The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel (3 page)

“Sssh,” she says. “Her family is right over there.”

“That’s another thing. Do we look like unoccupied babysitters or something? Maybe we should go over and tell them our hourly rate.” He looks down at the little girl. “Do you have a sibling named Nintendo?”

She puts her fingers in her mouth and shakes her head.

“You will, just wait.” Just then, his cell phone bleats from his pocket, and he grabs it and holds it at arm’s length so he can read it before he flips it open. His face lights up. “Hello? Yes, this is Jonathan Morrow.” He leans over and mouths to Rosie, “Andres Schultz,” before he takes his mug of coffee, scrambles to his feet, and heads outside with the phone. She watches him through the window as he paces around, frowning and gesturing with his cup of coffee.

Ruby shows up then holding plates of eggs Florentine, and Sega’s mother comes over to get her daughter.

“I hope your husband didn’t mind,” says the mom. She’s so young and seamless that she looks like she could be Greta’s daughter, Sandrine. It startles Rosie for a moment, the realization that their friends have kids who are nearly old enough to have children of their own.

When Jonathan comes back a few minutes later, his face is so pink it looks as though he’s spent time under a radiant magic light. He sits down at the table, picking up his fork very precisely, as if he’s trying to keep from openly quivering.

“Well?” she says. “So does Andres Schultz have the Ming Dynasty cup that will make our lives here on earth worthwhile?”

“Nope,” he says. He takes a sip of his coffee and leans forward. “Actually, Rosie, he’s opening a museum in San Diego. From scratch.”

“Oh.” This is even more boring.

“No, no. Hear me out. He wants my teacups to be on permanent display there.” He puts down his fork and then picks it up again.

“Really! The Lolitas get to go on display somewhere? Are you going to just send them off, then?”

He shakes his head. “No, you don’t get it. Schultz wants
me
.” His eyes are so bright they’re practically shooting sparks. “I guess he was at that conference I attended in Toledo and he said that ever since then, he’s been thinking of doing this museum. And he says he’s now got the property and the building, and some backers, and he says he’s ready for me.”

“Does he have teacups, too?” She straightens her floral cloth napkin next to her plate, pressing down on its folds, thinking how it is that when your life starts to change, the surfaces of everything around you take on such meaning.

“No. He collects something else. Painted pottery, I think. Plates.”

She takes another stab at her eggs, but they slide off the fork, and she doesn’t seem capable of figuring out how to get them back on it. Finally she puts her fork down and puts her hands in her lap.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she says. “I have to be honest. I can’t wrap my head around this. You’re seriously considering this? You want to move to California after one five-minute phone call? To work in some guy’s museum?”

“To
start
a museum,” he says. “That’s the exciting part. To be in on the startup of a whole museum, and then to curate it.”

“But is this what you really want? You used to be a
potter
, not some museum guy.”

He starts rolling out words about all the blanks not being filled in yet, how they’ll talk later, et cetera, et cetera. Museum, upkeep, expenses. Pedestals for the teacups. Not a done deal. More talks to come, gauging interest, blah blah blah.

“You seem really interested to me. You’ve actually turned another color. You’ve pinkened.”

“Have I?” he says, pleased. He drains his coffee cup and looks at her, folding his hands in a steeple in front of him. “Maybe so. I feel pink.”

She looks at him. “Well, Mr. Pink, so you’d leave everything and move there? Just like that?”

“Us.
We
would move there. You can get a job teaching, and I’ll do this museum.”

“Are you crazy? I have a life here—”

“Yeah, but we’re stagnating. You’ve said it yourself, that we need something new,” he says. He takes her hands and leans across the table. “I can’t get it together here anymore,
Rosie. I’m getting old, and I feel like I’m falling in a hole. I need something big and important to happen.”

“But this—I can’t—”

He doesn’t even hear her. “You know what? We’ll get married. Let’s get married!”

Marriage! She laughs a little. The last time they spoke of getting married was at Lynn and Greg’s wedding thirteen years ago, in Mexico, and they were tipsy on the dance floor, caught up in the champagne and the mariachi band and the moon rising through the clouds. They’d go the next day to Tijuana, he whispered, keep the celebration going. But the next morning everybody was hungover, and they all sat together at brunch, moaning and drinking mimosas and squinting in the white-hot sunlight. As the day drained away, so did the jazzy, impromptu wedding she’d imagined. It was never going to happen, not with her and Jonathan. And really, who cared? They weren’t the marrying types, so why pretend?

Since then, when people rib them about why they don’t just go ahead and do it, one of them invariably laughs and says, “Omigod! Did we forget to get married? I knew there was something we were supposed to do.” They don’t even have to plan out a response anymore.

And now he’s looking at Rosie as if he doesn’t remember who they are. He’s delirious, is what.

“Look,” she says. “We may need a change, but moving to California is crazy. We’ll be away from all our friends, and I have my classes, and Soapie needs me, Jonathan. She’s frail and—”

“Oh, now don’t go invoking your grandmother on me,” he says. “If Soapie thought you were even thinking of giving up one single opportunity because of her, she’d run you
down with her convertible. And as for your friends—there’s e-mail and Facebook and cell phones.”

“But I love my job,” she says.

“Two months tops, and you’ll love your new California students, too. Come on. This is what we need. I know it is.”

He stands up and pulls her to him, holding her right there in the aisle between the tables. His face is mashed right up into hers, and his voice is low and urgent. “We can do this. Soapie doesn’t want to see you waste any more of your life.”

But has this been a waste? Is that the lesson of today, that they’ve been wasting time living this life, while they waited for some guy from California to wade in and offer up a solution?

“Please … don’t,” she says. “I have to think.”

He pulls her hair back from her face and smiles down at her, and her breath catches. This isn’t like him; he hates public displays. The café has come to a complete halt.

“Marry me, Rosie Kelley,” he says in a rough, shy voice.

The café waits to hear her answer. He is staring into her eyes and holding her in his grip.

“Don’t do it this way,” she whispers.

He presses his forehead down against hers and whispers, “Say yes. Why won’t you just say yes?”

“Because I
don’t know
,” she whispers. “You don’t even know. It might not work.”

“It’s worked for fifteen years,” he says. “It worked pretty well this morning, didn’t it?”

People laugh.

His eyes are like a stallion’s, and his fingertips press into her arms. And then it hits her. He has said no to absolutely everything imaginable for so long now—to sex, to parties, to
pieces of pie after dinner, to creativity, even to the little girl at their table this morning. He walks through life with a big chilly
NO
on his lips, and now, by God, he has said yes to something, and he needs her to say it, too.

He’s the introvert suddenly bathed in public adoration. Oh, he’s a pink man today, and the whole café is watching him.

“All right. Yes,” she says. She wants the moment to be over. He kisses her, and everybody starts cheering, and then Ruby is at her side, grabbing onto Rosie’s arm and smiling and dabbing at her eyes with a corner of her apron, and little Sega and her mother rush over, and so do about a zillion other people. There are babies and toddlers riding on people’s hips and mugs clanking as they’re being toasted, and people applaud and whistle.

“Wow. Are you really getting married?” Sega’s mother asks Rosie.

Rosie wants to tell her that she doesn’t know. Jonathan is the kind of guy who might change his mind, or forget. But she looks at him, smiling, being the center of congratulations, shaking hands, and she says, “Yes. Yes, I am.”

And she’s startled to realize she’s—oh, probably 99 percent happy about it.

By the time she gets to Soapie’s house an hour later, she’s decided she’s probably 99.8 percent happy about getting married, and she’d gladly round up to 100 percent except for the worry about Soapie. But Jonathan’s right: her grandmother is not one of those cuddly, needy old ladies who would put up with Rosie not living her life. And if she agrees to have a health aide, as her doctor thinks she should, then what’s the problem?

A new start. Lolitas out of the boxes. California.

Rosie makes her way up the white gravel driveway to the back door of Soapie’s four-bedroom colonial, lugging the bags of food she’s cooked for her this week, along with the treats and peace offerings—chocolate bars with almonds, honey-roasted peanuts, and macaroons.

And then her heart stops. Through the windowpanes of the back door, she sees Soapie lying on the kitchen floor, perfectly, chillingly still. Her grandmother is wearing a lavender workout suit, and her white-blond hair is splayed across the tile floor, and—this is the horrible part—her cold blue eyes are fixed on the ceiling.

Fear rises in Rosie like floodwater. Her hands start shaking so badly she can barely balance the bags of groceries on her knee as she turns the key in the lock.
So this is the way it ends
, she thinks.
Shit
.

She rams the door with her shoulder, but even before she’s managed to get inside, Soapie moves. Her lavender-clad
arm is fluttering upward and then floats there in midair, fingers splayed. She looks like a woman possibly admiring her manicure.

“Oh my God!” says Rosie.

“Oh, hi,” Soapie says in an oddly flat, thick voice, like someone awakening from sleep. “You’re here.”

“Jesus, are you all right?” Rosie says. “I thought you were dead. Are you okay?” She drops the bags on the counter and rushes over to her grandmother. Soapie doesn’t seem to be bleeding from anywhere that she can see, and her color is good. Better than Rosie’s just now, most likely. “Did you hit your head when you fell? Do have any idea how long you’ve been down here? Do you know what day it is?” She takes her wrist and holds it, but of course Soapie pulls it away.

“Stop it. I’m fine, just fine,” she says, and she does sound perfectly well now, just a little sleepy.

“My heart just about stopped. How long have you been down there?”

“I slipped, is all. And now don’t you go making a big deal out of it.”

“But what if I hadn’t come along right now? Why aren’t you wearing that Life bracelet thingie?”

“Why? Because I loathe it.”

“But why? What harm does it do? Someone could come and help—Here, do you want to get up? Let me help you.”

“Rosie. Stop,” she says. “Come sit down. Stop
twittering
. You’re making me nervous.”

“You’re making
me
nervous,” Rosie says, but she gets down on the floor next to her grandmother, inhaling her signature whiff of Jean Naté. The floor is a beautiful Italian tile that Soapie had installed last year, part of a whole cosmetic redo of the house that included nothing that might be considered reasonable for a woman in her late eighties:
things like shower chairs, higher toilets, or stair railings. No, she went for track lighting, marble countertops, and Italian tile hard as cement.

“Listen to me,” Soapie says, and Rosie’s almost relieved to hear that her voice is as scrappy and rough as ever. “You have got to stop worrying about me all the time. If something is going to happen to me, then it’s going to happen.”

Soapie’s eyes are crystal blue, perhaps a little foggier than they had once been, but still fringed with mascara-laden black lashes and a span of turquoise eye shadow coagulating in the wrinkled creases of her eyelid. Rosie takes in the web of wrinkles, the sagging jawline, the bright blotches of misplaced rouge—and all of it pierces her.

“I know that
sounds
like it makes perfect sense,” she says, “but how can I not worry when I come in here and find you on the floor? What if I hadn’t been here? You might have died
today
.”

“First of all,” says Soapie, “I wouldn’t have died because my yoga class is coming here in an hour, and they would have picked me up—”

“Your yoga class? How could they save you? The door is locked.”

“I would have yelled to them where the key is hidden.
And
,” Soapie says firmly, “second of all—I don’t care.”

“You don’t care about what?”

“How I die. When you get to be my age, one way is as good as another. If it’s going to be a fall on the floor, then that’s just one way it might happen.”

“Some ways, it seems to me, are worse than others. And lying here, not being able to get help—”

“Stop it. Listen to me. I’m not afraid of death. I know I’m having little strokes. I do see what’s happening, and it’s fine with me. Remember this. When you hear that I’ve died,
just be grateful that I went the way I wanted to. Not in some nursing home or being kept alive by machines. Okay?”

Rosie grimaces. “Let’s get up off this cold floor. Please? Can’t we please get up and sit down at the table or something? I’ll make you a cup of tea, and we can talk sense.”

“All right. I need to get the Bloody Marys made anyhow. Pull me up, will you?”

Rosie guides her slowly up to a sitting position. “We’re having Bloody Marys?”

“For the yoga class. I told you.”

“Wait,” Rosie says. “You have a yoga class that drinks?”

“Yes. This is one of the advantages of being so fucking old.” Soapie reaches up and gathers the wisps of white-blond hair that have straggled out of her topknot and twists them back with her trademark rhinestone clip, just the way Rosie has seen her do a million times before. “You can cuss if you want to, and you get to drink when you do yoga, because it’s not about enlightenment or whatever the hell makes people do that stuff.”