Love Love (14 page)

Micah Braun. What if Kevin hadn't called that ball out? He was certain he would've lost the match. The two following turned out to be cupcakes, straight set wins for him. He flew to Florida and reached the semifinals, the beginning of his professional tennis career.

Kevin left the court and walked up to the club's lounge, where the big-screen TV was showing a classic tennis match, Björn Borg against Jimmy Connors in their tiny white '70s shorts on the green grass of Wimbledon. There was no one on the guest Internet-connected computer in the corner, so he sat down to search the fate of his old opponent. A few clicks later, he found a photo of a man in a business suit accepting a golden plaque for some innovation in project management. Kevin imagined his own face up there, the red necktie tight around his neck, a fake smile for the photographer. If Kevin had called the ball in, would they have changed places, changed lives?

For all he knew, this wasn't even Micah, just some guy who shared his name. Feeling as if he'd wasted not only the last fifteen minutes but also the entirety of his life, Kevin closed the browser, pushed off the desk, and headed for the pro shop to gather his things.

11

J
udy was crouched down, deciding between spending the extra twenty cents on a can of Goya black beans versus its Wegmans counterpart, when she saw her. But was it actually Alice?

A can in each hand, Judy jumped up to her feet too quickly and rammed her head against the red coupon holder jutting out from the shelf above. She was about to whack the stupid thing but then saw that the coupon it had just spit out was for any Goya canned product. Maybe this was her lucky day. She snatched the coupon, and with a whirl and blink of its red LED light, a brand-new one eerily slid into place.

Judy still had another dozen things to get from her shopping list, for a Tex-Mex fish taco and steak dinner she planned to make for her and Roger tomorrow night, but that could wait. She rolled her cart slowly out of the ethnic foods aisle, passing by the yellow jars of Old El Paso salsa and blue cans of La Choy lo mein, navigating past the throng of postwork shoppers.

Alice wasn't by the juices and milks, and though there was a lithe blond woman considering a wedge of Swiss cheese in the dairy section, she had two kids with her and didn't stand like Alice. Her ex-sister-in-law had the posture of a dancer, straight-backed and graceful, that made her easy to pick out. Judy had always liked her, quite a bit, in fact, and initially, when Kevin had told her that they were splitting up, Judy felt as distressed about her brother's loss of a wife as her own loss of a friend.

But were they friends? They had gone out clothes shopping on occasion, but most of the time, Judy had seen her with Kevin at family functions. Alice hadn't reached out to her since the divorce, and vice-versa for Judy, so maybe they had been more like family and less like friends, and for that reason, there was no reason to see each other.

Judy was about to turn her cart around when she caught a glimmer of gliding Alice, floating into and out of her vision at the end of the aisle. It was her. She remembered Kevin mentioning Alice had moved to Holmdel, which was about ten miles away from here. Judy abandoned her cart and sped after her, not wanting to lose her again, and she almost ran into her. Alice was inches away, reaching for the back of the milk shelf. Judy passed her and found what she was looking for, the spinning tree of bread loaves for cover.

The first thing Judy noticed was Alice's glossy black belt, how it wouldn't circumnavigate half of the female thighs in this supermarket, let alone their midsections. Alice had found her milk, and now she was onto orange juice, and as she leaned over and reached down, a perfect circle of her butt pressed against her black skirt, and her calves were toned and shaped like those out of a pantyhose catalog. Four men walked by her, and it was almost funny how their heads all swiveled like robots.

She should hate Alice, and maybe if she hadn't known her, she would. But last Christmas, the first one without her mother or her husband, when Judy saw her father and Soo saunter into Kevin's house, it was Alice who had saved the evening. She maneuvered Judy past Bill and the surprised faces of a bunch of Kevin's other friends and brought her to the deck, to the December evening air, so Judy could vent.

“I saw it, too,” Alice said.

Soo, beaming with an irrepressible supply of yuletide joy, had been wearing a brooch on her sweater, a brooch that Judy had given her mother the year she died. It was a Christmas wreath made with tiny emeralds, accented with a ruby-encrusted red bow, which Judy had bought with money she didn't have. It would take her half a year to pay off the credit card debt from that present, but she knew it was the last gift she would be able to give her mother, and she'd wanted to make it count. Except it was now pinned on her stepmother's chest, glittering green like some gaudy lucky charm.

“That fucker,” Judy seethed, “you know what he did? I bet you a thousand dollars he gave it to Soo as a present, a fucking regifter!”

Alice was freezing out here, hugging herself tight. Judy knew this was not what she'd wanted to do, stand listening to an angry tirade from her sister-in-law, but Alice pulled up two lawn chairs and gestured for her to sit.

“It's Christmas Day,” Alice said. She cupped her hands and blew into them, the white steam of air escaping between her fingers. “The last thing your mother would've wanted would be for there to be a fight, right?”

Alice was correct, but this was not what Judy wanted to hear right now. She needed someone who'd agree with her and not make her feel small by lecturing on the obvious, which was what she wished to tell Alice, but she knew she couldn't. For almost twenty years she'd known her brother's wife, knew her almost as long as he'd known her himself, and yet she had no idea who she really was. There was personal information, of course, that Judy had come to know through overheard conversations and related anecdotes. That she was born in Boston, raised in Buffalo, went to college in upstate New York, and met Kevin at a doctor's office. That she liked ballroom dancing and ate kimchi more than her Korean husband. And yet none of these little factoids of her life and personality added up to anything, because this woman sitting out here with her, braving bitter pockets of winter wind, was still just a familiar stranger.

“Alice,” Judy said, choosing to stand instead of sit. She grabbed the hollow metal of the patio chair, so cold that it numbed her hands, “who are you?”

Alice coughed up a nervous chortle of laughter. “That's an interesting question.”

Somewhere in the distance, an animal howled. Kevin's house was in the middle of nowhere in Warren County, so a coyote wasn't out of the question.

“Never mind,” Judy said. “I don't know what I'm saying.”

Judy turned away and headed for the door, but Alice's voice stopped her.

“Happier,” she said. “That's who I used to be.”

For the next hour, they huddled together and talked. At some point Kevin came out, wanting to know why they were turning into icicles out here, and they both shooed him back into the house. In those sixty-odd minutes, Judy learned more about Alice than she had in all the years she'd known her. The reason why Alice looked like a dancer was because she used to be one; she'd been a theater major in college, and for a while, she had the dream of becoming a professional, but it didn't take her long to see that there were people who were just naturals, who'd always be so much better than she could
ever hope to be. Still, an instructor had taken an interest in her and had told Alice she would work with her privately, but Alice refused.

“If I need someone's help, it's not worth doing.”

Alice had spoken with such finality and determination that it verged on fury.

Judy had recalled that Christmas many times whenever she thought of Alice, because it was the first and only time they'd connected as real people, but now Judy saw it for what it had been. Alice hadn't shared a part of herself to get closer to Judy; rather, it was because she'd felt sorry for her and wanted to cheer her up. And maybe it went even further than that. Because a couple of months afterward, she and Kevin split up, which meant Alice had probably known it would be the last time she'd have to see Judy. The conversation had been a going-away present.

Judy sat down on an empty pallet next to the cartons of eggs. Leaning against the tower of squeaky Styrofoam containers, puffs of refrigerated air soothing her back, she knew her thoughts were silly fabrications in her head. What was real was that she missed seeing Alice on New Year's and Easter and Mother's Day, on their birthdays and the barbeque on the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving and Christmas. They'd pass the time talking about some vapid TV show or the latest popcorn flick, never talking about anything of consequence, but when you stacked up these incidental layers of small talk, they added up to a level of comfort impossible to duplicate in any other relationship. For all those previous years, she'd taken Alice's presence for granted, never knowing how easily she could disappear from her life. If Judy had known their ties were so tenuous, she would've tried harder—or maybe not. It was always easy to believe in hindsight.

Judy got up and dusted herself off, and when she scanned the dairy section, where Alice had been picking between tiny tubs of foil-topped yogurt, she was gone. Had Kevin also felt this way when Brian ceased to exist at the Lee family gatherings? Did he miss her ex-husband as much as Judy missed Alice? Her brother often played the role of a dumb jock, claiming he led an unexamined life and was quite happy to do so, but in reality, she knew he actually spent time thinking about these things, and probably more now than ever with his recent discoveries about his origins. She felt guilty that she hadn't called him since Friday. This was an extraordinary time for him; she needed to be a supportive sister.

Judy grabbed her cart and started to back away when a hand on her shoulder halted her.

“What the hell, Judy? What is this, some sort of a tag team?”

Judy didn't know what to say. Standing in front of her was Alice, who was not only beautiful from her butt down but also from the neck up. She had a face incapable of expressing displeasure, all watery blue eyes and chubby pink cheeks. That was always the funny thing about her, those squeezable, rosy cheeks of hers, in stark contrast to her slim body.

“Did you say
tag team
?” Judy asked.

Alice said nothing, just looked at her with what Judy supposed was her serious, penetrating glare: angled eyebrows, locked jaw, arms at her side. She waited until her eyes returned to their familiar fluidity, and when they did, Judy stepped forward and hugged her hard.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Judy said, “but I've missed you.”

She hardly hugged back, but that's what Judy expected. Alice had never been a touchy-feely woman, and there was no reason to think she would've changed. But at least she was smiling when they broke their embrace.

“It's good to see you, too, Judy,” she said. “Don't mind me. I had a strange day.”

It felt comfortable to walk around the store with her, as if they shopped together every week. At the bakery, after sampling a toothpicked cube of cheesecake, Alice told her about her encounter with Kevin in the morning.

“Okay, so that's what you meant by
tag team
,” Judy said.

Alice nodded. “I actually saw you when you were standing by the shoe polish, but when you kept following me . . .”

“I was following you, wasn't I? Like a spy.”

They laughed, and as they continued to push their carts through the brightly lit aisles of the supermarket, Judy resisted from asking Alice about their divorce. She'd heard the breakup only from Kevin's point of view, that they argued all the time, that they grew apart, that they'd reached a point in their relationship where separation seemed more natural than being together. But there had to be some other reason, didn't there? Two people who loved each other didn't just drift away from one another. Gusts of severance blew from many different directions, but there was always a source of the wind. For Brian,
it had been Judy's sadness and anger, but who the hell did he think he married in the first place? What had given him the right to love her in the beginning and tire of her at the end, when she'd always been the same person?

“Judy?”

“Sorry,” she said. This was becoming a bad habit of hers, zoning out. “I was just thinking about Brian.”

“Oh.” They'd somehow veered back to the bread section. Alice picked up a twin pack of English muffins and Judy got a loaf of cinnamon raisin bread.

She wished Alice would ask her about what happened between her and Brian so they could share in their mutual failures and maybe even learn something, but her ex-sister-in-law said nothing.

“Well, I guess I'm done shopping,” Alice said.

Judy considered following Alice to the checkout lanes, but what was the point? Whatever this had been, whatever they had between them, it was over.

“I've got a few more things on my list,” Judy said.

“Then I guess this is good-bye.”

There were no hugs this time, just two friendly waves an arm's length away.