The Accidental Book Club (14 page)

“It’s not obnoxious,” Jean said, and then she and Mitzi locked eyes, and both of them let out breathy laughs. “Okay, it can occasionally be a little obnoxious.”

“I’m a jerk, I know. But I don’t mean to be. It’s sort of like that Thackeray book. The whole book was about being trapped by your mistakes and blah blah blah. But you know what he got wrong?”

Jean rolled her eyes. “So many things.”

“Dorothy couldn’t think more polar opposite of the way I think if she tried, but she’s still my best friend and I love her and none of that other stuff matters. She accepts that I’m a jerk, and I accept that she does everything exactly how I wouldn’t. That’s what he got wrong. Human connection. But tell that to my gut when I’m lying awake at night, stressing about whether I’ve done the right things in my life.”

“Me and you both,” Jean said. She wiped the sweat that was rolling down her temples. “Would you like to come inside? Much cooler in there. I’ll get you something cold to drink.”

Mitzi looked at her watch again and grimaced. “Nope. I’ve got to get back to the salt mines.” She stood up straight and patted her backside. “Besides, my buns are about half-baked by now anyway. You sure you’re gonna be okay? I can call in sick. Say I got a bad chicken sandwich undercooked by a bleeding heart free-range freak.” She grinned and winked.

“Actually,” Jean said, “I’m feeling a little better.” And she was. Certainly not great, but a little better. She could still feel a little twist in her heart with the memory of Wayne’s gardening gloves. She could still feel the anxiety over what would happen with Laura and Bailey. But in a way she felt lighter too. Not because Mitzi, the most put-together woman in the group, had a weakness. But because Mitzi, the most put-together woman in the group, had a weakness and had shared it with her.

She stood in the driveway and waved good-bye as Mitzi pulled down the street. The sun pounded into the top of her head, and she could feel sweat bead on her lower back and slide down into her waistband. She really could think of doing not much else besides grabbing a cold glass of water and lying down for a few minutes to shake this terrible afternoon.

She went around the house and through the back door, the one right off the living room, and was immediately struck by how much cooler the house felt compared to the outside. But her relief was short-lived, when she was struck with something else.

At first it didn’t make sense what she was seeing. At first the best her brain could do was articulate the words,
That shouldn’t be happening!
but it took a few seconds for the rest of her to catch up on what was going on.

Bailey was lounging across the couch on her back, one leg dangling toward the floor, her right hand holding a book above her head. In her left hand, she absentmindedly swung something around and around in lazy circles.

Jean’s eyes darted to the end table.

The glasses. They were gone.

Bailey was swinging Wayne’s glasses around in circles.

“What are you doing?” Jean barked, aware of how she sounded, but unable to control herself. The scent of the mower still lingered in her nose. The vision of his gloved hands holding hers still rolled around in her gut. And now this insolent granddaughter of theirs had moved his glasses from where they’d sat for more than two years undisturbed, and was waving them around as idly as if they were a toy.

Bailey turned her head, a curious expression on her face. She stopped swinging the glasses, which hung loosely from her fingers now. “What? I’m reading. And I gotta tell you, this stuff is—”

Jean pointed. “Those,” she said. “They’re not for playing.”

Bailey looked curiously at the glasses. “I wasn’t playing with them. I had them on because I was getting a headache and Father of the Year forgot to pack mine, but old Gramps was even blinder than I am.”

“Put them down,” Jean said, her voice gruff, and louder than she wanted it to be. “They aren’t supposed to be moved. Put them back.”

Bailey’s eyes went wide and then narrowed into little slits, the look Jean knew best on her granddaughter. “Okay. Whatever. What’s your problem? It’s not like he’s going to need them or anything.”

Jean’s hands clenched into fists. Sweat rolled down over one eyelid. “And stop doing that. Stop saying things like that.” She stormed over to where Bailey was lying down and snatched the glasses out of her hand. “He was a wonderful man, and you may not disrespect him in this house.”

Bailey sat up, the book closing in her lap. “Whoa. How did I disrespect a dead dude?”

“By doing that,” Jean said, pointing, as if tracking the words in the air. “By calling him the dead dude and Zombie Grandpa and saying that he kicked the bucket and took a dirt nap and all the other things you say and do to impress yourself. It’s not impressive. It’s disrespectful. And it . . .” She stopped, pressed her lips together.
Hurts,
she was about to finish.
And it hurts.
But a lump had suddenly appeared in her throat, and she could feel the metal of his frames burning into her hand, could feel the sweat from her palms making them slick.

She couldn’t put them back on the end table. Not now. They’d been moved. They’d been moved, and he hadn’t come in asking where they were. He hadn’t needed to put them on to read a scene out of his favorite Preston and Child book. Bailey had been playing with his glasses, and nobody had noticed because he wasn’t around to care.

In the meantime, Bailey had pulled herself to standing. “This place sucks,” she said. “I can’t wait to leave.”

Jean said nothing, the fight drained out of her, as Bailey walked around the couch and sped past her, up to the kitchen, the book she’d been reading tucked into the crook of her arm.

“Oh, good, you’re up. This is gonna be a real treat,” Jean heard Bailey say when she got to the kitchen. Jean shuffled a few steps to the side and peered up the stairs, where she saw Laura, a glass of water sweating in her hand, her back to Jean.

“Good morning to you too, sunshine,” Laura responded in her usual flat voice.

“Morning? It’s, like, one. When are we going home? I want to go home. You have to take me home,” Bailey said, her voice ratcheting up with every word. Jean recognized the same hysteria coming on that seemed to happen between Laura and Bailey every day at about this time. She didn’t want it. She wanted to put her hands over her ears and tune it out.

“Bailey, I’ve told you. We’ll go home soon, okay? Can I not be sick for a while?”

“But you’re not sick! You embarrassed yourself in front of everyone, and now you’re acting like it’s all some big terminal illness that made you do it, but it’s not. You’re hungover. Tonight you’ll feel great, just in time to drink again. Don’t think everyone in this house doesn’t know it.”

Jean blinked, hearing Bailey voice her own thoughts, her own worries.

“Don’t talk to me that way,” Laura warned. “I’m not your grandmother. You won’t get away with it.”

“Oh! And speaking of. She’s nuts. Just went ballistic on me over a pair of stupid glasses. This place is so messed up! This is abuse. It’s got to be abuse to keep me here.”

“Nobody’s abusing you.” Now Laura’s voice was edging upward, and Jean’s head started to pound with every syllable. “You’re so spoiled.”

“Oh, really, Mom? Spoiled like a CEO’s daughter, or spoiled like someone else’s baby? Because you know I was switched at birth!”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know! You know what I’m talking about!”

Jean started up the stairs, but by the time she got to the top, Bailey was already storming out of the room and to her bedroom. Jean heard a few steps and then a slam, a sound she had gotten used to.

Laura shook her head, rubbing her temples with a thumb and forefinger. “What did you do?” she asked Jean when she finally looked up again.

“I told her to put down your father’s glasses,” Jean said defiantly, her hand still shaking around the glasses. How would she bear to look at that table ever again without them there?

Laura rolled her eyes. “Really? All this over Dad’s glasses? It’s so morbid, you know, the way you hang on to his stuff like he’s coming back.”

“Yes, you’ve told me.”

“Can’t you just leave well enough alone with her? Can’t you just . . . focus on the living people in this house, Mom? It’s like you’re living with a ghost, and he’s your only friend in the world.”

Jean opened her mouth to protest, but then snapped it shut again when she realized the only thing that might have come out of it were the words,
You have no idea how right you are.
“It’s my house,” she finally said.

“Oh, okay, so now I get it. We’ve worn out our welcome. You want us gone. Very nice. Glad to know I have someplace to come home to when I’m sick.”

“That’s not what I meant at all. You know that. You can always come here, sick or not.”

Laura nodded, unconvinced. “No. Kenny is always welcome here. But Laura. Oh, well, we don’t have to worry about her, because she’s got it all together, man. She can handle whatever is thrown her way.”

“I never said that.”

“You didn’t have to. Every move you made, my whole life, has said it for you. Why do you think I drink, Mom? Because it’s the only time I get to just be Laura, not Laura the Perfect.”

“We never expected you to be perfect.”

“There is no more we! You need to come to grips with that, Mom! He’s gone, and my daughter is upstairs, angry because his glasses were more important to you than she is.”

For a moment, Jean simply gawked at her daughter, almost unable to believe what had just come out of the woman’s mouth.
What about you?
Jean wanted to ask.
What part of this is your fault? I wasn’t the one drinking. I wasn’t the one who got her so angry in the first place!

But what came out of her mouth might have been even more surprising. “What is your plan?”

“What?”

Jean curled her fingers tighter around the glasses. “What is your plan? When do you go back to work? When do you get . . . better?”

Laura blinked a few times, her mouth hanging wide-open. “You want me out,” she said. “Very nice. I guess I know how you feel now. Okay. Okay. You want to creep around here in your little shrine to the Great Wayne God, then fine.”

“No, of course not,” Jean said. “I want you to get back to your life.” But it was useless. Talking to Laura had become useless. Talking to Bailey had become useless. Every bit of the situation seemed useless. Plus, she wasn’t sure if maybe Laura was right. Maybe she had made this a shrine to Wayne, without even thinking about it. Maybe as he faded away from her, she only tried to hang on to him tighter—so tightly it was all anyone else could see.

Laura refilled her glass under the faucet and stomped up the stairs—just as Bailey had done a few minutes before—and Jean was alone.

At first she stood in the silent kitchen, listening to ice crash into place in the freezer and the mumbling of TV voices upstairs. But after a while she too trudged up the stairs and shut her bedroom door.

Her legs felt so heavy. Her eyes felt heavy. Her stomach, her breasts, everything felt as if it were being pulled to the ground. She hadn’t felt this way since right after Wayne died.

Jean walked to his dresser, which she’d emptied of his T-shirts and boxer shorts and socks long ago. She’d stored her sweaters there, but then had spent last winter chronically cold because she couldn’t find the strength to open his dresser and take a sweater out.

But the top drawer she’d opened many times. Three times a day for the first month, twice a day for the second month, once a day for the third and fourth months. Once a week for the fifth. And then she’d . . . stopped.

She opened it now and peered down at the contents inside. Wayne’s wallet, including snapshots of both kids, of Bailey at age seven, of Wayne and Jean at a flower show, a snapshot of Jean holding a diapered chimp. She’d had that one taken at a festival down on the riverfront; Wayne had loved it, had always joked that it was a photo of the two of them together. She opened the wallet, lifted it to her nose and closed her eyes, smelled the leather. She rifled past his driver’s license and his credit cards (all canceled now, of course), his voter registration card. She pulled out the yellowed newspaper clipping he’d kept in there—his mother’s obituary—then refolded it and put it back.

She touched his wedding ring, the pinkie ring she’d given him for their first Christmas and he’d never worn, the rosary with the wooden beads his grandmother had given him as an infant. She picked up his autographed DiMaggio baseball, the one he was so proud of, and turned it around in her hand, inspecting the signature. She remembered when her father had suggested that the signature was a fake how angry Wayne had gotten, how they had almost come to blows. She laid the ball back in the drawer and picked up his bartending book that she’d kept because he’d sketched so many notes in it and she didn’t want to forget his handwriting. She flipped through the pages, looking at nothing, but seeing it all—
oranges, triple sec, great Christmas cocktail, try this at Jean’s birthday party, no to the vodka, too sweet
.

Handkerchiefs, watches, coins, his handwritten wedding vows, the wristband he’d worn at the hospital when Laura was born, a lifetime of memories and treasures, a person’s life boiled down to just enough to fit in a top dresser drawer.

Jean’s Crying Time drawer.

In the beginning when she felt like she was drowning in grief, her therapist gave her permission to cry, but only during specific times.

It’s healthy to grieve,
he’d said,
but it’s unhealthy to grieve too much. Schedule crying times, say, noon to one, every day, you will think about him and cry your eyes out. But by one-oh-one, your eyes have to be dry and you have to be moving on. Understand? Give yourself a few times a day these first few weeks, and we’ll pare it back later.

And so she did. During the days, she gathered up Wayne’s everyday things and took them to Goodwill. She packed his clothes in boxes and stuffed his shoes in garbage bags and gave away his CDs to friends and donated his coats to charity. She erased him from the house, dry-eyed all the while. And then she put the small treasures—the things she wanted to keep, that she thought he would want her to keep—into his top dresser drawer, and she would touch them and smell them and curl up with them and cry with all she had.