Double Trouble (19 page)

She spread her hands and looked at the ceiling, carefully recalling the fortune verbatim. I was struck by how much she resembled the Madonna in the church we had gone to every Sunday as kids. Her hair was long and blond, kind of kinky and spread over her shoulders like worked gold. Meg’s face is a little round and very sweet, and she has the biggest, most soulful brown eyes in the world.

Well, except for those of the Madonna.

“A man will sweep into your life,” she recounted with awe. “Your fortunes will change dramatically for the better as a result of his influence. You will ride into summer’s abundance ripe with possibilities.” Her smile flashed. “Isn’t that great? Do you think he’s The One do you do you? I could be pregnant by the summer!”

I laughed a bit under my breath, then began to browse. “Meg, they’re all The One, at least you think so at the beginning. You’ve got to get over this idea that your life isn’t complete without a man.”

“Not just a man not just any man but
the
man The One Maralys aren’t you listening?” She trailed behind me, including opinions on everything I touched in the midst of what she was saying. “Not just a guy in my bed but a lover in my life—oh Maralys surely not that dress—a partner a soul mate—it’s not your color—my divine soul mate and better half—the zipper’s out of that I can fix it but it’s not worth the price she insists upon—my
destiny
!” She sighed rapturously. “He’s gorgeous in kind of an uptight sort of a way kind of auburnish hair—you can’t wear green we’ve been through this a thousand times it’s your complexion—and tall definitely tall I’ve had to shorten the pants for one buyer but the most marvelous eyes...”

“Hazel.”

Meg blinked and looked at me, astounded to comparative silence. “How did you know that?”

“He’s my brother-in-law. My sister walked and he was cleaning out her stuff. A lot of it was new so I told him to take it back, then bring the rest to you.”

Her features lit again. “Maralys! I love you!” She threw her arms around my neck, nothing but exuberant our Meg, and gave me a big smacking kiss. “You saved me!”

“Well, no, not really.” I was embarrassed by this show of affection, though it said much for my recent isolation that I endured it. “I didn’t think he’d do it.”

“You are so full of shit, Maralys.” She punched me in the shoulder and we grinned at each other, then she cocked her head. “He’s cute.”

“Mmm. In a way.” I sauntered down the aisle, taking advantage of the opportunity to turn my back on her. Meg knows me too well.

“So why’d you come?” She was right behind me. “Checking up on him?”

I snorted. “Hardly. I need something wow.”

“How wow?”

“Really wow.” I spun and snapped my fingers, as if I was remembering the idea which I’d just had. What was a celebration without other people? It wasn’t as if I didn’t have space. “Which reminds me. I’m having a party in two months and you’re invited.”

“What’s the occasion?”

“Tax freedom. The official elimination of the fiscal burden of Neil.”

“Awesome! Oh, I’ll be there!” Meg pursed her lips and considered her inventory. “But now we need two wows.”

“Did James bring any women’s stuff?” So maybe I
was
checking up on him. Or maybe I was just tempted by the prospect of a good deal.

There would have been something weird about buying one of my sister’s cast-offs and I doubt I would have done it, but I was wondering, you know?

Meg was on a roll again, fingers trailing over her stock. “Yeah a few things brand new like you said and of quite recent vintage but I took them because they’ll move easily and they did some are gone already though I don’t think you’ll like any of it since it’s kind of conservative for you and not your size.” She was back in her usual mode, brow furrowed. “This designer stuff is hell to alter all those linings and flat-felled seams to pick out and replicate and it’s not worth it unless you just can’t live without the piece here let me show you.”

She pulled out a cocktail dress and we both grimaced.

“Who knew they made fabric in puce?”

Meg clicked her tongue. “It’s called soft salmon, Maralys.”

“How do you know that?”

She flicked the label. “It’s from that snotty boutique on Mass that’s so bitchy about returns that they won’t make any so I take their stuff here and actually have a few people who come looking for it because they like the merchandise but hate the store.”

I knew the place she meant, though I’d never set foot in it. I had a sudden image of James, in that boutique, talking earnestly about Bolivian cockatiels and started to laugh. Damn near spilled my coffee, too.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing. Well, nothing that I could explain easily anyhow.” Meg kept giving me That Look. “Okay, I didn’t warn him about that place. Maybe I owe him an apology.”

“You owe him my thanks in a big way and hey if you’re going to see him will you take a check along? I owe James Coxwell some major money and he said he was moving soon so I don’t have an address.”

This seemed most unlike our boy. “What did he tell you to do with it?”

“He said he’d come back in but I wasn’t expecting to sell so much so fast and he might want the cash.”

I looked at the cocktail dress and remembered his assertion that Marcia and I shared a genetic ability to tick him off. “You’d better stick with his plan.” I grinned. “Now, come on, I need a knock-out dress.”

“I’m going to
give
you a dress for sending me this business so pick a good one.”

“Oh, that’s a smart move, Meg.”

“What?”

“You’re on the verge of bankruptcy so you’re going to give stuff away. You know that I will pick the best dress you have.”

“You probably will. You have great taste.”

“And I’m prepared to pay for the dress. I’ve saved my pennies and all, so don’t even go there.”

Meg eyed me for a long moment and looked suspiciously as if she might cry.

I flung out my hands. “Where would I shop without you? Nope, this a purely selfish decision on my part. I
need
this store.”

“You are full of it, Maralys,” she said with undisguised affection. I, amazingly, did not get a hive. You must be able to work up a basic immunity to this mushy stuff. Meg surveyed me skeptically. “But I will find you the very best dress. What color is your hair going to be on May 15?”

“Whatever color it needs to be. You can choose.”

“I like that.” She smiled and set to searching.

It was hours before I got out of there and hours after that—in the wee hours of the morning, in fact—that I got cold feet about the party. Dozens of people in my cave, touching my things, thinking they were my pals. Easy, sport. Who else should I ask?

Who
shouldn’t
I ask?

Ah, yes, what about The James Question?

Fact was, I kind of missed the incisive commentary. He tended to call my chips as fast as I called his. Maybe it was a sparring of equals that I craved.

He certainly didn’t duck and run like Neil had. Good old Neil. I wondered whether he was still in Baja, then wondered whether he had managed to incur as much new debt as what I was coming close to paying off. Yep, big sucker move there to go for a joint partnership. That’s how the IRS got my number—that’s how I got left holding the proverbial bag.

I wondered whether some unfortunate chick had just realized that she too was holding a bag of debt, courtesy of Neil, who had suddenly departed to parts unknown. It was as ancient history as James’ Romans to me, though.

And James, I knew, was not the kind to leave anyone to do his dirty work. You had to like that in a guy. A woman like me really had to like that in a guy. Still, if I called him, it would be showing a weakness. Not my style. I launched an aircraft carrier’s worth of paper airplanes—all with exceedingly excellent design—while I waffled. The fallen glowed in the light from the monitors, a fleet of indecision all over the hardwood floors.

Then, as so often happens, the phone rang and Fate decided what was going to happen next.

“Hello?”

A long silence was my only response.

I turned down the stereo, the hair on the back of my neck prickling like crazy. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

“M -” It was just a hoarse whisper, but I would have known it anywhere.

“Dad? Dad, what’s happened?” Hysteria had me by the short hairs and was giving me a shake. “Are you there? Are you all right?” I was scrambling for my coat and praising cordless phones all the way across the loft. “What’s happened? Dad, talk to me!”

“I fell.” The words came in an exhalation, a single helpless and hopeless sound that made my blood run cold.

No, no, no, this was not the script I ordered up.

Make it stop.

Make it stop now.

“Okay, Dad, listen up. I’m coming. I’ll be there in ten. Don’t move, don’t do anything, don’t answer the door. I’ve got my keys. Understand?” He didn’t answer, I could barely hear him breathing over the sound of my own heart. Deep breath. Time for levity, Maralys. Being freaked will just freak him.

“Are you there, Dad?” I asked sternly. “Because if you are, you’d better tell me that you won’t do anything stupid, like start tap-dancing on the tables like you always do. I want to find you snoozing comfortably by the phone when I get there, okay?”

A little sound that could have been a laugh. “Okay.”

Okay. It was going to be okay.

I didn’t believe it for a minute. That was why I ran like hell. I ran right in front of a cab—they aren’t anxious to stop in this neighborhood at such a time and my erratic behavior didn’t reassure this guy.

“My dad. He’s old, he fell, I gotta get there.” I shouted at his window. He unlocked the back door, persuaded by my entreaty or my possible insanity, I don’t know.

But he moved. He squealed the tires and rocked, before I even had the door closed. You’ve got to love a stranger who runs a very red red, just for you.

“You call 911?”

I balled my hands in my pockets and watched the vacant windows of the sleeping city fly past. “It might not be that bad,” I whispered. The cabbie flicked a look at me in the rear view and I knew that my manner betrayed that fleeting hope. “It might not be that bad,” I said again, then closed my eyes.

Right, Maralys. And the moon is made of green cheese. Why not serve yourself up a slice?

The wise cabbie handed me his cell and I dialed.

----

Subject
: teenage girls

Dear Aunt Mary -

My daughters are driving me insane. They won’t listen to me. They won’t do what they’re told. They dress like sluts and stay out half the night. What am I going to do—besides scream myself hoarse every day?

At the end of the rope

----

Subject
: re: teenage girls are aliens

Dear Rope End -

In a supreme sacrifice to this advice column when it was no more than a gleam in her eye, Aunt Mary had her reproductive organs removed and burned, purely to ensure that she could gather a wealth of experience regarding sexual relations without ever having to learn a thing about kids. This I did selflessly for all of you that you might reap the benefits of my wisdom.

Which is a long way of saying - you’re on your own.

And you owe me.

Aunt Mary

***

Uncertain? Confused? Ask Aunt Mary!

Your one stop shop for netiquette and advice:

http://www.ask-aunt-mary.com

----

S
o, I was sitting in the waiting room at Mass. Gen., wondering what the hell I was going to do. Truth is that I’m not crazy about hospitals and Mass. Gen. is my least favorite. Bad memories in a major way. It gave me the crawls just to cross the threshold.

But what choice did I have?

Dr. Moss had been in the hospital and had come ’round to see my dad. I didn’t ask what she was doing in the hospital in the dead of the night, much less why she looked pooped, just listened glumly to her prognosis.

Dad had chipped his hipbone when he fell and though it wasn’t broken, it would be painful in the healing. She didn’t think he should live alone anymore. I thought it would kill him to lose his independence.

Stalemate.

She suggested all the usual options of nursing homes and senior facilities but I knew the only way he’d leave that house would be in a box. I couldn’t articulate it though, because I was still all jumbled up from finding him crumpled on the floor of the kitchen, as frail as a bird, the phone clutched in his hand.

The ambulance had been right behind me, a damn good thing because I wouldn’t have remembered the number 911 right then and there. Your health care dollars at work, God bless them.

Thing was, I could understand the old bugger. If we put him in a home, we’d be telling him that he wasn’t fit to be an adult any more. He’d die of that as much as anything.

I could appreciate his desire to go down swinging, to die with his boots on, as it were. His dignity seemed like such a small thing to grant him, yet at the same time, something protective within me wanted to shield him from his own frailty.

From himself.

Clearly, anyone with a speck of independence would find that sentiment insulting. I was insulted with myself for even having it. So, I sat there and worried over it.

Dad was sedated now and sleeping, the morphine having ended his flirting with the nurses and his insistence that he was fine. It was over but I couldn’t make myself go home, so I sat vigil in the hall, sorting through my own tangled feelings. They didn’t even have any magazines there, which was worse than having just bad ones. There was no escape from my thoughts.

I had dug in there deep, so jumped into the stratosphere when James suddenly sat down beside me.

“Hi.” His composure was perfectly unruffled, as if we’d run into each other at the supermarket, instead of in the geriatrics ward at 3:45 on a Thursday morning. He looked tired, I noticed, though he smiled a little bit for me.

My heart took a lunge for my mouth. It didn’t help when his thigh bumped against mine. He was wearing jeans again and a shirt that looked as though he’d picked it up off the floor. He’d combed his fingers with his hair and those details, as well as the concern in his eyes, told me why he was here.