Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger (7 page)

“That’s the best part! Some younger guy, claims he’s independently wealthy and an artist and blah blah blah.” I had more cheese. I was going to gain ten pounds tonight alone unless the inner trembling that had begun when Dottie told me about the farm burned it all off. “I mean, I don’t know, maybe he’s totally on the up and up. There was something I kind of liked about his face, and she’s certainly charming.… There’s no reason a handsome younger man
wouldn’t
be interested in her.” I shrugged. “But of course it has all the hallmarks of a Very Special
Golden Girls
episode, doesn’t it?”

“Or a
48 Hours
mystery. ‘She was the town character in a town full of characters, but two weeks after she married Juan deHotti, she vanished, leaving nothing behind but a broken bottle of illegal absinthe and questions
.…’
”

“Absinthe?”

He nodded. “Dottie Morrison would never do anything in an ordinary way.”

“So there would have to be a hallucinogenic involved?”

“Obviously.” Another smear on another toast, another inch on my hips when he handed it to me. “So this begs the obvious question. Are you going to the wedding, whereupon you will finally see your Achilles’ heels again?”

No point in pretending I didn’t know who or what he was talking about. “No. Well,
probably.
”

“And that’s why there’s this subtle little shadow in your eyes tonight?”

Leave it to a gay man to be so perfectly attentive. “Yes, but it’s not just that. She’s selling the farm”—I felt an unexpected catch in my throat as I said the words—“and they’re going to be here for the next month or so cleaning it out.”

He held up a finger. “Hang on. This is going to require wine.” He looked at what remained of the cheese. “And Stilton. None of this wimpy stuff. I’ll be right back.” He got up from where we were sitting cross-legged on the floor of my shop and slipped out the front door, leaving the bells to tinkle emptily after him.

And I felt alone.

Sometimes it would come over me. Not often, but sometimes the Monster Thought I tried to avoid would sneak up on me and roar to life when I was just sitting there minding my own business, thinking about something else entirely.

I was alone. Not just at this moment, but in my life. Yes, it had been a choice. A decision I’d made after the Burke-Frank fiasco. Yes, I’d had
dates
along the way, I wasn’t a nun, but I never got too close to anyone. Truth be told, I was never even tempted. Maybe in some small space deep inside I
wanted
to be tempted. I couldn’t imagine myself being the kind of woman who, faced with the perfect man who could offer a lifetime of fun and companionship, would put her hands up and say,
Whoa, no way. I am
not
interested in being happy.

But I didn’t know. Because at thirty-one I still hadn’t met someone who came close. And I knew thirty-one wasn’t old, even though crossing the line of thirty had felt significant to me, and I knew it wasn’t too late, it’s never too late, Dottie was proving that right now. I knew all the things I’d say to a friend who was saying the same things I was right now, but here, in the dim quiet of the shop, I was very aware that I might spend my whole life just exactly like this. Seasons passing predictably. Perfect fall days, icy winter nights, muggy summer mornings, I’d see a million of them. I’d already seen a million of them. Some of them brought good things, some bad, most
meh
. But
years
could slip away like that.

When I was growing up, the only thing I ever really wanted—my only
dream
, if you will—was to be just like my mom. To get married and have children and shop for back-to-school clothes, and bake Christmas cookies, and dye Easter eggs, and plan birthday parties, and have peaceful nights and sitcom neighbors. I thought I’d have a husband I could count on as a partner, the way my mom could my dad, someone to watch TV with, play tennis badly with, read in bed with before switching out the lights and sleeping the sleep of the contented with.

And, of course, work in the shop during the day. Very often my mother would take her handwork home and do it while watching
Survivor
or
The Amazing Race
with my dad, but there never seemed to be a lot of stress or friction in her life. She lived exactly the way you’d imagine the perfect woman in a detergent commercial lived—simple, easily satisfied, always wise, rarely disappointed.

They still lived like that now, though they’d moved to a suburb of Tampa four and a half years ago, leaving me to take over the shop. Now Mom puttered around the house, making projects of repurposing objects and turning them into shabby chic works of art. She got ideas from magazines and HGTV, and from the many overpriced shops that sold those kinds of things all along the wealthy corridors of beachside towns of Florida’s Gulf Coast.

I’d given up the dream of having the same idyllically domestic life a long time ago, but I’d never really replaced it with a
new
dream. I carried on day to day, and I was doing fine, but there were no huge
ups
.

I wanted a few huge ups.

Yet I was never an
Eat Pray Love
kind of girl. My adventurous spirit had its only roots in digging around old “haunted” houses in the neighborhood as a kid and taking the occasional weekend in New York or Atlantic City or Rehoboth Beach now. I wasn’t a soul-searcher.

I was boring. I wasn’t dead, of course, but I wasn’t really
living
either.

The bells over the door chimed and Glenn came in with a large bottle of white wine; two glasses; and a tray of cheese, crackers, and cured meats that looked like it had been put together by Martha Stewart herself.

“I need to go to an ashram,” I told him as he sat down in front of me.

He scoffed. “You wouldn’t even make it out of Chhatrapati Shivaji.”

“Huh?”

“The airport in Mumbai.” Glenn didn’t often flaunt his worldliness, but he’d been all over the place and he’d seen and done more in his thirty-two years than most people did in a lifetime. Every once in a while, after a couple of drinks, he’d tell a story of something that had happened to him or someone he’d met that would be so outrageous there was no way to
not
believe it.

Me, on the other hand … say “Mumbai” to me and I think
Hey Mambo
. He was right, there was no way I was ever going to be any sort of adventuress, when I couldn’t even book a flight knowledgeably.

He pointed to a blue cheese and added, “Try this with the fig jam.”

I did. It was fantastic. Of course.

“You know what you never talk about?” Glenn was assembling little samples of cheese, condiments, and crackers and pushing them in front of me.

“Charpi Shivaji?”

“
Chhatrapati
Shivaji, and yes, but no. You never talk about Frank Morrison. Or Burke. What the hell really happened there?”

Glenn had grown up here and gone to high school with all of us, he’d even been on the football team with Burke, but he’d gone to college abroad and spent a couple of additional years living in Manhattan before moving back and opening the Mouse Trap. We hadn’t really been that close in high school, but we’d been the best of pals since his return, so it was hard to remember sometimes that he hadn’t been here for it all. That he didn’t already know it.

“You know what happened. I was on my way to marry Burke when Frank told me he’d been cheating on me and I couldn’t trust him. Called off the wedding, had a brief, ill-advised relationship with Frank, and, boom, end of Morrisons. End of story.”

“There.” He pointed at me. “That right there. Elaborate on this brief, ill-advised relationship with Frank.”

I sighed. I just hated thinking about this stuff. Which, okay, right there was probably a clue that I hadn’t really worked it out. But I was happier not thinking about it. Why keep poking the bruise?

“You know how they say the best way to get over a man is to get under another one?”

Glenn laughed. I think he’d said that himself on more than one occasion, though sometimes making lewd variations of the expression. “I am familiar with the expression, yes.”

“Well, it ain’t always true. When I left the church that day, the day of the wedding that would have changed my whole damn life, I was beyond heartbroken. I was numb. That day, and for a lot of days afterward, I wished, more than anything, that I hadn’t heard anything, that I’d gone on with the wedding and with my life in ignorant bliss. If the stories were true but he was faithful once we were married, was there ultimately any harm?”

“Hard to say. If you never knew and it never happened again, it’s like that stupid tree falling in the woods, isn’t it? If the next chapter, or the next six chapters, or however you look at a married rest-of-your-life and all the things that follow, was what you thought it was, maybe it
didn’t
matter what happened before.”

I shrugged. “I don’t think I’ll ever know the answer to that.”

“But you knew, for sure, that what Frank said to you was true.”

“Actually, to this day I don’t know the extent of it. But I do know that in the heated five minutes we spent in the rectory, he admitted that he
had
had one or two indiscretions. He said it was while we were broken up, but we were
always
breaking up and making up, there was never any reason to believe it.”

“The old ‘we were on a break’ from
Friends
.”

“Exactly! Now it’s in our lexicon forever. Shorthand for someone fucking up and someone else either having to forgive or not forgive.”

Glenn put a piece of cheese in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “There is another possibility. Maybe he bought it every time you dumped him. Maybe he
believed
you every time you got fed up, or had a drama queen moment, and walked away. Some guys do, you know. Guys see what’s directly in front of them and act from there. It’s a biological difference between our brains.”

“Yeah, there are a
lot
of biological differences in our brains. Men can have meaningless sex too.”

“True.” He put his hand on my arm and made me look into his eyes. “That’s
true
.”

“I’ll never understand that.”

“No, you probably won’t. When you filter the act through your own brain, you cannot make it mean anything less than love, and, honey, that hurts so much more as a betrayal, doesn’t it?”

A lump formed in my throat. Why, after all these years, I didn’t know. It embarrassed me and I swallowed hard. “No.”

Silence bloomed between us.

“You know what the last thing he said to me was?”

“What?”

“There’s gum on your ass.”

Glenn laughed. “
What?
”

“There was. I’d sat in gum and it ruined my dress. It and everything else I’d sat in, but the gum was the biggest insult and that was his parting shot of, and
at
, me.
There’s gum on your ass
. It was so typical of him I almost laughed. But he was
always
able to make me laugh, even when I was most livid at him, so if I’d laughed, that would have been like giving in, saying it was all okay, when I knew it would never be okay again.”

“I’m sorry. This iceberg goes deeper than I thought.”

Deeper than I’d thought too. I couldn’t think about that day with Burke. Couldn’t do it. Right or wrong, good or bad, it was too painful. I closed my eyes for a moment, then said, “Anyway. Frank. I don’t think he meant to be as artful as he was, manipulating me, I think he really thought he was being sincere in trying to warn me not to make a mistake.”

Glenn raised an eyebrow. “But he got the girl?”

“No. I moved back home. Didn’t run off down the aisle with him, as great as a
fuck you
as that would have been to Burke—”

“Which I’m sure he offered to do.”

I shook my head. “No, he didn’t, actually. He didn’t.” I thought about it. I’d always thought he would have, given the chance. He was interested, probably, but he never actually
said
so, so maybe that was all my vanity in play, no reality at all.

“So how did you feel about him?”

“Well, it’s funny, I had a crush on Burke before I discovered Frank. I was fifteen at the time, so he seemed much more sophisticated than Burke or me. And he
was
, actually. Did you know him in high school?”

“I really didn’t.”

“Well, he was pretty much always sixty-three years old, you know? Very serious. Very
smart
.” I shook my head. “Man, that guy is
smart
.” That was part of his appeal for me, and I realized why at this moment. “He was the kind of guy who seemed like he could take care of things. Anything. Everything. So when I was broken and vulnerable, I think I wanted him to take care of me.”

Glenn handed me a cracker. “It would have been an easy way out of heartbreak.”

“If it had worked.”

“It never works.”

“No easy outs.”

We laughed, but neither of us really meant it. Heartbreak sucks and we both knew it.

“So you guys, what, dated? Was it serious?”

I shook my head. “One night. Well, I don’t know, it was a few drunk nights in a row, but only one …
night
. You know.”

He looked nonplussed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“We drove to Vegas and I started drinking, starting with some Bud Lights from the 7-Eleven on 15, and didn’t sober up till we got back. The first night, in some Hampton Inn off the highway, I was hammered and upset and I just…” I shook my head and gestured. “We did it, and…” I shrugged.

Glenn raised an eyebrow. “And it was good?”

I nodded. It was. “It
was
.”

“But you didn’t do it again.”

“Well…”

“So the next night in Vegas you did it again.”

I felt the pink rise into my cheeks. “Okay, yes, but that was
it
. That was all. After that I began to feel really guilty for doing that to Burke.”