An Ex to Grind (40 page)

I took Buster up to Connecticut for the weekend, so I could pour my heart out to Weezie and he could play with the kids. It was a balmy, blue-sky day when we arrived, with spring flowers in bloom and birds chirping and the lawn green and fragrant, and I was grateful to be out of Manhattan, away from the scene of the crime. Of all my crimes.

To my surprise, Nards was there when I pulled into the driveway. He hadn't moved back into the house permanently, but he and Weezie were spending the occasional night together, working things out, taking it one day at a time. Or, in this case, one weekend at a time.

"I hope you don't mind that he's staying over too," she whispered as we were unloading my car.

"Mind?" I said. "You've got a huge smile on your face. I'm thrilled."

"He and I realized we both made mistakes," she said. "This marriage business isn't easy."

"But the divorce business is worse. So whatever you guys are doing to stay together, keep it up."

We went inside, and there was Nards, looking contrite but pleased to be back home, even temporarily. He bounded over to me and hugged me like my long-lost brother.

"Before another minute goes by, I need to tell you how ashamed I am for what I did," he said sheepishly. "If I can restore even half of Weezie's trust in me, I'll be happy. Your trust too, Mel. You saw me in the restaurant that night. You must—"

"I'm hardly in a position to judge others," I said, cutting him off, wanting to lessen his load. "Not after the fiasco with Dan."

"That's another thing," he said. "I feel guilty about encouraging you to hire Desiree. If there's any way I can make it up to you or help you repair your relationship with Dan, please tell me."

"Thanks, but he and I are beyond repair."

"Don't say that. He has his weaknesses, but he never struck me as a guy who holds a grudge."

"Yeah, well he's holding one now. Two, actually."

Weezie joined us, and we all sat in their cozy den. "Two what?" she asked with her usual cut-to-the-chase curiosity.

"Grudges," I said. "Dan's holding one against me and one against Leah."

"I can't believe he thinks she was in on your plan," she said. "She was just another single woman in the city, looking for love."

"And she found it," I said. "She adored him. She was good for him. She was everything to him that I wasn't."

"Would you stop putting yourself down?" she said. "Let's concentrate on how you're going to get him back."

"I'm not," I said. "It's Leah who has to get him back, and I'm going to help her do it."

"
What
?" said Weezie and Nards at the same time.

As soon as the pronouncement was out of my mouth, I knew I meant it. Dan told me he'd chosen Leah; that she was the one he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. I was his past, and she was his future.
When you love someone, you want them to be happy, even if it's not with you
. Yes, there it was again. Evan's voice. Mrs. Thornberg's too. But for the first time their words weren't empty rhetoric. They felt right to me.
What makes an ordinary person heroic is when they give up the thing they want most
. Maybe I was getting in touch with my inner heroine after all.

"It's true. I've been mulling this over for the past few days and now I'm sure about it."

"Sure about what?" Weezie said, still confused.

"I'm going to find Leah, talk to her, and help her win him back," I reiterated. "It's the only way I can really make amends to him."

"Very generous of you," said Nards, regarding me with new respect. He had always been the pontificator. I never expected him to look up to me as his shining moral example.

"He was generous to me once," I said. "It's time I returned the favor."

We discussed how I might accomplish bringing together two people who no longer trusted each other. We all agreed that hiring Desiree to help with the matchmaking wasn't an option.

I was done with her, besides which I wasn't in a position to hire anybody now that I was jobless.

"We're strategizers," said Weezie. "We'll come up with something by the end of the weekend."

But we never did.

On Monday morning, I brought Buster over to Dan's, afraid he'd be home, afraid he wouldn't be. True to his word, he'd made himself scarce. It was Isa who answered the door and explained that he was out running errands, then driving to a meeting at L.I.U.

"As for her, she cleared out of here and took all her things," she added, referring to Leah. "No more marriage."

"Is Dan very depressed?" I asked, sickened by this latest irony. I'd told Ricardo that Mr. Swain was so depressed that he needed Leah to care for him. Now Mr. Swain really was depressed and needed Leah to care for him. What had I done? And how could I have done it?

"He is,
chérie
. He keeps her picture on the dresser in the bedroom."

"He always did hang on to his glory days, those times when he was happiest," I said. "Keeping a picture of her proves he still loves her."

"If he still loves her, then why is she gone?"

I sighed. "He's convinced that she wasn't honest with him about why she was living here. He thinks she was part of my plan. He thinks she tricked him too."

"But she didn't know anything about your plan. I took those pictures of her personal items behind her back. I could show them to him, so he could see for himself that she was innocent in all this."

I considered the idea, because it would probably help Leah's cause, but I ultimately rejected it. Dan was upset enough that I'd hired Desiree to trick him. He'd go ballistic if he found out about Isa's involvement and would surely fire her. I couldn't let that happen. She had Reggie to feed. No small thing. Literally.

I went into the bedroom and looked at Leah's photograph. It was a color shot of her with Buster, which surprised me. (I'd expected a picture of her alone, the breeze blowing through her mink coat hair.) She was down on the floor with him, her face cheek to cheek with his, and she was beaming. I had no emotional attachment to her, obviously, but even I couldn't help but be moved by her obvious affection for my dog.

"Isn't that a nice picture?" Isa said, coming into the room behind me. "She was crazy about Buster, and Dan loved that about her."

No, I didn't know Leah, but if she was crazy about Buster, she couldn't be all bad.

As was my custom now, I stopped over at Mrs. Thornberg's before heading back downtown. She had just spent over an hour wrestling with her TV remote—it needed new batteries and she couldn't pry the battery door open, not with a fingernail or a bobby pin or even a key—so I was glad I came. Thanks to my Swiss army knife, I was able to solve the problem in time for her to watch Larry King later that night.

"What's the latest?" she said as we sat in her kitchen munching on dill pickles. I felt so at home that I didn't even notice their smell anymore. Same with the mothballs. And I was relieved that her dentures were holding up well enough for her to keep biting into them. (The pickles, not the mothballs.)

"I'm taking your advice and throwing myself into getting Dan and Leah back together," I announced.

"I gave you that advice?"

"You told me that if I loved Dan, I should want to see him happy, even if it wasn't with me."

"Glad you listened."

"I listen to everything you say."

She clucked with pleasure. "Most young people today think we
seniors
—such a stupid word—don't know what we're talking about. Like we all have Alzheimer's or something. Some of us still have our marbles, you know?"

"I do know. And I'm taking your advice, as I said. The question is: How do I get Dan to let Leah back into his life? And how do I get Leah to forgive Dan for not trusting her? How do I even get them to tolerate being in each other's company for five minutes, not to mention decide to go through with their wedding after all?"

"That's a tough one," she acknowledged, "but not insurmountable."

"Really?"

"Sure. Mr. Thornberg and I had a tiff before we got married and we ended up together," she said.

"What was the tiff about, if you don't mind my asking?"

"Remember when I told you he was a tightwad?"

I couldn't help laughing. "Yes."

"I wasn't kidding. He gave me an engagement ring with a diamond the size of a pea. No, half a pea. His parents were big shots in the brassiere business. I thought, They couldn't afford better?"

"What did you do?"

"I gave the ring back to him. I thought money was everything then, because I was such an ignorant, willful girl. I accused him of being a cheapskate, and he accused me of being a gold digger. We were both sorry, naturally, but were too pigheaded to admit it. Such fools."

"So you broke up, and the engagement was off?"

"Yes. And it took Mr. Thornberg's brother, Harry, to bring us back together. I didn't think it was possible, because nobody was speaking to anybody at that point."

"How did Harry get you and Mr. Thornberg to kiss and make up?"

She scratched her chin, as if to jog her memory. I noticed she had a single hair there. A whisker. "Harry knew we shared a love of music."

"Classical?"

"No, dance music. The jitterbug. There was a band that was popular in that era—the Jack Gordon Band, I think they were called—and we used to dance to their records. So Harry bought each of us their latest hit. He told me that mine was a gift from his brother, who was 'too remorseful' to give it to me himself, and he told his brother that his was a gift from me, because I was 'too remorseful' to give it to him myself. On top of that, he finagled it so we both showed up at this dance hall where the band was playing. Well, given that we each thought the other was apologizing, we fell right into the trap and got back together. The rest, as they say, is history."

"I'm trying to figure out what the lesson is here."

"The lesson is this: if you want them back together, you've got to appeal to their mutual interest in something."

I shrugged. "Dan likes football, but I don't even know Leah, let alone what she's interested in."

"You're not a dummy. You'll think of it."

"I feel like a dummy these days. I don't have a job and nobody will hire me and the Heartbreak Hotel is starting to look like a palace compared to living out of my car."

"I thought you were moving in next door once he starts coaching. Isn't that what you said?"

"He offered. I haven't decided."

She put down her pickle and went for her purse. After rummaging around for her wallet, she pulled it out and handed me a roll of bills.

"Take it," she said. "It's all the cash I've got on me."

"Oh, no," I protested. "I couldn't."

"Fine," she said, continuing to shove the money at me. "Call it a loan if it'll make you feel like Miss Businesswoman."

I didn't take it. I couldn't believe she'd even offered it. I was the one who was always handing out cash, or so it seemed. "I'm very touched," I said. "More than you'll ever know. But I'll be okay. Once I get my self-respect back and can look at myself in the mirror without flinching, the career stuff will fall into place."

Mrs. Thornberg patted my head. "You're my good girl. You'll find a way to make things right between the lovebirds. But in the meantime, my bad arm is killing me. I think I strained it trying to get the batteries into that remote. Could you help me clean my refrigerator?"

I helped her clean her refrigerator. I helped her reorganize her pantry. I helped her wash her kitchen floor. And as I did, she reminisced about the story she'd just told me, about Harry bridging the gap between her and Mr. Thornberg and getting them to the altar.

"Remember," she said. "He appealed to our common interest in something and then put us at the same place at the same time. That's what did it."

As I alphabetized her spices and scrubbed her fridge and mopped her floor, I wondered how I could replicate her brother-in-law's feat. It wasn't until I got home and started thinking about Evan—about how I missed him and wished he were there to guide me—that an idea broke through.