Ex and the Single Girl Page 6

  “So, how’s your dissertation coming along?” he asked.

  I smiled. “Great. Good. Almost done.”

  “It was about Austen, wasn’t it?”

  Don’t know. Been so long since I’ve touched it I can hardly remember. “Yeah. I’ve always had something of a fascination with her work. But lately...I don’t know.”

  A light smile played on his face. “What don’t you know?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m up for a faculty position. If I finish my dissertation in time, I’ve got a real shot at it.”

  He lifted his mug. “So what’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He smiled. “Well, I’m sure you’ll figure it out. At any rate, you should be proud of yourself. Getting a Ph.D. is a tremendous accomplishment.”

  “Yeah,” I said lamely. “I know. It’s just...”

  I stared down at the table for a moment, then looked up to find him watching me, waiting for me to finish. He seemed genuinely interested. Maybe someday he’d write about a halfhearted bookstore clerk. Maybe the ambivalence I typically kept to myself would be helpful.

  “I envy people who know what they want,” I said, finally. “I’ve been quarter-owner in a bookstore since I was born. It seemed to make sense to go to college and study literature. And then, I just kept going to college. And now it’s the end of the line.”

  ‘And you don’t know what you want to do.”

  I didn’t answer. He reached over and tapped two fingers on the back of my hand.

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  I met his eyes, and my heart kicked up a notch. Time to go. I stood up.

  “Thanks for the tea,” I said.

  “You’re quite welcome.” He stood up as well. “Thank you for the muffins.”

  We smiled at each other for a moment, then I turned and walked to the door. He held it open for me and I walked out to my car without looking back. I parked in front of the Page before I realized I’d completely forgotten to ask him about the book signing.

  “So, you never had sex with Ian Beckett?” Beauji said, resting her glass of ginger ale on her stomach. We’d finished dinner over an hour earlier, and she and Davey had used a good meal and a bottle of wine to crack me wide open about Ian Beckett. “Honey, if I had that man in my bed, there’s no way either of us would have gotten any sleep.”

  “Surprisingly, that kind of comment doesn’t bother me as much as it should,” Davey said. He stood up and grabbed the bottle of wine. “The third-trimester hormones are making her horny as hell. You should have seen the way she looked at the pizza guy the other night.”

  “I did not!” Beauji said as she smacked his knee, the only part of him she could reach without moving. Davey grabbed my glass and emptied the bottle into it, then headed into the kitchen, throwing a wink at me over his shoulder.

  “All I know is that if that kid comes out in thirty minutes or less, I’m ordering a paternity test.”

  “It’s not just that we didn’t sleep together,” I said, covering my eyes with my hand.

  Beauji leaned back and shouted into the kitchen, “Davey, there’s more, get in here!”

  Davey skidded out of the kitchen and hopped onto the couch, still working the corkscrew into the bottle of wine.

  “I can’t believe I’m telling you this,” I said.

  “Confession,” Beauji began.

  “Good for the soul,” Davey finished.

  I clamped my eyes tight. “I cried.”

  Beauji gasped. Davey sighed. I opened my eyes, and both of them were handing me compassionate looks.

  “Why?” Beauji’s voice tightened. “What did he do to you?” I looked at the ceiling, too annoyed with myself to make eye contact. “He said I was beautiful.”

  “Bastard,” Davey said, popping the cork out.

  “Did he know you cried?” Beauji asked. She, like all women, understood how being told you’re beautiful can make you cry. It’s a sure sign you’re in a bad place, and every woman has been there, even Beauji, who’d always been loved. Even Beauji, whose men had stuck.

  “Yes,” I said, taking another sip of my wine. “It only lasted for a few minutes. He handled it well. I mean, he didn’t run screaming from the room.”

  “I’ve done that,” Davey said, nodding.

  Beauji cut her eyes at him. “Once.”

  I sat up. “But enough about me. Tell me about the baby. Have you picked out a name?”

  This was a stupid question, as Beauji’s name had been a result of her father’s dogged determination to name whatever came out of the chute Beau Jr., and as such she had sworn never to name a child before he or she was born, but I thought it would at least be an effective way to change the subject.

  I was mistaken.

  “We still have to talk about you a little more,” Beauji said. Davey gave her a warning look. “Beauji...”

  She cut him a look back. “Davey, she has a right to know. Mags has probably already told her, anyway.”

  “My wife,” Davey said, turning to me as he stood up, “doesn’t have any sense for what’s her business and what is not.” He leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. “Good to have you back, baby,” he said. He leaned over Beauji and kissed her on the lips. “Stay out of it.”

  Davey headed up the stairs and I kept my eye on Beauji, my heart beating a little too hard and a little too fast. I knew something was up with Mags. I could smell it. Judging by the look on Beauji’s face, whatever the news was, she wasn’t expecting a positive response from me.

  “What is it, Beau?” I asked. “You have to tell me now. Is Mags sick? Is Bev sick? Who’s sick?”

  She waved her hand at me. “Nobody’s sick. But I think Mags tricked you into coming down this summer for a reason. Has she told you why?”

  My eyebrows knit. “Nothing aside from getting extracurricular with the Englishman. Is that what you’re talking about?”

  She shook her head. I waited a few seconds, then spit out an impatient, “Well, what is it, then?”

  “It’s Jack,” she said. “He’s coming to town.”

  It doesn’t matter who your parents are or how healthy or sick or ambivalent your relationship with them is, they will always be the most powerful people in your life. They will be the ones whose approval you will always crave. They will be the ones who hold the power to elate or crush you with a word. No matter what you tell yourself—that your father wasn’t worth your time anyway, or that your mother was too batty to really know what she was doing to you—your parents will always be the people who juggle knives over your heart. If you’re lucky, they’ll know it and will juggle carefully. If you’re unlucky, you’ll be born to Mags Fallon.

  “Wake up, lady!” I said, flicking on the light in Mags’s room. It was one o’clock in the morning. She was lying on her stomach with curlers in her hair, as she had during every night of her adult life. She was wearing an old T-shirt from a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert she’d gone to in the mid-eighties during a brief flirtation with recapturing her youth.

  “Mags!” I said, louder. She didn’t move. I reached over and pulled the blanket off of her and shook her shoulder. “Up, up, up!” One eye creaked open.

  “Mmmmmf?”

  “Mags, we need to talk.”

  She flopped over and pulled herself up. “Portia? What’s the matter, baby?” She blinked her eyes and squinted up at me. “Is the house on fire?”

  “No.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “You called Jack, that’s what’s going on.” I crossed my arms over my chest, trying to look intimidating. “You invited him to visit, that’s what’s going on.”

  She yawned. “Oh. That.”

  “Yes. That,” I said, getting even angrier at her lack of shock and instant remorse. I was expecting regret, sorrow, chagrin. Something that would confirm how right I was to be upset, how wrong she was to arrange a visit with my father without asking me first. I was expecting all that, whic
h was insane, because yawning and stretching and acting like it wasn’t a big deal was what Mags always did, and I should have known.

  “Good night, darlin,” Mags said, flicking off the light and pulling the covers around her. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

  “Mags—”

  “In the morning,” she said again, waving her arm limply over her shoulder, shooing me away.

  I stood there in the shaft of dim yellow light coming from the hallway, watching as my mother drifted back to sleep. I considered flicking the light back on and demanding to know what the hell she was thinking. I considered wheedling Jack’s phone number from her and calling him and telling him not to come. I considered getting a bucket of ice water and dumping it over her head, making a big ruckus until the entire house woke up, until the entire neighborhood woke up.

  Instead, as Mags’s soft snore gained momentum, I shut the door behind me with a gentle click and headed off to my room.

  I have one vague recollection of Lyle Jackson Tripplehorn, in which he plays a classical music album on the record player in our living room. That’s all I have: one flickering image of him carefully placing the needle on the record and then smiling at me, walking toward me, arms out, ready to dance. I remember snuggling my head into his neck and smelling his shirt as he waltzed me around the living room. I remember feeling happy and safe and loved.

  But what the hell did I know? I was two.

  I don’t remember much about the letters in the shoebox. I sealed them all immediately after writing them and never looked back. Mostly, they were just stories about me growing up. What happened at the softball game. What kind of trouble Beauji and I had gotten into. What my favorite books and movies were. Some letters contained school pictures. There were some drawings. There were questions about his life. Where did he live? What did he do for a living? Did he ever have any more children? I never asked him why he’d twirl me around a room so lovingly and then leave me without so much as a look back. I never wanted the answer to that question.

  I turned on the light in my room and went straight for my closet. I pulled the shoebox out and tossed it on the bed, then paced back and forth, unable to look at it. What was I going to do? Open the letters, torture myself with the ghost of a little girl who was stupid enough to believe her father might come back? What did it matter, anyway? Why did I care? I picked up the box and put it back in the closet, closing the door quietly behind me. I put my hand to my chest, felt my heart banging against it.

  Damnit.

  I was thirty years old. I hadn’t seen him in over twenty- seven years. I could barely remember the man. What did it matter?

  I walked over to the bed and sat down. It mattered. And Mags should have known that it mattered. It could have at least occurred to her that it might matter. What the hell was wrong with that woman, anyway?

  I tossed my legs up on the bed and pulled the comforter over me. I slept in fits and starts throughout the night, until finally the clock said six, and I got out of bed and put on my sneakers.

  It took me an hour to trek the five miles out to the Babb farm. When cars passed, which wasn’t too often, I stepped off the road and ducked out of sight, just in case it was the Mizzes looking for me. It never was. A man in his sixties drove by in a Ford pickup, and my heart rate sped up. It could have been Jack. Would I even recognize him now? All I had was a small handful of old pictures and a faded memory of a smiling man waltzing me around to Bach, or Rachmaninoff, or whoever wrote waltzes.

  When I saw the farmhouse, I stopped walking and looked at my watch. 7:05. Ian was probably inside, writing. Doubt began to creep over me. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment how it might look, me showing up two mornings in a row. On the other hand, I had forgotten to ask about the book signing, so there was a legitimate reason to return.

  But not at seven in the morning.

  I turned and started to walk away, then stopped. I’d also left my copy of Clean Sweep there for him to sign. I could go back for that. And he knew that I knew he started his days at six, so it’s not like the hour was all that outrageous.

  And I wanted to see his smile. Just for a second. Just one quick hit of warmth before I went back to face the Mizzes.

  I turned around again, took a few more steps toward the farmhouse, then slowed down. I was going to look like an idiot. Like a stalking idiot. Like...

  “Portia?”

  I froze. The door swung open and there he was, holding his WORLD’S GREATEST GRANDMA mug.

  “I was wondering if you were going to come in and say hi,” he said, his smile radiating warmth and good humor. “It was looking doubtful there for a minute.”

  I winced. “You could see me?”

  He jerked his head toward the front window to his left. “I like to write by the window. The view inspires me when I get stuck.” Oh. Good. God.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, dropping my head and putting my hands over my eyes. “I just... I...”

  I looked up. I had no excuse. There was no way to mitigate the humiliation. Time to face the music.

  “Come on in.” He raised his mug and winked at me. “I have coffee.”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your writing,” I said, sitting on the couch with my mug of coffee. Ian sat on a high-backed chair in front of a small table pushed up against the window. His laptop sat on the table, a screen saver drawing random multicolored swirls behind him.

  “Not at all,” he said. “I needed a break anyway.”

  “I was just coming by to see... Yesterday, I forgot to ask you... I was wondering if you might be interested in doing a book signing event at the Page? We couldn’t pay you, but there’d be hot coffee and some more of Vera’s signature muffins.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Blueberry?”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  He laughed. “I’d love to. Thank you for asking.”

  I smiled at him, then looked down at my coffee. I could feel his eyes working on me, checking out my dusty sneakers, my mussed hair, my slept-in clothes. I suddenly wished I’d taken a shower before I’d come.

  “Do you want to tell me what’s really going on?” he asked after a moment.

  “Hmmm?” I’d been enjoying talking in circles around the very obvious fact that I was a woman on the edge. I’d been hoping he would have picked up on that.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “If you want to tell me what’s going on, I’m happy to listen. If you’d rather talk about something else, we can talk about something else.”

  I took a deep breath, willing myself to think of nothing other than Tan Carpenter and the Russian mob that was, at the end of chapter three, threatening to kill his daughter.

  “The book,” I said finally, motioning toward the desk where it sat next to the laptop. “It’s really good. I especially like the way Tan used the prosthetic leg as a weapon. Very funny.” He cut his eyes at me. “Are you making fun of me?”

  “No,” I said, although I was, a little. You can take the girl out of the snobby elitist literary program, but you can’t take the snobby elitist literary program out of the girl. “I’m just changing the subject. Badly.”

  He nodded. After a moment, he stood up and walked over to me, holding his hand out for mine.

  “Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

  The barn stood back on the property, about fifty yards away from the house. The earthy smell of the summer morning was thick on the grass, and each step we took seemed to make the fragrance stronger. Ian dropped my hand when we got to the barn to pull one of the doors open, then motioned for me to go inside.

  I stepped in, my eyes taking a moment to adjust to the darkness. The last time I’d been in the barn was when I was in high school, when Vera sent Bridge Wilkins and me over to help Morris do some repairs on the roof. My role was limited to handing tools to Bridge like a surgical nurse, and keeping Morris, whose body was just starting to fail him, from working too hard.

  While the barn st
ill looked the same from the outside, inside was a bit of a shock. All the aging straw and random whatnot that had been stored there over the years was gone. The cement floor had been swept, and fresh planks of wood were piled up next to a table saw and a couple of sawhorses. Two golden X’s glowed along the barn’s east wall, vibrant against the older, darker wood they supported.

  “Have you been doing this?” I asked.

  “Bridge mentioned tearing it down when he met me here to show me the place. I thought that would be a shame.”

  “Bridge Wilkins?”

  He nodded. “You know him?”

  “You’re in Truly now, darlin’,” I said, thickening my drawl. “Everyone knows everyone.”

  “Good point,” he said.

  I looked around. “How’d you learn how to restore barns?” Ian shrugged. “My uncle was a carpenter.”

  “And you’ve been doing this? All by yourself?”

  “Today, as it happens, I think I’ll be needing some help.” He walked over to the pile of lumber and picked up a limp tool belt that was sitting on top. He grinned at me as he returned, cinching the belt around my waist, his eyes locked on mine. He gave the belt one final tug, dropped his eyes, and pulled a hammer out of a loop on my side. “My father always said that nothing clears a mind like manual labor.”

  “Sounds like a wise man,” I said.

  He nodded, not moving. “He was.”

  My breathing went shallow. He stood perfectly still, two feet away from me, his eyes reading mine. I inhaled as my heart rate quickened, thus making it official: I had me a bona fide crush.

  And it was the absolute last thing I needed.

  I put my hands on the tool belt and smiled up at him. “Where do I start?”

  ***

  It was noon when we broke for the day. I hadn’t decided not to go in to work at the Page so much as I hadn’t wanted to stop working on the barn, so I played hooky and stayed with Ian, pounding nails into walls and feeling better with each swing of the hammer. We’d managed to put up a few more supporting posts on the east wall, but when we were done, it didn’t look like the sweat and dirt that covered us amounted to a whole lot. We went back to the house, and Ian grabbed a clean pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt from his room.