Everything's Relative

by Jenna McCarthy

  “Is that what you’re afraid of?” Jules asked.

  “Sort of,” Brooke admitted. “That and failing.”

  “First of all, you’re not going to drop dead or fail,” Jules insisted. “You’re young, you don’t smoke, you’re female—that lowers your heart attack risk, you know—and besides, you were a track star once, remember? You’ll pick it back up in no time. The hardest part is getting started.”

  “But will you still come with me?” Brooke pouted.

  “Yes, I’ll come with you,” Jules told her. “A few times.”

  “I hate you,” Brooke said.

  “No, you don’t,” Jules told her. “Or at least, you won’t forever.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Brooke said.

  Brooke

  Brooke flipped open her teacher’s planner to the calendar. There was a huge red circle around the day’s date. July fifteenth. She and her sisters were halfway to the deadline to get their inheritance. The problem was, they weren’t halfway done with the work—far from it, in fact.

  Brooke had tried to run; she really had. It was just so . . . hard. She’d nearly resigned herself to the fact that she was destined to be out of shape and poor for the rest of her life, until the night she’d overheard Jules and Shawn talking.

  “I just don’t think she’s going to make it,” Jules had said. Brooke assumed she was talking about Lexi.

  “But she dumped Jake; that’s a start,” Shawn had replied. He didn’t sound very hopeful.

  “Dumping Jake wasn’t exactly a Herculean feat. She’s not just out of shape, Shawn, she’s out of motivation. She’s got no drive at all, and I don’t know how to help her. I hate to say it, but I’m starting to think she’s hopeless . . .” Jules trailed off here and Brooke had sat, stunned, realizing that the weight of the world—their world—had been dumped on her shoulders. She was hopeless?

  No. She wasn’t. She wouldn’t be. She couldn’t be. She owed it to her sisters, to Jules at least. That was all there was to it. It would be awful and painful and she might pick up a few new swear words along the way, but she was going to do this. She was going to run a godforsaken half-marathon, at twenty-eight-out-of-shape years old.

  She said it out loud, for accountability, even though she was alone.

  “I am going to run a half-marathon.”

  The dog-walking was going to help her kick off her training, she rationalized, and she was sure six months was still plenty of time to get in shape.

  Brooke was buoyed by this newfound focus for about five minutes. Then she remembered that she had an entirely separate problem, at least as far as their inheritance was concerned: She didn’t have a single prospect for a date on the horizon. It wasn’t like Brooke was expecting or even hoping to meet her future husband before this charade was over; all she had to do was meet, and somehow engage, a decent-enough specimen of the opposite sex who might be willing to spend a few hours a week in her company.

  How hard could it be? she wondered now. People met reasonably suitable potential partners every day of their lives, in every venue imaginable. They met in coffee shops and in bars, at weddings and in gyms, on cruise ships and airplanes and now, as often as not, online. Brooke even worked with another teacher at Little Me who’d met her husband at Chuck E. Cheese’s. Lety had been very busy wrangling twenty four-year-olds at the annual end-of-the-year pizza party, and Jeremy was a part-time fix-it guy who’d been called in when the Skee-Ball machine had jammed up. Apparently it was love at first sight, even though Lety wasn’t wearing a stitch of makeup and had just dripped pizza grease on her boob when her eyes locked with Jeremy’s during Jasper T. Jowls’s guitar solo. They’d been married for five years now and Lety had just had her first baby, a little boy they named Steven but called Skeeter, after the machine that brought them together. So obviously, you could find love pretty much anywhere. Brooke just had to get out there and start looking.

  “What about Facebook?” Jules asked. She was chopping broccoli for a salad she’d promised Brooke was not only low-cal but delicious. Raw broccoli that wasn’t drowning in blue cheese dressing and dusted with bacon bits? Brooke was skeptical, to say the least.

  “I hate Facebook,” Brooke said. “I had an account but I shut it down when I realized that it’s basically a place for people to post pictures of their billion-dollar weddings and their Hawaiian vacations and their perfect children so that everyone else can feel like crap. I don’t need that in my life.”

  “Oh, come on. It’s harmless fun. You can check in with some of your old high school friends, see who’s up to what, spy on Billy McCann . . .”

  Brooke felt her face turn chili-pepper red at the mention of Billy’s name.

  “I can’t believe you just pulled the name Billy McCann out of your butt,” she said. Just saying his name after all these years made her knees turn to Jell-O.

  “Are you kidding me? We all thought you’d marry Billy! I was ready to order you a Mrs. McCann T-shirt thirteen years ago.”

  “You were long gone by the time I was dating Billy,” Brooke reminded her.

  “I still came over and took you guys out for dinner and stuff. Don’t you remember that?”

  Brooke wasn’t sure. She might recall grabbing a burger with Jules once or twice after she’d moved out, but that was about it.

  “Well, yeah, of course,” she said now, fearful of hurting Jules’s feelings. “I just meant, we were kids. It was stupid. I’m surprised you paid attention, is all.”

  “What ever happened with Billy anyway?” Jules asked now.

  “He was a year ahead of me, remember? He went into the Coast Guard after high school. Mom wouldn’t let me call him—she said it was too expensive to call long distance, so I wrote him dozens of letters, but he never wrote back, not even once. Finally I stopped writing. I never heard from him again.”

  “Well, maybe he had a good reason; you never know,” Jules said. “Besides, people change, they grow up. This is exactly what Facebook was made for. Let’s look him up.”

  “I don’t know—” Brooke started to protest, but Jules was already pecking away at her first-generation iPad that lived on the kitchen counter.

  “Look! I think I found him! This is him, right?” Jules didn’t wait for a response. “Wait for it,” she said, scrolling through the About section. “Interested in . . . women! Relationship status . . . single! Bingo. I think we just found your suitable mate.”

  “Current city: Miami,” Brooke read. “That’s three thousand miles away.”

  “Big deal. Lots of relationships start out long distance,” Jules insisted. “You guys have history. I’ll bet he’s tried to look you up a dozen times.”

  Brooke scanned his profile page. The banner photo was of Paris at night, presumably taken by Billy, or why else would it be there? The smaller photo was of Billy and a little boy. They were on the beach and both of them were flexing and posing for the camera. Brooke took over the mouse and double-clicked the photo to enlarge it. “My little man,” the caption read. The boy looked remarkably like him, and Billy hadn’t changed one bit.

  Brooke clicked the web browser closed.

  “Why’d you do that?” Jules wanted to know.

  “Did you get a good look at Billy?” Brooke demanded.

  “I sure did. He’s hot! What’s the problem?”

  “Have you taken a good look at me lately?”

  “Brooke, you’re beautiful,” Jules said. “You have to see that. You don’t have to have a protruding rib cage to fall in love. You know that, right?”

  Brooke wasn’t convinced.

  “Look, he’s on the opposite side of the country. You reach out to him, feel things out, see if it’s even worth pursuing. And you’re going to start running tomorrow, right? You’ll lose weight naturally, and I’ll help with the food. By the time you’re ready to see Billy, you’
ll knock his socks off. It’s actually perfect!”

  “You realize you’re basing this perfect-case scenario on the yet-to-be-confirmed fact that Billy is available and that he’s been carrying a torch for me for the past dozen or so years and that he’s got a thing for women who might actually weigh more than he does, right?”

  “Mom died and left us thirty-seven million dollars,” Jules reminded her. “Anything is possible.”

  Maybe Jules was right. Maybe it was worth a shot.

  Lexi

  “What can I get for you today, Officers?” Lexi said. She tried to sound casual and hide her excitement at seeing Rob, but she was sure it was written all over her face.

  “I’ll take the usual,” Rob told her, giving her his big Colgate grin. “Extra nuts.” The usual was a scoop of marshmallow swirl and a scoop of cookies-and-cream, and the “extra nuts” was their little private joke.

  The first time he’d come to The Inside Scoop and ordered from Lexi, she’d burst out laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” Rob had wanted to know.

  “That’s the girliest ice cream order I’ve ever heard,” she managed to say between laughing fits. “And you’re a cop. You pack heat! You’re killing me right now, Rob. You want some pink sprinkles on that?”

  She’d fixed him the ice cream, and then dumped about a half cup of chopped peanuts on top.

  “I didn’t order nuts,” he said when she handed it to him.

  “I know,” she said. “But I thought you could use some.”

  He’d taken a bite, proclaiming it even better with the unsolicited topping. “The salt and sweet together—” he’d started to say, but Lexi had cut him off.

  “Stop, just stop,” she’d howled. “Honest to God, you could lose your man card forever for talking like that.”

  “Just a scoop of vanilla today, please,” his painfully shy partner Frank said now.

  “For real?” Lexi wanted to know.

  “Yeah, why?” Frank asked.

  “Because vanilla is so . . . vanilla! We have pistachio and maple nut and rum raisin and mango and like twenty-five other flavors and you really want vanilla?”

  Poor Frank didn’t know what to say. “What’s your favorite?” he asked her.

  “Black raspberry chip with sour gummy worms on top,” Lexi said without hesitation. “It’s amazeballs.” Rob raised his eyebrows. “Amazing. I meant it’s amazing.”

  “I’ll take that, then,” Frank said. Lexi beamed at Rob, who shook his head, clearly impressed with her ability to turn grown men into mush.

  “You might want to try not to make customers feel bad about their boring ice cream orders,” Rob whispered when Frank went to the end of the counter for napkins and spoons.

  “Vanilla? Seriously? He asked for it, Rob.”

  “Have you even tried the vanilla?” Rob wanted to know.

  “I’ve had vanilla ice cream before,” Lexi told him.

  “Try it right now and tell me it’s not delicious,” Rob said.

  She scooped some into one of the tiny taster cups.

  “Can I at least put some pineapple or something on it?” she wanted to know.

  “Nope. You need the pure, authentic vanilla experience.”

  She lifted the cup to her lips, feeling strangely self-conscious. Normally she enjoyed making guys squirm with her overt sexuality, but for some reason Rob was different. She wanted him to think she was classy, not just another whore he’d had to shuttle home from a dive bar. She wondered if he’d ever done that before, and tried to shake off the thought. Now she popped the ice cream into her mouth instead of sucking suggestively on the cup.

  “Well?” Rob wanted to know. His mischievous grin was nearly more than she could take.

  “Not bad,” she said with a shrug, wiping her hands on a rag.

  “Not bad?” Rob demanded.

  “Fine, it’s delicious,” she laughed.

  “You really shouldn’t underestimate vanilla, Alexis,” he said, winking at her.

  Maybe I shouldn’t, Lexi thought.

  Jules

  Jules had written just over thirty thousand words. It came out to one hundred and twenty double-spaced pages. They were good pages, too. The writing was solid and her thoughts organized, and the whole thing teemed with imagery and emotion. There were heart-wrenching parts because there had to be, but she’d peppered them with what she felt were perfectly placed bursts of comic relief, much like the incomparable “hit this” scene in Steel Magnolias that pulled viewers back from the brink of despair just when they needed it most.

  The problem was, she was stuck. Completed memoirs ranged anywhere from sixty to a hundred-and-twenty thousand words; even on the low end of that scale she was barely halfway there. It wasn’t the deadline anymore; she’d done the thirty thousand words in two months and had four months to go, give or take. The issue was that the story was told. She didn’t know what else she could say. She’d even seen it through to the grand finale, when she and Lexi and Brooke received their inheritance. She’d had to be vague and ambiguous there, of course, because it hadn’t technically happened. But she was sure she’d captured the emotions at least: the ecstasy, the pride, the relief.

  Now she supposed it was simply a matter of going back through what she’d written and filling in with details and vignettes, and that thought overwhelmed her. She’d crafted her segues so carefully and paid such close attention to the balance of it all, she just wasn’t sure that meddling around in there was a good idea. She needed to print it out, to see her words on actual paper with actual ink and not on a computer screen, she decided, before she could decide what to do next.

  It turned out, one hundred and twenty printed pages was quite impressive. She fanned the stack back and forth in her hand and watched the words blur before her. I wrote this. All of it. Those are my words, my stories. She was torn between pride for what she’d accomplished already and trepidation about what she had yet to do.

  “Is that your book?” Brooke asked excitedly, sweeping into the office.

  “Jeez, you scared the hell out of me,” Jules said. “When did you come home?”

  “Just now, from walking the dogs,” Brooke said. “I ran them today, too. Well, I ran and walked but mostly ran. Two miles!” Brooke had driven around the neighborhood and mapped out one- , two- , three- and five-mile loops. “And look,” she added. She lifted her T-shirt to reveal the droopy waistband of her sweatpants. “They’re practically falling off! They’re a little stretched out because I haven’t washed them in forever, but I still think I’ve lost at least a few pounds.”

  “That’s fantastic, Brooke. You must feel so great.”

  “I wish I didn’t have so far to go, but it’s a start,” Brooke said.

  “I know what you mean,” Jules said.

  “Your book?”

  “I’ve pretty much told the whole story, even the part about getting the money,” she said.

  “No way! That’s amazing. You’re done? Can I read it?”

  Jules explained about the word-count business and how she basically needed to double what she’d written and she felt like she was right back where she’d been when she couldn’t think of an idea at all.

  “Maybe you need to take a break for a while, get some distance?” Brooke suggested. “I know when I’m grading the same papers over and over my brain starts to go numb. Sometimes if you just leave something alone for a while and come back to it, you can see things much more clearly.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Jules said. What else could she do but take a break? It wasn’t like you could force words out of your brain that weren’t there. Jules had written enough to know that. She slipped the printed pages into a file folder in her desk drawer.

  “Any progress on Project Billy?” she teased Brooke.

  “Other than obsessively porin
g over his pictures and trying to piece together his life, not really. The kid’s name is Alec, but I’m not even sure if Billy’s the dad. It’s hard to tell if he’s ever even been married. I mean, it’s not like people post pictures with captions like ‘this is my awful ex-wife’ or anything. But he went to grad school at the University of Miami and he’s a marine biologist and he likes to surf and scuba dive and I think he has his own boat!”

  “Wow, nice stalking, Nancy Drew.” Jules high-fived her sister. “Have you contacted him?”

  “Not yet,” Brooke said. “I figured I should get my profile back up and get some photos up there and stuff before I do. Hey, do you know how to Photoshop?”

  “No, why?”

  “I was wondering if you could put my head on Angelina Jolie’s body.”

  Jules laughed and shook her head.

  “Too skinny? I thought you’d say that. How about Kate Winslet? Christina Hendricks? Mindy Kaling would be good, but you’d have to lighten up the skin. Ooh! How about Jessica Simpson when she was like four months pregnant the second time?”

  “Brooke, you’re being ridiculous. Why don’t we go out and get you a nice outfit and take some really great pictures of your beautiful head on your actual body? Shawn has a pretty decent camera, and I’ve got mad shooting skills.”

  “I’m not spending one penny on an outfit that will fit me now. I’m going to get in shape and lose this weight. I ran six miles this week. Well, technically I jogged slowly, and not six miles in a row or anything. My farthest distance is two miles. But I did it three times!”

  “That’s fantastic!” Jules said, giving her another high five.

  “It’s a start, at least,” Brooke said. “It’s not about Mom’s money even. I could probably run thirteen miserable miles once, knowing what’s at stake. But I want to lose this weight. This isn’t me, or it’s not how I want to be, at least. I’m doing this.”

  Jules was blown away by Brooke’s determination. She’d noticed her sister serving herself smaller portions when they ate together and passing up fattening side dishes in favor of extra veggies and lean protein. Brooke hadn’t complained about walking the dogs since the first week; she’d even insisted on taking the route a few times when Jules was already dressed and ready to go. And now she was actually running, on her own even. Jules was nearly bursting with pride.