Getting Warmer (17 page)

“I guess you can just start on your homework,” I said.

At least this way they’d do their homework, or at least some of it.

“Has anyone seen Robert since last week?” I asked as casually as I could. They looked at me blankly. A few kids shook their heads.

“I heard he couldn’t read,” Marisol said. “That he went out for that play and he didn’t know what the paper said.”

The kids stopped rummaging in their backpacks. Their heads shot up.

“Oh,
please
,” I said, rolling my eyes for effect. “This is how rumors get started. Robert tripped over a couple of lines because he was nervous. Stage fright. I guess he’s just sick or something.” I bent my head down to look at some papers. The kids went back to their backpacks. I pretended to believe they were looking for paper and pencils and not their cell phones.

When I had a free period, I went down to the office to tell Jill about my weekend. She was standing next to Nicolette’s desk, leaning on her elbows. Nicolette looked pale and tired. Her hair was lank. A hangover, I assumed.

Jill stood up when she saw me. “Nicolette and Rodney went to Vegas this weekend.”

“Really? I went to Sedona. With Jonathan.”

“You’re not getting it,” Jill said. “Nicolette and Rodney
went to Vegas
.”

“I get it. Casinos. Cigarette smoke. Hookers. Vegas.” I smiled suggestively. “Sedona was incredible.”

Jill rolled her eyes. “Show her your hand, Nic.”

Nicolette held out her left hand and forced a smile.

It took me a minute. “You didn’t.” The band was white gold and speckled with diamond chips. “You did?” I looked back at her face. I realized why she looked so drawn. She wasn’t hungover; she had simply neglected to apply makeup this morning. “But you wanted a big wedding. The bridesmaids were going to wear teal.”

Nicolette began to twist the ring around her finger. “All that really matters is that me and Rodney love each other. And I’d changed my mind about the bridesmaids’ dresses. They were going to wear ice blue.” She burst into tears.

Jill squatted down and assumed her professional tone of voice. “You acted impulsively. You can get the marriage annulled.”

“You mean, like, divorced? No! I love Rodney!”

Jill took her hand. “Why are you so unhappy, then?”

Nicolette paused to take a scratchy institutional tissue from the brown and tan box on her desk. She blew her nose, dabbing into the nostrils to make sure she hadn’t left any residual snot. She threw the used tissue into her metal wastebasket and took Jill’s hand. Jill, to her credit, didn’t flinch.

Finally, Nicolette spoke, almost inaudibly. “Nordstrom.”

“What?”

“I was gonna register at Nordstrom this week. Now it’s too late.”

In her office, Jill filled me in on the details. Rodney had planned the whole thing. In front of the Bellagio, while the fountains swayed to “Singing in the Rain,” he had fallen on one knee and whipped out a little velvet box. He said he’d never loved anyone like this before, not even his second wife. He had already booked the chapel, ordered the flowers: everything. He even took Nicolette to a boutique at Caesar’s Palace, where he bought her a $2,400 dress. The service was tasteful: no Elvis impersonators or show-girls. The flowers were genuine silk.

When Nicolette told her parents, she expected them to be happy. More to the point, she expected them to spring for a reception. But her mother kept saying, “I didn’t get to see my oldest daughter get married!” And her father kept saying, “At least we didn’t have to pay for it.”

“She could send out announcements,” I said. “She’d probably score some gifts.”

“I know, I said that. But all she kept saying was, ‘I want my fucking wedding!’”

“Oh, my gosh. Did Dr. White hear her?”

“No, just the president of the computer club. He’d stopped by to drop off a form.”

“It’s probably good for him.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

When I got home after school, I found my mother sitting on the couch, her bandaged foot on the coffee table, propped up on Southwestern print pillows. She was reading. I leaned over to check the title:
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
.

“Oh, Mommy, are you going to give me a little sister?”

“Funny.” She glanced up without smiling. “Would you believe your sister hasn’t even started taking folic acid?”

I shrugged.

“I can understand why she didn’t take it before she knew she was pregnant. It wasn’t like she was anticipating a baby. But now . . . tsk.” She shook her head and went back to reading.

I wandered over to the kitchen and surveyed the overflowing fruit bowl. After pressing the flesh of a still-firm nectarine, I chose a pluot, which is a cross between a plum and an apricot. My mother buys fruit—or sends my father to buy fruit—that nobody has ever heard of. In the summer, it’s: “That’s not a plum, that’s a pluot.” In the winter: “Anybody can see that’s a tangelo. It’s got a little bumpy thing on the end. Oranges don’t have that.”

I bit into the fruit. It was sweet and juicy. I was eating a lot better now that my parents were home. I wandered back to the sitting area. “Isn’t Shelly the one who should be reading that book?”

“We just sent her a copy from Amazon. She should get it Friday.”

“And the folic acid?”

She turned the page. “I had your father FedEx a bottle today.”

“They do have stores in Rhode Island, you know.”

She pursed her lips at something she had just read. “Do you think your sister knows enough not to eat sushi?”

“If Shelly doesn’t know enough not to get pregnant, she probably doesn’t know enough not to eat sushi.”

My mother put down the book and let out a giant sigh. “What Shelly needs—what Shelly has always needed—is a man who will take care of her.” She shook her head in disgust. “Instead she’s wasted the best years of her life—
the best years
—with that immature, self-centered, self-righteous . . .” Here she mumbled something that sounded an awful lot like “son of a bitch.”

Here is all you really need to know about Frederick. He is thirty-one, three years younger than my sister. My mother thinks that’s significant. “Maybe if she’d find someone her own age, she wouldn’t always have to be the adult in the relationship.” He’s a bit on the short side and not fat, really, but soft and pale, utterly lacking in muscle tone. He has a pleasant enough face; if he took to jogging in the sun every day, he might approach attractive.

But the only thing that truly matters about Frederick, the reason Shelly has devoted six years of her life to him, is this: Frederick is brilliant. Frederick is working on his second PhD, in biostatistics and epidemiology. (I am so not-brilliant that I don’t even know what that means.) His first PhD was in molecular biology. I’m not entirely sure what that is, either, but at least I can pronounce it.

Shelly thinks Frederick will cure cancer some day. Pretty much everybody else thinks Frederick will just stay in school until he runs out of biology graduate programs, at which point he will retire to the basement and devote the rest of his life to reading back issues of
The New Yorker
.

“Your sister wants you to call her.”

I looked at the bulging tote I had hauled home from school. “I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

My mother glared at me. “Your sister needs our support right now.”

 

She answered on the third ring.

“Hi, Shelly.”

“Hi.”

I waited for her to talk. She didn’t. “Mom said you wanted me to call you.” That didn’t come out quite right.

“I never said that.” She cleared her throat. “But, um, it’s nice that you did.”

“So . . .” I said.

“So . . .”

“How are you?”

She snorted. “Well, let’s see. The man I thought I loved is a fucking asshole. I feel like I’m going to puke, like, twenty-two hours a day. And I have no idea how I’m going to support a baby on my crap-ass income.”

“But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”

She didn’t laugh. “I never even thought I’d be able to get pregnant. My periods were so irregular, every doctor I went to see said my hormones were out of balance.” That was news to me, though it did explain a lot. “And that piece-of-shit Frederick, he thinks I did this to trap him. That’s what he said. ‘You’re trying to trap me.’ Fucking, piece-of-shit asshole.” She blew her nose.

“Like he’s such a prize,” I said.

She was quiet. And, then, a whisper: “He’s really brilliant, you know.”

Robert lived in a one-car garage townhome in the Sonora Sunset town houses. The complex was about as far as you could get from Agave High and still be within the required limits. An unarmed octogenarian in a security uniform manned a tiny gatehouse.

“I’m here to see Robert Baumgartner,” I told him. “Unit B seventy-six.” He gave me directions without calling Robert or checking my identification, more Wal-Mart greeter than gatekeeper. Still, his presence allowed Sonora Sunset’s residents to boast that they lived in a gated community, which mattered at least as much as personal safety.

The townhomes, rather predictably, were white stucco with red roofs, their garages like row after row of great, yawning mouths. Here and there, silver-haired seniors in pastel track suits strode by, fulfilling their daily power walk requirements before the sun got too hot. Mostly, though, the complex was quiet, even by Arizona standards. Unit B seventy-six was a middle unit, near the back of the development. A tidy white car sat in the driveway, the garage door closed. Robert’s clunker was nowhere to be seen.

I didn’t really expect him to open the door; it was early, after all, not yet 7 A.M. I’d stopped by on the way to school, hoping I could encourage Robert to return to class. If he was here, he’d probably be sleeping. Still, it was worth a shot.

He opened the door almost immediately. He was even dressed, in gym shorts and a Nike T-shirt, although maybe that’s what he’d slept in. Comforting smells wafted out from behind him.

“Did I wake you?” I asked after a moment’s silence.

“No,” he said. “I was just cleaning up from breakfast.” He blinked at me. His eyes were brown and round, fringed with thick, black lashes. Standing in the doorway, he looked both younger and older than at school: younger because he seemed less cocky, more forthright; older because he was so clearly in charge of his household.

“Can I come in?”

He stepped aside. I was prepared for dimmed lights, a big screen television with a game cube or Nintendo or Xbox or possibly all three.

The walls were Southwestern mauve, the furniture blond wood. There was a television, of course, but it was small and neatly stacked on a freestanding glass-and-bamboo bookshelf, between a potted jade plant and Robert’s framed high school picture.

“Are your parents home?”

“My mother’s sleeping,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, silently disapproving.

“She’s a nurse,” he said, scratching his arm. “Works the night shift. She takes care of premature babies.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling chastened for the flash I’d had of his mother as a crack addict. “And your father?”

“Left when I was three.”

I nodded and waited for him to say more. He didn’t. “Does your mother know that you haven’t been going to school?”

He paused, looked down at the carpet for a minute, then back up at me. “Do you know I’m eighteen? ’Cause that means I’m responsible for myself.”

“I know that you’re eighteen,” I said. “And I’m not trying to get you into trouble. I just want you to come back to school.”

“Why?” he said. “What’s the point?”

“How do you expect to get a job without a high school diploma?”

He ignored my question and wandered into the tiny kitchen. “You hungry?”

I started to say no and then realized I was starving. I hadn’t had time to eat before leaving the house, and my mother, now that she was injured, had stopped serving me breakfast in bed.

“The omelet’s all gone, but this is pretty good.” He handed me a blueberry muffin. So that’s what smelled so good.

“Your mother bakes after working all night?”

“No.” He smiled. “I’m the cook of the house.”

I cupped the muffin in my hand so I wouldn’t get crumbs on the tan linoleum floor and took a bite. “You made this?” It was simultaneously lighter and creamier than the usual blueberry muffin. I took another bite. “What’s in here?”

“The usual stuff, plus sour cream and cream cheese. A little lemon rind.”

“This is amazing.” I looked at him. “I never would have taken you for a baker.”

“You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?” he asked, half smiling. “It wouldn’t do much for my rep.”

“Your secret is safe with me.” I took another bite. The kitchen was quiet except for the hum of the air conditioner. “You never answered my question. About how you’re going to get a job without a high school diploma.”

He took a muffin for himself and placed it on a napkin on the glass-topped kitchen table. “I already have a job. At the hospital laundry.” He settled himself into a chair, his long legs spread wide and braced on the floor, as if for stability.

I sat down in the chair across from him. “And that’s what you want to be doing twenty years from now?” I put the remainder of the muffin in my mouth and chewed slowly.

“I’ll work my way up. There’s this guy I know, works in the hospital kitchen, says he might be able to get me a job in there.”

“Is that what your mother wants for you?”

He sighed. “Listen. My mother has done everything for me. Everything. She’s tired, like, all the time. She could live in a bigger place than this, a nicer place, without so many old people, but she wanted to make sure I was in a good school district. But I just . . . I can’t do it.” He poked at his muffin but didn’t eat it. I thought, what a waste.