The Night Before(3)
It’s the way happy people talk when they want to make the rest of us feel better.
Our friend Gabe was over as well, lending advice. Gabe was the fourth lifelong compatriot in our childhood band of thieves. He lived right next door with his parents and older brother, until the brother went to military school and then enlisted in the army. Now Gabe lives in that same house where he grew up. He bought it from his mother after his father died and she moved to Florida.
It’s odd how the three of them are all still here. Right where I left them a decade ago.
Gabe got married just last year to a woman he met through work. Melissa. She was a client of his, but he never talks about that because it’s awkward and unseemly—his words. Gabe does IT forensics, sometimes for suspicious spouses like Melissa had been when they first met. He found the evidence that led to her divorce and now she’s married to Gabe.
He’s happy, but not the kind of happy that makes you talk shit about it. I imagine it will take more than a baby to get him there. Melissa was broken, and Gabe likes to fix things—people, especially. But Melissa is an outsider to Rosie and Joe, and to me now that I’ve come home. She moved here from Vermont to be with her first husband and now she’s here for Gabe. It’s difficult to see her in three dimensions.
It doesn’t help that she is tolerated here rather than welcome, though we all try to hide it. She’s tall and stick thin and that makes Rosie feel short and fat, even at five four and 130 pounds. Melissa doesn’t like how much Joe swears, her back arching every time he drops the f-bomb. Which, of course, makes Joe say it more. He managed to use it four times in one sentence last week at a barbecue. And me—well, I’m a single woman with a lifetime of stories lived with her husband. She’s too simpleminded to understand our friendship.
So, as Joe says every time she leaves and wants Gabe to follow, Fuck her. The band of thieves from Deer Hill Lane is a tough crowd.
Gabe stayed today, after Melissa left. He gave me a cheese-ball wink and said something encouraging like, Laura will eat this guy for lunch. She’s always been fierce and fearless.
I tried to smile. But the truth is, I left a great job because a man broke my heart. Not so fierce and fearless after all, am I? Not exactly Lara Croft or Jessica Jones, kicking ass and taking names. Men falling at my feet—but I have no time for them because I have to save the world.
This talk, like the ones before it, stopped before we got to the good part. To the bad things this fierce and fearless girl has done. Right here, in this town.
Mason calls out for Joe. His voice melts my heart. Rosie probably put him up to it. I can hear her—Mason—go call for Daddy! She’s enjoying a glass of wine.
Joe rolls his eyes.
“Want me to leave the bourbon?” Joe asks.
“Which one of us needs it more?” I reply.
“Good point.”
Joe takes the bourbon and leaves me with the dress and the makeup.
And the mirror.
I did not find Jonathan Fields right away. I was a novice on findlove.com and did everything wrong. The first mistake was being honest in describing myself. I said I was independent but compromising. I preferred tequila to chardonnay, scuba diving to sunbathing, sneakers to high heels. I said I didn’t know if I wanted children. Cringe.
And the worst, most colossal mistake—the pictures. They were current and unfiltered. Me on a hike with an old friend. Me playing with Mason on the front lawn. Me standing in the kitchen in a T-shirt, my mousy brown hair in a ponytail. No boobs showing, not even my poor excuse for them.
I thought they were attractive—the pictures, that is (I’m not a good judge of boobs). All of it, the entire profile, was me. The old me.
When we were just kids who ran through the woods like hooligans, thoughts of romantic love a million years away, our mother used to hold court in our kitchen. One day Rosie and I came inside undetected. I can’t recall what we needed from the house, but we stopped at the foot of the kitchen door when we overheard her say my name to Gabe’s mother, Mrs. Wallace. I was six, Rosie eight. They were drinking coffee.
I don’t know.… She was just born that way. Born with fists for hands. It’s hard to love a girl like that.
I’ve never forgotten it, that expression. Fists for hands. Or the conclusion she’d come to about my fate. Rosie pulled me away, back outside, where we were free and easy. She made a joke about it, about how our mother was always wrong about everything, anyway. Rosie was trying to protect me from words that should have been hurtful, but all I remember feeling was a sense of pride that our mother had bothered to see me at all. I had always felt invisible to her.
We never spoke of it again—about how hard it was to love me. Rosie got her hands on Joe and held on to him like the golden ring at the carousel. And I rejected everything remotely feminine, beating it all away with my fists for hands. The color pink. Smiles. Dresses.
In the race for love, she learned to walk and I’m still crawling. Though she’s never stopped trying to teach me.
I find my reflection in the tiny oval mirror and give it a look of admonishment. My brown eyes and mousy hair.
No, no, no.
Nope. No looking back. Lipstick, cherry red …
Old Laura woke up every morning to an empty mailbox on findlove.com. Not a wink or like or message. So, in spite of the worry Rosie hides behind smiles, she helped me change my profile and the new me got a date with Jonathan Fields.