I Love You More: A Novel (16 page)

Ryan didn’t respond, and that made me happy. All in all, the visit to Dairy Queen wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d thought it might be.

Ryan and I were both done with our ice cream by the time we got to my house, so I asked him if he wanted something to drink.

“You got any Coke?” he asked.

I went and got us two Cokes and a bag of Cheetos.

“Where’re your parents?” Ryan asked as we climbed the stairs to my room.

“My dad’s on a business trip—he travels a lot—and Mama’s at a Junior League meeting.”

“My mom does Junior League too.”

I knew that because Ryan’s mom had been on the same committee as Mama a couple of years back, but I didn’t say that because I didn’t want Ryan to know I knew who his mother was. I figured he might think I’d been stalking him, which I had.

“Really?” I said.

“Wow,” Ryan said when we walked into my room. “Where’d you get all the dictionary posters? They’re cool.” By
dictionary posters
, Ryan meant the blown-up word definitions that plastered my walls.

“My dad got them for me.”

“Why are they all P words?”

“Because my name starts with P.”

“Oh” was all he said.

Ryan looked around like he was trying to figure out where to sit, which I had to admit, to myself that is, was a conundrum. My room is pretty small; it’s on the back corner of our house. The bed, dresser, bookshelves, and desk are pretty much crammed together on the three available walls; the closet is on the other one. There is an extra chair, in fact it’s smack-dab in the middle of my room, mostly because there’s nowhere else to put it, but it’s always filled with dirty clothes and other stuff I can’t seem to find the time to put away. Going to school and studying to be a master speller takes a lot of time and effort.

I shook off my shoes and sat on the bed. Ryan did the same thing.

We ended up talking for a long time, hours I think, all about
cars and motorcycles, baseball and basketball and soccer, his bug collection, and this new video game called
Super Smash Bros. Brawl
that he was saving up for.

“I had a really good time,” he said, when he was getting ready to leave.

“Me too,” I said. And that was true.

I walked Ryan to the front door and watched him walk down the street; that’s what a good hostess does. At the end of our street, he turned and waved. I waved back. When he was safely out of sight, I dashed back upstairs to my room, my socks slipping and sliding along the wood floors, and pulled my favorite dictionary out from its hiding place under my bed.

Maybe because I was in a state of total excitement—I mean I had officially
arrived
—I felt more like manifesting the next stage of my perfect relationship with Ryan Anderson than looking up words. But since working on my word journal had always helped me deal with stress or anxiousness, I figured I’d do that before indulging in my transformation through manifestation exercises. What was weird is that it seemed like three of the new words specifically related to my life at that very moment, and since that was the case I figured the fourth word had to be some sort of omen, and as it turned out, it was.

Nelipot:
someone who walks without shoes. (That’s what I had just done. I figured sock skiing counted.)

Accubation:
the practice of eating and drinking while lying down. (That was what I was doing right then and there. Finishing up my Coke and Cheetos.)

Wanweird:
unhappy fate. (That was what I was worried might happen between Ryan and me if I didn’t continue to practice manifestation.)

Vigesimation:
the act of putting to death every twentieth man.

The next time we met, the word
murder
came up again. We’d planned to meet at Rainy Cove Park but it was closed due to mudslides caused by heavy rain, so we opted for Diana’s house instead. We were sitting at Diana’s dining-room table when the split pea soup she was cooking boiled over.

“I’ll get it,” Bert said. She hurried to the stove. “Ouch. Damn.”

“Are you okay?” Diana and Jewels asked in unison.

“Of course I’m not okay,” Bert said, while shaking her hand in the air. “I burned my fucking palm on the pot handle. What do you think? I just like to scream?” She turned on the faucet.

“Butter works better than cold water.” Diana opened the refrigerator. “Shoot, I’m out.”

“How about olive oil?” Jewels asked.

“Do you want my skin to bubble up?” Bert asked.

“Oh, stop being so dramatic,” Jewels said. “For God’s sake, just blow on it.”

“You can be such a bitch, Jewels.”

“Me, a bitch? Well at least I’m not a cheap bitch.”

“What does that mean?” Bert asked.

“Stop it, Jewels,” Diana said.

“It’s true,” Jewels said. “She never pays her portion of the bill.”

“Yes, I do.”

“You don’t. There’s tax and tip too, you know.”

“That’s enough,” Diana said. “There’s no need to take our frustrations out on one another.”

“I’m not frustrated,” Jewels said.

“Well I certainly am,” Diana said. “What are we doing? Here we are, seven months later, and what have we accomplished? Other than a lot of complaining and spending, we’re no better off than we were that day we first met at Rainy Cove Park. I thought the point of all this, the point of
us
, was to help one another.”

“You guys have helped me,” Bert said.

“You know what I mean,” Diana said. “We’re all still married to him.”

“Diana’s right,” Jewels said. “We’re nothing more than a bunch of whimpering wives.”

“Worse,” Bert said. “Two of us aren’t legally wives. We’re mistresses.”

Bert’s comment sobered us. We gathered in the kitchen, ladled the soup into our bowls, and ate, only the clanking of our spoons betraying our presence. During this internal interlude, we reflected on the unlikelihood of our bond.

There was lovely and sensuous Diana. She was one of those “beauty inside and out” types of women that you wanted to hate, or expose as fakes, but Diana was anything but a fake. She was kind, generous, and talented. She’d majored in fine art in college, was quite a successful local painter for a time, but gave it up when Picasso was born. Diana’s father came from old Southern tobacco money. Her mother was a homemaker and, like her daughter later became, a tireless volunteer. Upon her parents’ death, Diana received a large inheritance. She said that Oliver wasn’t aware of her financial circumstances, but we weren’t convinced. Oliver knew everything.

Jewels came from a stable, upper-middle-class background. Her father was a Wall Street stockbroker; her mother had danced
for the New York City Ballet until a bad fall damaged her ankle. Jewels’s architectural career began in New York, but after her affair with one of the firm’s partners erupted, he suggested she either look for a new job or transfer to the Raleigh office. Attractive, but not necessarily pretty, it was Jewels’s athletic physique, seeming confidence, and disarming charm that caught men’s attention, but something else entirely snared them. While she strove to portray herself as disciplined and dispassionate, there was a heat forever bubbling just beneath the surface of her skin which few could escape.

Bert was opinionated, outspoken, suspicious of anyone or anything new or unknown, and in general a pain in the ass. Her father was Catholic and a fisherman, her mother Lutheran and a schoolteacher. Bert’s most admirable quality was her passion for human justness and fairness. Whether she was saving whales or marching for gay rights, Bert was relentless and unwavering in her pursuit of righting wrongs. And there was something else, something somewhat frightening but at the same time intriguing about Bert. She dabbled in the occult and, although she continuously denied it, had a sixth sense. There were times we were certain she could read our minds.

Yet even with all our differences, in that place, at that time, our souls were on the same path.

Diana gathered our soup bowls, rinsed them in the sink, put them in the dishwasher, returned to the table.

“We could build an empire,” Bert said.

“What?” Jewels asked.

“Our differences,” Bert said. “Together we’re unbeatable. After we kill Oliver, we should start a business.” She paused. “Well, don’t look so surprised. I know we’re all thinking the same thing. Besides, it’s easier to sever yourself from a dead person.”

“Bert’s right,” Jewels said. “As long as Oliver’s alive, we’re doomed.”

And there it was: Oliver’s fate. Ineluctable.

None of us said anything for a while. Words seemed meaningless. The future had inserted itself into our present. As if we’d just bought a new, massive piece of furniture, we’d have to shuffle things around to make room for it.

My first important spelling competition was a big success except for two things: Ryan couldn’t go because he hurt his ankle playing soccer, which meant that Ashley Adams went in his place, and Daddy didn’t show even though he promised he would. Daddy had never been too good at follow-through, so I knew I should be pretty used to it by then, after all he was really important and busy and he was just who he was and he didn’t mean anything by it. He had criminals to defend. I should understand that his only daughter taking first place at some regional, not even state, spelling bee just wasn’t that big a deal in comparison. Besides, he called later that night to apologize and said “I love you more than life itself,” which was true, that he’d “make it up” to me, which meant he would buy me something, that he was “proud” of me, which made sense since I was the reigning regional spelling champion, that obviously there would be “other spelling bees” that he “wouldn’t miss,” that since I was his “smart and wise Picasso” he knew I wasn’t like other kids who got all “upset about little things,” I could “see the big picture,” and that he was confident I would “take it all in stride, Phasm (an extraordinary appearance, especially of brilliant light in the air; a phantom, an apparition).” And he was right, I would because what else could I do, and also
because if a person were all those things that Daddy had said, smart and wise and didn’t get upset and saw the big picture and was able to take things in stride, then that someone would be above such petty emotions as sadness, resentment, and selfishness. In short, that person would be perfect, like an angel or something, or really, really, really “nice” like I used to think Ashley Adams was, which she obviously wasn’t because she didn’t even congratulate me when I won.

But the thing is, even though I knew I shouldn’t be sad, all I wanted to do was cry, and the harder I tried not to, the more my chest hurt and the more I wished I could just run up to my room, lock my door, lie on my bed, and look up words.

Daddy and I talked for a pretty long time, Daddy mostly because I was afraid my voice would shake, about how hard everything was for him at work and how some other lawyer he worked with had tried to sabotage him, and I tried really hard to listen and understand because isn’t that what a smart and wise and see-the-big-picture person would do? After a while, I was able to tell him I couldn’t believe someone would do that to him, being that everyone knew how caring and generous he was. I think that made him feel a little better, but I could tell he was still upset, and by the time we said goodbye I felt more sorry for him than for me. And even if secretly I were still sad, which I wasn’t, after what happened the next day, I totally forgot about the stupid spelling bee.

I had started listening in on Mama’s phone calls the day after I saw Jewels and Bert in the blue convertible. If Mama answered it downstairs, I’d run upstairs. If Mama answered it upstairs, I’d scurry downstairs. There was an art to picking up the phone so Mama, and whoever was on the other end of the line, wouldn’t hear the click of the lifted receiver, an art that I mastered. Mostly what I’d heard to that point were conversations between Mama and Junior League ladies or Mama and Daddy, but that day I hit pay dirt.

“Did you get the house?” Jewels was asking when I picked up the receiver.

“Yes,” Mama said. “Luckily they had a cancellation, but it’s not until July, the week of the fourth. I’m not sure how I’m going to explain the departure from our usual time to Oliver. I already mentioned I wanted to go somewhere different this year. Do you think he’ll get suspicious?”