My Very Best Friend (34 page)

I try not to let those questions plague me, because the answer is: It is what it is.

As simple as that phrase is, it’s helped me through the years: It is what it is. Acceptance.

I don’t like that my father died.

But I accept it.

And that’s what brings on the tears, one more time.

For me, for us, it was the time of the bees.

And I would go to his grave soon, I would.

Not yet, though.

“Charlotte, it’s Maybelle. Are you done having your nervous literary breakdown?”

“I’m not having a nervous literary breakdown.” I put my feet up on a chair in my backyard. At a thrift shop I had found a black wrought iron table and four chairs with curlicue backs. I’d added a pot of marigolds. Excellent place to read my new book,
Astrophysics.

“Yes, you are.”

“No, I’m not.” My garden was coming along. I’d hired the Stanleys. Toran came, too, when he had time. I had brick pathways now, created from the old brick, and the wood from the old trellises was being used for a long grape arbor. The trumpet vine had not dared to pop up again.

“You’re not writing, I can feel it. It’s time to put the breakdown aside and start your story.”

“I don’t have a story in me.” I was in a red summer dress and a rock necklace. Very McKenzie Rae Dean–like.

“You do. Find it. Hang me out to dry, hit me with sticks. Your story is probably hiding behind your intestines. Or your liver.”

“I would never hide a story behind my intestines. Too much acid. And I wouldn’t have anything unclean near my liver.”

“Write for the women out there who need another McKenzie Rae Dean book. They pretend they’re McKenzie Rae, especially when it gets to the sex with handsome hunks part. On another bad note, Sheryl was caught with weed at school. Now she’s suspended. She said that weed helped her find herself. I told her that weed is helping her to get a job at McDonald’s. I drove her there yesterday, dropped her off, and drove home. It’s five miles away from our house. I told her that she had so much time on her hands, she could get a job.”

“Did she get the job?”

“She did. She called me from a pay phone and begged me to pick her up, but I told her I wasn’t coming because she needed to walk the marijuana out of her system, the sneaky pot-smoking brat. I told her, if you have time to smoke pot, you have time to work and walk. Put a Big Mac in that and smoke it.”

“Good mothering language.” I ran my hand over my hair. The sleek feel was still a surprise. I was putting on makeup in the morning, too.

“And do you know what Randy did?”

“No, I don’t. That would be impossible for me to know.”

“He’s having sex with his girlfriend.”

“What did you do to him?”

“What any competent mother would do.”

“Which is?”

“I screamed at him and then we went and I gave him money to buy a jumbo box of condoms. Do I look like a grandmother? No, I don’t. I am still young and hip. I told him, ‘You hormone-driven baboon. I told you not to have sex as a teenager, but here you are, and I know you’re not going to stop because you’re like a dog in heat, so stick that sock on your pecker every single time you do it with Crystal because if you get her knocked up you are going to work full time next to your pot-smoking sister flipping burgers to support your offspring, because I won’t do it.’

“And he said, ‘Okay, Mom, thanks.’ He was all red in the face, embarrassed that I knew he was doing the naked hump, and I said, ‘I love you,’ and he said, ‘I love you, too, and I won’t get her pregnant,’ and I said, ‘You better not or I will tie your dick in a knot and you won’t need a vasectomy. Got that, son?’ And then I grabbed a banana when we got home and he and I went into the bathroom and I showed him how to do it, and then I said, ‘Don’t come out until you can get a condom over your pecker within ten seconds and done right,’ and then we all sat down and had my mother’s manicotti. Delicious.”

“I love manicotti. Can you send me the recipe?”

“Sure. I’ll tell you right now if you want. The key to a tasty manicotti is the ricotta cheese. . . .”

I wasn’t nagged further about my book and I acquired a new manicotti recipe. It was a fine call.

I’ve sold millions of books.

Each year a chunk of money goes to the island kids for scholarships. I review all the applications and choose ten kids to get a pile of money for their four years at college or for trade school. They have no idea who it’s coming from, and that’s the way I like it. I want to help people help themselves anonymously. No attention.

One check each year goes to pay for a full-time art teacher and one full-time music teacher. It’s a small school, grades K–12, so the kids get art and/or music every day. I also pay for a former science professor on the island to teach three after-school science classes a week. The kids love watching things explode, and they each make a rocket, among other things.

One check goes to an abused/stray cat sanctuary in Kalispell, Montana. The staff gets them healthy, then tries to find owners for them. Ten cats lived in each yurt with an enclosed area outside so the cats can go outside anytime to play.

The woman who runs the sanctuary, Adelaide, calls me often and we talk cats. I have visited her twice and enjoyed playing with the cats immensely.

The other checks are for “Newspaper People.” When I read stories in the newspaper that yank my emotions out, I write checks. I am especially a sucker when kids are ill and their parents have quit their jobs to take care of the kids and their finances have collapsed.

I manage my own finances. I won’t pay some slick financial manager 2 percent to do what I can do better, even with all their patronizing, condescending talk trying to convince me they know better, which they don’t. I have a friend, Launa, my accountant, send the family a check under her firm’s name so the donation is anonymous. She forwards the parents’ grateful thank-you notes. More yanking of my emotions ensues.

It is wrong to keep all of the money that I have made. My father would be appalled. My mother likes to help me give it away. As she says, “When we were broke in Seattle, people helped us, so now we help others, especially women. Women power.” So we do. She gives money away, too.

I would have to figure out who needed what in St. Ambrose.

A start would be helping with the garden fund-raiser, but I had no idea what we could sell.

Like I said, I’d rather write a check. I’ll do it anonymously.

I walked by a lingerie shop—Tea’s Naughty Scotswoman’s Lace and Lingerie—in the village the next afternoon. A white lace negligee caught my attention in the window. I stopped and gaped. It was low-cut, almost to the belly button! And all that thigh . . . exposed!

I mumbled to myself, “I can’t wear that!” Then I mumbled, “Too much leg, too much hip.” I tilted my head at a ninety-degree angle to peer at the mannequins. “I’d have an embarrassment hot flash if I wore it.” I pointed at it, shook my finger, as if I were accusing it of leading me astray. I stopped shaking my finger when an older woman gave me a funny look and said, “Don’t bother scolding the mannequins, dear. They can’t see.”

I walked on. I went as far as Sandra’s Scones and Treats Bakery. I walked backward for a few seconds, then realized how foolish it was to walk backward in the village. People would think I was crazy.

I next studied a red negligee on another white mannequin.

“I could never wear that, either,” I said aloud, leaning forward, nose almost to the glass. There were garters, too. “With my luck they would snap right off and hit me in the face.” I said that out loud, too. I leaned farther in, and my nose smacked the glass. Ouch! The mannequin was wearing heels with some fluffy, furry thing at the toe. How do you walk in those?

I turned on my flats, the cheetah print ones, as I had been feeling animalistic that day, and got as far as Laddy’s Café. I walked backward for exactly six steps, then turned and scuttled back to Tea’s Naughty Scotswoman’s Lace and Lingerie, head held high. I am not a crazy lady!

The mannequin off to the right was wearing black. Sheer black. My nipples would pop through. I think I have overly wide nipples. I am unsure, because I have hardly ever seen other women’s nipples, but they seem large to me.

A woman stepped out of the shop. She was short with a bob of blond hair.

“Hello, luv. I’ve seen you walk backward several times. Can I help you?”

“I only walked backward twice.”

“Yes, dear, would you like to come ’round and take a peek?”

I pointed to the lingerie on the mannequins. White. Red. Black. “I’ll take all three. Size medium.”

“Do you want to try them on?”

“I will at home.”

“Lovely choices. Come along in, then.”

I came along in. Twenty minutes later, after instructions on how to use the garters, only snapping my fingers twice and my thigh once, and with instructions on how to tie the back of the red lingerie piece, and how to get into the sheer black one without ripping it, I was back out the door. I stopped at Sandra’s for a scone, clotted cream, and black coffee to contemplate what I’d done.

Me. Charlotte Mackintosh. Romance writer with no romance until lately, and now I had bought sheer lingerie for my overly wide nipples.

I peeked inside the bag, nose in. I had never, ever worn lingerie. Not once. Yet, wrapped up in pink tissue, inside a black and silver bag with a silver heart, there the lacy tidbits were. “I cannot believe I did this,” I said out loud. “I can’t believe it.”

I took the lingerie out and put it on the bakery’s table. I took out the shoes with the fluffy, furry thing at the toe and the garters. I held each negligee up to my chest.

“Ah, my lady, your man is going to have a lucky night tonight!” The waitress grinned at me. “More coffee, or should I get you chocolate pretzels to take with you? My husband and I always get hungry for chocolate pretzels after shagging. Must be the salty and sweet together.”

I nodded. “Yes. Sounds like a delicious postcoital snack. Thank you.”

“Frilly and ladylike at the same time,” an older woman with white hair piped up. “Ah, to be young and bouncing around in bed again. I miss those scoundrelly days!”

“Very sexy,” a woman said, about twenty-five. “But how do you get into the black one?” I showed her. “And the garters? Never worn them myself.” I showed her by example.

When I headed out, with my pretzels, an old man said, in a gravelly voice, “Don’t kill him, luv! Leave him something for the ’morrow!”

I peeked inside my black and silver bag again and laughed. I remembered what my mother had said about my grandma, seer of the future, albeit often all jumbled up.
“Your grandma knew how to dress for her husband. One time I saw her lingerie in her dresser. It was like looking at a porn star’s drawers. She couldn’t keep him off of her.”

I didn’t want to keep Toran off me at all.

After my marriage to Drew broke up, he transferred out of our lab to another university so I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. He said, “This is my fault.”

I held it together by working constantly. I worked long hours, classic workaholic behaviors, and took on more research and writing projects. I was published twice in academic journals that only competitive and jealous colleagues read, and the writer’s mommy.

But there was still time at night, and I started thinking about writing my time travel romance novels again.

One day I was driving home and I saw this woman, probably going to a costume ball, dressed in 1890’s attire, a flowing, layered crimson dress with a bustle and a ruffled bodice, a wide-brimmed velvet hat, and a lacy parasol.

Soon after that, I saw a man wearing a rock T-shirt and old-fashioned top hat.

I felt exhausted, ugly, divorced, and hopeless.

If I started writing time travel romances, my alter ego, McKenzie Rae Dean, would be an eye-catching rebel. Courageous. Sassy. Sly and dangerous and aggressive when she needed to be. She would wear heels and have my green eyes and my brown hair, only her hair would be sleek and untangled. She would stand up to men, like the toad I worked with in the lab, Dr. Len Xavier, who was a pompous, chauvinistic, credit-stealing ferret. In fact, I would name the first pompous, chauvinistic, credit-stealing ferret in my book Dr. Len Xavier.

No, I would get sued for defamation. Ha! I would call him Xavier Lenson.

Xavier (I refused to call him Dr. Xavier even to his face) believed a person who was promoted had to have a penis.

Those misogynistic feelings about vaginas were the final kick I needed.

I had finished my master’s thesis in gene therapy and was passed up at the university research lab I worked at for one promotion, then another. I deserved both. At a meeting with about thirty people in our lab, Xavier promoted a man who was hired after me and hardly had a grasp on basic biology. I’m not sure he had a basic understanding of what cells are. I’m not sure he had a basic understanding that he had toes at the end of his feet and why they were there, evolutionarily speaking.

When Xavier said, “I am proud to promote a young man who has proven himself time and time again”—blah blah blah—“please help me congratulate Darren Scholls!” hardly anyone clapped. I did not miss the looks thrown my way, how a number of people were shaking their heads, how Vil Tourno said, “That is total shit,” and Larry Sho said, “Should have been you, Charlotte,” and Maureen Levitt said, “I am so sick of women here getting screwed.”

I stood up. I stood up in that lab, for myself, for other women, right in the middle of it, and said, “I cannot believe you gave Darren Scholls my promotion.”

People clapped.

“Darren Scholls does not know anywhere near what I know about gene therapy. He came here after me. He doesn’t have the experience that I have. He hasn’t published as I have. He isn’t doing original research, like I am. Xavier, you know as well as I do that you are not promoting me because I have a vagina.”

Xavier’s face appeared ready to pop, red and puffy. Darren said, “I deserve the promotion,” which was a mistake, because a whole bunch of people said, “No, you don’t,” quietly, but altogether it was as if it was shouted through a megaphone.