Melissa Senate (9 page)

W
E WERE ROBBED JUST OUTSIDE OF
C
EDAR
R
APIDS
, I
OWA
.
Stella had spotted the words
Pie Diner
—something we thought only existed in the south—and insisted on stopping there for a late lunch. The place was a greasy spoon, but had a damned good hamburger, and six kinds of homemade pie. Stella thought it ridiculous that I ordered the apple pie when there were five more interesting varieties, but I loved apple pie. In her day, Grammy Zelda made a mean apple pie. Stella went for the s’mores pie; how was that any more interesting? When we got back into the car, which we’d had to park at the far end of the lot, Stella immediately noticed that her cup of malt balls was missing.

“My malt balls are gone,” she said. “Oh shit, my makeup bag is gone! And my book!”

“Did you bring them into the diner with you?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Someone stole my stuff!”

I stared at her. “When we were walking from the car to the diner, I asked you if you locked the doors and you said yes, Stella.”

“I thought I did.”

I rolled my eyes and checked the trunk. Our suitcases were still there. There was a button inside the car that opened the trunk, so the thief clearly found our clothes worthless.

Thank God we’d both brought our purses; sometimes we just took some cash and left the purses in the trunk. In the supposedly locked car. The thought of having to cancel all my credit cards—not that I had more than two—and go to the DMV for a new license would have infuriated me. As would losing the wallet Tom had given me for my birthday last year, a tiny picture in a heart-shaped frame on my keychain of me, Stella and my mom, and the engagement card from Nick that had been addressed only to me.
Maybe we should be going there.

I clutched my purse to my body.

“My prenatal vitamins were in my makeup bag,” Stella said, kicking the tire. “And my forty-two-dollar moisturizer. Shit, shit, shit!”

“Who would steal someone’s open container of malt balls?” I wondered aloud while Stella stopped someone getting out of his car to ask where the nearest police station was. And a stained, dog-eared copy of
What To Expect When You’re Expecting,
which you could find in every library, used bookstore or book bin at the town recycling center?

And who spent forty-two dollars on moisturizer?

The Isley, Iowa, police station happened to be around the corner. Talk about a brazen thief. The baby-faced cop in uniform who returned to the scene of the crime with us to check for evidence and clues said that crowded parking lot car burglaries were on the rise. From the sounds of what was stolen, he figured a down-on-her-luck pregnant lady saw Stella’s malt balls and book and fancy makeup bag lying on the seat and couldn’t resist trying the door and then taking the items.

“Probably in and out in fifteen seconds,” the officer said. “In fact, I’d say she stole your property, then went into the pie diner for lunch. You were probably sitting a few feet from her.

There had been a pregnant woman a few tables away, as a matter of fact. Both Stella and I had noticed her come in because she was waddling and looked so uncomfortable in the early-July heat. She was alone, too. And had a tote bag. Which was probably hiding Stella’s stuff.

“Maybe she’s still inside,” Stella said. “We can check her bag!”

“That would constitute an illegal search and seizure,” the officer said. “Her pregnancy alone doesn’t make her a suspect.”

“Oh,” Stella said. “I am never spending twenty-five bucks on mascara again.”

“I can’t comment on that one way or the other, ma’am,” the officer said. “But I do suggest you lock your doors from here on in.”

She declined to fill out a report. According to Stella, she’d rather spend the next hour in a drugstore buying all new Revlon or L’Oreal products than sitting in some hot police station.

As we drove away, Stella stopped short, then pulled over. “I was using the Denny’s menu as a bookmark,” she said. “In
What To Expect.
” She burst into tears, leaning her face against the steering wheel.

I stared out the windshield. Numb. There was a reason I’d kept that stupid Denny’s menu in my mother’s hope chest. I’d always thought it was because my father’s vows, on a kiddie menu, reminded me that he’d once loved my mother, that he’d once promised to love her forever and had meant it. I grew up believing that although he’d walked out, left her and us, taking his damned ten percent, that he’d once been good and true. The vows said so. I’d always accepted that people could change, for the better and worse, and Eric Miller had changed for the worse.

But now, thanks to Stella swiping the vows and using the menu as a bookmark, I had nothing to prove he’d once been better. And neither did Stella.

“He’s out there somewhere, Ruby. Do you ever think about that? He’s out there somewhere, eating scrambled eggs for breakfast, or taking a Tylenol for a headache or going to work or whatever. He’s living and breathing somewhere right now.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say to that, Stella. How the hell can I care? He walked out on us. He left Mom and he left us and never looked back. Never sent a card, never tried to find us when we moved. He stopped being our father a long time ago. That man eating scrambled eggs isn’t our dad, Stell.”

“Except that he is.”

Except that he is.

“I want the vows back,” she said, her voice cracking.

“I know. Me, too. I’m the one who was hanging on to that Denny’s menu, remember?”

She looked up at me. “I know.”

“It’s okay, Stella,” I said, rubbing her back. “Maybe the universe is trying to tell us not to hang on to what
isn’t.
”

She sat back and let out a deep breath. “I have way too much of
what isn’t
in my life, Ruby.”

“Clarissa or Silas
is,
” I told her, gently patting her belly. “I is, too.”

She gave me a little smile and nodded and then started driving again.

The baby-faced cop had said we really couldn’t drive through this area without stopping to see the scale-model of the USS Enterprise. Neither Stella nor I had known what he was talking about at first. But then we remembered someone in South Bend having mentioned it to Rory as a must-see. Apparently, the nearby town of Riverside was the future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk (he would be born in Riverside on March 22, 2233). I’d never seen a single episode of
Star Trek,
but Tom was a huge fan of the show and had DVDs of all the movies, so how could I not get a picture of the minispaceship?

Besides, there was no way we could drive on to Nebraska. The five-hour drive from Chicago to Cedar Rapids had been long enough, and the loss of Stella’s malt balls and the book and the vows had sent her into several crying jags. Somehow, the lack of malt balls symbolized the lack of Jake or James or Jason, the fruitlessness of finding the thief representing the fruitlessness of finding him. And the lost vows stood for the loss of her chance of a life with Jake or James or Jason.

So I called the hotel that Rory had booked us into in Lincoln and arranged for the room the following night. All the hotels we’d called in Riverside were booked, so we ended up at a tiny motel on the outskirts of town. In the small lot, we triple-checked that the car was locked up tight.

Inside the narrow four-story motel,
Star Trek
memorabilia filled every surface of every wall and table. At the front desk, Stella asked for a room with two queen-size beds, and the guy behind the counter—wearing Spock ears—said, “For God’s sake, Jim, I’m a doctor—not the concierge of the Ritz!” Neither Stella nor I got it, so he explained, in detail, the inside joke from
Star Trek,
about how Bones constantly said, “For God’s sake, Jim, I’m a doctor not a ‘fill in the blank’ when Captain Kirk would ask him to get creative in order to save them from oncoming aliens.

I was going to tell him that we had never seen a single episode of
Star Trek,
but that we had seen the first
Star Trek
movie, together, and liked it. I decided against that, though, since I was afraid that would land us in the “bad” room that every hotel had.

The room had lumpy twin beds but very strong air-conditioning, which we both felt was more important. We took showers, and while Stella primped with her toiletries, I called Tom. It was a short checkin conversation, all of thirty seconds long. I was exhausted from driving, and Tom had just gotten back from a six-mile run.

Stella turned from the mirror above the dresser and pointed her blush brush at me. “You know, if you didn’t add the ‘I love you, too,’ before hanging up I would really wonder about you two.”

“Meaning?” I asked in my most bored voice, dropping down on the bed. The pillow was soft and fluffy. I closed my eyes.

“Meaning, what kind of conversation was that? You just got engaged, but you might as well be an old boring married couple.”

“There’s nothing wrong with old, boring married couples, Stella. It’s called being comfortable. It’s called checking in. And that in itself is nice.”

She stared at herself in the mirror. “I wish I had someone to check in with, actually.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“No, I know,” she said, sweeping a sparkly sand shadow across her eyelids. Who exactly was she primping for, anyway? “But still, I can’t help but notice that you’re not having long, romantic conversations with Tom every night.”

Until just now, Tom and I hadn’t spoken in a few days. Yesterday, I’d responded to his text message from the previous night with:
I’ll call you when we get there. xo, R.
And he’d responded with
Ok. xo, T.
Which made me feel a little more comfortable. Suddenly I had room—to breathe, to think. If I wanted, if I really wanted, Tom would fly to Las Vegas and we would be married in a chapel just like that. If I wanted.

“We don’t need to talk every day,” I said.

She slicked on some lipstick, which was too bright for even her dramatic coloring, wiped it off and tried the other shade she’d bought, a pretty sheer rose. Then she flopped down on the bed, which squeaked, and put her arms behind her head. “I was just thinking about how Silas and I used to talk for like two hours every night on the telephone, even though we’d just spent hours together. We had so much to say to each other. It’s been that way with every guy I’ve been in love with.”

“Tom and I have a lot to say to each other.”

“Then why aren’t you saying it?” she asked. “Why didn’t you tell him all about the burglary? Or about the incredible apple pie—you said it was the best pie you’d ever had in your life. You didn’t even tell him about meeting Sally. Or our stowaway cousin. How could you not have been dying to tell him about all that?”

I took my own cosmetics bag from my suitcase, which contained all of three beauty products: moisturizer (the four-dollar version), mascara and sheer lipstick. Other than that I had sunscreen with bug-spray protection, my trusty Secret antiperspirant, and a tiny vial of stick perfume (a delicious musk scent) that I got at Banana Republic. And that Nick always commented on.

I put on some mascara and lip gloss and played with my hair. “Maybe I’m just more private than you, Stella,” I said, though that wasn’t really true. “Did you ever think of that? Maybe I don’t share my every thought and feeling.”

“I never liked that about you,” she said.

Which made me laugh. A few times when we were growing up, Stella would literally grab me by the shoulders and say, “Tell me what you are thinking, dammit!”

Tom and I did have a lot to say to each other. We just chose not to discuss everything to death. I could talk about love with Tom, or politics, or family, or our wedding, or teaching, or school gossip, anything. But most of the time, I just enjoyed having him there. Even when I had a rush of things to say to Tom, his presence was so calming, so sturdy, that I sometimes felt that rush steady itself.

A friend at BLA once vented to me that her boyfriend never talked to her, that when she tried to talk to him about how they never talked, he’d say he was content to be in the same room with her and didn’t need to make small talk. She would rant how she wasn’t talking about small talk, that she wanted a real conversation, but he insisted if you had to make real conversation, you were really making small talk. Because you had to think about it, he insisted, and therefore it wasn’t real.

They broke up a few dates later. My friend had told me I was lucky that I “thought like a guy,” that it was no wonder Tom and I had such a good relationship. I tried to tell her that I had no idea how men thought, that Tom and I were simply compatible, but she didn’t buy it.

Stella got up and stood next to me in front of the mirror, scooping up her long hair and twisting it into a bun at the nape of her neck. “I hope J and I have a lot to say when I find him. I mean, I know we’ll have a lot to say, given what I have to tell him. But I mean after that, after the shock wears off, when it’s just two people together. We had so much to say the night we met. We talked for hours about everything and nothing. But what if it was just the booze? What if he turns out to be a total stranger?”

I looked at her reflection. “Well, Stella, he will be, really. But you have something very big in common now. You’ll need to develop your relationship based on that.”

Now
that
would be a challenge. Though I supposed the
New York Times
article and question fifteen didn’t apply to Stella (not that she was getting married) or those who were starting at square two or three. There
was
no strength of the relationship to
be
challenged. They were starting with the challenge.
They
were the challenge.