Melissa Senate (3 page)

Before I could think or process, Tom’s sister found me with a “there you are!” and launched into color schemes again and how she could plan the entire wedding for us for free. Stella got up from the desk chair and whispered, “We can see the house that James Dean grew up in in Indiana!” I tried to ignore Stella, but she said, “Can I steal my sister for a minute,” to Tom’s sister, then pulled me into the bathroom and shut the door. “Should I call Hertz?” she asked.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Get me out of here!

No, no, no. It was crazy. And I wasn’t crazy. “Stella, Las Vegas is almost three thousand miles from here. You and me in a car for three thousand miles? Come on.” Then again, perhaps I should find a wedding chapel—a drive-through, at that—as soon as possible so that I didn’t destroy a good thing. And Tom and I had a good thing. A very good thing. Tom had been there when my mother died. He’d taken care of me. He’d taken care of business. He’d been there for two more years of my life. And we’d both had ups and downs.

Nick, on the other hand, had been my lunch buddy. Had shared his stories about women. About his lack of feelings about the women he dated.

But
he’d
also been there when my mother died. While I’d been waiting for Stella’s plane to land at the Portland Jetport, I’d walked over to the huge expanse of windows, stared at the planes coming in, the planes being loaded up with bags. I stood there sobbing. And I called Nick on my cell phone, but got his voice mail and left a message. And very late that night, after Stella had fallen asleep wearing my mother’s favorite huge wool sweater, and Tom had gone home, Nick had knocked on my apartment door with two pints of ice cream, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two boxes of Puffs tissues. And we sat on the floor in my living room, on the rug, in front of the fireplace, and he told me about the day
his
mother had died, also a car accident. He was thirteen and thought he wasn’t supposed to cry but then couldn’t contain himself anymore and sobbed through the funeral. His father and older brother held him tight and let him cry without a single shush, and that was what he remembered most. The not being shushed.

What Stella remembered most about our mother’s funeral was what I’d said about not loving Tom.

“Aren’t you curious to know what Nebraska is like?” she asked now. “If it’s all cornfields? We can break the drive into a week, stay along the way, see some really cool sites. I’m
dying
to see the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Ohio. That’s just a couple days into our trip! Ruby, you could actually touch the hem of the leather jacket Bruce Springsteen wore on the cover of
Born To Run.
”

I doubted you could actually touch it, but I wouldn’t mind seeing that leather jacket. Or driving through a cornfield that never ended.

“Come on, Ruby,” she said. “School is out. You said all you’re planning to do this summer is take a Spanish class and learn to knit. You can do that in the car! You can bring those Berlitz tapes. I’ll plan the entire trip—down to where and when to stop for the night. I’ll even make all the reservations. We’ll stick to a plan, and you know how you like plans. We’ll take a week to drive down, spend a week there, and then Tom can fly down, you’ll get married if you’re really serious about it, and then we’ll all drive back. You’ll drop me in New York, and then you two can drive back up to Maine and live boringly ever after. Or we can even fly back, and you know how I hate to fly.”

“Why do you want to do this so bad, anyway?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at her. “Why do you want to be stuck in a car with me for three thousand miles? Why do you suddenly want to help me pick out a wedding chapel when you think Tom is wrong for me?”

“The plan isn’t to pick out a wedding chapel, Rubes. It’s to trap you in the car for a couple of weeks. Someone has to try to save you from making the biggest mistake of your life, Ruby. And Grammy Zelda doesn’t drive. I’m all you’ve got.”

At least she was honest.

“So, you’re going to drive all the way to Las Vegas to convince me not to get married.”

“Just say yes, Ruby. I want to make sure I can reserve a really cool car. A convertible. Red.”

“Say yes to
what,
exactly? To listening to you tell me that I don’t love my fiancé? I don’t think—”

She clutched her map. “Okay, so there might be another reason I want to go to Las Vegas,” she said, biting her lip. “And I remembered how you said that if you ever got married, you’d want to elope to Las Vegas, so that’s why I thought of you, why I figured I’d ask if you were interested in driving there.”

I waited for the reason, which seemed slow in coming. Which was worrisome.

“I…uh…I can—what’s that cliché? Kill a bird with a stone?”

“Two birds,” I said. “With one stone.”

“Well, the first bird is your engagement. Which I do plan to kill.”

“And the other bird?” I prompted. It was
that
bird that was making me nervous. Did Stella have a gambling problem? Did she owe loan sharks a pot of money or something? Did she want to be a legal prostitute?

“No other bird. That’s it.” She dropped down on the bed and burst into tears.

“Stella?” I handed her the box of Puffs from the bathroom.

She took a deep breath and wiped at her tears, then squeezed her eyes shut. “Okay, so I’m pregnant and I think the guy, the father, lives in Las Vegas. I’m ninety-nine percent sure that’s what he said. I want to try to find him. Okay? Is your answer yes now?” She stood and walked over to the window and stared out, biting her lip again.

I stared at her. Stared at the profile of her stomach, which was flat as always.

“I’m ten weeks, Ruby. Due in December. The second. Isn’t that amazing?”

It was our mother’s birthday. But she’d died the day before she could turn fifty-four.

Stella’s face crumpled. “It was a one-night stand. I don’t even know his name. I think it starts with
J.
Jake or James. Jason, maybe.”

“Oh, Stella,” I said, now really aware what it meant to be unable to form a thought.

She burst into tears again. She stood there and cried and I wrapped my arms around her.

“We had this amazing chemistry, Ruby,” she said, her voice cracking. “But we drank so much and kept drinking and then in the morning he was gone, no note with his name and number, nothing. I met him in a bar and I remember he said something about living in Las Vegas and being here—New York—on business. I’m pretty sure he said he was a lawyer. Or maybe not. I can’t remember. I wish I could remember.” She started sobbing again. “How can I not remember anything about the father of my own baby? How can I do that to my baby? How can I do that after knowing what it’s like not to have a father?”

I squeezed her hand. “It’ll be okay, Stell.”

“Will you help me try and find him?” she asked, sniffling. “In between checking out wedding chapels—I mean, if that’s really what you want?”

I had no idea
how
we’d find him, but I nodded. Las Vegas wasn’t Blueberry Hills, Maine, with its population of six thousand. How would we find a guy whose name might be Jake or James or Jason, and who might be a lawyer, and who might not even live in Las Vegas? “We’ll leave Monday morning,” I told her.

It was Saturday. That would give me enough time to pack, to plan—what I didn’t know.

I would make her do most of the driving, if that was okay for pregnant women, and I assumed it was. It would do her good to focus on the road. And I could stare out the window at the passing scenery, the passing states. And think. And that would do me good.

I wouldn’t have opened the presents, I would have waited till I got back from the trip, but Tom’s sisters and aunts insisted. Once the party winded down, and it was just family (Stella feigned a migraine and disappeared into my bedroom with my laptop, to research the route), Caroline handed me a box with a bow. And she kept handing me boxes for almost an hour. Tom and I received great stuff, including a talking scale, exquisite wineglasses and matching kitschy lingerie from Stella.

I lay in bed with the ribbons-festooned paper plate on my head that the Truby women also insisted on making me. Once it was on my head, I couldn’t seem to take it off.

“You’re lucky I don’t know where you keep your scissors,” Stella had said earlier, making menacing cutting motions with her fingers.

I was wearing the kitschy nightie. Tom was wearing the matching boxer shorts. Navy-blue silk with cartoonlike lobsters with thought bubbles that said:
Eat Me!
The lobsters were over certain areas, of course. Tom thought they were hilarious. You had to give him credit for that.

It had taken me a while to tell Tom about Stella, about the situation, the road trip. I’d waited until he came back from driving Zelda and Harry to the nursing home. Then until we’d cleaned up. Then until we had some leftover barbecue chicken, and then until we went upstairs to bed.

“I think it’s a great idea,” he said, gently yanking a purple bow taped on by my ear. He lay down beside me, smelling of Ivory soap. “Even if Stella doesn’t find the guy, which seems kind of a needle in a haystack, you two could use a good, long road trip. You need to work on your relationship once and for all.”

“We might murder each other before we hit New Hampshire.”

He smiled. “I have a feeling this Stella is going to be a very different Stella than you’ve ever known. She’s pregnant. And alone.”

That had to be scary. I’d tried to talk to her all night, but she kept saying she didn’t want to talk about it, then finally faked sleeping so I’d leave her alone.

“And I don’t know about eloping to Vegas, Ruby,” he said, “but if it’s what you want…”

Needless to say, I switched the birds. Stella’s real bird with the fake bird about checking out wedding chapels, giving that old dream of mine a chance. I couldn’t exactly tell Tom that Stella planned to deprogram me for forty-two hours.

“Though, it would be pretty cool to get married in the Elvis Wedding Chapel,” he said. “If there really is one. But no Elvis impersonators officiating, okay? They can serenade us, though.”

“Deal,” I said, finally able to take off the stupid hat. Tom was always able to make things feel okay.

“Anyway, we have plenty of time to talk about that,” he added.

I hadn’t realized how often he gave that as his final answer. Tom envisioned a big fancy wedding like every Truby had before him. I knew that because he’d said so a few times. I supposed that was how that list of questions in the
New York Times
article worked; at some point you’d have to go from bringing up an issue to actually deciding how you felt, what you could live with, what was a deal breaker. Eloping to Las Vegas or having a fancy schmancy wedding with a tentier cake and a band were both good. But Las Vegas was better. For me, anyway.

A deal breaker—a real deal breaker—was being in love with someone else.

Tom’s hands were exploring the lobsters, but it was close to two in the morning, and he was asleep in seconds. I ran my hands through his clean brown hair and listened to him breathe. For a moment, all was well in the world. I was with my Tom. He loved me, and I loved him.

And then, as always, Nick’s face, his body, his voice, was all over me. I hadn’t spoken to him since the party. And I wouldn’t call him or go see him before I left Monday morning. It didn’t matter—okay, it
shouldn’t
matter—if Nick was serious, if he really meant it, if he really had feelings for me. What mattered was how I felt. And I had no clue.

S
TELLA CRAVED CHOCOLATE MALT BALLS, TEN CARTONS OF WHICH
she had in the car—a red convertible like she wanted. She kept a bunch of the malt balls in the cup holder between us.

“I am dying for a McDonald’s hamburger,” she said, a malt ball puffing out her cheek. “Not Burger King or Wendy’s. It has to be McDonald’s. And I want extra ketchup. A ton of ketchup.”

She was in luck because there was a McDonald’s every half hour between here, which was still Maine, and Las Vegas. It was only eleven o’clock. We hadn’t even been driving an hour, hadn’t even hit the New Hampshire border. So far, so good, though. Sort of. We hadn’t had a single fight, even though Stella had answered every one of my questions with
I don’t know.

Including:
Where exactly are we looking for Jake or James or Jason?

Usually, I’d come at her with my
Stella!,
but as long as the place we were looking took a long time to get to, that was all I needed to know.

I hadn’t eaten in McDonald’s in years, but the idea of a cheeseburger and fries and a Coke sounded so good. Stella ordered two hamburgers, fries, a strawberry milk shake, and apple dippers “for the baby.”

“I guess I’ll be huge in a month at this rate,” she said.

Stella was five foot seven and 117 pounds. This I knew because she’d announced her weight this morning and logged it in her pregnancy journal, which she’d been keeping since she’d gotten the news last week.

She’d known for a week and hadn’t told me. I had serious feelings for another guy and didn’t tell her. What were we supposed to talk about for three thousand miles?

“Omigod, are you those twin kiddie stars who don’t look alike?”

Stella beamed at the teenaged girl behind the counter while I turned red and stared at my flip-flops. “You saw us on
Where Are They Now?
”

“Yes! Omigod, it
is
you!” The girl turned to tell her co-workers that Stella and I used to be famous, but no one cared. Except me, busy cringing. And Stella, preening.

For a few years—almost thirty years ago—Stella and I were in-demand baby models. We were the fraternal twins—one blond with pale-brown eyes, and one dark-brunette with blue eyes—who looked nothing alike except for the same ridiculously big, bow-lipped smile and double dimples. Our faces, those smiles, were on countless baby products, but particularly Goodness Sakes brand.

Though we grew up cute enough (Stella
much
cuter, actually), our modeling days were over by the time we were potty trained. Our family life made it until we started losing our baby teeth. Eric Miller, our father, ran off with a low-level casting agent and exactly ten percent (his fee as our “manager”) of our sizable earnings when we were six and just “regular kids.” Our mother and grandmother and great-grandmother had an “eh, who needs that lowlife thief!” approach to his abandonment and barely mentioned his name again, unlike everyone else in our Queens, New York, neighborhood way back when.

Which was why we moved to Maine. After reading in a magazine like
Life
or
Time
that “Greater Portland” Maine was among the top ten places in the country to raise children, and that beaches were to Maine what parking meters were to New York City, Mom packed up me and Stella, her mother, and Grammy Zelda, and moved us to Blueberry Hills (after waiting exactly one year for that “lowlife thief” to return). We stuck out like the boroughs people we were with our Queens accents and interest in playing handball against the sides of people’s houses. And so much for blending in and putting our past behind us. My mother told everyone who’d stand there and listen about our glory days and our no-good father. But Mainers weren’t interested in former child stars and their tabloid families. They cared about when the tide was coming in, if your kid was allergic to peanuts, and whether or not this winter would be as bad as the last. And so within a month, we settled in with our new fleece sweatshirts and shiny forest-green Subaru as though we’d always lived in Maine. Come summer we learned how true it was about the beaches.

A few years ago, Stella had spent months sending VH1 e-mails and letters and pictures about our former glory as two-year-olds and how we’d make excellent candidates for their
Where Are They Now?
show about the formerly famous and almost famous. Finally, she’d heard back from a producer who wanted to include us in a “former child stars” medley episode. I said no way. Stella green-lighted them, anyway, and they filmed me walking into BLA without my knowledge and interviewed several students and faculty members, none of whom had known about my baby modeling days.

We hadn’t spoken for two months after that argument. “It’s no one’s business where we are now!” I’d yelled at Stella, but she’d thought it would lead to at least ten minutes of fame for her (it didn’t) or maybe even our father knocking on our door (he didn’t).

“He’ll see what he missed out on and grovel to come back in our lives,” Stella had said.

Intellectually, I knew that Eric Miller hadn’t left because our careers ended. I knew it was about him, his lack of
something.
According to my relatives his problem was reality; he couldn’t deal with it. The reality of family life, of him having to earn a living instead of relying on his daughters. I stopped thinking about it a long time ago. Stopped thinking about it
often,
anyway. But Stella brought it up a lot. Which I understood. How were you supposed to make peace with it? How could you form it, phrase it, reduce it in your head so that it was okay, so that it didn’t mean your father didn’t love you?
Oh, my dad? Dunno. I haven’t seen or heard from him since I was six, but that’s okay. He just wasn’t the dad type, you know? And I’ve moved on!
What were you supposed to move on from?

Stella used to scream this when we were teenagers.
What am I supposed to say?
she’d yell at me, as if it were my fault, as if I knew the answer when friends, neighbors would casually ask where our father was.
Where am I supposed to tell people he is?

“Omigod!” the girl shrieked for the tenth time. “Will you read my face?”

“On the house,” Stella said, winking at her, and the girl announced she was on break and led Stella to a table under a giant poster for a free coffee between 5:00 and 8:00 a.m.

During her three seconds of airtime on
Where Are They Now?,
Stella had claimed to be a professional muse and face reader. Her ability to read faces was particularly important for her role as muse, she’d said, because she could, simply by studying the face and its expressions in a two-minute period, instantly pinpoint what was potentially blocking the artist she was working with.

Substitute wealthy male lover for artist.

I munched a long, skinny French fry and watched her stare at the teenager’s fresh-scrubbed face. Stella just looked at her, her own expression neutral, and within ten seconds of being stared at, the “truth started to show” on the girl’s face. That’s what Stella called it. According to my enterprising twin sister, if you sat across from someone and stared at them without speaking for longer than fifteen seconds, the person would begin to squirm. Would begin to feel as though Stella could see inside her, as though Stella
knew.
And within a minute, what was bothering—or thrilling—the person would appear via expression, be it worry or joy or fear or anger, giving Stella her in.

The girl started biting her lip. Her gaze darted from Stella’s stare to the poster to me to the employee who’d taken her place behind the register. Back again. Then tears welled up in the girl’s eyes and she wiped them away with a napkin.

“You’re clearly upset about something,” Stella said in her gentle voice.

For this, a ten-minute “face reading,” Stella would normally charge fifty bucks. And the sucker would gladly pay!

The girl sniffled. “My boyfriend dumped me because I won’t—” she leaned closer to Stella and whispered “—give him a blow job.”

Stella nodded and studied the girl for a moment. “That happened to me once. When I was a junior in high school.”

“I’m a junior!” the girl said, brightening.

Stella studied her from several angles. “Yup, it’s clear. That guy was
so
not the one. You totally did the right thing by not wasting your first experience with him. Excellent!”

The girl beamed. “How will I know when it’s the right guy?”

Now it was Stella’s turn to lean in. “There won’t be a moment’s hesitation. You won’t have to think about it. Won’t be grossed out by the thought of it. Everything will feel right. That’s how you don’t end up regretting something, even if it ends up not working out.”

The teen stared at Stella. She was clearly hoping Oh Wise One would keep talking forever. But Stella was done. “Omigod, you are so good.” She leapt up and ran over to her co-workers behind the counter. “Omigod! Guys! I totally get it now!”

Huh. I had to hand it to Stella. Not bad, sister dear.

“That depleted my energy stores,” Stella said, grabbing the fry out of my hand. “And what I told her goes double for you,” she added as we headed back to the car. She stopped to take a sip of her milk shake. “The knowing part. The not regretting.”

“Did I ask for a face reading? If I did, my expression would say, ‘people who offer unsolicited advice are annoying.’”

“Whatev,” she said, unlocking the driver’s side. Guess she wasn’t tired of driving yet. Which was fine with me. She tended to talk more when she wasn’t behind the wheel. “I’ll bet he saw it,” she said.

“Who saw what?”

“Our father. I’ll bet he saw the
Where Are They Now?
show. Or someone told him about it. Actually, he probably makes sure to watch each episode, just in case we were ever featured.”

I shrugged. I had no interest in talking about Eric Miller. What was the point? For a long time, our father’s abandonment was all Stella and I had in common, so it was what we talked about. Even as six-year-olds, we spent hours discussing every possible scenario, wondering out loud
why, how
until our answers began to irk the other and we stopped talking about even that. Stella had created a fairy tale of how our father had fallen madly in love with the beautiful casting agent, who must have despised little girls and wanted to lock us in a dungeon, and our father loved us so much that he left us behind forever to save us.

Right. Sure. The way I saw it, our father just didn’t love us enough. Or just didn’t care. That infuriated Stella, but wasn’t it the truth? To this day, Stella still believed in the wicked stepmother-dungeon story. And I still went for the he-just-didn’t-give-a-shit route.

“You know, Ruby, the fact that you won’t talk about it means it bothers you,” she said, taking a bite of her hamburger. “So you might as well talk about it.”

“What’s to say?” I asked, squeezing ketchup on my fries. “Eat before your food gets cold, Stella.”

“Ugh, I told her I wanted extra pickles! There’s, like, one pickle on this hamburger.”

“You can have mine,” I said, taking the top of the bun off my cheeseburger, where four pickles were mushed into a dollop of ketchup.

“She gave you my pickles,” Stella said, picking them off and laying them on her hamburger.

I’d much rather talk pickles than about our father. “Do you crave pickles?” I asked her. “I thought that was just a joke, a cliché about pregnant women.”

“Actually, I only crave malt balls and the entire McDonald’s hamburger experience. I just happen to love these little pickles.”

She turned on the radio, to a classic rock station, and we ate to
Dream On, Wish You Were Here,
and
Freebird.
Stella ate all her fries and most of mine, too. The only thing she said while eating was that she couldn’t think of a single band, rock or otherwise, that had come out of Maine. I reminded her that Patrick Dempsey was from Maine, and we agreed that he was enough.

My cell phone rang just as she pulled back on to I-95. Tom. We had a half-minute checking-in, how’s-the-driving-going conversation.

When I put my phone away, Stella fiddled with the radio, searching for a song she liked. She slid in a Jack Johnson CD. “So this morning while you were in the shower I asked Tom how was he going to live without you for two weeks and you know what he said?”

I knew what he said because he’d posed the question rhetorically last night in bed, his hands cupping my face, his eyes full of all good things looking into mine. And then he’d answered, and I had no doubt he’d told Stella the same thing.

She took a sip of her milk shake and licked her lips. “He said you were always right here and put his hand over his heart. Not bad.”

I smiled. “Told you.”

“So why
don’t
you love him?” she asked. “And don’t say it was two years ago that you said that. I can tell you don’t, Ruby. You’re
loving
to him. But you don’t love him. Not the way you loved Mark Feeler. I just wonder why. If he’s such a great guy.”

She was bringing up Mark Feeler? I was madly in love with Mark Feeler when I was
thirteen.
Well, when I was thirteen until I was seventeen. He’d lived next door and was a year ahead of us in school (and he’d gone to the public regional schools, not BLA). I followed him around, unknowingly a pest. Mark was in a band, and I, their most ardent groupie, would race home after school to watch them practice in the Feeler garage. When no one else was around, we’d have long make out sessions. He always tried for more, sticking his hand up my shirt or unzipping my jeans. I usually let him. It never went farther than that, and when I was fifteen and sixteen, he had a succession of girlfriends of whom I was incredibly jealous. I tried to adopt their look, but I couldn’t. Stella had it, that sense of style, and she might have been interested in Mark, but she’d had the same boyfriend from age fourteen until the summer she graduated from high school. There was no one else for her but that boy, a wild child named Silas, whose joie de vivre had caught up with him.