The Accidental Book Club (2 page)

Mitzi reached over and patted Dorothy’s hand. “She’s young. You’re going to find any young girl annoying right now. And for good reason.”

“Absolutely,” Jean agreed. “You’ll come back to romance. When you’ve gotten some distance.”
Like me,
she almost added, but knew that wouldn’t be the truth. She still had to read romance as an outsider. She still had to skim over the more tender scenes, the scenes that made her think too hard about Wayne.

“Oh, Dorothy, I almost forgot,” Mitzi said, changing the subject. “My neighbor is convinced that your oldest son, Leonard, is the one who stole the hood ornament off his vintage Mercedes. He is seven shades of pissed. You’re probably going to have the cops on your doorstep soon. Just a heads-up.”

Dorothy groaned. “Just what I need—more cops. Those boys . . .”

“Send them to church. A good pastor will turn them around,” Mitzi said. “Send them to
my
church.
I’ll
turn them around.”

“Let me at ’em. I’ll take care of ’em,” Loretta offered. “God, this wine is good, Jeanie.”

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t want you defiling my Leonard,” Dorothy said.

Loretta faked indignation. “Well, I never!”

“Oh, yes, you have!” Mitzi and May said together, and everyone, including Loretta, burst into laughter.

Jean placed her plate on the table and eased into her chair. She cleared her throat. “Okay, okay, before we get too sidetracked, we need to discuss our next read. Any suggestions?”

Everyone looked at one another, munching, eyes wide. Jean always asked for suggestions but rarely got them. “All right,” Jean said. “I printed out this list.” She held up the list and waved it around, then looked at it again. “I was wondering about R. Sebastian Thackeray’s newest one.
Blame
, I think it’s called?”

“Oh, I’ve heard good things about that one,” Loretta said around a bite of Dorothy’s famous tabouleh salad. “Everyone’s raving.”

“Not everyone. I heard some feminist groups have been giving him grief over it,” Janet said.

“Eh, everyone knows feminists are always looking for something to be pissed off about,” Mitzi said.

Dorothy rolled her eyes. “Oh, goodness, don’t get her started on the feminists.”

“But we liked that one of his that we read last fall. What was it called?” May asked.

“Something about crime lines,” Dorothy said. “It was pretty good. He can write.”

“
No Crime in Timelines
,” Jean corrected. “And yes, we all liked it, which was why I thought—”

The phone rang, interrupting her. Since Wayne died, her phone didn’t ring very often. Only the book club members ever called, really. Or the occasional telemarketer.

She excused herself from the table and rushed to the kitchen to answer it.

“Jean?”

“Yes?”

“This is Curt.”

Jean blinked. As long as it had been since anyone had called her, her son-in-law Curt had never called her in the seventeen years since he’d married her daughter, Laura, and whisked her away to the other side of the state. “Yes, yes, how are you?”

“Uh, not good. I’m afraid there’s a little problem.”

“A problem? What kind of problem?” Jean laid the book list on the counter.

“It’s Laura. She’s in the hospital. I think maybe you should come.”

J
ean hadn’t seen her son-in-law in ages, and she almost didn’t recognize him as the graying man pacing the hospital corridor in a suit and tie, a cell phone plastered to his ear.

She stood in front of him, her purse looped over one wrist. With her other hand, she pushed the purse into her stomach uncomfortably, trying to suppress the jittery feeling that she needed to Do Something. He glanced at her, held up one finger, and continued talking, turning to pace away from her.

She waited patiently, standing as straight as she could to stretch out her back. It had ached for a rest stop near Columbia, but she’d insisted on pushing through, driving the four hours to St. Louis without stopping until she pulled into the hospital parking lot.

Jean had never been a fan of road trips, and she and Wayne had felt like they were in the way the few times they’d invited themselves to Laura and Curt’s house (Laura had extended the invitation only twice), so she was not used to the drive. And she was especially unused to the drive alone, without Wayne behind the wheel cracking jokes and singing that infernal Willie Nelson song. Her unfamiliarity, combined with her worried and hurried pace and her refusal to stop, had set her back to aching something fierce. She was far too old for tests of endurance.

Curt came back a few seconds later, stuffing his phone into his pants pocket.

“She’s sleeping it off now,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder at the room behind him. “She’s been out for a while. Bailey’s on her way. Neighbor’s bringing her, even though I told her to have Bailey call instead. The last thing she needs is to be a part of this.”

“What should I do?” Jean asked. The sterile scent and faint beeping emanating from somewhere unidentifiable on the ward threatened to tug her memory back to an awful place of unsuccessful treatments, shed tears, and eventual surrender to the inevitable. She had not been in a hospital since they had decided to take Wayne home to fight his final losing battle. She did not miss the depressing corridors, the grim-faced people. “Can I see her? Where is she?”

He turned in a slow circle, as if looking for someone to answer her questions, then scratched the back of his neck and cocked his head at her. “Listen, Jean. There’s something you may not know,” he said. “Laura is an alcoholic. I need you to understand that.”

Jean tried to give a reassuring smile, tried to nod as if this were something she had a firm grasp on, but she was still reeling from the short rundown he’d given her on the phone. Her daughter was in the hospital with alcohol poisoning. On a Tuesday afternoon. She’d gone to work—which was what her daughter did best, work—and had proceeded to cause some sort of scene. They’d threatened to call the police if she didn’t vacate the premises and, hours later, during which time Laura had been God-knew-where doing God-knew-what, her friend found her, sprawled facedown on the front lawn, car keys still clutched in her hand. What in God’s name was understandable about that?

“You told me on the phone she was drunk,” Jean answered, as if this settled everything.

He shook his head. “Drunk and then some. But today . . . this . . . This is nothing unusual. Your daughter has a drinking problem. It’s gotten worse since we split, but it’s been going on for—”

“What do you mean, since you split?”

He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket nervously, glanced at it as if he didn’t know how it had gotten into his hand, and then shoved it back into his pocket. “She didn’t tell you,” he said. A statement, not a question. Jean shook her head. “Of course not,” he mumbled, then took a deep breath and let it out through pursed lips. “I left her about a month ago. I couldn’t take the drinking anymore. It got to be too much. And Bailey’s just been impossible to deal with.” He shook his head, wiped his hand up and down over his face a few times, and sighed; then he took another deep breath. “Laura’s going to have to go to rehab. There’s just no way around it. She’s been telling me for a year that she’ll quit when she’s ready, but she’s too far in to do it on her own now. She’ll never be ready. She’s going to kill herself. Or someone else.”

Jean blinked. “For a year,” she said, trying to maintain a sense of poise, to not look like she’d been made a fool of by her daughter all this time. After Laura landed that big job of hers five or six years ago, she hardly spoke to her family at all. Kenneth never heard from his sister. Wayne and Jean received only the rare phone call, and they saw Bailey only intermittently. Laura always seemed to have an excuse for why they couldn’t come home for Christmas.
Things are crazy at work, Mom. I’m barely going to get time for Christmas here with Bailey and Curt. I can’t possibly get to Kansas City. We’ll just have to ship gifts again,
she would say. To hear Laura talk about it, Bailey hadn’t had a birthday party since she was ten. Wayne’s funeral was the first time Jean had seen Laura in well over a year, and here it had been another two years, and she hadn’t seen her since. But to not know her daughter well enough to know that she was struggling with booze so much so as to have ended up in the hospital felt like a failing somehow. She should have visited without invitation. She should have invited Laura and her family more often. She should have called more often. She was ashamed.

“And Bailey will be with you?” she asked. “While Laura’s . . . away?”

He rolled his eyes. “She won’t want to, but yes. She’ll have no choice. I’ll write down my apartment address for you. And I’ll let you know where we decide to put Laura.”

“Put Laura,” Jean said, realizing she was only repeating again. It was just that she felt so very knocked down by this news, so very confused and unsure of how things could have gotten this out of control without her even knowing about it. “Like a dog needing a home.” The words were out of her mouth, sounding sharp in the hallway, before she’d barely formed the thought in her head.

He held out a hand. “I didn’t mean it like . . . I just meant I’d let you know what rehab she’d be staying in. This is hard, Jean. I want you to know that. This isn’t easy for me at all. I love . . .” He paused, swallowed, his eyes suddenly looking very bloodshot and swimmy. “I love them both. But I can’t say I love my family, because for the longest time I’ve had no family. Maybe it’s my fault too—I don’t know.”

“Well, she had a reason to drink, I would imagine,” Jean said, trying to offer sympathy, but also hoping for an explanation. She realized her words might have come off as blame, and maybe that was what she was looking for. If Curt had done something to cause this, then maybe she hadn’t done it. “Something must have been wrong.”

He looked up at her sharply, and though she didn’t know Curt well enough to guess what anger looked like on him, she thought maybe that was what she was seeing in the pinched creases on his temples. She pulled herself up taller, scrunched her purse tighter into her stomach, and lifted her chin. She certainly didn’t feel as strong as she used to be, but she wasn’t one to back down when cornered, either.

“There was a lot wrong,” Curt answered. “But if you’re asking if I did something to her, like cheat on her or hurt her in some way, the answer is no. I’ve been devoted to her. Longer than most men would be. Longer than she’s been devoted to me.”

“I wasn’t asking that,” Jean said, though, of course, she had been.

“Most of what was wrong was she was so married to her job and her booze and her projects, she didn’t have time to be married to me,” he said. He stared at his shoes for a moment, then suddenly stood up straight and gestured toward the room, stepping aside. “You might as well go in. But don’t expect to have a conversation with her or anything. Already tried. Didn’t go well.”

Jean took a couple of steps forward, suddenly feeling very sorry for her son-in-law with his stooped shoulders and the way his pants seemed to hang on his hips as if he’d recently lost a significant amount of weight. Sadness and regret seemed to envelop him. She couldn’t help but call to mind his and Laura’s wedding day, the way he followed Laura around, skimming her lower back with his fingertips or clutching her hand like a dazed child, laughing at all her jokes, brushing his knuckles along her chin adoringly. He was so utterly bulldozed by Laura, Jean was sure if she looked closely, she’d see hearts in his eyes. He might have followed the girl anywhere; he just must have never expected to have to follow her here.

Jean put her hand on his arm, very lightly. “I’m sorry,” she said, though she wasn’t sure if she was simply expressing sympathy, or if maybe she was apologizing too.

The curtains in Laura’s room were pulled shut—surely to ward off the immense hangover that she would be likely to wake up with—and the room was dim, gray. From the doorway, Jean barely recognized the form in the bed as her daughter. She, like Curt, had also lost weight—a lot of it, from the look of things. She was skeletal. But as Jean stepped closer to the bed, she could see that her daughter’s face had a certain puffy, doughy quality to it, as if she were a Christmas roll ready to be popped into the oven. She was strapped to a monitor, which, from what Jean could tell, the hospital put everyone on, whether they were there for a heart attack or an ingrown toenail, and an IV snaked into the back of one hand. The other hand, wrapped in a cloth bandage, was resting across her chest.

Jean stood next to the bed and simply stared down at her daughter. Alcohol poisoning. It still didn’t make sense. And now separation too? What on earth had happened? And why hadn’t Laura told her?

Laura had been such a pretty child. Everyone commented on it, how pretty she was. Her features were striking, and she had a way about her that was so easily flawless. Dainty. She’d been Jean’s “moon child”—always orbiting around Jean’s legs as she tried to vacuum or shop or cook dinner. She had rarely been more than a few steps away. While Kenny had taken every chance to bolt and explore the world in his bold, fearless way, Laura was more careful, more prone to worries and fears. And she seemed to take everything so personally.

She could do things. Schoolwork was easy for her. So was making friends. She could sing reasonably well, and she was artistic when she wanted to be. She was incredibly organized, even from a very young age—she had a tendency to stack and line up her toys just so—and she seemed only to get smarter, better with age.

She was pretty. She was talented. And she was a perfectionist like Jean had never seen before. She was the kind of child you didn’t worry about. The kind of child who had it all together. Who grew up to have a romantic marriage and a beautiful baby and a high-pressure executive job that she loved—loved!—with everything she had. The kind of child who grew up to be the woman who had it all. And had it all together. The kind of child who allowed you to sit back and be proud of a job well done.

Only now she was lying in a hospital bed. And as Jean looked down into that puffy face, she could still see the shades of her “moon child.” She could still see that pretty little girl beneath.

A nurse bustled into the room, interrupting Jean’s thoughts. “She probably should get some sleep. She’ll have to have that wrist X-rayed when the doctor comes in.”

Jean’s hand wrapped around her own wrist involuntarily. “What happened to it?”

The nurse shrugged. “Nobody knows. Probably never will. That occurs pretty frequently in cases like these. People get drunk, they injure themselves, they black out or pass out, and then the next morning are wondering how their wrist got broken. It’s all a mystery to everyone.”

The nurse left the room, and with her gone and Curt gone and Laura snoozing, the room once again seemed bleak and gray and filled with a sweat-soaked stranger who might have had a passing resemblance to Jean’s daughter. Jean felt a sense of surrealism—maybe she was actually still at home and Dorothy was telling one of her long, complicated stories about her son’s legal troubles, and Jean had simply zoned out. She was imagining this, and would soon snap to, only to find that, frustratingly, she’d dropped a cheese-coated roasted red pepper into her lap. But the longer she stood there, listening to that infernal faint beeping, the more real it became.

Her daughter was in trouble.

Softly she crept forward until her knees brushed the crinkly mattress. Laura’s skin was pale and glossy, and each time she breathed, Jean got a new whiff of acrid alcohol-laced breath. She brushed Laura’s bangs off her forehead with one finger and was transported back in time. It seemed every memory she had of her child was one of achievement—graduations, weddings, brunches to celebrate new jobs, new promotions. But how deceiving had those appearances been? Had Laura gone out after those graduations, gotten smashed on cheap cocktails, and ended up sobbing in someone’s backseat about how bleak her life really was? Had she been an inattentive mother, unable to handle the imperfection, the mistakes that every mother must face over and over again? Why did she need to do this to herself?

To hear Curt talk, it certainly sounded as if there were imperfections with Bailey. That sweet child with the long hair that curled up in little wispy waves at the very ends. The one who sucked on her index and middle fingers so much that she talked with a lisp until she was eight. So adorable, with those big brown eyes and the freckles across her nose. So deep, those eyes. Jean had always felt as if another child were lurking somewhere beneath—another child that nobody would ever truly understand or know.

“What happened, Laura?” Jean whispered, and at the sound of her voice, Laura stirred, chewing out a garbled sentence that made Jean worry that she’d awakened her. She backed away from the bed and left the room, unsure of what to do next. Stay here? Go find a hotel? Turn around and go home? Curt hadn’t made it exactly clear what he’d brought her here for.

She walked a ways down the hall and happened upon a small cut-in that housed half a dozen chairs and a silent but running TV. Curt was slouched in one, a bottle of water in one hand, his other hand holding his forehead. His elbow was propped on the arm of the chair so his face was tipped downward. A man in a pastel pink sweater and khakis sat in a chair across from Curt, leaning over so that his elbows rested on his knees. He was saying something in a low voice, and Curt was nodding. When Jean paused in the doorway, the man stopped talking and looked up at her.