Vanilla

  “You could do this full-time, you know. Why are you crunching numbers and doing data analysis for me?”

  “Because I’m more than just a pretty face?” I posed it as a question, adding an innocent blink and making dead doll eyes. “Because I like to pay my bills and do things like eat and buy stuff?”

  “Bills, schmills,” Alex said.

  I rolled my eyes. “Says the bazillionaire.”

  “Pfft.” Alex leaned over my shoulder again to scroll through the pictures then nudged me. “Seriously, I know my wife’s a bloody genius with the camera, but you...look at you.”

  I looked over the photo he’d pulled up. Critically, I could see what he meant. False modesty is a worse sin than vanity, I’ve always thought. I was pretty. I’d been pretty my whole life.

  “There’s more to me than eyes and mouth and tits, Alex.”

  He stepped away as I swiveled in my chair, and though Alex could be counted on to make light of nearly anything, this time he looked solemn. “Yeah. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry.” I shrugged, looking again at the pictures. “I like having my picture taken. I like working with Olivia. I like the idea that something we’ve done together goes to raising money for something useful. It seems to make it worthwhile.”

  “And if you hadn’t met Olivia in Scott’s workshop, you’d never have met me, and I’d never have been able to convince you my life would not be complete without you by my side.” Alex put his fists under his chin and fluttered his eyelashes at me. “So, lucky me.”

  I was the lucky one. Alex had started his own investment-planning business a few years back, consulting mostly. He had the contacts and the skills to make people a lot of money if they let him. He’d brought me on as a partner, my job to take care of all the bits of the business he found boring, which was just about everything other than figuring out the best places to make money grow. I handled client accounts, paperwork, office filing, billing...and though there were days when working with him felt more like trying to wrestle a bag of kittens into a top hat worn by an eleven-armed octopus that hated cats, I wouldn’t have given it up for any other job. Before agreeing to take on the responsibility of keeping this joker in line, I’d been drowning in the corporate world of human resources for Smith, Brown and Kavanagh, where going to work every day had been like feeling another small piece of my soul shrivel and die.

  “Serendipity. If I’d never met Scott, I’d never have met Olivia, and then I’d never have met you while you were throwing a pity party about how starting your own business was so much more work than you wanted to do...”

  “It wasn’t a pity party,” Alex interrupted. “I was just, you know.”

  “Whining,” I told him with a grin and ducked his attempt to poke my upper arm. The truth was, he might like to slack off in the office during the boring bits of paperwork and filing stuff, but he was a genius with the clients. And he knew how to make money grow, no question about that.

  He leaned over my shoulder again to look at the picture of me in front of the apple-bobbing barrel. “That picture is hot as fuck, Elise.”

  From another guy, in another office, this might’ve been grounds for sexual harassment. Instead I eyed it, then him, with another lift of my eyebrow. “You like the whole woman tied up on her knees with something in her mouth, huh?”

  “Who doesn’t?” Alex laughed.

  It wasn’t like Alex and I talked in detail about our sex lives. We’d become friends, but there are some things you don’t talk about with the people you work with. Especially when he’s a married man, and you’re basically the only two people in the office. I had no idea if Alex had seen any of my other photos, the ones I did with Scott. Alex and I were linked on Connex, of course, because these days everybody collected connexions like kids used to collect baseball cards. I’d posted a few shots on there a long time ago, but I now avoided putting anything too private on that social networking site because I’d connexed with family members. My mother had a hard enough time accepting the fact I posed in my bra and panties. If she saw me in a black vinyl catsuit with a whip in my hand and a man at my feet, she’d have plotzed. I wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed about any of it; it wasn’t a secret, but it wasn’t as if I went around introducing myself like “Hi, I’m Elise, and sometimes I like to dominate men.”

  I laughed, too. “Lots of people like it the other way around, believe me.”

  “Both work,” he said with a flash of a grin I suspected had wooed him into the pants of many a woman in his day. Alex Kennedy was just one of those guys who turned heads and made lashes flutter. It wasn’t just his face, which was gorgeous. It was the way he looked at you, like what you said mattered, like in that moment, nobody else existed but you.

  “You could be a model yourself, you know,” I told him somewhat abruptly. “I’m surprised Olivia doesn’t use you more often.”

  Something flashed in his eyes, and a secret sort of smile slipped across his mouth before he focused again on me. “I’ve let Olivia take pictures of me.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, but didn’t ask. The look on his face told me everything I needed to know about that. “Tell you what, rock star, how about you sign off on all this stuff, you take me to lunch and then you can get home early to your gorgeous wife and make some more pictures together.”

  Alex grinned. “You got it. I’ll even take you out for sushi, how’s that?”

  “Awesome.” I pushed the folder toward him. “Sign.”

  Fifteen minutes later, I was teasing him about how painless it had been to actually finish some work, and we were walking to the closest sushi restaurant. Tucked in a small storefront on Front Street and directly across from the parking garage, it was a favorite lunch spot for a lot of the people who worked downtown. Fortunately for us, Alex’s procrastination meant the lunch rush was over, and the dinner crowd hadn’t yet arrived. We had our choice of tables in the restaurant’s cozy back section, and we took a seat in the corner. The server brought us hot tea and bowls of miso soup. I dipped my porcelain spoon into the golden broth, stirring up the bits of scallion, then blew on it to cool it. I was suddenly starving.

  We talked for a while about our favorite TV program. Alex had turned me on to the show about two monster-hunting brothers who drove around in a black Impala—sometimes in the office, we’d toss quotes from the show back and forth to each other, trying to stump the other. Because Alex was way more into the show and had been watching it for a lot longer, he was usually able to beat me at the game. Now, asking me which of the brothers I’d be if I could choose, he claimed he would always be Dean, the older brother, and I was stuck being the younger brother, Sam.

  “Except shorter,” he said.

  I made a face. “And without a penis, don’t forget that part. That’s kind of important. Anyway, I’m totally Dean. Dean’s way cooler.”

  “We can’t both be Dean,” Alex pointed out.

  “You have Sam hair.” I gestured at the raggedy mop of dark hair that spilled over his forehead.

  “But you’re the smart one, and you do all the computer stuff,” Alex said. “You have to be Sam.”

  We both laughed at that. He pushed the platter of spicy salmon toward me then took some for himself. Alex waved his chopsticks at me.

  “So...how was your...meeting...last Friday?”

  I paused. My once-a-month dates with Esteban weren’t a secret, exactly. Alex had no problem with me rearranging my schedule to accommodate appointments. Well, once a month, always on the second Friday, I had a “meeting.” I’d never told Alex what it was for, nor had he asked, until just now, though I could tell by his tone he suspected I hadn’t been seeing a chiropractor.

  “It was very productive,” I told him.

  He waited. I smiled. He shook his head.

  “What’s your story, Elise?”

  I gave him a falsely innocent look. “I don’t have a story.”

  “Everyone has a story,” Alex s
aid. “We all have secrets. What’s yours?”

  “If I tell you, it would hardly be a secret, would it?”

  Alex grinned. “C’mon. You know you wanna.”

  All at once I did want to tell him, the sudden urge to share swelling up inside me with unexpected fervor. Why? I didn’t know, other than I hadn’t told anyone about the lover I’d been seeing once a month or so for the past year and a half, not even my best friend, Alicia. She’d moved to Texas two years ago, which had made it easier to keep Esteban a secret. If I hadn’t shared our relationship with the girl I’d known since elementary school, it certainly wasn’t something I should share with Alex.

  My phone booped with my nephew William’s ringtone and saved me. I swiped the screen to take the call. “Hey, kiddo. What’s up?”

  “Can you come get me from my lesson?”

  I paused, dragging a piece of sushi through a puddle of wasabi-smeared soy sauce. “When are you finished?”

  “I’m supposed to go until six-thirty but the rabbi had another meeting so he let me go now. I texted my mom a couple times, but she didn’t answer me.” William hesitated. “I texted my dad but he said he’s in a meeting and asked if you could get me.”

  “Maybe she’s stuck in traffic,” I offered around a mouthful of rice and fish. “Can you give her a few more minutes?”

  Another short pause came, then William said quietly, “Can you please come and get me, Auntie?”

  He hadn’t called me that in a while. Heading toward thirteen, William had taken to calling me Elise without even an aunt in front of it, a habit that made me sad but one I didn’t denounce. Kids grew up. It’s what happened.

  “Sure, kid. Let me finish up my lunch, and I’ll be right there. Another fifteen minutes or so, okay? If your mom gets there first, text me.” I disconnected and gave Alex an apologetic look. “My nephew needs to be picked up from his Bar Mitzvah tutoring. I guess his mom’s late. I’m only a few minutes from the synagogue. Mind if I run to get him?”

  Alex shrugged. “Sure. Are we all done in the office?”

  “I am.” I gave him a significant look that he returned with a grin. “I guess you are, too. Thanks for the sushi. See you tomorrow.”

  It took me about ten minutes to get back to the parking lot in front of the office. Another ten to get to the synagogue, and only because I hit every red light on Second Street. I spotted William sitting on one of the benches at the shul’s front doors. He was tapping away on his phone, head bent, still wearing his kippah as was required by the synagogue for males while in the building, though he didn’t usually wear one outside it. He looked up when I pulled into the half-circle drive, his expression wary. I hated to see that on the kiddo’s face, not sure why he looked like that.

  “Hey,” I said through the passenger-side window. “Is your mom on the way or do you still need a ride?”

  “Yeah, I need one.” William slid into the passenger seat, backpack at his feet, and put on his seat belt without being reminded.

  God, I loved that kid. I had a strange and winsome flashback to the smell of his head when he was a baby. My brother and Susan had gotten pregnant and married at age twenty, one year before we all graduated from college. I’d lived with them for the last four months of her pregnancy and the entire first year of William’s life, both so we could all save money and to help them out with the baby so they could finish their degrees. I’d changed diapers and done midnight feedings, the whole bit. William would kill me if I leaned over to sniff him now, though, not to mention that I was sure the experience would not be the same as it had been when he weighed ten pounds and fit in my arms like a doll. Instead, I waited until he’d settled before pulling out of the synagogue driveway and onto Front Street.

  “Your mom didn’t get back to you?”

  “She said it was okay if you took me home.” William’s phone hummed, and he looked at it. “She says she was running late at yoga and to tell you thanks for picking me up.”

  “No problem, kid. My pleasure.” Traffic was still fairly light, though in another half an hour it might start to get heavier with rush hour commuters all trying to merge onto the highway. It was only late April, but one of the first days that promised summer after a bitter and seemingly endless winter. “Hey, you wanna go get some ice cream?”

  William shifted to look at me. “Right now? Before dinner?”

  “Yeah, of course, before dinner. That’s the best time to eat ice cream.” I shot him a grin that he returned.

  Instead of turning right to head over the bridge to get him home, I kept going a little ways so I could head across town to our favorite ice cream shack. Every year I figured would be its last, that competition from chain frozen ice places would put it out of business, but so far the Lucky Rabbit was still around. My twin brother, Evan, and I had both worked in the Lancaster location during the summers in our long-ago teenage years, flipping burgers and scooping the homemade churned ice cream into waffle cones. Time had weathered the Lucky Rabbit sign and left huge potholes in the parking lot, but that was what Pennsylvania winters did to all the roads, left them pitted and rough.

  I pulled into the gravel lot and avoided the ditches as best I could and found a spot near a splintery picnic table. We ordered not only sundaes but also onion rings. Not even a bare nod to providing a reasonable dinner, because aunties don’t need to do that.

  “So, how’s it going?” I asked around a mouthful of hot fried onion dipped in chocolate ice cream.

  William shrugged. He’d ordered mint chocolate chip with caramel sauce, a combination that made me shudder. “Okay, I guess. My Torah portion is really long.”

  “You have time. Another three months or so, right?” His Bar Mitzvah was scheduled for his birthday weekend in late July, which meant a sucky early summer of tutoring and attending services.

  He shrugged again. We ate mostly in silence after that—William devouring most of the onion rings, all of his ice cream and the rest of mine that the late sushi lunch had left me incapable of finishing. We talked a little bit about the school year that was coming to a close. His new video game. His best friend, Nhat, who might be moving to another school district. William lingered over the last few bites, drawing it out until I finally asked him what was wrong.

  “I don’t want to go home,” he said.

  “How come?” I gathered the trash and watched him from the corner of my eye as I got up to toss it.

  William shrugged again. It was becoming his favorite response. “Just don’t.”

  “Is something going on at home?” I sat again on the picnic table bench, wincing at the scrape of the rough wood on the back of my thigh below my hem. I’d be lucky to get out of here without a bunch of splinters in my butt.

  “No.”

  I knew he was lying, but I wasn’t going to prod him. William looked like his mother, but he was his father’s boy in personality. My brother had always held things close to the chest, and poking him to get him to talk never worked.

  “You have to go home, kid. It’s a school night. Your dad will be home soon, and I’m sure your mom is wondering where you are.”

  “I bet she’s not.”

  I paused at this, but decided not to push. “C’mon, let’s go. Hey, maybe you can come and spend the weekend with me. You haven’t done that for a while.”

  “Can’t,” William said sourly. “I have to go to services.”

  I loved that kid, but there was no way I was going to volunteer to take him to the three-hour Saturday Sabbath service. I’d fallen off the religion wagon long ago, a fact that killed my mother on a daily basis. Her angst about it had probably contributed a lot to my lack of observance. Sometimes you twist a knife because you can’t help it, even if you’re ashamed to admit it.

  “How about Saturday night? I could pick you up after services. We could go to the movies.”

  “I’ll have to ask my mom,” William said doubtfully.

  “Like she’ll say no?” I scoffed, but stopped my
self from reaching to ruffle his hair. “I’ll talk to her. But it’s a plan. Okay?”

  That earned a ghost of a smile from him, which relieved me. In the car, just before we pulled into his driveway, I said casually, “You know, you don’t have to be perfect at this Bar Mitzvah thing. Nobody’s going to be expecting you to nail it without any mistakes, the rabbi and the gabbaim are there to help you if you need it. You’re not performing a play that you have to memorize. It’s okay if you’re not exactly perfect.”

  He shook his head. “Mom says she expects me to do my best.”

  “Your best,” I said as I turned off the ignition. “Not perfection.”

  I went into the house with him, both to make sure there was someone home before I dumped him off and to talk to my brother if he was there. Evan wasn’t, but Susan must’ve made it home right before we got there because when we came into the living room from the front door, she was coming down the stairs with her hair in a towel. Without missing a beat, she told William to put his stuff away and set the table for dinner. She barely looked at me.

  “Thanks for getting him,” she said, clearly distracted. “I ran late at yoga. It’s this new class...”

  “No problem.” I waited a second or so, but my sister-in-law wasn’t going to give me the time of day. I was used to that. We’d never been close, and I’d never been sure why, but it had stopped bothering me years ago. I took in her wet hair and the smudges of mascara under her eyes. The traces of lipstick in the corners of her mouth. She wore a pair of yoga pants and a loose T-shirt, but also a pair of pretty dangling silver earrings, along with a matching bracelet of hammered links. Not exactly the sort of accessories I’d have picked to exercise in, if I ever did such a thing.

  “I was happy to do it,” I added when she didn’t answer me. “You know, the shul is only a few blocks from my office. I’d be happy to pick him up anytime if you need me to. Or he can walk down and hang out with me—”