Good Grief (17 page)

“Can’t I come?” Crystal whines as I drive her to her friend Melvin’s, where she’s supposed to spend the night.

“Nope, sorry.”

“But you said we could sew!”

“We will, just not tonight.”

“I’m really good at bowling.”

“We’re not
going
bowling. My friend’s been hurt.”

Crystal kicks the dashboard with her bare foot.

I glare at her. She bows her head and frowns, hugging her grungy backpack to her chest.

“Think about something fun you’d like to do this weekend,” I tell her.

“I could watch your stuff while you’re in the hospital, and then we could all—”

The glass hospital doors jolt open automatically, revealing the cavernous hallway into the ER.

“Move!” a man shouts as he bumps past me toward the front desk, clutching a bloody towel to the side of his head. I scramble in after him. The doors slice shut behind me.

At the front desk I tell an admitting clerk that I’m there to pick up Drew. “I’m Drew Ellis’s . . .”
Person to contact in case of emergency?
“Ride,” I tell her, not wanting to elevate my status.

She leads me down the hall to Drew, who sits behind a tan curtain on a gurney, examining a pair of crutches. His face brightens when he sees me. Even his
wrinkles
are handsome—intelligent lines across his forehead, crinkly crow’s-feet when he smiles. Ethan’s face always lit up when I walked into a room. I was grateful for being loved this unconditionally—loved for just showing up! But he knew all of my flaws and foibles.

“No breaks,” Drew says proudly. His right arm is held close to his body in a sling, his fingers poking stiffly out of an Ace bandage. He wiggles them. “Only a few stitches.” He points to his knee, lumpy with bandages under his jeans, which are torn and streaked with blood.

I must blanch; he quickly insists that he’s fine, only a little banged up.

As I listen to Drew’s story of getting hit—a pickup truck packed with teenagers turning right on red without stopping—my pulse takes off and my head swims. I’m distracted by the red sharps container on the wall behind him. It overflows with a tangled plastic catheter dotted with tiny beads of bright red blood. Beyond that, a row of empty gurneys lines the wall, their black cushions gleaming under the bright lights. I wonder what happened to the people lying on them, whether they got to go home.

Drew says he stopped at the store to buy me daffodils and was headed back to his car when
wham!.
I picture him sprawled in the gutter. Then my train of thought is interrupted by an awful smell: rubbing alcohol. The stark odor of illness. The smell of the prep pads I rubbed over Ethan’s hip before giving him his pain shots.

There must be a place to sit down here. I take a step toward Drew’s gurney, but there’s no chair. I consider the floor, spotting a brownish quarter-size stain on the linoleum that could be blood. Then the whole room turns inside out.

“Miss Stanton?” A blurry nurse hovers over me.

I’m a Mrs.,
I want to tell her. No, I’m not.

“I’m not,” I stutter.

“You’re not Sophie Stanton?”

“I am.”

“Okay, honey. What day is it?”

“It’s, um . . .” It’s my day off. The day the theater’s dark. My first-date day. “Monday,” I stutter.

“You fainted. You’re fine. You didn’t hit your head.”

“What
did
I hit?” Fainted! How mortifying.

“You fell forward, onto the gurney.”

Which gurney?
Drew’s
gurney? It’s been a long time since I’ve dated, but I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to do a face plant on your suitor’s gurney on the first date.

“Are you all right?” Drew asks, hobbling over to me.

He’s got his jacket on, one sleeve dangling at his side, and he’s clutching some paperwork.

“I’m fine,” I tell him.

Drew and I head across the hospital parking lot toward my car. Although I promised the nurse that I was all right, I’m still light-headed. Drew fumbles with the crutches, leaning into me accidentally. I cup his elbow in my hand. He leans closer for support, readjusts. His body gives off warmth. My knees wobble.

I try to suppress the dawning realization that this is a stellar first-date story.
Your father and I had our first date at the hospital!
No. Stop that. How can there be a nuclear family in my future without Ethan?

“Oh,
ow,
” Drew moans as he hops along the uneven asphalt.

“Look at us.” I laugh and touch my fingers to the side of my head, as if to be sure it’s still there. “I’m sorry I fainted,” I add. “Since my husband died I don’t do well at hospitals.”

The word
husband
hangs in the air before us.

“Oh.
Oh.
” Drew stops, touches my shoulder. “God, I shouldn’t have asked you to come down here.”

“It’s okay.”

A car swerves into the driveway of the hospital, the driver gunning the engine up to the ER. Drew rears back and we both almost tumble over. We right ourselves, laughing.

“Let’s rest,” Drew says, making a U-turn toward a nearby bench.

We sit side by side on the bench in silence. I feel as though we’re two kids who don’t know each other yet, waiting for the bus on the first day of school.

19

Drew Ellis is a laugher. He throws his head back and pounds the table with his fist until his face reddens and tears fill his eyes and you can’t help but feel that you’re the funniest person on earth when you’re telling him a story.

Over dinner on our second date (which is really our first date, since our hospital get-together ended after a short ride home), I recount my corporate demise at Gorgatech. When I get to the “Gentlemen, start your hair dryers” part, I’m afraid I’m going to have to perform the Heimlich on Drew.

“What a
terrible
job!” he gasps, drying his eyes.

I never thought of it as a terrible job. I thought of myself as a terrible employee. For the first time, I see the humor in my public relations career.

“Yeah!” I agree, laughing.
Laughing
for the first time about Lara and the patch.
For immediate release: This job sucks!

We eat at a restaurant downtown that features oddly vertical entrées, ingredients stacked high and topped with feathery sprigs of rosemary, making them look like ladies’ hats.

Drew Ellis is a listener. He leans forward and makes direct eye contact, tilting his head as if to bring one ear closer. I hate to make comparisons to my husband, but I can’t help it. Ethan never listened this carefully. He was always distracted—a part of his brain working over chinks in software code. Sometimes several sentences into a conversation Ethan would yelp, “What?
What?
”—a tip that he obviously hadn’t been listening. This made me feel boring and sometimes, as I told a story, my voice would lower until I decided that what I had to say was dumb. “Oh, never
mind,
” I’d grumble.

“I’m listening!” he’d insist.

Drew Ellis is decisive. He glances at the menu for only a moment before choosing the filet. And he seems to have made up his mind right away that he likes me. Or is he this way with all of his dates? Fawning and laughing and complimenting. Either way, I’m not sure I’m up to this undivided attention, this pressure to break out of the sweatpants comfort zone and be clever all the time.

Drew Ellis has lots of friends. We sit at a table overlooking the street, and when festival actors passing by the window spot him, they burst in to say hello, lavishing us with hellos and handshakes.

Drew Ellis is generous. He leaves our waitress a big tip and waves people ahead of him in traffic as we pull away from the restaurant in his rattly old BMW.

Drew Ellis is tidy. His car is immaculate on the inside, nothing but a fountain pen and a small box of Kleenex on the seat and a notebook for recording gas mileage. It’s not like riding in Ethan’s car, where you’d be ankle-deep in a heap of take-out trash and used coffee mugs.

Drew Ellis smells sweet, like clothes that just came out of the dryer. As we say good night on my front porch, he gives me a once-on-the-mouth, respectful, I-know-you-recently-lost-your-husband-and-more-than-anything-you-just-need-companionship kiss. Despite its simplicity, it is the most complicated kiss of my life. My first post-Ethan, widow kiss. But it is also a relief, like peeing after a long car ride. Drew whispers, “Good night,” and heads down the front walk. I stand paralyzed on the porch, a warm boozy feeling pooling in my knees. I hate him for being such a terrible good-riddance list candidate.

Drew Ellis keeps calling my house.

“Hi, just wondering how you’re doing,” he says, his impeccable actor diction echoing through my answering machine. “Thought maybe you’d like to take a drive out to Jackson this weekend.”

I can’t call Drew Ellis back. If I call him I might go out with him again and if I go out with him again I might fall in love with him and if I fall in love with him he might dump me or die.

“‘Feelings, nothing more than feelings . . . ,’” he croons into the machine the next evening, hamming it up and then laughing at his own joke. “Listen,” he adds, his voice lowering with seriousness, “I completely understand if you’d rather not go out again. Just give me a call to let me know you’re okay.”

Instead of calling Drew Ellis, I fill out a registration form for night classes in the culinary arts program at the local university. Because I don’t think I’m going to master this fondant thing on my own. Besides, I don’t need an actor boyfriend; I need a vocation, a new career. When I get to the dreaded question that stains every starting-your-life-over-again form—
Person to contact in case of emergency
—I write:
George Clooney.
I seal the application, stick it in the mailbox on the porch, then start a double batch of vanilla cake batter so I can practice frosting.

Soon the whole house smells like a bakery. For hours I work on perfecting fondant, until the edges of the cakes are crisp and even and the sheen on top is as smooth as glass. When I run out of cake layers I ice a shoebox, then an old Styrofoam kickboard I find in the garage. Squeezing pink, blue, and yellow icing through the tubes over the fondant, I try roses, balloons, and cursive writing. I wish imaginary people happy birthday—
Quentin
and
Zachary
—so I can master more challenging letter combinations.

Despite the sweet, buttery smell of the cakes, I have no desire to sample them. It seems the more I work with food, the less I feel like eating it. Maybe it’s simply that finding enjoyable work is as satisfying as curling up with a box of Mallomars.

Exhausted, with fondant cemented under my fingernails, I fall asleep in my clothes on the sofa. I dream that Chef Alan takes all the entrées off the menu at Le Petit Bistro, replacing them with desserts. As he crosses out the veal Oscar and shrimp scampi, I notice that his tangle of a beard is made of spun sugar.

Drew Ellis shows up at Le Petit Bistro to invite me to his house for dinner.

“Sorry I haven’t called,” I tell him, hoping for once that Chef Alan will charge out of his office and interrupt. “I’ve been busy.”

Drew nods with interest. “What have you been up to?”

“Um . . .”
Decorating shoeboxes with frosting?
“Signing up for cooking school. . . .” My voice trails off. I’m not sure if I’m ready to tell anyone about my new career ambitions. It’s like telling people you’re quitting smoking or going on a diet. You feel silly later if things don’t work out.

“Great.” He points to the strawberry rhubarb pies cooling on wire racks, ruby filling bubbling through golden brown lattice crust. “You’ve obviously got a natural talent.”

Sometimes I’m wary of Drew’s knack for saying just the right thing. Before I know it, I’m agreeing to have dinner at his house on Monday night when we’re both off from work.

“Great,” he says. “It’s a date.”

There’s that word again.

Drew Ellis can’t cook. There’s nothing in his refrigerator but a bag of potatoes that have grown eyes and tentacles, and the smell is so sour that I wonder what decaying matter he threw away just before my arrival. This isn’t in keeping with his tidy car!

He’s set the coffee table in front of the fireplace in the living room with a bottle of Chardonnay, wineglasses, paper plates (one of which looks used), candles, and a little bouquet of double delight roses from his garden. He hands me a take-out menu from a Chinese restaurant and insists that I make all the choices.

Drew Ellis keeps books in his dishwasher. Books! After we finish our kung pao and mu shu, I clear the coffee table and open the dishwasher to load the forks and knives. There, where the plates go, are plays by Tennessee Williams and George Bernard Shaw, lined up in alphabetical order, spines facing up.

“Oh, my bookshelves are all so full!” Drew says, waving at the books. “I hand-wash.” He adds that he rarely eats at home, buying most of his meals at the diner off of I-5, where they serve “great” biscuits and gravy. I’m disappointed by this overall disregard for food.

Despite his stinky refrigerator, Drew Ellis is a neat freak. As he fixes us coffee, I notice that all of the handles on the mugs in his cupboard point in the same direction. On our way back to the living room, he’s compelled to straighten my shoes by the door. When I start the crossword puzzle in pen, he gasps and fetches a jar of freshly sharpened pencils.

Don’t ask
why
I’m doing the crossword puzzle on a date. Suddenly I feel the need to keep occupied. The room’s too primed for romance. Logs crackling in the fire, jazz piano moaning on the stereo. I swear I can hear the wine breathing in our glasses. While I wouldn’t mind a little post-kung pao ravishing before the fire, I’m certainly not brave enough to facilitate it. As Drew adds a log, I sneak a peek at him from behind the newspaper. He’s handsome, but not
impossibly
handsome, as I’d first thought. Slightly beakish nose, brown hair thinning a bit at the crown of his head. His forehead is a little too high, his eyes set a little too deep. Only a little, but still. He looks up. I return to the puzzle, the pencil point snapping and flying across the room.

Drew Ellis suffers from stage fright. Stage fright! Mr. Handsome-self-confident-voice-projected-across-the-room-like-a-javelin. As we split a Toblerone bar for dessert, he tells me about his job as an actor, describing intense preperformance jitters.

“I’m fine once I get
on
stage,” he explains, “it’s the hour leading up to the show.”

“What happens?” I’ve given up on the crossword. We sit cross-legged in front of the fire, our knees barely touching, an electric current running between them. I try to seem unfazed by Drew’s closeness.

“Shaking, sweaty hands, racing pulse. All the symptoms of a heart attack, basically. A thirty-second, three-pound-weight-loss trip to the bathroom. You get the picture.”

I’m about to tell Drew just how
much
I get the picture when I recall the magazine article I read last night: “Dating Dos and Don’ts.”
Don’t share your insecurities!
I even used a highlighter pen on the article, studying up on how to be single again the way you’d prep for a final.

“What are you afraid of?” I ask him.

“That I’ll forget my lines.”

“Have you ever?”

“No.” He sits up straighter, eyes widening. “But it’s more than that. That I’ll lose my job. That I’ll be a washed-up actor doing the dinner theater circuit in the Catskills, singing ‘Copacabana’ to a roomful of geriatrics.”

“Wow. That’s a very specific fear.”

“My shrink helped me put it into words.”

“
You
go to a shrink?”

“I’m
from
New York.”

“Drew, I’ve read your reviews. There’s no way you’ll ever lose your job.”

“Once I was in a musical in Manhattan that opened and closed the same night. By noon the next day I was filling out an application at Brew Burger.”

“Right. And how many years ago was that?”

He laughs. “Twenty.”

“That’s all I’m saying.”

He kisses me. Cool, sweet mango lips, warm tongue. Not my husband.

He pulls away and we both stare into the fire.

Finally I ask to use the bathroom.

Drew trails behind me. He says he wants to explain his bathroom floor. He started remodeling months ago but couldn’t decide on tiles. Brushed limestone or plain linoleum?

As I step onto the splintery plywood subfloor, exposed nails cutting through my socks. Drew pulls back the shower curtain to show me a case of tiles in the tub that he doesn’t like but hasn’t gotten around to exchanging.

Good, Drew Ellis is a waffler, a procrastinator.

“These look like bird poop.” He picks up a tile and frowns at the coin-size brown splotches in the pattern. “Why are you smiling?” he asks, looking up at me.

Because you’ve got foibles.
Now that I’ve got material for a good-riddance list, I may actually be able to date Drew Ellis.