I CLOSED UP EARLY. WHY NOT? THERE WERE NO MORE flowers. I called Gloria.
“I need to shop,” I said. “And I need advice.”
“My two favorite things in the world. Can I give you advice while we shop?”
“That would be best.”
“Buzz drove up the Cape this morning to fish. According to my calculations, he is absolutely stuck in traffic on Route Six about now. I’ll pick you up.”
Over the years I had wondered many times why my marriage to Mort couldn’t have been more like my friendship with Gloria. Not that I needed Mort to go shopping with me (though once or twice in the course of thirty-four years would have been nice), but I wished I could have called him when I needed advice and thought he might be willing to drop everything. Gloria, I knew, would fly back from her first European vacation if I had needed her help, and I would have done the same for her. It was an understanding between us. Mort would tell me to hold on, whatever it was could wait while he puttered through the tasks at hand. When he did show up, he never would have remembered that I had needed something from him. When I asked him again, he would tell me to hang on one second and then he would go to get a sandwich. And even when I had his attention, it would wander away from me. “Julie, look at that,” he would say as I was pouring out my heart. “Do you see that water stain on the ceiling? How long has that been there?” What happened was that over the years I just stopped asking, I stopped trying to confide. If I had a problem, I went to Gloria. If I had a little success that merited celebration, she was the one I called. If it was a failure, a fear, a questionable lump that required someone sitting with me in the doctor’s office for three hours, it was Gloria, not Mort, who was there. Gloria, I knew, would love me unconditionally, as we had loved each other when we were fourteen and there was no one else to love. She told me the truth when I asked for it and sometimes when I didn’t. When we disagreed (rarely), we did so with respect. She had seen me through Nora’s biker phase and Sandy’s would-be childhood marriage. I had seen her through her daughter Kate’s anorexia and her son Jeff’s arrest after a one-night spree of stealing radios out of cars. After all our kids were grown, she stayed with me and Mort for two months when she finally left Shelly, her first husband. Mort liked Gloria, but he groused, not about her presence in the guest room, but about our closeness.
“You’re always talking,” he said. “My God, it never stops. You would think she’d been in Tibet for twenty years instead of eight blocks away.”
But what Mort didn’t understand was that I wanted to talk. I wanted someone to hash things out with, somebody who paid attention and remembered. That was Gloria. That was not my husband.
I told her about old woman Cacciamani on our way to Saks. I told her about Al the priest as we pulled into the lot. When we had secured a good parking space and turned off the engine, I showed her the letter.
“You were holding out on me,” she said, digging through her purse for her glasses. I handed her mine. “This should have been first.” She read it carefully and then she read it again. She held it up to the light as if to make sure it wasn’t counterfeit. “This is good. And you said yes?”
“I said yes.”
“I never would have thought otherwise. I wouldn’t have a fool for a best friend.”
“I have some decisions to make.”
“He doesn’t give you a lot of help with the dress code. And this business of always meeting at CVS is a little weird.”
“It’s only the second time. And the first time was my idea.”
“That’s fair enough. Maybe it will turn out to be ‘your place.’ You can go there for anniversaries.”
We got out of the car and walked toward the store. I had no business spending money on anything, but after the last couple of days I’ll admit I felt like I deserved a treat. “Help me control myself.”
“How do you mean that?”
“Financially.”
“That part is no problem. For the rest you’re on your own.”
We swung through the doors and immediately I felt comforted by the smell of perfume and face powder and new shoes. I always thought about Holly Golightly saying that nothing bad could happen to a person in Tiffany’s. As far as I was concerned, the same held true for Saks.
Gloria stopped at the Chanel counter, politely brushed off the salesgirl, and ran three different stripes of lipstick across the top of her hand. “Now, the first thing you want my advice on is your clothes. That’s the easy part. The second thing you want my advice on is Sandy and Nora.” She rolled her hand back and forth in the light trying to decide which was her best color.
I picked up a tube called Splendor and drew a line across the inside of my wrist, making myself look like a victim of a suicide attempt. “Precisely.”
“I want to tell you to lie. Every instinct I have thinks that you should lie, you know that.”
“I do.”
“But you won’t, because you really can’t. You lied once and it ended up so badly. Lying to your children is totally different from lying to your husband or even your friends. Lying to your children can have all sorts of psychological repercussions for everyone involved, and you just don’t want to get into that.
“On the other hand.” She stopped and picked up a pretty black compact containing four round pats of eye shadow, butter and lavender, pink and gray. “Isn’t this beautiful? Don’t you want to buy this? I never could make any sense out of eye shadow.” She put it down and picked up her train of thought. “On the other hand, telling them is just going to be hell.”
“Right,” she said. “That’s your problem in a nutshell.”
“And the answer?”
Gloria smiled at me sadly. “There isn’t an answer, angel, because there isn’t a question. You know you’re going to tell them, you know it’s going to be awful, and that’s really all there is to it.” Her eyes teared up a little bit. Gloria was every bit as willing to cry for me as she was for herself.
I felt comforted by the depth of her sympathy. The thing about talking to Gloria was that it was a little like talking to myself, only much better. With Mort I was always trying to convince, to state and prove my case. Gloria believed me right from the start. She only wanted to help me come to my own logical conclusions.
“So I guess that’s solved,” I said heavily.
“Well, at least that leaves us the fun part. Don’t forget you’re going to spend the day with Romeo tomorrow.”
“I do forget that. Given how this day started out, it still seems pretty hard to believe.”
Gloria discouraged me from buying the cotton sweater that came down almost to my knees. She encouraged me to buy a matching underwear set in a color the gorgeous twenty-something salesgirl called champagne.
“It’s good with your skin tone,” the salesgirl said.
“Black is too aggressive for the first time,” Gloria said. “Black says you knew all along you were going to have sex.”
“I don’t know that we are,” I said.
“See, all the more reason to go champagne.”
There was lace on both the bra and panties, but not so much that I felt like I was trying to pass myself off as Belgian. “I’m so out of practice. I’ve been buying my underwear at Target for so long, I didn’t know they sold it anywhere else.”
“Welcome back to the world,” the salesgirl said, and took my credit card.
Since I had spent all of my discretionary income on two articles of underwear, I decided to content myself with something I already owned for outerwear. Gloria thought it was a good plan, seeing as how he had never seen ninety-eight percent of my clothes, anyway.
She looked at her watch and steered me toward a phone in the women’s lounge. “You need to call Nora now and tell her to come over.”
“I can call her once I get home.”
Gloria handed me a quarter and a dime. “Tell her you’re on your way and you want to meet her there.” She looked at me hard. “Do you want me to dial?”
I took the change and called my oldest daughter, who, to my complete surprise and disappointment, answered the phone. I requested the meeting.
“This is Cacciamani business, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
Nora sighed. “Sandy’s already told me about salting the roses.”
One positive side effect of all of this was it seemed to be bringing Sandy and Nora closer together. “Well, there’s more.”
“So much more you can’t tell me over the phone?”
“It would just be a lot easier if I could talk to you both together.”
Nora sighed again. Really, she had perfected the art of the sigh. It was at once bored and inconvenienced. “All right. I’ll be there in a half an hour.”
I hung up the phone and looked at my watch. “She said a half an hour. We’re going to have to really move it to be there on time.”
“You have to stop being so afraid of her,” Gloria said.
“Why?” I said. “She’s scary.”
Gloria drove me back to the flower shop so I could pick up my car. “You’re going to have a wonderful time tomorrow,” she said. “We’ll look back on all of this someday and have one hell of a laugh. It will be years from now, but it will happen.”
I put my arms around her neck. “I’m going to have to take your word on it.”
She tapped the horn twice and waved as she drove away. I wished that she could have come home with me, but she didn’t offer because she knew it wasn’t right and I knew it wasn’t right and neither one of us had to say it.
Dreaded Lexus. Enough of that. Sandy and Nora were sitting in the kitchen. They had plugged the kids into reruns of Gilligan’s Island, which I felt sure was doing them absolutely no good and very possibly some harm, but we needed the privacy.
“So,” Nora said. She was dressed casually, which meant slim black pants and a fitted black sweater, with her hair pulled back in a gold barrette. Sandy was dressed casually, too, which meant the Celtics T-shirt had just come out of the dryer.
“So here’s the thing.” I sat down across from them in the Meet the Press configuration these family meetings usually took on. “A priest came to see me at the shop today, a Father Al, and he brought me a letter from Romeo.”
“After I left?” Sandy asked.
“Actually, yes. You had just gone.”
“You’re getting letters from Catholic priests now?” Nora said incredulously.
“He didn’t write the letter, he only delivered it, and you might want to pace yourself because there’s more to come.” I couldn’t help but think about the night I had called both of the girls home to tell them Mort had left with Lila. Sandy was married to Sandy Anderson then and both girls brought their husbands. It was so humiliating to have to announce my private life like that, to tell them all that my marriage had failed and that their father preferred a much younger, much more attractive woman to me. Both girls cried. They had counted on us always being together. I thought that night was the hardest thing I was ever going to have to do. It turns out I was mistaken.
“He wants to see you,” Sandy said.
Bless her for that. “Tomorrow morning.”
Nora looked at her watch. “Well, seeing as how it’s seven o’clock now, I don’t think you’re calling us over so we can discuss this. I think you’ve said yes and you’re just filling us in on the details.”
“I wasn’t planning on asking permission, if that’s what you mean.”
“The answer is no,” Nora said, standing up. “We’ve been threatened and harassed, property has been damaged.” Nora took anything concerning property very seriously. “These aren’t just people we don’t like anymore. These are dangerous people. Dangerous to you and me and Sandy, not to mention the children. You just can’t keep thinking that you’re the only person in this world whose needs matter. You have to think about your family.”
I was trying to remember how Nora had taken the news of her father’s departure. I wondered if she’d ever called him and roughed him up, tried to make things turn out the way she wanted. I had no idea.
“I’ll admit things have gotten out of hand, but I want to see Romeo again, I need to. I just don’t want to lie to you. You asked me to tell you the truth, this is the truth.”
Sandy was thinking about it. She was holding the past in one hand and the present in the other and making her silent assessments. I asked her where she stood on all of this.
“I think these are really, really crazy people,” she said quietly. “And I think you’re making a mistake.”
I could live with that.
“Don’t call me,” Nora said. “I have to detach myself from this.” She picked up her purse and said good night to her sister, her niece, and her nephew.
“Does that mean ‘Don’t call me and let me know how it goes’ or does that mean ‘Don’t ever call me again’?”
“I’ll let you know,” Nora said, and then she was gone.
I had a real lump in my throat. It wasn’t that I needed her approval. It wasn’t that I was worried she’d never come back. But we had been having the same old fight for so many years that it just made me sad beyond measure. She was my daughter, she had been my baby. We had shared a body for a while. It seemed like ever since then I’d been missing her.
“So you aren’t going to walk?” I said, turning around to Sandy.
“I’m not moving out, if that’s what you mean, but I want you to listen to me, Mom. I think this is a serious mistake you’re making. That’s what you told me, and maybe for my age, for that time in my life, you were right.”
I was fairly stunned by her admission. I reached out and petted her hair. “I’m just so much older.” I felt so much older.
“I know,” she said without any unkindness. “That’s why you should know better.”
Tony came into the kitchen with a flashlight. “Come outside, Grandma. I made you a surprise.”
“He’s been working on this all afternoon,” Sandy said.
I followed my grandson out into the yard. He was holding a piece of paper in one hand and shining his flashlight with the other. He took me over to the roses, which looked perfectly healthy in their new bed of black soil.
“I know that woman wasn’t coming to borrow the roses. I know she wanted to steal them,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “You’re right.”
“So I did this thing. We learned this in Cub Scouts. See, I broke some sticks and set them in the ground, see?” He shined his light down, and sure enough, there were about a half a dozen small sticks set casually among the rosebushes. “Then I made a map that shows where all the sticks are now. Then every morning I bring out the map and I check to see if the sticks are in the same place. Mr. Hollins says you have to remember that the wind can blow them around some, so not to get upset if they aren’t in exactly the same place, but you’ll know if someone was there.”
I crouched down and studied his work. Tony was a seriously meticulous kid. “It’s a good plan,” I said. “Thank you.”
“At least it keeps us safe,” he said.
Let me extend the fairy tale, if I may. It was more complicated than it had originally appeared. It wasn’t just the five frightening fire-breathing sons I would have to contend with. There was also a desert to cross and then a jungle of thorns. There were seven years of drought and then seven years of flood, followed by famine and pestilence and war. In addition there was a burden of doubt that had to be dragged behind me in a burlap sack at all times. It was absolutely written in the decree of my fate that Doubt had to come along. It had a whining, high-pitched voice that rang in my ears for every step I took.
“Are you sure?” Doubt would say. “Do you know him? Could he be worth all of this suffering you’ve brought on the world?”
“Shut up,” I say to the sack.
“Have you thought of the people you love?” Doubt says. “The people you’re hurting?”
“Shut up,” I say.
“He may not even be there—did you think of that? After all this time, it could all turn out to be nothing more than an elaborate hoax and you will be forced to live with the shame and embarrassment for the rest of your days.”
“Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.”