The Transformation of Things (25 page)

The clock said seven-thirty, and I heard Will in the shower. I figured I had about an hour, maybe two, until the phone rang, until Kelly called with the news, and I debated whether I was going to answer it.

On one hand, I knew I couldn’t stay mad at her forever, but on the other hand, when she called, the call would be full of obligations, musts. Must help plan the wedding. Must attend. Must be a bridesmaid. Must write a toast.

Maybe deep down Kelly felt the same way I did—she hated Sharon, she was angry with our father, she still couldn’t really get over the death of our mother—though it had been nearly twenty years. On the surface, Kelly wouldn’t let it show; she
would do all good things expected of one’s daughter. That was Kelly, the person who called Beverly Mother.

And yet a part of me still wanted to answer the phone, wanted to hear my sister’s voice, wanted to bitch with her about how Sharon would be a crappy stepmother. Because sometimes, no matter how mad you were or how much you wanted to hate her, your sister was the only other person in the world who felt exactly the way you did.

Will came out of the bathroom still wet and wrapped in a towel from the waist down. I closed my eyes and inhaled him, the pine aftershave, and then I opened them again and watched him for a moment before he turned, before he noticed me. His curls were dewy, and his broad shoulders were lined with drops of water. He saw me, and he smiled, this incredible, soft smile that he reserved only for me, a smile that brought me back to when we were first dating, a smile that seemed to say everything he was thinking about me, everything good. “You’re up.” He walked over and kissed me lightly on the lips. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” I murmured, but as I leaned in to kiss him back, his face swirled in front of me, and I closed my eyes.

“Don’t forget,” he said. “Be ready by four, okay? And wear something nice.”

Something nice.
Not to go to the club or an auction, but to go out, with him, on a real, bona fide date. I felt a surge of something warm through my chest as I watched him walk toward his closet, watched the way his strong arms moved as he opened the door.

I thought about Kelly, and the way she wanted to get Dave’s attention and couldn’t get it. And here I had Will. No other family, no job that kept him away at all hours anymore.
Just Will. One hundred percent Will. Maybe we could have a baby. Maybe Will would be nothing at all like my father, now that he was no longer a judge. This Will would be around to help, to give love; this Will, the one who came home early for Valentine’s Day and planned something special, the one who left me notes on the table with the word
love
in them, and sometimes came home for lunch just to spend time with me. Not Judge Will, who hadn’t even remembered to give me a Valentine’s Day kiss two years running, who’d had Janice send me an expensive bouquet of roses that I was sure she had picked out and he had never even laid eyes on. No, this Will, the one walking out of his closet now in khakis and a blue sweater, was clearly different.

“What are you thinking?” Will asked. “You look so serious.”

“Oh, nothing.” I shook my head. “You look nice.”

He walked over and sat at the edge of the bed. “I’m going to make some coffee. Meet you downstairs in a few minutes?” He traced the edge of my cheek with his thumb, and I closed my eyes for a minute, leaning into the warmth of his hand.

After I cleaned up from breakfast, I got dressed and wandered over to Lisa’s. She was still her pajamas when I arrived, and she looked like she’d forgotten to take a shower yesterday—her hair sticking out like a wild woman’s.

“You and Barry doing anything for Valentine’s Day?” I asked.

“Oh shit.” She sat down at the kitchen table and put her head in her hands. “I forgot.”

“Well, I was going to go pick up something for Will, if you want to come.”

“I should bake him something,” she said. “Barry loves my cakes.”

“Lisa,” I said with mock seriousness, “I have something very, very important to tell you.”

“What?” She looked up.

“No one loves your cakes. Your cakes are a disaster.”

She looked at me, and then she started laughing, and she couldn’t stop, until tears started rolling down her face. The tears kept coming, even when the laughter stopped. I leaned in and hugged her, and for a few moments, we sat there in her kitchen, holding on to each other.

We ended up in the Villages of Oak Glen, the same shopping center with Applebee’s, because I knew there was a Hallmark store there where Lisa and I could pick out cards, and I also knew we wouldn’t run into any of the other ladies of Deer-field, for Lisa’s sake.

Lisa and I walked down the aisles, laughing at the sappy cards. Then she pointed to a section that said, “Baby’s First Valentine’s Day.” She didn’t say a word, just pointed, but I could see the way her face fell, the way any trace of laughter dissipated into dust.

“Oh, Lisa,” I said.

“I never thought this would be my life. I mean, who ever thinks this when you get married, that you’re going to wake up every morning feeling so shitty?” She paused. “Well, you know.” I nodded, because in a way I did. Or at least I had. I thought about the way I’d felt this morning, watching Will walk across our bedroom, and just thinking about it again now, I felt a little breathless.

She picked up a card. It was burgundy with two interlaced hands and the words “Love Is Forever.” “Does anybody believe in this crap?” she said. “Love is forever.” She sighed.

“I don’t know.” I shrugged, thinking about my father and Sharon, about the way she’d swirled her rum and Coke and announced she was being made into an honest woman. It did seem to make a case for the contrary of love lasting forever, the way he’d quickly abandoned my mother as soon as she got sick, and now he was willing to promise forever to someone else. But then I thought about Will again, standing by his closet door, wet from the shower, and how I’d felt a swell in my chest, a feeling I thought had died, but perhaps had only been buried somewhere.

I picked out a card for Will that had two interconnected hearts on the front, and on the inside simply read: “You + Me = Love.” Nice. Elegant. Mathematical. Straightforward. I knew he would like it.

As we walked up to pay, I noticed the table with the figurines that Will had found the last time we were here. I saw “The Perfect Family,” and then next to that, there was another one, a figurine with the same couple. In this one the baby was older, a child, a little girl Ara’s age. The man stood with his arm around the woman; she leaned her head into his shoulder, and the little girl stood dressed in a pink dress with a pink bow in her hair, staring up at them with what could only be described as blatant love and admiration.

I picked the figurine up and turned it over to read the name. “Afterglow.”

“What’s that?” Lisa asked. I showed her. “Oh please. Nobody’s that happy. In real life, the woman would’ve gained twenty pounds, the girl would be screaming, and the husband would be at work.”

I nodded, and though I knew she was probably right, that this figurine only captured a moment, a frozen one at that,
and that it didn’t show what lay beneath the surface for these people, for this family, I took it up to the cash register and bought it anyway.

When I got home I ate lunch, and then I took a long bath. I shaved, moisturized, perfumed, straightened my hair with a straightening iron, put on a little mascara and some lipstick, and then I put on the red dress that I’d worn to the auction last year.

If I closed my eyes I could remember her, the Jen who’d walked into the club frozen, holding on to Will’s arm as if we were both statues, that Jen who’d stood up in front of the wealthy people of Deerfield, who’d announced bids and prizes into the mike, the Jen who’d sat at a table with her friends, carefully cutting into her food, laughing at the appropriate moments, adding a comment at the right time. Had that been fun? Had I enjoyed that? I couldn’t remember, now, any feeling of joy from that night, not even the smallest bit. Even the excitement I’d felt when we counted up the donations at the end of the night was muted. It was something, maybe, but nothing real, nothing to make the pain of losing someone, a person, a mother, to breast cancer, subside.

But the dress was gorgeous. I’d bought it in the city, at a boutique just down the street from
City Style.
It was a one-of-a-kind, hand-dyed, hand-spun red silk, with a strapless interlaced bodice and a knee-length silk skirt.

“What do you think?” I remembered spinning in front of Will. He’d sat in his study, looking through a pile of briefs.

“Very nice,” he’d said, without looking up.

Tonight, just as I was looking for my shoes in the closet, I heard Will come into the bedroom, and when I walked out, he stared at me. His eyes moved all across my body, up and down the length of the dress. “Wow,” he said. “You’re stunning.”

I felt my pulse quickening, my face turning hot, and I felt a little nervous, like first-date nervous. It seemed absolutely insane, to have that feeling after so many years together, but I had it nonetheless.

He walked toward me and touched my hair, which had grown back nearly to my shoulders. “It’s straight,” he said.

“Do you like it?”

He nodded and leaned in and kissed me softly on the lips. “Just let me get changed, and I’ll meet you downstairs.”

Will came down dressed up in a suit, clean-shaven, looking so much like Judge Will on his way to work, yet looking nothing like him at all. This Will had bright eyes that stared at me with this quiet intensity, a tender sort of glow that I wasn’t sure I’d ever really seen from him before, not even when we were first married.

“You look nice,” I said.

He reached for my hand, and he led me out to his car. He opened the passenger door for me, and then, once I was sitting down, pulled a scarf from his pocket and tied it around my eyes. “So you’ll be surprised,” he whispered, barely grazing my ear with his lips as he said it.

On the ride, I closed my eyes behind the scarf, listened to the din and hum of traffic, the sound of the soft jazz saxophone Will had put on the radio. At one point Will put his hand on my leg, and I felt calm, warm, a feeling that everything was going to be all right. I wasn’t worried about dying or dreaming, and I almost felt like I could be lulled to sleep.

What I guessed was about forty-five minutes later, the car slowed down and came to a stop in a parking space. “We’re here,” Will said. He pulled the scarf off gently, and I blinked to focus my eyes.

We were in the parking lot of Il Romano, the restaurant
where we’d met, had our first blind date. And had never been back to since. After my review, the restaurant took off, and it was nearly impossible to get a table.

“How did you manage this? On Valentine’s Day?”

“I have my ways.” He smiled.

Not only did Will manage a table, but the same one in the corner, the small half-circle booth that we’d shared on our first date. “This is so nice,” I said, genuinely surprised and overwhelmed by his thoughtfulness and a little amazed by his ability to pull it off. “Thank you.”

Will put his arm around me, and I leaned into him. When the waiter came over, Will asked if I minded if he ordered for us. “No, go ahead,” I said, surprised because it wasn’t the sort of thing he usually did. Even at the club we’d both always ordered for ourselves.

“Do you know what I ordered?” he asked, after the waiter had gone.

“Antipasto, chicken marsala, Chardonnay—”

“Our first dinner together,” he said. “Do you remember?”

It was funny that he remembered it to a T, that easily, when I really had to think hard to remember, and I’d been the one to write the review. What I remembered with precision: Will’s eyes as he’d stared at me across the table, bright and smart and sexy and warm. The food, not so much. “How do you remember that?”

He shrugged. “I wrote it down.”

“You did?”

He nodded. “I was looking through some of my old things last week, and I found it, on a yellow legal pad.” He paused. “Do you want to know what else I wrote down?” I nodded. He cleared his throat and starting singing, softly,
“Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes …”
It sounded different in his
voice now than it had that night, after he’d had too much wine, and he’d serenaded me on the walk home from the restaurant. He’d commented on the real stars in the cool night sky and the pretty green color of my eyes, and then he’d started singing.

“Oh, Will.” I reached for his hand now. “I’d forgotten about that.” I’d almost forgotten the way another person could surprise you, the way they could instantly and irrevocably make you feel that there were actually stars in your eyes.

“Here. I have something for you.” He pulled a tiny box, wrapped in gold foil, out of his pocket and handed it to me. I carefully tore off the wrapping paper, and as I opened the box I felt a spark of something; nerves, excitement.

Inside was a pair of diamond star earrings tucked into black velour, sparkly enough to be real stars against a dark night sky. “Oh, Will,” I said again. “They’re beautiful.” I paused. “You shouldn’t have. I mean, how can we afford these?”

“Sssh.” He put his finger to his lips. “Try them on.”

I took the tiny pearls out of my ears and put the new stars in. “What do you think?”

He nodded, kissed my earlobe, and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.

I thought about the figurine sitting in my purse, still in the Hallmark bag, still unwrapped, and then I knew I had to give it to him. “I have something for you, too,” I said, fishing through my purse, and then handing him the bag.

He took the figurine out, looked at it, and smiled. He turned it over and read the bottom. “Afterglow,” he whispered.

“Do you recognize them?” I pointed to the couple.

“The Perfect Family?” I nodded. “It’s beautiful, Jen,” he whispered. “Thank you.”