Julie and Romeo Get Lucky (9 page)

“I'm good for another ten pounds, tops,” Alex said. The way he bounced her up in his arms gave me a little shiver.

“Put her down, Alex. I don't want you hurting yourself.”

“I'm not that much of a cow yet,” Nora said.

“You are, actually,” Alex said.

“Hi, Nora,” Sandy said, trying to make an effort. “Hi, Alex.”

Alex set his wife on the bed, and she stretched out flat with her arms above her head. On her back, it was clear to see what she had been hiding. There was a significant amount of baby under that baggy shirt, a lot more than what I thought of as nearly four months' worth.

“It seems a little weird to have this right in the middle of the room,” she said.

“The guys who brought it over didn't do placement, just delivery.”

Alex left to go get the bags, while Nora gave a couple of bounces on the bed. “It's pretty comfortable. Did you try it out?”

“There wasn't time,” Sandy said.

Nora looked from me to Sandy and back to me. “So what do we do now?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Read a book, watch television. Romeo has some books on tape.” I wondered if Nora would be interested in Saint Augustine.

“I thought we could talk, spend some time together,” Nora said brightly. Alex came in and set two large suitcases down on the floor, then he left again. “What time do the kids come home?”

“Not until three-thirty,” Sandy said. “And Nora, no more lottery tickets. Sarah was crushed that somebody else won the pot.”

“There's always another pot.”

“But I'm telling you, really, no more.”

“Look, I'm in bed. If Mom doesn't sell lottery tickets in the house, I guess I'm not buying them.”

“I should get to work,” Sandy said.

“Do you have to go in today? It's my first day of bed rest. Can't we have some fun?”

“In bed?” Sandy said.

“Well, it would be awfully boring just to lie here.”

She was not quite four months pregnant. No one carried to term with triplets, but still that could be three months, even four months, of awfully boring days.

“I thought that's what bed rest was all about,” Sandy said.

Alex came back in the door carrying two more bags.

“Where are you going to put all of this?” Sandy said.

“There are still closets here, aren't there? There's the closet in my old room.”

“Sarah lives in your old room,” Sandy said. There was an edge to her voice, but she caught it and held up her watch. “Look at this. Boy, am I late.”

“You're not late,” Nora said. “You know the boss.”

“Late, late, late,” she said, and ran straight into Alex, who was coming back in with a collection of variously sized tote bags and computer cases. She apologized, waved, and was gone.

Nora looked around the room, taking it all in again from the vantage point of her newly installed bed. “I'm awfully hungry.” She smiled at me very nicely. “Could you make me a cheese sandwich?”

“I could,” I said, but for some reason the very thought of it made me nervous. I turned and started for the kitchen.

“Mom?”

I turned. I waited.

“It is hormone-free cheese, isn't it?”

“I don't think so,” I said. “I don't know why it would be.”

“I just assumed, with the children and all, that you'd be feeding them…” She stopped and looked at me again. “Why don't you get me a pad of paper and a pen, and I'll make out a shopping list. There are a lot of things I can't eat anymore. In fact, you might just want to read
What to Eat When You're Expecting
. That could be a lot quicker.”

“But I probably won't finish it before I go to the grocery.”

Alex beamed, so proud of his wife for putting the needs of their little trio first. “I need to get back to the office,” he said, and he kissed her.

I don't know why I thought he was going to say, “Let me go to the grocery store for you.” It was wrong of me to hope, but I did.

“I hate that he has all this pressure on him,” Nora said after he had gone.

“He can handle it,” I said.

She tore off the piece of paper and handed it to me. “Let me just have half a cheese sandwich for now. I'll have a little bit of bad food to tide me over until you get back. And Mom?”

“Hmm?”

“Could you take that plastic out of here? I can smell it. It's making me feel a little nauseated.”

I sniffed, but I wasn't pregnant and couldn't smell plastic. I dragged the enormous, twisted pile of clear sheeting backward with me into the kitchen, where I kicked it down the back steps, making a mental note to do something about it later. Then I made my pregnant daughter a very bad cheese sandwich. I noticed a peculiar little trembling in my hand as I spread the mustard on the bread. I was her mother, and I knew she liked mustard. I folded it over and put it on a plate and took it out to her with a napkin.

“The bed's not plugged in,” she said, fiddling with the control box that stuck up from the side on its metal arm.

“I'll get to that,” I said. “I'll need to get an extension cord.”

She looked at the sandwich and then she looked at me. “Pellegrino?”

And suddenly the trembling was stronger. My left hand started flopping like a fish against my hip, and I quickly stuck it in my pocket. “I'm out,” I said hoarsely. “Do you want a glass of water?”

Nora narrowed her eyes at me, or at least I thought she narrowed her eyes: Maybe I was wrong. “Tap?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Okay.”

“But you'll put Pellegrino on the list, and some Evian, too. And limes. I'll need some limes, but make sure they're organic.”

I nodded as I was backing away from her. She was asking a question about the remote for the TV, but I was already running up the stairs to tell Romeo I was leaving. I could feel my heart going a million miles a minute in my chest. I stumbled into the room, panting like a coyote in August.

“Did you run up the stairs?” he said, looking concerned.

I nodded too vigorously. “It's good exercise. Nora's here. I'm going to go and get her some things she needs at the store. Do you want anything at the store?” I tried to quell the caged-animal quality in my tone.

He thought for a minute, then he nodded at the ceiling. “I'd like some of those little prethreaded floss picks. I don't know what they're called. I think they have them at CVS. Would you mind?”

“Not a problem,” I said. All the air was going out of the room.

“Hey, Julie,” Romeo said.

I turned around and gave him a bright smile.

“Slow down a little. You don't need to kill yourself.”

I hadn't even thought about it until he mentioned it.

My left hand was still shaking badly, so I drove with my right. I kept telling myself to stay calm, drive slowly, don't make any mistakes, but everything in me wanted to smash down on the accelerator and jump over the curbs, plow through flower beds and trash cans. I was Popeye Doyle and this was
The French Connection.
I had to get out of there. It had only been twenty minutes, and no one had been unpleasant, and I had to get out of there.

I could tell my luck was changing. I hit three green lights in a row, then turned down the alley that took me to the back entrance of Roseman's. I got out of the car and slipped in the back door, praying that no one would see me. I could hear Sandy in the front of the store, talking to a customer, and I slipped right up to the huge metal door and opened it without a sound. I went into the cooler and sealed myself in.

Oh, how I love you, cement floors of my youth! How I love you, white plastic buckets. How I love you, endless rolls of cheap roses from Argentina in every conceivable color and tiny pink carnations that really do smell better than anything and huge, dramatic mums and cheerful flat-faced Gerber daisies hanging in cardboard racks—I love you all, even the indestructible leather leaf fern, and the trembling mists of baby's breath gathered in the corner. I love you, cold air and the sweet smell of living things, and oh, oh, how I love you, cooler, in all your perfectly boxed silence and solitude. All I had needed was the chance to be alone in the place that I knew better than anyplace else in the world.

All of the trembling went up from my hand and through my chest and into my throat, where it released itself in great, gulping sobs. I sat down on an overturned bucket and cried me a river, not even bothering to cover my face with my hands. I knew from experience that a person could make a lot of noise in a cooler and never be heard. I don't know how long I would have gone on, if I hadn't finally felt the light pressure on my knee, a small, warm hand pressing against my leg, then the quiet repetition of my name.

“Julie? Julie?”

I closed my mouth and opened my eyes. Through a blur of tears, I made out the outline of a beautiful girl. It was Audrey Hepburn kneeling right in front of me.

“Hey, honey,” she said when I looked at her.

“Hey, Plummy,” I said, and hiccupped. “Welcome home.”

P
LUMMY HAD ON A PAIR OF BLUE JEANS WITH THE
hem turned up to her knee and an ancient corduroy shirt that I wear sometimes when I'm working in the back. It had been Mort's shirt, and he loved it, but after he ran off with Lila he never had the nerve to come by the shop and take it back. I thought of that shirt as my divorce settlement. Plummy's hair was long and heavy and dark, and she had twisted it up and run the twist through with several of those green sticks we used to hold message cards in bouquets. So how did she manage to look like she had just stepped off the runway at Prada?

“Can I get you anything?” she said kindly over my weeping. “A glass of water? A cup of coffee?”

I shook my head, sending tears in every direction. “I'm sorry.”

Plummy reached into her back pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, clean and pressed and embroidered with tiny purple lilacs at each corner. It was completely a gesture from the movies. I couldn't bear the thought of blowing my nose on it.

“Go ahead,” she said.

“I never,” I said, fighting back a sob. “It's just—”

She smiled at me, and in that smile it was easy to see that for all her success and sophistication she was still a young girl, a very sweet young girl. I tried to focus on the sweetness as a way of calming myself down.

“I cry in the cooler all the time,” she said. “As far as I'm concerned that's why they installed them in flower shops in the first place. When I was growing up I always went into the cooler to cry, unless I was going into the cooler to make out with some guy. They're good for that, too. When you've got five brothers and an overprotective father, you learn how to take your privacy where you can.”

“I can see that.”

“Wait right here.” She got up and pulled open the heavy metal door while I took a few deep breaths and tried to reassemble the woman I used to be. I was too tired and too upset even to think about being embarrassed. I'd been caught doing more serious things than crying in a cooler.

Plummy came back holding a tall glass in one hand. “Drink this anyway. You lose all that fluid when you cry.”

I sipped the water, and somehow it made me feel calmer. Maybe it was just the fact that someone had brought it to me, instead of me bringing it to someone.

“So I have to ask you, but you don't have to tell me, does this have to do with my father?”

“Oh no,” I said, but then I remembered the floss picks. “Well, not in the way you would think. He's getting better, and I love having him around.” I looked at her big dark eyes and was struck by how much they reminded me of Romeo's.

“But it's got to be hard.”

“It was maybe a little easier when he could stand up.”

“And Sandy told me about Nora and the triplets.”

I smiled and took another sip. “So you're completely up to date. I don't have to tell you anything at all.”

“Triplets.” Plummy shook her pretty head. “I still don't think I'm up to taking care of a cat.”

“Good,” I said. “You stick with that feeling.”

The door opened up a little bit, and Sandy said, “Plummy, are you talking to somebody?” then she said, “Mom?”

“I was crying in the cooler,” I said.

Sandy sighed. “I've already cried all over Plummy this morning. At least I got her while she was still fresh.”

Plummy laughed and pulled another handkerchief out of another pocket to dab her own eyes. I guess she bought them in bulk. “I'm like a duck. It all rolls right off me.”

I wiped my face again and finished the water. “I think I really just want to come back to work. I miss this place. Sandy, maybe you should stay home for awhile and run the house and I'll come in.”

“In your dreams,” Sandy said.

“It's a beautiful store,” Plummy said. “Not to be disloyal, but I think it has much better light than Dad's store.”

“That's very sweet of you,” I said.

Sandy leaned against the door. She seemed like a different person now that she was out of the house. “I just got a call from the school, and they told me that Sarah threw up and wants to come home.”

“Too much Halloween candy?”

“It could be, or maybe she worked herself up into a state over this lottery business. Who knows, she might even have the flu, but I need to go get her.”

I stood up from my bucket, which was very low, and that, combined with the cold, had left me stiff. “I'll go get her. If she feels like it, I'll take her to the grocery store with me, and we can buy pesticide-free, antibiotic-free, hormone-free saltines for Nora.”

“I liked her better when she was just worrying about calories,” Sandy said. “Are you sure you don't mind getting Sarah?”

“It will give me a chance to stall for a little while: Besides, I want to spend some time with her. I know she's pretty depressed.”

“What's Sarah depressed about?” Plummy asked.

“She didn't win 234 million dollars in the lottery,” Sandy said.

Plummy nodded gravely. “I didn't either. I was really down about that, too.”

“If I ever see another Mega Millions ticket in our house, you mark my words, there will be hell to pay,” Sandy said.

The three of us left the cooler rubbing our arms and stamping our feet. I was all ready to go, but when I was walking past the work bench, I saw the most amazing thing: a bunch of flowers nestled in a low box, ready to go out for delivery. Now, I see flowers all the time, I see them with a professional eye, and nothing knocks the breath out of me anymore—but this did. This was a swirl, a storm of yellow butterflies suspended over a mossy field, tiny yellow orchids on stripped stems, each suspended at a slightly different height, and yet all of them moving together. It was so elegant, so whimsical, so true, that I expected the whole thing to lift up and fly out of the store. I held up my hand to touch and then, instead, I leaned forward and blew.

Plummy clapped her hands. “That's exactly right!” she said. “It should inspire you to move the air around it.”

“She's a genius,” Sandy said, speaking of Plummy. “I didn't even know there was such a thing as a genius florist until she showed up for work this morning.”

Plummy blushed and shook her head. “My dad's pretty good, but he didn't have a lot of room for self-expression. His parents were both squashers.”

“My parents weren't squashers, and I never came up with anything close to that,” Sandy said. I leaned past her and blew again ever so lightly on the yellow blossoms and made them shiver.

I don't know what exactly had made me feel better—the cry or the talk or the sight of those yellow butterflies. Maybe it was everything. “Good-bye, beautiful girls,” I said, and kissed them both. “Thank you.”

I left the store feeling thirty pounds and thirty years lighter. I had gone to the very bottom of my sadness and was filled up again with beauty and goodwill. It was a much-needed exchange.

The principal of the grade school herself led me back to the nurse's office, where Sarah lay stretched out on a cot with a wet rag over her eyes. I had come to claim my own sickly children from this very office in the past and very likely from this same cot. Always, the sight of them lying there pale and supine broke my heart. That was back in the days when there was a genuine nurse sitting at the desk and not just the office secretary. She glanced up at me from her paperwork and smiled. “I'm Mrs. Oates,” she said. “Someone's sick.” That was the full extent of her diagnostic capabilities.

“Hello, Button,” I said to Sarah.

Sarah lifted one edge of the washrag to look at me. Then she bent her fingers up and down in a weak attempt at a wave.

“Feeling crummy?”

Her head moved against its little paper-covered pillow in half a nod.

The faux nurse checked the paperwork to see that I was in fact registered to claim my granddaughter and not just someone who trolled nurses' offices looking to collect sick children. I signed a release form and peeled Sarah off the tiny bed.

She was wilted. Everything about her seemed damp and limp as a jonquil beaten flat by a violent rain. I held her hand as she wobbled down the hallway and out the door without so much as a word; but as soon as we stepped outside, and that bright November wind smacked her in the face, she seemed to perk up immeasurably. She took a long, deep breath and then got into the car.

I noticed the sudden resurgence of color in her cheeks. “How are you now?” I asked.

She sniffed and touched her fingers to her forehead. “If I say I feel better, do I have to go back?”

“No.”

“I think I feel better.”

I leaned over and kissed the part of her hair. “Good.”

“Do you ever just feel like you need to get out of a place?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. Was something going on at school?”

She leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. “The other kids were teasing me about not winning the lottery.”

“Why? I'm assuming they didn't win, either.”

“They never said they were going to win.”

“I see.” I backed out of the parking lot, crunching through the last of the fall leaves. “Do you feel well enough to go to the grocery store with me, or do I need to take you home?”

“Will you buy me a lottery ticket?”

I put the car in park and turned around to get a good look at her. “Listen, Sarah, this has got to end. Your mother says so, I say so. It isn't good for you. Eight-year-olds aren't supposed to gamble. We never should have started letting you play in the first place. Life doesn't work like a movie. You're not Charlie, and there is no golden ticket. It's a wonderful thing to imagine, but it's also a wonderful thing to live in the real world, okay? We all want you to live in the real world with us.”

Sarah looked down at her lap. She gave the shoulder strap on her seat belt a couple of distracted tugs. “I'm supposed to win,” she said quietly.

I folded my hands over the top of the steering wheel and tried to think of a way to explain this that wouldn't crush every ounce of joy out of life. “No, you're not, darling, no more or less than anybody else. When those numbers come up they don't come up for you or against you, they just come up.”

“We could do a lot with that money,” she said.

“You're absolutely right, and so could everybody else, too. You don't want to spend your life with your head in the clouds, wanting things you don't have. We've got a very nice life just the way we are.”

“I think I'm feeling sick again.”

I patted her knee. I felt for the kid, I really did. It was neither greed nor entitlement that she suffered from. She had simply believed in the fairy tale, just like any other kid who thought that little pigs built their houses in defense of huffing wolves. “Okay, I'll take you home.”

She shook her head. “No, let's go to the grocery store. I'm just tired, is all. I'm not going to throw up or anything.”

Even in the health food grocery store, there were still plenty of cookies and ginger ale and Gummy bears and magazines to be had, all the sorts of things that grandmothers were perfectly willing to buy sick granddaughters who had recently lost their betting privileges. And Sarah wasn't pushing her luck. All she asked for was a demure box of whole-wheat animal crackers.

We had a long list, and neither of us was in such a hurry to get home again, so we coasted slowly through the wide aisles of Bread & Circus, where I thought I'd have better luck finding the eggs of chickens who had taken free range of the south of France. When we rounded the corner to contemplate a collection of organic soups, my cart was rammed head-on by my friend Gloria.

“You never shop here!” she said.

“It's too expensive,” I said. “These eggs are five dollars a dozen.” I picked up the eggs and peered inside the carton to make sure that none of them had been broken on impact.

“And aren't you supposed to be in school?” Gloria said to Sarah. “They still have school, don't they?”