Just Like Me, Only Better (17 page)

Sometimes when Ben was with Hank, I would leaf through old photo albums. When Ben was tiny, I had an ill-advised romance with scrapbooking, which meant that I’d sacrificed a lot of photo space for fancy-edged papers, glossy stickers, and the inane ramblings of a sleep-deprived mother. (“Benji used to cry when I put him in the bath, but now it’s his favorite time of day!
Splish-splash, splish-splash!
Don’t forget your duckie, sweetheart!”)

When I’d page through the albums, I’d ignore all that silliness and just focus on Ben’s face from a year or two ago, before his toddler softness had begun to melt away. And then, inevitably, I’d cry: not because I wouldn’t see him for a day or two (though that didn’t help) but because the simple passage of time meant I was losing my little boy, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Maybe that, really, is what I loved about teaching little kids. You helped them and loved them and watched them grow, but when they left you, a new crop came in to take their place. Time stood still. Innocence endured.

At ten-thirty I took the kids out to the blacktop for physical education. Mrs. Ortega was ready with piles of blue plastic jump ropes.

“Hey there, Mrs. Czaplicki!” she said a little too loudly. (Mrs. Ortega said everything a little too loudly.) Around us, kids began jumping rope, the sound like whips on pavement.

“Did you see that picture on the Internet this morning?” Mrs. Ortega’s voice boomed.

“Uh, no.” The Internet was a big place. She was going to have to be a little more specific.

“That Haley what’s-her-face. You know the one I mean? From that kids’ show? There was a picture of her at a café with some guy. When I saw it, I was like—what’s Mrs. Czaplicki’s picture doing on the Internet?” She laughed (loudly).

I said, “I’ll have to check it out.”

She bent over and squinted. “For a minute, I thought your legs had lines on them. But it must just be the shadow from your skirt.”

“Must be.” I smiled pleasantly. And then I practically sprinted back to the classroom.

I’d kept my cell phone turned off all morning. There was a message from Jay: “Don’t know if you saw the press this morning. Call me.”

Did he sound happy? Annoyed? Or just neutral?

“Hi, Jay.” I sat at Mrs. Largent’s desk and fiddled with a yellow pencil.

“Veronica.”

“Hi.” The pencil point jabbed my finger.

“Have you seen your picture today?”

“Um. No.” I put the pencil down.

“It’s online. Your publicist—I mean, Haley’s publicist—said
Us Weekly
is planning to run it in its next issue.”

“I guess that’s . . . good?”

He was quiet for so long I thought we’d lost the connection. Finally he spoke. “Do you want to know the picture caption?”

“Of course.” I picked up a pink eraser and squeezed it tight.

“ ‘Is the Romance Back On?’ ” he read.

“I guess that’s not the angle you were going for,” I said. And then, in my defense: “We were just talking.”

“While gazing longingly into each other’s eyes.”

I stopped squeezing the eraser. “Excuse me?”

“That’s what it says. ‘
Pop princess Haley Rush and supposedly former flame Brady Ellis grabbed a bite at Fred Segal Melrose while gazing longingly into each other’s eyes.’ ”

“You can’t go out to lunch with someone without making eye contact.”

“You’re both leaning over the table so far, it almost looks like you’re making nose contact.”

“Oh.” I was screwed.

“Plus there’s a shot of you hugging hello or good-bye. You’ve got that stuffed dog on your back.”

“It’s a koala.”

He sighed. “Haley’s publicist was thrilled.”

“She was?” I perked up.

“Of course, she thought it was really Haley in the picture. She’s going to release a statement from Haley saying that she loves Brady deeply as a friend but at this time their relationship remains platonic.”

“Did Haley really say that?”

“What do you think? Anyway, like I told you, Haley’s got some recording sessions scheduled this week, so we need you to lay low.”

“What do you mean?” I’d already been seen by at least a hundred people that morning, maybe more.

“Stay out of L.A.”

“Oh! I can do that.”

“And keep next week open. Maybe we’ll send you out for Pinkberry. Or maybe . . .”

“What?”

“It might not be a bad idea to set you up with Brady again. For coffee or shopping or something.”

“I’ll keep my week open!” I said helpfully.

 

 

There was another message on my phone. It was from Hank.

“Hey, Roni. I was just going through a pile of mail on my desk and there’s this birthday party invitation that got forwarded from our old address. For Ben. It’s coming up—Saturday, I think—at the what’s-its, the Shefflers. It’s already past the RSVP date, so you might want to call what’s-her-name, Terri, and tell her if you can make it.

“Sorry I didn’t tell you earlier. But I’m sure it will all work out.”

 

 

 

H
ank was always sure that everything would work out, which, unfortunately, wasn’t the same as making sure that everything worked out.

Nowadays, he said, “It will all work out” when he forgot to send in Ben’s permission slips or pass on phone messages. When we were married, he said it when his business was too slow to cover our monthly bills. But most memorably, “It will all work out” was what he said when I told him I was pregnant.

It was early February. A Sunday. We had been dating for four months.

It had been raining for days; television news reports featured mud slides and car wrecks. Water seeped in around the edges of Hank’s drafty little two-bedroom house. The backyard, all lawn, looked like a swamp.

The television was turned to CNN. Hank was sitting on a backless brown stool at the kitchen counter, reading the sports section of the
Orange County Register
and slurping coffee out of a Disneyland mug. Disneyland was only five miles from his house, so close we could hear the fireworks at night as we lay in Hank’s lumpy queen-sized bed. Hank went to bed at nine o’clock each night, so when I spent the night, I did, too.

We had never been to Disneyland together. A few years later, when Ben was two, my parents gave us annual passes for Christmas, and we’d hit the theme park every Sunday for two months until we both admitted we hated the place. But I didn’t know that then.

All I knew was that the pregnancy stick I’d bought at Long’s Drugs had two lines instead of one, and that second line meant that my life was about to change forever.

Hank’s kitchen was dark but functional: a long orange Formica counter, dark brown cabinets that reached to the ceiling, a brown stove, a brown refrigerator, a big yellow sink with a window that looked out to the bare backyard. There was no room for a dishwasher, but the kitchen—in fact, the whole house—was such a step up from my shared college apartment that it felt like a palace.

There are things I hadn’t told Hank. That I had lost my taste for coffee weeks earlier. That my breasts were tender. That my abdomen ached with what felt like menstrual cramps, but that never yielded any blood.

I had never told him I loved him. But I did. Didn’t I?

Pulse racing, I crossed the tan linoleum to the counter. Hank glanced up from his paper, gave me a fond smile, and rubbed my arm once before reaching for his coffee cup.

The pregnancy stick was still in my hand. I considered placing it on the counter in front of him. That would be dramatic. But since it was covered in my urine, it would be gross, too. I kept it in my hand.

“I have something to tell you.”

He looked up from his paper and smiled neutrally. He didn’t look concerned or worried—as if nothing I could say could affect him all that much. Since the night at the bar, Hank and I had spent a lot of time together—at least four nights a week—but the relationship continued to have an easy-breezy feel. We had passed the two big holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas, without either of us suggesting that we spend them together.

When Hank saw that I was tense and borderline teary, he tilted his head to one side, furrowed his brow, and encircled my waist. “Something wrong?”

“I’m pregnant,” I blurted. I held up the stick in case he needed proof, but he barely even looked at it. Instead, he stared at me, as if checking my expression for any indication that I might be joking.

When he didn’t say anything, I felt compelled to fill the silence. “I don’t know how it happened. I know they say that no protection is a hundred percent reliable, but we were so careful. This is just—this is so not in the plans.”

I would graduate in a few months. After that, I would teach for a couple of years, get married, and teach for a couple more. Then, and only then, was I supposed to have a baby.

I needed Hank to know that I hadn’t gotten pregnant on purpose. That I wasn’t trying to trap him.

“I don’t know what to do.” In a rush, the tears came. He jumped up from the stool, the wooden legs shrieking against the floor. He took me in his arms and held me tight.

“
Shh
,” he whispered into my ear. “
Shh
.”

“I just don’t know what to do,” I sobbed again.

“It’s okay,” he murmured. “It will all work out.”

I didn’t have the vaguest idea what he meant by that, but for some reason it made me feel better.

 

 

And it did work out—at least in the short term. Hank didn’t propose marriage so much as suggest it. And I didn’t accept so much as agree.

We were married in Hank’s backyard on March seventeenth. After a rainy winter, the ground was still soggy, but at least the skies were clear. A For Sale sign hung in front of the house. We’d already put in an offer—well, Hank had, anyway—on a brand-new twenty-one-hundred-square-foot, three-bedroom model across town.

We commissioned a cut-rate caterer to provide hors d’oeuvres and cake. Thinking it was a St. Patrick’s Day party, the caterer brought a green cake decorated with candy shamrocks. I was upset for maybe thirty seconds before I realized how appropriate it was: nothing quite works out the way you plan it. I wished I’d told Susy and Ellen, my maids of honor, to wear green instead of “whatever you want.” They wore black.

My parents, trying their hardest to look pleased, came down from northern California. Hank’s sister and her husband flew in from Colorado, and his mother drove in from Redlands. His father had died years earlier.

Hank’s brother-in-law was the only relative who really seemed to enjoy himself. He got drunk on green beer (one of my friends brought the dye) and said, “I always said, the only way Hank was ever gonna get hitched was if he got some girl in trouble!”

Otherwise, ours was just your basic, low-budget, backyard wedding. Music played from a boom box, but no one danced. Friends took photographs, and some remembered to give me copies. One of Hank’s friends from high school—a big, bald guy with a goatee whom everyone called Jacko (even though his name was Daryl)—flirted outrageously with pretty Susy. Out of earshot, she howled with laughter and said, “Ew, he’s old!”

Later, when everyone was gone, Hank carried me over the threshold—otherwise known as “the back door.”

“Gettin’ a little heavy there, missy.”

“It’s all baby weight,” I responded, a running joke throughout the pregnancy. (If my weight gain had indeed been all baby, Ben would have weighed forty pounds at birth.)

“And that’s missus to you,” I added.

He grinned. “I’ll try to remember that.” He set me down gently.

“I wish you could have had the marriage of your dreams,” he said—a Freudian slip for the ages. “I mean, the wedding.”

“I loved my wedding. It was perfect.”

“You’re right. It was.”

All at once, I was filled with happiness. Hank was kind and gentle, playful and good-looking. He had a steady job. He had bought me a house. In the fall, when we had our new baby, we would truly be a family. Things were happening faster than I might have liked, but in the end I was getting everything I had ever wanted out of life. Hank was right: it had all worked out, after all.

Six years later, Hank would marry Darcy at the Ritz Carlton in Dana Point. There would be exotic flowers, a string quartet, and gallons of champagne. Ben, dressed in a tiny blue suit, would be the ring bearer.

But I didn’t know that then.

 

 

 

S
orry Brady couldn’t be here instead of me,” Jay said later that week, handing me a little cardboard cup filled with Pinkberry frozen yogurt. He’d gotten me Haley’s favorite: original flavor, topped with pineapple.

“You mean, you asked him?” Too late, I realized he’d been joking and that my quick, desperate response made me look like an idiot.

“Ha-ha, funny,” I added, oh-so-cleverly.

We put our yogurts on a retro-cool white plastic table away from everyone else and sat in matching green Lucite chairs. Around us, the walls glowed orange. Someone in line did a double take; otherwise, people ignored us.

Jay pulled out his phone and pushed a couple of buttons. “We’re here, but we’re alone.” He swept the room and the entrance with his eyes. “So call them
again
.”

The call over, he placed his phone on the table, right next to his yogurt. “Damn Rodrigo.”

“What?”

“A couple of paps were supposed to be waiting when we got here.” He shook his head. “Oh, well. Maybe someone will catch us with a cell phone camera.”

I was wearing the white miniskirt again (the dry cleaners had removed the coffee stain), along with an artfully faded green tank top (chosen to stand out against the orange walls), big sunglasses, and tan cowboy boots. Simone had proclaimed that cowboy boots would be Haley’s signature item, which was unfortunate since all ten pairs pinched my toes.