Goodbye To All That (25 page)

“It’s just coffee,” his father insisted. “It’s not like I’m sleeping with her.”

“Good.”

“I can’t even imagine
 . . .
” His father shuddered, as if the very idea of sex with the dermatologist disgusted him. Then he seemed to reconsider. “Gert did say she was very pretty.”

“Just take it slow,” Doug warned him. “If you walk too far down that path, it may be impossible to retrace your steps.”

His father blinked a couple of times as he digested Doug’s metaphor. “How would you know? You’re an expert on having sex with people who aren’t your wife?”

“I was thirty when I got married,” Doug said. “And I wasn’t a virgin.”

His father’s dark eyes flashed, not with disapproval but with competitive fire. He probably hadn’t been a virgin when he’d gotten married, either. But he’d gotten married right out of college. Forty-two years was a long time to be having sex with the same woman.

Yet Doug could imagine nothing he’d like more than to have sex with Brooke for forty-two years. The Brooke he knew, though. Not the Brooke with feathery hair in layers of gold and bronze and copper, and probably a few other metals, all done up by a Manhattan-based pretty-boy who might, God forbid, wind up becoming his brother-in-law.

“So,” his father broke into his thoughts, “what’s up with Mackie and Maddie? How are my two little angels?” He took the iron from Doug and arranged the shirt on the ironing board so he could press the front.

His ironing services no longer needed, Doug flopped onto the sofa and drank some beer. His digestive system was empty—better than full of egg foo yong from Colonel Ping’s, he consoled himself—and the lager’s bitter, yeasty bubbles sloshed inside his stomach with nothing solid to absorb them. Thinking about Brooke’s hair stole his appetite, though. Not even pretzels or beer nuts could tempt him. Not even a sprig of grapes or a banana from his mother’s fruit bowl.

“The girls are great,” he said, wondering whether they would someday grow up and journey all the way to New York City to change their hair styles. These days, they both wore their hair straight and shoulder length. Madison liked to clip brightly colored barrettes shaped like flowers and butterflies into her locks, and Mackenzie sometimes insisted on having a single narrow braid woven from the hair beside her left ear, but otherwise their hair was a sweet, honey-blond color, the color genetics had given them.

“What a pair,” Doug’s father said, shaking his head and smiling fondly. He lifted his shirt, scrutinized it and draped it on a hanger, evidently satisfied that it would pass muster with the dermatologist. “I can tell them apart all the time, now. It takes me a minute or two sometimes, but I’m usually right. How does Melissa tell them apart so well? You and Brooke, of course you don’t need a minute or two. But Melissa sees them only once in a while, and she can always tell one from the other, right away. How does she do that?”

Melissa’s name dragged him back to thoughts of Melissa’s boyfriend. “So, Melissa’s still with that hairdresser,” he said experimentally. His father’s reaction would inform him as to whether this was a subject they could discuss.

“The goy? Marlon Brando?”

“Brondo,” Doug corrected him. “Something Brondo.”
Lucas Brondo,
he knew damned well. Since his father didn’t veer back into mushy grandpa comments about the girls, Doug decided to share his uneasiness about the situation with Brooke. “It’s the weirdest thing, Dad—Brooke arranged to have this Brondo guy do her hair.”

“Brooke? Your Brooke? What, she couldn’t find someone with a scissor and a mirror closer than two hundred miles away?”

“That was exactly what I thought. Why the hell would a woman travel all the way to New York City to get her hair done?”

His father settled on the sofa next to him, lifted his beer and snorted. “You’re asking me why women do what they do? I know a lot, Doug, but not about that.”

“It just
 . . .
shook me up,” Doug said. “The whole thing. Her going so far away for a haircut.”

His father twisted to study him. “You’re having problems? You and Brooke?”

“No. Not at all,” Doug insisted. “We’re fine. It just
 . . .
” He shrugged. “She went all that way, and she never even told me she was going. And it’s
 . . .
Melissa’s boyfriend.” Another shrug. He didn’t want to come across as desperate. He
wasn’t
desperate. Shaken up, that was all.

“So? Was it worth the trip? Does she look two hundred miles better?”

“I don’t know.” Doug sighed and stared down into the small-bore opening of the bottle in his hand. “She looks great,” he conceded.

His father didn’t miss his glum tone. “You like her hair better the other way? Let her know. Tell her to let her hair grow back out the way it used to be. Communication is important. Like I should be giving anyone marital advice.”

Doug managed a smile. Back when he was a teenager, when he was schtupping Lynette Baker every chance he got, he’d never asked his father for advice on his social life. Nor had he confided in his father during his college years, when he’d squeezed a semi-decent social life into his pre-med schedule. Certainly not in medical school, when he’d had a bizarre relationship with Jennifer Zelnik, a fellow med school student who disliked him as much as he disliked her but, Christ, they were good in bed together, so they’d fucked and fought throughout the four-year slog and then gone their separate ways. Not once, in all those years, with all those women, had Doug turned to his father for guidance on how to survive a relationship. The last time he’d discussed women with his father, as he recalled, was shortly after his bar mitzvah, when his father had bought him a package of condoms and said, “God forbid you should use these. They expire in three years—see the expiration date?—and I expect you to throw them out because you’re too young to need them. But better you have them and don’t need them than you need them and don’t have them.”

Doug admitted that that was pretty wise counsel, actually. “The fact is,” he said, “Brooke’s new hair looks really good.”

“Well, of course,” his father said. “She’s so pretty, that wife of yours. Not that pretty is everything. There was a popular song when I was in college, about how if you want to be happy you should marry an ugly woman. Calypso. That was very big then, Calypso music.”

“I know that song,” Doug muttered. It was one of those catchy, bouncy tunes that, once lodged in your mind, plagued you like tinnitus. “Mom was pretty and you married her.”

“And look at me now. Ironing my own shirts.”

“Making a coffee date with a dermatologist. Who’s also pretty, according to Gert.”

“I shouldn’t have called her. I should have asked Gert to introduce me to some ugly women.” His father laughed. “So, this is why you came here? To tell me about Brooke’s new haircut?”

When his father put it that way, it sounded remarkably stupid. “I just wanted to see how you were doing,” he said. “Maybe I had a premonition about your struggles with the iron.”

“It was good timing, your coming here. You want something to eat? I picked up some cold cuts and torpedo rolls. Sliced turkey, low-salt. And some lettuce and tomatoes, and a couple of pickles. I’m eating terribly since your mother left.”

The cold cuts didn’t sound as terrible as anything from Colonel Ping. Doug would have eaten take-out from Lotus Garden. But Colonel Ping, and Brooke’s hair, and the girls spending all afternoon at a friend’s house because their mother’s tresses were being ministered to by Melissa’s boyfriend
 . . .

“Nah. I’m not that hungry,” he said, which was true. He was actually kind of queasy. “Anyway, Brooke’s got food waiting for me at home.”

“Then go home, eat her food and count your blessings. I don’t care what the song says—if you’ve got a pretty woman who cooks you dinner, count your blessings.”

Doug didn’t bother to mention that Brooke hadn’t cooked his dinner, that in fact she was an unenthusiastic, uninspired cook. Truth was imbedded in his father’s statement—he had Brooke, and he ought to count his blessings.

Really, everything was perfect between them, hairstyle notwithstanding. It was as perfect as it had ever been, wasn’t it? It would be even more perfect if he could get his parents back together so they could baby-sit for the girls in February. Brooke would be so grateful if he accomplished that. He’d be her hero—more heroic in her eyes than he already was.

“Do me a favor, Dad,” he said as he drained his beer bottle and stood. “Don’t fall in love with the dermatologist. Work things out with Mom.”

“We’ll see,” his father said, sounding both cryptic and weary. He rose, too, and ambled with Doug to the kitchen to drop off their empty bottles. From there he accompanied Doug to the door. “Do
me
a favor, Doug. If you hear anything about your mother having coffee with some other man, let me know, okay?”

“Sure.” As if his mother would share such news with him. With Jill, perhaps. Doug ought to give her a call.

“And let me know if she changes her hair, too,” his father added. “I like it the way it’s always been. I don’t want her to change it.”

Doug thought about handing his father’s advice back to him, telling the old man he ought to communicate with his wife. But they’d been communicating when they’d decided to separate, hadn’t they?

Jealousy might bring them together again a hell of a lot faster than communication.

After arriving safely on the strip-mall side of the street, she walked around the parking lot to the rear of the building. An eighteen-wheeler, its sides adorned with the fluffy-teddy-bear logo of a toilet paper company, was being unloaded by a driver as Carlo watched. Ruth waved, then turned toward the back door and noticed the young man leaning against the cement wall. She immediately recognized his lanky build, the woolly hair tumbling around his face, the red apron extending below the edge of his battered leather jacket and the glint of silver at the outer corner of his left eyebrow.

He was smoking.

“Idiot,” she muttered, stalking across the asphalt to confront him. “Wade Smith, what the hell are you doing?”

He gave her a crooked smile, then eyed the cigarette in his hand. “Smoking?”

“Do you know how unhealthy that is?”

“Hey, come on,” he said amiably. “Don’t give me a hard time.”

“You think this is a hard time? You should hear my husband.” She never talked about Richard with her coworkers, but this morning the statement slid out easily, without thought. He was still her husband. She could still use his expertise to make a point. “My husband is a cardiologist. He treats people who smoke cigarettes. Their arteries are a mess. Their hearts, their lungs, their throats, their gums and teeth, they get strokes, they get cancer, they get phlebitis—”

“Okay, okay.” Wade’s smile hadn’t been big to begin with, and now it was gone. He turned away and took a defiant drag on his cigarette.

Ruth wasn’t that easily silenced. “It’s a terrible habit.”

“It’s not a habit. This is the first smoke I’ve had in six months.”

“Second,” Carlo noted with a smirk. Apparently he’d been eavesdropping from his post near the truck. “First one was five minutes ago.”

Ruth clicked her tongue in disgust. She’d gotten used to Wade’s hair and his facial jewelry. She’d grown fond of his low-key personality, his patience, his surprisingly unsarcastic humor. She was not going to stand by while he sucked poison into his body. “Put that thing out, Wade. Let’s go inside and get you some nicotine gum. Or one of those patches. With our employee discount, it won’t be that expensive.”

“A lot cheaper than cigarettes,” Carlo added.

Ruth sent him a grateful look.