The Smart One (12 page)

He folded his arms. “They’re my
favorite
cookies.”

“I know that, Dyl, but they don’t sell them in the summer.”

“Why not?” he whined.

“Because the chocolate melts. I can’t get them again until the fall.” She drew a sack of oranges from a bag and put it in the refrigerator.

“That sucks!” he said, raising his voice. “That totally sucks!”

“We have other cookies, Dylan.”

“I don’t
want
other cookies!” he yelled, and ran back into the basement.

Clare turned to me, the color draining from her face. “This is how he’s been. He’s just angry all the time. I was hoping it would just pass, but now I’m getting concerned.”

I couldn’t blame her. It wasn’t like him to be bratty. Something was troubling this boy, and someone needed to find out was it was. I wondered if I could be the one to do it.

I hung around for a bit, stalling, hoping I might get to see Leo again. I was just about to leave when I heard the doorbell.

“Hey, you’re still here,” Leo said when I opened the door.

“I was just on my way.”

Clare came out of the kitchen, and I got the distinct impression Leo was checking her out in her tight cotton-candy-colored top. How could he not? She looked hot as hell. Instead of feeling threatened, I was glad for her. Clare, God bless her, needed to be ogled.

“How was your lit class?” Leo asked.

Clare grinned. “Very…dynamic.”

“Who are you reading?”

I could have stuck around for the conversation, but I fig
ured I’d let Clare discuss literature without feeling like her bookish sister was judging her. “I’m going,” I announced to both of them.”

“You’ll call me?” Leo said.

Clare’s eyebrows went up.

“I will,” I said, and left.

With our mother’s birthday only a week away, my sisters and I decided to meet at Fortunoff—a local jewelry and fine gift store considered a Long Island institution—so we could chip in for something special. Joey was still being mysterious about her disappearances and hadn’t said a word about the man with the red beard. Clare and I were determined to watch her closely for any signs of drug use. I was also burning to know if anything was going on between her and Kenny.

While Clare scrutinized some gold neck chains, I turned to Joey. “You hear from Kenny again? About the shoebox?”

“Didn’t he tell you? His mother said it was probably in storage. Sam rented space from one of those self-storage places and moved a whole bunch of stuff there.”

“What do you think of this chain?” Clare said, tapping her finger on the glass case.

Joey looked at the chain and snorted. “Boring.”

“So was it in there?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Joey said. “We couldn’t find the key. Renee told Kenny it was a special key with an orange ring around the top, and that Sam kept it in his desk drawer, but it wasn’t there.”

“It’s not boring,” Clare insisted. “It’s classic, elegant. Italian design, I think. I’ll ask the saleswoman to take it out for us.”

“We?” I said to Joey. “You went over there?”

“Last night.”

Okay, fine. So Joey and Kenny were together last night. They had probably sealed the deal, picked up where they left off, rocked and rolled till dawn. I could handle that. I could. And anyway, what difference did it make? With any luck, I’d get a job offer from Las Vegas any day now and all of this would cease to matter. I’d be the new Bev. The Las Vegas Bev, with a new apartment, new friends, new clothes, new everything.

The saleswoman laid the necklace out on a square of black velvet.

“See?” Clare said. “See how it reflects the light?”

“Everything reflects the light in here,” Joey said. “They probably have special bulbs or something.”

“So what happened?” I asked Joey.

“What do you mean what happened?”

“When you went to see Kenny.”

Clare picked up the tiny tag on the necklace with her manicured fingernails. “It’s twenty-four karat,” she said. “I knew it.”

“Nothing happened,” Joey said to me. We just fucked for a couple of hours and then shot heroin.”

Clare and I both snapped our necks toward her. The saleswoman pretended she didn’t hear, but I saw her ears flush.

“I’m kidding,” Joey said. “Take it easy. We just talked.”

Clare let out enough carbon dioxide to fill a greenhouse.

“About what?” I asked.

“He told me what a prick his father is. But Kenny’s all fucked up over it. Part of him is sure his father is guilty. But part of him is hoping the body in the drum isn’t Lydia’s and that this whole thing will just go away.”

“I see.”

Clare picked up the gold chain. “What do you girls think?” she asked, trying to get us back on task. “Should we take it?”

Joey rolled her eyes. “We need something more exciting.”

Clare held it to her neck to model it for us. “Look at it,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”

“It’s lovely,” I said. “But Joey’s right—we need something with more pop.” I pointed to a hammered silver cuff in the next case. “Something like that.”

“That chunky thing? Clare said. “It’s so bohemian. That’s an art teacher bracelet, not a mom bracelet.”

Joey laughed. “She’s right!”

“Well, what’s
your
idea?” I asked Joey.

“How about a Star of David on a chain?” she said.

Clare and I looked at each other and shrugged, surprised that Joey came up with a pretty good suggestion. We went to the counter that sold religious jewelry and found an impressive assortment. I concentrated on the sparkly array, trying to get my mind off whether or not Joey was telling the whole truth about her and Kenny. As luck would have it, we couldn’t agree on which one Mom would like, and I got caught up in the debate. Clare favored a gold star embedded with tiny diamonds, which I thought was fine, but not terribly exciting. Joey liked the one that substituted a heart for one of the triangles, which Clare thought was ghastly and I thought was just kind of weird looking. I liked the star with colorful gemstones in each corner and couldn’t understand why my sisters thought it was juvenile. We kept looking, making the poor saleswoman show us every item they had, until we finally found one we agreed on. It was a delicate star with little sapphires and diamonds set in white gold that we all thought Mom would love. We paid and had it shipped to her at the Waxmans’ address down in Florida, and then left the store satisfied.

Back at home, my sisters followed me to the front door, where I paused to look in the mailbox, even though I knew delivery came in the afternoon. It was, in fact, getting harder and harder to keep myself from checking the mail pretty compulsively for that job offer. To my surprise, there was a single small package inside in the box. I took it out and saw that it had a handwritten note on the front from Teddy Goodwin, asking me to pass it to Joey.

“For you,” I said, handing Joey the package. I unlocked the door and we went into the house. Joey took it straight to the trash can and dropped it in.

“What are you doing?” I said. “Don’t you want to see what it is?”

“I
know
what it is,” she said. “It’s a homemade CD with some song he wrote that he thinks I’ll record, and he’ll be the next Neil Diamond or something.”

“Don’t you at least want to listen to it?” Clare said. “Maybe it’s good.”

“I don’t care if it’s good,” Joey said. “I’m not interested.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“You’ll hurt his feelings,” Clare said.

Joey rolled her eyes and retrieved the package from the trash. “Fine,” she said, tearing open the envelope and sticking the CD in her purse. “I’ll listen to it. You happy now?”

“Why are you getting so upset over this?” I asked.

“Because everyone seems to think I should do whatever I can to get back into the music industry. But maybe I don’t
want
to get back into it, did you ever think of that?”

I wondered if it was just fear holding her back, and I hated to see her let go of her dream for that. I thought of how many years I wasted running around pretending to be an artist, lying even to myself about what was in my heart.

“Are you worried about the temptations?” I asked.

“You mean drugs?”

“Yeah.”

She laughed through her nose. “You don’t get me at all, Bev.”

“Because if that’s it, if that’s even a part of it, I understand. But you shouldn’t let go of what’s important to you.”

“And also,” Clare added, “remember that we’re here for you.”

“Okay, thank you Dr. Phil and Oprah,” Joey said. “When I’m ready for a rousing chorus of ‘Kumbaya,’ I’ll let you guys know.”

“Don’t be so snide,” I said. “We love you. And you scared the living shit out of us for years. So if we seem to be watching over you like a couple of old aunties, cut us some slack.”

Joey sighed. “Fine. But cut me some slack too. I’m going to rehab, doing exactly what I need to do. Don’t worry so much.”

Did Joey have any idea how hard that was after what we’d been through? The first time she disappeared, we filed a missing person’s report, and then Mom, Dad, Clare, and I huddled together, crying, worried that she’d turn up dead. We didn’t sleep, we didn’t eat, and when we finally found her, strung out in Oregon with some junkie friend, I didn’t know whether to weep with joy that she was still alive or strangle her till she was dead.

Clare suggested we all go out for lunch and Joey looked at her watch.

“I have to pass,” she said. “There’s someplace I need to be.”

“Again?” I said.

Joey snickered and patted me on the noggin. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it. I’ll catch up with you guys soon.” And then she was gone.

Saturday was a glorious summer day, the atmosphere uncharacteristically clear for that time of year. No haze hovered between the heavens and the earth. It was just the white sun, the blue sky, and us fun-starved mortals. Leo and I decided it was a perfect beach day, and he offered to bring the beer if I brought a picnic lunch. So that afternoon found us side by side on a blanket, propped up on our elbows as we chatted from behind sunglasses, getting to know one another.

Since this was Jones Beach on a Saturday in early July, it was the farthest thing from a romantic scene of two lone lovers by the surf. We had little more than the seven square feet of space my blanket took up on the sand. Surrounding us were families with babies and children, groups of teenagers, grandmothers, grandfathers, and extended families from every known ethnic group and then some. As Leo told me about himself, a round, hairy-backed man with a toddler on his shoulders walked by our blanket toward the water.

“Where was I?” Leo asked me.

“College.”

“Oh, right.” He went on to explain that he had left Oneonta a few credits short of his bachelor’s degree because a friend
of his was making tons of money working as a stockbroker and convinced him to take the exams required to become a “registered rep.” So at twenty-one he was wearing a suit and working for one of those boiler rooms on Long Island, selling false promises to people who often couldn’t afford to take the losses. The place was a snake pit, he said, but he got so caught up in the flow of money he very nearly lost his moral compass. Then one day, when it got impossible to lie to himself about what his company was really up to, he got in a fight with his boss over refusing to sell a stock that was sure to tank after they finished with it. He walked out and never went back.

“Best thing I ever did,” he said. “Couple of months later the Feds shut the place down and two of the guys I worked with were indicted for stock fraud.”

“So how did you go from a stockbroker to construction? Seems like an odd transition.”

“Wasn’t a straight line,” he said. “After I left Parker Jameson, I sold cars and then mortgages and finally real estate. From there I got involved with this other guy buying handyman specials, fixing them up and flipping them for a profit.” A brazen seagull landed a few feet from our blanket and walked toward us. “This what you’re looking for?” Leo said as he tossed it a crust of bread. He turned to me. “What was I saying?”

“Handyman specials.”

“Right. My father was a contractor, so it felt pretty natural. Still, I had to make a lot of mistakes before I knew what I was doing.”

I turned onto my side to face him. He wore bright orange trunks with a Hawaiian print, and his skin was tan and smooth. A suggestive line of dark hair ran up his belly from the top of his bathing suit. His body was long and lean—and maybe a little too skinny—but I wanted to touch him. I propped my head on my elbow instead.

“Do you like it?”

“What?” He was looking at the ocean and seemed distracted by the shrieks of children jumping the waves.

“Your job,” I said. “You like it?”

“It’s cool doing something where you get to see a finished product when you’re done, something you’re actually responsible for.”

“Interesting.” I sat up and squeezed a puddle of sunscreen onto my hand, which I rubbed onto my chest and shoulders. I glanced over to see if he was watching. He wasn’t. I followed his line of sight and realized he was looking at a sailboat in the distance. I looked down at my chest and back at the horizon. Hey, I wanted to say, I’ve got breasts here.

I cleared my throat. “I’ve had a few different jobs where I got to create a finished product, but it never lit me on fire. I guess I was in the wrong field.”

“And the teaching thing?” he said.

I closed my eyes and pictured a classroom. I saw myself walking around the room as the children worked on something I had just taught. I’d stop to offer gentle comments here and there. A small face would look up at me with an expression that said, “Is this right?” The guilelessness of the look, the complete trust in my guidance, touched me in such a raw spot it caused a lump to swell in my throat.

“The teaching thing feels right,” I said.

“How’d you come to it?”

I told Leo that after catching my ex cheating, it shook the foolishness right out of me.

He sat up and rested his elbows on his knees. His flat nose was already turning red. “Was that rough? The divorce, I mean.”

“Yes and no. I think deep down I knew that marrying Jonathan was a mistake, but I kept telling myself I could make it
work, that he was an artist and I needed to accept him for who he was. But it meant wrapping my life around someone who was exhaustingly intense and self-absorbed.”

Leo watched as a beach ball landed a foot from our blanket. He picked it up and tossed it back to a small girl in a tie-dyed bathing suit who stood beside us, arms outstretched.

He turned back to me. “What were we talking about?”

Oh God. I’d been droning on. “Forget it,” I said. “I just broke the cardinal rule of the first date. You’re not supposed to talk about your ex.”

“I don’t believe in rules,” Leo said.

“I’ll bet you don’t,” I said. “You want to go for a swim?”

The water felt like ice against my flesh, and I tiptoed in carefully, my elbows out so I could keep my arms dry as long as possible. Leo dove right into a wave and swam several few feet out.

“C’mon!” he called.

“Give me a minute!”

Even as a child I needed to get used to the water slowly. The cold of it felt like torture, and I had to deal with it inch by excruciating inch, until I summoned the courage to bend my knees and let my body submerge up to my shoulders.

I looked toward Leo and saw a high wave between us. I swam toward it as fast as I could so I could get over it before it crashed. I just made it.

“Water feels great!” Leo said, taking my hand and leading me farther out.

Though we were nearly fifty feet past the shoreline, the undertow pulled out and we were able to stand with our heads above water. We jumped together as a gentle swell rose and passed. A larger one rolled in and flooded beneath us as we floated. It was lovely being out this deep, past the point where the waves broke, just enjoying the rhythm of the tide as it
pushed and pulled, with the sounds of the other beachgoers blending into the background, enveloped by the ocean’s steady song.

As a kid, I coveted being out this deep. I remembered eyeing the swimmers beyond the whitecaps, envious of how relaxed they seemed, enjoying the peaceful rolls of the waves without fear of being pummeled.

Sometimes, when the dads were at work, we would go to the beach with the Waxmans, and Kenny’s mom always brought Lydia along so she could watch us kids while she and my mom “coffee klatched,” as she called it. One particular day, I was in the ocean with Kenny and Clare while Lydia played with little Joey at the water’s edge, making footprints in the wet sand and then watching as the water rolled in and erased their impressions.

The three of us bigger kids were laughing and jumping the waves. Occasionally they were big enough to knock us down, especially if we were talking and not paying attention. Clare and Kenny seemed to take it in better humor than I did. I hated the surprise of finding myself submerged and then breaking the surface with a stinging pain in my nose. But I stuck with it, continuing to watch the swimmers farther out, who floated gently over the massive swells of the deeper water.

“You ever been out that deep?” I asked Kenny, as I pointed.

“Sure,” he said. “Haven’t you?”

I shook my head.

“Never?” he asked.

“We’re not allowed,” Clare said. “It’s too far.”

Kenny glanced over his shoulder at Lydia playing with Joey, and then at our moms on their beach chairs. “No one’s watching,” he said.

I looked at Clare, hoping she would put her foot down and
say something like,
We’re already out too far
, but she just shrugged and said, “Let’s go.”

The two of them swam over the top of a wave while I treaded, unsure of whether to continue or retreat. I wanted so badly to be out there, but felt a terrible danger in passing the point where the tallest waves broke at their fiercest. I watched as just such a monster loomed over Kenny and Clare. But they dove straight inside it, their heads bobbing to surface beyond the foam once the whitecap broke.

“C’mon!” Clare called.

I couldn’t see her expression, but I could hear in her voice that she was smiling, and that was what did it. I couldn’t bear missing out on the fun.

I swam toward them using the undertow, watching as a wall of water approached them like a rolling mountain. It lifted them up higher and higher, and I heard Clare’s faint laugh rising. As it approached me, morphing from a gentle giant to a violent white-capped beast, I knew what I was supposed to do—swim right through the middle of it. But I panicked at the thought of being beneath all that water, and I tried to swim over it, to beat the wave before it fully crested, even though it was already breaking as I approached. And then it happened. I was tossed under water with a terrible slam. Dazed, with my eyes shut tight in terror, I swam as hard as I could back to the surface. I could barely hold my breath; the wave had taken me by surprise, so I’d had no chance to fill my lungs. I kicked hard, anticipating the sweet moment where I’d break the surface and gasp in a huge gulp of air. I reached out with my hands like a blind person, knowing I’d be free of the water any second. Then a shock and a moment of incomprehension as I hit something hard. It was the ocean floor! I swam in the wrong direction.

A confused panic seized me and I must have opened my
mouth to breathe, because my lungs filled with water. A special kind of sickness came over me, like a sleepiness I could accept or reject. And then, before I got a chance to decide to fight or not, some unseen force grabbed me and pulled me up, up until at last I felt sweet air. I took a big, frantic gulp of it into my lungs, and as I coughed out water to replace it with oxygen, I heard the female voice of my rescuer.

“You’re okay, dear girl.”

It was Lydia.

I clung to her as she carried me back to my mother, my little bird heart beating fast against my ribcage. I felt Lydia’s chest rise and fall in steady rhythm, like the sway of the ocean, and I knew I was indeed okay. It didn’t occur to me then that she had saved my life. And perhaps she hadn’t, perhaps I would have made it to the surface on my own, or some other swimmer would have yanked me out. But I think at that moment I understood for the first time how I could love someone I wasn’t related to.

By the time Leo and I headed back from the beach it was early evening, and I was enjoying his company enough to want to prolong the date. But this was exactly the kind of situation that strained my social skills. We were both sandy, salty, and sweaty, and if I suggested dinner, it would mean stopping to shower at my house or his, and I just couldn’t picture how that would play out, and whether or not he would assume it was a come on. I hadn’t yet made the decision about whether I wanted to take this relationship to the next step. That was the point of spending more time with him—to decide if I liked him enough to sleep with him.

As we headed north from the shore in Leo’s van, I wondered how my sisters would handle the situation. Actually, I wondered how
Clare
would handle it. Joey’s approach was
easy to imagine—she’d rip her clothes off and jump him. But Clare? I tried to channel her charm, picturing her sitting next to this dark, winsome guy. Most likely she’d flirt, dropping subtle hints that she wasn’t quite ready to say good-bye. I opened my window. Leo had the radio on, drumming to the beat on his steering wheel.

“It’s still so beautiful out,” I finally said.

“Supposed to rain tomorrow.”

So much for that approach. I put my hand on my stomach. “Beach makes me hungry.”

“I’m still full from the beer.”

Either I was really bad at this or Leo just wasn’t interested. I decided I needed to be more direct.

“I had fun today,” I said.

He glanced over at me. “Me, too,” he said. Then he put his hand on my knee.

Okay, now what? I wished I had some sort of pocket translation dictionary for exactly what this kind of thing meant. I understood that he was attracted to me. That much was clear. But was this a come on, or just a statement? If I didn’t react, would he take it as a rejection? If I did react, would he take it as a green light to his overture?

WWCD,
I thought.
What Would Clare Do
?

“I didn’t think we’d have much in common,” I said, “but we do.” There. A conversation starter. Not bad.

“Such as?” His right hand stayed on my knee, his left on the steering wheel.

“We both started out in careers that were wrong for us, and made a lot of misguided choices before winding up where we belong.”

He nodded, thoughtfully. “Only, I think you have more of a commitment to yours. I’m still not sure if I’ll stay in construction or wind up someplace else entirely. Maybe I don’t have
one
path, you know? I’m always thinking about what’s next.” He laughed. “I think I’m kind of ADD, to tell you the truth.”

Ah, that seemed to fit with everything he’d said. And maybe it should have scared me off, but I thought that a distractible guy, always looking for a diversion, might be exactly what I needed right now.

He took his hand off my knee to change lanes, and then left it on the steering wheel. Maybe it was because the idea of any type of commitment was just taken off the table, but I was feeling more at ease, and I figured the timing was right to ask him if he wanted to have dinner together.

“What’s on your agenda for tonight?” I asked.

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” he said, “but I didn’t know how long a date you’d be up for.”

Why on earth didn’t he know that I was up for a longer date? I’d been giving him every signal I could think of. I was starting to wonder if maybe it was him and not me.

“I still have some energy left in me, Leo.”