Can I Get An Amen? (15 page)

. . .

As I dressed the next morning, the black pants suit that I had planned on wearing didn’t seem right. It was the suit that I had picked out with Jill for my interview with Kent & Wagner.

“Does it look too severe?” I called from the bathroom, where I stood twisting in front of the mirror. Kat was lying on the bed drinking a cup of Starbucks that she had just retrieved from the hotel lobby. Her face was freshly washed and smelled like lavender.

“It only looks severe because you have your hair pulled back like a nun. Wear it down,” she said as she considered other edits to my look, “and put on a statement necklace.”

“I didn’t bring a statement necklace!” I said, panic-stricken, sticking my head out of the bathroom.

“Relax,” said Kat as she reached down into her handbag next to her and pulled out a gorgeous costume necklace that she had purchased at Barney’s, a twisted tangle of gray pearls and smoky crystals.

“Oh my God, thank you, Kat!” I gushed as I rushed to retrieve it.

She eyed me as I fastened it, then turned to appraise the
revision in the mirror. “What shoes were you going to wear?” she asked.

“My black pointy-toed flats.” I always wore flats, a throwback to being the tallest girl in the class, beginning in elementary school.

“Wear those instead,” she said, pointing to her beautiful black ankle boots.

“Should I do a dramatic eye?”

“No…,” she said, as if she had already thought it through. “I think we might already be pushing the limits for a nine a.m. court appearance.”

. . .

The courthouse was a foreboding brick building with squeaky tile floors and archaic letter-board signs that provided information about departments and locations. It looked perfectly content to sit stoically as the wind attempted to batter it, whipping about the few stray leaves that had managed to hang on this long. With my head down, I marched forward with a confident determination that I didn’t feel. It just seemed to be the way that one should approach such a structure: with purpose. I nestled my face down into my thick scarf and stepped quickly up the stairs, Kat’s shoes making a muted clacking noise as I went.

“Ellen.” He said my name with quiet recognition, stepping out from the portico.

I jumped, more surprised than I should have been at the sound of Gary’s voice. I’d thought that he might try to meet me outside. It was part of why I had arrived thirty minutes early, to deny him his last act of chivalry.

“Hi, Gary.” He was wearing his gray wool overcoat and was holding his leather briefcase.

“It’s good to see you, Ellen.” Resting his hand lightly on my elbow, he leaned forward and gently kissed my cheek. As his clean-shaven face brushed against mine, I could feel how cold it was. He must have been waiting for some time. “I know that it can be… intimidating in there, so I thought that we could walk in together.”

My hair blew across my face, and I pulled a hand from my pocket and tucked it back behind my ear. “I would have been fine.”

“I know,” he said softly, trying to smile. “You look great.”

My face did not change, but I averted my eyes. “Thank you,” I said coldly.

An older man with a salt-and-pepper beard and a thick, lined sweatshirt walked past us into the building. As he opened the door, a gush of heat rushed out. “Well, we may as well get out of the cold,” said Gary, reaching for the door with a glove-clad hand. I paused, looking at him as he held it open. He was the archetypal ideal husband. He was the man that an advertising agency would cast to sit on the deck of an oceanfront summer home to sell financial services. He’d stare triumphantly at the horizon as the camera panned out to show a wife collecting shells on the beach and two children sailing toy boats in the water.
We can get you here sooner than you think,
would come a deep and steady-sounding voice. Then the background would drop to black and a staid-looking logo would flash on the screen.

“After you,” Gary said, gesturing me into the warmth of the courthouse.

. . .

I held my cell phone against my cheek, hoping that no cops were around as I sped up to the on-ramp of the Mass Pike, the heat in my car blasting on high. “It’s done.”

Kat took a deep breath. “So… how are you?”

“I’m fine.”

Kat paused. “You don’t sound fine.”

“The only thing that isn’t
fine
is that I’m
fine
.”

“Uhh… okay.”

“I mean, I just got divorced. I shouldn’t feel
fine
, but I do. We went to the house; I saw Beverly and Daniel. And I’m
fine
.”

All day, I had expected it to kick in—I was waiting for the agonizing sense of loss to rip through my core—but instead, it felt like I was just going through the motions to formalize something that already was. Ironically, it was how I’d felt on our wedding day. All those months of planning and anticipation for an event that didn’t seem to fundamentally change what we were to each other. It seemed as if we were married before we were married and divorced before we were divorced.

“So it really wasn’t hard to see Daniel and Beverly?”

“No. I mean it was all hard, I guess.” I pictured Daniel’s face as he gestured toward a large flat box wrapped with paper that looked like it had been hanging around the home since last Christmas. “Daniel made me a collage with magazine clippings of the Celtics,” I said with a fond, bittersweet chuckle. “And Beverly cried when she hugged me good-bye.”

“What about Gary?”

I thought of how Gary had walked me to my car. I hit my turn signal and changed lanes. “Gary said all the right things,” I said bitterly.

“Ellen, I would love to still be part of your life,” he had said. “In any way that you’ll have me.”

It felt like my chance to stomp and scream and tell him that I’d have him as my husband or nothing. It was my chance to tap into some of the anger to which I felt I was entitled.
Would your
girlfriend like that? Our being friends?
But I could summon none of it. “I don’t know, Gary,” was all I could manage. “Let’s just see how things go.”

He took my hand, and again, I knew that I should pull it back, scold him for daring to touch me. “Thank you, Ellen,” he said.

“For what?”

“For coming here for this. I am so glad you did.” He looked at me sheepishly. “I didn’t know how good it would be to see you.”

. . .

When I got back to the hotel, Kat was waiting in our room with an open bottle of wine. She gave me a long, silent hug, then handed me a glass. “I made reservations for dinner.” I knew what she was thinking, that I should celebrate being newly single, but she had the sense not to say it.

“All right,” I said reluctantly, kicking off Kat’s shoes. I had no energy for an argument. “But I want to get to bed early. I didn’t sleep well last night.”

“Then let’s hurry. Wet your hair in the tub. I’ll blow it out.”

I plopped down on the bed. “Can’t I just go like this?”

I knew I was ruining the girls’-night-out vibe that Kat was trying to create for me, but I wasn’t in a cupcakes-and-cosmos sort of mood.

. . .

We arrived early for our reservation and took seats at the bar. A handsome young bartender immediately approached us. “What can I get for you ladies?” He had an English accent and an appealing little dent in his nose that kept him from being too pretty.

Kat flipped open the drink menu. “I’ll have a glass of
the Malbec,” she said with a flirtatious smile. Then she leaned back in her stool and recrossed her legs. She sure could turn it on when she wanted to.

“And for you, miss?”

I looked at the elegantly lit bottles behind him. The bar was small and dim and warm. “Just a Maker’s Mark, with a couple of ice cubes, please.”

He smiled approvingly. “All right, then,” he said, giving me a wink as he went off to fetch us our drinks.

“He’s cute,” whispered Kat conspiratorially.

“Kat, don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

I looked down at my left hand. I hadn’t worn my ring since I left Boston, and I pictured how my hand used to look, with a simple but beautiful two-carat round diamond set in a classic platinum band. I remembered how proud of it Gary was, telling me that princess cuts were trendy, but this style would last. “It’s an heirloom, Ellen,” he had said.

“I’m not up for the single-girl thing. Not tonight, Kat.”

“Oh, really?” she asked with playful defiance.

“Yeah, oh really.”

“What if it was that guy Mark back there, pouring you a glass of bourbon?”

At the mention of his name, I felt a stirring that I knew I wasn’t supposed to be feeling.

M
y mother pulled a loaf of cubed French bread from the freezer and bit the bag open with her teeth. “I’m keeping things simple this year,” she said as she dumped its contents onto a baking sheet and poured on a full cup of melted butter. “Just a turkey, my oyster stuffing, mashed potatoes, and a salad.”

“Sounds great, Mom,” I said reflexively, taking a sip of my peppermint tea, then scrunching my feet up onto the barstool. It was only eight o’clock in the evening, but I was already thinking about bed.

“I mean it. No one ever eats the candied yams or green bean casserole, so I’m not making them.”

“I think that’s smart.”

She opened the door to the top oven and slid in the baking sheet. “Christmas, too. Things are going to be different this year. Your father and I aren’t doing big gifts for y’all. You don’t need all that anymore.”

I nodded in agreement and she seemed disappointed that I didn’t put up any selfish protests.

She turned to the kitchen sink to wash her hands. With her back to me, she asked, “So, I guess your sister isn’t coming tomorrow?”

“No… I don’t think she is.”

“I still can’t understand why she thinks that
she’s
the one who’s got the right to be mad.”

I didn’t answer, having learned not to try to position myself as moderator between my parents and Kat. Instead, I tried to redirect her. “So, Luke will be here in the morning?”

“Yes,” said Mom, drying her hands on a dishrag hanging on the oven door. “His train will be here around noon, and then he’s going to stay until Saturday.”

Luke usually came out to New Jersey for only one night at a time, so his extended stay was something of an event. What my parents didn’t know was that Mitch was going to his father’s house in Boca Raton for Thanksgiving, so Luke would have been alone all weekend. “That’ll be nice,” I said. “To have Luke here.”

My mother propped one hand on her hip and looked at me directly. “So, what’s Kat doing, then? Did you ask her?” The overhead lights above the island harshly lit her face, casting dramatic shadows over her bags and wrinkles. She looked older than I had ever seen her look.

“She was invited to spend Thanksgiving with a friend, Mom.” I was shorter than I had intended to be.

“I can’t imagine what friend would be more important than family.”

“I don’t know, Mom. I didn’t really get a chance to ask her. I was too busy getting divorced.” I knew I was being something of
a martyr, but I did not feel that I had received an adequate level of sympathy for my ordeal.

“Well, excuse me, Ellen! Seeing as you spent the past two nights with her, I thought it may have come up.”

“All right, Mom. I just am kind of tired and drained and don’t really feel like getting in the middle of it.”

“Stop being so dramatic, Ellen. No one is putting you in the middle of anything. For your information, I just found out Aunt Kathy will be coming for Christmas, and I was hoping that maybe Kat would at least grace us with her presence then.”

“Aunt Kathy’s coming?” We all loved Aunt Kathy. Even Kat.

“Yes, she’s going to be here for Christmas and she’s staying until the second. She’ll be here for Eugene White.”

“Oh, right,” I said, remembering the Arnolds had arranged for him to speak at our church. “So, when is that happening?”

“The twenty-seventh. Lynn and Ed were really hoping to have him come before Christmas, but I think this’ll be nice. They postponed their holiday party so that they could have it that night, too.” Her pointer finger shot suddenly into the air, as if she had some urgent information to convey. “As a matter of fact, Lynn specifically asked me to invite you.” Anticipating my resistance, she quickly added, “It would be very rude if you didn’t go.”

“Oh, come on,” I begged.

“Ellen, this is a very big deal to your father and me. For Lynn to ask us after everything that happened during that terrible dinner…”

“Fine,” I said, shaking my head. “I’ll go.”

She headed to the pantry and came out with a five-pound bag of russet potatoes.

“And don’t forget about the Donaldsons on Friday.”

“What?” I couldn’t so much as place the Donaldsons, much less recall an invitation to their house. “Who are the Donaldsons?”

“Ellen! I told you about this weeks ago. They are a very nice couple from our church and they have a party the day after Thanksgiving every year. You met them three Sundays ago.”

I vaguely recalled meeting a large woman who was built like Julia Child. She had a horsey face and ashy blond Princess Diana hair.

“So it’s going to be all churchies there?” I imagined the typical spread laid out for “fellowship” after a church service. “What, are we going to sit around drinking burned coffee from foam cups and eating mini powdered-sugar donuts?” Even the snobbiest churches had much to learn when it came to catering.

“Listen to yourself,” said my mother, as if astounded that I had come from her womb. “As a matter of fact, it’s going to be a very nice party. The Donaldsons live up in Chester; their property is just stunning.” She emptied the bag of potatoes into a colander. They landed with dull thuds. “They breed these beautiful horses called Friesians. Glenn hooks them up to a wagon and gives hayrides. And Ann makes her delicious homemade eggnog.”

“Eggnog with rum in it?”

My mother rolled her eyes and bent down to rummage in a cabinet under the island. “Yes, Ellen. With rum in it.”

“Is Luke going?”

My mother hesitated. “Luke wasn’t invited.”