People felt bad for me when Ben left, but no one really liked him. No one really thought I was happy either. To have seen me with Leo, probably grinning like a lovesick kid, they must have seen this coming. Leo Vance isn’t going to stay in Laurel Ridge with that woman forever. She’s setting herself up for a fall. Real or imagined, We knew it! is what I see on their faces. Everyone but me saw this coming.
I don’t know where Kate is when I find myself on the receiving end of Vicky Miller’s pouty face. I have to give Ben credit, she really is a very attractive woman. Blond and fit and nicely maintained. “I heard,” she says.
“Oh,” I say, looking over her shoulder for a way out. She’s stepping closer to me and to my horror her arms are reaching out to pull me into a hug. The thought of it is unbearable. “Wait. You’re not going to touch me, are you?”
“Of course. I just want to give you a hug. I feel terrible.”
“Because you slept with my husband? Or about Leo?” That’s how raw I am. I don’t care who on the playground knows. I don’t care if I seem a little crazy. All I know is that if this woman touches me with her self-pity, I will die.
“Nora,” Vicky says in the most maddening way, a cousin of “calm down.”
Kate swoops in from wherever she’s been slacking off and links her arm in mine to drag me away. “She knows,” she says to Vicky over her shoulder. “Everyone knows, and we think you’re gross.”
This makes me smile as she maneuvers me to the other end of the blacktop. “Gross?” I say. “That’s like the kid in school who eats his boogers.”
“Give me a break,” she says. “I’m new to this.”
“You’re a good egg,” I say.
“I have to tell you something,” she says. And she’s nervous.
“Tell me you’re pregnant,” I say.
“No. I’ve been paid off too. By Leo.”
It’s really hot on the blacktop and I am feeling hazy. “What are you talking about?”
“I got a check today for Ready Set for a hundred thousand dollars from Leo Vance’s Charitable Trust.” She gives me a second to hear it. “And I know he’s the devil and he uses money to ease his guilt for being a total creep, but that money could help me double the reach of my program over the next two years. Like, it could change everything.”
“What is wrong with him?” I say, repeating my favorite rhetorical question.
“So you want me to return it?” Kate looks like she’s about to start begging.
“Sorry. No, of course not. Keep the money, that’s amazing. I just don’t know how a guy who has the time to call his charitable trust and initiate a donation doesn’t have time to return my text and say, ‘Hey sorry, I’m out.’？”
“At least he feels guilty; like, at least he knows he’s a jerk,” she says.
“I don’t know. I didn’t think I could feel worse. But Leo feeling sorry for me is sort of next-level bad.”
* * *
? ? ?
When school’s out in June, I decide to take my kids up to my parents’ house in the Adirondacks for two weeks. When my parents moved out of Chesterville and my dad sold his pool-cleaning business, he insisted they retire on a lake. All that water to swim in, he said to anyone who would listen, and no one has to clean it.
I’ve paid this month’s mortgage and taxes, my credit cards are paid off, and I have $8,329 in the bank. I am not ready to go back into the tea house to write. Maybe I’ll be able to write something someplace else. I also hope that with my parents as a distraction for my kids, I might be able to fall apart a little.
My parents make everything seem easy. My mom told me once, “The secret to a happy marriage is that you give a hundred and ten percent to him and he gives a hundred and ten percent to you.” In spite of the maddening mathematical impossibility of this statement, I always liked the sound of it. My parents are like a couple of cartoon magpies, always offering themselves up to each other. They were high school sweethearts, and she worked as a nanny while he started his pool-cleaning business. Everything he has, he credits to her. And vice versa.
It’s possible that growing up watching the fantasy of this marriage is what makes writing romance movies so easy. My parents make me believe that some people really are made for each other and that a joyful, easy marriage is possible. Two people who love each other and are looking in the same direction can build a wonderful life. I’ve caught myself using my parents’ gestures and quirks in movies, making me wonder if they’re the prototype couple I keep tweaking over and over again.