Goodbye To All That (5 page)

He hovered near the cooking island, watching them through the plumes of steam that rose from the pot of boiling pasta. Madison wore a striped jumper and Mackenzie had on pink overalls. They refused to dress identically, which made life easier for their teachers and friends. They no longer looked identical to him, either, but that was because he was their father and knew them so well. He knew Madison liked to suck on her hair and Mackenzie tilted her head when she wanted to ask a question. When Madison was excited, she tended to hop on one foot, whereas Mackenzie preferred to bounce on both feet.

Right now, they were so involved in describing the show they’d been watching that they didn’t even notice their father’s arrival in the kitchen.

Brooke didn’t notice him, either. She looked slightly blurry through the fog rising up from the pot, nodding and smiling and managing to sneak a sip of her wine as the girls twittered and fluttered like baby birds attempting to fly.

He didn’t understand a word they said. Watching them was like watching a foreign film without the subtitles. He observed, admiring his girls, his beautiful girls, all three of them, all of them his. He observed and wondered what Brooke would think when he told her about his parents.

But even a crappy car was better than the bus, so Melissa wasn’t complaining. She usually took Greyhound instead of Amtrak when she visited her family, because the bus terminal was closer than the train station to where everyone lived. She hated that on the bus, you couldn’t stand and stretch your legs during the trip, and the little lavatory across from the back seat emitted putrid odors, and you usually wound up sitting next to someone who snored or had dirty fingernails, or who was so fat his blubber oozed under the armrest and into your territory.

Of course, you could get stuck sitting next to a fat, dirty snorer on the train, too.

She’d been willing to tolerate the bus trip this weekend because Jill had insisted that her attendance at this all-of-a-sudden family shindig was essential. “I know it’s a schlep for you,” she’d said, “but Mom and Dad really need you here on Saturday. We all do.”

Melissa and Luc had already made a plan for the weekend. She’d intended to spend the morning checking out a few apartments for sale, and then in the afternoon she and Luc had figured on taking in a movie—another terrific thing about him was that he didn’t mind chick flicks—and dinner, and maybe some club-hopping followed by a night in bed. He often worked on Saturdays, either seeing clients in the salon or doing hair for a bridal party at this or that hotel. Lots of women got married in New York every weekend. Maybe someday Melissa would be one of them, and she’d get a stylist from a salon like Nouvelle to come to the hotel and do everyone’s hair. Expensive, but given the total cost of a Manhattan wedding, who’d even notice? Hair was at least as important as the flowers. Maybe even as important as the dress.

But Luc happened to be free this weekend, and she’d been looking forward to their first Saturday afternoon together until Jill had phoned and summoned her home. Melissa had whined and fumed, to no avail. She’d attempted to find out what was so freaking essential that it required her to drop everything and come running, also to no avail.

Jill could be outrageously bossy.

Wallowing in disappointment, Melissa had phoned Luc to break the bad news to him about their thwarted weekend plans, and he’d told her to hang on a minute, and when he’d come back to the phone he’d announced that his roommate didn’t need his car that weekend. Luc would have to do all the driving—Alan didn’t trust just anyone with the keys to his precious wreck of a car—but driving to Massachusetts with Luc would sure beat spending four hours each way on the bus seated next to a filthy, obese snorer and inhaling rancid fumes from the lavatory.

She’d already told Jill she would be taking the eight a.m. bus and promised to call when it was about fifteen minutes away from the terminal so whoever was going to pick her up could time the short drive. She probably should have phoned Jill back and informed her of the change in transportation plans, but she hadn’t. She’d been pissed off by Jill’s imperiousness. So she and Luc would show up unannounced at Jill’s front door, and Jill would deal with it. Jill was a whiz when it came to dealing with things.

Melissa and Luc had packed overnight bags, figuring they’d spend Saturday night in Massachusetts and drive home Sunday. If Jill didn’t want to put them up at her house—and Melissa could respect that; Abbie was twelve years old, and Jill might not want her spending the night under the same roof as an aunt engaging in premarital sex—then they could stay at Doug’s house. It had a zillion rooms, and the twins were too young to care who stayed in which room with whom.

Or, if necessary, she and Luc could stay at her parents’ house. They hadn’t turned her bedroom into a study or a sewing room or a second den. Melissa’s childhood bedroom remained intact, the décor unchanged from the day she’d left for Brown University thirteen years ago. French provincial furniture, pink Swiss-dot curtains, rose-hued carpeting, a canopy bed—the room was a shrine to girlie-girl taste. One of these days Melissa would drop by and reclaim her stuffed animals. For her future children, of course, not for herself.

If worse came to worst, she and Luc would get a room at a motel for the night. A bed-and-breakfast would be more romantic, but the autumn leaf season was in full swing, and most of the B-and-B’s in New England had been booked a year ago. She consoled herself with the thought that a motel would be cheaper. She really had to save money if she was serious about buying an apartment.

Traffic was heavy on the Cross-Bronx—as if that was anything new. Cars, cabs, vans and eighteen-wheelers inched along, brake lights flashing like electrified rubies. Luc fiddled with the radio dial, gliding from one burst of static to the next. Apparently the radio didn’t work any better than the CD player. Melissa could attempt a conversation with him, but he didn’t look interested in chatting, so she focused instead on the folder of print-outs in her lap, each page describing a condo or co-op for sale. Kathy, the broker she was working with, had faxed them to her yesterday.

One bedroom or two?

Assuming she did wind up having children
 . . .
and she really hoped she would in the not too distant future. She was already thirty-one years old and didn’t want to be one of those forty-something moms contending with colic and hot flashes at the same time. Plus, she wasn’t sure she should raise her offspring in the city. City-bred kids were so hard, so tough, so jaded, and you had to pay a fortune in tuition for a decent private school. So investing in an apartment big enough to include a nursery seemed pointless. Closets were far more practical.

Still, it bothered Melissa that a one-bedroom apartment could cost as much as a two-bedroom. She compared two of the units Kathy had recommended, holding their sheets side by side on her knees. Both apartments were located in buildings in the same borderline neighborhood—not quite the Flatiron District, not quite Grammercy Park, not quite the northern edge of Greenwich Village. Closets were important, but did two huge closets equal one bedroom? And bottom line, did she want to spend close to seven figures for an apartment that wasn’t actually in a neighborhood?

Setting those two pages aside, she lifted the next one from the pile and tried to read it as the paper trembled in her hand, picking up the car’s vibrations. Clinton—at least that was a real neighborhood, and nowadays Hell’s Kitchen, which overlapped with Clinton, was almost chic. Two bedrooms but tiny, tiny, tiny, if Kathy’s notes about the square footage were accurate. The second bedroom could easily pass for a walk-in closet. Melissa could move an armoire in front of the window. No one would have to know it was an actual room.

She was so damned tired of renting. And if she bought an apartment, it would give her an excuse to move out of her ugly, boxy Upper East Side studio apartment, which cost an alarming amount in rent even though it had so little closet space she’d had to buy a coat tree for her jackets and raincoats.

She glanced over at Luc, who’d landed the dial on a station playing an overblown metal song she didn’t recognize, which, while awful, was an improvement over the static. He looked dashing in his sunglasses. Slightly bored, perhaps a little too highly buffed, but gorgeous enough to spark a tremor of excitement low in her belly, a response which made her realize that taking a motel room tonight would be a wise move. Even in Doug and Brooke’s enormous house, Melissa wasn’t sure she and Luc would have enough privacy for her to feel comfortable jumping his bones.

She wondered what her family would think of him. She wondered if this was an optimal time to invest in real estate. She wondered if she’d be able to push through a settlement with the purse counterfeiter her client had brought a suit against before their trial date, which was ten days away. It was a stupid case; the counterfeiter didn’t have a prayer of winning. But he kept balking at a settlement because settling would mean shutting down his business, and as long as he could delay that fateful step he could continue making money selling made-in-China rip-offs of her client’s expensive bags from folding card tables on street corners. It was going to take a judge’s order to force him out of business, which meant it was going to take a trial.

Ten days. Shit.

Forget about it,
Melissa ordered herself.
Forget about everything: the city’s real estate market, the looming trial, the sour aroma of truck exhausts, the fact that we still haven’t reached Connecticut because the traffic is moving so slowly.
What the hell were so many long-haul truckers doing on the highway on a Saturday morning, anyway? Didn’t they get weekends off? The rig in front of them had license plates from Tennessee, West Virginia and Arkansas. She’d bet the driver was chewing tobacco and listening to a CD of some nasal-voiced singer with two first names.

“What time do you think we’ll get there?” Luc asked.

“If the traffic ever thins out, we might be able to do it in three and a half hours.”

Luc made a face. Even pouting, he was adorable. He wore a black T-shirt that fit him just loosely enough not to be obscene, jeans faded to powder blue, a slate-gray blazer and tooled cowboy boots with silver tipping their toes. His black hair was short but well styled, his cheeks darkened by a stubble he’d trimmed to just the right length using a hair clipper. Melissa had always assumed guys got that kind of stubble by not shaving for a day. She hadn’t known they could actually create a day-old stubble with a grooming tool.

She’d learned so much from Luc. She’d learned the importance of mixing lowlights with highlights to give her hair dimension, and she’d learned about a fantastic serum that cost eighty dollars an ounce but kept her hair from frizzing like nothing else she’d ever tried, and she’d learned that she did, indeed, have a g-spot.

“You sure my being there isn’t going to be a problem?” Luc called over to her.

“They’ll love you,” she said, hoping that uttering those words with conviction made them true. She hadn’t told anyone in her family about Luc, not because her social life wasn’t their business but because she didn’t want their input. She’d learned that if she mentioned she was seeing someone, they all inputted like yentas on meth.