The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel (13 page)

“Really now?” Rosie says, fascinated. “Ardent, huh? There’s a word you don’t hear much. So what do you call him? Would you say he’s your boyfriend?”

“God, that’s so distasteful in people over thirty, isn’t it?”

“Well, what do you prefer then? Lover? Partner?”

“God, no.
Lover
is way too clinical, and
partner
makes it sound like we went into business together.”

“Wow. This is big-time, isn’t it? Soapie Baldwin-Kelley falls in love at long last. It’s been a long dry spell since Grandpa. Good for you.”

“I guess he’s my main squeeze. That’s it.” Soapie settles back in her chair, looks at her nails for a long time. “That has the right touch of joie de vivre, I think. That, by the way, in case you haven’t figured it out, is what was wrong with you and Jonathan.”

“That I didn’t call him my main squeeze?”

“No. That you don’t have joie de vivre with him.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I have eyes, Rosie. You want more out of life than he could ever give you. He’s a nice enough guy, but he’s
limited
. Pitifully limited.”

“Well, in some ways maybe, but we’re all …”

“No. Just look at his thing about teacups in boxes, and you’ll see everything you need to know about him. He’s a
dry man
. No spirit! He’s like an arid desert of a human being. Now that you’re done with him, I can tell you the truth. I never knew what you saw in him. I always thought you were settling.”

“Come on, he’s funny,” Rosie protests. “Mostly. Or sometimes.”

Soapie sighs and lights a cigarette. “Uh-oh, now you think you need to defend him. I just think he’s not the love of your life, that’s all I’m saying.”

“Huh. I didn’t know you believed in the concept of ‘love of your life.’ ”

“I’m not sure I do. But you do. And you’re way better off without him. Even today, with your hair like that. If you’d get your hair done, eat some decent food, and buy some decent clothes, you could start having a little fun and then you’ll see what life can really be like. Get you some joie de vivre. You could have adventures.”

Seriously?
Rosie wants to say.
You think I should take life advice from a woman who’s nearly ninety years old and after fifty dry years is only now discovering how great it is to have a man in the bed?

Two days later, she finds herself in the kitchen with Tony Cavaletti, who is making a pot of coffee and a pan of
cinnamon buns for breakfast. After two days of having no appetite, she has been brought to her knees by the smell of the cinnamon. She’s pretty sure she can gather enough self-control to keep herself from grabbing all of them and running upstairs once they’re done, but she can’t promise that at some point she won’t be licking the pan. She just hopes she can wait until after Tony leaves for work before she starts in on it.

He hands her a cup of coffee and smiles at her. “So if you don’t mind my asking, what’s the deal with you anyway? Why didn’t you go with your fiancé to California?”

She gives the short version: teacups, Andres Schultz, sprained foot hurting, too much pain to ride in the truck for days and days. She leaves out: fury, dirty oven, friends being referred to as puppy dogs. None of that feels particularly significant right now, somehow.

“Now see,” he says, “in a case like that, I myself would ask myself if I didn’t hurt my foot unconsciously to get back at him.”

“Yes, well, there might have been a little of that,” she says. She pours cream into her coffee cup and stirs it.
When are those cinnamon buns going to be done?
She wants to get as many as possible and then leave the room.

“Because—well, didn’t I hear something about how there was going to be a wedding here and then it got called off or something?”

She sighs. “Yes, you’re right. We had this wedding all planned and everything, and then he decided he had to go to Texas to check out somebody’s teacups, and I had to cancel everything.”

His eyes bug out. “What? Dude didn’t come to his own wedding because he had to go see some teacups?”

“Dude even had a whole story about floods and fires and
apocalyptic events that might be threatening these little teacups.”

“Please tell me you’re making this up.”

“No, but I’m actually making it sound worse than it is,” she says. “I probably should have just hung in there and waited it out. I mean, it’s not like I was even all that mad about not getting married. We’d been living together just fine for fifteen years, and I didn’t even care if we got married, not really. And now I’m here and he’s out there, and it’s all screwed up.” She takes the sponge and starts wiping down the counter. “I think it was just that my foot was hurting.”

“So now you really miss him.” He stops and looks at her so deeply that she has to look away. “I get that,” he says. “The heart is a funny little animal, isn’t it?”

“It is.” She feels a lump in her throat.

“It gets this idea about somebody, and then it doesn’t let go, even when things go bad. Even when they go
awful
, and anybody else could see plain as day you should get out. There’s your own stupid little heart just bumping around claiming, ‘No, it’s fine! I’m fine! It’s all good!’ ” He does a funny little dance when he’s showing the heart talking.

“Well, that’s not quite the situation here,” she says. “I just was
momentarily
mad. But I’m probably going out there to live with him again. Eventually. I just need to get Soapie straightened out first.”

“Well, sure,” he says.

“And how’s your situation?” she says.

“Don’t even ask,” he tells her. Then the oven timer goes off, and he gets busy taking the rolls out, and she gets busy trying not to fall into a swoon over them, which requires balling up her hands and putting them in the pockets of her bathrobe.

She’s not sure why she’s crying.

All in all, the first week living back at home with Soapie turns out to be more of a challenge than she’d bargained for. As she told Greta, she’d barely survived living there the first time. Luckily there are other people with them now. Tony bops around the house and makes gin and tonics every evening for everybody and appears ever ready to pick up anyone who happens to fall on the floor. Rosie likes the way he takes the stairs two at a time and how he goes tearing out of the house each morning with his bent-up rake and an old lawn mower, ready to tackle the gardens of North Haven like he’s some superhero in a backward baseball cap.

And George Tarkinian comes over nearly every night, and Rosie finds herself so pleased to see him again. She and Soapie used to go on vacation with his family when Rosie was little, and she remembers him and his sweet wife, Louise, and their much-older daughters. He had been a voice-over announcer as well as a competitive swimmer, and Louise—she suddenly remembers this—made brownies with instant coffee in them, and Soapie would never let Rosie have any because she said they would get her too “jazzed up.” Of course she had sneaked in and stolen a brownie and then had spun in circles on the front lawn, laughing until she was dizzy, and George had scooped her up and carried her inside when she fell down and cried, holding her against his chest.

He still has those broad swimmer’s shoulders and, as Soapie points out, all of his original teeth and most of his hair, and a rich, intimate voice that can make you want to go out and buy household cleaning products.

He smiles at her and holds out his arms. “Look at you! Let me just tell you how glad I am that you’re here with us,” he says.

With us
. He and Soapie are clearly a couple—and yet both of them talk about Louise as though she’s a very dear friend they have in common, someone unfortunate whom they both adore and wish were with them. It’s the very oddest, sweetest thing: he goes to sit with Louise in the nursing home every day, and then comes to Soapie every night. The two of them hold hands and take long walks, and Rosie has come upon them practically making out in the kitchen.

Late at night, they walk upstairs to Soapie’s bedroom, arm in arm, both of them holding their glasses of water, Soapie carrying her cigarette case, and they close the door and spend the night together.

Rosie has to admit that it’s actually kind of wonderful.

At the end of her first week, Jonathan calls her in the middle of the night. She fumbles in the dark for her phone, before she quite comes awake, and then there he is in her ear.

“I just wanted to say I miss you and I love you,” he says, his voice crawling up right there next to her brain.

Maybe she’s dreaming. “Are you really there?”

“I am.”

“I love you, too,” she says, but her voice feels as if it’s coming from very far away.

She flips over her pillow, which has gotten hot in the night. She’s going to have to get up and turn on the air conditioner. It’s stifling in this room. What time is it anyway? 3:23.

This can’t be a good time to be awake. She tells him something important, but it turns out that it was a thought left over from sleep, and he says she doesn’t make any sense.

Then he starts filling up the air with his facts. He knows the average daily temperature in Nevada versus the average daily temperature in Arizona for June. He’s got the goods on rainfall situations everywhere. Gas prices. The cost of an average night’s stay in hotels across America. He says he fears for the teacups when he goes over the mountain passes. Also, there is no good radio in the middle of the country. And it is hot already. Vicious, wicked hot.

She is silent.

“You should go back to sleep,” she hears him say, and then he is gone.

After that, it’s like the “I Miss Jonathan” switch in her brain has been activated. She was better off for the first few days when she thought she might hate him. In her suitcase she finds one of his T-shirts, packed there by mistake, and she takes it to bed with her each night because it smells like him. Some days now she aches for her old life: the way the river’s reflection danced on the ceiling, the hibachi on the balcony, the way he held her in bed.

She finds herself trying to explain to Greta how furious she was, and how much she now misses everything about Jonathan.

“You’ll end up going back with him,” says Greta. “It was sensible not to ride in that truck with a broken foot. You did the right thing.”

“I know,” she says. “But I probably should have married him when he wanted to, two weeks ago.”

“Don’t worry. When your foot heals, and you get Soapie settled, you can fly out there and join him,” Greta says. “Right now you can just have some drifty time. And I hate to say this, but it’s probably the last big chunk of time you’ll get to spend with your grandmother. It would be good if you could enjoy it.”

Greta’s right. After that, Rosie spends the next two weeks cleaning out Soapie’s office, making piles of old files to throw out. She collects paint chips for the guest room. She spends time talking with Soapie about the possible new Dustcloth Diva book. But the whole time, she’s aware that there’s something wrong with her: she’s tired and sad, just dragging around, really, like somebody who has a low-grade fever and probably
this minute
she’s growing a catastrophic brain tumor or something. Maybe it’s only that she really does miss Jonathan more than she ever thought she would, but she wakes up crying some mornings. And then, as she lies in bed debating whether it’s worth the trouble to get up, she thinks that maybe she’s coming face-to-face with the real lack in her life: the fact that she never really had a mother and that in a deep, fundamental way, she’s always been an unwelcome addition to Soapie’s life.