“Should we leave her the rest of the box?” Izzy asked.
“Yeah.” I folded down the wax paper and closed the box, then set it on the cobblestone walkway.
“What if a dog eats it first?”
“Run it up to the porch.”
Izzy picked up the box, ran up to the wide blue-floored porch, and placed the box on a little glass table that stood between two cushioned wrought-iron chairs.
When Izzy and I walked in the house, the Cone phone was ringing. No one seemed to be answering, so I rushed into the kitchen, put the bags down on the table, and looked for the phone. I found it between a stack of phone books and a Hills Bros. Coffee can that held pencils, pens, and a dirty wooden ruler.
“Cone residence, this is Mary Jane.”
“Mary Jane! You’re back.” It was Dr. Cone.
“Yeah, we got lots of sweets.”
“Great. Can you bring some out to my office?”
“Okay. Popsicles and—”
“You pick an assortment. Just lots of sweets.”
“Okay.”
Dr. Cone hung up and I looked at the phone for a second before setting it in the cradle. My stomach churned. I was still worried about bringing the correct sweets to Dr. Cone and Jimmy.
“Can I have a Popsicle?” Izzy asked.
“Just a half. Don’t want to spoil your dinner.”
Izzy ripped open a Popsicle box and sat on the floor, removing Popsicles one by one. I could tell she was looking for the right color. The Popsicles had started to melt during our walk, so the colors were printing through the wrapper.
“Purple.” Izzy handed me a purple Popsicle. I placed the gully between the two sticks against the edge of the kitchen table and then slapped the top one with the heel of my palm. The Popsicle broke into two perfect halves. I ripped off the paper, gave one half to Izzy, and stuck the other in my mouth. I held it between my lips, melting, as I unloaded the sugary treats onto the kitchen table.
Next, I opened the freezer door and looked inside. A warty, hoary frost covered all the contents, like the Abominable Snowman had vomited in there. Few things could be identified past a shape: rectangle, edgy blob, carton. “How about we clean out the freezer today?”
“Okay!”
I took out a few boxes of unknowns and placed them on the dirty dishes in the sink to make room for the Popsicles. Then I shoved in all the boxes of Popsicles but one, which I placed in the bottom of an empty Eddie’s bag. On top of the Popsicles I put two boxes of Zonkers, and then two of each of the other candies.
“I’ll be right back.” I headed out the screen door as Izzy flipped over to her stomach and continued sucking her Popsicle. I was nervous about getting the sweets order right. But, I realized, far less nervous than when I’d run into my mother at Eddie’s.
I paused in the middle of the lawn, looked up toward the sun, and shut my eyes for just a few seconds. My heart wasn’t even beating hard. In fact, I felt wonderful.
4
I learned two things that first week that Sheba and Jimmy stayed in the Cone house. The first was that addicts ate a lot of sugar to replace the drugs and alcohol they’d been taking. The second was that being married to an addict seemed harder than being an addict.
Most mornings I arrived to find Sheba and Izzy waiting for me in the kitchen. Sheba didn’t like to cook and both she and Izzy thought I made the best breakfasts. I started making a daily trip to Eddie’s with Izzy, where we’d stock up on ingredients for a good breakfast the next day: eggs, flour, sugar, baking soda, bacon, real maple syrup, butter, and loads of fresh fruit and berries. Also, I’d pick up more sugary treats, particularly Screaming Yellow Zonkers, which Jimmy had declared essential to his recovery.
Sheba talked a lot when there were adults in the room. She gossiped about other celebrities, and once complained at length about a particular director who wanted her to take off her top for a horseback riding scene in which “there was no logical reason this character would ride without a top on!” More frequently, she talked about how hard it had been living with Jimmy the past year. There was the Oscars party where he “nodded off” at the table and his head fell on his plate; the intimate dinner party at a famous producer’s house where he disappeared into the bathroom for two hours and then stumbled out and fell asleep on the couch, his head falling into the lap of the sixteen-year-old daughter of the producer; and numerous flights on airplanes—private and public—where he vomited all over the bathroom, peed in his pants, and/or had to be carried off once they’d landed. I wondered how she had stayed with him through all that. And then my sex-addict brain wondered if it had to do with attraction and if she was a sex addict like me, and just couldn’t pull herself away from his body. Jimmy was muscly and lean. And he had a smell to him that made me want to stick my face into his chest. It was almost an animal smell, but sweeter, softer.