The Accidental Book Club (6 page)

“Well, finally!” Loretta said, a little too late to be seamless. She set the book down and gestured toward Janet. “Someone who knows sexy. The rest of you have no taste.”

“Oh! Speaking of no taste,” Dorothy said, gulping down the last of her wine. “I heard the ex’s skank got a job at Lookie Lou’s.”

“Before we get off task,” Jean began, but it was already too late. You didn’t bring up an establishment like Lookie Lou’s and not get a reaction. Not in this group, anyway.

“No way!” May gasped. “The stripper place?”

Dorothy nodded. “That was my reaction too. Who wants to see that old broad take her clothes off?”

“You mean other than Elan,” Loretta pointed out.

“Well, Elan’s standards plummeted the moment he turned fifty and bought that dumb motorcycle of his,” Dorothy said.

Loretta rolled her eyes. “That thing’s not a motorcycle. It’s a glorified bicycle. All it needs is tassels on the handlebars.”

“I’m pretty sure the tassels are on his girlfriend, if you know what I mean,” Mitzi said.

“How’d you find out?” May asked.

Dorothy made a face. “You’d rather not know.”

Which, of course, made everyone want to know.

“Justin saw her there,” Mitzi finally volunteered. “Can you imagine? Busting into a strip club with your fake ID, all ready to get your excitement, and there’s your dad’s girlfriend? Hi, Stepmom! When’s dinner?” She cackled and upended her drink.

“For real?”

Dorothy nodded miserably, then turned to Jean. “We gonna eat soon? This conversation is going to turn my stomach.”

“Of course,” Jean said, jumping up from her chair and herding everyone back into the kitchen. “Before everything gets cold.” Not that Jean cared too much about cold these days. Lately she’d taken to eating cold soup out of the can while standing over the kitchen sink. What was the point of dirtying a bunch of dishes for one person? Although, on the inside, she supposed she knew that was hardly healthy behavior.

Truth was, she wasn’t really in the mood for food right now, either. She’d been too into everyone’s stories. The dating, the ex-husband, the mother, even Loretta’s creepy adoration of R. Sebastian Thackeray. Keeping tabs on her friends’ lives helped her feel connected. And helped keep her mind off Laura.

“So, Jean, how is Laura, really?” Mitzi finally asked as they all sat down around their plates.

“I haven’t talked to her since the hospital,” Jean said. “And Curt hasn’t called me in two weeks. I’m assuming everything is status quo.”

“Is she still in there?”

Jean shrugged. “Who knows? They don’t exactly keep me in the loop. And I hate to bother them. Curt seems . . . frazzled, I guess.”

“Who’d blame him?” May said. “Sounds like his life is a shambles right now. I think I’d be frazzled.”

“Both of their lives,” Jean said. “My granddaughter, Bailey, is apparently acting out too. Being a real problem, from the sound of it.”

“Aw,” Mitzi said, and clucked her tongue. “Poor thing. Probably doesn’t know what hit her.”

Jean shrugged, remembering the sadness she saw in her granddaughter’s eyes that day she’d spotted her up in the loft. There was something about those eyes that begged for help, yet at the same time seemed to also threaten. In the end, Jean couldn’t bring herself to tell Curt he’d seen her up there. She felt as if it wasn’t her battle, and Bailey wanted it that way. She couldn’t pretend to know what was going through Bailey’s mind, or what the girl was thinking and feeling. Surely she felt lost and alone. Surely she missed her mother. But Jean couldn’t shake the nagging feeling of guilt for not reaching out to her when she could have. She wasn’t sure she’d done the right thing. “I’ll call them again tonight, see if I can find out what’s going on,” she said.

“It’s all you can do,” Loretta agreed.

“Maybe you haven’t heard anything because it went so well she’s already out and back at home,” May added.

“Hopefully so,” Jean said, but deep down inside she knew it meant anything but that.

After lunch, they convened in the living room, where everyone sprawled back against the thick cushions, complaining about how full they were, followed by how amazing Mitzi’s egg rolls had been, and flavorful Dorothy’s sliders, and as always they joke-guessed about who was going to get May’s “extra protein” in their cheesecake bite.

“I’m wearing a bandanna when I cook now, you guys. I told you,” May said, but everyone continued to giggle anyway.

And then, since Jean’s emergency trip to St. Louis had derailed their last meeting and they had no book to critique, they all agreed on reading the first few chapters of
Blame
aloud, Mitzi starting, followed by Dorothy, and rounded up by Loretta, who made everyone laugh with her sultry, deep Thackeray voice.

“Gross, you sound like Count Chocula trying to get it on with Franken Berry,” Mitzi said, which elicited more giggles, especially after Loretta retaliated by smacking Mitzi’s arm playfully with her book.

Too quickly, the meeting was over. The dishes were washed and put away, and Jean was too full to eat dinner, too tired to watch TV, too wired to read.

She ended up taking an early shower to wind down, and then wrapping herself in her fluffiest terry-cloth robe and bunny slippers. She turned on the television and held the Thackeray book in her lap while watching the evening news, her wet head still wrapped in a towel.

“Well, Wayne, we’ve got a doozy this month,” she said aloud, and held up the book as if to show it to someone in the room. She opened it and began reading.
“Johnna Bland’s life was a travesty. She’d been hooking since she was thirteen, stuffing her grand, vellicating thighs into clothes three times too small, counting on her meth addiction to keep her thin, to keep her pretty, too blind to realize how not thin and not pretty she already was. Not even to her daughter, Blanche, whose grandest hope was to hook half as well as her mother someday, to gather up a little cash and have a little fun before unceremoniously killing herself on a subway track
.
”
She frowned at the page. “Dear God,” she said, then looked upward toward the ceiling again. “We’re in for a long one, I’m afraid,” she said. She let out a long sigh. “I sure wish you were here to read it with me.”

The day Wayne died wasn’t the day Jean felt her life spin out of control. That actually happened on the day he was diagnosed.

She would never forget the silent car ride home from the hospital. She’d driven to the appointment, because Wayne hadn’t been feeling well and wanted to push his seat back and recline, maybe grab a quick nap while she traversed cross-town traffic. But on the way home from the hospital, he’d snapped his seat back into its upright position and had simply stared out the window, the only sounds being the rushing of the heater and the muted noises of the cars around them—a thumping bass here, a honk there. He was thinking. Jean knew the set of her husband’s jaw when he was ruminating. But she didn’t ask him what he was thinking about. She already knew.

She couldn’t remember blinking once on the way home.

They’d sat that way all night—side by side at the dinner table, on the couch watching a movie, in bed reading paperbacks. All in total silence, as if neither of them knew what to say to the other.
It’ll be all right
would be a lie.
I’m scared
would be too honest for either of them to handle.
Maybe it’s a mistake
would be so optimistic as to be idiotic. It wasn’t a mistake, and it wouldn’t be all right ever again, and they were both frightened as hell, and to admit any of those things aloud would be to say a truth that neither was ready, or prepared, to face.

“We need to tell the kids,” Jean finally said after Wayne had flipped the switch on the bedside lamp and they’d both lain in the dark, silent, side by side, eyes wide-open and staring at the ceiling.

“I know,” he’d responded. “Can we wait?”

“The doctor said it could be just months.” Jean almost choked on the word
months
, her voice wavering at the end of it. “We want to give them time. To say . . .” G
ood-bye. Give them time to say good-bye.
But her throat wouldn’t let the word out.

“But I don’t want it to be just months, Jeanie,” Wayne had said, and he’d sounded almost like a little boy rather than the fearless man she’d known and loved for decades. She’d reached out under the covers and touched his hand.

“I know,” she said. “Neither do I.” And she’d swallowed and swallowed because she didn’t want to cry in front of him. She didn’t want his fears confirmed, that he would leave her broken and alone. She’d wanted him to feel she could take his death. That she could handle it and be okay. She wanted to gift him that peace.

They’d called both kids the next evening on the speakerphone. Wayne had told them himself, breaking down halfway through the sentence each time. Kenneth had cried like a baby, had blubbered on about how his dad was a fighter and he could beat this. Laura had sounded distant, distracted, as if not really taking in the news.

“Whoa, that’s rough,” she’d said. “How long?”

Wayne had squeezed his eyes shut. “They’re saying not very, I’m afraid. I’d like to see Bailey soon.”

“Sure, yeah,” she’d said, but in a very
yes, dear
sort of way. “Wow. Cancer. You’re what, sixty-seven?”

“Yes,” Wayne had answered.

“A hundred years ago, you would’ve been thought of as an extremely old man,” she’d said. “For what it’s worth.”

Wayne had glanced at Jean and then frowned, a perplexed crease between his eyebrows. “I suppose you’re right,” was all he’d said.

That’s Laura,
Jean had told Wayne when they hung up.
That’s her way of dealing with hard stuff. You know how she is. If she can’t solve it, she doesn’t know what to do with it.

But given events of the past couple of weeks, Jean couldn’t help but wonder if maybe Laura had been drunk that night too.

And now look at her. Sitting in a rehab center out in a St. Louis suburb somewhere, fighting with her husband, fighting with her daughter, fighting with bill collectors, fighting to keep her job. So much fighting.

Jean wondered now if Laura was feeling like she had felt back when Wayne was diagnosed, back when he first got sick. She wondered if Laura felt like she was swimming and swimming, taking in water with each choking breath, but never getting anywhere. She wondered if she felt jellyfish stinging her gut and sharks nipping at her heels, prodding her to go on, to hurry up, to get on top of things. She wondered if that was why Laura had gotten to where she was right now—just trying to get out of the damn ocean. Just trying to get to the beach where she could dry off and get her wits about her.

Not that it mattered. You could lose control, but that didn’t mean you got to check out of your life. It didn’t mean you let your teen daughter drown because you couldn’t hack the temperature of the water.

Jean decided not to read any more aloud after all. She laid the book in her lap and leaned her head back against the sofa cushion, closed her eyes, imagined what Wayne’s reaction to the Thackeray book would have been.
Jeanie,
she could hear him say,
I’m trying to find a greater truth here. There has to be a life truth he’s trying to reflect back at us with this.
How Wayne had always done that—tried to find more in the books they read than was actually there. He’d felt so strongly about not only reading them, but also learning from them. She’d once joked that he could find a greater life truth in a Dr. Seuss book, so what had he done? Come home from the library with a Dr. Seuss book and dissected it for her, page after silly page.
You see, Jeanie, this book is, at its core, about courage in the face of adversity,
he’d said.
It’s actually very sophisticated.
And then he’d started the book over, reading in the voice of a Shakespearean actor. He’d had her laughing so hard by the end of it that pain stabbed her sides, but she’d also been in awe of him. Of what he could do. Surely that was a gift. It felt like a gift to her, anyway.

The phone rang, jarring her out of her thoughts.

She got up, absentmindedly carrying the book with her, and set it on the table next to the phone.

“Hello?”

“Jean, it’s Curt again.”

Her heart sank. The last time Curt had called, it had been bad news. And he didn’t sound any better this time. “Yes?” she asked timidly.

“It’s Bailey.”

“Bailey?” This took Jean aback. She was expecting it to be about Laura. “What happened? Is she okay?”

A pause, a deep breath. “Depends on what you mean by okay. Physically, she’s fine, yes.”

Jean waited for more, but he didn’t elaborate. What did that mean,
physically, she’s fine
? “Good,” she said, unsure what else to say. Unsure what else would make him keep talking, or even if she wanted him to. Seemed like the only time Curt talked to her these days he was saying something that almost hurt her to hear.

“She’s a pain in the ass,” he finally added. “Out of control. I don’t know what to do with her, and I can’t . . . I just can’t handle her anymore. She needs her mother, but we all know what happened there.”

Jean sank into the chair next to the phone. Wayne had called it her “necessary chair,” after the argument they’d had over whether to buy it.
Where in Sam Hill’s name are you going to put it?
he’d asked.
In the telephone nook,
she’d responded, proud of herself for naming the little alcove in the hallway where the telephone jack was.
What the heck for?
he’d pressed.
To sit on while using the phone,
she’d replied as if he were dumb.
If you’re going to have a telephone nook, it’s necessary to have a chair to sit on
. Of course, not once had anyone ever sat on it. They’d simply carried the phone to whatever chair or bed or bench in the house they wanted to sit on. Now, finally, Jean was sitting in the necessary chair, and no one was there to notice it.

“Have you taken her to see someone?”

“See someone? No, listen, that’s not why I’m calling.”

“Okay?”

“I’m calling because I need to ask a favor.”