So Much for My Happy Ending (8 page)

“Hey, can I take you out for an early supper as a way of thanking you for helping me?”

“It's barely five.”

“I did say early, didn't I? Come on, I'm hungry and I hate eating alone.”

Going home was the right thing to do. I still had some boxes to unpack, thank-you notes to write for last month's holiday gifts, bills to pay….

“April?”

“Yeah, I'll get some food with you.”

Since the weather was unseasonably warm, we went to Café Flore, which has outdoor seating. It was nicely fenced, so it was easier to pretend that we were in a countryside café rather than a restaurant that was bound to eventually be demolished by a runaway Muni bus. Once we had ordered and picked up our food and beverages at the counter and found a table I asked the question that had been killing me since I met Jeremiah. “Did you really go to college?”

“I did indeed,” Jeremiah said as he scooted his chair in.

“So at what point did you unlearn the English language?”

He made a show of wincing although it was obvious that I hadn't hurt his seemingly impenetrable self-esteem. “April, did you take a foreign language in college?”

“French.”

“Were you any good at it?”

“I was good enough to get Bs in my classes but I'm hardly fluent. If pressed I could probably still manage to give a Parisian tourist directions.”

“And if pressed I can speak proper English,” he said with what I think was supposed to be an upper-crust accent but sounded more like a bad John Cleese impersonation. “I was even able to produce the very few grammatically correct term papers that are required of an accounting major. But unless called upon to speak in front of a large gathering of professors who are unfortunate enough to have the proverbial stick pushed up their literal asses I see no need to do so.” He then added in his normal voice, “It ain't who I am.”

I pretended to buy this as we began our light meal but I suspected that, while in college, Jeremiah's grammar was better than it was now, even when in casual setting. My guess was that hanging around with a bunch of stoned rockers had had its effect on him whether he was consciously aware of it or not.

Jeremiah was now pulling out the Leibovitz book with every third or fourth bite of his sandwich. “They're gonna love this. I know I do.”

I shrugged and allowed the bubbles of my mineral water to tickle my tongue before swallowing. “Just don't get any mustard on it.”

“Yeah, yeah, I'm being careful. You know, you got good taste, April,” he said while looking into the eyes of Yoko Ono. “Are you into photography, too?”

“Art in general, I have a B.A. in art history. I wanted to be an art curator.”

“But you don't anymore?”

I shrugged. “Believe it or not, it's a difficult job to get. I would have to go back to school for my Ph.D., and even then the odds of landing a curator position would be against me.”

“What are you sayin'? You just gave up?”

“I didn't give up.” Jeremiah raised an eyebrow at my involuntary rise in volume. I swallowed and tried again. “I put myself through school by working part-time at Dawson's. A few months before I graduated, Dawson's offered me a job as an assistant manager and I grabbed it. I thought it would be a good way to pay off student loans and save for a graduate degree.”

“So this job is temporary?”

I shook my head. “Not anymore. Turns out I'm a good manager and I will probably make buyer soon. So now I'm a fashion girl. All's well that ends well.”

“I gotta tell you, that ending sucks.”

“It works for me,” I snapped. “Besides, if I was trying to land a curator's job right now I'd have to relocate in order to land the first position available, and how could I do that while maintaining my relationship with Tad?”

“Your fiancé's name is Tad?”

“Tad Showers.”

Jeremiah fell back in his chair. “No fucking way.”

“Yeah, I know, that would make me April Showers. Obviously I won't be changing my name.”

“No, it's not that…What I'm trippin' on is that I know Tad—we were buds.”

“Really? When and what do you mean ‘were'?”

“He had a thing with my friend Jackie.”

“Shut. Up.” I placed both my palms on the tabletop and leaned in. “Okay, you have to understand, I haven't met any of Tad's exes…Well, there's Jen Vesilind and…Cathy or Constance or something like that, but they don't count because he only went out with them three or four times each, but Jackie—he's actually mentioned her! You have to tell me all the gory details.”

Jeremiah pulled a pair of sunglasses out of his jacket pocket. He unfolded them and then folded them back up. “I'm not real big on gore. How's Tad doing these days?” There was an edge of concern in his voice that I found puzzling, but not distracting enough to get me off the subject at hand.

“He's fine. Tell me about Jackie.”

Jeremiah unfolded the glasses yet again and put them uselessly on the table. “Jackie moved to L.A. about six months ago. I haven't talked to her for a while.”

“I mean tell me about what she was like then!” Really, men could be so dense. “What does she look like, what were they like as a couple—the dirt!”

“Jackie's a hottie. Dark, long brown hair. She's kind of on the tiny side but she's toned, you know, one of those chicks with definition in her abs and shit.” He took another bite of sandwich and I waited impatiently for him to continue. “She's a bit of a wild woman,” he finally added, “and not the easiest gal to get along with. I've always made it a point not to get too involved in her love life.” He met my eyes and then slumped slightly when he realized that I was not going to just let the subject drop. “Okay this is what I know. I was Tad's trainer for a while, that's how we met. When he got a load of Jackie he befriended me in order to get to her.”

I shook my head impatiently. “Tad wouldn't do that. He's insanely ethical.”

Jeremiah lifted his eyebrows as a silent indicator that he wasn't buying it. “It doesn't matter why we started hanging out. What matters is that we did and it turned out that we have a lot in common.”

I pressed my fingers to my lips in order to keep myself from pointing out that apart from male genitalia, Jeremiah and Tad had nothing in common whatsoever. But it hardly seemed a point worth arguing.

“So he and Jackie hooked up and Tad and I became buds. When things didn't work out for them, Jackie moved out and Tad fell off the face of the earth. That's what I know.” Jeremiah took a large bite out of his sandwich, oblivious to the fact that my heart had stopped beating.

“Did you say—” I stopped myself, not wanting to give away that I was so ignorant about the romantic history of the man I had agreed to marry. How could he have not told me that he had lived with someone before? Wasn't that one of the things couples were supposed to share with one another? I didn't need him to confess to the details of his first sexual experience, but to not tell me that he had lived with Jackie…

“Yo, you all right?” I refocused my eyes to see Jeremiah staring at me from over his sandwich.

“Fine,” I said weakly. I smoothed my hands over my cotton-Lycra black skirt as if I expected to find a wrinkle.

Jeremiah took one last bite and then unfolded his glasses once more, and without putting them on gazed into their lenses as if the UV protective glass doubled as a crystal ball. “We should all get together one of these days.” His words came out a little too slowly. “I haven't seen Tad for a while. I'd like to catch up.”

A simmering anger was beginning to melt away my shock. “Oh, I definitely think that's a good idea. How about you drive me home tonight? Maybe we can surprise him.”

I
t was eight o'clock when Jeremiah walked me to my door. He openly admired the exterior of our house as I fished for my keys. It wasn't all that impressive, but it was a house and that put it a step above the majority of the other San Francisco residences.

“Tad knows the owner—he's giving us a deal on the rent.” I spoke in a voice that was barely above a whisper. I didn't want Tad to hear us. I wanted to spring Jeremiah on him the same way his former living situation with Jackie had been sprung on me.

I finally found my keys, and flung open the door. “Hi, honey, I'm home,” I announced. I could hear the notes of a commercial jingle coming from the living room.

“Goddess, I've been wondering when you'd show up.” Tad entered the foyer carrying two glasses of wine. He stopped short when he saw Jeremiah. I'm not sure what I expected, but I didn't expect him to look as if a ten-pound dumbbell had been dropped on his foot. Despite my anger I felt myself start to reach out to him, but then as quickly as it had come his expression of pain disappeared, washed away by something that looked like dull apathy.

“You remember Jeremiah, don't you, Tad? I ran into him in the Castro. He's the lead singer for Dig, the band Caleb, Allie and I went to see a few weeks ago. Isn't that just a big ol' coin-kidink?” I waited to see Tad's reaction. Surely from my flippancy he could surmise that Jeremiah had spilled a few beans.

But Tad barely acknowledged my presence at all. “Jeremiah…” He made an apologetic gesture to indicate that the wineglasses made a handshake impossible. “I haven't seen you for a while.”

“Over two years, man.” Jeremiah stuffed his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall. “You're lookin' good. Still working out?”

“When I have time.”

I looked from one man to the other. Jeremiah's tone had changed. It had become more…cautious. And Tad…I looked back to him. What was going on with him? He didn't seem embarrassed or anxious, as I had originally hoped he would be. Whatever he was feeling was a lot less dramatic and a
lot
more disconcerting.

“Tad, aren't you going to offer your old pal a glass of wine?” My voice lacked the sarcasm that I had meant to relay. Tad silently handed a glass to Jeremiah and one to me before turning around and leading us into the living room before disappearing into the kitchen. He emerged a minute later with a glass for himself.

“Nice pad you got here,” Jeremiah commented. “You still working for Nextel?”

“I started my own business.” Tad sat down on the couch and stared at the television. Some documentary about forensic science was on the Discovery Channel.

“You finally did that, huh?”

Tad gave a silent nod of accession.

This was supposed to be a righteous moment for me. Tad had lied and I had brought Jeremiah home to make him sweat. But I didn't feel righteous and Tad wasn't sweating. He was barely responding to the fact that there were other people in the room.

Jeremiah cleared his throat uncomfortably. “All right, I don't want to be cuttin' into you two's quality time.” He took a small sip of wine and placed the still-full glass on a box near the fireplace. “We should all go to dinner one of these days. Maybe this weekend?”

I waited for Tad to respond. He didn't. “I think both Tad and I will be working all weekend but maybe the weekend after that?” My voice came out an octave higher than normal. This was so weird; Tad and I had gone to dinner with Caleb twice, Allie once and several more times with his partners, with and sometimes without their wives. Why not go to dinner with Jeremiah? What was going on here?

“Sounds like a plan.” Jeremiah smiled but it looked strained. He nodded at Tad one more time. “Good seeing you, buddy.”

Tad turned his head slightly in his direction but didn't bother getting up. “See you later.”

I escorted Jeremiah to the door. Jeremiah patted my arm absently as he stepped out onto the front walkway. “You got my number, right? You'll call to firm up our plans?”

“I'll call,” I repeated.

“Or if you just want to shoot the shit.” He smiled at me. “I'm always good for that.”

“I don't usually shoot shit, but if I feel the urge, I know who to call. Good night, Jeremiah.”

“'Night, April.” He stood there for a few seconds as if deciding what his next move should be. Eventually he turned around and walked into the darkness.

I returned to the living room and noted that Jeremiah's glass had already been cleared away. Other than that, there was no indication that Tad had moved.

“Jeremiah told me you two used to be friends.”

“Uh-huh.” His eyes never left the flickering screen.

“He told me that you met Jackie through him.”

“That's right.” Again his voice lacked any indication of nervousness, anger…or emotion.

“He also told me that you and Jackie used to live together.”

His eyes traveled to me, and for a brief moment he held me with his gaze. I felt an inexplicable chill travel up my arms. I watched as his eyes slid slowly back to the TV. “She stayed with me for a few weeks while she was in-between apartments. It was never either of our intentions that it be permanent.”

Oh. I hadn't been prepared for a
reasonable
excuse. I toyed with the button of my coat, which I had yet to remove. “What was the deal with you two anyway?”

Tad's shoulders raised and dropped an eighth of an inch in what barely qualified as a shrug. “Jackie has issues. She's immature and a pathological liar.”

I reached down to retrieve my glass of wine and finished half of it in one gulp. There were a million questions I wanted to ask but only one answer that I had to know immediately. “Did you love her?”

Tad's mouth curved into a sardonic smile. “I cared about Jackie a lot for a while but I never considered asking her to marry me. You're the only woman I've ever wanted to make that kind of commitment to.”

The words were obviously meant to reassure me and they might have if they had been followed by a hug or a kiss, or even the touch of his hand. But Tad remained in his seat, watching a couple of guys in white coats analyze the fingernails of a corpse.

I shifted my weight from one foot to the next. “Tad…what is it? What's wrong?”

“Nothing, why?”

I hesitated. The question seemed simultaneously valid and ridiculous. “You seem—” I grappled for the right word “—down. You seem kind of down.”

Tad mechanically reached for his wineglass. “I'm tired. I've been working a lot of hours.”

That was true enough, another reasonable excuse, but…but what? He had a right to be tired. Hadn't I broken down in Liz's office today for the same reason? I looked down at my throbbing feet. Earlier today I had planned to unburden myself to him about Liz and more importantly about my mother's latest rejection, but after I found out about Jackie I had set my mind on having it out with him. Looking at him now, I couldn't imagine talking to him about any of those things.

“I'm tired, too.” My response came too late to be considered casual. “I think I'll got to bed early…Care to join me?”

“In a bit.”

I nodded and waited for something unknown, an explanation? A sign of tenderness? Finally I turned around and went to the bathroom to prepare myself for sleep.

 

I had woken up just in time to hear Tad's car pull out of the garage. It wasn't unusual for him to leave for work in the wee hours of the morning, especially recently, but considering his bizarre behavior of the night before his early departure felt like a method of avoidance. Not that I had a problem with avoidance, particularly since I didn't know what we were avoiding.

I went about my morning routine, and when I got to Dawson's it was unusually quiet. Liz was off, so I didn't have to deal with her reprimands for skipping out the day before (yet), and the customers were sparse. The few that did come in seemed to be set on returning unwanted Christmas gifts. By two o'clock we had done two thousand dollars' in sales and twenty-five hundred in returns. Just another reason why I hated the holidays.

It figured that on the day I desperately needed to be distracted I was forced to stand around and think. There was something that Tad wasn't telling me. Was it about Jackie? Jeremiah? Or was it something else entirely? When someone acted like that on
One Life to Live
it usually meant they had a brain tumor or a split personality. I tried to compare Tad's behavior to Victoria Lord's when she was having one of her many bouts of dissociative identity disorder. It didn't really fit. For one thing, Tad wasn't locking anyone up in a secret, previously nonexistent, underground room. The brain tumor seemed more likely.

“April?” I looked back to see Sally waving the phone at me as she credited another dissatisfied customer's MasterCard. “It's Marilyn.”

I took the phone from Sally and stretched the cord so that I was still standing on the outside of the register. “Hi, Marilyn, how are you?”

“What the hell is going on?”

“I take it you've pulled up our numbers.”

“Damn good thing I did. Do you have the department roped off or something?”

“Yes, I have it roped off and every time a customer comes within ten feet of the department I hold up a pair of your jeans and say, ‘I bet you'd like to buy this, huh?' It's really driving them crazy.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. I leaned back against the counter and rolled my eyes up toward the recessed lights. Sarcasm loses its therapeutic qualities when you're constantly having to apologize for it. “I'm sorry, Marilyn. I'm just feeling frustrated about all the returns.”

“Are you even trying to turn them into exchanges?”

Again sarcasm was called for and yet perversely forbidden. “We're doing what we can. I have a few personal customers coming in later and they all love Hardtail and Versus jeans.”

“Well, that's something. Remind your staff that they need to be selling a Michael Stars tee with every sale. Everyone needs a Michael Stars tee.”

Everyone who's a size four with a B cup. “I'll remind them.”

I hung up the phone and stepped behind the register to look at the credit slip for the last return. Eight hundred dollars.

“Excuse me, are you April?”

I looked up from the credit receipt to stare into the face of a future Playboy centerfold. Everything from her leather pencil skirt to the blond streaked hair that fell over the burgundy fauxfur collar of her tightly fitted sweater was pure sex kitten. I tugged at the sleeve of my own top self-consciously. “Yes, I'm April, can I help you?”

“Gigi Messinger.” She reached over the counter and shook my hand a little too vigorously. “I sell in the 532 store. I just moved here from SoCal.”

“Welcome to northern California. What can I do you for?”

“Is it true that you're looking for an assistant? Because if you are, I'm, like, totally your girl.”

No way was I hiring someone named Gigi who referred to southern California as SoCal. “I am looking, but I've already had a lot of other people call about the job.” Total lie.

“I promise you, I'm the one you want. My sales are, like, awesome. I've been a Dawson's Super-Seller every month for the last two years.”

“Well, that's great, Gigi, but I'm looking for someone who has some managerial experience under her belt—this is a large-volume department and I demand a lot from my staff.”

“I totally hear you.” Gigi put her hand on her rather well-endowed chest for emphasis. “You don't want some slacker taking up space. I was the assistant in San Fernando Valley's Rhapsody department for a year before I moved up here. I figured it would be good for my career to move to a store that was closer to the buying offices—you know, get myself noticed and then get promoted. I've been at Dawson's for a total of two years and before that I was at Bloomie's managing handbags.” She retrieved a folder out of her briefcaselike handbag and pulled out a résumé printed on pink marbleized paper.

Shit, she was going to make it hard
not
to hire her. I glanced down at the current month's schedule that was proudly displayed next to the register. In less than three weeks I'd be flying to Spain, and if I didn't hire someone for the assistant job by then I might as well draw a bull's-eye on my forehead and hand Liz a rifle. I took the résumé from her and scanned the information. “Why don't we go somewhere we can talk.”

Gigi eagerly agreed and I took her to the more casual of the two Dawson's cafés and bought us both nonfat lattes. I couldn't help but notice the way the cashier was drooling when he handed Gigi hers, but she seemed oblivious.

“Love, love, love your floor,” Gigi gushed as we maneuvered ourselves to a table with a view of the street below. “The way you have the Michael Stars tees mixed with the formal skirts—I mean, wow!”