Out to Lunch (6 page)

“Uh-oh. That’s bad, huh?” He continues to swipe at me absentmindedly with his hamlike hands, ensuring that the pollen smears are well distributed. But I am not going to let this faze me. It’s a sweater. I ruin half a dozen a year myself with cooking spatters when I’m too lazy or overconfident for an apron, and god knows how many over the years because practically everything I eat eventually ends up landing on my chest.

I reach down and grab Wayne’s hand to stop his mauling. “I’ll get it cleaned, don’t worry. I’m just going to go change quickly; why don’t you grab a beer from the fridge.”

* * *

I
head up the stairs and pop into the little laundry room off the closet, and dump the sweater in a sink of cold water with a little Woolite to see if it is salvageable. Then I pull one of my endless black turtlenecks off a shelf, figuring I might as well guard against the probability that I will be spattered with something else before the night is over, and head back downstairs.

“Be nice.”

I’m always nice.

“What’s up with the pup?” Wayne is hunkered down on the floor petting Volnay. “She wouldn’t jump in my lap and when I went to pick her up she whimpered?”

Oh, poor thing, it’s a damp day, her arthritis must be bad. I go to get her a pill. “She’s getting old, she has arthritis. The weather must be making it worse tonight.”

Wayne hauls his ungainly carcass off the floor. “Aw. That’s sad. Are you going to have to put her down or something?”

My heart catches in my throat. I’ve always known conceptually that pets by nature are gifts with an expiration date, but since I’ve never had one before, that’s always been someone else’s problem. I can’t begin to think about actually making that decision, and certainly not within a month of putting my best friend in the ground. “No,” I say, trying to keep my annoyance out of my voice. “She’s fine, just takes some extra medications and is a little slower, that’s all. Vet says she is otherwise in good health.”

“I have a friend who has a dog like that,” Wayne says, taking a pull on his beer and waving off my offer of a glass. “He just got a puppy. The puppy makes the old dog feel a little younger, the older dog sort of helps train the puppy, and he knows when he has to let the older dog go it will be better because he’ll still have the puppy.”

“I’ve heard that. Sounds like it must be a good plan for a lot of people,” I say, heading to the stove to work on dinner. My cooktop is actually in the kitchen island, since I like to cook with company, and I hate having my back to people when I cook for them. This way I can talk and visit while I putter. The island is enormous. When I rehabbed the building I bumped out the back, losing part of the backyard in favor of a much bigger eat-in kitchen, so the island is a full twelve feet long and four feet deep. One end is a four-by-four square of foot-thick custom larchwood butcher block, the six-burner BlueStar cooktop in the middle, with a dark gray soapstone counter behind, with room for four people to sit, and more soapstone to the right of the cooktop, where I have my prep trays all set up.

Wayne perches on a chair on the other side of the island. “So look at all this!” He gestures to my prep trays energetically, promptly knocking over my abandoned wineglass in his flailing. Here is the thing about really good wineglasses. First? They actually do change the taste of the wine. I’m not a wine snob, but my ex-fiancé Jack was pretty knowledgeable, and he showed me the importance of proper stemware, gifting me a complete set of Riedel stemware for both Burgundy and Riesling, my two favorite types of wine. Second? They don’t just break. They EXPLODE. Into teeny tiny miniscule little shards of crystal. I look down at my prep. The trays are now aglitter with glass and doused in wine.

“Oh, shit, Jenny, I’m so sorry, I just . . .” Wayne starts to get up, and I reach across the divide and place my hand on top of his head and push down.

“Do. Not. MOVE,” I say through gritted teeth.

He looks up at me, and I can swear I see his chin with its ridiculous landing stripe quiver.

“
He’s all you have left of me. Don’t lose it. I broke more than one wineglass in our time together, as did you, and we always laughed it off.”

I look at this grown man, hazel eyes not quite tearing up, but definitely extra shiny. I can see the mortification in his face. And I realize that the Voix is right, the only thing I can do is make it better for him. I take my hand off his head.

“So, I’m thinking we go out instead?” I say with as light a voice as I can muster.

Wayne breathes and smiles widely. “Orbit Room?” he says, his favorite place for burgers, and very close to my house.

“Absolutely. We can come back here for dessert.” I gesture across the room to my kitchen library, a sort of a pantry nook that houses all my cookbooks and equipment, where the tarts sit on the counter, safe from Hurricane Wayne. Hurriwayne. Have to remember to tell Nancy that one.

Wayne sits quietly while I dump what would have been dinner in the trash, and clean up the spilled wine and glass bits. I toss Volnay a bully stick to keep her busy in our absence, feeling bad that there will be no delicious bones for her to gnaw on later, and grab my jacket.

Wayne and I head out to his car, a massive black Escalade with the license plate MLMFLCN. And before you ask, this is not some Roman numeral for a year when something interesting happened. This is Wayne. It stands for
Millennium Falcon
, Harrison Ford’s spaceship in Star Wars. Between that and the horrible gangsta vibe of the car itself, I’m loath to get in. But I haul myself up into the beast, and off we go. The sooner we get there, the sooner I get the remains of my evening back, and I have very specific plans that include a long hot bath, the latest Sarah Pekkanen book, and an eventual Ambien.

The Orbit Room is a nondescript neighborhood bar on California, just north of my neighborhood. They have sassy waitresses, bartenders with generous pouring hands, and truly killer burgers. Hipsters and capital F Foodies might flock to Kuma’s, with the endless waiting and the loud music. And Kuma’s makes a heck of a burger, I cannot lie. But at the end of the day, if I want a burger, I want it soon, hot, and in a place where I can hear the person across the table from me. The Orbit’s burgers may not have the street chic rep, and there aren’t the same volume of topping options, but they are juicy, beefy, cooked perfectly to your preferred temp and served with mounds of either fries or onion strings, both of which are the perfect pairing of crisp and salty.

We’re halfway through dinner when Wayne puts down his “plain burger, medium, with fries, please,” and looks me deep in the eyes.

“How are you?”

“Fine, thanks.” On autopilot.

“Not fine, I know you’re not fine, I’m sure as hell not fine. How ARE you?”

I put down my “American cheese and bacon, rare, with onion strings, please” and look back at him. I take a swig of my Blue Moon and wipe my mouth.

“I’m okay, really, Wayne. I mean, I miss her, of course, and it’s sad. I pick up the phone to call her at least four times a day. But that isn’t so unexpected. We had all that time to process, you know? So it’s more disconcerting than debilitating. I’m mostly just trying to figure out a little what my life is supposed to be about now.”

“Well, apparently your life is about making sure I don’t send all Aimee’s money to a Nigerian prince.” To his credit, Wayne says this with total good humor, and not a hint of resentment.

“Well,” I say, trying to stay in the same vein, “you know how tempted you are by those overseas lotteries. And so many of your friends end up stranded in Spain with no money!”

Wayne laughs. I have to begrudgingly give him a little credit; a lot of guys would be enormously pissed about being financially babysat by their wife’s best friend. “Well, I get it. I mean, Aimee always said that the only reason the business was worth as much as you got for it was because you guys didn’t just plan cool parties; the food was always as extraordinary as the décor and the details. Even more, she said. Because at the end of the day people left your parties raving about the food, not just flowers and table settings. So essentially, I have you to thank as much as Aimee for my lifestyle, and you to answer to as much as her. That’s the truth, Ruth.”

I suddenly realize that whatever Aimee may have said to me about this weird arrangement, her explanation for Wayne must have been much different. Because of course, Wayne has no idea that I’ve never really liked him. Oh, boy.

“Well, I think she just wants us both to have time to heal and for us to help each other get through this.”

“Exactly.”

“How’s Noah?” I ask, desperate to change the subject. Wayne’s big face lights up.

“He’s great! I mean, he’s sad too, obviously, but I think it is more that he’s worried about me. He calls me every night to check up on me. I went up to Madison yesterday to see his soccer game, and he scored a goal, so that was amazing! He definitely gets his athleticism from his mom.” Wayne laughs, his pride obvious and unabashed.

Noah is a sweet kid. Polite, relatively low maintenance, the perfect stepson, Aimee always said. “Well, good for him. When do you get him next?”

“He’ll be with Josie and her family for Thanksgiving Day, but then I get him for the rest of the weekend. Then I probably won’t see him till Christmas break.”

Every time I hear Noah’s mom’s name I can’t help but think of Josie and the Pussycats. Figures Wayne would knock up someone from a comic book. At least she didn’t let him name the kid Luke. A lifetime of “Luke, I am your father,” and the bugger would be in a clocktower with a rifle by his fifteenth birthday.

“Well, that will fly by, I’m sure.”

“Yeah. I guess. What are you doing?”

“For the holiday? I’ll be with Andrea and her family for Thursday, the potluck at the Library on Friday, and probably working at the Library on and off the rest of the weekend to give the team a break.”

“That’s nice of you. Maybe Noah and I will stop by!”

“Absolutely. That would be great.”

“You’re doing terrific. See? This isn’t so hard.”

“I do need to bring up our first money discussion. There’s something I want to do.”

Oh. No. Too soon. I swallow the mouthful of burger that has suddenly turned to lead on my tongue.

“You know how Aimee donated a bundle of money to U of C a couple of years ago, to fix up the theater and the quad where they do the plays in the summer?”

“Yeah . . .”

“I want to commission a statue of Aimee for that quad. Right now there’s just a little plaque on a wall that no one can really see.”

“Um, I dunno, Wayne, the university might not . . .”

“They’re totally in! I talked to them today. I even get to pick the artist. And they’ll have an unveiling ceremony and stuff. We’ll have to make an additional donation, and pay for the statue, but I think it will be a great way to honor her, you know?”

“Did Aimee ever say anything about something like this that would make you think she would want it?” Because I know she would be MORTIFIED. Can you imagine? Some hulking bronze statue that undergrads can dress up for holidays, rubbing a boob for luck on their way to their Russian Lit class? Every summer having to either cover it up or incorporate her into the set design for the plays? Ugh.

“Well, not specifically, but she always really liked sculpture. And the guy that did the piece in the living room, the one we bought in Miami? He said he would be available to do it.”

GACK! The heinous sculpture of death. I try to stay calm, after all, this may set the tone for the rest of these discussions, and I have eleven months and sixteen days of them to get through.

“Well, how much are you thinking it will cost?” What the hell, if it is just four or five grand, I might as well let him do it.

“The artist said it would be sixty grand for the commission. And then there would be some installation costs, et cetera. Plus the extra donation for the university. Probably one fifteen to one twenty-five all in.”

One hundred twenty-five THOUSAND DOLLARS??? Hell. To. The. No. I try to keep my face impassive. “Well, Wayne, I think we want to be very careful. After all, that is a lot of money and the piece will live forever. And I never knew Aimee to want big public acknowledgment of her generosity like that, that’s probably why the small plaque. But why don’t you have this guy send you a drawing and some specs so that we know what we are really dealing with, and then we can make a final decision.”

This will at least put it off a bit. And since Wayne has the attention span of a deranged hummingbird with ADHD, he might forget entirely.

“Yeah, that’s a good idea! Don’t want to do something that doesn’t do her justice. I’ll talk to the artist tomorrow.”

“Great. How are you doing otherwise?”

“I’m okay. My guys have been really good; they check in on me all the time, stop by so I’m not alone. And Aimee’s brothers have been pretty great about calling and stuff. But the house feels really empty. I mean, I was used to being there alone a lot, because of the crazy hours you guys worked, but it’s just different now that I know she’s not coming home . . .” His voice catches a little. “But I’m hanging in. Day by day, you know. You betcha.”

“Good.”

“The accountants said that Aimee told them I could sell the house if I was too haunted by her memory or something, as long as the sale covers whatever I buy to replace it. But I dunno, if I move someplace she never was, then it’s like I won’t feel her there, and I like feeling her there.”

I can’t imagine Aimee’s house with someone else living in it. It’s hard enough to imagine it with just Wayne. Aimee built it from the ground up, every detail was hers; no one else could ever fully appreciate the things she agonized over. Another of the places we diverged, I wanted old history and quirky and patina. Aimee liked shiny and new, ultramodern and sleek and flawless. I wanted to stay in Logan Square, quiet and off the beaten path, and she wanted Lincoln Park.

“You shouldn’t really make any big decisions about anything for a while. I think it must be like AA, you know, they tell you not to make any big life decisions or start any new relationships or anything until you’ve been sober a year, you know? You just need to take your time and figure out what life looks like for you now that Aimee is gone.” This is actually a good tactic, maybe I can convince him that he should spend this next year grieving and not doing much, and he will mostly stay out of my hair and then I can hand him back to the lawyers and they can babysit.