The Starter Wife (38 page)

The cover story read: “Britney’s Secret Sorrow.”

Kenny grabbed the magazine and flipped open to a page which had been marked with a tiny neon-green Post-it Note. He handed her the magazine.

Gracie took a look and started reading out loud: “‘Britney Spears endured heartache when her mentor, Lou Manahan of Durango Pictures, died suddenly in a terrible drowning accident. She’s seen here leaving the Forest Lawn Mortuary with a friend.’”

“Where does it mention you?” Gracie asked. She was almost desperate for Kenny to get some satisfaction.

“Well, it doesn’t exactly mention me by name, that’ll come later,” Kenny said. “I’m the friend.”

“Oh,” Gracie said, putting the magazine back on the counter. “Right, right.”

“I have to be careful where I go—you know, I’m being followed by paparazzi,” Kenny mentioned for the second time. Gracie actually saw his chest puff out.

She merely shrugged and raised her eyebrows and cocked her mouth to the side as if to say, “Poor thing.”

“Hey, are you going to the Chili Cook-off today?”

“I was going to take Jaden there—”

“Because I’m going to take, you know …”

“Britney? Britney Spears is going to the Chili Cook-off?”

“She’s in town for a few more days and then she’s taking off on tour. She’s, you know, just a small-town girl. She likes that sort of thing. We have to be careful of the, you know …”

Gracie nodded. “Paparazzi.”

“Did I tell you they’re following me?” Kenny asked. “Oh, hey, I just want you to know, it’s okay if you’re going, too.”

“Thank you,” Gracie said, as she savored the bittersweet taste of sarcasm. Divorce had not made her a better person.

Maybe the next life-changing event would.

“Hey,” Kenny said. “Are you taking that guy?”

Gracie went blank.

“You’re not dating anymore?” Kenny asked.

“Oh no, we’re dating. We’ve never stopped dating. It’s pretty much nonstop dating here in the Malibu Colony.”

“Okay, maybe I’ll see him there—what’s his name?”

“Sam. Sam Knight.”

“Knight. Any relation to the Knight family? The rubber business is just part of it, right? That’s a good business. Bronf-man was in liquor, Anschutz in real estate. Marvin Davis was oil. The Sony guys were … Japanese, right? Maybe I should talk to him.”

“No,” Gracie said, blunt as a fist.

“I’m sure Britney wouldn’t mind double-dating,” Kenny said, oblivious to the negative bent of Gracie’s reaction. Perhaps, Gracie thought, his obliviousness was some sort of survival mechanism.

Perhaps Kenny was more evolved than Gracie.

“Over my old dead body,” Gracie said under her breath. Which proved the evolved theory.

Kenny was turning to leave. “Oh, Kenny,” Gracie said, “I hear the chili at the Cook-off is great.”

Kenny flashed her a thumbs-up and went out the door.

“T
WIRLY CUPS!”
Jaden screamed, pointing at the oversized cups that spun around. Jaden and Gracie had been on the mini-roller coaster, the Ferris wheel, and some other ride that had no name but definitely had a purpose: to cause the rider to swear never to ride it again, as long as he or she lived.

Gracie didn’t know this Jaden—the Jaden who was pulling her from ride to ride, from nausea to worse. Her Jaden was serious and wise and old beyond her years. Her Jaden would be able to do Gracie’s taxes in a couple years. This Jaden was something else entirely. Had Britney had a (shudder) good influence on her overly serious daughter?

“It’s the corn on the cob,” Joan said as she watched from the sidelines as Gracie hobbled and Jaden hopped out of the whiplash-inducing, innocently named Twirly Cups. Joan was the official Holder of Belongings—as she would no more get
on a ride at the Malibu Chili Cook-off than agree to have her nails yanked out of her fingers with needle-nose pliers. “Theory Number One on outdoor events: Wherever there’s corn dogs, there’s trouble,” Joan informed Gracie as she bent over, flipped her head between her knees, and heaved.

“Daddy!” Jaden suddenly screamed, and ran through the sunstroked masses, slipping away from Joan and Gracie.

“Jaden!” Gracie gurgled. “Jaden, come back here!”

“I’ll go after her,” Joan said, diving into the fray. Gracie checked her balance and ran after them.
Carnivals,
Gracie thought, as she pushed through the red-faced maze.
The ultimate parental test.

Gracie came upon a knot in the crowd that was impenetrable. People were hovering like bees in a hive, except they were holding their cameras aloft, up over their heads, their lenses fixing on the center of the human knot, the vortex of the fleshy tornado. Gracie jumped high enough along the periphery to catch the top of Joan’s red head. Jaden had disappeared—

“Jaden!” Gracie yelled. Her voice came out raspy. Her throat was tightening; like screaming in a dream, she thought.

“JADEN!”

Jaden shot forward between the legs of one of the two bodyguards, hurling herself into Kenny’s arms.

“It’s my daughter, it’s all right, Bo,” Kenny said to the bodyguard. The bodyguard put his hands up; his massive pinky ring, coated in diamonds, flickered. That’s cool.

Standing next to Kenny was Britney, attacking the remainder of an ice cream sandwich. Gracie focused briefly on Britney; she looked as though she could have been in her living room, sitting on a plaid couch, sucking the liquefying vanilla ice cream from between two chocolate wafers. She seemed entirely
unaware of the impact of her presence on the rest of humanity. Bo the Bodyguard started to push Gracie back into the crowd, his shoulders braced against her chest—

“Not without my daughter!” Gracie screamed, uttering the same words as Sally Field in the movie in which she displays her acting chops by trading in a nun’s habit for a burka.

T
HE CROWD DISPERSED
after they’d captured their pictures of Britney eating junk food, or at least witnessed enough junk-food debauchery to report back to family that evening over the dinner table.

Gracie was holding Jaden’s hand while Kenny held the other one. It was a nice domestic tableau, had it been at all domestic.

“We have to go now, Jaden,” Gracie said, tugging at her child’s arm; the child who attached herself to her mother like a limpet for months of preschool was not budging.

“I want to stay with Daddy,” Jaden said, brutally slashing at her mother’s heart.

Britney had sent one of the bodyguards to get her a hot dog, and he had returned. She was off to the side, awaiting the handoff.

“Can I talk to you?” Kenny said, low.

Gracie looked at Kenny; his color was off. She couldn’t tell whether Kenny really looked green, or if it was just the reflection of the sun mixing with the riot of primary colors of the carnival.

“You’re sick,” she concluded.

“I can’t be sick in front of Britney,” he said, his voice carrying a tenor of desperation around the edges.

Gracie looked at him with an expression of, well …

Joy?

“It’s kind of a sensitive time in our relationship,” Kenny whispered.

“Well, what do you want me to do about it?” Gracie asked. How was she supposed to help him out of this one? She couldn’t have his diarrhea for him, for God’s sake.

“Can we go to your house?” Kenny whined. “I don’t think I’m going to last much longer.”

Britney came over with her hot dog. She smiled and ate, smiled and ate.

Gracie smiled back. “So, listen, we’ve got to go—” She tugged again at Jaden’s arm.

And then she turned to Kenny. “Kenny, were you going to finally fix that thing for me?”

“Right, right,” Kenny said. “The, ah, thing in the sink …”

“It’s called a faucet,” Joan offered.

“I’d better go do that right away,” Kenny said. “
Right
away.”

K
ENNY CAME OUT
of the bathroom paler than Nicole Kidman in winter.

“Both openings?” Gracie asked, grinning. She couldn’t help herself.

Kenny held on to the doorway. He tilted his head in what appeared to be a nod.

“Wow,” said Joan, “impressive.”

“Do you think I could …”—Kenny was gulping air like a landed goldfish—“stay here tonight?”

Gracie looked at Joan. Joan looked back at Gracie. They shrugged.

“On the couch,” Joan said.

“Brit’s leaving for a twenty-city tour in a couple days,” Kenny explained. “I didn’t want to leave her with a bad impression.”

Gracie nodded, sympathetically.

And then she and Joan stumbled into the kitchen. Gracie laughed so hard she barked.

T
HE DIGITAL CLOCK
contended the time was 3:32
A.M.,
but the white-blue light outside declared it to be closer to six. Since Joan had arrived back home, Gracie had been sleeping in the small downstairs bedroom, sometimes called the maid’s room; it resembled a cave. She had been wide awake for twenty minutes, had rolled around for a good hour, hour and a half, before that. She finally rose and peered out the window facing Surfrider Beach. “Hello, you,” Gracie said. The full moon, high above the house, cast a lantern glow over the whole of the beach. “No wonder I can’t sleep,” she said.

Suddenly, so faint she couldn’t be sure of its veracity, she heard a muted tap-tap-tap at the window facing the entryway to the house. Gracie thought it was an animal sound at first-a squirrel, perhaps the oversize raccoons that came down from the lagoon for their nightly repast in Joan’s garbage cans. She raised the blinds.

On the other side of the tempered glass, Sam raised his hand.

Gracie jumped away from the window and fell backward, knocking over the side lamp. The light went on as the lamp rolled onto its side.

Gracie lay twisted on the floor, her heart pounding. She weighed her options as quickly as possible—tell him to leave at once or she’ll call the police, tell him not tonight, or ask him to come in and see if he’d like something to drink or make out with.

Gracie chose the third option. She stood back up and went to the window and pulled the blinds up again.

No one was there.

Gracie put her hand sideways over her forehead, eliminating the glare from the streetlamps, and pressed her nose to the window. She could see no one.

Gracie mentally kicked herself. How could she have overreacted so, well, overreactedly? She had no evidence that Sam had done anything wrong—all he had done to her was bring her flowers, massage her back, kiss her wildly, and save her life.

“I’m an idiot,” Gracie said out loud. It wasn’t the first time in her life, or even that week, that she’d had that thought.

And then she put her slippers on, tripped over the lamp once again, yanked the bedroom door open, and ran out.

S
AM HATED
the reaction he’d seen on Gracie’s face. He knew the origins of that expression too well—fear. She feared him. Not only did she not miss him like he’d missed her the last few days—she was afraid of him.

“Dumb, dumb, dumb, idiot,” Sam muttered to himself, as he kicked a rock with his sandaled foot. He knew what had set off the fear—he knew that she had found out the truth—probably from her friend, the redhead who stayed there with the old man.

He jumped the fence leading to Surfrider, the rusted barbed wire lining the top nothing but a minor nuisance as he skated over to the other side.

As he walked back to his “den,” as he liked to call it when Mrs. Kennicot asked him where he made his home, he swore to himself that he would never make the same mistake again. It was folly for a man like him to get emotionally involved with a woman—any woman. Sam reminded himself that even
Romeo and Juliet, the star-crossed lovers who had youth and idealism and healthy knees on their side, had wound up dead.

G
RACIE WASN’T
sure what she was doing as she moved her legs, but she knew she had that same feeling in her stomach as she did when she was a teenager and she would park in her boyfriend Gorgeous Georgie’s Mustang two blocks from her house to make out for what seemed like seconds but was really hours. The windows would be so thick with steam, droplets of water would form inside and roll from the top of the windshield down to the dashboard.

The tide was high. Of course the tide was high, Gracie thought—look at that frikkin’ big round moon! Gracie cursed her luck and her sudden venture into the Land of the Impulsive. She waited for the waves to subside before she scooted under the fence, the edges of her nightgown dragging up saltwater and sand.

S
AM HAD SPREAD
his blanket and rolled out his sleeping bag. He’d made a pillow of his clothes—the new Dockers were an especially prudent purchase—rolled up, they gave real support to his neck. He didn’t feel like reading anything, which he often did to calm his mind, to reach out to the purity of the words after a day of contending with the outside world. He was thankful he didn’t have access to a television set. He never, unlike the other guys, really wanted a Walkman, or whatever they were calling them now—iPods? He liked music, but he liked the sound of the ocean better. He’d grown up with the sound of waves lulling him to sleep; he would die, he hoped, hearing the same.

Sam got into his sleeping bag and lay back, his hands tucked
under his head, and stared up, past the barbed wire, to the sky. The moon, at its most full, its most bright, had denuded the stars. No matter, he thought. He was content. The moon had hypnotized him; he was as vulnerable as a deer caught in the headlights of a pickup truck.

The hair on his arms suddenly stood on end. He had the sensation of being watched.

Sam had never used the switchblade he had taken from the guy who had stolen his gear. He actually hadn’t even taken it from the guy—he’d found it on the very spot the man dropped it. The spot on which he’d snapped the man’s wrist in half. He figured no one else wanted a part of it; seeing how it hadn’t brought that particular guy much luck, no one else would touch it.

But it proved lucky enough for Sam. Sam didn’t plan on using it as a weapon—in fact, since he’d been in the war, he didn’t like the idea of weapons in general. But the knife had a sharp, thin blade—all he had in his pack were a couple old butter knives. This one could cut apples or rope—whatever he needed.