Wallflower In Bloom Read online

  I rolled my eyes again.

  When the drummer came back from the men’s room, he stopped at our table.

  “Hey, Herman,” I said.

  He ran a hand through his hair and smiled. “Do you really think I look like him?”

  It would take me the next decade to learn that when people show you their true colors, color yourself convinced the first time.

  When he asked me out, I said yes.

  “Would you keep it down?” I said. “I barely even hit you.”

  Mitchell was lying on his back. His eyes were closed and he was holding one thigh and rolling back and forth. “Oww,” he kept saying. “Oww, wow, wow, wow, oww.” It was almost like one of Tag’s group chants.

  I wondered if I could get away with leaving, or if, in this crazy, crazy world, tapping the man who’d completely wasted the most marketable years of your life on the leg with a golf cart that barely did fifteen miles an hour and not hanging around could possibly be considered a hit-and-run.

  He interrupted his chanting to whisper, “Call. An. Ambulance.”

  “Oh, puh-lease. You call an ambulance.”

  “I can’t believe you hit me,” he said. I’d almost forgotten how whiny his voice was.

  “You should be thanking me for missing your hands,” I said. “At least you’ll live to drum again.”

  Mitchell groaned. He mumbled something about the pedals.

  When I didn’t say anything, he went back to his chanting.

  “Listen,” I said. “I barely slept last night. I’m going to get going now.”

  He opened his eyes. “You’re just going to leave me?”

  “What a coincidence,” I said. “I was about to say the exact same thing to you.”

  I found his cell phone in his car and threw it at him so he could call his pregnant bride-to-be. It was the best I could do.

  I took off before I had to listen to his phone call. I didn’t even want Mitchell, at least I was pretty sure I didn’t, but it still stung. More than stung. In fact, it felt a little bit like a golf cart had hit me, too, right in the gut. A few tears escaped, and I blinked them away as I drove. By the time I pulled up to my front steps, a sheep shed had never looked so good.

  Tag’s architect and his team had indeed done an incredible job on it. They’d kept most of the shed’s original rough interior barn board, which made it feel warm and cozy and also meant that I could hammer a nail in a wall pretty much anywhere without making a mess. The kitchen was just the right size for someone who didn’t cook, and it was open to a cute little dining nook and a mini–great room beyond. The guest bath even had a pocket door to save space. They’d tucked a narrow staircase up against the wall when you first walked in, which you had to climb hand over hand like a ladder. The second-story addition created a surprisingly big master bedroom with south-facing windows and a French door leading out to a tiny balcony. It had a spacious walk-in closet and a master bath with a garden tub and a separate shower.

  The sheep shed was a sunny, happy space for one person—two if you were really getting along. It would have been perfect, if only it had been mine.

  “For all intents and purposes, it is yours,” Tag would say whenever I offered to buy him out. “It’s just a business thing.”

  “It’s not a business thing,” I’d say. “It’s a control thing. You’re a total control freak.”

  “I know you are, but what am I?” my stupid brother would say.

  I put everything I’d pilfered from Tag’s house in the fridge and bumped my suitcase up the stairs in front of me. I had a stacked washer and dryer tucked into a corner of the walk-in, so I dumped out my dirty clothes on the floor in front of them. A pair of stretched-out dingy underpants rose to the surface, and for a minute I thought my ripped underpants had mysteriously reappeared after I had abandoned them in the hotel elevator. Then I remembered that, minus the rip, I owned a wardrobe full of clones.

  I opened my underwear drawer and started throwing underpants on the floor, one after another after another. Big fat ugly underpants I’d fallen into wearing after Mitchell moved out the last time. Because they were comfortable. Because no one was going to see them anyway. Because I really didn’t give a shit. About anything. Anymore.

  I turned my head, but before I could close my eyes in self-defense, the way I usually did, I caught myself in the closet’s full-length mirror. I tried to look at myself as if I were assessing a stranger. My eyes had raccoon circles under them from yesterday’s mascara. My hair was flattened on one side and sticking out on the other. I was wearing baggy sweats and a baggier T-shirt and I looked lumpy and bumpy and frumpy. It was as if my shrunken insides had donated their weight, their bulk, to my outside.

  I closed my eyes and rolled the top of my sweats down over my hips. I rolled the bottom of my T-shirt up as high as it could go. Then I counted to three and made myself open my eyes and face the mirror again.

  I tried leaning forward. I angled to the right and then to the left. I pulled in my stomach and held my breath. I squinted my eyes in case I’d lucked out and Steve was nearsighted. But even if I factored out the toothpaste drool cascading from my mouth, the man who had walked into my hotel room had seen, up close and personal, the disaster I’d become.

  If only I could turn back the clock. I’d be in killer shape when I met Steve Moretti. I’d be wearing dazzling underwear when he walked in on me. By the time he figured out I was Tag’s sister, he’d have already fallen head over heels for me. He wouldn’t want to use me to get to Tag. He’d only want to get to me. When Tag found out about us and got all territorial, we’d already be a couple. We could both tell Tag to get over himself. Together.

  My head was starting to pound. Really pound. I was old enough to know my Austin meltdown wasn’t only about Steve. He was just one more person in a long, long line of people trying to use me to get to the rest of my family. If only I’d hightailed it out of town as soon as I graduated from college. I would have called my family once a week and sent presents on holidays. Visited for a week in the summer, or maybe early fall, when it was still beach weather but the tourists were gone.

  I’d drifted through high school, mostly marking time. Tag played in a band and Colleen was an artist, so those worlds were taken. If I joined a club or tried out for a play, the minute I turned around Joanie would be right behind me. Until I could get out from under the shadow of my siblings, it didn’t seem possible to carve out a space of my own.

  Even my friends seemed more interested in my family than in me. Do you think Tag will be home? they’d ask as we got out of the car or walked up the brick path that led to my house. Is he seeing anyone?

  Anyone and everyone, I’d say. Take a number.

  Will Colleen be home? I want to ask her where she got that miniskirt she had on today.

  In junior high, I went steady twice, which didn’t involve much more than a few pause-laden phone calls, a couple of dances, and spin the bottle in somebody’s rec room while the parents were upstairs. I didn’t date much in high school, and when I did, it was usually one half of a double date. You’re perfect for each other, one of my friends would say, fixing me up with her boyfriend’s friend.

  Of course this was never true, but by then it would be too late. I’d have to sit in the front seat and listen to some guy with knobby elbows and a wannabe mustache go on and on about himself while my friend and her boyfriend groped each other in the backseat.

  I whiled away the time with crushes on movie stars and a moderately cute guy named Chad Gibson who, by virtue of his last name, was sentenced to four years sitting in front of me in homeroom. Freshman year we ignored each other. Sophomore year he turned around and asked to borrow a pen one day. The next day he gave it back.

  Junior year he walked me home. We talked about books and movies and teachers we hated, and when I stopped to switch my shoulder bag to the other side, he reached for it and carried it the rest of the way.

  When we got to my house, I invited
him in. My mother was baking chocolate chip cookies. Then Joanie wandered into the kitchen and never left.

  By that weekend, she had a date with him. Don’t look at me, she said when I threatened to kill her. He told me you were just friends.

  Freshman year in college, I stood in line on Sundays to call my parents collect from one of three dorm phones. I drifted, rudderless, not sure who I was without being wedged in between my siblings. I switched majors twice. The next year I switched dorms. I made friends and had boyfriends, lovers even. When we graduated, two friends and I landed jobs in Denver. I had a boyfriend named Ethan, and we hiked and climbed and went river rafting together. Still, my homesickness was like a low-grade fever. Maybe a childhood spent being a conduit for my siblings had left me without the ability to thrive when I pulled the plug.

  After a year, I moved home and barely left the beach for a month. Being near the ocean was soothing. The rhythm of the sea felt like home. It was as close to climbing back into the womb as I could get without completely humiliating myself.

  I stayed in the area and worked a series of dead-end local jobs and dated a series of dead-end local guys while Tag’s star began its meteoric rise. When he hired me to be his PA, it actually worked for a while. It was fast-paced and every day was different. I was good at it, and even reflected glory can be intoxicating. Nothing was ever enough for Tag, though. Before long my job had swallowed most of my life, and what was left I’d squandered away on Mitchell, whom I’d just begun to date.

  I loved denial—it was warm and cuddly like a favorite childhood blankie—but standing here now, sweats rolled down over my hips, I forced myself to push it away and look at the facts. I’d spent the last decade in and out of a dead-end relationship as I worked seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day at a job that made me disappear bit by bit on the inside, as I bulked up inch by inch on the outside.

  I shook my head to clear away the past and turned to take in the depths of my walk-in closet. Some women arrange their clothes by season: winter-spring-summer-fall or spring-summer-fall-winter. Others do it by color: lightest to darkest or darkest to lightest or even whites here, blacks here, and colors over there. Some just cram everything in wherever it will fit.

  I had a system, too, though I was pretty sure I’d never acknowledged it before, even to myself. My closet was arranged by size: Now, Not That Long Ago, Once Upon a Time, Never Again, and In Your Dreams. I didn’t even have to check the tags to verify the humiliating range of ever-increasing numerals displayed on them.

  I wondered what size I’d be when I’d finally had enough.

  Let go of the past and go let the future in.

  Okay, so mixing a drink was probably not the best next move. It was definitely five-thirsty somewhere in the world, but we still had a few hours to go in this neck of the woods. And I wasn’t really even that much of a drinker. If I were to get all Dr. Phil, the truth was that food was my drug of choice. I ate to self-medicate, to soothe and calm myself, to distract me from my troubles.

  Then I drank to give the food something to absorb. Or possibly because I got tired of all that chewing. Or maybe to me alcohol was like a fork-free version of dessert.

  I had to admit that boozewise, I leaned toward the sweet stuff. Baileys Irish Cream, frozen strawberry daiquiris, Kahlúa sombreros, piña coladas. And I also had to admit that right now I could have killed for a bottle of ChocoVine.

  Killed made me think of golf carts and Mitchell and marriage and some other woman having my baby. I tried to conjure up an image of an ugly little Tweety Bird–headed infant in smelly diapers to make myself feel better, but it didn’t help all that much.

  And then I started thinking about Steve Moretti again. Which made me realize I hadn’t checked my cell phone since I’d turned it off when I climbed into the town car at Lake Austin Spa Resort. There might actually be a message on it from Steve. Wasn’t there an old saying about how letting go of one thing made room in your life for something better? If there wasn’t an old saying like that, there really should be. Let go of the past and go let the future in. It wasn’t the most brilliant chiasmus I’d ever come up with, but I could work with it.

  But then again, there might not be a message on my cell from Steve, and even if there was, it might not necessarily be something I’d actually want to hear. And there sure as hell would be lots of angry text messages and voice mails from Tag, and possibly from my parents, as well as about a zillion Tag-related messages I’d have to decide whether or not to deal with. I mean, I’d quit, but had I really quit?

  So basically what it came down to was that I was simply too tired and beaten down to handle turning on my phone without a little fortification. And for the first time in my life I could remember, I was too wiped out to feel like eating.

  So that left liquid reinforcement. I clomped back down the steep stairs to the lower level of my sheep shed, turning sideways because the treads were so narrow you couldn’t get your whole foot on them. I opened my tiny refrigerator to inspect the contents. I’d grabbed a few bottles of wine from Tag’s wine fridge, and also a bottle of some fancy shmancy Russian vodka he kept in his freezer. I usually made it a point to stay away from the triple-digit-proof stuff, but it looked so cold and refreshing I’d snagged it anyway. I’d also taken some chocolate soy milk that Afterwife had started carrying, mostly because I liked the old-fashioned glass milk bottle it came in. I’d had a vague idea that after I drank the milk I’d use the bottle for a vase to hold the flowers I was going to pick from one of my brother’s gardens to make myself feel better.

  I leaned my head against the refrigerator door as a new revelation hit me. If I’d really quit, I couldn’t even ask my ex-sisters-in-law if they’d let me in on Afterwife, maybe take over the marketing end of the business. Because I’d never been a wife. If Mitchell somehow managed to die from his golf cart injuries, I wouldn’t even get the street cred of being his widow. His pregnant bride-to-be would be his almost-widow.

  I’d be nothing.

  I dug out my blender and slammed it down on the counter. I shoveled in some big scoops of the Ben & Jerry’s Triple Caramel Chunk ice cream I’d grabbed at Tag’s, then buried it in chocolate soy milk. I opened the bottle of pretentious vodka and filled the blender right to the tipitty top. I knew the proportions were off, but at the moment, I didn’t really give a triple caramel shit.

  “Let the pity party begin,” I said.

  I curled up on my loveless love seat in my tiny great room. I thought about starting a fire in the little fireplace and burning my pitiful underpants one by one, but I was afraid all that scorched elastic might set off the smoke alarms. So I turned on the TV instead.

  I lucked out and found a Mary Tyler Moore Show rerun. Growing up, I’d watched the show religiously with my family on Saturday nights, long before I understood what it meant to be a single woman who knew she needed to move away when a long-term relationship ended.

  It wasn’t just any episode I’d stumbled upon, but Season 1, Episode 1, “Love Is All Around.” Mary has just moved to Minneapolis when her neighbor Phyllis butts in and invites Mary’s old boyfriend Bill to visit. Bill is a doctor and such a jerk that he even brings Mary flowers he stole from a patient’s hospital bedside. Finally, finally Mary gets up the courage to tell him good-bye for good. When he leaves, she tears up and tells herself how lucky she is to be rid of him.

  I wiped my eyes as the credits rolled. “I’m really lucky, too, Mary,” I said. “I’m so lucky.”

  I took a long drink from my tall glass. It was like the world’s most incredible milk shake. The vodka had completely disappeared into the rich, sweet chocolate-covered caramel of the ice cream. Boyohboy, Ben and Jerry sure knew their stuff. I wondered if one of them was single.

  I drained my glass and shivered as the Russian vodka hit my brain. American men could mail-order Russian brides—who knew, maybe if I placed an ad, a Russian man would order me. Totally cracking myself up, I took a moment to laugh, then clicked of
f the TV. I picked up the glass again and tucked my cell under my armpit on the same side. I took the handful of steps required to get to the kitchen and grabbed the blender off the counter with my other hand. Then I worked my way back up the steep stairs, occasionally putting the blender down and leaning on it for balance. I decided my next house would be a single story ranch in the south of France. And I was a poet and I didn’t even know it.

  I threw my phone on the comforter I’d been meaning to replace for at least two years and put the blender down carefully on the table at my side of the bed. Wait a minute. I didn’t even like this side of the bed. Ten years ago Mitchell had claimed the other side. And I’d let him. But they were both my sides of the bed now.

  I moved the blender over to the table on Mitchell’s former side, just because I could, and poured myself another glass of frosty heaven. I wondered if Ben and Jerry would be open to expanding with a line of soy-and-vodka-based ice-cream drinks. Frosty the Snowsoyshake? Shake, Rattle, and Drink? As soon as I had a good night’s sleep, maybe I’d pitch them. I mean, my time working for Tag certainly qualified as product development, so I had plenty of experience.

  I took a long rejuvenating drink. And another. Those Russians sure knew their vodka. Then I decided I’d cruise the Internet for a little while, catch up on the state of the world, and work up to the messages on my cell phone. My laptop was all the way over on the little desk on the other side of the room, which was starting to feel like a long, long way to go just to catch up on the state of the world, but its larger screen seemed like a good thing right about now, and I had to pee anyway, so if I made it all part of one loop, then it made sense.

  I should have gone to the bathroom before I picked up the laptop, but I didn’t think of that until I got to the bathroom. But no worries, I just put the laptop on the floor. When I bent down to pick it up again, I got a little bit wobbly. Lack of sleep and those damn time zone changes will do it to you.