The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel (6 page)

Then Tomas comes in, and they break away to tell him. He looks concerned and baffled by the news, and it’s not until Leo gets there and the announcement gets told once again that Tomas finally breaks into a smile.

“Oh, I see now! I think before you mean Jonathan
not
marry you but someone else. I think you crying.” Tomas is young and sentimental, working as a bartender and seeking a wife. The group thinks he’ll eventually meet somebody, but he says the women in the clubs are all too rude. Pantomiming with his thumbs, he shows how they text even while they flirt with him.

“Jonathan is not crazy. Of course he marry Rosie.” This is from Mara, Goldie’s best friend and sidekick. “It take him time, yes, but he do right thing. Finally.”

Goldie winks at Rosie. “Yonatan is a man who know his own time, and Rosie let him.”

“Rosie should get award for patience,” says Leo, an elderly gentleman with rheumy eyes. He smells of aftershave and hair gel. “Might we see the ring for admiration purposes?”

So she explains that there is no ring, that she and Jonathan are too old and settled for anything foolish like an engagement ring. Mercy.

“No, hell no!” says Karenna. “Nobody too old. You need ring.”

By then, everybody else has filed in. They have fourteen students today, which is pretty typical. Some, like Goldie and Mara, the matriarchs, have been coming for years, while the others come in and out as they get jobs. This class is her guilty pleasure, taught through adult ed instead of the community college, and although she gets the students to write papers and practice their grammar, mostly they’ve all become good friends, working on language problems as they come up in everyday life: filling out forms, negotiating rental agreements, outlining talks they need to have with their significant others and relatives, whatever needs doing. She’s gotten people out of bad relationships and into better ones, helped Tomas buy a used car, taken Mara’s soccer-playing grandson to physical therapy when he got injured, helped Goldie when her father needed to go into full-time nursing care, coached Carmen through the exam to get a home daycare license.

In return, they mother and spoil her, bring her food and recipes, knit her socks and hats, invite her over to their houses for tea and spicy coffee, introduce her to their grandchildren.

“Wait. You get marry, and then you still come here?” asks Goldie suddenly. “Or you move away?”

Rosie closes her eyes. She has to tell them, then, about the museum. They know about the teacup problem already; she’s made a story out of it more than once.

They’re quiet, staring at her when she finishes. She expects them to look upset that she’s leaving, but instead she can see from their expressions that all this time they’ve been feeling sorry for her, and that they’ve always quietly wondered if she was being stupid, living for so long with a man who clearly has some kind of decision-making disorder.
There’s a certain relief that he’s turned out to be a real man, someone with plans they can understand.

“Well,” says Mara. “It just a disappointingness that he not do this back in time. So late for all of life to come.”

“Babies, you mean,” says Goldie. She smiles and shrugs at Rosie and then leans over and pats Mara on the arm. “Yonatan and Rosie have whole life together already before now. Maybe they choose no babies long ago.”

“Chose,” Rosie says, “and that’s right. No babies. The timing here is just right. It’s perfect.”

After the class is over, Rosie walks to her car in the parking lot, already punching in the cell phone number of Mrs. Cynthia Lamb.

“Hi!” she says with a great show of cheer when Mrs. Cynthia Lamb answers. “How are things over there?”

“Well, it’s quite an odd sort of situation now, isn’t it?” Mrs. Lamb says in her clipped British accent. “If I didn’t have proof, I would almost think you gave me the wrong address. Your grandmum is nothing like I expected.”

Rosie laughs with relief. This has to be a good sign. “Really? And how is that?”

“Well, she’s quite a character, that one. A charmer. Even though she didn’t seem to have any idea that I was coming, they were very gracious, both she and her gentleman friend. He even made me some breakfast.”

“Wait. Her what?” Rosie says.

“Her gentleman friend. Tony,” says Mrs. Lamb. “He’s starting a gardening business.”

It takes Rosie a moment to remember. “Oh, him! No, no. He’s just a kid who’s staying there, somebody in need of a place to stay.”

“No, dear, he lives there. Both of them have made it clear that Mrs. Baldwin-Kelley doesn’t need my services.”

“You don’t want the job?”

“Dear, they don’t want
me
.”

“Mrs. Lamb, my grandmother is a mess, and I’m moving across the country soon. I need to know that she has somebody who’s qualified taking care of her. That gentleman friend is just a guy that nobody even knows.”

“But, Miss Kelley, I don’t force myself on people who don’t want to be served.”

“Please,” Rosie says. “Just do me one favor, will you? Tell me that man’s last name, and his cell phone number, and I’ll go and talk to him. Trust me. He is not qualified to be her caregiver.”

There is an uncomfortable pause, and then Mrs. Lamb says, “Ask your grandmum his name. I am not at liberty to say any more about the situation.”

“Mrs. Lamb.” She swallows. “My grandmother won’t tell me his name.”

“Well, there you go.”

“Pretend I want him to be my gardener. Who is he?”

Papers rustle. Rosie hears a long sigh. Then Mrs. Cynthia Lamb says, “Well, I don’t know what harm it could do to tell you, but I’d like to tell you that I hope I’m in as good a shape as your grandmum when I get to be eighty-eight. His name is Tony Cavaletti. Now don’t ask me anything else.” And then she hangs up the phone.

It takes a few days to track down Tony Cavaletti. She knows better than to stage an ambush at Soapie’s house, even though Jonathan is convinced that Tony Cavaletti is out to fleece Soapie and thinks Rosie should march in with the authorities and demand that he leave. Soapie would never stand for that. There would be nothing left of Rosie but an echoing scream and a little greasy spot on the rug. She has to be sneaky. She drives past the house at different times to get a look at his car, and when she discovers a red pickup truck parked in the driveway with a rake shoved haphazardly in the back, she knows she’s got her man.

And then, on the day that Andres Schultz flies into JFK airport and Jonathan drives all the way to New York to pick him up so he can come and meet the Lolitas for himself, bingo! Rosie sees the red truck parked in front of the Starbucks in Branford—and she pulls into the parking lot, checks her teeth in the mirror, squares her shoulders, and heads inside, her heart pounding.

Which customer could possibly be Tony Cavaletti? There’s a dark-haired guy in jeans and an orange Syracuse sweatshirt drinking an iced coffee and staring at a laptop screen, a couple of young women texting, an older man in one of the armchairs snoozing with his mouth open, and some guys playing chess. She gets her coffee and makes her way over to Syracuse Laptop Guy.

“Excuse me. Are you Tony Cavaletti?” she asks.

He looks up blankly and then shakes his head.

“Outside,” one of the chess players calls out to her. He jabs a thumb toward a courtyard where there are chairs and tables scattered about. Sure enough, sitting at one of them is a youngish man with dark brown hair underneath a Red Sox hat turned backward. He’s in some kind of intense conversation with two women sitting across from him. One of them, with short pixieish black hair, is wearing a long skirt and sitting with her knees up and she looks like she might be crying, and the other one, with pinned-up blond hair and a blue sweater and jeans, has her arms folded over her chest and is staring off into the traffic. Rosie stands at the glass window, tapping on her paper cup, unsure of what to do.

“Go save him,” says the chess man, and the others laugh. Another says, “Yeah, get him away from those chicks before they make him wish he was never born.”

“Are you his friends?” Rosie asks, turning to them, and they get quiet. Finally a guy in a faded green T-shirt clears his throat and says, “Nah. We don’t know him. We overheard those women working him over pretty good, so we feel bad for him.”

Rosie wants to ask what the subject was of this workover. Were the women yelling at him about abuse of the elderly? Toxic freeloadery? She looks back out the window and sees that now the blond woman with the jeans has gotten up and is walking away, swinging her arms angrily. The other woman turns around and calls to her, and then she says something to the guy and then she leaves, too. He watches her walk away and picks up his phone.

She pushes her way out of the door and goes outside. “Are you Tony Cavaletti?” she says to him, all business. He looks up, startled. Now that she’s closer to him, she can see that
his eyes are so dark they look almost black. He’s also not as young as she had been expecting. Handsome, she’ll give him that, but in a scruffy way—and certainly not a kid, except perhaps to somebody who’s close to ninety.

“Guilty as charged,” he says.

“My name is Rosie Kelley,” she says. She likes the tone of voice that she’s using, firm and strong; she’d practiced it in the car on the way over. “I believe you’re living with my grandmother. Sophie Baldwin-Kelley.”

“Did anything happen to her?” he says, and there’s a flicker of alarm in his eyes.

“No. I’ve just got to talk to you about her.”

“What’d you say your name was again?”

“Rosie Kelley.”

“Ah, the in
fam
ous Rosie,” he says. He puts his phone down and smiles. “I know all about you.”

“Actually, it’s pronounced
in
famous,” she says. “Accent on the first syllable.”

He looks at her for a long moment, smiling. “So what can I do for you?”

Okay. She takes a deep breath and says, “I’m afraid I have to ask you to move out of my grandmother’s house.” When he doesn’t say anything, she throws in, “I’m sure that you most likely didn’t understand the situation when you moved in there, but she is really quite frail, and she needs a trained, qualified caregiver—”

“Not just some dumb guy, is that what you’re saying?” he says, still smiling.

She doesn’t let herself be swayed by this blatant fishing for compliments. “I need to hire somebody official to come and take care of her. And while I’m sure that you’re very nice and all”—which she is
not
sure of, not in the least—“you’re
simply not qualified to do the kind of care that I think is needed at this time.”

“How do
you
know I’m not qualified?” he says.

“Well, with all due respect, you seem to be somebody who’s trying to find work as a gardener, and considering the fact that my grandmother has all these health needs at the moment that are not being addressed, I can say with some assuredness that I need to find somebody who can do more than take care of the roses.”

He’s silently fiddling with his phone, so she takes a deep breath and continues, “So I would appreciate it if you could come up with a plausible excuse to tell her why you need to move out, and then I would like you to leave her house as soon as you can.” She stops, having run out of things to say. It was genius on her part, she thinks, to remember that Soapie is going to need to hear some excuse for why he’s leaving.

He waits for another long moment, looking at her face and then looking away, possibly checking out his image in the window of the Starbucks, which is reflecting back at them like some giant mirror giving off heat.

After a while he drums his fingers on the table and says, “So, if I may ask … what does your grandmother want? She say she wants me to leave?”

“Well, that doesn’t really matter, because she—”

“Wait a minute. What do you mean, it doesn’t really matter?”

“No. You see, she’s not really in a position to judge what she needs right now. I don’t know if you realize it, but she’s had several
very
dangerous falls lately, and she’s not taking her medications, and what she needs is somebody from an agency, somebody who’s qualified to take care of her.”

“Wait. Hold up a minute. How do you know?”

“How do I know what?”

“How do you know whether she’s in a position to judge what she needs or not? People get to say what they need.”

Rosie shifts her weight to the other foot. “Mr. Cavatelli,” she says.

“Cava
letti,
” he says. “The L is in the middle.”

Just then a young Goth couple with hair so black it’s as though they mistook the shoe polish for hair dye comes tripping out through the glass door, laughing, and make their way, stumbling, over to a table by the window. They’re both wearing black capes, and the girl has on purple lipstick and earrings that look like they were made from bat wings, and to Rosie’s surprise, the boy grabs at her and kind of nudges her up against the window and then starts kissing her, while they both keep giggling. It’s a fascinating sight, and neither Rosie nor Tony Cavaletti can quite bring themselves to look away.

When she does manage to tear her eyes away and looks back at him, he’s shaking his head. “Young love. You remember being like that?” he says under his breath, and shrugs.