Lovely You

by Jamie Bennett

  “Are you guys ready?” I asked brightly, when I joined them on the curb. Joey held out his hand and I passed him Pia’s leash.

  “We’ll see you later,” he told me, and the two of them walked off toward a waiting car.

  “What—where are they going?” I asked, confused.

  “Back to your house. Who was that guy?” Nate asked me.

  “Um, no one. I mean, he was someone I knew.” Why was I lying? My heart was pounding like I had done something wrong and gotten caught, like when my friend had shoplifted in high school and the security guard stepped in front of us at the door of the big makeup store. I wasn’t in high school anymore, and I hadn’t done anything wrong. “Whatever, Nate. Stop glowering at me. That was my former fiancé. Having dinner with the next woman he’s planning to marry. We’ll see, though.”

  Nate’s face was as cold as ice. “That’s why you were acting that way? Flirting with me at the table, touching me, flipping your hair. Walking around with your chest stuck out, shaking your ass. What in the actual fuck, Scarlett?”

  Oh my God. He was so jealous! I smiled again. “Nate, really? I broke up with him, remember?” I stood on my tiptoes and put my hands on his shoulders. “I don’t care about him at all. I don’t think I ever really did.” I pressed my lips to his.

  It only took me a moment before I realized that Nate wasn’t kissing me back. He put his hands on my shoulders, put me down on my flat feet, and looked me in the eyes. I had been wrong about him being jealous. This was now the second time that I had kissed him, and he had rejected me again. Obviously, it was a no.

  I was a no. Still.

  Chapter 13

  Joey was going to drive me crazy. “Will you please sit down?” I snapped at him. “You look fine. Everything is fine!”

  I had been a little on edge for the past few days, since we had gone out to dinner at La Méprise and run into Mats. And everything was really, really not fine.

  “I just want to impress her,” Joey said, studying himself in the mirror and trying to smash down a piece of hair that didn’t want to comply. “I’ve been working out, eating right. You picked my outfit. It’s good, right?”

  Kiana was coming today. Joey was going to meet her at the airport and then they were going to stay at a hotel for a few nights. Which meant that I would be alone, again, in my apartment. I was happy about that, because it would be good to have my own space again.

  Right. Super happy.

  “Joey, what if when you see her today, Kiana is wearing a garbage bag? Or she gained ten pounds?”

  He turned away from his reflection, puzzled. “I don’t care what she wears or how much she weighs.”

  “Exactly.” I stared at him.

  “Ok, I get it. But I’m trying to win her back,” he explained, and I rolled my eyes. From his side of the phone conversations that I had overheard, she was as good as won.

  “She’ll leave Tuesday, and then I’ll come back to stay here. If that’s ok,” he said, looking at me cautiously.

  “Whatever, it’s fine,” I answered, getting up from the table. This was where Nate had sat to do his work. “I’m going for a run.”

  “Didn’t you just get back from swimming?”

  I passed my hand over my wet hair. “I need to do more.” Swimming wasn’t enough, and running probably wouldn’t be, either. But I had to do something, because I couldn’t stay in this apartment that was so empty and awful.

  Nate was gone, back to Hawaii. It had felt like Joey punched me in the stomach when he casually mentioned it. Nate hadn’t slept at my apartment after the dinner at La Méprise, but I’d had too much pride to ask where he was that night. Then when I got home from work the next day, all his stuff had been gone. Yesterday, after practically the whole week had passed by with us avoiding the topic of Nate and with me dying to know where he was, Joey had volunteered that Nate had flown to Kona that morning to check in on his business. He then added that Nate planned to return when Kiana left so he could get back to his new bodyguard job here in San Francisco. I had shrugged like I wasn’t really paying attention, I didn’t really care, when actually the words that he was gone were a gut punch, and that he was coming back made me almost dizzy with relief. But I just shrugged, like he hadn’t been in my thoughts at all.

  Actually, I had replayed the scene outside of La Méprise again and again in my mind. After Nate had rejected my kiss, we looked at each other for a moment. I had stared into his dark eyes and felt dueling flames of shame and anger burn through me. “I get it,” I had told him. “I get it.”

  “You don’t get shit, Scarlett,” he answered. His eyes were like ice. “I don’t know why I’ve been wasting my time.”

  I couldn’t stand it, the way he was looking at me, the way his voice had sounded when he said my name. Like it was a bad word. I’d had to leave before I started to cry. “Fuck off, Nate! Get the fuck out of my house, you freeloading asshole. My brother was right about you.” Then I had turned and walked—ran—in the other direction in the shoes I could barely stand in. And when I finally took a car home, Nate had been gone, and Joey hadn’t met my eyes.

  I hadn’t seen Nate at all that week, and I’d hardly seen Joey and Pia, either, since the three of them spent so much time together. I was back to working all the time, cocooning on the couch at night where Nate had slept, watching handball, badminton, and strong man competitions instead of closing my eyes.

  “I’m going to go to the airport to get her,” Joey said, pulling me out of the memory. “I’ll see you on Tuesday. If you’re sure it’s ok for me to come back to stay here.”

  “Of course it’s ok!” I snapped. “It’s not your fault that your friend is such an asshole.”

  “Nate’s not an asshole,” Joey said. “Don’t say that. Don’t even think it.”

  I was totally taken aback by the anger in his voice. “You don’t know—” I started to defend myself.

  “I saw how you were acting at the restaurant the other night, all weird and flirty. You picked that place so we would run into your ex and you could use Nate to show off that you had somebody new. I saw you make the woman at the other table so upset. That was your ex’s new fiancée, right?” Joey shook his head. “It was embarrassing, how you acted. It wasn’t right to treat Nate that way, either. All he’s been doing is trying to help you.”

  “I don’t need his help, and I don’t need advice on how to act from a guy—”

  “Go ahead,” Joey told me. “Say it. A guy who can’t take care of himself?”

  “A guy who lost the love of his life because he treated her like shit!” I said instead.

  “Yeah, I did,” Joey said quietly. “And now I see what mistakes I made, and I’m trying to fix them. I’m trying to fix myself to be the person that Kiana needs. I hope I can make this up to her and it’s not too late. I hope she can see how sorry I am.”

  “Why don’t you buy her a fucking cake,” I suggested. “You can write ‘I suck, Kiana’ on it and you guys can eat it at your pity party.” I grabbed my keys and my shoes and slammed the front door behind myself. My neighbor came out and told me to stop making so much noise and I almost threw my shoes at her. Instead, I pulled them on and gave her the finger, then made myself run down the stairs, scared the whole time, instead of waiting for the elevator. I just kept going out onto the sidewalk, and I ran so far that I got a little lost in the city I thought I knew so well. It turned out that I didn’t know anything.

  When I got back, the apartment had never seemed so quiet and empty, even filled with the new furniture and all the stuff. I looked around the kitchen at the towel that Nate folded into thirds and hung carefully after he used it, at the new spices lined up in straight rows in the cupboard, at the containers of leftovers stacked in the fridge, labeled and dated. He was really a control freak about keeping things orderly. I picked up some cold spaghetti from the week before and realized I was hugging it as I thought of him.

  Jesus Christ. I went into the guest bedr
oom, where all my stuff was still all over the floor, piled and messy. I had a little time before I had to go, so I started to get that catastrophe squared away, too.

  The room looked better by the time I got into my newly repaired car, with all the dents flattened out and the dashboard lights extinguished. I drove north, across the Golden Gate Bridge that Joey had been so crazy about and where Nate had warned me to watch the road. I did watch what I was doing, and I didn’t look at my phone while I drove, because it practically put him over the brink when I did that. “It’s against the law,” he had said about a million times. I realized my hands were shaking as I went into the Robin Williams Tunnel above Sausalito and came out again into the sunlight.

  It was my mom’s birthday, and she had emailed, not called, to invite me to come to a party at her house. “Zara is dealing with her husband herself. I don’t want you to get into any kind of scene with him,” she wrote. I nodded to myself. I would just stay far away and keep with groups so he couldn’t corner me. Plus, I had my brass knuckles in my purse. “Your brother and Lanie are fine with you coming if you can behave yourself and keep your distance,” my mom had continued. “I do want you there, honey, but I don’t want problems. I just want to enjoy the day.” That was what I had become, the person who had to be handled ahead of time so she wouldn’t ruin a party. Even so, I got furious when I thought about it, to the point that it almost blurred my vision. Why did I have to change my behavior to hide from Bradley, why wasn’t he getting emails warning him to stay away from me? Why were Lanie and all her teary feelings more important than me and mine, why wasn’t my mom warning Brooks to behave himself and not start arguments with me?

  I rubbed my burning eyes. Because I was the problem, not them. That was why.

  The phone rang and I immediately hit the button on my steering wheel to answer, without thinking. And my heart sped up, hoping about who it might be. “Hello?”

  “Scarlett? It’s Mats.”

  “What? Who?” I was so taken aback that I couldn’t really process it.

  “Mats. Your fiancé,” he answered, confused.

  My brain clicked into gear. “You’re my former fiancé. Why are you calling me?”

  “Well, it was really good to see you the other night,” he said finally. “I’ve been thinking a lot about you since then.”

  I was sure he had, after the way he had been looking at me at the restaurant. Like I had been cold water in the desert. “Really?” I asked. “How sweet.”

  “I mean, I guess, we broke up and all…”

  I waited for a moment, but that seemed to be it. “Did you call me for a specific reason?” I prompted.

  “Uh, yeah. Um, remember Roberta Frisell?” he asked.

  I thought. Vaguely, I remembered a short girl with unfortunately thick ankles who had been really nice. I wished, suddenly, that I hadn’t thought of her ankles before I thought of how nice she had been. “Yes, sure. What about her?”

  “She’s having a brunch at her house tomorrow. She asked me about you the last time I saw her. Maybe, I don’t know, if you don’t have, I mean, if you…”

  “Are you asking me to go out with you, Mats?” I jerked the wheel a little and straightened out before I got close to another car. “What about Missy?”

  “We’re taking a break,” he said, but it sounded a little tremulous. “We’re taking a break,” he repeated, sounding surer of himself.

  I thought for a moment. “Send me Roberta’s address and I’ll meet you there,” I told him, not really sure of what I was doing, except that it felt nice that Mats wanted me back. And maybe I hadn’t ever loved him, not the way I was supposed to for a marriage, and maybe he was a wienie, but he had never treated me badly and I had liked him, mostly. Wasn’t that enough? Anyway, maybe that was what I was going to get.

  “Great, great. I‘m glad you can come. I missed—”

  “Mats, I’m going into the tunnel in Sausalito and I’m going to lose you,” I lied. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” I hung up, and my hands shook more. What was I doing? I turned up music, loudly, like I did to the TV. I wanted to drown out my mind.

  There were plenty of cars at my mom’s house because she had a ton of friends. I parked off the lawn, just in case anyone wanted to check on my car later. “You can’t be next to the fire hydrant,” one of her nosy neighbors told me, coming out of his house to wave me away. So I moved it again.

  I remembered coming to my mom’s house for parties, before everything changed. I had loved to make an entrance, me in my gorgeous clothes and my perfect hair, my cute fiancé at my side. Mats had been pretty good at these things when I succeeded at pulling him off his phone. Now I entered quietly, coming around through the side at the kitchen door and startling the caterers. But I did make a beeline to my mom when I stepped quietly into the living room with the other guests.

  “Happy birthday, Mom.” I handed her my gift. She was always easy to shop for, because she loved whatever we gave her.

  She stepped away from the crowd of her friends and hugged me, and I forced myself to relax.

  “Scarlett, I’m so glad you came,” she told me.

  “I won’t cause any problems. I promise,” I said. “I’m going to stay away from everyone.”

  “Oh, honey.” She looked incredibly sad, and I felt incredibly guilty for making her feel that way on her birthday.

  “I’m going to go get a drink. Of water,” I clarified, and stepped quickly away. I surveilled the room and located Bradley, near the bar, of course. He was wearing a hideously bright, tangerine-colored blazer, so he would be easy to spot. It was like a warning beacon. I saw Brooks and Lanie, who were always easy to see because of their height. Brooks was looking over at me, but he turned his head when we locked eyes. Ok, simple enough. I would be able to avoid everyone pretty easily.

  I talked for a while with my mom’s friends, but then I gravitated to my old bedroom to get away from their questions about my love life, my career, my friends. My mom had moved to this house right after I had gone away to college so I had never spent a ton of time in the room and it didn’t feel totally my own. But all my old things were still there, in case I wanted to come back to stay, I guessed. Or until I got my act together and cleaned it out, like my brother and sister had done with their rooms.

  I heard voices coming from behind the door. “No, Zayne, you’re this guy. Make him walk like this.” It was my niece, Isla.

  “What are you guys up to?” I asked as I came in, and they looked guilty.

  “We’re just playing with these old toys,” Isla said defiantly. “We aren’t hurting anything.” She put her hand on her little brother’s shoulder protectively.

  Even my niece didn’t like me. “That’s fine,” I told them. “You can play with anything in here. This was my old dollhouse.” It was huge, a gift from my dad when I was little. Since I didn’t have a younger sibling to boss around like Isla did, my dad had played with me for hours, moving furniture and dolls through the little rooms. “This is the Parsnip family,” I told them, kneeling and picking up the dad doll. “Meet Bernard Parsnip, his wife Lucinda, and their kids, Travalia, Duke, and Indigo.”

  “That’s fancy,” Isla said, and I nodded.

  “It took me a long time to come up with their names,” I explained. I patted down Lucinda’s hair and made her wave. “She was a doctor and Bernard used to sell junk bonds.”

  “What is that?” my nephew Zayne asked, daring to speak to his nasty aunt.

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “I heard it once in an old movie, and when I said it to my dad, he laughed. So I kept it. My dad was your grandpa.”

  “The one who died,” Isla explained to her brother.

  “Yes.” I cleared my throat. “Lucinda, are you home from work yet?” I asked in my old Bernard Parsnip voice. “I’m going to make vegetables for dinner. I think the kids love them.”

  Isla giggled. She picked up Indigo Parsnip. “Daddy, we hate vegetables!” she answered. She handed
her brother the Duke doll, but first he did the voice wrong, then he said the wrong thing, too, so she had to do some coaching.

  We played for quite a while, moving the furniture to the upper levels because of the impending tsunami, planting a roof garden of pizza and candy that we grew out of paper, preparing for the zombie attack (that was my nephew’s idea, and Isla graciously let him have just the one).

  “Better make some more arrows, son,” Mr. Parsnip-through-me directed Zayne-as-Duke. “I’m a deadeye with my trusty bow.”

  “Hi, Uncle Brooks,” Zayne answered.

  I looked up quickly. Brooks was leaning against the door frame, smiling slightly. “Hi, Zayne. Are you guys having fun?” My nephew nodded enthusiastically. “You always tried to make me play dolls, too,” Brooks said to me. “I was a lot older than you,” he added quickly when Zayne looked askance at the Duke and Travalia dolls in his hands.

  “You weren’t so much a dollhouse guy,” I agreed. “It was more Dad’s thing. My thing with him.”

  Brooks nodded, still looking at the wooden house. “Your mom is looking for you,” he told the kids. “She wants you to have lunch before the birthday cake.”

  “Cake!” It was a magic word. Both of them took off like shots.

  I stood too and brushed off my hands, then futilely at the wrinkles in my clothes. “After you,” I told my brother, but he didn’t move.