Goodbye To All That (8 page)

“Right.”

“I mean it. I promised Mom I wouldn’t tell.”

“Okay,” Melissa said impatiently.

“We’ll act calm and sympathetic, and hopefully we’ll be able to work this out so they won’t get a divorce.”

“Fine. We’ll act calm and sympathetic,” Melissa said. A wave of sorrow rushed at her, and she felt her knees wobble. “A divorce? I don’t want them to get a divorce.”

“None of us do.”

“I mean, it’s terrible.” She thought of Luc flying out to Vegas to gawk at showgirls with his father. She thought of everyone she knew who came from broken homes. Her friend Lindsay, who had to pass messages between her parents because they refused to talk to each other. Her friend Natalie, whose father had celebrated his fiftieth birthday by dumping her mother and marrying a twenty-year-old waitress. Her colleague Garth, whose father liked to trade in for a new model every year and whose mother now lived with four cats.

Oh, God. The thought of having of a twenty-year-old stepmom and a mother who was a cat lady brought Melissa to the brink of tears.

The doorbell rang. “That’s probably them now,” Jill whispered. “Remember, calm and sympathetic, and none of us knows what this is about.”

Melissa and Doug nodded. Gordon’s voice sounded muffled through the bathroom door as he said, “Hey, Ruth and Richard! Come on in.”

“Calm and sympathetic,” Jill repeated.

Melissa hardly heard her. She burst out of the bathroom and charged down the front hall, screaming, “Mommy, Daddy, you can’t get a divorce!”

“Do you have any wine?” Melissa asked, her gaze circling the table. Her eyes glistened, as if she were a nanosecond away from erupting in tears. How the hell were they going to persuade their parents to forget this silly divorce idea if Melissa was falling apart?

It was possible her falling apart would keep their parents together. Histrionics might work, especially histrionics from Melissa, who was, after all, their precious baby.

“No wine,” Jill said, then added for Doug’s benefit, “No scotch, either. We’re doing this sober.”

“Shit,” Melissa muttered before plucking a raspberry-patch tea bag from the straw basket in which Jill had stacked an assortment of teas.

“Who is that man?” their mother asked Melissa as she carried a steaming cup of coffee to one of the dining room chairs and sat. So casual, so relaxed, as if she hadn’t ordered Jill to assemble everyone for the purpose of announcing the dissolution of her marriage—and as if she wasn’t thoroughly pissed at Jill for having pre-announced the announcement.

“Lucas Brondo,” Melissa answered, compulsively bobbing her tea bag in and out of her cup. He’d been introduced to Jill’s parents when they’d arrived, but with everyone crowded in the hallway and Noah performing an elaborately choreographed hand-shake-hand-slap with his grandfather while the twins babbled simultaneously and Abbie wrapped her grandmother in a much more enthusiastic hug than she ever gave Jill, Melissa’s guy had faded into the background.

Obviously he hadn’t faded completely. Her mother had noticed him.

So had her father. “Brondo? That doesn’t sound Jewish. Is he Jewish?”

Melissa sighed. “I have no idea.”

“Brondo,” her father pondered aloud. “Like that actor, what was his name? Marlon Brondo. He wasn’t Jewish.”

“Brando, not Brondo,” her mother corrected him. “Look, Jill got you that rugelach you love.”

“You’re a sweetheart. Thank you.” Jill’s father slung an arm around her shoulders and squeezed. Evidently he didn’t mind that she’d revealed the truth to Doug and Melissa. She tried to gauge his mood. On a cheerful scale of one to ten, he seemed somewhere between a four and a five. The prospect of a divorce apparently hadn’t crushed his spirit. Either that, or the rugelach had taken the edge off his despair.

At sixty-four, he was still a handsome man, his face lined but not pruny, his hair silver but not thin. Dressed in khakis and a polo shirt—a golfing outfit nearly identical to Doug’s—he looked fit and sturdy. If he was cheating on her mother, Jill would smash the plate of rugelach over his head.

“Those grapes look nice,” her mother commented, scrutinizing them as if searching for insects on their curved maroon surfaces. “Did you get them at Whole Foods?”

For God’s sake. She didn’t want to discuss where she shopped for grapes. “Everyone sit down,” she said. Someone had to take charge. As usual, Jill would wind up being that someone. “Get something to drink, sit and let’s talk.”

“There’s nothing to say,” her mother remarked stiffly. “You’ve already told everyone.”

Jill dropped onto the chair at the head of the table. She studied her mother, seated halfway down the table to her left. Like her father, who was seated halfway down the table to her right, her mother looked fine. Her hair needed work; smudges of gray marked her temples and streaked through the chin-length strands. She ought to color it like Melissa’s, which looked truly spectacular—not just its feathery cut, with a hint of bangs grazing her eyebrows, but its color. A blend of dark and light browns with glimmers of gold, it reminded Jill of the variegated hues in the golden oak sideboard standing against the wall behind her mother. Her mother’s hair was variegated, too, but its drab brown and gray reminded Jill more of a rotting log than varnished oak.

Her mother’s face sagged a bit and her figure had reached the elasticized-waistband stage. For the most part, though, she wasn’t aging badly. Her mood seemed more angry than sorrowful.

The room had grown silent. Everyone was seated and gazing expectantly at Jill—except Doug, who slouched in a chair next to his father and swirled a teaspoon through his coffee in a lazy circle.

“All right. As we all know, Mom told me she and Dad were getting a divorce.”

Melissa, who’d taken her place at the opposite end of the table, emitted a tiny sob-like sound. “I can’t believe this. I just can’t believe you’d do something like this.”

“What don’t you believe?” Jill’s mother asked. “Half of all marriages end in divorce, isn’t that the statistic?”

“Half of
all
marriages, maybe. Not my parents’ marriage,” Melissa argued.

“We’re not getting a divorce,” Jill’s father said, surprising her—and, if their stunned expressions were anything to go by, Melissa and Doug. They all gaped at their father, who helped himself to a slice of the honey-coated rugelach and took a bite.

Since he was chewing, Jill’s mother took over. “What he means is, for now all we’re doing is separating. I’ll be moving into my own place. Nobody’s talking to any lawyers at this point.”

“Your own place? What place? Where are you moving? Why is Dad getting the house?” The questions shot across the table in all directions, like bullets at Normandy.

Swallowing, her father held his hand up to silence everyone. A few crumbs stuck to his fingertips. “I’m getting the house,” he said, “because she’s the one who wants to do this. It’s her idea. She wants us to separate? Fine, she can move out. That rugelach is wonderful, Jill. Not as good as my mother’s, but
 . . .
”

“Nothing is as good as your mother’s,” Jill’s mother muttered, which made Jill wonder whether her father had been unfavorably comparing her mother’s cooking to his mother’s for the past forty-two years. Could that be her reason for walking out on him?

“Where are you moving?” she asked her mother.

“I found a nice little apartment,” her mother said.

Her father rolled his eyes, as snide as Abbie on a hormonal day. “Nice,” he snorted. “What can you find for less than a million dollars that’s nice?”

“I don’t need a mansion,” Jill’s mother retorted. “I don’t need lots of space. It’s just going to be me.”

“Overlooking a highway.”

“It’s not a highway.”

“Not to be crass or anything,” Doug said as he tore a sprig of grapes from the platter, “but how are you going to afford this nice little apartment? You’re a one-income couple, and Dad’s probably thinking about retiring in the next few years or so—”

“I’m not ready to hang up the stethoscope yet,” Jill’s father said.

“Still, this isn’t the time to be squandering your money. You should be preparing for the future. You know how much Grandma Schwartz’s nursing home costs. What if one of you became incapacitated?”

Jill’s mother glanced at her husband. “He’s already diagnosing us with Alzheimer’s.” She turned back to Doug. “I’ll pay for the apartment out of my earnings. I have a job.”

“A job.” Jill’s father snorted, punctuating his words with more sarcastic eye-rolling. “You call that a job?”

“What job?” Melissa asked, her voice still tremulous with unshed tears.

“Did I mention I like your hair?” Jill’s mother said. “Very breezy. Very pretty.”

“Tell her about your job,” Jill’s father said.

Jill’s mother sat straighter. “I’ll be a clerk at a First-Rate. You know, the discount chain.”

“A clerk?” Doug was clearly appalled. “A clerk? You’re going to wear one of those ugly red bibs?”

“It’s more than a bib. It’s more on the order of an apron. You could call it a smock,” she said. “Or a pinafore. Like the Gilbert and Sullivan opera.”

“Mom.” Doug sounded indignant. “You’re an educated, cultured woman. A musician. You shouldn’t be running a cash register.”

“I won’t start on the register. That comes after I’ve been there a while,” she explained. “Lots of educated, cultured women are clerks. As for my music, it’s not as if anyone’s going to pay me to analyze the
Goldberg Variations
for them.”

“But a discount store clerk?” Melissa chimed in. “Couldn’t you be a secretary instead? It would be easier on you. You could sit at a desk.”

“I’ve been a secretary,” Jill’s mother reminded them. “When your father was in medical school I worked as a secretary. I don’t know if they still call that job secretary anymore. Administrative assistant.” She shrugged. “I don’t want to do that. It’s all about serving the interests of others, making everyone else look good. You knock yourself out and your boss gets all the credit. Forget that. Anyway, I’ll meet more people at First-Rate. It’ll be fun.”

“Fun?” Doug shook his head.

“I want to earn money,” she said. “I don’t want your father paying my rent. That would defeat the purpose.”

“What purpose?” Jill asked, lowering her voice in the hope of defusing the tension that churned the air. “The hell with the job, Mom. We want to know why you’re doing this.”

“Yes,” Jill’s father agreed, giving her mother a pointed look. “We’d all like to know that.”

She scowled at him. “You and I have discussed this, Richard. I’ve told you. It’s
 . . .
” She considered her answer, then sighed. “It’s nothing in particular.”

Jill’s father gazed at his children, eyebrows raised and his hands spread palm up, as if to say, See? She’s nuts.