Family and Other Accidents (26 page)

the way
he said “putz”

Unfortunately for Mona, Jack's girlfriend isn't a bimbo. Kathy
is
blond,
does
have great tits (probably real), and
is
seventeen years younger than Jack. But the truth is Kathy just made partner at a prestigious firm, has an Ivy-covered education, and probably made more her first year out of law school than any newspaper has ever considered paying Mona.

Still “Blond Ponytail” is what Mona's sister insists on calling Kathy.

“Jack still making an ass of himself with Blond Ponytail?” Melanie asks when she and Mona have one of their Bloody Mary brunches on a Sunday morning.

“They seem happy.” Mona threads a red curl behind her ear, and lets Melanie be bitchy for her. The girls weren't close as children, but found themselves single and in Chicago as they slipped into their forties. “Its been so long, I wish them no evil.”

Melanie blows air through her lips, says: “You're a better woman than I am.”

“Eh,” Mona says, takes another spicy sip. “She can have him.”

But when she gets home from brunch, Mona showers, dries her hair, and reapplies makeup, even though she has no plans for the evening. Waiting for Jack to bring back their son, she puts on new jeans (she may not have Kathy's cleavage, but she's still got a great ass), and the kind of sexy casual top that only works on soap opera people.

The doorman buzzes the intercom.

“Jack Reed and Ryan are here,” he says from eighteen stories down. It's the same doorman as when Jack lived in the building, and Mona wonders if they have the same mindless conversations about sports and the weather they had six years ago.

“Send them up,” she says. Almost as a reflex she fluffs her hair in the mirrored foyer, shoves her lips forward in a pout. She has the door open when the elevator delivers her ex-husband, in pressed pants and a dress shirt, even on the weekend.

Without acknowledging Mona at all, her six-year-old son dashes by her. “
SpongeBob
is on.” His words float behind him, followed by the elastic voices of cartoon characters.

Jack lingers in the door frame, looking uncomfortable and a little sick, sweat beading his brow, flush across his cheeks.

“Can I talk to you for a sec?” he asks.

“Sure,” Mona says, heart rattling with uncertainty. “Do you want coffee?”

Jack nods, and she leads him to the kitchen. The espresso machine—sleek and black with a single button that grinds the beans and brews individual cups—had been something from their bridal registry. But Mona makes the coffee, as if Jack wouldn't know how.

“Thanks.” He sits at the kitchen table, sips. His bushy eyebrows crimp with worry and he presses his lips into a tight white line. This is the kind of moment she relished when they were together, one of the rare times when he lets her help him.

“What's up?” She sits in the chair next to his.

“Mo—” He looks at her, his mouth not quite open and not quite closed, like he doesn't remember how to use it. Realizing what he's going to say, she stops him so she won't have to hear it.

“You're marrying Kathy, aren't you?” she asks, feeling sobs and screams ripening in her belly. Bowing her head, she rubs the bridge of her nose.

“I'm sorry,” Jack says.

He hadn't ever apologized for sleeping with Kathy in the first place, hadn't apologized when he moved out or when he asked for a divorce.

“I'm sorry,” he says again.

And something surprising happens: Mona doesn't break down. Her sinuses dry up, and she takes Jack's hand from the table, feels its familiar weight. Leaning into him she touches her lips to his forehead where his graying black hair parts.

“It's okay,” she says, realizing it's true as she says it. “And, frankly, it's about time.”

When he looks at her again, there's something in his eyes that can only be described as gratitude. It's a private moment she will share with no one. When she tells her sister, she will let Melanie say things about blondes and home-wreckers, nod, and order another Bloody Mary. But now she holds Jack, feels his torso tremble.

“I'm happy for you,” she says, and he thanks her again and again.

         

Kathy Kreinhart decided she had a thing for Jack Reed when he called Paul Billings a putz. She'd been a summer associate and Jack had been assigned her partner/liaison because he'd gone to Penn for undergrad and law school and she was on the same track, set to start her final year in the fall. Jack had given her a few assignments, and she'd thought he was kind of cute in a square-jawed, overpriced-haircut kind of way. But when he invited her into his office and told her she'd done a stellar job on a brief she'd helped write, he shook her hand with command and smiled at her firm grip.

“If you're sure you want to do litigation, you don't have to go to corporate for the second half of the summer.” He waved her into a seat across his massive desk, from his important-looking chair on the other side. “I can find some interesting projects for you here.”

He looked genuine, as if he
were
truly thrilled by her five-hundred-word brief, and she felt comfortable enough to tell him that Paul Billings, a junior partner, had asked her to do all kinds of ridiculous crap—proofread his memos, get Krispy Kremes from the bodega in the lobby, pick up his dry cleaning.

“That's not your job.” Jack shook his head. “If he asks you do anything else, just tell him you're doing stuff for me. That guy is such a fucking putz.”

It was the way he said “putz,” the way he rolled his eyes (nice eyes, that dark brown kind where the pupil bleeds into the iris). The other summers had been complaining about Billings for weeks, but when Jack definitively gave him the thumbs-down, Paul Billings became their private joke. She smiled, knowing how she looked when she smiled. At twenty-four, enough people had told her she was pretty that she figured they couldn't all be lying.

“I really learned a lot from that last project,” Kathy said, which wasn't true. “I think I would like to stay in litigation.” Which was true.

Jack nodded, told her about an upcoming case, asked if she wanted to discuss it over lunch. Just as Kathy was thinking about what it would be like to be out in the world with Jack Reed, she noticed the picture of the redheaded woman in a platinum frame on his desk.

That had been almost eight years ago. At the time, the redhead had been Jack's wife. Kathy didn't sleep with Jack until a year and a half later, when she'd joined the firm and Jack brought her in on the Ryan department store trial, when the redhead was pregnant with a child Jack hadn't wanted, and Jack's brother was almost dying. There'd been a challenging absence in Jack's kiss, in his eyes, but she'd attributed it to the guilt and gruel of his life. She pretended it would abate with time. They lost the case, Jack's brother got better, the redhead had the baby, and she and Jack broke up, got back together, and broke up again. After Jack's divorce was final, he asked Kathy to move into the new condo he bought a mile and half down Lake Shore from the one he used to share with the redhead. For the past four years, Kathy and Jack have been driving to the office together most mornings, eating Asian takeout together most nights. On Sundays Jack has his son, and some weeks Kathy goes with them to Wrigley Field or the Lincoln Park Zoo. Some weeks she eats lunch at her parents in Rodger's Park instead.

“He's never going to marry you,” her father says, sipping an Old Style and fiddling around with a model airplane at the same dark wood table that had been in the kitchen since she was a kid. Only six years older than Jack, Kathy's father, bald and shriveled, could pass for Jack's father.

Kathy's mother says nothing and busies herself making tuna sandwiches and coffee, despite Kathy's offer to take them out to brunch.

“I don't care about getting married,” Kathy says and means it.

“You're thirty-one years old,” her father says. “You should think about those things.”

“I don't,” Kathy says, resisting the urge to point out that marriage hadn't made her father nice, had made her mother frumpy and complacent with frosted hair and sagging breasts. “I'm happy,” she says.

And she is. Until two weeks later when Jack gets up in the middle of surf and turf at Gibson's. He bends down, and Kathy takes another bite of lobster, assuming he dropped his napkin on the way to the men's room. On one knee in front of her, Jack takes her hand.

“Kath,” he says. “I was wondering if you might like to get married.”

If Jack hadn't spent a chunk of the previous year finding a Massachusetts' divorce lawyer for his brother, she might believe him. If he ever so much as kissed her in public, she'd think he's sincere. She doesn't think he is, instead assumes the whole thing is an uncharacteristically mean joke, and she wonders if she mentioned her father's comment.

“Aren't you supposed to have a ring when you do that?” she asks flatly.

Jack smiles; he looks good when he smiles, like men on TV who sell Viagra.

“Yeah, I've got one of those.” He reaches into the pocket of his suit jacket and pulls out a velvet box with a ring—a very, very big ring. More accurately, a normal-sized platinum band with a very, very big square diamond in the center.

Something surprising happens then: Kathy starts crying, sobbing actually. There are audible gasps from restaurant patrons, who stop slicing sirloin and sipping red wine to watch. The creases in Jack's brow deepen, and he puts his hand on the thigh of her suede skirt, asks if she's okay. Kathy nods and sniffles, reaches for the cloth napkin in her lap to wipe her nose.

“Is that a no?” Jack asks.

“No, I mean it's not a no         .         .         .         I mean         .         .         .         I just didn't realize how much I wanted to marry you until you asked.” As she says it, she realizes it's true.

“If I'd known you'd fall apart, I would have done this at home. I thought it might be romantic here.”

Taking her hand, he slides the ring on her finger, and the people clap. Jack waves and grins, while Kathy feels heat on her cheeks and dabs at her eyes. The waiter clears away their plates of steak, seafood, and creamed spinach, returns with a molten chocolate cake. A lit candle glows over the hills of ice cream.

“Make a wish for a long and happy life together,” the waiter says.

Kathy and Jack exchange looks about who's supposed to blow it out, and the small flame dances between them, the light reflected in Jack's eyes. And she thinks that she catches something in his gaze that she hasn't seen before, something open.

That look is still there later that night when he lays her naked on the bed, licks her body starting at the big toe of her left foot and continuing to her blond widow's peak. It's there the next morning when he pulls her under the sheets after she comes back from the bathroom.

“Ohmygod, I'm going to be Mrs. Reed. Just like Donna.” Kathy laughs, and Jack rolls on top of her, squashes air from her lungs, making her cough. He's a tall man who's put on ten pounds in the years she's known him, not really fat, just filled out, and she likes his heaviness on her.

“You're going to take my name?” He brushes his straight nose against her straight nose. “How very fifties of you.”

“Katherine Reed sounds like an attorney you'd trust.” Her voice is strained from his dead weight. “I've always thought Kathy Kreinhart was kind of ducky.”

“Okay, Mrs. Reed.” Jack rolls off of her, swats her butt. “I'm hungry. Make some eggs.”

But he makes the scrambled eggs and fresh ground coffee, brings it to her on a tray. They eat in bed and tumble around until he goes to pick up his son from the redheaded woman. While Jack takes Ryan to the Shedd Aquarium, Kathy drives out to the southern suburbs to show her mother the engagement ring.

“I never thought he would ask you.” Cupping her daughter's hand in her own, Kathy's mother cries and talks about places where they could have the reception. “This is a miracle.”

“Come on, Mom, it's not as though he figured out who shot Kennedy,” Kathy says, but feels herself caught up in something, too, wonders if maybe she does want a wedding with a lacy white cake and a cover band after all.

As usual, her father is cantankerous and unhelpful. “Well if you want kids, you'll have to do it right away,” he says without really looking up from the model airplane he's putting together on the kitchen table. “Jack's almost fifty.”

“It doesn't matter how old Jack is.” Kathy's mother perks up in a rare moment of defiance. “Kath's got twelve good years for kids.”

Kathy starts to say that she doesn't want kids, but doesn't. Instead she smiles at her mother and helps chop tomatoes.