Every Other Saturday (7 page)

The reason for his visit snapped back to him, along with a touch of the anger he had felt earlier. “Yeah. Listen.” He had an absurd impulse to call her “Mia Mendel’s Mom.” He swallowed. “Julia. I was thinking about your situation with your son. I’m wondering if we can work something out.”

She eyed him suspiciously. “What did you have in mind?”

Dave ignored her tone. “I feel bad about all this, and I was thinking since we both need Elizabeth on the same Saturday nights, why don’t we combine forces and put the kids together? Maybe she would give us a group rate.”

He could tell her wheels were turning by the way she bit one side of her lip, so he went on. “I know Lyric would love to hang out with Mia. I have a great playroom at my place with a pinball machine and a pool table. I’m sure your son would love it.”

Julia stared at him as though he were an equation she was trying to solve. Dave was backtracking in his head, about to say that he hadn’t intended to make her uncomfortable, when she spoke. “It would have to be at my house.”

And you’re welcome. Who was this woman? “Fine. I’ll have to make sure Debbie is okay with that. Do you have a place for Lyric to sleep?”

“Mia has a trundle bed.”

“Great. Lyric will think that’s fun, I’m sure.”

Julia nodded, slowly. It wasn’t quite the ticker tape parade he’d been expecting, considering he had driven here voluntarily to solve all her problems, on her own terms. “Sounds like I’ll see you at your place next Saturday night.” He turned to go. “I’ll let Elizabeth know.”

“Wait.” Julia stepped forward and caught him by the sleeve. He waited. Now closer, he could see her eyes were rimmed with red. “I’m sorry about… I didn’t behave…it’s complicated with Brandon and his dad isn’t always helpful; I—”

She was gripping his sleeve, floundering like a fish dying on the pier, and Dave began to worry she was going to pull him down with her. He patted her hand. “Stop. It’s okay. We worked it out.”

“And you’re right. I can be a martyr sometimes. It’s something I need to work on.”

“I shouldn’t have said that. I was pissed off.”

“Maybe. But sometimes we need to hear the truth about ourselves, even if it sucks.”

Dave shrugged. Between his parents and Debbie and the people who commented on his blogs, he got the unvarnished truth about himself far more often than he could have wanted. Maybe that was why it was so easy for him to call out other people’s bullshit: he had come to expect everyone had his thick skin.

Then it hit him. “We do need to hear the truth, don’t we?”

“What?”

“Mia Mendel’s Mom, you’re a genius.” He clapped her on the back and walked to his truck, leaving her gaping at him in the doorway.

Just over a week later, Julia stood in her living room dusting the bookshelf knick knacks for the third time: everything from the New Orleans voodoo doll to the little Greek urn inlaid with gold. It was the first Saturday of their babysitting arrangement, and she was unaccountably nervous about Dave Bernstein coming to her house.

Forcing herself to put away the duster, she picked up the little black and gold urn, and examined it closely for the first time in years. She and Adam had acquired it on their honeymoon in the Greek Isles: their biggest purchase ever at the time.

“It’s too expensive,” she’d said. She leaned into Adam as he wrapped tanned, linen-clad arms around her. The late afternoon light streamed pink into the little tourist shop near their hotel, with its whitewashed walls and blue tile floor.

“Anything for Mrs. Adam Mendel.” He’d kissed the Cheshire Cat tattoo low on her exposed shoulder blade. This always made her crazy. She wore a halter top and sarong, showing off the fact that she’d lost twenty pounds for their wedding. It was the thinnest she’d been since high school, and she was enjoying it.

“It’s probably overpriced,” she protested. “You never get deals in these shops.”

“But you love it, right?” he muttered. He moved a hand under the tie behind her neck and kissed the rose, and then pulled the daisy on her wrist to his lips.

“It’s probably made in China,” she said weakly, hugging the urn to her. Adam’s lips on the back of her neck made it hard to concentrate.

“So lift it up and look on the bottom,” he’d whispered, nipping at her ear. Even years later, the memory made her flushed. The rest was a blur: making out rather indecently in the shop with the urn pressed between them; then sheepishly waiting for the irritated store owner to verify their traveler’s checks and make change so they could get back to the hotel. She still had drachmas in the garage somewhere. They’d been replaced by the Euro not long after their honeymoon and were useless now. Julia kept thinking she would give them to Brandon one day; he might at least find them interesting artifacts.

The rap at the door startled her from her reverie and she nearly dropped the urn. Placing it carefully back on the shelf, she opened the door to find Lyric Bernstein, clutching a sleeping bag and well-worn pink teddy bear. Her eyes—dark brown like her father’s—were wide, her expression serious.

“Hi, Lyric!” Julia said, as brightly as possible. “Welcome to our house. I’m so happy you’re going to be hanging out with Mia and Brandon tonight.”

She stood back to let Lyric walk in, but the little girl stood still, glancing back at her dad. “Go on,” he whispered. “It’s going to be fun.” He shrugged at Julia. “I think we thought this was a great idea in theory, but now that it’s actually happening…”

“Oh,” Julia said. “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head in dismissal. “It’s fine. In ten minutes, she’ll be running the show. Are you okay? You look flushed.”

Her hand flew to her throat. “I’m good, just…just ran down the stairs.”

Lyric stepped in, and Julia directed her toward the kitchen. “Can I give her a couple of cookies?” she asked Dave over her shoulder. “I told the kids they could have dessert if they ate a good dinner.”

“Sure.” He took a seat on the couch. He wore khakis, she noticed, and a pressed buttoned-down Oxford in a soft shade of purple. His dark hair, which was thinning just the tiniest bit, had been cut short so that it looked more even. It was strange; he normally wore team t-shirts and jackets and shorts when she passed him in the preschool hallways. But these clean-cut, dressier clothes seemed to reveal more of his athlete’s body than usual.

He wasn’t a large man, but muscular and agile-looking for his size, despite the hint of middle-age spread around his belt line. From where she stood in the doorway to the kitchen, she got a faint whiff of some kind of manly deodorant or body spray. It was a clean scent, not overpowering. But still. The distinct maleness of it, of Dave himself, here in her living room, made her realize how very long it had been since a guy over the age of nine had been in her house at all. The flushing ache that she’d begun to feel remembering her honeymoon returned, slowly moving up her torso. Like wildfire. Or indigestion.

Jesus. She was staring at him. Julia realized it at the precise second that Dave seemed to notice too. He raised an eyebrow. “Okay?”

“Yes,” she said quickly. “Sorry. I thought you were about to say something.”
Quit saying you’re sorry, you idiot. Could you possibly apologize to this man one more time in an evening? Stop it.

He looked thoughtful. “I guess I was just thinking you’re going to be Lyric’s new favorite person. Her mom doesn’t let her have sweets at night at all.”

“Oh no! Should I—? I promised my kids, but I could—I don’t usually let them, it’s just…”

“No, don’t worry about it. I’m more lenient about that stuff than Debbie is. Life is too short.”

“It is,” she agreed.

And then they were staring at each other, each waiting for the other to say something. Life might be too short, but sometimes it felt
really
long.

“I’m just going to finish getting ready.” She was ready, hair pulled up and wearing the black skirt and buttoned-down white shirt that were Caroline’s uniforms. But she suspected Dave, like most men, would accept that there was some mysterious woman thing she still had to do. “Do you mind letting Elizabeth in when she gets here?”

“Sure.”

She turned and practically ran up the stairs of the split-level ranch, heart pounding. “Jeez,” she muttered under her breath, “I need to get laid.”

“What’s laid?” Brandon asked.

Julia looked up in horror to see her son in front of her, just coming out of the bathroom. She hadn’t even seen him go upstairs.

“No, honey. I said late. I hope I won’t be late.”

“But you are working for Aunt Caroline, right? She won’t be mad if you are late, right?”

Julia couldn’t help but laugh. “Have you
met
Aunt Caroline?”

Brandon smiled back, probably remembering the time they had arrived late for Christmas Eve at Caroline’s, when Mia was still a toddler. Between her tantrums, Brandon’s five-year-old habit of removing his shoes in mysterious places, and Adam’s passive-aggressive dragging his feet in protest of being forced out into the cold for the Christian holiday, they were almost an hour late getting to Caroline’s house for dinner before Mass. In some families, the hostess in such a situation might have skipped church, or perhaps left behind a note, a key, even a husband to open the door for the latecomers. She might have put dinner in a warm oven, left directions to the new church that Julia had never visited, or at least called to make sure her sister and family were not bleeding in a ditch.

Caroline being Caroline, however, she had packed her own family into the car and left without a word, turning out every light inside and outside the house, except for the one in the front dining room, which shone over the delicious meal, left laid out on the table with a locked door guarding it. The Mendels had spent the next hour and a half in the driveway with the minivan running, heat on full blast. Brandon and Mia shared a stale pack of peanut butter crackers and a mini box of gravelly raisins, both of which Julia had found tucked into her center console. Adam complained for the first half hour, heavy on the expletives and assertions that his family would never pull this kind of crap at Rosh Hashanah. His family members all fully expected everyone to be fifteen minutes late for everything. When Julia finally pointed out that they had been
more
than fifteen minutes late, he exploded in anger and then spent the rest of the evening sulking and making snide comments.

This turned out to be a match for Caroline, who did the same. Upon returning from church, Caroline looked like she’d sat on a very large icicle the whole way home. Her boys, still adolescents, were both in a snit about some video game Caroline was refusing to let them play. Only Ben, Caroline’s stoic and even-keel husband, spoke to the Mendels with any warmth, which apparently was not enough for Adam. So they sat around the dining room table, eating the tepid, congealing meal in silence. Only Ben and Julia saw the humor in the situation, and exchanged careful grins at each other while Ben kept the kids somewhat entertained.

At the time, Julia had felt that she and Ben were the balancing forces for two strong-headed people, and that his happiness with Caroline was an indication of what was ahead for her own marriage. Now she thought of this incident as a red flag she should have noticed. She should have seen how unhappy and ungenerous Adam was. In another year, he would announce his relationship with Christy and intention to leave. Had it already been going on, even that Christmas, right under Julia’s nose?

Snapping back to herself, Julia patted Brandon on the arm as she passed him in the hall and headed into her bedroom. Downstairs, she heard the doorbell ring and the sound of Elizabeth and Dave’s voices. His first time ever setting foot in her house, and five minutes later he was playing host. The whole setup was surreal. She shuffled to the bathroom to reapply some lipstick and hyperventilate a little.

# # #

“So he’s going out with someone tonight?” Caroline handed Julia a centerpiece filled with flowers, and then called out to a man in an impeccable black chef’s uniform, just a shade darker than his skin, carrying an enormous silver bowl of ice. “No, Louie, not there. Put that with the punchbowl in the garden.”

“It’s going to rain,” Lusala “Louie” Okeke, Caroline’s indispensable second-in command, said definitively as he turned to her with raised brows.

“How much?” Caroline said with a smirk Julia remembered well from their childhood. She looked down again to scan her ever-present clipboard. “We’re going to need the four-tier cupcake stand. Well?”

“Twenty dollars,” Louie said.

“You’re on. And you close out the Bonner wedding for me next weekend.”

“What? No way. That’s worth way more than twenty dollars.”

“Fine,” Caroline said. “Twenty bucks. Be dull.”

Louie gave Caroline a long look, one eyebrow raised. “Was she always like this?” he asked Julia.

“Worse,” Julia said. “There was pinching involved when we were kids.”

He gave an exaggerated shudder and carried his ice bowl back in the other direction. “How would you survive without him?” Julia asked her sister.

“Bite your tongue. I don’t like to think that question, much less ask it out loud. Every couple of years, he threatens to go out on his own and I have to give him a raise. He’s seriously overpaid.”

“He is
not
.” Julia knew her sister well enough to know that whatever Caroline paid her right-hand man couldn’t possibly be enough.

Caroline ignored her. “So this Dave guy, he’s starting the whole Jewish Date thing tonight?”

“J-Date. Yeah, he has his first date tonight. It’s sort of ridiculous.”

“Why ridiculous? No, see, spread them out. Like this. The cupcakes will sit in the middle on the little sticks. We’ll put them out when the ceremony starts so they don’t dry out. So, you don’t think it’s a good idea?”

“The cupcakes?”

“The dating thing. Dave Whatshisname. From the Cave.”

“Bernstein. Come on, you know who he is.”

“Yeah, yeah. Ben reads his blog. Fair warning, he tried to get me to get you to get an autograph for him.”

“An autograph? From Dave Bernstein?”

“I know. Men are idiots. But, his blog is kind of a big deal.”

Julia rolled her eyes. “Whatever. Any woman who would go out with him under these circumstances is an idiot, too.”

“He’s cute, though, right?”

Julia focused on getting the wooden skewers perfectly even on the centerpiece she was arranging, remembering the scent of Dave’s aftershave or whatever it was, and the crisp lines of his purple shirt. “I guess. If you’re into that sort of thing.”

“What’s he…” Caroline started, but was interrupted by one of the waitresses who had a pantyhose emergency, and the two of them raced off to the bathrooms, leaving Julia to the flowers and her thoughts.

Julia moved from table to table, adjusting the centerpieces. She heard the quartet warming up in the background, and thought of her wedding to Adam. Because they had means, and truthfully, cared far more than Julia or her family, Adam’s parents had been the driving force of the event. They’d chosen the pricey hotel ballroom and the rabbi and the kosher caterer, and even convinced Julia to cover her tattoos during the ceremony. The only thing she’d asked for, through all the plans and the ever-expanding guest list of people she didn’t know, was to walk down the aisle while a friend’s punk band played “Lover’s Rock” by the Clash.

To his credit, Adam had lobbied for her right up until the end, until his parents finally overcame them both, getting them to “see reason” and imploring them on behalf of the older guests. When his mother implied that some of the great-aunts and uncles might keep their gift checks in their pockets if they thought the music sounded like “tuneless shrieking,” Adam had turned and Julia was defeated. It was one of the earliest and most bitter regrets she had about their marriage.

She hoped Brandon was okay. He had stayed with Elizabeth many times with few problems, but Lyric was a new element: neither of the kids had friends spend the night yet. She hoped Bran wasn’t at home going berserk because of the invasion of his usual environment.