She, Myself & I (36 page)

“Hi,” I said to Faith the Stepmother, and then glanced back at Laura.

She didn’t look anything like I thought she would. I’d assumed Oliver’s wife would be beautiful, but in a cold and distant way. A pouting-blonde-heiress type, who walked around with a small yapping dog stuck in her Hermes bag. The kind of woman who’d married Oliver because she liked the idea of being Mrs. Oliver Klein, wife of the hottest chef in Miami, and not because she truly cared about the man.

But Laura was pretty in a plump, homey way. Her green eyes were kind, and her smile was wide and punctuated by a dimple in each cheek. She looked like she could have been a cheerleader back in high school, the girl-next-door who was friends with everyone. Laura wasn’t the slut that men screwed on kitchen counters when their wives were away—she was the one they married.

“Let me tell you about the specials tonight,” I began, and then stopped abruptly, because I’d forgotten to write them down. For once I hadn’t feared being yelled at as Oliver had done on my first day of work. He’d barked at me a few times since we’d started sleeping together—“If I didn’t, people would be suspicious,” he’d insisted—but even he had the sense not to target me when his wife was sitting just a few feet away in the dining room. I wondered if he knew I was waiting on her.

That would worry him, I thought. Or at least, it should.

“No, don’t bother. Oliver said he was making something special for us. He likes to do that,” Laura said, laughing self-consciously.

Jealousy cut through me. When Oliver and I were together, we just ordered pizza, or picked up drive-through, or occasionally he’d bring home leftovers from the restaurant. But other than the omelet he’d made on that first night we’d spent together, Oliver had never cooked anything special for me. But, after all, he was her husband, and I was just his mistress. Who was I to be jealous? I gritted my teeth into a smile.

“Sarah, where are you going?” Adam called out, and I turned around to see what would cause him to shout across the dining room from where he stood at the kitchen door.

Sarah had emerged from the ladies’ room, tears streaming down her face, and was storming toward the front of the restaurant. When Adam called out her name, she turned and looked back, first at him, then at Laura. And then, her body shuddering with tears, she flung the glass front door open and fled.

“Sarah?” Calla said to Sarah’s departing back, and then shrugged prettily when the waitress didn’t respond.

I watched her go, and then turned slowly back around, wondering if Laura had noticed the commotion. She had. Her face had gone gray and her eyes looked moist.

She knows, I realized. She knows her husband’s unfaithful.

Suddenly my shirt collar felt too tight around my throat—Adam insisted that we keep them buttoned all the way up—and my ponytail hurt my scalp, pulling and stretching the hair back too hard.

“Um. Can I get you anything else right now?” I asked.

“Who was that?” Laura asked.

“Who?”

“That woman who just left,” she said.

“That’s, um, Sarah. One of the servers. She’s having a bad day, she, um, just broke up with her boyfriend,” I said, and then hastily added, “He’s in grad school at UT. The boyfriend, I mean.”

Laura looked at me, and I could tell that she didn’t buy the lie. I didn’t know what to say, I felt like the world’s biggest hypocrite. Was I supposed to console my married boyfriend’s wife over the knowledge that he was screwing yet another woman?

“I’ll bring your starter out as soon as it’s ready,” I mumbled, falling back and practically running for the kitchen.

Adam was standing at the back of the dining room, next to the door.

“What’s it like meeting the big guy’s wife?” he asked, smirking at me.

“Fuck off, Adam.”

Chapter Forty-one

Kevin drove me home after my shift. I was exhausted. Sarah’s dramatic exit had meant we were one server short, and Adam piled most of the grunt work on me. Turns out he didn’t have much of a sense of humor about being told to fuck off.

As Kevin pulled out of the employee parking lot, he glanced over at me.

“Are you mad at me for telling your sister?”

I shrugged. “No, not really. I’m glad that I know. Well, not glad, but . . .”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. I heard that prick Adam sat the wife in your section.”

I nodded and sighed. It had been a long night. Oliver had played the part of the devoted husband, cooking his beloved wife her favorite foods for dinner: coconut shrimp, roasted chicken, white-truffle risotto. Laura had oohed and ahhed over each dish and pretended that she had never seen a teary-eyed girl run from the restaurant.

I had managed to avoid Oliver for the most part—which was easy, since we always pretended we didn’t know one another during the dinner rush anyway—and then he left early with his wife, entrusting the kitchen to Ansel’s less-than-capable hands.

“What was she like?” Kevin asked. “I didn’t get to meet her.”

“She’s nice. Too nice for Oliver,” I said honestly. “So . . . how is it that everyone in the restaurant knows about Oliver and me?”

“I don’t think everyone does know, and don’t worry, I didn’t tell anyone other than Paige. Ansel suspected something. He told me that Adam claims to have followed you after work one night and saw Oliver take you to his apartment, but Ansel didn’t know whether to believe him. I hate to say this, because I don’t want to make you feel worse, but the general consensus was that you were too smart and too well grounded to get involved with someone like Oliver,” Kevin said.

“Not that smart. Obviously. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking,” I said.

“It happens to the best of us. I’ve gotten involved with guys like Oliver; I think most people have. Just be glad you found out early,” he said sagely.

When I got home, all of the lights in the apartment were still on, and Paige was sitting up on the couch, wearing her bathrobe, reading a Maeve Binchy paperback and eating a Butterfinger.

“Why are you still up? Are you feeling okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” Paige said, yawning loudly. “I wanted to hear how it went with Oliver tonight.”

I collapsed on the couch next to her, kicking off my Doc Martens. I glanced at Paige and saw that her eyes were rimmed with red. There were discarded tissues balled up on the table next to her.

“Have you been crying? What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m just tired. Long day at work.”

“Uh-huh. What’s really wrong? Is it Zack?”

“Maybe a little.”

“He calls all the time, why don’t you talk to him?”

“Three days. He hasn’t called in three days,” Paige said, and her eyes filled with tears. She picked up the Kleenex box and pulled out a tissue. “It’s my last one.”

“I’ll get you more,” I said.

“He’s probably forgotten all about me and met someone new,” she said, sniffling into the precious last tissue.

“Paige . . . you haven’t taken any of his phone calls in weeks. He probably figures that you don’t want him to keep calling,” I said.

“I know,” she said miserably. “I think I’ve screwed everything up.”

“What happened? I don’t even know why you guys broke up.”

Paige sighed and rubbed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “After Zack proposed to me, I thought it over for a few days. I thought about Scott, and how badly our marriage ended, and I thought about all of the crap luck I had with guys before that. And I wondered if maybe I was just cursed when it came to marriage.”

“Oh, please. You don’t believe in curses.”

“I know. Which is why I decided I was being stupid, and that the worst mistake I could make would be to lose Zack. And so I decided to say yes.”

“Paige!”

“I felt awful for ruining his romantic proposal that night, and I wanted to make it up to him. So I made reservations at Fonda San Miguel, which is where we went on one of our first dates. I had it all set up—I bought him a wedding band that I was going to give to him, and I’d arranged for the waiter to bring over a bottle of champagne.”

“What happened?”

“I’m getting there. Anyway. When Zack got to the restaurant, he was acting very cool and very distant. And before I even got a chance to tell him my answer or give him the ring, he launched into this big speech about how disappointed he was about my reaction to his proposal—”

“I can see his point.”

“And that he thought I was just scared of commitment—”

“You are.”

“If you keep interrupting me, I’m not going to tell you the rest of the story.”

“Sorry. Go ahead. I’ll be quiet.”

“So then I got angry at him for pressuring me, when he promised he’d give me all the time I needed to think things through. And I was pissed that he’d ruined what was supposed to be this big romantic gesture—”

“But he didn’t know that!” I said.

“Mickey! You promised you’d let me finish.”

“I forgot. Please continue.”

“Well, that was basically it. We had a fight, and I left, and we’ve barely spoken since.”

I stared at her.

“What?” she asked.

“Let me get this straight. Zack proposed to you, and by your own admission you didn’t handle that particularly well. Instead of accepting his proposal, like you wanted to, you left him hanging for a few days.”

“A marriage is supposed to last until one of us dies. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to spend a few days thinking it through.”

“Absolutely. But then you decided to say yes, and instead of telling him your decision, you picked a fight with him because . . . what was it again?”

“He was crowding me, pushing me for a commitment.”

“But you’d already decided you wanted a commitment!” I said, throwing my hands up.

“Well. Yeah. That’s why I think I screwed things up,” Paige admitted.

“Paige. You have to call him.”

“I can’t!”

“Why not?”

“Because . . . because . . . I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” she said.

“That’s mature.”

“What happened with Oliver tonight?” she asked. “Come on, I need to think about something else. I’m all cried out, and I’m out of tissues.”

“It was . . . bad,” I said.

“Did you confront him?”

“I didn’t have a chance. His wife showed up. And I had to wait on her,” I said dully. I slumped back against the sofa and rested my feet on the edge of the coffee table.

“No! What? I thought they were separated,” Paige gasped.

“Me, too. Apparently, Oliver had a big blowup with his boss in Miami, and made such a big stink on his way out that he couldn’t get a job in another restaurant there,” I said.

“His wife told you that?”

“Kevin told me, he just found out today, although I don’t know who told him. Anyway, that’s why Oliver ended up in Austin—turns out it was the only place he could get a job. But apparently he’s hoping to get back in somewhere in Miami, so he didn’t want to move his wife and kid out here, just to move them back again,” I said.

I sounded amazingly calm even to my own ears as I relayed these tidbits of information. It had been such a weird night, and somehow it felt like it was all happening to another person.

“He’s an even bigger asshole than we thought. So, he’s just been cheating on his wife all along?”

“Mm-hmm. I’m an adulteress,” I said bitterly. “And she was nice, really nice. She deserves better.”

“You deserve better. And it’s not your fault. You thought he was separated,” Paige said fiercely.

“I knew he was married. I didn’t exactly go out of my way to find out what the status of their marriage was,” I said. I’d been too worried that if I pushed him on any aspect of his life, he’d leave me, and that shamed me even more than Laura’s kind smiles and overly generous tip.

“You didn’t talk to him at all?” Paige asked.

“I couldn’t. He got in late and then left early. The other chick he was seeing stormed out in tears. Laura—that’s his wife’s name—saw her, and I think she knew,” I said.

“Well, I’m sure it isn’t news to her that her husband is an asshole,” Paige said. “I will never understand why women stay with guys like that.”

“I thought I was in love with him.”

“Oh, Mick.” Paige leaned forward and wrapped an arm around me.

“I’ll be okay,” I said, although the words sounded hollow to me.

“So what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to go over before my shift tomorrow and quit,” I said.

“Good. Tell him to shove it up his ass while you’re there. Are you still going to Mom’s for lunch?”

That had been our agreement. Paige would let me be the one to tell Mom and Dad about my plans, but I had to do it soon. This weekend. And I was okay with it. I’d been putting it off for long enough.

“Yup. Tomorrow should be a fun day,” I said.

“Aren’t they all,” Paige sighed.

“We make quite a pair, don’t we,” I said, slouching over and resting my head on my big sister’s shoulder. “I’ve been screwing and getting screwed over by a married man, and you’re knocked up and not talking to the baby’s father.”

“We’ll be okay. Cassel girls always land on their feet,” Paige said.