The Accidental Book Club (9 page)

“Kids made it home okay?” Loretta asked.

“Kenny got in last night. He called.” Good old Kenny, Jean thought. God bless him. While her older child, Laura, had practically left skid marks in Jean’s driveway, so eager to get back to St. Louis, to get back to work, Jean’s younger child, Kenneth, had stayed on for weeks, working remotely on his laptop during the day, helping Jean sort out the paperwork and the lawn mowing and the grief by night. Jean had finally been forced by guilt and by an overwhelming desire for alone time to send him home, to get back to his wife, his job, his life. She’d needed time to think. To process. To cry without feeling on show. Kenny had called the minute his plane touched down in California. Laura hadn’t even called to check in. For all Jean knew, her daughter never made it home at all. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

“They doing okay with everything?” Loretta had asked.

Jean turned her face down so that her nose hovered just above the counter. She could smell the whiskey on her breath when she spoke. “Kenny’s had a bit of a hard time with it, but you know Laura.” Loretta made a noise of affirmation, but neither of them finished the thought—Laura didn’t have a hard time with much of anything, it seemed. Or maybe, Jean wondered, Laura had a hard time with so many things, this wasn’t noticeable. Jean changed the subject. “Oh, Loretta, I hope Wayne knew how much I loved him,” she muttered, her voice echoey to her own ears.

“Of course he did,” Loretta responded. Loretta’s hair was dyed as jet-black as an oil slick, her cheeks just as powdered and her lips just as red as the day she retired from the car dealership eleven years prior. Her hands showed more veins; the skin of her arms sagged a little. But otherwise she might have never aged a day since Jean met her. Loretta dropped another dollop of whiskey into Jean’s glass and inched it toward her.

Jean wiped the corners of her eyes. “I’m just thinking about all the times we fought. Stupid fights that meant nothing. Now they seem so huge, and I hope he wasn’t thinking of those things at the end. Because they’re all that I can think about now. I can’t help it.”

Loretta patted Jean’s hand. “That’ll pass,” she said. She bent to look Jean directly in the eyes. “It will.”

They got up and moved into the living room, a room Jean had scarcely been able to force herself to enter. Wayne’s eyeglasses still sat atop a folded newspaper on the end table next to his armchair, where he had had a habit of leaving them when he wasn’t wearing them. Jean doubted she’d ever touch them. How could she move them? The date on the newspaper might grab her eye, startle her back to the day they’d learned about the cancer. Or worse, the first day he’d been too sick to put on his glasses.

Jean had eased herself onto the couch, on the opposite end of where Loretta was sitting. She felt like she was uncharacteristically sprawling, and she was miserable, the chocolate slugging uncomfortably in her stomach as her eyes dragged toward the end table, and found a balled-up pair of black socks tucked underneath it. She’d missed those all this time. How had she missed them?

Loretta leaned forward and touched the spines of a couple of books stacked on the coffee table, pushing them around to read the titles. “Goodness, you read a lot. You ever been in a book club?” she asked.

“Not officially,” she answered, though, of course, she was thinking of her nightly reading ritual with Wayne, and how that had felt like a club of sorts. They’d been doing it since the children were small—at first reading picture books aloud to Laura and Kenny, the whole family draped over one another in the living room, the kids’ heads fresh-smelling with shampoo. But Jean and Wayne had continued it after the kids had outgrown bedtime stories, choosing their own books, books that interested and expanded both of them. It became a private book club, just the two of them, holding their stories close to their hearts, reading and discussing with feeling, sometimes grieving together over endings or laughing so hard they had to stop reading to wipe their eyes. Wayne’s favorites had always been the philosophical novels—Thomas Mann’s
The Magic Mountain
being his all-time favorite. Jean had loved the quirky popular novels. They’d both chuckled over
Then We Came to the End
and had both cried over
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
. Jean had cherished those moments together. She missed them so much, the thought of cracking open a book without him left her a little panicky.

“You should start one. I’ll be your first member,” Loretta said.

“I don’t have time . . . ,” Jean started, but she trailed off because she and Loretta both knew now that Wayne was gone, she had nothing but time. Wayne had been where all her time went for so long.

“I understand,” Loretta had said, picking up a Kazuo Ishiguro and leafing through it. “But if you ever decide you have time, I’d suggest a book club. It’s a perfect fit for you. And triple nipple brownies and booze are a perfect fit for me.”

Jean hadn’t responded—really hadn’t given Loretta’s advice any more thought—and not long after, the whiskey had made them both sleepy. Jean had seen her friend out and had immediately climbed the stairs to the guest bedroom, had flopped, face-first, onto the bed, and had slept the sleep of the bone-exhausted.

When she’d gotten up again, she’d gone, as if pulled, to the living room and had crouched next to the end table and plucked Wayne’s socks out from underneath. She sat on the hardwood floor cross-legged and did what she’d been doing with his clothes since he’d gone—pressed them up to her nose. They didn’t smell like dirty socks. They smelled leathery, and faintly of his cologne, as if he’d worn them on a special occasion. She wracked her brain to think of where they might have gone, but nothing came to mind. In that instant, it felt as if he’d been sick for such a long time, as if he’d been dying forever. Was it possible that she’d created a life around her husband’s death? Was it possible that she’d not only lost him, but had lost a part of herself as well—the part that was Wife of a Dying Man?

Dear God, no.

She’d pressed the socks to her nose again and inhaled. Closed her eyes, saw Wayne’s face, the fleshy, laughing face, the one that didn’t know an army of monster cells was coursing through his body, defeating him from the inside out. The face that gazed at her, heavy-lidded behind the lenses of his glasses, his hands soft and relaxed around
The Three Musketeers
or
Blink
or Maya Angelou’s
Celebrations
.

And she’d decided, right there on the darkened living room floor with her dead husband’s dirty socks in her hand, that she would do it. She would start a book club. She would start living again.

Jean took Loretta’s hand and let her friend pull her up out of her seat. She was being gently dismissed from La Lounge. “Let’s have the meetings here,” Jean tried. “Just while Bailey’s . . . being difficult. We can move them back when she goes home.”

“No way. You think the kid’s embarrassing? Did you see the land whale that’s currently rotting on my living room recliner? We can’t give Mitzi this kind of ammunition. There are apples and trees, and then there’s Chuck.”

“Point taken.”

“Besides, I can’t be relied on to clean my house. You never know when Flavian is waiting for me. And I hate to keep those abs waiting.”

“He’s a fictional character. For all you know, he has Chuck’s abs.”

Loretta coughed out a laugh. “Cross yourself after such blasphemy. I love that old coot, but his abs are more of a . . . shelf. To set his beer on.” She turned to Jean and patted her on the head, pushing her gently toward the door. “Now, go home and start putting together your recipe. And I’ll let the ladies know that the club is on as scheduled.”

“Okay, okay,” Jean said, trudging out of the room. “But if Bailey blows up the meeting, I am going to blame you.”

“Well, that’s what the book is all about. Blame!” Loretta called, just before shutting La Lounge’s door. “Way to get in the spirit!” Jean heard her call from behind the door.

Jean let herself out of Loretta’s house and dawdled going back across the lawn. She gazed at the Knock Out roses that were just beginning to bloom along the side of the house.
Knock Out flowers for my little knockout,
Wayne used to say. He’d planted them for her. Jean plucked a hot pink flower off the stem and held it to her nose. It didn’t have much of a smell, but something about the motion made her chest pound all the same. How Wayne had loved the roses. How he’d loved everything outdoors.

She dropped the rose to the ground. “I don’t know what I’m doing, Wayne. You’ve gotta help me out a little here, okay?”

She waited, listening for a response that would never come, and then pivoted on the ball of her foot to head back inside, back to angry, expecting Bailey. She was completely clueless as to what would come next.

“O
h, don’t even get me started,” Mitzi bellowed as she plowed into the kitchen. She plunked down a plate of nachos, the solidifying cheese forming little grease beads on the tops of the chips. She slammed her copy of
Blame
on the counter. Jean noticed a forest of sticky notes poking out from the top. “What a class-A bunch of crapola this book was.”

“Hold it for the meeting,” Loretta called from the dining room table, where she was already two and a half glasses of wine and half an hour of basic bondage facts in. Jean now knew more than she ever wanted to know about collaring, age play, and the Gorean philosophy.
What’s the problem?
Loretta had asked when Jean had scrunched up her nose.
It’s literature-based. I’m just getting you into the right mind-set.

“I don’t know if I can hold it for the meeting. How can you be so calm? How can you not want to find this jerk and just . . .” Mitzi trailed off, then growled, picked up the book, and headed into the dining room. “Pour me some of that. My blood pressure’s through the roof.”

“Where’s Dorothy?” Jean asked, arranging a plate of beef and jalapeno empanadas, a perfect, and accidental, pairing with Mitzi’s nachos.

Mitzi stood in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room, holding a glass of merlot to her chest. “Ugh, Chester’s in jail. Arrested last night for DWI. She’s trying to get him out. But I say she should leave his ungrateful bahookey in the clink. Those boys need to learn a lesson, and if their dad’s not gonna be around to teach ’em, she’s gonna have to get a whole lot tougher.”

“Chester’s hardly a boy anymore,” Loretta said.

Jean considered this. “He’s only sixteen, though, right?”

“Exactly,” Loretta said. “Old enough to drive, old enough to suffer the consequences of being stupid, that’s what I say.”

May, who’d come in midconversation, set a box on the counter, then reached in and pulled out a beautiful cake. “Aw, poor Dorothy,” she said, as if not noticing that everyone had gasped and cooed at the cake.

“Hey, May,” Mitzi called out. “How’d last night go with the pharmacist?”

“Pharmacy tech,” May corrected. “And he’s way young. I felt creepy. Like I was babysitting or something.”

“Ooh, our little May is robbing the cradle,” Loretta called from the other room, and while the ladies chuckled, Jean tried to give May a consoling look. “So, did you deflower the kid?”

“Loretta! No!” May cried.

“Uh-oh, somebody’s been reading Flavian Munney books again,” Mitzi cackled, and Jean was glad for it, because May’s blush had gotten so deep, she almost looked like Janet.

May uncovered her cake and Jean took a break from arranging empanadas to admire it. “Looks delicious,” she said.

“Coconut rum with an almond Irish cream ganache,” May said. She crinkled her nose. “My date was with a baking blog.” She and Jean exchanged smiles. “I love baking blogs. They don’t snore or steal your CDs.”

“Enough with the primping already,” Mitzi called from the dining room. “I have got to talk about this book or I’m gonna explode.”

May reached over and patted the back of Jean’s shoulder, then sauntered toward the dining room. “Make you mad too?” she asked. “I seriously wanted to throw the book against the wall.”

“Probably it was your hysterical uterus making you want to do that. You are a woman, after all, and thus prone to bouts of emotion that will someday take down mankind,” Mitzi answered. “According to R. Sebastian Thackeray the Turd. Oops, I mean the Third.”

“Ah, but I’m not a mother, so I get a reprieve,” May said. “It’s you baby-poppers that make the world a horrible place to live. You’ll probably mess up heaven too, if I recall correctly.”

“Save it for the meeting,” Loretta said again, then called, “Jeanie, are you coming out anytime soon? I can’t hold these animals off much longer. They want blood.”

“Be right there,” Jean called. “Just as soon as I’ve got all the silverware out.” The truth was she already had everything out. But she’d heard the floorboards squeaking above her head and knew that Bailey was roaming around upstairs. She hadn’t seen the girl since last night, when Bailey graced Jean with her presence only long enough to snag a box of Pop-Tarts and take it upstairs, as usual. When Jean had tried to call her down for dinner, there’d been no response, and other than the toilet in Bailey’s room flushing a few times during the night, it was almost like having nobody here at all. The girl hadn’t come down for breakfast, and Jean worried that this meant she’d be getting hungry soon. The smell of food might bring her downstairs. And then what would she do? Jean hated that she didn’t know. She couldn’t predict, and Curt’s predictions had been dire.

She tried to linger as long as she could, but soon she could hear the ladies’ chairs scraping against the wood floor as they convened over the buffet, filling their plates and cooing over May’s beautiful cake.

“I even brought dessert wine to go with it,” she said, pointing to the box she’d set on the floor next to the counter.

“Good thing I live close enough to walk home,” Loretta joked.

“You mean stumble,” Mitzi corrected, and Jean tried not to think about her daughter, with a broken wrist and no idea how it got that way.

“Har-har,” Loretta responded, and they all carried their plates back to the table where they could get down to the business of letting recipes derail their book discussion.

They had just sat down when Janet arrived, glancing particularly sheepishly at Jean, who wasn’t sure whether she was supposed to acknowledge that they’d seen each other at the supermarket or not. And especially not sure whether she should mention the behavior of Janet’s manager.

Fortunately, Janet came in quietly and sat, her head bent over her plate. She never even added an uh-huh to the discussion about the book that she’d been so eager to discuss at the market.

“So clearly Thackeray is a misogynist,” Mitzi said.

“He’s definitely got mommy issues, at the very least,” May agreed, around a bite of empanada. “Do you think he was abused? I think maybe he was abused. He’s got a lot of anger.”

“I can’t even get into what I thought of the plot,” Mitzi continued, “because I was so angry at the . . . the attitude.”

“Did anybody else see him on
Sixty Minutes
the other night?” Loretta asked.

May pointed with her fork. “Yeah. He seemed so arrogant. And the thing is, he’s kind of short and fat.”

“Short-man syndrome,” Mitzi singsonged. Mitzi had gone on more than once about short men, and all the women rolled their eyes and groaned when she said it. “What? It’s a documented fact!” she argued, but heads had begun to turn toward the doorway to the kitchen.

“And to think you thought he was sexy, Loretta,” May said.

Loretta shrugged. “They can’t all be Flavian.”

Jean turned just in time to see Bailey standing in the doorway, wearing nothing but a long T-shirt and underwear, her makeup smudged across her face. Her stomach dropped.
Not now. Please, not now.

“Hi,” May said brightly, and Bailey turned to her, but didn’t reply.

“This is Bailey,” Jean announced, noticing that her voice had a little quake in it. “She’s Laura’s daughter. My only granddaughter.” She thought that continuing to talk might make her voice sound more commanding, but it only grew weaker.

“Yes, yes, hello,” Loretta said, putting down her fork and wiping her mouth with a napkin. “Are you hungry? We’ve got Mexican.”

“I am hungry, actually,” Bailey said, wiping sleep from her eyes. “Nobody eats around here.” She glared at Jean, who tried to keep her smile pasted but felt it wilting on the corners.

“I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to wake you up this morning,” Jean said, then turned back to the table. “We’re still getting to know each other’s schedules. But we’ll eventually get there!” She recognized that this last bit came out too brightly.

Bailey’s face transformed into a huge smile, which she made even worse by twisting one index finger in a dimple. “Sure will, Grand-ma-ma,” she said in a British accent, lacing the words with such sarcasm, the room went absolutely silent. “We shall sing show tunes in the parlor this evening. I hope you all can make it. Didn’t anyone ever tell any of you that staring is rude?”

She turned and disappeared back into the kitchen. Jean couldn’t bring herself to look up from her plate. She sat there, fork in hand and lips pressed in on themselves as humiliation ate through her insides. She waited for Mitzi to say something, bracing herself for it.

But after a moment of uncomfortable silence, when Mitzi finally spoke up, it was only to say, “And the way he ended this piece of trash. Instead of dying, they all lived, because death would be too kind for such lowly women? What a trite bunch of bunk. How could anyone glean anything positive from it? I’m positive I’d like to use the last thirty pages to line the litter box. How can this man’s mother not be absolutely shrinking with shame right now? I wouldn’t leave my house ever again. I would completely deny having given birth to that . . .”

She stopped in midsentence as Bailey reappeared. Jean turned and gasped. The girl stood in the doorway, one hand on a hip, the other clutching a hunk of May’s cake. She had icing on her cheeks and nose and was chewing with her mouth open. Jean could see the cake on the counter behind her, a huge hole in one side, where Bailey had snatched her piece right out of it with her hand.

“This is pretty good, I guess,” she said. Then she pointedly glared at Jean. “But it’s probably not the healthiest breakfast in the world.” She shoved another huge bite in her mouth, squishing cake up onto her cheeks and into her nostrils and through her fingers. Big dollops of it fell to the floor, some landing on Bailey’s bare toes, some landing on the dining room carpet. When she was done, she held up her hand and squeezed it into a fist, watching as what was left in her hand fell to the floor. “It’s a little dry, actually,” she said around her mouthful, and then strode out.

The dining room was bathed in absolute silence. Jean could hear Bailey’s feet slap across the hardwood kitchen floor and up the stairs and then, after a bit, her bedroom door slam. She closed her eyes with relief. It had been worse than she’d imagined it would be—she thought the girl might roll her eyes or not speak or be surly, but she never thought she’d make such a scene in front of everyone—but at least she was done for now.

She didn’t know what to do. Did she try to defend herself? To tell them that she’d tried to wake Bailey every day and had gotten nothing but yelled at for her efforts? To mention that she had plenty of healthy breakfast food, that she wasn’t so clueless about raising a child as to not know what she should have for her meals, but just that Bailey wouldn’t eat anything? Did she pretend nothing ever happened? Jump up and clean the cake off the floor? Throttle Loretta for making her have the club here—hadn’t she known this would happen?

Loretta cleared her throat and continued eating. Mitzi took a sip of wine. Janet sat and licked her lips repeatedly, glancing worriedly from the doorway to Jean to May and back again. She looked ready to bolt any minute.

But May, God love her, simply dug back into her nachos and took up the conversation as if it had never been interrupted. “Did you read any of the reviews? There are, like, a thousand five-star reviews on it. People are calling it ‘an insightful social commentary.’”

“All men, undoubtedly,” Mitzi added.

“I didn’t think it was all so bad,” Loretta said. “I mean, if you look at it ironically, like maybe he wasn’t really blaming everything on women and mothers, but was making a statement that that’s what our society has come to. We all do seem to blame the parents when a kid does something wrong. And we shouldn’t be.” She only glanced at Jean when she said this, but Jean heard her loud and clear, and it was enough to shake away some of the embarrassment of what had just happened.

Jean waited until the next time Loretta caught her eye and mouthed,
Thank you
. Loretta nodded just slightly.

“That is so not how he meant it,” Mitzi plowed on. “He’s a horrible little troll, and I hope to God that no woman ever allows him to procreate.”

“So tell us how you really feel,” Jean joked, and somehow the tension started to drain away. Somehow, eventually, she was even able to forget the glops of cake that were on the floor, waiting for the ladies to leave so she could clean them up.

The only thing she wasn’t able to forget was that Bailey had barely just arrived.