Every Other Saturday (16 page)

After work that night, Julia let Dave talk her into sharing a bottle of expensive bourbon.

“It was a gift from a sponsor,” he explained as she fetched two glasses. “I had a terrible evening, so I thought I’d taste it.”

“Looks expensive,” she said when he had poured a half-inch into her glass. She sniffed. “Smells expensive.”

“Probably is. The guy who gave it to me specializes in the stuff they put in the luxury boxes and VIP rooms.”

She tasted the bourbon, letting the warm liquid roll down her throat, leaving an intense but honeyed sensation in its wake. “Wow.” She coughed. “You’re going to ruin me for Wild Turkey,” she said. “That’s what my grandmother always drank.”

“Ugh.” He shuddered. “Though after tonight, I would settle for that if I had to.”

“That bad? Worse than being stood up?” Julia took another experimental sip. This one went down more smoothly. She could taste cherries, maybe almonds. She set down the glass abruptly. The last thing she needed was to develop an expensive bourbon habit.

“Much worse.” Dave sat back in his chair. “See if you can guess. If you get even close, I’ll buy you this bottle.”

“She was fat.” Julia cringed in anticipation of his response.

“What? No. That doesn’t matter to me. Actually, I like a little…well, anyway. Guess again.”

“She got drunk and threw up on your shoes.”

“No. That would be annoying, but this was worse.”

Julia’s mind raced with possibilities. She tried out several in rapid-fire succession. “She was pregnant? She had a tail? STD? Bad hygiene? Scales?”

“No, no, no, and I think I’m learning more about how your brain works than I want to know.”

Julia laughed and took another sip, forgetting her earlier resolve. “Okay, I give up.”

“Good,” he said. “Because you weren’t going to get it. So this girl I went out with tonight turned out to be someone I dated in college. The last person before Debbie, actually.”

“How is that possible? Has she changed that much?”

“No, unfortunately she has not. She used a picture of a friend and called herself Bethany, then lured me out on this date so she could tell me everything that’s wrong with me. She had a list.”

“Holy crap. That is batshit crazy.”

“Right? It’s been almost twenty years.”

“Sounds like I need extra fortification for this story.” The bourbon made her light-headed, so she got up to rummage in the bag of leftovers from tonight’s wedding. “Hey, do you want some chicken salad? I am almost positive it hasn’t been sitting out too long. So you left when you saw her, obviously.”

He accepted the paper plate. “I guess it’s crazier than I told you. The way she did this was, the friend from the picture actually came to meet me, and we ordered wine and dinner. She seemed nice, a little jittery, but I figured it was just first date, weird circumstances, whatever. Then as soon as she ordered, she excused herself to the restroom, and then here comes Emily.”

“Oh. My. God.” Julia slapped her hand over her mouth. “You are kidding.”

“I wish. At first I thought, this is a funny coincidence. I’m out on this date and here’s my college girlfriend in the same restaurant. I’m looking around for like, her boyfriend or husband or whatever. But it’s just her, and she sits down in my date’s chair. I’m thinking ‘That’s a little forward,’ and then she goes ‘Hello, Dave,’ in this super creepy voice. Suddenly I get this chill up my spine.”

Julia ran a hand along her forearm, where the hairs stood upright. “I’m getting chills right now! I would have freaked out.”

“I was in shock. The waiter brings the wine and she reaches out and takes a big sip, and I was like, ‘Hey, that’s Bethany’s glass,’ but then I see Bethany—or whatever her real name is—going out the front door of the restaurant. That’s when it started to sink in.”

“They seriously put some planning into this.”

“No kidding. So Emily launches into this whole speech about what a terrible boyfriend I was, and how it was unfair to dump her before she got a chance to tell me all the ways I mistreated her. She pulled out this list, in staggering detail, of the dates and times and when I said this or did this or forgot this.”

“Was any of it true?”

“All of it was probably true. I was a nineteen-year-old jackass.”

“Fair enough.”

“At this point, I’m wondering if there’s someone I should call. I have this image of the people in the white coats who always came for Daffy Duck in the cartoons, and I’m thinking, ‘How do you get those guys? Do they have some sort of white coat emergency number?’”

Julia laughed, nearly spitting out a mouthful of chicken salad.

Dave looked pleased. “The waiter comes with the food, and I look up at him for help, because he’s the one sane person I can have contact with and leave the table, and I realize the waiter looks familiar. It’s her brother, Julia. She took me to a restaurant where her freaking brother works.”

Julia’s eyes widened. She swallowed and took a gulp of bourbon, beset with the sudden irrational urge to go make sure all her doors were locked. “No. Way. What did you do?”

“What could I do? When in crazy town, be crazy, I guess. So I say, super-polite, ‘Excuse me a minute, Em.’ Like we’re actually out to dinner together and she’s just telling me about her day. I shake his hand and I’m like, ‘It’s good to see you. Todd, right?’”

“You remembered his name?”

“No. I met him maybe once while we were dating. But he was wearing a nametag.”

“Stop. I can’t take anymore—I have to pee. Hold that thought.”

He waved her away. Julia kicked her shoes off at the bottom of the stairs and scooted up to the bathroom in her room, to avoid making too much noise near the kids’ rooms. She was tipsy, and the vanity lights seemed particularly bright and harsh on her face as she washed her hands. She fussed with her hair a bit and wiped a stray smudge of mascara from beneath her right eye.

What was she doing? This could go very, very wrong.

Time for more bourbon. And just a tiny splash of body spray—not enough to be obvious, just enough to diffuse the food smells of her work uniform.

Downstairs, she stopped at the record player and put on an old Blondie record before returning to the table. She lugged the bin of records with her and put them in an extra chair, catching Dave’s eye. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“What? No. So anyway, Emily. Where was I?”

“You shook Todd’s hand.”

“Right. It turns out, he’s a fan of the blog, and I could tell he felt sort of weird being part of this whole setup, but he’s a good brother and she’s his big sister.”

“Big sisters are a force to be reckoned with.”

“He basically asks us not to make a scene, and Emily goes back to reading her list. I’m not listening anymore, just watching her mouth move and imagining using the candle on the table to set her hair on fire.”

“Yeah,
that’s
not psychotic at all.” Julia gave him a look.

“You try listening to that crazy woman for ten minutes and tell me you don’t get the same idea, and then we’ll talk. By the end, she started talking about herself in third person. ‘I don’t understand why you had to do this to Emily. Why wasn’t Emily good enough? Emily is awesome!’”

“Oh, my,” Julia said.

“Don’t judge my pyromaniac fantasies until you’ve been there.”

She waved her hands in surrender.

“Eventually, I asked her if she was finished, and she said no, and I just said, ‘excuse me one second,’ got up and left.”

“Wow.”

“Right.”

Julia let the room waver warmly around her. “I’m sorry you had a bad date.” She watched the ice clink lazily in the half-glass of bourbon that remained. The amber liquid swirled as she rotated the glass on the table.

“That’s an understatement.” Dave downed what remained in his glass with one gulp and returned it to the table. “But thanks.”

“Have another.” Julia felt suddenly silly. “I am.” Before she could talk herself out of it, she poured three fingers of bourbon over the remaining ice. Three very chubby fingers.

He eyed the bourbon warily and cocked an eyebrow at her.

She held the bottle over his empty glass in invitation. “Come on, it’s rude to let a lady drink alone, right?”

“I hadn’t heard that.” But he smiled. She poured.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said.

She shrugged. “You don’t have to finish it.”

“But there are sober children in China.”

It was an old joke, but her laugh was real. Funny how things got funny again after a few years. Or a few drinks. Funny was kind of a funny word.

Dave said, “Sometimes I wonder if this whole thing wasn’t a huge mistake.”

“What do you mean?” This seemed to require the most sober attention she could muster. She molded her face into a serious expression, hoping he wasn’t thinking of bailing on the babysitting arrangement. Julia had already begun to wonder how she was going to manage in January.

“The whole thing is becoming a freak show. This all started because my daughter wanted me to try to find a relationship, and now it’s…a spectacle. Even if it wasn’t, I don’t know if I’m ready for a real relationship anyway.”

“Because of Emily?”

“No. She was right. But it’s probably more because of Debbie. Who I became when I was married to Debbie. There’s a lot I’m not proud of. Things I said, things I did, things I let go unnoticed.”

“I know,” Julia said. “I just can’t figure out how to
not
be angry.”

“You’re angry?”

“Now
that
is an understatement.” What possessed her to keep talking, she wasn’t sure, but she told Dave all about her confrontation with Adam about Christy and the baseball signing.

“He should’ve checked with you.” Dave said. “That shows no class.”

“It’s not even that. Well, it is. But I wish I could give them what he can give them. I can’t pick them up in a shiny SUV and take them to meet famous baseball players. I can’t afford to be the cool mom. He’s late with child support all the time, which makes it worse. He does the things they want, but I can’t keep up with the stuff they need.”

The tears came strong and fast, surprising her. Dave came around the table and took the seat next to her, putting an arm awkwardly around her shoulder. He must have seen what a mess her face was becoming, because he stood again and handed her a napkin from the sideboard.

“Their weekends with him are like vacations.” She tried to ignore the whiny sound of her own voice. “He can take them to all this amazing stuff. And I can’t—because of money, because of work. When we were a family, I didn’t have to miss stuff.

“Now I’m the homework mom and the therapy mom and the one who has to fight with Mia about getting dressed in the mornings. I have to force Brandon to do things that make him so uncomfortable that he wets himself…” She trailed off, breathing deeply to calm the lump in her throat, and wiped her face. “Thanks.”

“Can I ask,” Dave said softly, “about Brandon? I don’t want to intrude.”

“It’s okay.” She was used to talking about it. “We’ve been seeing a therapist and we’re supposed to be working on his OCD as a family, but the divorce makes everything harder.”

“So it’s something you can work on at home?”

“He’s supposed to be working on it everywhere,” Julia said. Seeing his blank look, she explained. “There are these, they call them irrational thoughts or obsessions, and they make Brandon anxious. When he feels anxious, he does compulsions—little rituals—that make him feel better.”

“Rituals? Like a religious thing?”

“No. Well, it can be. It can be anything. Touching something a certain number of times, walking in a circle, reciting something, counting, cleaning… The rituals feel good in the moment, but they don’t actually help. They make the OCD worse—feed the monster, so to speak—and the cycle continues, getting more and more intense. Each time he gets an obsessive thought, it takes more to calm him down.”

“Like crack.”

“Pardon?”

“What you’re saying. It sounds like a drug addict. Needing more and more of something to feel the same.”

She shrugged. “I guess. Anyway, we’re supposed to try to help Brandon not do his rituals, delay them, do fewer of them, whatever. It’s hard. There are big tantrums sometimes.”

“Crying on the floor, kicking kind of thing?”

“Yes. Or pulling over bookshelves, or throwing a baseball trophy through the window.”

“Julia, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Every family has their thing. It’s just that Adam doesn’t always pitch in like he should. I go to the therapist, and try to tell Adam what to do for Brandon, but I can’t make him do it. I remember the school events, go to the conferences, the birthday parties. And I have to be the president of the fucking PTA. He gets to be the hero and give them ice cream and roller coasters and fun all the time. I know that sounds petty.”

“No,” Dave said. “It doesn’t.”