Mrs. Everything (53 page)

“Dad’s smart,” Lila said, shrugging. “If you were smart, you would have figured out how to turn it into something by yourself.” She unfolded her skinny legs from the couch and sauntered into the kitchen, and it was all Jo could do not to yank the phone out of the wall and hurl it at her youngest daughter’s head.

*  *  *

The New York City lawyer, whose name was Robert Rhodes, subpoenaed both Dave and Nonie. Rhodes got to depose Dave Braverman. When Dave had tried to argue that he and Jo had come up with the concept together, Rhodes delivered a blistering cross-examination. He’d asked Dave exactly which moves he’d thought of, how many times he’d taught or even attended one of Jo’s classes, and if he knew how a burpee was performed, or how to modify the move for someone with bad knees, or where one parked to access the fitness trail where the class had originated. Dave had mumbled through his answers, seeming to flinch from the video camera. When his deposition ended, his lawyer had huddled with hers, and by the end of the day, Dave offered Jo a lump-sum settlement. Jo suspected that the money wasn’t even close to how much he’d already earned from his first-ever successful entrepreneurial endeavor. But it would be enough. She’d be able to pay off the loans she’d taken out for Kim and Missy. She’d be able to move out of the sad, thin-walled condo and back into a real house, and put enough away so that Lila could attend whatever college would be lucky enough to get her.

When the check finally arrived, Jo bought a three-bedroom house, new construction, a ranch-style home set on a quarter-acre lot, with a screened-in back porch, a lush green lawn in front, and, out back, the swimming pool that she’d always wanted, complete with an in-ground hot tub.

“Take a trip,” Bethie had told her when Jo called to say that they’d settled. Bethie had waved off all of Jo’s attempts to pay back the money Bethie had lent her for the lawyer. “I owe you
more than I could ever repay. Send Lila down here again. Just go see the world. You’ve waited long enough.” Jo packed a bag and drove Lila to Atlanta. She spent the night at the house in Buckhead where Bethie and Harold lived, endured Lila’s murderous glances across the breakfast table, and said, “See you in August!” As soon as Lila was out of sight, Jo exhaled, feeling a lightness in her chest, a sense of hope for the first time, her shoulders drop down from her ears, where they’d been permanently hunched.

In the driveway, she sat in the driver’s seat, her hands resting on the old station wagon’s steering wheel. Missy was in New York, where she would spend her summer interning at a literary magazine. Kim was in Philadelphia, finishing her second year of law school. Jo was forty-nine years old, a woman of a certain age, with money in the bank. She didn’t have to rush home to try to scramble up some summer-school classes, or teach on the fitness trail. She could buy herself a ticket anywhere in the world. Or, she thought, as the first real smile she’d smiled in what felt like years moved across her face, she could buy two.

At a Sunoco station, she gassed up the car, and at the register, asked the clerk if they had a map of the United States. “You’re in luck,” said the guy behind the counter as he slid a folded map across the counter. “Just got the one left.” Jo thanked him, paid, and climbed back behind the wheel. She cranked up the air-conditioning and turned up the radio and, as the opening chords of “Jump” by Van Halen thundered from the speakers, Jo Kaufman turned her car west. She couldn’t remember where, or when, she’d found out that Shelley Finkelbein had moved to Colorado, but she knew that that was where her old flame was living.

Maybe she’s with someone
, Jo thought, as she made her way across the country.
Maybe she’s gotten married again.
She imagined dozens of scenarios, each one more painful and humiliating than the last, but she kept going, driving to Colorado in all-day, seventy-mile-an-hour gulps, driving from dawn until midnight,
collapsing into bed at roadside motels, telling herself,
All she can say is no.

*  *  *

There were no Finkelbeins in the phone book, but there was an R. Ziskin in the Denver phone book, with an address on Willow Court. Jo drove down her street, parked the car, and walked up the driveway of a neat little bungalow with pots of bright-red geraniums by the door.

Jo knocked. The door swung open, and there was Shelley, as if she’d been standing there waiting for Jo’s arrival. Her skin was still creamy, faintly freckled, although lined around the eyes and lips. Her hair was short, still dark and glossy, curling in wisps around her cheeks. She wore jeans, acid-washed and fashionably high-waisted, and a billowy bright-green button-down blouse tucked into them. A heavy silver and turquoise necklace hung around her slender neck. Her feet were bare, and her nails were painted red, and Jo saw a silver ring on one toe, but no rings on her fingers. Jo drank her in, her scent, the shape of her body. Shelley’s small, capable hands, her luminous eyes, her quick, inquisitive glance and the tilt of her head.

“Shelley?” Jo cleared her throat. She’d barely spoken in the long three days of her drive. Her voice sounded rusty. She was aware of how she must look, rumpled and road-weary, her hair sticking up in spikes and her hands and face sticky with sweat and dust. A scrap of a poem moved through her head:
Come live with me and be my love.

“Jo.” Shelley’s cheeks flushed, faintly, and she opened her arms. She still smelled like flowers and cigarettes, and she still felt just right in Jo’s arms. “I never stopped hoping,” she said.

PART

  six

2006

Jo

C
ome on,” Shelley called. “If we don’t go now, we’re going to hit traffic.” Shelley was dressed for Thanksgiving dinner at Kim’s house in black cotton leggings and a midnight-blue velvet tunic, with her short silvery hair brushed up into spikes. She wore black patent-leather clogs, “my dress-up clogs,” as she called them, the ones Jo suspected had been chosen because they’d aggravate Kim’s mother-in-law. Once, Shelley had owned a collection of high-heeled shoes that would have rivaled any boutique’s. Now she had arthritis and flats.

Jo slipped silver teardrop earrings through the holes in her ears that had gotten longer as the years had passed, and gave herself a quick check in the mirror, making sure her gray wool pants weren’t wrinkled and that her black cashmere wrap didn’t have cat fur on its sleeves. As Shelley put her coat on, Jo pulled her contribution to the Thanksgiving meal out of the refrigerator and gave it a shake, watching with satisfaction as the shimmery surface of the cherry-flavored Jell-O gave an obliging wiggle.

“It’s going to be okay,” Shelley told her as they walked down
the driveway. It sounded, Jo thought, as if Shelley was trying to convince herself as much as Jo, but she made herself nod and say, “I know everything’s going to be fine.”

And even if it wasn’t, Jo thought, as she turned on the car and pulled onto the street, she’d had such happy years with Shelley. She thought, sometimes, that everything she’d experienced, the years in the suburbs, the bankruptcy and financial uncertainty, the collapse of her marriage, Dave and Nonie’s betrayal, Lila’s endless misery and scorn, that all of it had been the price she had paid for the life she had now. Thanks to the settlement, she had enough money to maintain the house in Avondale and live nicely. The plan was to move to New York City after they’d both retired, if they could find a way to do it affordably. For now, they could go to the city once every month for a day or two of theater and museums, although sometimes, at Shelley’s insistence, they’d go to Foxwoods, the new Indian casino up by New London, where Shelley would play poker and Jo would wander the casino floor, sometimes playing nickel slots, sometimes people-watching, sometimes just sitting with a book. Every summer, they did a big trip. So far, she and Shelley had toured Venice and Copenhagen and Barcelona. They’d taken a cruise on a barge through Holland, when the tulips were in bloom, paddled kayaks beneath glaciers in Alaska, and ridden bicycles through the countryside in Provence. On their first day, after a hilly, fifteen-mile pedal through the rolling countryside, they’d stopped at a winery for lunch. Jo had limited herself to a few sips of white and a single swallow of red, admiring the cool, cave-like interior of the stone farmhouse where they were dining, and enjoying her Niçoise salad and fresh baguette. Shelley, meanwhile, had insisted on tasting everything they poured, finishing her glasses and Jo’s, sampling whites, reds, rosés, sparkling wines, even dessert wines. “I’m just having a little bit!” she’d said, flushed and indignant, when Jo pointed out that they’d have to get back on their bikes when the meal was over. By the time they stepped back into the afternoon sunshine, Shelley was past tipsy. She’d put her helmet on backward, waved off Jo’s help, climbed on her bike,
wobbled maybe ten yards down the smooth dirt of the winery’s driveway, and then rolled, very slowly, into a shallow, grassy ditch. Jo ran after her and found her lying on her back, helmet askew, laughing so hard she was crying.

“BUI!” she’d gasped. “Biking under the influence!” Jo had laughed and held her, and they’d drowsed together, under the lemony sun, and Jo had spent the rest of the ride pedaling solo, with Shelley sobering up in the van.

Over the years, Jo had imagined a hundred different lives for her lost love. She’d pictured Shelley in a jewelry studio, her small, fox-like face intent as she used a blowtorch to twist metal into earrings and pendants, or Shelley onstage, performing monologues, or Shelley as a poet in loose-fitting black clothing, walking through a forest bright with fall leaves. She’d been amused when, with a combination of pride and chagrin, Shelley told her that she’d become a speech therapist. “I had to do something practical after the divorce,” she explained on their first night in Colorado. They’d been in bed, where Jo had been delighted to find that Shelley smelled just the way she remembered, that same intoxicating combination of flowery perfume and tobacco, even though Shelley claimed to have stopped smoking in the 1970s. She’d put on weight since the last time Jo had seen her, and she’d been careful to keep a pillow or a length of sheet over her midsection, until Jo had pulled her hands away and kissed every silvery stretch mark, every inch of yielding skin.

“Speech therapy?”

Shelley lifted her chin. “I was broke.” Her father had died by then, of colon cancer, the year after Shelley’s wedding, and her mother wouldn’t have been supportive, even if Shelley had asked.

“No alimony?”

Shelley bit her lip, a gesture Jo remembered well, and said, “Denny wasn’t in the mood to be generous.” More lip-nibbling ensued, before Shelley said, “He found me in bed. With someone else.”

“The pizza delivery boy?” Jo teased.

“More like the pizza delivery girl,” Shelley confessed, ducking her head, as Jo felt jealousy flare in her chest at the idea of some long-ago stranger. “Denny was furious. He felt like I’d pulled some kind of bait and switch on him. That I knew I was . . .” Jo saw her throat work as she swallowed, before saying, “. . . gay before I married him. That I never intended to have kids, or be a mother, and I lied to him.”

Jo hadn’t meant to ask, but the words were out before she could stop them. “Did he have any idea? Did you ever tell him about—”

“You?” Shelley gave a sad smile and shook her head. “Of course not. He thought you were my friend. That was all.” She shook her head again. “You were the brave one, remember?”

“Not so brave that I didn’t end up exactly where you were,” Jo said.

Shelley sighed and reached for Jo’s hand.

“I took what he gave me, and I didn’t want to move back home, so I took out loans and I went back to school, and I have spent the last fifteen years teaching children how to pronounce their diphthongs.”

“Come here, you diphthong,” said Jo, opening her arms. Later, she’d whispered, “Do you forgive me?”

“For not running away with me?” Shelley answered, plucking Jo’s thoughts from her head with that old, familiar ease. “Please. You had two babies. I don’t know what I was thinking. It was a fantasy.”

Jo had rolled onto her side, pulling Shelley close. “I’m here now.”

Shelley had put her condo on the market and took the first good offer that she got. In Connecticut, she’d rented her own apartment, telling Jo that they shouldn’t rush into things, that maybe they’d changed and wouldn’t get along as well as they once had, but she’d ended up spending almost every night with Jo in Avondale, and when her lease was up after the first year, she hadn’t renewed it. She found a job as a speech therapist in a school district two
towns over, and Jo continued as a permanent substitute teacher. They took their big trips in the summer and shorter ones throughout the year, skiing in Vermont or driving up to Northampton or down to New York City to see exhibits or concerts or shows. They hung the bright, abstract paintings Shelley had collected on the walls, and spread her Navajo-style rugs on the floors, and crammed her clothes—so many clothes—into Jo’s bedroom closet, putting the overspill into the room where Missy and Kim slept when they were home. Shelley met Jo’s friends—brisk, take-charge Judy Pressman; peppy, preppy Stephanie Zelcheck; Valerie Cohen, who was working on a PhD in romance languages at the University of Connecticut. The women welcomed Shelley into the book club, and marveled at her and Jo’s story, and pointedly did not mention Nonie Scotto, who’d once read books and sipped wine and raised her babies alongside them. Years went by, and they were happy. Except for Lila.