Where You Least Expect (6 page)

“Hello, Mother,” she said.

“Oh, Verna, what did you do to upset your father?” she asked.

That her mother had decided she was to blame was hurtful but not remotely surprising.

“Nothing. He’s piss—mad about something. You know he fired me, right?”

“Oh, he didn’t, did he?”

“He did.”

Verna briefly considered asking her mother to talk to him and try to get him to change his mind, but she knew that would be fruitless and frustrating, so she saved her breath. Vernon’s word was law at Love’s Cafeteria and at home, and her mother wouldn’t go against it, or even try to get him to consider a different perspective. She never had before, and Verna knew she never would.

“Well, dear. I know you’ll work it out.”

It was just the sort of unhelpful, unreassuring reassurance that she’d come to expect from her mother, a harsh reminder, no matter how unintended, that Verna didn’t have a soft place to land, at least not emotionally.

“Yeah. Well, I gotta go.”

She had to end the call before she lost it.

“Okay, Verna. Take care.”

Take care.

Her mother would have shown more affection for a door-to-door salesman. It was that thought that had Verna breaking down in tears.

Chapter Five

“Happy birthday…”

The sounds of a slightly slurred woman’s voice rang across the backyard and to the balcony where Joe sat, unwinding from a long day of doing nothing at all. Instantly irritated, he stood and walked around the side of his balcony and looked into Quinn’s—Verna’s—backyard. His gaze zeroed in on the shadowed figure that he recognized as Verna sprawled out on one of the brightly colored deck chairs.

“Verna, what’s all that racket?” he yelled gruffly.

She turned her head and raised an arm abruptly, tittering a little giggle when some of the liquid in her glass spilled over the rim and landed in her lap.

“Joe!” she screamed. “Wish me a happy birthday!”

She was drunk. What the fuck?

He spun on his heel and headed toward the opposite side of his deck.

“Well, fine, keep your fuckin’ happy birthday. I ain’t want it no way!” she yelled.

He couldn’t stop the chuckle that sprang up at her words as he walked down the deck stairs and quickly scaled the ten-foot privacy fence that separated their yards. Then he walked up her stairs and only stopped when he stood in front of her, waiting for her to notice him, though she seemed content to hum under her breath and wipe at the wet spot on her shirt with a paper napkin.

“That’s going to leave lint,” he finally said, and she screamed, dropping the glass that she held, and glanced around wildly before settling her gaze on him.

“Motherfucker! Dammit, Joe! I told you about sneaking up on people. I coulda been packing heat.” Then she looked down at the wineglass that had broken at the stem but thankfully hadn’t shattered, and grumbled, “And you made me drop my fuckin’ wine.”

After looking at the glass with a final disapproving huff, she reached between two deck chairs, a bottle in her hand when she lifted it.

“But the joke’s on you, MFer. I don’t need a glass.”

And with that, she lifted the bottle to her lips and took a healthy swig.

“Stop swearing at me. And I think you’ve had enough of that,” he said, dislodging the bottle from her fingers.

She narrowed her eyes and then reached for the bottle, which he easily kept out of her grasp. Two quick steps and he placed the bottle on the deck railing before walking back over toward her and then plopping in the chair beside her.

“So you don’t want me to be happy either, huh? No surprise there. But fuc”—she glanced at him guiltily—“screw you. And everyone else, too.”

“Delightful as always, Verna,” he said, to which she glared. “What’s gotten you in such a mood?”

“Don’t you listen? I already said it’s my birthday, and it’s been quite revealatory. Wait, re-ve-la-tory.” She spoke slowly, her enunciation precise, as if she either struggled with the pronunciation of the last word or thought he was the babbling drunk and not her.

“And usually birthdays involve cake and presents and friends and, you know, happiness, which seems conspicuously absent.”

“Happiness!” She flopped back in the deck chair and threw an arm across her eyes, the dramatic motion making him laugh out loud. “It’s my thirtieth birthday, one that has only proven the truth of most of the shit I’ve always believed but could never fully accept. How can I be happy?”

“Christ, Verna, you’re not that old,” he said, and she took her arm off her eyes long enough to glare at him riotously. “What? You’re not. Certainly not old enough to warrant these theatrics, not that any age is, but still,” he said.

“Why am I not surprised that you don’t get it?” she asked, still looking at him hard.

“Explain it to me,” he said as he leaned forward and pinned her with a hard glare of his own.

After a moment, she looked away and then waved at him dismissively.

“Never mind. It doesn’t matter. And besides, you don’t even like me, so why would I share anything with you?”

“To be fair, Verna, you don’t like me very much either.” She shrugged at the statement, and he continued. “But I’ll admit, I’m intrigued.”

And he was. Verna was annoying as fuck, but she was almost always in good spirits, so he was genuinely curious about why something as innocuous as a birthday had her resorting to getting drunk alone.

“Intrigued like, ‘Let’s laugh at Verna and the shitshow that is her life’ or some other kind of curious?”

Odd comment, but he let it pass.

“Some other kind of curious; we’ll call it something like reconnaissance.”

She looked at him again, her expression still skeptical and her eyes surprisingly clear for someone who’d consumed what looked to be more than her fair share of wine.

“Fine,” she said, huffing out a breath. “I’m thirty.”

The words were spoken with the same misery with which one would deliver a piece of particularly devastating news.

“I gathered,” he said, shaking his head.

“Do you have any idea what that means?” she asked, her eyes slightly bugged out with incredulity.

“That you were born thirty years ago today,” he said slowly, not quite catching her drift.

“No.” She paused. “Well, yes, it means that, too. But more importantly, it means that as of today, I am officially, unequivocally, a failure.”

“I’m not following.”

She quirked a smile then, one that said she wasn’t surprised that he wasn’t keeping up.

“Stop smirking and connect the dots, Verna,” he said sharply.

She smiled a bit brighter, but the look fell away with her heaved sigh.

“I suck at life, Joe,” she said with a finality that made him want to comfort her.

“You don’t—”

“It’s okay,” she said, cutting him off. “I don’t need anyone to try to smooth it over, give me a pep talk to make me feel better. I suck at life, at everything. I’ve known it for a long, long time, but I always thought I’d get better, turn the corner, that I had more time to improve. But I’m thirty now. And as my father so definitively established, time is up.”

“What? Verna, you’re not making any sense.”

“It’s just,” she started to shrug and then stopped halfway through the motion, gave a sad little shake of her head instead, and continued, “I have nothing to show for myself. There’s nothing to justify my existence. I never finished college, or even went seriously. That car you hate so much, it was my grandmother’s before she passed. You know about the house, but I bet you didn’t know I only pay about a third of what Quinn could get on the open market, and I had to fight to even get her to take that.”

“She’s your best friend; it’s understandable that she doesn’t want to take your money.”

“Or maybe she just pities me.”

She looked so miserable his heart went out to her as he groped for words to refute her thoughts.

“Quinn loves you like a sister; she wouldn’t insult you with pity. And besides, people aren’t what they own, Verna, what degrees they have, and you shouldn’t reduce yourself to those arbitrary measures,” he said, finally settling on an approach.

She rolled her eyes and leaned back in her deck chair.

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ. It’s worse than I thought. You’re actually trying to make me feel better. I should just end it now.”

She put a finger to her head and pretended to shoot herself.

“Verna,” he said, his low voice making her jump and turn to look at him. “Don’t ever say that again, you hear me? Don’t even think it.”

“It was just a joke,” she said quietly.

“Not a funny one and it’s no laughing matter,” he said, voice still firm.

She nodded quickly, but he held her gaze, hopefully conveying how seriously he took the issue. After a moment, she looked away and in increments, the sudden tension faded.

“It’s just,” she said, “I’d imagined so many great things. I was going to do this and do that, follow my dreams, fall in love…” she said wistfully. “And as I drove home today, it hit me: I’m nothing. I have nothing and I am nothing.”

The words and the fierce conviction with which she said them tore at his heart. He had to wonder why he’d never noticed her deep self-loathing before, had to wonder if anyone noticed or if they, like he’d sometimes been, were thrown off the trail by her wit and abrasiveness.

“Verna, you’re not nothing. You have people who care about you, people whose lives you make a little bit brighter every day. That’s so much more than a lot of other people can say.”

She laughed, but the sound was bitter. “That’s right, I’m a little ember of goodness and light, aren’t I?”

“To the regulars at the restaurant you are. Do you think many other people take time to listen to them and make an effort to make them feel special each and every time they show up? And what about the people at the food bank who get what might be their only decent meal of the week because of what Love’s does on Wednesday nights? And if I had to bet, that was all your idea. I’m right, aren’t I?”

“Pfft. That stuff’s just human, a grasping attempt not to be a complete waste of space.”

Talking to Verna had often felt like he was banging his head against a particularly thick wall, but never more so than tonight, and he was getting frustrated.

“Okay. So, explain to me, in detail, why you, who, by all accounts, is a well-liked and well-respected person, is nothing, and I’ll tell you why you’re wrong. Four sentences or less. Go.”

“I lived with my parents until I was twenty-nine years old. Outside of a few business classes at the local community college, all I’ve ever done is work at a restaurant, my parents’ restaurant, a place from which I was fired, today, on my birthday, by my
father
, and even though I know what I want to do with my life, I’m too chickenshit to really go for it. I’m so scared of failing, I more or less had to be forced to attempt to try. Oh, and I’m a virgin.”

She said the last as if she’d delivered the deathblow, and he had to admit that he stumbled over that one. But Joe didn’t quit on a mission, and his mission now was to prove to Verna how wrong she was.

“I’m sorry, but your father is a grade-A asshole.”

She snickered. “I won’t argue with that.”

He continued. “Lots of people live with their parents for even longer than you did. There’s no shame there. In fact, the whole moving-out thing is a recent historical development. Staying with parents well into adulthood has been a norm for the majority of human history.”

“Yeah, until you get married, which is awfully hard to do when you’re a loser.”

“Don’t interrupt,” he said, mostly looking for a ploy to buy time. Verna wasn’t a loser, but he sensed he needed to be careful. Even drunk, that sharp mind of hers was intact, and he knew she’d flip his arguments right back at him if he let her get the upper hand.

“Now, as I was saying. You have that client, right?” She nodded slowly. “Great, so that’s a first step. If that’s what you want to, do it. There’s no rule that says you have to have everything figured out by a certain time. You’re still breathing, so you still have time to get what you want out of life.”

He paused and glanced away, trying to choose his words carefully before he looked back at her.

“And as for the other, you’re just a late bloomer.”

“Joe, I’m thirty. That’s not late blooming, it’s failure to bloom.”

He chuckled but quickly got himself under control.

“And besides,” he said, smoothly, or so he hoped, gliding past the derail, “it’s nice that you waited. When it finally does happen, it’ll be that much more special because you’re with the right person.”

She rolled her eyes so hard he half expected they would fall right out of her head.

“I can see it now, fifty years in the future, after my nephews have decided it’s time to put their spinster aunt someplace, I’ll find true love in the retirement home. I’ll have on my best compression stockings and everything. And if my octogenarian lover manages to live through the encounter or, imagine this, stay awake the whole time, I’ll be the happiest lady in the rec room.”