Seeing Jack so many days after our intimate dinner date gone wrong was as uncomfortable as putting my size-nine feet in size-six shoes. He was charming as always, of course, ready to pull out my chair, ask after my health and smile at my feeble jokes. But there was a vaporous yet impenetrable wall between us that only I seemed to sense, a wall made of memories, of the joy and the grief Jack had experienced with Emily, of all the things I would never ask Jack to put down in order be with me.
When he’s ready, I’d been telling myself. I knew I shouldn’t fool myself with even that, any longer.
Linda had invited Pete and Maggie to dinner, as well. “The more the merrier,” she’d said, and I was grateful for their presence.
“Ben’s going to camp next summer,” Jack announced over dessert. “He’ll be in the pilot for the JA program. It’s going to be outstanding.”
He turned to me. “He’s been in a growth spurt, Quinn. He ate me out of house and home for three weeks and now he’s taking off like a weed. Eat, grow, eat, grow. That’s how it works with Ben.”
“I miss him. I’m glad he’s in school and doing well, but I do miss him.” How much more stilted could this conversation get?
“He misses you, too. You should stop by and say hello sometime.”
And run into you again? That’s like taking a bandage off one hair at a time. No thanks.
“I’ll call him.”
“He’d like that.” Something flickered in Jack’s eyes.
Disappointment? Hardly. Relief.
Then unexpectedly, he added under his breath, “I missed you, too.”
Unfortunately, Jack left the party first without offering to walk me to my car.
As I was leaving, Linda backed me into a small powder room just off their foyer and demanded, “What happened? Where’d the magnetic pull between you two go? You’re acting like strangers.”
A rap on the front door forced Linda and I to spill out of the powder room.
The front door opened. “Linda, I forgot my jacket in the dining room.” Jack looked as if there was something he wanted to say but before he could, Maggie breezed in from the other room.
“Oh, good, you haven’t left yet,” she said to Jack. “You mentioned that you’d never been on a studio set. Why don’t you come tomorrow? Quinn is interviewing me.”
“Thanks, Maggie, but I have appointments all day tomorrow. I’m sorry.”
He glanced at me and looked away. “Really sorry.”
“Another time, then.”
But of course Jack and I both knew another time wouldn’t come.
“Hey, Quinn, how’s it going?” Sam greeted me at the studio with his ever present smile. “Are you ready to interview Maggie about her upcoming transformation?”
Sam is the most engaging and likable guy on the studio set. He is also very handsome in his own broken and patched-back-together way. I can see why Maggie enjoyed their time together during the show.
“Not bad, considering. Sam, may I ask you something?”
“Of course. I’m an open book.”
“You are, aren’t you? What you see is what you get.”
He grinned his toothy smile. “I hope it’s more than that. What you see isn’t that great.” He held up a mug. “Coffee? You’re early and we’re late. We’ve got time.”
I took a mug and sat down out of everyone’s way in a darkened corner of the room by a large curtain. “How do you do it? Everybody loves you. Every woman on the set would like to take you home and cook you dinner.”
“Is that an invitation?” He leaned back in his own chair and crossed his legs at his ankles. “I don’t ‘do’ anything, Quinn. I’m just me. Simple, steady, ugly me.”
“You aren’t ugly!”
“Have you looked at me lately? My nose looks toward my left ear, my jaw shoots the other way, I’ve got a mouth full of ivories that just won’t quit and I had terrible acne as a kid. Ugly is my middle name!”
There wasn’t anything to say. He hadn’t exaggerated, yet when I look at him I see warm eyes, a smile that’s spread throughout his entire body, curly black hair, broad shoulders, a trim body and the one of the most beautiful personalities I’ve ever met.
He saw my confusion. “‘Handsome is as handsome does, Sam,’ my grandmother used to say. She told me that if the most beautiful person in the world was a bad-tempered liar, their handsomeness would only fool people for a little while. Then others would see them for what they are and they wouldn’t be so pretty, anymore.”
He took a swig of the coffee. “That bit of knowledge came in handy when I started boxing and got beat up like this. I always figured if I was handsome on the inside, it would show through, like Grandma said.”
“And it does.”
He smiled endearingly at me. “So I never bothered to get my nose fixed and I’m doing okay.” A shadow passed over his features. “That’s why it is so hard to work on this particular show.
“These women don’t get it. There’s not an ‘ugly’ one in the bunch. Look at Maggie. She’s gorgeous. I have no idea what she’s doing here.” He looked at me shyly. “I’d love to have a woman like Maggie by my side. I’d walk ten feet tall.
“You’re a Christian, aren’t you?” Sam asked abruptly. “I can tell from things you say and how you act around here. You’re just—nice.”
“That’s a lovely compliment, thank you.”
“See, I’m a Christian, too. My grandmother saw to that. She told me that God made me perfect for the purpose He had for me. I didn’t believe her for a long time, but lately I’ve realized she’s right.”
I leaned forward and felt my elbow bump into something on the other side of the curtain. When I moved again, whatever had been there was gone.
“See, here I am, happy as a clam, with a bunch of discontented women. If they looked like me, then they’d have something to be dissatisfied about! Maybe God’s trying to make a point here. You know Mandy, the blond lady you interviewed first? She is changing her mind about what she wants to have done.”
Sam’s eyes sparkled. “She said that talking to you and meeting me proved to her that looks aren’t everything. Cool, huh? I just had to wait until God put me and my ugly mug in a place where it could do some good.”
I didn’t attempt to stop Sam from calling himself ugly because he wore it as a badge of valor rather than of shame.
“I wish Maggie could hear you.”
“Hearing isn’t enough. She’s got to believe I’m telling the truth.”
Maggie. After Sam left, I peeked around the curtain to see if I’d knocked something over with my elbow and found Maggie, huddled in a corner, half-hidden by the big sheets of canvas. Tears streaked her face.
For the very first time I thought that Chrysalis could do Maggie a little good. She needed someone to powder her nose.
I knelt beside her, put my hands on her shoulders and felt her tremble.
Impulsively, I opened my cell phone and called Pete. “Can you come to the studio and pick Maggie up?”
“Didn’t she drive herself? I thought you were taping today.”
“Something has come up. Pull up at the side door. I’ll have her out there in five minutes.”
“Is she okay?”
“She will be if you get over here.” I snapped my phone shut and turned back to Maggie.
“I’m taking you out of here.”
“The interview…”
“Is off. Come on.” I pulled her to her feet and steered her toward the nearest door and made sure no one else saw us.
After I’d stuffed her, weeping again, into Pete’s car and given him instructions to take her home and stay with her until I got there, I went back into the studio. Sam and Eddie were looking worried. Frank flapped his arms like a big black raven when he realized Maggie was missing.
“The taping is off. We’ll have to try again tomorrow. Maggie isn’t up to it. I just sent her home.”
“You sent her home,” Frank blustered. “Who gave you authority to do that?”
“She’s not well, Frank. She couldn’t string two sentences together. You don’t want that on camera, do you?”
He gave a helpless little flutter with his hands. “What about tomorrow?”
“We have other things we can do if she’s not able,” Sam said.
Frank started to protest but closed his mouth again. Sam was the go-to guy in this operation. If Sam could work it out, things would be okay. “You’d better go look after Maggie.”
By the time I got home, Maggie was in the shower and Pete was striding back and forth across the floor. Dash weaved in and out around him as Pete paced, tripping him up with every other step.
“What went on over there? I’m going to call Eddie and—”
“No need. Eddie and Frank didn’t have anything to do with this.”
“What then?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. I found her curled up in a ball, sobbing like a baby, so I called you and got her out of there. I told them she wasn’t up to the interview and walked out.”
“She shouldn’t be doing this,” Pete muttered. “She’s probably come to that conclusion herself. She told me that the plastic surgeons she consulted with won’t have anything to do with her.”
“Good. It restores my faith in medicine. But that shouldn’t make her fall apart like this.”
“What would?”
We heard a small scuffling at the door and turned to see Maggie wrapped in fuzzy white terry cloth from head to toe. Her eyes looked like burnt patches in her ashen face.
“I’ll tell you,” she said softly. “I’ve done something stupid. I’ve fallen in love.”
Of all the things she could have said, that was the last one I expected.
“I don’t want to be in love with this man. I shouldn’t be. It makes no sense.”
Pete and Dash flopped onto the couch. Maggie and I sat down in the chairs across from them.
“So it’s not about the show?”
Maggie passed a hand across her eyes. “The show is the single most stupid thing I could do. I just felt so hurt and awful about Randy and losing the health-club job.”
“Don’t forget the gray hair,” Pete said helpfully.
“I had to do the very dumbest thing I could in order to realize that I was being ridiculous. All this time I’ve allowed the childhood tape of my sisters’ voices tell me I wasn’t pretty enough or thin enough. They’ve grown up and gone on with their lives but I keep opening all the old wounds.”
“They were jealous kids, Maggie.”
“I had no idea how much I had internalized their hurtful words.” She looked agonized. “I’ve been living my life as if everything they said is true and it’s not…it’s not.”
“What do your sisters have to do with being in love?” Leave it to Pete to bring the conversation back into focus. “And what’s so bad about being in love?” He made a strangled sound in the back of his throat. “Unless the person you love acts like you are invisible.”
Dash, seeing that Pete was unhappy, tried to crawl into his lap.
“Who is it and why didn’t you tell us?”
“And does he know about it?”
Maggie buried her nose in the neck of her robe.
“So this mysterious guy doesn’t even know you’re attracted to him?”
“I hardly know him and he has no idea how I feel about him. It wouldn’t work…we aren’t anything alike…I never thought I could imagine myself with someone like him….” And she burst into tears. “I’m a shallow, vain, hypocritical snob!”
That sounded like the start of a very long conversation. Silently I stood up and began to make coffee.
We sat staring into the bottoms of the mugs until Maggie spoke again. “I saw Randy yesterday. I met his new girlfriend.”
Pete groaned and covered his face.
“She’s very nice. Not what I’d expected, though.”
I recalled Pete’s description of her.
“She even suggested that Randy and I take a few minutes alone to talk.” Maggie scrubbed at her hair with the towel before pulling it away, letting her dark locks fall in a fan across the white shoulders of her robe. “He apologized for hurting me.”
“As well he should.”
“Then I asked him why he broke up with me.” Her eyes started to shine with tears again. “He said he didn’t think we’d work as a couple because my looks got in the way.”
I saw red. “That’s why you thought you weren’t pretty enough? Because Randy didn’t like your looks? The man has to be blind.”
“Oh, he loves how I look. What he didn’t love was how much time I spent obsessing about myself. He said he was uncomfortable about the way I put myself down and was so focused on my appearance that it ruined our time together. His new girlfriend makes him laugh and she doesn’t care if her hair is messy or her nose is sunburned when they go out on his boat,” Maggie marveled. “She accepts herself the way she is and he does, too.
“I spent so much time trying to look like I thought he wanted me to look that I ruined the relationship we had. He was right. I was a narcissistic nincompoop. Now my confidence is shot and I can’t face the most wonderful man in the world!”
“You did face Randy,” Pete pointed out. “Kristy will barely speak to me.”
“It’s not Randy I’m worried about, anymore,” she said obliquely.
Maggie took a tissue from the box on the table nearby and blew her nose, eyes watering and looking miserable. But before she could speak, the doorbell rang.
When I opened it, I was in for another surprise. Jack Harmon stood on the other side of the door.