Here Today, Gone to Maui (25 page)

“It’s kind of over the line,” he mumbled.

“It doesn’t look like an office,” Tiara said. She was right. It had a big plate-glass window over a low strip of beige stucco, and—were those yellow booths inside? It reminded me of something. What was it?

“It looks like a Subway sandwich shop,” Tiara said.

“It’s just a work space,” Michael snarled. “And the booths work really well for desks.”

“Was it once a Subway?” I had to know.

“Not for a whole bunch of years,” he said.

 

 

Out on the deck, the three of us scanned the ocean for whales and ate the dinner I’d made: grilled mahimahi topped with mango salsa, Kula greens tossed with a citrus vinaigrette, steamed rice, and, of course, the pineapple-shaped lemon cake. The air was perfect: warm with just the right amount of moisture and a touch of a flower-scented breeze. Below us, waves playfully slapped the rocks.

“So this photographer at the condo was saying this exposure could totally open the window for me to do other things,” Tiara said. “Reality shows, print ads, the sky’s the limit.” She gestured with her fork as she yapped, launching a tiny chunk of mango that just managed to miss my shoulder. It hit my hair instead.

“Open doors.” I slid the mango off a strand.

“Huh?” Her fork stopped moving.

“The expression is ‘open doors,’ not ‘open the window.’ ”

“When a door closes, a window opens,” Michael added helpfully.

“But a door didn’t close,” I said.

Michael picked up the wine bottle to refill my glass. “Boyfriend disappears, she finds out he had another woman? I’d call that a closed door. Slammed, even.” He picked up his wineglass by the stem, his brown eyes crinkling in amusement.

A cell phone rang. Michael made a Pavlovian grab for his pocket, but it wasn’t his phone, it was Tiara’s—which, I feel the need to point out, she’d encrusted in pink rhinestones.

“It’s my mom!” she squealed, opening the phone and scampering back into the house—at least, as much as a person can scamper on heels. “Mommy! Did you see me on TV?” She shut the French doors behind her.

“The picture really didn’t look like you,” Michael said.

“Sure it did.”

He sipped his wine, considering. “It looked like you on a really lousy day. You didn’t look that bad, all things considered.”

We drank our wine and gazed at the sky. The sun was so huge and orange that it hurt my eyes.

“So, how’d you start your company?” I asked.

He raised his eyebrows. “What did Jimmy tell you?”

I thought back. “He said he didn’t want to work for anyone else, so he just got some money together and did it.”

“That’s not so far from the truth,” Michael said. “In college—I went to UCLA—I got really into surfing.”

“Your parents must have been thrilled.”

“Oh—very.” He grinned. “It was exactly what they’d pictured when I said I wanted to go to college on the West Coast. Anyway, I had this plain black wetsuit I’d bought used, and it seemed really boring. So one day when I was supposed to be in class, I bought some fabric paints and painted a school of fish on it.”

“What class did you skip?”

“Business.”

My mouth twitched.

He smiled. “Okay, so maybe I should have made it to that one. Anyway, the other surfers were all, ‘Hey, dude! That suit? Is so. Totally. Awesome.’ ” For a guy who owned a wetsuit company, Michael did a lousy impression of a surfer boy. “Some of them asked me to paint their suits, too.”

“And that was it? You just got into business?”

“Well, no. Fabric paint doesn’t hold up so well in salt water. After a few times in the ocean, the suits looked like crap.”

“Did people get mad?”

“Nah. Surfers don’t get mad. They just get . . . less mellow. At any rate, after college, I had a couple of sales jobs and hated them. I started diving, and it became the thing I lived for, the only thing that kept me going during the week. I started playing around with wetsuits again and finally figured out how to make the designs last.

“People kept saying, ‘You could sell those,’ so about six years ago, I decided to give it a shot. My parents lent me a few thousand dollars to get started. I found a manufacturer, did some really basic designs, and started selling the suits out of the back of my van. Two years ago, I hired Ana—her designs blow mine out of the water.”

“So to speak.”

“Right.” He sipped his wine, smiling over the glass.

Beyond us, the sun slipped down, down, and finally disappeared into the sea. “Another day in paradise,” I quipped.

“There’s no place I’d rather be,” he said with complete sincerity.

For the first time all week, I woke up the next morning feeling almost happy. The bed had a down-filled pillow top; it was like sleeping on a cloud. Instead of cars pulling into the Maui Hi parking lot, the rhythm of the waves had lulled me to sleep and kept me there.

In this mood, even the “Plain Jane” segment seemed laughable. At noon, the police would deliver a statement revealing Jimmy’s identity and declaring me (and Tiara, yeah, sure, whatever) to be innocent victims. Soon the public would lose interest in all of us.

After brewing a pot of coffee (Folger’s, which seemed so wrong in the land of Kona coffee), I took my mug out to my own personal lanai. The ocean was calm and silver blue, the air damp and salty. And Folger’s coffee turned out to be far better than I would have guessed. For the first time in days, I felt like I could breathe.

It was two hours later in California, so I called the office.

“What are you wearing?” I asked Lena, a frequent recipient of my “appropriate office attire” spiel.

She laughed. “You perv!”

“Lena . . .” I tried to sound threatening, but a whale jumping in the distance made me grin.

“White blouse, black skirt, totally boring. I look like a waitress.”

“How many buttons are undone?” I asked.

Lena sighed and then paused, presumably to button up her gaping shirt. “Only one button open. Though I’ll tell you, this high neck is kind of cutting off my circulation.”

“You’ll live,” I said.

“You sound better than the last time we talked,” she said. “Back to your usual bossy self.”

“Thanks—I think. I feel better.”

“Is it because of that other guy—the one they showed on the news? Because he’s kind of hot—all dark and mysterious.”

“He’s not mysterious,” I said. “He just doesn’t like to get his picture taken. Anyway, I just wanted to check in, see if anyone needed me.”

“Things are pretty quiet here,” she said. “But there’s a woman who’s been calling for you, says she knows you from high school.”

Even though I went home for Christmas every December, it had been years since I’d looked up any of my old friends, most of whom had moved away years ago. “Really? What’s her name?”

“Let me check . . . here it is. Katie Rothman.”

“Katie!” I felt a surge of something vaguely resembling happiness.

“So you do know her?”

“Oh, yeah, we used to be—we were really close. Did she leave a number?”

My heart raced as I dialed the New Jersey phone number. I hadn’t seen Katie since her wedding to Ron, and I hadn’t given her my new contact information when I’d moved. Still, I thought about her every time I went home, and I found myself missing her at odd moments.

“Hello?”

“Katie, this is—”

“Jane!” she crowed. “I thought you’d fallen off the face of the earth!”

“Your parents moved,” I said lamely. “I didn’t have a number for you . . .”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You’ve got it now. How’ve you been?”

“Good,” I said reflexively. Then: “Well, not really.”

“Thorry,” she said. “Thtupid question.” Katie’s lisp always came out when she felt emotional—on her own behalf or someone else’s.

“Are you back in New Jersey?” I asked before the conversation veered to my newfound fame. “You have a 201 area code.”

“Yup—my days as a cool New Yorker are over. We bought a house here last year—just couldn’t see raising kids in the city.”

“You have kids?” I pictured pink-cheeked babies with lots of piercings.

“Two,” she said. “Seymour is three and Maya just turned one.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said, feeling immensely relieved. Everything worked out for the best. Katie was happy. I had made the right choice, not telling her about Ron.

“But that’s not what I called to talk about,” she said.

“You saw me on the news.” I sighed.

“Well, yeah, that’s how I was able to track down your work number. But I figure you probably don’t want to talk about that right now. What I had to tell you is, I saw Joey Ardolino!”

“No!” I could picture him perfectly, leaning against my locker, batting his absurdly long eyelashes: the first man to break my heart.

“My garbage disposal broke a couple of months ago,” Katie said. “Seymour shoved some plastic play food into it—so I called a plumber, and it turned out to be Joey!”

“Joey’s a plumber?” I pictured him living in a neat, modest house, coming home every night to a houseful of kids and a casserole made with cream-of-mushroom soup. It sounded like a pretty nice life, actually.

“Yeah, but that’s not all,” Katie said. “He’s gay!”

“Joey’s a
gay plumber
? Get out!” I broke into laughter.

Her laugh was high-pitched and infectious, just like it had always been. “I know! I said to him, ‘Can’t they kick you out of the union for that?’ And he said, all serious, ‘There is no union.’ Which for some reason I thought was really funny.”

“Oh my God,” I hooted. “All that he put us through—and he didn’t even like girls?”

“See?” she said. “It really
was
him and not us.”

But what about the other men who’d broken my heart? What was their excuse?

“Tell me more about your life,” I said. “How’s Ron doing?”

“Ron?”
She paused. “Omigod, Jane, it really has been a long time since we talked! Ron and I split up eight months after our wedding.”

“I’m so sorry.” My stomach clenched.

“Actually, it worked out really well,” she said. “See, if we divorced before six months were up, we’d have to return all of our wedding gifts, and there was no way I was gonna hand over my rice cooker.” That had been from me.

“What happened?” I asked, knowing what the answer would be.

“He was screwing around,” she said casually. “And I caught him.”

“Wow,” I said, guilt flooding through me: I should have told her about Ron. I could have stopped her from marrying him. “But—you found someone else.” Another artist, I figured, or maybe a musician.

“Patrick worked with Ron,” she said. “Six months after the divorce, he called me up—said he’d wanted to wait a respectable amount of time before asking me out, but that he’d always had a thing for me.”

“So he’s an investment banker?”

“Yup. And the nicest man in the world,” she said matter-of-factly.

“I need to tell you something,” I blurted. “The night of your rehearsal dinner, Ron made a pass at me. I should have told you, but you looked so happy, and I didn’t want to ruin things for you.” I blinked away tears. “I’m so sorry, Katie. I should have said something.”

“Ugh—he was such a jerk,” she said, sounding completely un-surprised. “It wouldn’t have made any difference if you’d told me what happened. That wasn’t the first time he put the moves on one of my friends.”

“It wasn’t?”

“There were two other times before that—that I know about, anyway. When I confronted him, he said he was just a flirt and it didn’t mean anything. And I believed him. I guess there are some things you have to find out for yourself.”

“True,” I said. “But preferably not on national television.”

 

 

After I got off the phone, I headed for the kitchen, where I whipped up a batch of banana muffins and set to work unloading the dishwasher. Michael and I had cleaned the kitchen together the night before. He had loaded the dishwasher while I wiped the counters and put away the food. We made a good team.

“Something smells good,” he said, wandering in from his bedroom shortly after the muffins came out. He was wearing blue gym shorts and a white T-shirt that said DIVE CATALINA. He had a slight case of bed head, but it actually made him look cute and vaguely boyish.

“Banana muffins,” I said, placing one on a little plate and sliding it across the counter. “Careful, they’re still a little hot.”

He took a bite and nodded with pleasure. “Delicious,” he said after swallowing.

“There’s coffee, too,” I said. “Though it’s a little old. I’ll make another pot.” I turned to face the complicated stainless-steel coffeemaker that had taken me about fifteen minutes to figure out.

“No, no, this is fine.” He took another big bite of the muffin and crossed the kitchen to pour himself a mug of the old coffee. We were standing so close I could see his morning stubble, brown with flecks of red.