Love You to Death (2 page)
Mohel,
Henry.
Moh-el.
I didn’t think now was the time to correct him.
A second later he slurped at his own coffee and tugged at his collar, and half the contents of the cup ended up on his nice gray shirt. “Oh, shit.”
“I’ll dab some club soda on it when we get to Olivia’s,” I told him. “I’m sure it’ll come out.”
He shook his head. “I can’t meet your entire family with a giant coffee stain on my shirt. Let’s stop at L.L. Bean. I’ll buy a new shirt, change into it there and we’ll be in and out in five minutes. We’re a little early anyway.”
I glanced at my watch. It was almost twelve-thirty, and we were expected at one. Olivia’s house was only a few minutes’ drive from L.L. Bean, which was two minutes up the road. “Okay, good idea,” I told him.
He parked, and we headed past the giant duck boot into the store. L.L. Bean was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year (yes, Christmas, too!) just in case someone needed a tent in the middle of the night or a monogrammed tote bag at the crack of dawn. As we walked past the canoes to the men’s clothing department, I eyed Henry to see if he was still uncomfortable about the bris, but he seemed focused on finding a good shirt. He stopped in front of a table stacked with crisp oxfords, grabbed three and headed for the fitting rooms.
I touched his arm. “Henry, about the bris—you don’t have to watch, you know. You don’t even have to be in the room. You can suddenly have to use the bathroom. Then it’ll just be a party. Okay?”
He smiled and dashed into the changing room.
I waited by a rack of plaid pajamas, exactly the kind my father had always said he wanted for Christmas, year after year. For the past three Christmases there was no Dad; we’d lost him to a heart attack (hence the pact the Foote sisters had made to be closer), but Olivia and Opal and I still placed his presents under the tree as usual—the pajamas from me, the sherpa-lined moccasin slippers from Olivia and the terry bathrobe with the serious moose on the pocket from Opal. I had no idea how long we’d continue this odd tradition. Or what my stepmother, Veronica, did with my father’s gifts.
I also had no idea what was taking Henry so long to try on a shirt. Five minutes had come and gone. I glanced at my watch. Six. Seven. At the ten-minute mark, I eased closer to the men’s fitting room and called out, “Henry?”
No response.
“Henry?” I tried again.
No response.
A salesclerk emerged with an armful of jeans. “No one’s in there, miss.”
“My boyfriend is trying on shirts. Tall, dark hair?”
“Oh, yes. I saw him. He went into a fitting room, but left a minute later.”
Huh? “What do you mean, he left? I’ve been standing right here.” Had Henry come out and not seen me over the stack of plaid pajamas and Shetland sweaters? Was he looking for me by the cash registers?
My cell phone rang as I peered around. Henry’s number appeared on the tiny display. “Henry, you are such a guy!” I teased into the phone as I headed toward the checkout line. “You’re lost, aren’t you? I’m right by the cash registers, near the pond. Come find me, okay? We’re running a little late now, and—”
“Abby, I’m really sorry,” he interrupted, “but I can’t. Okay? I’m sorry.”
“You can’t
what,
Henry?”
“I just can’t,” he said, his voice a pitch higher than normal. “I can’t do any of it. The no sex. The living-room circumcision. People eating lunch while a newborn is screaming bloody murder. I can’t do it.”
Oh, good Lord. “Henry, honestly, you don’t have to
watch.
You can go into another room with the other squeamish types.” But you can totally forget about sex now!
“I can’t, Abby,” he repeated for the tenth time. “I just can’t. I can’t!”
“Fine,” I snapped.
Wuss!
“I’ll meet you by your car. Just drop me off at my sister’s and we’ll talk about this la—”
“I’m already on the highway, Abby,” he interrupted. “For what it’s worth, I’m really sorry.”
Click.
What!? “But you have my nephew’s gift and the honey cake!” I shouted to dead air. Was I on
Punk’d?
Was Ashton Kutcher going to jump out from behind the monogrammed tote bags? Not that I was a celebrity. “Jerk! Superjerk!” I yelled at my phone while people nearby stared at me.
I slunk back over to the pile of plaid pajamas, mentally listing what Superjerk had driven off with, aside from my dignity and the sideshow boyfriend my entire family wouldn’t get the chance to gawk at. There was the four-foot-tall fuzzy stuffed monkey I’d spent an hour deciding on, plus an adorable and expensive outfit from Baby Gap. There was the traditional Jewish honey cake that was almost impossible to find in the state of Maine, and the four bottles of Coke and Diet Coke that Olivia had asked me to bring. And then there was my umbrella to stop the snow flurries from turning my I-spent-an-hour-with-a-blow-dryer, pin-straight, shoulder-length hair into a frizz puff. I glanced down at my beloved brown suede lace-up boots with the three-inch heels. The ones I also shouldn’t have worn when it was flurrying outside. The ones that already pinched.
“I am going to
kill
him!” I muttered.
The salesclerk, adding jeans to a table, eyed me under his glasses. “Can I be of any assistance?”
You can assist me in the murder of Superjerk.
I shook my head and stomped off toward women’s shoes for a pair of cheap sneakers and expensive wool socks to keep blisters at bay. Then it was down to the kids’ department for a two-second perusal before I ran to the checkout with an adorable faux shearling baby bundler with bear ears. Then up to the café for a whole cheesecake and a pecan pie. Hopefully no one would want any Coke. Or Diet Coke.
Four blocks into the half-mile walk to Olivia’s house, the flurries turned into fat, wet f lakes. To ward off tears, I practiced an amusing anecdotal version of the story to tell around the buffet table,
(Heh, get this—he couldn’t handle a little ceremonial snipping, so he ditched me in L.L. Bean!),
but it turned out there was nothing amusing about it.
Great. Now I was tearing up on the sidewalk like a moron. I repositioned my packages to dab under my eyes so that mascara tracks wouldn’t compete with the frizz-puff for scaring away small children. Of course, the cheesecake, fighting for space with the tall boots in the shopping bag, upturned onto the ground. A car honked, and I jumped, but it turned out to be Opal and Jackson.
“Abby, sweetie, those sneakers totally don’t go with that outfit,” Opal said, grimacing at my feet. “And hello, what’s with those hiking socks?”
I’d never been so happy to see Opal in my life.
“N
ext date you go on, I’m coming with you,” Opal said as we rang the bell to Olivia’s house. I’d filled her in on where my new boyfriend was. Which was probably back home by now. With my monkey and Coke collection. “When the guy sneezes into his pasta or stares at the waitress’s chest or drones on about his bad childhood and then asks you for a second date, I’ll be there to tell him
no.
”
“You won’t have to,” I said. “Because I’m never dating again.” Ever.
Jackson, Opal’s surfer-dude of a fiancé, walked behind us, carrying the four-foot-tall plush rhino Opal had bought for Oscar. I wondered what Henry was going to do with the monkey. “Once,” Jackson said, “before I met Opal, I didn’t date for, like, a whole week. That was rough.”
“I’m talking
forever,
Jackson,” I said. I’d had it. No more. Done. Finis! I would devote myself to my work, even though it didn’t require devotion. I would read the classics. I would volunteer. Take Latin. Or piano. I would do anything but date.
A young man in a Clark’s Catering T-shirt welcomed us in and took our coats and gifts, and I polite-smiled my way through throngs of people I’d seen once or twice in my life, the last time being Olivia’s wedding. My father’s side of the family was small and not from Maine, so the relatives I saw most often were my mother’s. And my mother’s family and the Foote family had shared the same space
twice
since the divorce—my high school and college graduations. Since I was clearly never getting to the altar, they wouldn’t have to worry about bumping into each other on the dance floor at my wedding reception and clawing at each other.
Olivia rushed up to me with Oscar cradled in her arms. She looked absolutely amazing, despite having given birth a week ago. Shiny blond bob with swingy bangs. A little mascara and lip gloss. Cute silver hoop earrings with tiny dangling pearls. Banana Republic outfit unstained by spit-up. I couldn’t pull myself together like that, and I didn’t even have a pet or plant to take care of. Also throw in three separate notebooks in her possession at all times, one to note time/color/consistency of Oscar’s poops, one for Oscar’s nutritional intake and one to document any new developments. Such as:
burped twice after 4:00 a.m. feeding instead of once!
I’d misplaced my new day planner already and it was only the beginning of January. Olivia glanced around me. Behind me. “Where’s Henry?” she asked. “I’m dying to meet him.”
“We broke up,” I said, poaching a miniature chocolate cream pie from a tray on the buffet table. Delicious. Chocolate really
could
make you feel better. “Yum, these are good.”
She tilted her head and eyed me. “Broke up? Between the time I spoke to you this morning and now?”
While I soothed myself with yet another mini pie, Opal launched into the entire sob story for me, including the $142 I’d had to spend on items like socks.
I expected a
How dare he! Someone go teach that punk a lesson!
But instead, everyone in hearing distance began berating me for picking another jerk.
“Where do you find these losers?” guffawed Olivia’s husband.
“Dear, you really need to start watching Dr. Phil,” said an aunt.
“What Abby
needs
is to find a man like her father,” my stepmother, Veronica, said, setting a tray of potato blintzes on the buffet. She kissed me hello on the cheek, her perfume overpowering. “Now,
there
was a good man.”
True, except for the cheating-on-my-mother part. When she was at home with a newborn. My father had gotten around the six-week rule by having sex with Veronica, his administrative assistant, and getting her pregnant. Which was why I had a half sister less than a year younger than myself. Had he pulled a fast one on Veronica, as well, impregnating her attractive replacement at Foote, Finnegan and Bowman, Oncologists? No. He’d fallen head over heels in love with Veronica, to whom he’d been happily married for twenty-four years. That made it harder to be as angry at him as I’d wanted.
As the “telephone” version of my latest breakup made its way around Olivia’s house (“Abby caught her new boyfriend having sex with a salesclerk in the fitting room in Wal-Mart! A
guy
salesclerk!), various relatives and friends of the family produced seven nice-single-young-men from Veronica’s and Oliver Grunwald’s sides of the family. They were marched up to me no matter where I went in Olivia’s huge antique farmhouse. One was introduced moments after I’d taken a huge bite of a potato blintz. I’d been so startled by the nice-single-young-man’s braces (was he even eighteen?) that I dropped the blintz, laden with sour cream, on my sweater.
The introduction was always the same. “Have you met Abby? Isn’t she lovely? She works at
Maine Life
magazine as the ‘Best Of’ editor! Ronald/Michael/Jonathan, don’t you own your own business? Abby can declare you the best plumber/attorney/moron in the state!”
Nope. Been there, done that. Including the Best Moron, even if that one was only in my head. (Unfortunately,
Maine Life
was not a snarky magazine.) Anyway, no one was a bigger moron than I was. I’d been bamboozled by a guy—Riley—who’d dated me in the first place only so that I’d put him on the “Best CPAs in Portland” list. I’d named him one of the best only after he’d gotten me quite a refund, though.
If my system sounded a little shady, it really wasn’t. There were no criteria, other than my own taste. If I ate dinner in a random Chinese restaurant and loved the moo shoo pork, I named it Best Moo Shoo Pork in the next issue. The guy who dug me out when I was stuck in a snowdrift last winter? Best Good Samaritan. Restaurants, stores, businesses—you name it—sent me invitations to sample them in the hopes of landing a spot on one of my lists. Finch, my boss, had given me the column after grudgingly agreeing that my answers to reader mail, which were printed in the magazine’s letters section, generated bagfuls of more reader mail.
Where’s a good place to get my nails done? Where’s the best place to hike? Where’s the best place to literally and figuratively dump your girlfriend when you learn what a bris is on your way to a bris?
Readers wrote in to say they’d tried my recommendations and agreed 100 percent. There were a few—we’re talking three or four—
what, are you, crazy?
letters a month, but though I couldn’t pick The Best Men in Maine, I had a knack for picking the best anything else for the female demographic. Anyway, after Riley I vowed no more boyfriendotism.
Braces was still talking. Turned out he was nineteen and a sophomore at Bowdoin. He’d just finished telling me that he “dug” older women when Olivia saved me with an “Abby, can you help me with Oscar?” and led me to her bedroom. “Figured we could use a little break from wall-to-wall people,” she said to me as we slipped inside.
As she shut the door behind us, I was relieved to find that I wasn’t being summoned for diaper duty. Opal was in the rocking chair, the fat Sunday newspaper on her lap, a mimosa in her hand and a plate of crudités on the tiny round table next to her. Olivia headed over to the window and rocked Oscar, his sleepy eyes finally closing. I sat on the ornate wrought-iron bench to Olivia’s dressing table and mentally oohed and aahed at my baby nephew.
See, Henry, no newborn screaming bloody murder! He’s sleeping like a baby!
The bris had taken all of two minutes, and Oscar looked happy and peaceful.
At the rate I was going, I’d never have an Oscar. Someone was clearly poking a voodoo doll version of me with a stick and chanting,
No love for you! No future family for you! Only superjerks for you!
“You okay?” Olivia asked me.
I nodded. “I’ll be fine. One of these days.”
“Abby,” Opal said, pointing a hummus-laden carrot stick at me, “no one ever treats me like crap. You know why? Because I don’t
take
crap. Repeat after me—I will not take crap!”
“But this was invisible crap,” I said. “Henry was a great guy until he turned into an asshole. So was Ted.” Crazy as that sounded, it was true. God, I’d loved him. Six months later my heart still squeezed when I thought of Ted.
“Great guys don’t turn into assholes,” Opal said, her two-carat engagement ring gleaming on her finger.
“Sometimes they do,” Olivia said, staring out the window.
Uh-oh. I glanced at Olivia, hoping that all was well in the Foote-Grunwald household. “Olivia?” I asked. “Is everything—”
Olivia smiled at me. “Everything’s fine. Really, hon. I’m just hormonal. And starving.” She nuzzled Oscar’s fuzzy head. “Want to hold him so I can eat?”
“Of course,” I said. I’d held Oscar once, in the hospital when he was hours old, but there’d been doctors and nurses around to save his life if I did something wrong, like drop him on his head. Olivia settled him in my arms. He moved his tiny mouth, but he continued sleeping peacefully. I liked the way the small weight of him felt. “Olivia, why don’t I stay after the party, help clean up and babysit for a few hours? Take some time to yourself.”
Not that I had any experience with newborns. The thought of that wobbly neck scared me. As did the poop diapers. And being in the same house with Oliver Grunwald, whose every sentence began with, “Do you know what your problem is? I’ll tell you,” as though
he
were Dr. Phil and not a mortgage broker, made me itchy. Apparently I wasn’t asked to be Oscar’s godmother because Oliver thought my bad taste in boyfriends would preclude Oscar from growing up with a good male influence in his life, should Olivia and Oliver perish. But Olivia was clearly overwhelmed, so what was an unbearable brother-in-law and a little poo in the name of helping my sister?
Olivia smiled at me. “Thanks, Abby, but that’s okay. I’ll definitely take a rain check, though. Count on it.”
Whew.
“Olivia, I totally would have offered to come help, too,” Opal said, flipping through the weddings-and-engagement section of the newspaper, which rivaled my love life for Opal’s favorite topic of conversation at any get-together. “But I’m going headpiece shopping with the head case after this.”
The head case was Opal’s mother-in-law-to-be, whom I’d met at the engagement party, and who was less a head case and more a carbon copy of Opal, only thirty years older.
Next month, soon after Valentine’s Day, Opal and Jackson were marrying at a posh inn in Prouts Neck. I was a bridesmaid and had to wear a wig for the wedding. Brunettes weren’t permitted in Opal’s bridal party. Yes, you heard that right.
“How gorgeous are my pictures going to look!” Opal had said several months ago when she told me I had to wear a wig for her wedding because I wasn’t blond. “The bridal party is all blond and the ushers are all dark haired. That’s
hot.
You’re not upset, are you, Abs?” she’d added, fake pouting. “I really, really want you to be in the wedding, but I really, really want a blond theme.”
Opal was obsessed with Paris Hilton and had adopted one too many of the socialite/actress’s trademarks. Like the “that’s hot,” the crazy fashionista clothes, the oversize sunglasses collection and several giggling blond friends. All she was missing was a tiny dog to carry around. And the Hilton money. She had the height and bony frame and the unusual-beautiful face. Her eyes (which were really blue but were now tinted-contacts emerald-green) were huge, and her nose too long, her mouth too wide and her teeth too big. Which, with the long and silky light blond hair, made her look like a model. Olivia was striking, too, but in a different way. Her “pretty” was intimidating in its even-featured, lightly enhanced, expressive efficiency.
Anyway, being blond for a day sounded pretty good.
“God, would you look at this bride’s dress?” Opal said, holding up the wedding section of the newspaper. “What was she
thinking?
” She shook her head and continued ripping brides to bits. Then she sucked in her breath and quickly folded the paper and put it away.
“What?” Olivia asked.
“Nothing,” Opal said, slowly shaking her head at her sister and darting her eyes to me.
“Opal, if you’re going to be so obvious, you might as well just tell me,” I said, bracing myself.
She gnawed her lip, then unfolded the paper and handed it to me while carefully taking Oscar out of my arms.
Puck-Darling
Ted Puck and Mary-Kate Darling are delighted to announce their engagement…
I screamed and f lung the paper away as though it were a big, hairy bug; it fluttered down to the floor.
I will not look. I do not care.
I snatched up the paper. I looked. I cared.
Ted, a cheating jerk, and Mary-Kate, a cheating slut, are planning a December wedding.
A little embellishment there.
I glanced at the picture of the happy couple. Ted looked gorgeous, of course. Mary-Kate Darling looked…darling. So her name
was
Mary. Well, Mary-Kate. And it was startling to see, now that I was seeing her for longer than the five seconds it had taken her to shoot out of my bedroom, that she looked a lot like me. Long, straight, dark brown hair. Pale brown eyes. Cheekbones, but a round face that made her look like a nicer person than she clearly was.
Ted looked so happy in the photograph—eyes bright, million-dollar smile, arm casually slung over Mary-Kate’s bony shoulder. But he’d looked just as happy in the one photograph of us that I had. After our breakup I’d spent weeks staring at that picture, trying to figure out how we went from happily walking Clinton, Ted’s black pug (named for his favorite president), along Portland’s Eastern Promenade the morning after we slept together for the first time, to what happened on the night of my twenty-eighth birthday six months ago.
That glorious morning in the park, when I’d felt so in love, we’d run into my friend Jolie, out snapping photographs of seagulls at the crack of dawn for a class she was taking. Jolie wasn’t a master photographer; Clinton hadn’t even made it into the shot. But she had captured the brilliant blue Casco Bay in the background, the sailboats dotting the water, and me, glancing up at Ted, who’d just said something funny.
