The Guy Not Taken (2 page)
Authors: Jennifer Weiner
WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Jennifer Weiner, Inc.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address Atria Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
First Washington Square Press trade paperback edition June 2007
WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Copyright permission information appears on
p. 303
.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Weiner, Jennifer
The guy not taken : stories / Jennifer Weiner.—1st Atria Books hardcover ed.
p. cm.
Contents: Just desserts—Travels with Nicki—The wedding bed—Swim—Buyer’s market—The guy not taken—The mother’s hour—Oranges from Florida—Tour of duty—Dora on the beach.
1. Single women—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3573.E3935G89 2006
813’.6—dc22
2006043009
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-3520-1
ISBN-10: 1-4165-3520-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-9805-6 (Pbk)
ISBN-10: 0-7432-9805-5 (Pbk)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-4099-1 (eBook)
For Adam
Happiness
There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.
And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.
No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.
It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.
—Jane Kenyon
1947–1995
C
ONTENTS
A C
ONVERSATION WITH
J
ENNIFER
W
EINER
Q
UESTIONS AND
T
OPICS FOR
D
ISCUSSION
I
t was a late June afternoon. Jon, Nicole, and I were scattered around the pool in our backyard, watching our mother swim laps. Jon, who was almost fourteen, kicked rhythmically at the foot of his chair with his bright yellow Walkman earphones over his ears. “Cut that out,” my sister snapped. She was almost seventeen, and had felt entitled to boss our little brother around since his arrival had displaced her from her crib, even though he was taller than she was and muscular from a spring on the lacrosse team.
Jon kicked harder. Nicki leaned forward, brown eyes glaring, skinny shoulders tensed. “Stop it, you guys,” I murmured, as our mother touched the edge of the pool at the deep end and began another lap. The flowered skirt of her swimsuit flapped in her wake. Nicki sank back against the slightly mildewed cushion of her chaise lounge, which seemed to sag under the humid, gray sky. Even the leafy trees and lush lawns of our Connecticut suburb looked despondent in the heat. It had been over ninety degrees every day since June, and it hadn’t rained once, although there was thunder every night.
Mom flipped over again and started another lap, switching from the crawl to the breaststroke, with her sleek head bobbing
in and out of the water. Underneath the tinted plastic of her goggles, I couldn’t tell whether her eyes were open or shut.
“Why doesn’t she wear a decent bathing suit?” Nicki grumbled to no one in particular. Nicki herself was clothed in a scrap of a bikini, neon green with black polka dots, cut high on the thigh and low on the chest.
I unlaced my workboots with grimy fingers and wiped my forehead on my sleeve, smelling the gasoline that had seeped into my clothes. I’d taken a women’s studies class that spring and had come home from college determined not to take any stereotypically female job. I’d passed up a chance to babysit or peddle perfume in the air-conditoned mall, and had gone to work for a commercial landscaping company, earning six dollars an hour pushing a big red mower up and down endless corporate office parks. It was miserable work, and I wouldn’t even have a good tan to show for my troubles: Lavish Landscaping rules dictated jeans, not shorts, because the mowers would kick up stones or broken glass—whatever you’d run over—and spit chunks of it back at your shins.
I yanked my shirt down over my hips and started fanning myself with my Lavish baseball cap.
Nicki glared at me. “Get downwind,” she commanded.
“I’m striking a blow for gender equality.”
“You sure smell as bad as a man,” said Nicki.
Jon settled his earphones around his neck. “Mom bounced a check to the car place,” he said.
Nicki made a disgusted hissing sound. “Oh,” I said. I twisted my shirt, feeling a mixture of sorrow and indignation. Sorrow that my family, my mother in particular, kept finding itself in situations like this; indignation that, somehow, I’d become the one who was supposed to do something about it. Down in the deep end, Mom’s arms moved like pistons in a slow
machine, up and down, entering the water without a splash. When they’d dug the hole for the pool and filled it with concrete, the five of us had used a stick to write our names in the yielding gray sludge. Under the water and the tiles, our names were still there.
Nicki raked her pink-tipped toenails through the gravel. “I need a job,” she said.
“The babysitting thing didn’t work out?” I’d passed along all of the job offers I hadn’t taken to my sister, and as of that morning, she’d been working for a family down the street.
Nicki shook her head wordlessly, leaving me to fill in the blanks—the father had tried to grab her butt, the mother wanted her to empty the dishwasher while the kids were napping; the kids were brats; or some combination of A, B, and C. Or, more likely, one parent or the other had asked, with too much cloying sympathy,
How are things at home?
“Lavish Landscaping’s always hiring,” I offered. Nicki grunted something unintelligible and arranged a towel under her head. Even when she was annoyed, she was adorable, with her brown hair permed into corkscrew curls, and a tiny heart-shaped face to go along with her slender frame. All of the cute genes floating around in our collective pool had gone to Nicki, whereas I’d cleaned up in the big, bosomy, awkward, and acneprone department.
“No physical labor!” she pouted.
I reached for the newspaper our mother had tucked underneath her chair and flipped to the classified ads. “Avon Convalescent Home. That would be easy. Just feed the oldsters their mush, wheel them around a little bit.”
Nicki’s scowl deepened. “Josie,” she breathed in the fake-patient tone that signaled a full-blown tantrum was on the way. “You know how I feel about old people.” She reached for her
baby oil and smoothed a dollop onto one hairless calf. “About all people, actually.”
I turned back to the ads. “The state parks system is looking for seasonal workers.”
“No people!” said Nicki, shuddering. “I don’t want to spend my whole day telling a bunch of idiots where they can swim or how to find the hiking trails.” She grabbed the tube of generic suntan lotion and squirted it vigorously onto her chest.
I pressed on. “It says here they’re looking for maintainers.”
“What’s that?”
I took my best guess. “You wouldn’t have to deal with the people, just their messes.”
Nicki gave a noncommittal snort.
“You might not have to talk to anyone. You could just walk through the woods all day, and spear garbage on a stick.”
She sat up, intrigued by the image of the cool woods and a job that would pay her to poke things. “Huh.”
“Outhouses,” said Jon.
“What?” asked Nicki.
I explained, “Well, there probably aren’t bathrooms in the woods.”
Nicki grimaced.
“No outhouses!”
she cried. She flung her suntan lotion onto the gravel and flopped furiously onto her stomach. “Why, oh why, do you all torture me so?” she murmured into the cushion. Milo, our bulldog, strolled over to investigate the commotion. He approached cautiously to sniff Nicki’s foot, but his stentorian breathing gave him away. Nicki waved her arm. “Go away, dog!” she yelled. Milo shuffled sadly down the sloping hill that led to the deck at the back of our house, as our mother raised her head from the water.
“You could work at Friendly’s,” she said.
Nicki was momentarily silenced, as if the irony was too
great for her to decide immediately between one of several replies. Finally she arrived at “Who invited you into this conversation?”
Mom smiled and shook water out of her ears. “I was listening to you when I was swimming.”
Nicki was spoiling for a fight. “You can’t hear underwater.”
“Sure I can.” She did a showy backward somersault in the shallow end and popped her dripping head back up. “You could work at Friendly’s,” she repeated. “They need an ice-cream scooper.”
It was left to me to point out the obvious. “The thing is, Nicki’s not very friendly.”
Nicki swung around eagerly. “I am friendly!” she insisted. She peered into the backyard until she located Milo on the deck, underneath the shade of the picnic table, splayed on his belly and snoring.
“Come here, sweet puppy!” she cooed. Milo continued to snore. “Milo!” she called. The dog lifted his massive head and stared at Nicki distrustfully. “Oh, sweet Milo!” she sang. Mom watched from the water as Milo lowered his head until his jowls rested on the deck, and went back to sleep. Jon laughed. Nicki shoved herself off her lounge chair and stomped across the gravel to the fence dividing the pool from the yard.
“Dog!”
she hollered. Milo heaved himself to his feet and trotted briskly toward the back door. Nicki spared me a murderous look. The cordless telephone on top of Mom’s towel started ringing. The sound cut through the sticky air, silencing Jon’s laughter and Nicki’s yells. My sister stiffened. Jon turned away, and Mom ducked back under the water, gliding down the length of the pool without a breath.
When the ringing finally stopped, my sister stomped back across the gravel and snatched up the telephone. She flopped
onto her chair, punched in some numbers, and said, “Yes, in Avon, Connecticut, a listing for Friendly’s, please?”
