Ruby (19 page)

“They must be pretty hard up for baby-sitters,” Amy said.

Ruby slurped down spoonfuls of Jell-O. “Well, actually it’s a little late for baby-sitters, you could say, right? But my mother is knitting the baby all of these little tiny sweaters, even though she’s like totally mad and upset and everything. She’s crazy like that. Isn’t she, Olivia?”

Ruby turned her sticky face toward Olivia, who nodded. But what Olivia was thinking was how good a liar Ruby really was. How very, very good.

Olivia’s father was a stiff-upper-lip kind of guy. When his company downsized after thirty-five years there and he was forced into early retirement, he said, “That’s the way the ball bounces.” Then he took up golf with a vengeance, and now he walked around with madras pants in silly sherbert colors and a lime green cardigan. He liked to brag that he was the first Italian-American to join that country club. “How do you like that?” he’d say smugly.

“Hanging in there?” he said to Olivia. He tapped her lightly on the arm like they were old pals.

“Yup,” she said, tapping him back. “Hanging in there.”

“Good girl.”

Olivia wasn’t sure, but she thought those were the exact words he’d said to her when she woke up from an emergency appendectomy when she was eleven. She went out on the terrace, where a crowd of people her own age had gathered. On her way, she grabbed a beer and quickly drank about half of it.

A man wearing an apron that said
KISS THE CHEF
was grilling sausages. A woman who was either his wife or his date—she hung on to his elbow possessively—told Olivia they were duck, smoked chicken, and garlic and herbs for vegetarians. Inside, she said, there were a variety of condiments, like apple chutney, cranberry relish, and hot mustard. Then she continued talking to another woman.

Olivia looked out, across the road, to the beach. The water was flat and calm; the air hung in a haze above it.

A man smiled right in Olivia’s face. He was too cute for Olivia to talk to. Give her Pete Lancelotta and she could handle it. Give her shoulders like this and a pair of blue eyes and surfer-boy blond hair and she was lost.

“Are you going to kiss the chef?” he asked, grinning and pointing with his bottle of Corona to the man at the grill.

“Doubtful,” Olivia said in her best leave-me-alone tone of voice. A cute man at a party talked to you and the next thing you knew you had to have drinks with him, exchange phone numbers, all sorts of unpleasant things.

“He’s a doctor, too. Can you believe it? A pediatrician. Would you want your kid to be taken care of by a guy who wears an apron like that?”

Olivia gave the cute guy a tight smile.

“Which is my way of asking if you have kids, which is my way of finding out if you are married. Subtle, huh?”

Olivia refused to be charmed by him. “Actually,” she said, “no.”

A woman came over and linked her arm through the man’s. “Hey,” she said.

“Obviously,” Olivia said, wanting to get him in trouble, “you’re here with someone.”

Then she recognized the look on the woman’s face. She wore the expression that Olivia found too familiar—sympathetic and worried.

“This is Amy’s
sister,
” she said to the man.

Olivia said what the woman couldn’t. “The one whose husband died last year.”

“Oh,” he said, slightly embarrassed.

“I remember when that happened,” the woman told Olivia. “I heard it on the eleven o’clock news and I thought it was one of the most tragic things I had ever heard.”

“Me, too,” Olivia said. She held up her empty beer bottle as an excuse to leave, then went back inside. Lines like that surfer boy used, and he was here with a date. Who could a person trust these days?

“That was a good party,” Ruby said as they drove back later that night. Ahead of them, the sky was bright with color and smoke from the fireworks show. “I love Jell-O like that. Can you make that? It must be hard. Or maybe not.” She shrugged and pointed to the sky. “Pretty,” she said.

“I guess,” Olivia said.

“You don’t like parties, do you?” Ruby said.

Olivia pulled over to the side of the road and got out of the car, leaving the high beams on.

“I want to show you something,” she said, motioning for Ruby to follow her.

They stood in the darkness, the two headlights making a funny alien glow. Behind them, crickets chirped so loudly that when Olivia spoke, she had to raise her voice.

“This is where it happened,” Olivia said. She pointed to the spot in the road where David’s body had flown over that blue Honda Civic.

“No shit,” Ruby said, awed.

“Are you going to leave me?” Olivia said. “Are you going to keep that baby? Because if you are, just go now. I cannot do it. I cannot have you promise me this and he about it.”

“I’m not leaving,” Ruby said.

“I mean,” Olivia said, “you have no idea what I’ve been through.”

“I’m not leaving,” Ruby said again.

“Well,” Olivia said.

Her heart raced foolishly. She got back in the car. When Ruby slid in beside her, Olivia said, “Well. You’d better not.”

The car in the driveway was unfamiliar. So was the woman sitting on the front steps smoking a cigarette.

The woman stood when she saw Olivia and Ruby. She was tall and slender, blond. She wore khaki trousers and a white scoop-neck sleeveless shirt.

“Finally,” she said, looking past Olivia and Ruby, as if someone else should appear.

“Where is he?” she said.

“Who?” Ruby asked her.

The woman threw her hands in the air. “This is so typical,” she said. “I wrote him in January and told him I’d be coming through on my way back to New York. I told him to let me know if it would be a big deal for me to stay.” She looked behind them again. “Do you know how long it takes to get back from Central America? I’ll tell you how long. Forever.”

Olivia said, “I’m a little confused. Who are you looking for?”

She imagined it might be Ben. Or maybe the old couple who used to own the place.

“Are you Olivia?” the woman asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m Rachel,” she said. “The one he was buying the hat for,” she added.

“Oh no,” Olivia said.

“It is a big deal, right?” Rachel said.

She bent to pick up her duffel bag, but Olivia stopped her.

“It’s just so typical of David,” Rachel began. “I told him in the letter to leave a message with my service if there was a problem. It’s not like you can get messages in Honduras, you know.” She shook her head. “That’s David for you.” Then she noticed Olivia’s face. “What?” she said.

“David’s dead,” Olivia said, and the words, spoken so often today, did not come out any easier.

O
LIVIA KEPT REFILLING
Rachel’s glass with water, which the woman gulped down noisily. As soon as the glass was empty again, Rachel held it out to Olivia for more.

But finally, Rachel paused and said, “Dead. Jesus.” She didn’t put the glass down. Instead, she held it in both hands and looked into it as if it might hold some answers.

Olivia wasn’t sure what to say, so she gave Rachel the details: jogging, curve, blue Honda Civic. With each detail, Rachel’s eyes widened.

“Jesus,” she said again, looking up at Olivia. “Death waits at our door, but we don’t actually expect it to come inside.”

Inside, Olivia cringed. Who actually said things like that?

But clearly, Ruby was impressed. “Wow,” she said. “That’s heavy. Are you a poet or something?”

Olivia had forgotten Ruby was even there.

Rachel, too, seemed to see Ruby for the first time.

“Is she yours?” she asked Olivia.

“She kind of wandered in one day,” Olivia explained, shrugging.

Clearly, that wasn’t good enough for Rachel, who sat frowning at Olivia. Olivia considered what she knew about Rachel. She was a mountain climber, a doctor, the woman David had loved before Olivia. She was from the Bay Area, too, had actually gone to Berkeley with David and Rex. In fact, Rachel had moved back to San Francisco. Olivia remembered the computer-made change of address card she’d sent, how she’d cleverly imposed her image on it, her head already in California, her body stretching across the country, her feet still in New York. “Who has time to do things like this?” Olivia had said when she saw it. David had smiled knowingly. “Rachel can do more in a day than anyone I know.” And Olivia, already jealous of all the years Rachel had had with David, had muttered, “Well, goody for her.”

Now, she was, sitting right across from Olivia, glaring.

“She’s a runaway?” Rachel said.

Rachel spoke in the clipped, matter-of-fact voice of someone who was confident and self-assured. Olivia could imagine her giving a fatal diagnosis to someone, delivering bad news.

“Ha!” Ruby said. “I didn’t have to run away. My parents kicked me out.”

“Because you’re pregnant?”

“Duh,” Ruby said. “What do
you
think?” She moved closer to Rachel, so close that their knees practically touched. “Where do you live?”

“San Francisco,” Rachel said.

“Wow!” Ruby said. “That’s incredible. Ben would die if he was here. No kidding. Did you ever hear of Jack Kerouac?”

“I have,” Rachel said, obviously touched by the girl’s naivete.

“You have?” Ruby said, grinning. “That is so excellent.”

“Everyone’s heard of Jack Kerouac,” Olivia said sharply.

But Ruby ignored her. “Ben,” she told Rachel, “he’s the one. You know.” She blushed and giggled in her adolescent way, then rolled her eyes.

For the first time, her dramatics annoyed, rather than touched, Olivia.

“He
was
my boyfriend,” Ruby continued. “Until this morning.”

Rachel frowned even more. “He abandoned you?”

“Basically,” Ruby said. “Yeah. I mean, I’m the one who actually has to have the baby, you know? And then give it away after all these months of talking to it and stuff. It can hear and everything. So I try to tell it things. Ben read it ‘Howl.’ The whole poem. He put his lips right to my stomach and recited the whole thing. But he thinks I’m being so cavalier about it. That’s the word he used. I looked it up to be sure I understood. Do you know what the dictionary said? It said ‘haughty’! It said ‘carefree’! It said ‘offhanded,’ like I could give up a baby—our baby, no less—all carefree, like nothing mattered.”

Olivia tried to stand between the two of them, but she couldn’t quite wedge her way in.

“No one’s saying that, Ruby,” Olivia said, trying to force eye contact with Rachel. They were the adults here, weren’t they? Especially Rachel, someone so responsible that she gave up money and time to go to Central America and operate on children with some sort of severe facial deformity; she and David had seen a PBS special on doctors who do that, and he’d told her that Rachel was there, right then.

Rachel didn’t give any signal to Olivia at all. Clearly, they weren’t on the same wavelength.

“A baby isn’t something you discard cavalierly,” Rachel said in a voice so soothing that Olivia wanted to scream. “And I know you wouldn’t do that.”

Ruby was nodding with too much enthusiasm. “Olivia just made it sound so simple, you know? And her husband died and she’s all alone.”

“Wait one minute,” Olivia said.

“Olivia,” Rachel said, her voice still all smooth and buttery. “Can I talk to you alone?”

Ruby got to her feet. “That’s cool,” she said. “I’m going to bed anyway. I can’t believe I ever used to stay up all night. I mean, ever since this happened, I like fall asleep at nine o’clock. I never even see
Melrose Place
anymore. I’m totally out of the loop.”

Olivia thought of that A&W, those stoned teenagers with their pasty faces and tangled hair.

“Not a bad loop to be out of,” she muttered. How had she ended up the outsider here?

Ruby started to walk away, but she twirled around like a ballerina to face Olivia and Rachel again. She laughed. “Oh, yes,” she said with mock seriousness, “I’m a wayward teen. A bad seed.” She was almost graceful when she skipped away.

Olivia sighed and rolled her eyes. “Kids,” she said, aware that she was mimicking Ruby’s exaggerated motions. Olivia sat up straighter, cleared her throat, and tried again. “Seriously,” she said, “you can’t imagine what it has been like since …” The words stuck again and Olivia tried to force them out.

But Rachel didn’t give her a chance.

“I remember the night David called to tell me he’d gotten married,” Rachel said. “I was still reeling from the breakup. Instead of this gorgeous hat, he runs off with the milliner.”

“It was one of those things,” Olivia said. She could see him in the doorway of her small shop, through the steam from the hats she was blocking.

“I was still at the hospital, and when I heard his voice, I thought something was terribly wrong. Why would he track me down at work? Why not leave a message for me at home? So I immediately imagined that he had some fatal disease.” She added quickly, “Not that I had any reason to suspect that, but it seemed so
large,
him calling me there after all those months. I suppose a small part of me thought he wanted to come back.”

Olivia considered the word:
large.
That was how her heart had felt when they were first falling in love, as if her ribs, her chest, her body were all too small to contain this thing. That was how her life with David had felt, full and large. That was how losing him felt still.

Rachel was saying, “He told me you were his soul mate. For a time, I had hoped he was mine, I suppose. Funny, I almost envy you, sitting there, the widow.”

She looked directly at Olivia. She was a no-nonsense person, in her khaki trousers and sensible haircut and flat walking shoes. David never spoke badly of Rachel. But he had laughed at how organized she was, how practical. She was someone who knew about mulching a garden and how to use vinegar as a cleaning product; someone who put up preserves and knew how to fish and ski and change a flat tire. Rachel was sensible. She was a fourth-generation Californian. Her ancestors had arrived there in wagon trains.

Rachel leaned toward Olivia, her long, tanned arms reaching across the table.