Melissa Senate (10 page)

I told her about the article, about how she was my challenge to question fifteen.

She laughed. “I’m not the challenge, Ruby. The
truth
is. I’m just the one bringing it up, making you really think about what you’re doing, what you want.”

“I wouldn’t have said yes if I didn’t want to marry Tom,” I pointed out. Miss Defensive.

“Yes, you would have,” she said. “People say yes to things all the time for the wrong reasons, or for the right reasons for the wrong situation.”

“So I shouldn’t marry a man I love, a man I’ve been with for over two years, a man who has stood by me through thick and thin, but you should go off into the sunset with a total stranger?”

“He’s not a stranger,” she answered in a singsongy voice. “He’s the father of your niece or nephew.”

I held her gaze in the mirror. “I hope things work out with him. I hope he’s open to you, to the baby, to working out your problems—”

“If we have any,” she interrupted. “Maybe it’ll be true love. Maybe he’ll be thrilled about the baby.”

“Are you?” I asked. It was the question she’d refused to answer so far.

She took a deep breath. “I was scared at first, but now I
am
thrilled. Maybe he will be, too. I think if two people want the relationship bad enough, if you really, really love each other, then you make it work.” She stared at herself, then used her index finger to rub off some of her eyeshadow. “So what are some of the questions from the article?”

“Everything from how you’re going to handle money to whether you can stand each other’s families.”

“Those are big deals?” she said. “They sound pretty minor to me.”

“Fights and resentment over seemingly small things can lead to divorce.”

“So can big tits,” Stella pointed out. “Our father left for a hot young body and his freedom, not because of all that other stuff.”

“But agreeing on fundamentals must make things easier,” I said. “Like if Tom wants four kids and I want one, we should decide before we get married so that when we’re ready to have kids, there are no surprises.”

“But either of you could change your mind at any point,” she said. “Let’s say Tom told you he wanted the mother of his children to stay at home and not work. You would probably tell him to quit
his
job. But when you actually had a kid, you might
want
to be a stay-at-home mom. How can you really decide anything before you’re
there?
”

She had a point, but…I had no idea what the
but
was exactly. I just knew it was important to work things out, to be clear about how you felt, where you stood on important issues.

Right now, I needed to be figuring out where I stood on Nick McDermott, but if I were honest, I was…afraid to. Afraid to wonder. I glanced at my ring, and as usual, its sturdy sparkle gave me comfort.

The desk clerk recommended a bar and grill two blocks up called Spock Block that had good salads (according to his girlfriend), bad burgers (too gristly, according to his mother and aunt) and decent fish and chips (per him), which was what I was in the mood for. Stella had a craving for even bad French onion soup, and he assured us that they had that.

I was expecting the inside of the restaurant to be like inside the USS Enterprise, but aside from all the waitstaff wearing their pointy Vulcan Spock ears, it was just your average bar and grill.

The moment the hostess led us from the tiny waiting area into the main dining room, the restaurant got very quiet. As in a real hush fell over the crowd.

“Do you think they all saw the
Where Are They Now?
show?” she whispered, suddenly glowing and smoothing her hair.

“I think
that’s
what has their attention,” I said, gesturing in the direction of the guy on one knee in front of a girl’s chair.

There were murmurs of “aww” and “how sweet!” but the couple looked frighteningly young. They couldn’t be older than sixteen. Seventeen tops. They were both skinny, the same height, around five-nine, and had the same platinum-colored hair. His was short with a poof in the front. Hers was long and wildly curly, a little orange flower tucked in front of her ear. They both wore skinny black pants and black shirts—his a T-shirt, hers a tight tank top with the number 8 in white on her chest.

The guy placed his hand over his heart, a ring nowhere in sight. “Vanessa, I love you like the sky loves the bird. Will you marry me?”

“Omigod, yes, Vincent!” she shrieked and flew into his arms, knocking him to the floor, where they kissed like mad. “Yes, yes, yes!” she said between breathy moans.

Their audience clapped and cheered and whistled.

“I wish I had a ring,” he said between his own breathy moans.

She glanced at her hands, pulled off a silver ring from her right thumb and handed it to him.

“With this ring, I thee engage,” he said and slid it down her finger, then they started making out again.

The waiters and a few other patrons kept clapping, so Stella and I did, too. I wondered if this was all some kind of
Star Trek
reenactment, but the couple didn’t look like space creatures and weren’t wearing Spock ears. Still, they were teenagers!

“Congratulations!” Stella said to them as they sat back down. “Ruby, my sister,” she added, gesturing at me across the table, “just got engaged two weeks ago.”

“Congrats to you, too,” Vanessa said. “Your ring is so gorgeous.” She glanced at her new fiancé. “Not that I don’t love mine,” she said quickly. “I don’t need a ring to symbolize our commitment.” Which led to the kissing of each other’s hands.

A comical cough—four, actually, before it was heard by the lovebirds—announced that their dinner had arrived, so they parted for their individual seats, clutching hands across the table. They linked arms a lot, making a mess on the table with spilled soup.

“So I assume that’s how you and Tom were when you got engaged, right?” Stella asked, eyes on the menu. “All kissy pooh and lovey-dovey, right? Oh, wait. I keep forgetting that he proposed in school.”

“We’re not sixteen,” I whispered.

“We’re
eighteen,”
the girl informed us.

I felt my cheeks burn. “I didn’t mean—”

Vanessa rolled her eyes. “Yes, you did.
Everyone
thinks we’re too young to be so serious, but we know how we feel, so everyone else can MYOB. Right?” she said to her beloved.

“Righto,” he said. “That means
mind your own business,
” he added to us, eyeing us skeptically. The BLA kids spoke to each other in acronyms all day long. I was well versed in obnoxious.

“That’s my answer to you, too, Stella,” I told her. “MYOB.”

“Whatev,” was her retort. The waiter came over, and Stella asked for a taste of the onion soup. When he returned with a teeny cupful of it, her face lit up with one spoonful. She ordered two bowls and a house salad with cherry tomatoes, which they didn’t have. I went for the fish and chips.

She handed her menu back to the waiter and turned her attention to me. “So they shouldn’t get married because they’re too young, but you should get married even though you don’t love your fiancé?”

“Omigod, you’re marrying someone you don’t love?” Vanessa asked. “He’s rich, right?”

“He’s a schoolteacher,” I said, glaring at my sister.

“Oh. So he’s poor
and
you don’t love him?” Vanessa said. “And you’re marrying him because…”

“Because I
do
love him. Stella here thinks I don’t. But she’s wrong. She’s also not me, but seems to think she knows how I feel.”

“I am a highly respected face reader,” Stella said. “And your face tells me all I need to know. Just because you agree on how to live your life doesn’t mean you love each other. ‘Ooh, we both like spending Sundays with your mother, Tom! Ooh, we both like watching
The Tonight Show
before bed! Ooh, we both like saving money and sex twice a month!’ That’s not love, Ruby. It’s just compatibility.”

“Duh,” Vanessa said. “What do you think makes a relationship work? If Vincent and I weren’t compatible, we wouldn’t be in love in the first place. I mean, can you see me with some dorky guy in a plaid shirt and bad hair?”

“You make very good points, Vanessa,” Stella said. “But some people may choose compatibility and safety of choice over love. Some may think love is compatibility, when it’s being with someone who makes your heart move.”

I thought of Nick and tried to replace his face, his body, with Tom. It didn’t happen. It was those dark eyes, that unpredictability, that passion of Nick’s that so often did literally make my heart lurch in my chest. “But you can be madly in love with someone, Stella, and not be compatible, not be able to live with that person.”

Vincent shook his head. “That makes, like, zero sense. I mean, that person must have what you want if you fell in love in the first place.”

“Yeah, Ruby. That makes, like, zero sense,” Stella said, grinning.

I rolled my eyes. “Hey, face reader, is my expression telling you that I wish an evil genie would come along and zip your mouth?”

“What
I
wish is that I could have ordered a Caesar salad, but according to the book you got me—and now we have to get another one—I can’t eat raw eggs.”

“I read about that, too. I was going to get a Caesar, but in honor of you, I didn’t.”

Stella raised her glass at me. “That’s sisterhood.”

“Wow, you
are
sisters,” Vanessa said. “My older sister and I always fight like crazy, and then like a minute later, she’s like, can I borrow your pink tank top, and I’m like, okay, and then we’re best friends again.”

“You can borrow my Hot Mama tank if you want,” Stella said, smiling at me. “Ew, which reminds me—did you hear that baby-faced cop call me
ma’am?
I’m not even thirty yet! I’ve got weeks to go. Why would he call me
ma’am?
”

“I would call you
ma’am,
” Vincent commented around a mouthful of something orange.

“I guess that forty-dollar moisturizer really wasn’t working,” I said, and she laughed.

As our waiter cleared our plates and then took our dessert orders, the happy couple were back on each other’s laps, feeding each other Mississippi Mud Cake that the waiter announced was on the house.

“I secretly read her face,” Stella told me as she sipped her decaf. “The joy looks true-blue. His, too.”

“Because they’re babies!” I insisted. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”

“Ruby, they’re engaged. Not running off to Las Vegas to get married. And why are you worrying about people you don’t even know?”

I glanced at V Squared, as Stella had started calling them, and decided to put them out of my mind. A moment later, that proved impossible as from out of nowhere, a DJ announced it was karaoke time, and V Squared squealed and leapt up and ran to the makeshift stage by the door, where a karaoke machine, a microphone and two stools had been set up.

Vanessa and Vincent turned out to be Elvis Presley fans. They sang “Love Me Tender,” “Hound Dog” and “I Can’t Help Falling in Love,” for which they got a standing ovation from the small crowd that had gathered in Spock Block. Apparently, at eight o’clock every night, Spock Block turned into a karaoke joint.

“Do another!” someone shouted, and I had to agree that Vincent and Vanessa were good. They had a country twang, incongruent to their look and bad attitude, but they were both good singers and clearly loved to perform. For their encore, they did “Suspicious Minds.”

It took Stella over ten minutes and a promise to drive the first leg tomorrow morning if I did just one duet with her. I reminded her that I couldn’t sing—and that neither could she—but she said the baby would get a kick out of it—literally (padumpa!)—and I finally relented. She chose “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge, which got me all mushy, and that was how I found myself singing on a tiny stage in a restaurant in Riverside, Iowa.

“Shake it!” Vanessa called out, but I drew the line at shaking it. When we got back to our table, she said, “You weren’t half-bad. We’ve been doing the karaoke circuit on our way to Nashville. We’ve even won a couple of contests. We bill ourselves as the Singing Teen Elvis Lovebirds. People love it. We can sing anything, though. Rock, alternative, country, whatever. Maybe not metal. We don’t have the screech.”

The Singing Teen Elvis Lovebirds turned out to be from Minneapolis, had just graduated from high school, and were rebelling against their authoritarian parents who were insisting the pair go to college or get jobs and not fritter away their lives on singing or unattainable dreams.

“Like they’re not glued to
American Idol
three times a week when it’s on,” Vincent said, rolling his eyes. “That show is total proof that a good singer can make it—if you put yourself out there.”

Vanessa nodded. “Can you imagine really, really, really wanting something, and seeing a way to get it, but not going for it? I mean, you might as well be dead.”

Nick McDermott’s face floated into my mind again. His body, too. He wore those army-green cargos he liked, and his black Converse sneakers, and no shirt. He smelled like Nick. He was telling me about a revelation he’d had while rereading
Billy Budd,
and how he was going to teach it differently.

But I’m talking about the real thing. Ever since you got engaged, I can’t stop thinking about you. About us, Ruby. About the what-if, you know?

But then my cell rang, and it was Tom, and Nick’s image—
poof
—disappeared. I headed over to the little foyer by the restrooms, but it was still too loud in the place, and I could barely catch Tom saying he couldn’t hear me and would call tomorrow. I did hear his
I love you,
though, and I wasn’t even sure he said it.