The Whole Golden World (13 page)

20

R
ain fiddled with the stem of her wineglass and threw a forced smile toward the laughing Alessia, who was running her hand over the smooth arc of her belly.

Candlelight washed over the room and symphonic versions of Christmas carols wafted through the air, courtesy of Greg's pricey sound system. A cousin teased Alessia—who was sitting cross-legged in front of the tree, handing out gifts—that next year there would be no candles, and everything would be locked down and babyproofed.

“No ornaments on the bottom branches of the tree, either!” another cousin crowed. Alessia rolled her eyes but laughed along.

Rain tried to remember which cousin that was. TJ and Greg were the only two children in their family, but their uncles and aunts all had many kids, resulting in many cousins, who were all quite a bit older, and thus all their older kids of the next generation were downstairs, tearing apart the rec room and playing pool and Wii and who knows what else.

Leaving the adults to drink their civilized wine on their civilized couches amid their civilized music.

It all made Rain want to crush her wineglass in her fist.

She took a fake sip of her wine. She'd at first intended to decline any alcohol, on her third treatment cycle now, not wanting even the slightest chance of contaminating any burgeoning life. But she knew the speculation and teasing—good-natured or not—would be unbearable.

So she decided to accept a glass. At intervals she found reasons to wander into the kitchen and spill some down the sink.

There was another gift. Among the adults, they'd all drawn names. The next gift was for Alessia, from the one who had spoken moments ago. Tammy, that was it. Her name was Tammy.

A combined gasp and “aww” erupted from the crowd as Alessia unwrapped a baby dress covered with little red strawberries. She'd just learned they were having a girl.

Alessia trilled, waggling the dress at Rain, “I can't wait to be able to pass this on to you!” The “you” was drawn out and singsongy.

Rain felt herself growing hot under her sweater. Several pairs of expectant, wide eyes turned toward her.

Rain faked a laugh, waved her hand in a gesture of, “oh you're too much.” She did sip her wine for real this time, enjoying the way the smooth pinot noir rolled over her tongue. “Don't go starting rumors. No buns in this oven.”

TJ caught her gaze from where he'd been trapped across the room in a discussion about the corrupt college bowl system. He crossed his eyes at her quickly, so no one else would see, and—Christmas miracle!—she felt a smile, a real genuine smile, unfold.

They could share so much through a single glance. That one funny face said to her,
I'm sorry my family is being unbearable. Here, let me cheer you up by doing something stupid
.

She smiled back at him from behind her glass, to say,
Thank you. I needed that
.

Rain set down her glass carefully before she was tempted to suck the whole thing down immediately.

She pasted on a joyous holiday smile, and let her mind wander, as she shifted her waistband so it no longer pinched her bruised injection sites.

She was long past mourning the unnatural process required to get her a baby, though she did wonder what it would be like to just wake up one day pregnant. Late period, pregnancy test, happy announcements. She imagined Alessia holding the pregnancy test and being swept into her husband's arms. Must be nice.

Rain bit her lip. She was turning into her husband, letting her bitterness and envy overtake her. TJ could never be happy for his brother, no matter now nice Greg was to him, and in fact when he was particularly nice, it was worse yet, because TJ believed Greg was patronizing him.

TJ had never been able to explain the source of the one-sided animosity. He had never revealed some great conflict in their youth, or even any favoritism as they were raised, though he certainly noticed it now that Greg was a well-to-do doctor.

Alessia herself had been so supportive and kind when Rain finally did confide in her after the first failed cycle. She really did want Rain to have that pretty strawberry dress, to share in her joy and raise cousins together.

The last present under the tree was for Rain.

She had tuned out of all sounds in the room and so had to shake herself awake, nearly, when a gift was being handed up to her.

This one was from TJ's mother. Rain pulled on the artful forest green ribbon around the cream-colored package—decked out with stylized Christmas trees—and wondered if her mother-in-law had engineered the name draw. Something about the smile on her face . . .

It was a DVD, she could tell by the size and shape. When she peeled the wrapping back, she gasped before she could stop herself.

On the cover, a round pregnant woman in a leotard was in
trikonasana
.

Mrs. Hill cried in her delighted, girlish manner, “It's a prenatal yoga DVD! We just know this year is going to bring blessings for you and TJ. We just know it.”

Rain's hands would have been shaking, but she was gripping the DVD firmly to stop them from doing so. Her throat was suddenly dry, and as she swallowed, she found her breath shallow and her words simply gone.

TJ cleared his throat and noted drily, “No pressure or anything.”

“No!” protested his mother, as her hand flew to her throat. “No pressure! I just know that you're really hoping, really trying . . . We're just all really pulling for you.”

Rain swallowed again. Why was she so dry? A ringing started up in her ears threatening to drown out her words. Had TJ told them about the treatments? Did they all know she'd had her legs up in stirrups with a syringe squirting his sperm into her under the bright lights of a doctor's office?

“Thank you,” she croaked out, her voice in a whisper, glancing up at Alessia who was shaking her head, sending Rain a heartbreaking look of pity and mouthing
I didn't tell them
. “I appreciate the support.”

TJ crossed the room to her then and held out a hand to her. She took it and allowed herself to be led from the room, upstairs. She felt them all staring holes in her back, and she knew the moment they were out of earshot, the gossip would start.

TJ led her to a guest room, one of several in this enormous house that was home to just two people.

He settled her on the edge of a four-poster bed made up in cornflower blue and indigo and returned to join her after closing the door.

“How did she know?” was the first thing Rain said. “I thought we weren't telling them.”

TJ shifted on the edge of the bed. “I didn't mean to. Just that when Greg called about Christmas dinner and stuff, we got talking about the baby and he started asking questions about when we were gonna have kids. I was trying to dodge, but he was doing his lecturing voice about how we shouldn't wait forever, and fertility rates declining blah blah. You know, his ‘I'm a doctor so I'm smarter than you' routine and I finally snapped that we're seeing Dr. Gould. So then he got all excited because he knows her and says her success rate is ‘phenomenal.' I didn't tell you because you've seemed so touchy about this lately, I didn't think you wanted to hear it.”

“I would have liked a heads-up, so I didn't walk into a sucker punch like that in front of everyone, on Christmas.”

“I'll talk to Mom, tell her she shouldn't have done that.”

Rain held up a hand. “No. Don't. I don't want to make her feel bad, and it's already done, anyway. I guess everyone knows now.”

“I'm sorry, babe. Really.”

She traced a pattern in the bedspread with her finger. It had been ages since she'd done her nails. They were ragged and uneven. She used to paint her fingers and toes all the time, given that her bare feet were always on display at work.

“Well, they are your family, and if you want to tell them about our lives, that's fine. Just clue me in.”

TJ pulled her in for a hug and she let herself relax into it, trying to feel what she used to, especially since he was being so much more attentive and kind. Maybe seeing Alessia grow bigger renewed his genuine desire to be a father, for real, instead of just to compete with his brother. Stranger things have happened.

“You want to go home?” he asked into her hair.

“No,” she said with a sigh. “No, just go on down ahead of me and give me a minute to collect myself. And hide that stupid DVD somewhere. I don't want to look at it.”

“You got it,” he said, and kissed her cheek.

On the way out, his phone chimed.

“Who's texting you on Christmas Day?” Rain asked, perplexed. His whole family was here, anyway, unless they were texting him from downstairs to hurry up.

He frowned at the screen. “Doesn't make any sense to me. Must be a wrong number. Take as much time as you need. I'll save you some ham.”

Rain smiled weakly, and as he closed the door, she curled up on top of the quilt. As if she could eat anything now.

 

In a few minutes Rain had pulled herself together enough to descend the stairs back into the fray.

As she reached the main floor, she saw several heads turn toward her, then turn immediately away. They'd been instructed not to stare, she could imagine. Not to make her feel uncomfortable.

Too late for that.

Rain fake smiled when she happened to meet the gaze of the various cousins. They had started eating, and her spot was conspicuously empty. She squeezed TJ's shoulder as she came around to her chair, which he then jumped up to pull out for her, a ridiculously chivalrous gesture she'd never seen him deploy, even at the fanciest of restaurants.

Conversation had stalled, and they were all trying not to stare at her.

She reached for her water glass and satisfied everyone's curiosity. “We'll find out next month if our treatment cycle was successful. Thank you for your concern, everyone. Now, please let's talk about something other than my uterus.”

Everyone laughed, suddenly, as if all their mirth had been contained in a boiling pot and the lid had just flown off. Some of the cousins' kids down at the end of the table looked both confused and completely grossed out. Most likely they had missed the “Don't make Rain feel weird” speech and didn't know, which suited her fine.

Conversation finally drifted to politics—the Republican primary made for some lively conversation, just on the right side of proper and civil—college bowl games, and exploits of some of the younger kids in the extended family. Cousin Will's kid Nicky had a new fascination with the word
sexy,
which he had picked up somewhere. Everyone roared with laughter when Will related how his six-year-old said at Sunday dinner when their pastor was visiting, “Please pass the sexy carrots.”

Rain was starting to get her equilibrium back. This was why she loved TJ's family. Over at Angie and Ricky's house the day before, dinner had taken place at 6
P.M.
instead of the advertised 2
P.M
. because Angie had forgotten to properly thaw the bird, and most of the time they were treated to an off-again, on-again argument about some fight her parents had at their Walmart jobs resulting in a talking-to from their boss. They'd drop it, but then when conversation sagged an hour later, Angie would bring it up again as if they'd never stopped.

All the while, Fawn was groaning about Brock teething so much he was crying all the time, resulting in Rain searching the Internet for suggestions as Brock wailed himself into red-faced fury. Stone was half asleep for most of the day, texting and ignoring the rest of the family.

Such a refreshing contrast between that chaos and the easy camaraderie at this table.

When the pie was served and Greg remarked he'd like some of that “sexy apple,” the table roared again with hilarity.

Rain laughed, too, genuinely laughed, and in a lately-too-rare feeling of spontaneous affection, she put her hand on TJ's thigh.

His phone buzzed in his pocket under her hand, and she gasped like something bit her. “What the heck? Is someone still bugging you today?”

TJ frowned. “I'd better go call them back and tell them they have the wrong number.”

“Call them? Can't you just text them back and tell them to stop it? You could just shut your phone off.”

But TJ was already walking away, throwing her a confused shrug over his shoulder.

People texting on Christmas. Rain shook her head and took a sip of her water. Couldn't people ever just put their phones away to enjoy a holiday?

She looked back over her shoulder to see TJ walk out to the three-season porch and close the door behind him. She could see him in silhouette through the door and watched him talk for far longer than seemed necessary for a simple wrong number.

21

D
inah swept the floor of the Den around the last two customers, two teenagers holding hands and nuzzling on the couch in the rear of the shop, near the now-cold gas fireplace.

Janine was stacking chairs on top of the tables, and they'd already shut off the music.

Dinah finally leaned on her broom in front of the couple and announced, “Okay, closing time. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.”

The boy looked up, and Dinah almost jumped back. It was that curly-haired scary kid from back in September who'd grabbed his girlfriend's wrist. Justin something. This wasn't the same girl; this was a dishwater blonde whose hair was up in a messy ponytail, and she wore an
ARBOR VALLEY CHEER
shirt.

Dinah tried to act like she wasn't startled by him, but she felt her grip tightening on the broom handle. She'd gone upstairs to take a call; he must have come in then. She would have ordered him to leave. Janine must have forgotten all about that. Or she just didn't care.

He smirked at her and tipped an invisible hat. “Sure thing,” he said. As he stood, he kicked over the coffee table in front of the couch.

“Oops. So clumsy of me.”

The girl shrieked a giggle and clung to his arm. He refused to hurry his way out, just loping along, drawing out the moment. He knocked over a chair just before walking out the door to a fresh gale of giggles from his girl.

As the door clicked closed, Dinah whirled on Janine. “Why did you let him in here?”

“I didn't know we had a banned kids' list.”

“We do. It's a list of one. Him.”

“Sorry. I didn't realize.” Janine picked up the chair that had fallen. “No harm done here,” she said, inspecting the chair and the wood floor. “What's the matter with you?”

“You mean other than being furious that this kid comes in here and acts like that to me?”

“That's just it. The minute that coffee table went over I thought you were going to tear his head off. And then call the cops. But you just stood there.”

Dinah leaned on her broom handle. That would have been in character. She shrugged, propped the broom in a corner, and righted the table. It had a new scratch, but she'd purchased it from an antique store because she liked how it was artfully distressed in the first place.

She resumed sweeping. “Maybe I'm just tired of riding into battle all the time when nothing ever changes anyway. I mean, I turn around and instead of an army behind me, I'm all by myself. No one else cares, and I end up looking like a moron, and usually with a new mortal enemy.”

“Will wonders never cease,” Janine observed.

“Yeah, well. I mean, I tore into the principal for suspending Jared for pot smoking when he swore up and down to me he hadn't done it. I believed him.”

“Bless your heart,” Janine said, moving behind the counter to start cleaning the coffee pots.

“Don't make me feel worse. It was plausible. Only to have him confess to me that he really had taken a few puffs.”

“Did you break out the rubber hose to get that confession?”

Dinah suddenly felt so bone tired she wanted to curl up on the couch and sleep there all night, but the floor was still covered with crumbs, so she kept sweeping. “No. He heard his dad and me fighting about it again so he came clean to me. He said he couldn't stand to hear me defending him to Joe when he'd lied to me. I felt like I'd been punched in the stomach.”

“Least he told you.”

“Yeah. Eventually. Look, you know I don't try to be a bitch, right? It's not like I set out to be everybody's enemy number one.”

“You're not my enemy number one. You're probably, like, fourth or fifth.”

“Gee, thanks. I'm just saying that no one ever listened to me when I tried to be nice. You've said it yourself when you've filled in for me and tried to get the part-timers to shape up. They tune you out unless you go all General Patton on them. Running your own business is not accomplished with sweet-talking. And parenting difficult kids, yeesh. You've gotta gird your loins for those fights.”

“Gird your loins? From what you've told me, sounds like the other people need to do the girding.”

“Mutual girding. Girding all around. God, I'm tired. I sound like I'm drunk. But I don't like it is what I'm trying to say. I don't wake up every day setting out to make everyone hate me.”

“I don't hate you. You don't pay me enough to keeping working here if I hated you.”

Dinah stuck her tongue out at Janine. She needed to hire more people with a sense of humor. She should put that in a classified ad.

Dinah put the broom back in the closet and started counting the cash drawer out. The receipts were down again for the month, but at least the last two weeks of 2011 had finished strong. Maybe 2012 would improve. Maybe she and Joe would start speaking again to each other about something other than repairing the snowblower and budgeting for Morgan's tuition.

She'd apologized to him after Jared's confession and called Principal Jackson to apologize to him, too, which tasted like wet sand in her mouth to have to admit he'd been right about her son. To his credit, he was gracious about it. “Perfectly natural impulse,” he called her defensiveness, and he assured her he still thought well of Jared, who was going through the natural adolescent boundary testing.

Somehow, his kindness made her feel that much worse.

Joe was somewhat less forgiving. He restrained himself with effort from saying what was scrawled all over his face, posture, and body language. He was a living, breathing, three-dimensional “I told you so.”

What he'd actually said was, “I know you meant well.”

And then he'd turned on the TV and was silent the rest of the night.

“Got any plans for tonight?” Janine asked. “Gonna ring in the new year somewhere?”

Dinah sighed. “No. Just make some popcorn balls and watch the ball drop on TV. Morgan is staying over at a friend's house, but the twins are home. I keep trying to rally them for board games or something, but they just want to play Xbox all night.”

“Sounds thrilling.”

“You?”

“I'm going out with my boyfriend to this party at Amici's. Got a sparkly dress, tacky heels, you know the drill.”

“I used to know it, anyway. Have fun, be safe. Call a cab.”

“Yes, Dinah,” Janine said through a sigh. “I will.”

“All right, scoot on out of here. I'll finish up. Happy New Year.”

Janine was gone inside of two minutes, off to go don her sparkly dress.

Dinah double-checked the locked front door, shut off all the lights, and locked the safe.

Before leaving, though, she sat back down at one of the cushioned chairs near the front of the café.

The parking lot lights filtered in through the windows and set some of the tables in a glow. It looked like the set of a play. Any moment an actor would appear in a spotlight to deliver a tender monologue.

Dinah mentally rearranged the furniture to make way for the karaoke machine in the corner. The microphone for the sensitive songwriter-guitarist, the earnest poet. The Planning Commission would be meeting soon to consider final approval of her request, and once she had that finally in hand, she'd be able to turn around the downward trend.

Things were yet going to pick up.
Roll on 2012,
she thought.
Let's do this.

 

Dinah walked into her house wanting to scrunch her eyes shut. Lately, each time she crossed the threshold, she was greeted by some horrid disaster or a fight, or Joe's deep frown.

It was so . . . quiet.

“Boys? Joe?”

“Down here,” she heard Joe call.

She walked to the downstairs den with a hesitant step, as if she were picking her way across thin ice.

Joe was by himself in the den. A bottle of Korbel was in a mixing bowl, apparently a quasi–ice bucket.

“Where are the twins?”

“I sent them to my sister's. They haven't seen their cousins in a while.”

“You . . . What?”

Joe gave her a sideways smile. “You heard me. I sent them to my sister's. When was the last time we were home alone together?”

His New York was showing again: togeth-uh.

“Did they . . . Did they want to go? Were they glad?”

“Geez, Dinah. They whined a little bit, but they'll get over it. She has video games, too, and they like their cousin Jeff.”

“They don't like Lizzie.”

“Lizzie won't bother them. C'mere, sit down. They'll be fine with their aunt Sara and uncle John. She's gonna let them stay up until midnight and watch movies, and we'll pick them up tomorrow morning.”

Dinah drifted over to the couch and sat gingerly next to Joe. Why wasn't she thrilled? When the kids were younger, she would have given her left tit to have all night with the house to themselves.

She pushed away her imagined doomsday scenarios: the twins breaking into the liquor cabinet while their aunt and uncle went to sleep, or slipping out of the house just for the thrill of escape, then getting hit by a car, or freezing to death in the snow.

Joe popped the cork and startled himself, then he laughed, flushing a little pink with embarrassment. Dinah found that endearing, that after all these years he could be embarrassed about anything in front of his broken-down middle-aged wife.

She smiled gamely and held up her glass as he poured the champagne too fast and it fizzed nearly over the top.

She was trying to have fun. Yet . . . her kids would be gone all night, and she hadn't known that was going to happen. With Morgan she'd given her a hug and an “I love you” before she went to work, knowing she'd have gone to her party by the time Dinah got home.

The last thing she'd said to the boys was something like, “Don't forget to put your laundry away.”

“Are you in there, Dinah?”

“Yeah, sorry. I'm just distracted wondering what the boys are up to.”

Annoyance flashed across Joe's face, and he struggled to recover. “They're fine. Happy New Year, baby.” He clinked her glass.

She raised the glass and felt the bubbles pop against her nose and smiled at her husband, trying hard to stay in the present, with him on the couch, instead of where her heart was—with her kids, wondering if they were all okay.

 

Dinah woke with a start. Her heart pounded and she flailed around in a short panic before she realized she was on the couch, alone. She was wrapped in a blanket. The taste of cheap champagne plastered her tongue. The TV was off. She remembered sitting with Joe and making pleasant small talk about the New Year's Rocking Eve guests and how old Dick Clark was getting, and he had poured her another glass—or two?—and she remembered stretching out, pleasantly relaxed.

She blinked until she was able to focus on the digital clock on their old VCR. 1:30
A.M
. She'd slept through New Year's.

She'd done this any number of times in the past. They weren't big on whooping it up, especially after the kids were born, and with the boys being preemie and clinging to life at first, everything fun seemed trivial to the point of insult. It took her a long time to let herself enjoy a movie, even. She just wasn't a party person anymore.

This was different, though. Joe had gone out of his way to set up a romantic evening. There would be fallout.

She crept up the stairs in search of him and found him snoring in their bed. Well, why shouldn't he go to sleep? What did she expect, he'd be naked amid strewn rose petals?

Dinah frowned. This was going to be her fault. He was going to be put out and upset, but he's the one who sprang this on her and gave her champagne when she was already tired. If she'd known, she would have tried to conserve some energy, in fact she'd have gotten someone to fill in for her at the Den . . . Or suggested another night when she would be less busy working all that day.

She could almost hear him grousing that she was ungrateful for his gesture. All she did was accidentally doze off. And he didn't even wake her. Didn't even rouse her to go to bed so she wouldn't screw up her back slouched on the sofa.

She stood there for as long as five minutes, watching him snore, frozen with indecision about climbing into bed or going back downstairs. She wished with the fervent irrationality of a child that she could spin back time, so the twins could be home where they belonged and for all four of them to have played some cards and eaten popcorn balls and gone to bed at 12:01. What was so wrong with that plan, anyway?

A glow from the hallway light cast Joe and their bedroom in a dark gray. She could make out his features well enough, and at this distance, or maybe it was her half-sleeping brain and the champagne conspiring, he looked like she remembered him when they first met. No worry lines, no middle-aged paunch—though slender was never a word anyone would have used to describe Joe Monetti.

She'd been hired to wait tables in his uncle's pizza joint, though most of the time she was on the phone taking orders, or cleaning up. The orders weren't complicated to take, and the actual delivery of the pie and the Pepsi to the table didn't take so much time. It was a good job for a girl going to junior college and trying to decide how to spend the rest of her long, unfocused life. No booze at Monetti's, so the crowd was pretty tame. Mostly neighborhood families and the kids not old enough or naughty enough to sneak off and get drunk.

Joe came home from college and his family slapped the obvious moniker Joe College on him the minute he walked into Monetti's. Dinah heard it so often that when someone asked for Joe Monetti on the phone, she first replied, “You mean Joe College?” Joe made the pizzas and sometimes delivered them, and on slow days he and Dinah would sit at the counter stools like customers, she with her Keds swinging loose instead of braced on the stool, always pushing stray pieces of her hair behind her ear because she never took the time to make a nice smooth ponytail. He would always be turned backward on the stool, facing the restaurant, elbows on the counter. She'd sip her Pepsi and listen to him tell college stories, or famous family stories about the Monettis' first arrival in New York City two generations before.