Love, Accidentally (2 page)

“Maybe he was worried he’d change his mind,” Corrine offered.

“Maybe,” Ilsa said. She looked at her sister. “He isn’t anything like Jones, you know. I mean, yeah, he’s not working right now. But it’s only temporary.”

“Hey, I didn’t say anything,” Corrine said mildly. She tilted back her head and closed her eyes against the sun. Ilsa wondered if Corrine was remembering the night, almost a year earlier, when Ilsa had knocked on her door, mascara-streaked tears streaming down her cheeks. Jones had been her last serious boyfriend, an actor/bartender/bass player in a local band, a guy who couldn’t commit to anything: not to a steady job, not to regular credit card payments, and certainly not to the girl who’d sat on a stool in the background during his gigs. Ilsa’s pain didn’t stem from the fact that Jones had broken up with her, because in the back of her mind she’d known it wouldn’t last . . . it was the way he did it. As if she—
they
—had never meant much to him at all.

Ilsa had always been there to comfort Jones when his band didn’t get hired for a gig, or when a casting director deemed him too old for a commercial or bit part in a movie (she’d noticed an uptick in his hair-related purchases after those rejections, particularly products that promised to camouflage a receding hairline). She’d pretended to like the fact that he’d swapped his first name for his last, even though she knew it was just a way for him to grab a shred of attention in a town where everyone seemed to be vying for the same too-small share. But when Jones came to her apartment to pick up his stuff and she began to cry, he didn’t hug her or even spout the tired cliché about hoping they’d stay friends. He just shoved a few things into his bag and left. As if he’d stored up all the kindness and care she’d given him and was greedily carting it away, too, unwilling to return any of it to her.

Now she couldn’t believe she’d been so upset over losing Jones. She couldn’t believe she’d stayed with him for a full year, either, even if he did have six-pack abs, a deliciously strong jawline, and nimble fingers that turned bass notes into an almost religious experience (what those fingers did to her probably extended their relationship by a good six months after it should have been over). Already her memory of him was receding faster than his hairline.

“Grif is a really decent guy,” Ilsa said. She pressed her glass against her neck, relishing the cold on her warm skin. “I told you why he was fostering this little dog, right? His neighbor volunteers for a shelter, and she told him it was going to be put down if no one took it, then she showed him a picture. . . . And the way he talked about his family. He’s really close to his parents; I could tell.”

“Does he know what he wants to do?” Corrine asked. “Jobwise?”

“He wants to teach high school,” Ilsa said. “He loves history. He’s saved up some money and he’s going back to school to get his master’s.”

“That sounds great,” Corrine said. “
He
sounds great. Really.”

Ilsa released the breath she didn’t realize she was holding. She rolled over onto her side to face Corrine. “When you first saw Bruce,” she said, “the very first second. Did you . . . feel anything? Or did it come later, when you knew he was the one?”

“I didn’t think about him that way,” Corrine said. “He was married.”

“Wasn’t he newly separated?” Ilsa corrected.

“Yeah, but I didn’t know that at the time,” Corrine said. “He was still wearing a ring. And I could hardly miss it, since it was about four inches away from my eyes while he was giving me a filling.”

“So romantic,” Ilsa teased.

“Muzak in the background, a spit cup to my left . . . what more could a girl ask for?” Corrine said, laughing. “Do you want any more iced tea?”

“No, I’m good,” Ilsa said.

“How about staying for dinner? I marinated some salmon earlier. I was going to toss it on the grill with fresh corn and pineapple.”

“Somehow that sounds so much nicer than the In-N-Out burger I was going to pick up on the way home and eat in the car,” Ilsa said. “So where is Bruce, by the way?”

Corrine sat up, squinted at her watch, and frowned. “Good question. He went for a run but he should’ve been back by now. Maybe he stopped to get something to drink.”

“I haven’t seen him in what . . . three weeks?” Ilsa mentally counted. “Remember? Last time I came over he was in Seattle, and the time before that he was working late.” Ilsa adored Bruce; he was the perfect counterpart for her sister. He was easygoing, whereas Corrine could be a worrier, and his spontaneity offset her propensity to overplan. Corrine had homebody tendencies, but since they’d gotten married a year and a half ago, she’d seen him challenge her sister to do things she wouldn’t ordinarily: run a half marathon together, take up golf, and hike their way through Yellowstone National Park.

Corrine finished off her iced tea and stood up. “He’ll be back any second. Why don’t we open a bottle of wine and fire up the grill?”

Later Ilsa would think back to that night, and what would stand out wouldn’t be the fact that Bruce hadn’t come home for another hour, by which time Corrine was peering out the window and twisting her new wedding band around and around on her finger, or even that her sister drank three glasses of Pinot Grigio but hardly touched her salmon at dinner.

What would hit Ilsa with a quick, strong rush that felt like a sucker punch was this realization: Corrine never answered her question about when she knew Bruce was the right guy.

ILSA AND GRIF
weren’t in bed when it happened, thank goodness. That would’ve been difficult to forgive. Instead they were in the kitchen of his Manhattan Beach apartment, making dinner for a quiet night in. By now they’d been dating for six weeks, even though it seemed like much longer—maybe because they’d been together almost constantly. During late nights at bars and cafés and languorous weekend mornings, they’d unspooled each other’s histories. Ilsa now knew Grif was afraid of snakes, even harmless little ones—kind of funny, when you considered the fact that he’d once chased after two guys who were trying to break into his car—and that he regretted fighting so much with his brother Jake while growing up. She’d told him about the case of chicken pox that gave her the ugliest third-grade school photo imaginable, and he’d gone with her to meet Corrine and Bruce for drinks. They’d strolled in the park with Fabio, whose leg had healed beautifully, and she’d told him about the dogfight she’d broken up that had created the scars on the back of her right hand. She knew how Grif looked right before he fell asleep at night, and what it felt like to wake up with his warm body fitting around her.

She was mixing olive oil and red wine vinegar for salad dressing while he opened the oven door and checked on the roasting chicken. The small kitchen was bright and filled with good smells, and Ilsa was just savoring her first sip of Riesling when it happened.

“Can you hand me those tongs, Elise?” he asked.

She froze.

“What?” he said, glancing back at her.

She set her wineglass down on the counter. “You called me Elise,” she said.

“I did?”

She nodded.

“Sorry,” he said. She handed him the tongs, and he flipped over the chicken, then shut the oven door. “It’s kind of weird,” he said. “They sound alike. Elise. Ilsa.”

“She was the woman you dated before me?” Ilsa asked, and he nodded.

“You said you guys were together for a long time,” she said. She took a colander of lettuce to the sink and started rinsing it. “How long, exactly?”

She hadn’t asked about Elise before, though she’d been curious. Grif had mentioned his ex, casually, on their very first date while they sat on the beach and talked. She knew their history was tangled and their breakup recent—recent enough that a shadow had passed over his face when he’d mentioned it. But that was all she knew.

“On and off since we were fifteen,” he said. “Mostly on.”

She blinked hard. “So . . . almost
fifteen
years?”

“Yeah, I guess,” he said. “We’ve known each other forever. Since kindergarten.”

“Is she . . . does she live nearby?”

He shook his head. “She moved to San Francisco when we broke up.”

She took a deep breath. “Oh,” she said.

She found herself suddenly wondering what Elise looked like. And why had Grif ended things with her? They’d been together for half of his life, she realized as her hands mechanically tore the lettuce into a wooden bowl. Ilsa thought back to the family photos scattered on a table in Grif’s living room. She’d smiled at the picture of him graduating from high school, and teased him about how long his hair was at his brother Jake’s commitment ceremony with his partner. Now she realized with a jolt that Elise was probably there, just outside the edges of the pictures, witnessing those events as they occurred.

“We’re still friendly,” Grif said. “I mean, we don’t talk a lot. But we e-mail sometimes. I told her I met someone.”

“Yeah?” Ilsa asked, her voice sounding small.

“Yeah.” He moved closer, took her in his arms.

“Okay?” he asked, and she knew the single word encapsulated multiple questions: if she was okay knowing what a big role Elise had played in his history, okay with him not mentioning it before, okay with Grif calling her by the name of a woman he used to love.

She tilted up her chin to look at him. It was over between him and Elise, she reminded herself. She was the one Grif had chosen.

“Okay,” she whispered.

THE HOLIDAYS SNUCK
up on them. Ilsa and Grif were in his Lexus hybrid, driving to Sonoma County for a weekend of bike riding and wine tasting, when “Jingle Bells” began playing over the radio.

“I can’t believe Christmas is next month,” she said. Grif’s hand was warm on her bare knee, and she’d deliberately left her BlackBerry in her apartment. “Are you going home to see your family?”

“Actually,” he said, “I was thinking of coming home with you to meet yours.”

He glanced over when she didn’t respond right away. “Too soon?”

“No!” The word burst out of her. “I just . . . really like that idea.”

“Cool,” he said. “I want to see where you grew up. Plus I kind of miss snow. Maybe we can get in a little cross-country skiing?”

She and Grif now spent five or six nights a week together, and they’d officially adopted and shared custody of Fabio, but this, more than anything, revealed how serious their relationship had grown. She’d never brought Jones home—she couldn’t imagine his oversize personality fitting into her family’s cozy little ranch-style house. There hadn’t been anyone before him, either, whom she’d felt strongly enough about to introduce to her parents. Grif was the first guy they would meet since her high school boyfriends.

She put her hand on top of his, feeling her heart soar as they sped down the highway. “Corrine and Bruce are coming, too. We’ll have a full house. It’ll be great.”

But the day before their scheduled flight, Corrine phoned. Her voice sounded thick and uneven, and for a minute, Ilsa had the wild thought that her sister was drunk at eleven o’clock in the morning.

“We’re not going to make it home this year after all,” Corrine said. “There’s just . . . a lot of stuff going on.”

“Corr?” Ilsa felt something cold stabbing her gut. Fear, she realized. “What’s wrong?”