burner waiting to come forward when I finished a book. Until now. There it was on the screen in front of me: Chapter One. That was as far as I’d gotten.
What was that term people used when they talked about writing exercises? I couldn’t think of it, but I knew what it was. I laid my fingers on the keys and let th
em move.
They were four little girls living in house trailers on a forgotten Indiana lake. They didn’t have anything and the social workers who visited the lake families whispered among themselves that they never would. It was too bad, too, they said, because that Sharon was sure a pretty little thing and Althea was smart as a whip. Leona had an air about her that would give her stature in a place that promised good things to those who stood tall. And Joanne, well, she was a nice little girl. Such a shame nothing would ever come of any of them.
They didn’t know, those social workers, about the dreams…
I didn’t stop writing until I heard the back door open and close. I looked up, startled, realizing that the dining room had darkened around me and I was sitting in the little pool of light afforded by the desk lamp.
“David?” Where in the world had he been? It was eight o’clock, for heaven’s sake, and he’d left to play golf seven hours ago. “David, are you all right?”
“Don’t turn around till I say to,” he called from the kitchen.
“Okay.” I faced the screen again. “Since when do you play golf in the dark?”
I heard the rattle of a plastic bag and felt a slight thunk when something was set on the dining room table, then David said, “Okay, now.”
Half irritated, as much because of the interruption of my writing as with his lateness, I swiveled in my chair.
Sitting on the table was a new notebook computer.
“I know you’ve never really wanted a laptop,” said David, “because of the smaller keyboard. But you can’t take the desktop computer to Maine with you.” He sat in the dining room chair closest to me and looked into my eyes. His were very, very blue.
“You said you didn’t plan on writing in Maine, that it was going to be a vacation from life,” he said, “but you may as well stop breathing. You wrote your first book sitting on the bleachers at football practices, your second one sitting beside my mother’s bed for days and nights on end because she was afraid she’d die alone, and this last one even though you’re unhappy. You’re always going to write.”
