I'm Not Julia Roberts (18 page)

The stink of pot and alcohol mix with the tang of the sea. Her clothes and hair are mussed, disheveled. Anger boils in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t think she could be this reckless, this dumb. “It’s past one in the morning. Where the hell have you been? What the hell have you been doing?”

“Oh, chill out, Dad,” she says. “We were here, like, the whole time.” She scans the beach. “Where did Dom go?”

“I told you to be home by eleven.”

She’s not even looking at him, she’s pulling her cell phone from her pocket, she’s trying to focus on the screen. “How many times did you call me? . . . God. There’s like sixteen missed calls.”

He grips her arm again. “Ashleigh, I asked you a question. What have you been doing? Were you smoking? Drinking? Did you lose consciousness?”

“I was just resting my eyes.”

“And he just left you here? You have no idea what he or anyone else could have done to you,” Tate says.

“I know what he did to me.” She yawns. “I’m so tired. I want to go to bed. Is the house far? I hope you brought the car with you, ’cause I don’t feel like walking.”

“Ashleigh,” he says, “Ashleigh,” as if the sound of her own name might clear her head. “Do you have any idea how dangerous this is?”

“What?” She struggles to her feet. “The tide, you mean? I would have moved out of the way.” She laughs. “Anyway, this isn’t a big deal. Dom’s just a little summer fling.”

He stands, too, searching her face. She’s perfectly serious, she’s perfectly oblivious. That’s what does it, the obliviousness, the blindness, the unbelievable stupidity and self-absorption, that’s the thing. He thinks:
We should go to family therapy. That’s what we should do. Shouldn’t we?

He grabs her cell phone from her hand and launches it into the ocean. “You’re grounded.”

She rounds on him, incredulous. “You can’t ground me.”

“Yes, I can.” By the elbow, he yanks her across the beach. Several couples unlock lips to watch.

“Let go of me,” Ashleigh says. “Let go!”

“No.”

“You don’t even care about me! You don’t care about anyone! What are you doing? Why are you doing this?”

He doesn’t answer. He knows a thing or two about therapy, knows about acting as if. A caring man would yank his daughter across the sand. A caring man would ground her. A caring man would put a stop to all of this, right here, right now.

Tate makes like a caring man and drags his wayward, shrieking daughter back to the castle by the sea, where her family waits.

HUG MACHINE

H
e was a junior capitalist, Lu knew that much. He liked to frame himself in doorways, forearms braced in the jambs shoulder level, hands hanging open and relaxed, broad cheeks and wide-set eyes hinting at Slavic ancestry.
Kama Sutra
scenarios looped relentlessly through her dirty mind, scenarios impossible for so many reasons: Lu was married, he was engaged, Lu was head-butting forty, he was all of twenty-whatever, and Jesus, who could braid themselves like slipknots without pulling something, anyway? Lust, she thought, was ridiculous, and even more ridiculous in middle age, more oral, more aggressive, an absurd flashback to babyhood. When she looked at him, her mouth watered, every golden inch of this boy a place to sink her teeth.

“I like it,” he said. “But I don’t love it.”

“It” being the tenth condo she’d shown him in three weekends. How he could pull off a new condo before a big wedding, Lu didn’t know, but he seemed confident—an investment, he’d told her. He’d live in it himself for the eighteen months of the engagement, and then he and the wifey—a little slip of a thing Lu had met only once—would buy a house and rent out the apartment. That was the plan: Buy up property, rent it out. He wanted lots and lots of property, didn’t believe the rumors of an impending real estate collapse, or perhaps believed he’d outrun it. Sometimes he took stairs and sidewalks at an easy jog, turning back to look at her as if she were the one with the ball and she need only toss it to him and he’d win the game for everyone.

“The lake view is obscured by that other building,” he said, “and that bathroom. What were they thinking?”

“It’s brand new,” Lu said. “New fixtures, tile, tub.”

“The tub is orange. Who ever heard of an orange tub? Looks like a baby aspirin explosion.”

She realized that he had paused, waiting for her to respond, only after she’d been staring at his belt buckle for a long, delicious half minute. If she yanked on it, he’d peel away from the door hips first. “It’s bad,” Lu said, collecting herself, “but not the worst. You should have seen some of the places I’ve been in. Ducks everywhere.”

He blinked at her with eyes the color of the Blue Grotto. “Ducks? Like real ducks?”

“No, I mean country decorating. Duck borders. Duck wallpaper. Ducks carved into the banisters.” She’d never been in a place where there were ducks carved into the banisters, but what do you say to eyes like that, with them blinking at you? A stacked deck if there ever was one.

He hung his head, then glanced up out of the corners of his Grotto-blues. “Sounds pretty nasty.”

“Nasty is right,” she said, feeling the flush bloom on her cheeks.
God, Lu, get a grip!

He smirked one of his little smirks, private and sweet, one that had most likely been wielding power and influence over every female he’d encountered since the sixth grade. “So, where to now?”

“Um . . .” She looked at her clipboard, though she knew exactly what was written there. “There’s a new listing over on Farwell. Neighborhood’s a bit dicey, but it’s up-and-coming.” She flushed again. There. He’d reduced her to middle school. All she needed were the pimples and the high bullet breasts, and the transformation would be complete. “But unfortunately we can’t look at it today because the owners are having some work done.”

“Oh,” he said. He dropped his arms from the wall and slipped his hands in his pockets. “How about next Saturday?”

“I won’t be available to show you around next Saturday. Family event. My husband’s family.” She rolled her eyes and made a waving gesture, a “you know about husbands and their crazy events” gesture, except that he probably didn’t, being that he wasn’t even a husband yet, and why was she rolling her eyes at the mention of her own husband?

“So the Saturday after next?” His blond hair was fine, baby’s hair. Lu wondered if a lover had ever shampooed it for him, if he was old enough to have had someone in his life he called “lover.”

“If you really want to see it next Saturday,” said Lu, “I can make arrangements for another agent to show you.”

The smirk fell away, and he shook his leonine head, a single drop of sweat glistening in the chiseled channel over his lip. “No. I want
you
to show me.”

“I bet you were doing that thing, too,” said her sister, Annika, later, when Lu met her for drinks by her pool. “That preening thing where you toss back your hair and show your neck. You used to do that in high school.”

“I did not show people my neck in high school.”

“Yes, you did. You must have a thing about birds. That’s how birds mate.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I’m not mating.”

“What would you call it?”

“Flirting.”

“You don’t know how to flirt. That’s why you went around showing people your neck.” Annika took a sip of low-cal sangria that they’d made from a Weight Watchers recipe. “Listen to that beautiful sound. You know what that is? The sound of naptime.”

Asleep, Annika’s triplets looked like a band of angels. Awake, they were tumblers from the Cirque du Soleil, only more talkative. “Aren’t they a little old to take naps?”

“Who’s too old for a nap?”

“That’s true.”

Annika pointed a finger. “I hope you’re not tempted to do anything stupid.”

“Of course I’m tempted. The Virgin Mary would be tempted. You would be.” The jeweled drop of sweat had thrown her, that and the sudden loss of high school cool. Lu assumed that this lust was her own private experience, but what if it wasn’t? The reciprocity, even the possibility, unnerved her.

Sex reduced, sex plundered, sex mauled, and it massacred—just look at what people would do to do it, what it did to people who did it. Lu used a spoon to dig out some of the fruit at the bottom of the sangria pitcher, secretly eyeing Annika’s body. But the black bathing suit hid the cesarean scar and stretch marks Annika complained about so much, and the spider veins weren’t as obvious as Annie said they were. Even the few extra pounds she carried gave her an attractive kind of plushness, lush goddess curves.
I guess it wouldn’t be so bad,
thought Lu.
Would it?

Annika lifted her sunglasses and peered under them. “Will you stop staring at all my figure flaws, please?”

“What flaws?”

“You can’t fool me,” said Annika, stretching, smiling. “You know you’re checking out the damage.” She flipped on her side and pointed behind her. “Look! I have mommy butt!”

“Your butt is totally the same.” It wasn’t, but it was still a butt to envy.

“I’ll take your word for it.” Annika sank back into the lounge chair. “If you’re going to do it, you gotta do it now, honey. You’re thirty-nine.”

“So you keep reminding me.”

“Your eggs have wrinkles.”

“I earned every one of them.”

“The rates of mental retardation and autism increase as a mother gets older.”

“La la la. I can’t hear you.”

“You’ll be close to sixty when your kid goes to college.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“I’m just laying out the facts.”

“You want facts? The fact is that every time I think about having a baby, one of Ward’s kids does something odious or perplexing, and then I get all confused. This has been happening for years, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Devin is graduating now, right? In three months he’ll be off to college. So that’s at least one less deterrent to procreation.”

“True.”

“Look at you. You’re not even thinking about having a kid, you’re thinking about doing a kid.”

Lu popped a cherry into her mouth, plucking the stem from between her teeth. “He’s not that much younger.”

“Just ten or fifteen years.” She stirred her drink. “I’ve got some wrinkle cream if you want it. What’s his name, anyway?”

“Mr. Tasty Pants.”

“Uh-huh. And what about the Happy Husband?”

“Ward’s fabulous. He’s marvelous. Nothing wrong with Ward.”

“Okay, then. What’s wrong with you?”

Lu turned the corner and ran, the same route she’d been running since she’d quit smoking—for good this time.
Nothing’s wrong,
Lu told herself silently. Nothing serious, life threatening, or soul scorching, anyway. Even marrying into Ward’s tribe had proven less traumatic than it looked from the outside, mostly, sort of, at least relative to her own chaotic youth that included stints as stepdaughter, half-sister, and loony tune. But she’d beaten it, done better, at least a little. They’d muddled through the drama of the first years of blended family life and had reached some sort of stasis: The boys achieved the ability to reason, the ex was down to only periodic fits of idiocy, and Lu had gotten used to living in a one-and-a-half-bath Chicago bungalow the size of an Easy-Bake oven. One adapts, one adjusts, life settles like a handful of feathers tossed to the wind—scattered but restful. So why would she want to stir everything up again with a baby, a helpless baby, an autistic, head-banging baby born of her old and shriveled eggs? Where was the wisdom in that?

She turned up the volume on her radio, picked up the pace. She’d heard somewhere that musical choices were pretty much set in stone by the time you hit age thirty-five, but Lu was determined to stay open-minded even on this small level. The pop station blared some rock-rap hybrid whose hook was
“Shut up! Shuuuuut up!”
She remembered the first time she’d yelled at the kids—well, not the kids, but
the
kid, Britt, the mouthy one. They were in the car on the way home from another tense meal in which Ward had tried to force Devin to eat something more substantial than a few crackers, Ollie bursting into tears when Ward scolded him for offering to eat Devin’s food for him. Britt, who had the unenviable job of blowing off steam for the rest of them, cataloged a litany of random complaints on the way home, from his stupid fricking teachers to his stupid fricking mother to the stupid fricking window that was fricking broken and couldn’t they just fricking
fix
it already? And Lu felt the heat rising from her rumbling belly, in which her cheese-laden meal was already padding a fifteen-pound weight gain that would take her thirteen months to lose, and she turned around and screamed,
“Shut up!”
to Britt, who was so surprised that he actually did.

So many ways to count progress.

Anyway, after all that drama, maybe it was regular old five-year itch that filled her head with obscenities about this golden boy, that set her hands to twitching whenever she saw a plump vein rising on the surface of his forearm. The late thirties sexual peak, the perimenopause her mother insisted was right outside the door, if not actually in the house.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a hulking black Ford Explorer inching up behind her. Her stomach did a little dance of apprehension the way it had ever since she’d turned twelve and realized the world was full of people with questionable intentions. She turned her head slightly just in time to observe the purple missile propelled in her direction, just in time to jump back. The water balloon exploded at her feet, missing her by a yard.

She whipped the headphones from her ears and watched as the Explorer drove away, the boys inside it screaming with high school hilarity. Forgetting that people had questionable intentions, forgetting that she was thirty-nine years old, a woman, and alone, she screamed, “You missed, you stupid morons! You little shits
missed
me!”

The truck shrieked to a halt in the middle of the next block, and Lu’s heart leapt up and cowered in her throat. Would they get out of the car? Would they beat her up? Kidnap her for kicks? They idled there a moment, the truck’s engine rumbling like some great, dark animal loosed from the deepest caves. Then the driver stepped on the gas, and the truck disappeared in a cloud of exhaust.

“Hmmm . . . ,” said the man, inspecting some molding in the front room, trying to look as though he knew what he was doing. “Hmmm . . .”

The man wasn’t thrilled with the house, Lu could tell. And though she couldn’t really blame him—the house was a squat little wreck crouched on a stamp-size swatch of brown grass—she blamed him nonetheless, because he was making her work harder than she wanted to and because she would rather be sashaying around modest condos, Mr. Tasty Pants in tow.

The woman sucked on her own lips nervously. “Well, honey? What do you think?”

“Hmmm . . .”

Lu gave up and sat on the couch. For the life of her, she could not remember their names, kept thinking of them, insultingly, as Mr. and Mrs. Mister. What was worse was that she knew the woman, had seen her at one of Glynn’s stupid bunko parties, parties she attended only out of a wish for more company, or rather, company more like Lu herself—a few fellow anthropologists trying to blend in with someone else’s family, trying to dissect and understand its particular culture, trying to shape and influence without inciting the tribe to riot.

In this case, it had been explained to Lu in the car, the tribe had been left at home. “They don’t want to move,” the woman said. “Neither of them, though Dawn isn’t making as big a deal of it as I thought she would.”

“Are you kidding?” the man said. “Every time I come downstairs for breakfast she’s shooting daggers at me. That kid has some attitude.”
Ah, the stepfather,
Lu thought.

The woman blinked as if she had just gotten a faceful of cobweb. “She’s been better lately.”

“Come on.”

“She has! She took out the garbage this morning!”

Mr. Mister turned around to look at his wife in the backseat. “You always defend her.”

In the rearview mirror, Lu could see Mrs. Mister’s cheeks growing red and hivey. “And you always defend Sloane. She’s not perfect, you know.”

Lu turned the corner carefully, hand over hand.
Stepmother.

The man was cool. “I never said she was perfect.”

“You act like it,” the woman said, her voice cracking. “You always yell at Dawn more.”

“Give me a break,” said the man, turning to face forward again.

The woman crossed her arms and glared out the window for the rest of the trip.

Now, in the squat wreck of the house she knew they’d never buy, Lu wondered how this family could possibly function split down the middle the way it was. What were the odds of divorce in a second marriage? Sixty percent? Eighty? One thousand?