The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel (24 page)

“You’re putting on weight,” Soapie says.

“Am I?” She feels herself flush a little, but then Soapie doesn’t seem interested in pursuing that. Instead she crumples up the wrapper of her hamburger and wipes her chin with it. She pushes away the napkin that Rosie scrambles to offer, and then she says, “This is as good a time as any to have
the talk I’ve been wanting to have with you. It’s good we’re not at the house when we do it.”

“Why?”

“Because of those men we seem to have there. Why do we have men now, do you suppose? We didn’t always have men.”

“I don’t know. I thought we kind of liked them.”

“What’s the young one’s name again?”

“Tony.”

“And do you remember just how we got him?”

“Ah, I believe you hired him to come pour your gin and tonics.”

“Oh, right.” Soapie swallows, looks out the window, and sighs. “Okay, listen to me good because I made a paper for you. Of my wishes.”

“You made a paper of wishes?” Somehow this sounds so nice, like something a child might create, and yet Rosie knows it’s not going to be good.

“Yes. Here it is.” With difficulty Soapie reaches down in the pocket of her sweatshirt and pulls out a lined piece of paper, folded into eighths.

“Did you want me to read it?”

“No. I’ll read it to you. We’re going to discuss.”

Rosie can see that the first word on the paper, written in a spidery script, is
Death
.

“First order of things: I am dying now, Rosie,” Soapie says.

This conversation again? Rosie stares out the windshield at the oil change place just on the other side of the parking lot. A man is getting out of his car, and the attendant is rushing over with a clipboard. Just beyond that, there’s a Walgreen’s, and the sign with its big red letters is advertising Tylenol for sale, and bottled water. All the parked cars in that lot are silver. What were the chances of that?

She drags her eyes back to Soapie’s face. There’s a buzzing
sound from somewhere. Soapie is saying, “So in six months I want to go into one of those places, a home.”

“What are you talking about? You just got out of one, and you hated it.”

“You have to listen. In six months, I want to go back in there. And in the mean—”

“But this isn’t what you ever said you wanted. Not one time.”

“Will you just listen to me? This is a new plan. I’m doing medium fine
now
, but it’s not going to last, and I know it. I’m not going to be able to take care of myself forever, and I know that now. I saw myself dead in there, you know.”

“You saw yourself … dead?”

“I couldn’t tell what was now and what was then, and I didn’t know people anymore, and I was just … locked away somewhere in my head. That’s dead, if you ask me.”

“Oh, Soapie.”

“Maybe I’m like … George’s … wife.”

“Louise? No, she has Alzheimer’s. You don’t have Alzheimer’s. You just forget things sometimes.” Rosie reaches over and strokes her grandmother’s arm.

“But I wouldn’t know if I did, now would I?” She pulls her arm away and waits, looks at Rosie steadily, head-on. “I wouldn’t know when the time came. Did George tell you that he came, and I thought he was Eddie, my husband? Eddie, right?”

“Yeah, well, that was when your sodium was too low—”

“George is nothing like Eddie. And I sat right there and called him Eddie for one whole day, and I actually
thought
he was Eddie. Dead Eddie! And the point is—what was the point? You’ve made me lose it again. Just be quiet and let me finish.” She stares out the window, takes a listless sip of her Coke. Rosie can see her mouth muscles twitching;
a rivulet of Coke runs down her chin. There are tiny black hairs around Soapie’s mouth, hairs she’s never noticed before. “So. Anyway. I now see the wis—the wis, the
good
, in going where they look after you. I don’t want to be alone with the stove. I think I’ve got only a little while left. End of the year is what I’m thinking. In January I want to go to a nursing home.”

“But, Soapie, honey, I’m going to stay with you. You don’t have to be alone. Let’s get you home and settled in, and—”

Soapie frowns. “No, damn it. Why won’t you let me tell you the best part?”

“There’s a best part to this?”

Soapie waits, tapping her hands against her polyester pants, closing her eyes while she summons the words up from the depths. “You and I—we have the fall. Before I go to the home.” She turns to Rosie, and her eyes are almost wet with need, with begging. “So let’s go to Paris, just you and me. We’ll sell the house and then go and live in Paris until it’s time for me to come back and go into the home. We’ll travel all over France and have ourselves a time! George and I went there on our honeymoon, you know.”

Rosie feels like she did the day she went on the Tilt-A-Whirl five times in a row. She would like to quietly get out of the car and maybe throw up politely on the sidewalk. “George? You mean Eddie?”

Soapie makes a fist and pounds on her hand. “Eddie. Of course, Eddie! Eddie, Eddie, Eddie. Why can’t I keep it straight?” She looks at Rosie. “I can show you so many places. You can write in the cafés, and I can just
be there
with you. I can show you things.”

“Oh, Soapie—”

“We could do it. It could be our trip. Our last trip.”

“No, no, don’t. Please. We can’t. We could never manage
it, with your broken hip and … trying to get around … oh my God, the walker and stairs and maps … the trains … Jesus.”

“And I could die there, and then I wouldn’t
have
to go into a nursing home. I bet Paris is a good place to die.”

“No. No, we can’t do that.”

Soapie’s eyes are glowing now. “Stop saying no! Yes! We
can
go there! You’re always selling yourself short. We can make a big change if we want to! It’s the thing I’ve always tried to get you to see, and you never want to take any chances. Let’s do this! Our final thing. It could make the difference for us, for our whole lives.” She’s talking louder now, and she starts beating one hand against the other, in a karate chop, over and over.

“Soapie, no, no, listen to me. I’m pregnant. I’m having a baby in five months. In February.”

There’s such a long silence that at first Rosie isn’t sure for a while that Soapie understands. But then she sees the precise moment that the news lands. Soapie’s face undergoes a range of expressions, everything from shock to anger to surprise, landing somewhere near defeat before she looks down at the crumpled-up hamburger paper in her lap. “This can’t be what you want.”

“It is, yes.”

“You’re going to tie yourself into a thousand knots, doing this, you know.”

“I—”

“You’re way old for this nonsense, don’t you think?”

“I am. But I’m doing it.” She strokes the baby, making sure it’s real. “I’m the age you were when I was born. And you did it. You raised me.”

“Why are you doing this? What are you trying to prove? You’ll hate it, and then it’ll be too late.”

“It’ll be different for me,” she says calmly. “This will be
my
child.” She tries to say it kindly; she means it’s not some burden, some grandchild who’s an orphan, but Soapie turns and looks at her with such a flash of anger that everything in the car wobbles for a moment.

“How dare you say that to me? How dare you? Listen—no. Just take me home, okay?”

“What? I meant that—”

“No. I know what you meant.”

“I meant that because I’m choosing—”

“Take me home.”

“Okay. Okay. I’ll take you home.”

Rosie starts the car. She’s humming under her breath. She’s thinking that she withstood the abortion room, she withstood Jonathan’s fury, and she can withstand Soapie’s continued disappointment in her, too.

“No. First throw away this bag. There’s no sense in keeping junk like this around. I never let my car get all cluttered up the way you do.”

“I know. Here, give it to me.” She takes the bag and steps out of the car and walks down the parking lot to the trash can. Her heart is pounding, so she makes herself stop and take in a good, deep breath.

When she gets back to the car, her grandmother is shrunken down, leaning against the door with one hand resting against her head, her eyes closed.

Leila, the pregnant cashier at the health food store, is Rosie’s new BFF. She confides in Rosie that no one thinks she should be having a baby either, especially since her boyfriend left her. So now they high-five each other and call each other “BFF” whenever Rosie comes in for her weekly supply of organic kale and chia seeds and all the rest of the stuff the Internet says she should be eating. (These are definitely the kinds of foods you’d like to see your baby composed of. Your better humans all have internal organs composed of kale these days.)

She and Leila are getting so friendly that soon Rosie is sure they’re going to do a belly bump right there in the store. And it’s so great to have someone to compare symptoms with. Even though Leila is age-appropriate for pregnancy and will not be receiving her AARP card in the next few years, she still feels just as alone and scared as Rosie does most days.

Leila has a boyfriend who’s nothing but trouble, to hear her tell it.

“Big mistake, that guy,” she says. “But he’s gone for good. I think. For a while it was on and off, off and on, but now I think he’s pretty much decided to split. Which is fine. I said to him, dude, either help me or get out of my way. And I think he picked
out of my way
.”

Rosie can’t for the life of her think why talking about all
this is fun, but it is. She tells Leila about Jonathan and how freaked out he got when he found out. Fifteen years together, and one condom fail, and now he’s decided he’s not going to play daddy.

“Men!” says Leila. “How nice for them, that they get to rethink the whole thing, huh?”

Then they get to listing their various ailments and aches and pains since they saw each other last. Laughing, Leila tells her that the manager is about to move her off the cash registers and to the back room, where she can supervise the high school employees and serve as their model of what not to do.

“You’ve heard how if you can’t be a good example, you just have to be a cautionary tale? Well, that’s me,” she says with her eyes shining. “The managers want me to whine about pregnancy all the time, how hard it is, how much my back hurts. Isn’t that brilliant?”

It isn’t until Rosie’s back in her car with the groceries that it hits her. Leila and Tony would make such a great couple. She’s so cute and young, and he’s so enamored of pregnancy—they’d be delightful together.

She thinks she’ll go right home and announce that she’s met his future wife—except then, luckily, she realizes in time that would never work with him. Even as lonely as he is, he would just balk. No, she’ll have to think of a much more subtle way to get the two of them to meet. By accident.

As she’s falling asleep that night, she hears him get up and come out of his room and go down the hall into the bathroom. The door closes with a soft click, and then opens again after a minute or so, and he walks past her room again. She holds her breath and stares at the ceiling. It is possible
that she might be missing those nights when he slept next to her. His bare warm hands on her belly, waiting for the baby to move. How had she managed not to turn to him and start madly kissing him?

She squeezes her eyes closed. She has to get him a girlfriend. For everybody’s sake.

A week after Soapie comes home, she and Rosie are walking slowly down the path outside by the rosebushes, Soapie inching along with her walker and frowning at how hard it all is, and Rosie is talking about the baby and how pleased she is. And then she swallows and says, “Soapie, I am really so sorry that it didn’t work out about us going to Paris. I know that’s something you really wanted, and I would have loved to be able to do that with you. If only our timing had been a little better, you know?”

Soapie looks up at her in complete bafflement. After a while she says, “Who’s going to Paris? What are you talking about?”

It hits her like a body slam, how much has gone and in such a short time. She has to turn away.

There’s no mistaking the difference in Soapie now. They’re not the amusing little Gang of Four anymore, dancing and singing and cheating at Scrabble. George’s eyes look shiny all the time, like he’s holding all his tears right there behind them. He has that smiling-through-adversity deal down perfectly, which makes him seem almost pathologically sunny and optimistic, like the singing orphans in
Oliver Twist
. He flits back and forth in his little double life,
as Tony calls it, looking like a vaudeville performer who’s just about to grab a baton and break into a song-and-dance routine.

“George, my man George, now he’s living the dream! Two ladies in his life, and they both love him to death!” That’s what Tony says.

“And neither one has an ounce of her right mind left,” says George, and it makes them all laugh, even Soapie. They do this riff nearly every day now because they all enjoy it so much.

In an odd way, life seems even better than before, the way a warm, sunny day in winter might catch you by surprise in between snowstorms.