Lovesick (14 page)

“I had it right here,” she cries, referencing the nightstand.

Got me
, I pantomime.

“No pressure, and this is
not
a trick question,
seriously,”
she says innocently enough. “Did you happen to ask my dad before you asked me?”

“I did ask your dad,” I reply.

Paige lets out a sigh of relief.

“You didn’t have to, but I appreciate it,” she says, dragging the antique cast-iron bed away from the wall. “Can you call my phone with yours?”

“Just take mine,” I relent.

I pinch the inside corners of my eyes to help make the approaching migraine go away.

He’ll hear her voice and he’ll change his tune
, I pray.

Paige dials Gregory, then puts her cheek up against mine so we can both listen and speak together. I can hear it ringing. She glances over at me as if to remind me that this is the part where we both scream: “We’re getting married!”

“You talk,” I lip-synch, pulling away as it rings a second time.

We stare at each other, both holding our breath. Paige tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. There’s still time to confess everything.

Why isn’t Gregory answering? Is it because he sees my name on the caller ID? He’s avoiding me. He thinks I’m calling for a third
time. He’s irritated. He’s going to pick up and start screaming into the other end.

Hang up!

“Your daughter’s getting married,” Paige says like peekaboo. “You Sneaky Pete, how long have you known?”

Paige starts pacing around the room as she listens. Gregory does all the talking. Paige turns serious. Then she smiles. She nods. She nods again.

“Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” she says.

Now she’s thanking him …
thanking, thanking, thanking, nodding, nodding, nodding.
This is good. Confidence building. Future brightening.

“Of course, hold on, Daddy,” she says handing me the phone. “He wants to congratulate you
personally.
”

“Hello?” I say playfully, as if I don’t know who it is.

Utter silence.

“Gregory?” I ask, checking the line.

Paige beams a smile in my direction.

I whisper to Paige, “I think we lost the cell signal.”

She shrugs.

“Are you disturbed?” Gregory asks. He is beside himself.

“There he is,” I inform Paige, with a forced grin.

A few seconds pass.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asks. “Just smile and nod your head.”

I’m way ahead of him.

“Listen here. I’m not going to be the one who ruins this day for my daughter. I thought I made myself perfectly clear. We were going to wait.” He pauses to cough. “Why on earth would you ask my permission if you were just going to do whatever you want, anyway?”

Paige can tell something’s wrong.

“I don’t care what you say. We’re more excited than you are!” I cheer.

I’m about to vomit our expensive dinner.

“You and I are going to have a long talk at work tomorrow,” he says.

“Well, the wedding planning will have to wait one more day. I’m off tomorrow, and your daughter and I are touring wine country. There must be something we can bring back for you.”

Paige is delighted by my generous offer. I can read her mind:
Go ahead. Just do it. Call him “Dad.”

“Friday then!” he says, catching on. “You’re going to fix this,” he says in no uncertain terms.

“The ring is beautiful. She can’t wait to show it to you, too,” I say.

Gregory hangs up, and I tell the dead air to have a good night.

Lying head to toe on the bed, passing the phone back and forth, we start calling everyone we know. The more people we tell, the more the lie becomes true. First we wake up my parents in Vegas. Then we break the news to Lara in Los Angeles. Apparently she didn’t know anything. All of our friends ask the same questions. The men look forward: When’s the big day? The women reminisce: How did he do it? Did he ask your father? With each phone call I fine-tune the fib. I’m caught up in the excitement. By the time we reach Sid, I’m pathological.

“Aw, that’s great news, small fry. See what I said,” Sid tells Cookie. Then he’s back to me: “I just knew Gregory would give you the go-ahead.”

“I did just like you suggested, Sid,” I tell him, giving Paige a loving grin. “Gregory and I had a long talk, and he’s excited to discuss the next steps.”

Now Cookie is screaming in the background. “For Christ’s sake, they’ll be engaged in the morning,” she cries.

“Sorry kids, Cookie needs her beauty sleep.”

“Hang up,” she yells a second time.

I promise to call Sid tomorrow.

We’ve called everyone, even a few wrong numbers. It’s time for the engagement sex. Paige crawls on top of me and flips over so we’re both facing the ceiling. We stare at the intricate ceramic molding where a chandelier once hung.

“This is comfy,” she says.

I grunt back. To be crushed like this feels good.

“I’m tired. You tired? Because I’m tired,” she says quickly.

The alcohol buzz and engagement adrenaline have worn off and I’m feeling drained too.

“I am.”

A tacit agreement has just been reached.

“But just so you know, I want to,” Paige swears, turning her head slightly to kiss me on the cheek.

I close my eyes and start making snoring sounds. She adds her own snores to the beat.

“We have to promise to have sex in the morning,” she mumbles.

“I’m totally there,” I say monotone.

And before long, we’re out, one mattress on top of another.

Daybreak arrives and through a series of unconscious gymnastic moves, we’ve miraculously slipped into our customary snoozing configurations.

Paige is going to be a good sleep partner. Like any couple, we have our occasional land grab issues in bed, but aside from the occasional, terrifying psychotic laugh in the middle of the night, Paige doesn’t snore, move, or even speak in her sleep.

The bed is still crooked from when Paige was looking for her cell phone, and I never bothered to close the wooden shades, so now my face is sunburned. Paige is fending off the light by holding a folded pillow over her head with both hands. I roll my head toward her, hesitantly opening one eye for fear of bursting into flames. As the room comes into focus, I realize that Paige’s gorgeous diamond engagement ring is only inches from my face. It’s about to slip off. I gently push it back down her finger and close my eyes.

The ring may be the wrong size, but between the lighting, the brilliance of the stone, and the startling contrast against her tan skin, it most certainly is the right fit.

“I LOVE you,” she reminds me as if there’s a chance I’ve forgotten. I pull out of the Clos du Bois compound, our third and final winery. Her eyes are fixed on the dirt road.

“Then I love you, too,” I kid as we turn onto the main thoroughfare.

We’re both a little tipsy. Paige is somewhere else. In the last fifteen hours, I’ve lost track of the number of ILYs exchanged back and forth, but now that we’re engaged, it seems silly to count.

“Everything is changing,” she says with mixed emotion.

We pass a bunch of lazy cows lounging in a grassy field. If they’re lying down, is that a sign it will or won’t rain? I can’t recall. The looming clouds confirm my suspicions.

“I wish you could have met my mother,” she tells me.

Lydia died of leukemia nine months before I returned to Crockett.

“Me, too,” I tell her, but my answer only seems to make her feel worse.

“She was so funny.” Paige turns to me and chortles, “She would have
loved
you.”

I just nod. But Lydia wouldn’t have liked me at all. Unbeknownst to Paige, Lydia wrote me off as a hooligan years ago. A bubble-gum-stealing goon. I wish Lydia were still alive. I wish Paige had given me a proper introduction; then I could have apologized and won her over.
I was young and foolish then
, I would tell her.
Bunky was a bad influence. Do you know his current rap sheet is this long?
Gregory has no right to withhold his blessing, but if Lydia were alive today, she would.

Then, as if it’s just occurred to her, Paige says, thrilled and slightly anxious all at once, “I’m going to be your
wife.
You’re going to be my
husband. My husband!
That sounds so weird.”

“We’re a team,” I explain.

Hearing this makes her happy. I should say things like this to her more often. Five minutes pass silently before either of us speaks again.

“You’re my best friend, Andy.”

I’m touched. I privately award her points. We’re headed back to reality, back to Crockett, where the weather forecast is gloomy with a high likelihood of shit storm. Whatever happens in the
next twenty-four hours, I want her to promise me that she’ll feel the same way afterward.

It’s getting late. We’re both a little drunk. We need to head home. I’m sure Gregory’s already starting to worry. I turn down a dirt road.

“So you’re up for one more?” she asks, surprised.

The entrance to the vineyard is quickly approaching on the left, but I take a hard right, and park fifty yards away underneath a large oak tree. Then I stick the sun reflector in the front windshield, flip on the CD player, and awkwardly climb into the backseat. Paige takes my hand and joins me.

“We need to sober up,” I tell her in between kisses up and down her neck.

We pull off each other’s clothing, multiple layers at a time, until were both naked. I love her. And I love wine country.

THE phone rings twice and each time I expect it to be Paige crying hysterically because Gregory’s spilled the beans. But alas, both calls are from Sid, who wants the real scoop on how everything went down. I’m screening calls. Each time his digits appear on the display I let it go to voice mail. I’ll patch things up with Gregory. Then I’ll deal with Sid.

I hate the thought of Paige and Gregory together right now. I seriously doubt Gregory is capable of perpetuating this charade. I want Paige to call every five minutes and confirm that everything is status quo. I would call, but I can’t risk getting Gregory—the slightest provocation might set him off.

I am out of control. I’m exhausted. I’m wired. I need something to occupy my mind. I check my watch. It’s midnight. I have an
idea for an invention, but I’ll need some special software to draw it properly. I find a trial version you can download for free off the Web and work into the wee hours.
Sid is going to love this.
At some point, I drift off to sleep.

When my clock sounds at 7:00
A.M.
, I nearly fall off my chair. Touching my face, I feel the slight indentations across my left cheek from the keyboard. Untold volumes of drool lay between the keys.

It’s pouring outside. If it rains twice a summer in Crockett, that’s a lot, and because we live below the snow line, we haven’t seen snow in over a century.

I’m not accustomed to being the first at work, and by some great miracle, I manage to remember the alarm code on the third and final try. I use the quiet time to fill some new scripts and rework mine:

“You have every reason to be angry and I’m sorry,” I’ll begin. He’ll be expecting a magnitude 5.0 or 6.0 and the apology will take him off guard. At that point, I need to say things that make it utterly clear there is no undoing this.
So what do you think of the engagement ring? My parents can’t wait to see you again. Sid is so happy for us. Paige will make such a beautiful bride. I’m a lucky man. It’s big of you to forgive me. You’re handsome. Nice tie.

The bell on the front door jingles and my heart skips a beat. But it’s only Belinda. She shakes off her umbrella, jams it in the nearby pail, and then asks me about my trip to wine country. She mustn’t know that Paige and I are engaged; I can’t have Belinda congratulating Gregory before he even sets foot through the door—or maybe she should.

For the first time, in all the time that I’ve worked here, Gregory is late, by at least twenty minutes, and Belinda and I are beginning to worry. She tries him at home, but there’s no answer. We make a collective decision to open the pharmacy for business. By now, my stomach is doing somersaults. Somehow I’m responsible.

Forty-five minutes later and still no Gregory. I can’t take it. I call Paige and leave a cryptic message. As I hang up the phone,
Gregory walks in. He’s dripping wet. Wheezing and coughing, he ignores Belinda’s concerned questions, and heads straight for the storeroom. I try to make eye contact with him, but he won’t have it. The temperature in the room drops forty degrees.

I can’t take the anxiety. I poke my head in the back room.

“Everything okay?” I ask.

He flashes me a look to kill, his eyes watering more than usual, or maybe it’s the rain. He awkwardly peels off his wet baby blue windbreaker.

“What do you say you give me a sec?” he asks sternly, frustrated, shaking, barely catching his breath.

He pats his eyes and forehead with a handkerchief.

“Sure, sure, you got it. No worries,” I say as cheerily as possible.

I hesitate briefly before leaving.
Let me start off by saying that you have every reason to be angry with me …
But the words don’t come.

“Where is my future husband?” she shouts.
Oh God.

I pop my head back out onto the pharmacy floor. But it’s only Ruth Mulrooney. She’s been calling me her boyfriend from the moment we met. The eighty-year-old Crockett socialite and real estate tycoon is impeccably dressed in a long pink raincoat. With shiny white latex nails, she daintily pulls the plastic rain bonnet from her head. Her hair is dyed sherbet orange.

I compliment her scarf—it’s green paisley and I tell her that it brings out the hazel in her eyes. Ruth coos. My wedding news could end up hitting Ruth the hardest. I’ll let her down easy, but another day.

“That daughter of yours sure is lucky to have landed this catch,” she reminds Gregory as he enters from the back room, buttoning up his long white coat.

Gregory shoots me a look. It’s uncanny how people can say the kindest things at the most inopportune times. I hand Ruth her antiaging drugs—anticholesterol pills and antidepressants.