Coming Home to You (15 page)

I pursed my lips and waited for Ursula to respond. She was argumentative on a good day; I could only imagine how she would be under the influence of all those martinis. How many
had
she had? I wondered idly as I stared at her.

She pouted, pushing her lower lip out far enough to do a swan dive off of.

Greg nodded at her and dangled the keys. “
Home
,” he said resolutely.

Apparently, an un-tallied amount of alcohol had a somewhat mellowing effect on Ursula’s argumentative skills. She gathered her clutch from the bar and turned on her heel without comment, breezing toward the door and leaving Greg and me to stare after her in mystification. The woman was impossible to figure out.

He smiled apologetically and reached into his breast pocket to pull out a business card. “I’m sorry the evening was cut short,” he said, breaking his gaze to look down at the card in his hand. “But maybe we—and by
we
, I mean the two of
us
—could try and get together sometime.” He took my hand and slipped the card into it, giving me a confident smile and then turning to follow after his cousin.

I watched as he caught up to Ursula and slid an arm around her waist, ensuring that she would have no chance of straying back to the bar. I smiled slightly to myself as the door to the restaurant closed behind them, content in the knowledge that I would most likely never put Greg’s card to use, yet happily wrapped in the glow of being given the option.

It’s strange, sometimes, the satisfaction and invaluable reassurance that a stranger can give you.

Chapter 14

“Hi, honey, I’m home,” I sang out into the darkened house three hours later.

Three
very
long
hours later.

I’d done the dutiful team player thing and gone back to the banquet to make what I’d planned to be a cameo appearance. Just a quick,
Hi, I’m here, look at me long enough to register my presence and let me get on with my life
. Things didn’t exactly work out the way I’d hoped, though. Not that the first half of the evening had really gone according to plan.

After silently slipping through the French doors to the banquet room in hopes that I was being oh-so-stealthy and that no one would really question where I had been all evening, I found myself somehow chained to the CEO’s wife. Apparently, she was making it her mission in life to see that I was happily matched with someone who would make me forget Paul. Because, after all, the “best way to get over someone is to fall in love with someone else.” Or something to that effect—maybe a little less PG-rated. I had to remind myself that this sage advice was coming from a woman who was currently working through weekly marriage counseling sessions with husband number four.

I wasn’t quite sure if it registered with her that Paul had died as opposed to leaving me
voluntarily
, or vice versa; but she seemed to lump all of them in the same category. I also wasn’t sure of how to extract myself from her benevolence, which was why I spent the next three hours being dragged from pillar to post and introduced to every breathing man in the room without a wedding band. And on some occasions, to men whose marriages were supposedly “on the skids.” Not that she was one to gossip,
but
…

I bent down to unbuckle the straps of my shoes and stepped happily down onto the plush carpet, wiggling my toes over the pile. Cute shoes invariably come with a high price, and these were starting to give me blisters on the little toes of both feet.

“Can you rub my feet?” I grumbled, trudging over to the couch. “They’re absolutely killing me.” I flopped down, not bothering to turn on any lights. It somehow made the illusion more believable, speaking my absurdities out into the dark. Talking to someone who wasn’t there. I smiled sadly in the grayness of the room and closed my eyes.

“What am I doing?” I asked the emptiness.

It seemed like a reasonable question to ask.

What
was
I doing?

I was living in the house of a man I’d never met, writing him letters as though we were long-lost friends. Oh, and then there was the fact that I was talking to the walls. Even to me, the whole thing sounded insane, and I was the one doing all of it.

So was I going crazy?

I needed a second opinion on that, probably.

Unfortunately, though, the late hour meant I would have to wait for that second opinion. Tomorrow, I decided, I was going to pay Ray and Kate a visit, since they’d be back by then. And maybe then I would have answers to all sorts of questions that had been swirling around in my head unanswered for the past few months.

For now, I was going to have to satisfy myself with getting through the next few hours—hopefully sleeping through some of it. Sleep wasn’t often an easy task these days. Actually, the past year had been full of sleepless nights and erratic sleep patterns. I was used to it.

But I was beyond tired of it.

I picked up the remote and flipped on the TV, wondering what mindless drivel might be on. Life, I mused, would be so much easier if it all followed a script, like a made-for-TV movie. Even mine would be better, I was sure.
Girl meets guy, they get engaged, guy dies very suddenly and very tragically, leaving girl alone and heartbroken. Girl cries until the next commercial break and then gets into an elevator, where, Oh! She meets the man she’s really been destined for all along, and they live happily ever after.

Surely the writers would recognize the cruelty of leaving the sad woman alone to live out her days, loveless and hopeless. No one would want to watch a movie like that, so they wouldn’t leave it that way. They’d give her someone new to fall in love with.

So who was going to be my someone new, I wondered. Would I even
have
a someone new?

I slumped over sideways on the couch, completely unmotivated to get up and change out of my dress and into my pajamas. The channels flicked by on the screen as I pressed buttons disinterestedly on the remote, finally stopping on one of those reality shows about house-hunting.

Ah, another thing to think about and keep myself awake, I thought bitterly.

Maybe Ursula had the right idea with all those martinis.

The happy couple on the show were walking around in a second-floor walk-up on the Upper West Side of New York, commenting on all the space in the closets and kitchen area. Things that I really didn’t want to have to think about right now. Things that I hadn’t thought I’d have to think about ever again as a single woman.

Reality, as they say, is harsh. And reality was that there were roughly only six months left until Neil came home from his deployment, at which point I would be left with no place to live. I was going to have to face reality eventually, and I didn’t have a choice in the matter. There had been a lot of things over the past year that I hadn’t exactly had a choice in deciding.

Sometimes life just doesn’t give you a choice—the best you can do is try to handle it gracefully and make sure you have enough closet space. At least then you’ll have a place to hide when it all gets to be too much to handle.

I woke the next morning with a stiff neck and sticky contacts, having fallen asleep on the couch, still fully-clothed and made-up. My dress was rumpled, my hair was disheveled, and I had a serious case of raccoon eyes. Given the choice, I wouldn’t have answered the door, but the insistent pounding didn’t give me much of one.

This was getting to be a really annoying trend. Why did people seem to love waking me up this way? Maybe it was something about this house. Did Neil have an unending stream of visitors who pounded on his door like they were the angry villagers storming the castle, or was I special?

I was so flustered that I didn’t even remember to peer through the peephole. Perhaps not the wisest move, but I didn’t really have all my faculties in order yet. Anyone who caught a glimpse of me would have known that in an instant.

“Whoo-hoo, get a load of
you
,” Ray laughed, standing on the stoop with his arm around Kate. “You look ready to do the walk of shame.”

I didn’t even bother to give him a dirty look. I pulled both of them in for a hug, momentarily forgetting that I hadn’t gotten to brush my teeth before falling asleep the night before. Not that it really mattered. I was too excited to care, and they were too distracted to pay attention.

“Come in, come in, and tell me
everything
. I want to hear all of it,” I said, tugging them into the house and shutting the door behind them. “In greater detail than that little bit you gave me on the phone the other day.
Spill
,” I commanded.

Ray and Kate flopped comfortably on the couch, still entwined and looking like children at Christmas. I took a seat on the coffee table so that I could be close and look at them both directly as they told me their news.

“Well,” Kate began, her eyes shining with excitement as she looked from Ray to me and back again. I’d never seen her look so happy, and it warmed me all the way down to my toes. “You know most of it already, I think, but Ray completely surprised me by showing up in Atlanta. I didn’t even know he was coming; and then there he was, on my doorstep and looking completely lost.”

“I’ve never been to Atlanta before,” he interjected. “And it was early. I had a morning flight, and I was operating on very little sleep and very few functioning brain cells.”

Kate smiled at him fondly, then continued. “Anyway. So I called in sick to work, and we went out to breakfast; and then he just insisted on taking me for a walk downtown to see everything. We went past Ikea, and he looks at me and says, ‘So we should probably start looking at furniture.’” Her voice deepened in an attempt to sound masculine. “I had kind of an idea of what he was hinting at, but I decided to play dumb and make him ask like a proper gentleman.”

“I was going to,” Ray protested, poking her in the rib cage.

Kate laughed and wiggled away from him on the couch. “Stop interrupting me, I’m trying to tell her the story,” she pouted playfully.

“But it’s
my
story, too,” he crooned, smiling at her. He was enjoying this.

And so was I. I was watching the whole exchange with a fascination I’d never expected.

“You two are already arguing like married people,” I said with a chuckle. “Now get on with it, I wanna know what happened next!”

“Okay, okay,” Kate laughed. She shot Ray a look that said,
I love you, but sit there and shut up
. Apparently, he read the look loud and clear. He chewed his bottom lip and looked sheepishly at his lap, smoothing the flap on one of his many pants pockets.

“Where was I? Oh, yeah.” Kate leaned forward and scooted her butt to the front of the couch. “So we’re standing there in front of Ikea, and this out-of-nowhere comment is just hanging in the air. And then he says,” she cleared her throat and blinked rapidly, her face breaking out into a broad grin at the memory. She looked as though she was fighting off laughter. “‘Kate, will you make me the happiest man in the world and help me pick out a coffee table?’” Her voice squeaked and she collapsed into a fit of giggles. “It was insane.”

Ray just looked at her and flushed so deeply that even his ears were glowing. Kate was laughing so hard I thought she was going to fall off the couch, and I sat looking from one to the other, unsure of what to do. Clueless as I was, I was trying really hard not to laugh along with Kate. At least, not until I knew I was allowed. I looked back at Ray, who was still red-faced and shaking his head in mortification.

“That’s not the way I meant it to come out,” he said with a tone that pleaded for sympathy.

I coughed into my fist, earning me a dirty look from Ray, while Kate continued to shake with uncontrollable glee.

She finally stopped laughing, sucking in big gulps of air and flapping her hands in front of her face. “Oh, ooh, boy,” she hooted, wiping tears from the corners of her eyes and smudging her mascara. “Uh. Yes, sweetie, I know. It’s not how you meant it to come out,” she cooed at Ray, patting his leg. She turned back to me and smiled. “Ray is nothing if not eloquent,” she snickered.

I realized I was grinning when I caught Ray scowling at me, at which point I pulled an appropriately solemn expression.

After a silence thick with unreleased laughter, Kate resumed her narration. “He got so flustered that he almost just gave up. He turned bright red, just like he is now; and he started walking away from me, down the street.”

“I felt like an idiot, so I really didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t think that there was going to be any way to redeem that one,” he explained.

I nodded solemnly in understanding.

“So I ran after him and told him he would have to be more specific in what he was looking for if he wanted me to help him pick out something as important as a coffee table.”

“By that time, I’d had an uncharacteristic stroke of genius and figured out exactly what to say, and I said—” Ray was interrupted by Kate, who’d clapped her hand over his mouth so that she could have the satisfaction of finishing the story.

“And he said,” Kate’s eyes sparkled with triumph, “‘I want something that will hold a million silly knickknacks and family photos from the thousands of memories that we make together, if you’ll do me the very great honor of being my wife.’” The triumphant gleam in her eye had been replaced by the shimmering of tears, and her voice was hushed.

My own tears were lazily trickling down my unwashed cheeks as I looked at my two best friends, so very much in love and so looking forward to a life together. I smiled and realized that the happiness I was feeling for them was completely untainted by sadness for myself. It was silly, but the realization made me feel liberated.

To: Neil Epstein

From: Zoë Trent

Subject: Is your Inbox full yet?

Dear Neil,

Thank you for your advice on my meeting with Sam. I can’t tell you how much it’s helped, having your input. Most of the people in my life are too closely tied to the entire situation and would gladly volunteer to beat him senseless. I have a feeling that Ray might have offered up the services of one of his many “people.” So thank you again for your encouragement and guidance.