Chapter Eleven
“All I’m saying,” Olivia said, picking up her smoothie and taking a sip, “is that to the casual observer, it looks like something is going on.”
“Well, the casual observer is mistaken,” I said. “And even if there was, it wouldn’t be anyone’s business, anyway.”
“Oh, right. Because so many people are interested. All one of me.”
“You’re asking, aren’t you?”
She made a face at me, then picked up her phone, opening it and hitting a few buttons. The truth was, Olivia and I had never officially become friends. But clearly, somewhere between that ride and the day in the box office, it had happened. There was no other explanation for why she now felt so completely comfortable getting into my personal life.
“Nothing is going on with me and Nate,” I said to her, for the second time since we’d sat down for lunch. This was something else I never would have expected, us eating together—much less being so used to it that I barely noticed as she reached over, pinching a chip out of my bag. “We’re just friends.”
“A little while ago,” she said, popping the chip into her mouth, “you weren’t even willing to admit to that.”
“So? ”
“So,” she said as the phone suddenly rang, “who knows what you’ll be copping to a week or two from now? You might be engaged before you’re willing to admit it.”
“We are not,” I said firmly, “going to be engaged. Jesus.”
“Never say never,” she said with a shrug. Her phone rang again. “Anything’s possible.”
“Do you even see him here?”
“No,” she said. “But I do see him over at the sculpture, looking over here.”
I turned my head. Sure enough, Nate was behind us, talking to Jake Bristol. When he saw us watching him, he waved. I did the same, then turned back to Olivia, who was regarding me expressionlessly, her phone still ringing.
“Are you going to answer that?” I asked.
“Am I allowed to?”
“Are you saying I make the rules now?”
“No,” she said flatly. “But I certainly don’t want to be rude and inconsiderate, carrying on two conversations at once.” This was, in fact, exactly what I’d said, when I got sick of her constantly interrupting me to take calls. Which, now that I thought of it, was very friend-like as well, in its own way. “Unless, of course, you feel differently now?”
“Just make it stop ringing, please,” I said.
She sighed, as if it was just such a hardship, then flipped open her phone, putting it to her ear. “Hey. No, just eating lunch with Ruby. What? Yes, she did say that,” she said, eyeing me. “I don’t know, she’s fickle. I’m not even trying to understand.”
I rolled my eyes, then looked over my shoulder at Nate again. He was still talking to Jake and didn’t see me this time, but as I scanned the rest of the courtyard, I did spot someone staring right at me. Gervais.
He was alone, sitting at the base of a tree, his backpack beside him, a milk carton in one hand. He was also chewing slowly, while keeping his eyes steady on me. Which was kind of creepy, I had to admit. Then again, Gervais had been acting sort of strange lately. Or stranger.
By this point, I’d gotten so used to his annoying car behavior that I hardly even noticed it anymore. In fact, as Nate and I had gotten closer, Gervais had almost become an afterthought. Which was probably why, at least at first, I didn’t realize when he suddenly began to change. But Nate did.
“How can you not have noticed he’s combing his hair now?” he’d asked me a couple of mornings earlier, after Gervais had already taken off and we were walking across the parking lot. “And he’s lost the headgear?”
“Because unlike some people,” I said, “I don’t spend a lot of time looking at Gervais?”
“Still, it’s kind of hard to miss,” he replied. “He looks like a totally different person.”
“Looks being the operative word.”
“He smells better, too,” Nate added. “He’s cut down considerably on the toxic emissions.”
“Why are we talking about this again?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “When someone starts to change, and it’s obvious, it’s sort of natural to wonder why. Right?”
I wasn’t wondering about Gervais, though. In fact, even if he got a total makeover and suddenly smelled like petunias, I couldn’t have cared less. Now, though, as I looked across the green at him, I had to admit that Nate was right—he did look different. The hair was combed, not to mention less greasy, and without the headgear his face looked completely changed. When he saw me looking at him, he flinched, then immediately ducked his head, sucking down the rest of his carton of milk. So weird, I thought.
“. . . no, I don’t,” Olivia was saying now as she took another sip of her smoothie. “Because shoes are not going to make you run faster, Laney. That’s all hype. What? Well, of course they’re going to tell you that. They get paid on commission!”
“Who does?” Nate said, sliding onto the bench beside me. Olivia, listening to Laney, raised her eyebrows at me.
“No idea,” I told him. “As you’ll notice, she’s not talking to me. She’s on the phone.”
“Ah, right,” he said. “You know, that’s really kind of rude.”
“Isn’t it?”
Olivia ignored us, picking up my chip bag and helping herself again. Then she offered it to Nate, who took a handful out, popping them into his mouth. “Those are mine,” I pointed out.
“Yeah?” Nate said. “They’re good.”
He smiled, then bumped me with his knee. Across the table, Olivia was still talking to Laney about shoes, her voice shifting in and out of lecture mode. Sitting there with them, it was almost hard to remember when I first came to Perkins, so determined to be a one-woman operation to the end. But that was the thing about taking help and giving it, or so I was learning: there was no such thing as really getting even. Instead, this connection, once opened, remained ongoing over time.
At noon on Thanksgiving Day I was positioned in the foyer, ready to perform my assigned duty as door-opener and coat-taker. Just as the first car slowed and began to park in front of the house, though, I realized there was a hole in my sweater.
I took the stairs two at a time to my room, heading into the bathroom to my closet. When I pulled the door open, I jumped, startled. Cora was inside, sitting on the floor with Roscoe in her lap.
“Don’t say it,” she said, putting a hand up. “I know this looks crazy.”
“What are you doing?”
She sighed. “I just needed to take a time-out. A few deep breaths. A moment for myself.”
“In my closet,” I said, clarifying.
“I came to get Roscoe. You know how he gets when the oven is on.” She shot me a look. “But then, once I was in here, I began to understand why he likes it so much. It’s very soothing, actually.”
For the first time, Cora and Jamie were hosting Thanksgiving dinner, which meant that within moments, we’d be invaded by no less than fifteen Hunters. Personally, I was kind of curious to meet this extended tribe, but Cora, like Roscoe, was a nervous wreck.
“You were the one who suggested it,” Jamie had said to her the week before as she sat at the kitchen table in full stress mode, surrounded by cookbooks and copies of Cooking Light. “I never would have asked you to do this.”
“I was just being polite!” she said. “I didn’t think your mother would actually take me up on it.”
“They want to see the house.”
“Then they should come for drinks. Or appetizers. Or dessert. Something simple. Not on a major holiday, when I’m expected to provide a full meal!”
“All you have to do is the turkey and the desserts,” Jamie told her. “They’re bringing everything else.”
Cora glared at him. “The turkey,” she said, her voice flat, “is the center of the whole thing. If I screw it up, the entire holiday is ruined.?
??
“Oh, that’s not true,” Jamie said. Then he looked at me, but I stayed quiet, knowing better than to get involved in this. “It’s a turkey. How hard can it be?”
This question had been answered the night before, when Cora went to pick up the bird she’d ordered, which weighed twenty-two pounds. It took all three of us just to get it inside, and then it wouldn’t even fit in the fridge.
“Disaster,” Cora announced once we’d wrestled it onto the island. “Complete and total disaster.”
“It’s going to be fine,” Jamie told her, confident as always. “Just relax.”
Eventually, he had managed to get it into the fridge, although it meant removing just about everything else. As a result, the countertops were lined not only with all the stuff Cora had bought for the meal, but also all the condiments, breads, and cans of soda and bottled water— everything that didn’t absolutely have to be refrigerated. Luckily, we’d been able to arrange to use Nate’s oven for overflow—he and his dad were going to be gone all day, getting double time from clients who needed things done for their own dinners—as nothing else could fit in ours while the turkey was cooking. Still, all of this had only made Cora more crabby, to the point that I’d finally taken a loaf of bread, some peanut butter, and jelly into the enormous dining room, where I could fix myself sandwiches and eat in peace.
“You know,” Jamie had said the night before, as Cora rattled around the kitchen beyond the doorway, “I think this is actually going to be a really good thing for us.”
I looked at my sister, who was standing by the stove, examining a slotted spoon as if not exactly sure what to do with it. “Yeah?”
He nodded. “This is just what this house needs—a real holiday. It gives a place a sense of fullness, of family, you know?” He sighed, almost wistful. “And anyway, I’ve always loved Thanksgiving. Even before it was our anniversary.”
“Wait,” I said. “You guys got married on Thanksgiving?”
He shook his head. “June tenth. But we got together on Turkey Day. It was our first anniversary, you know, before the wedding one. It was, like, our first real date.”
“Who dates on a major holiday?”
“Well, it wasn’t exactly planned,” he said, pulling the bread toward him and taking out a few slices. “I was supposed to go home for Thanksgiving that year. I was pumped for it, because, you know, I’m all about an eating holiday.”
“Right,” I said, taking a bite of my own sandwich.
“But then,” he continued, “the night before, I ate some weird squid at this sushi place and got food poisoning. Seriously bad news. I was up sick all night, and the next day I was completely incapacitated. So I had to stay in the dorm, alone, for Thanksgiving. Isn’t that the saddest thing you ever heard?”
“No?” I said.
“Of course it is!” He sighed. “So there I am, dehydrated, miserable. I went to take a shower and felt so weak I had to stop and rest on the way back in the hallway. I’m sitting there, fading in and out of consciousness, and then the door across from me opens up, and there’s the girl that yelled at me the first week of classes. Alone for the holiday, too, fixing English-muffin pizzas in a contraband toaster oven.”
I looked in at my sister, who was now consulting a cookbook, her finger marking the page, and suddenly remembered those same pizzas—English muffin, some cheap spaghetti sauce, cheese—that she’d made for me, hundreds of times.
He picked up the knife out of the jelly jar. “At first, she looked alarmed—I was kind of green, apparently. So she asked me if I was okay, and when I said I wasn’t sure, she came out and felt my forehead, and she told me to come in and lie down in her room. Then she walked over to the only open convenience store—which was, like, miles away—bought me a six-pack of Gatorade, and came back and shared her pizzas with me.”
“Wow,” I said.
“I know.” He shook his head, flipping a piece of bread over. “We spent the whole weekend together in her room, watching movies and eating toasted things. She took care of me. It was the best Thanksgiving of my life.”
I glanced back at Cora again, remembering what Denise had said about her that night at the party. Funny how it was so hard to picture my sister as a caretaker, considering that had been what she was to me, once. And now again.
“Which is not to say,” Jamie added, “that other Thanksgivings can’t be equally good, or even better in their own way. That’s why I’m excited about this year. I mean, I love this house, but it’s never totally felt like home to me. But tomorrow, when everyone’s here, gathered around the table, and reading their thankful lists, it will.”
I was listening to this, but still thinking about Cora and those pizzas so intently that I didn’t really hear the last part. At least intially. “Thankful lists?”
“Sure,” he said, pulling another piece of bread out and bringing the peanut butter closer to him. “Oh, that’s right. You guys didn’t do those, either, did you?”
“Um, no,” I said. “I don’t even know what that is.”
“Just what it sounds like,” he said, scooping out a glop of peanut butter and putting it on his bread. “You make a list of everything you’re thankful for. For Thanksgiving. And then you share it with everyone over dinner. It’s great!”
“Is this optional?” I asked.
“What?” He put down the knife with a clank. “You don’t want to do it?”
“I just don’t know . . . I’m not sure what I’d say,” I said. He looked so surprised I wondered if he was hurt, so I added, “Off the top of my head, I mean.”
“Well, that’s the great thing, though,” he said, going back to spreading the peanut butter. “You don’t have to do it at the moment. You can write up your list whenever you want.”
I nodded, as if this was actually my one hesitation. “Right.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll do great. I know it.”
You had to admire Jamie’s optimism. For him, anything was possible: a pond in the middle of the suburbs, a wayward sister-in-law going to college, a house becoming a home, and thankful lists for everyone. Sure, there was no guarantee any of these things would actually happen as he envisioned. But maybe that wasn’t the point. It was the planning that counted, whether it ever came to fruition or not.
Now, as Cora and I sat in the closet, we heard the doorbell ring downstairs. Roscoe perked up his ears, then yelped, the sound bouncing around the small space.
“That’s me,” I said, pulling off my sweater and grabbing another one off a nearby hanger. “I’ll just—”
I felt a hand clamp around my leg, jerking me off balance. “Let Jamie get it,” she said. “Just hang out here with me for a second. Okay?”
“You want me to get in there?”
“No.” She reached over to rub Roscoe’s ears before adding, more quietly, “I mean, only if you want to.”
I crouched down, and she scooted over as I crawled in, moving aside my boots so I could sit down.
“See?” she said. “It’s nice in here.”
“Okay,” I told her. “I will say it. You’re acting crazy.”
“Can you blame me? ” She leaned back with a thud against the wall. “Any minute now, the house will be crawling with people who are expecting the perfect family Thanksgiving. And who’s in charge? Me, the last person who is equipped to produce it.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“How do you figure? I’ve never done Thanksgiving before.”
“You made pizzas that year, for Jamie,” I pointed out.
“What, you mean back in college?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Okay, that is so not the same thing.”
“It was a meal, and it counts,” I told her. “Plus, he said it was the best Thanksgiving of his life.”
She smiled, leaning her head back and looking up at the clothes. “Well, that’s Jamie, though. If it was just him, I wouldn’t be worried. But we’re talking about his
entire family here. They make me nervous.”
“Why? ”
“Because they’re all just so well adjusted,” she said, shuddering. “It makes our family look like a pack of wolves.”
I just looked at her. “Cora. It’s one day.”
“It’s Thanksgiving.”
“Which is,” I said, “just one day.”
She pulled Roscoe closer to her. “And that’s not even including the whole baby thing. These people are so fertile, it’s ridiculous. You just know they’re all wondering why we’ve been married five years and haven’t yet delivered another member into the tribe.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” I said. “And even if it is, it’s none of their business, and you’re fully entitled to tell them so if they start in on you.”
“They won’t,” she said glumly. “They’re too nice. That’s what so unsettling about all this. They all get along, they love me, they’ll eat the turkey even if it’s charred and raw. No one’s going to be drunk and passed out in the sweet potatoes.”
“Mom never passed out in food,” I said.
“That you remember.”
I rolled my eyes. We hadn’t talked about my mom much since the day Cora had laid down my punishment, but she also wasn’t as taboo a topic as before. It wasn’t like we agreed wholeheartedly now on our shared, or unshared, past. But at the same time, we weren’t split into opposing camps—her attacking, me defending—either.
“I’m just saying,” she said, “it’s a lot of pressure, being part of something like this.”
“Like what?”
“A real family,” she said. “On the one hand, a big dinner and everyone at the table is the kind of thing I always wanted. But at the same time, I just feel . . . out of place, I guess.”
“It’s your house,” I pointed out.
“True.” She sighed again. “Maybe I’m just being hormonal. This medication I’m taking might be good for my ovaries, but it’s making me crazy.”