So Close (4 page)

              “Thanks, Mandy.  I’m just making a run to the bank to get change before the lunch crowd.”  She had her diner uniform on. 

              “Okay,” I accepted her answer, which explained nothing whatsoever about what was going on.  “Did he dump you?  The ‘someone’ you’re seeing?”

              She shook her head.  Then she pointed to the dashboard.  Where a pregnancy test seemed to be cooking, it’s cross turning a deep pink. 

              “Fuuuck,” I said in a low long breath.  “What’re you gonna do?”  I asked stupidly, even though I’d passed three billboards telling me Jesus watches the unborn in the last mile.  There was nothing to do. 

              “It’ll be okay” she said.

              “God, Mom, how?”

“I don’t know.”

I had figured I was in for ten more years to get Billy to voting age and the hell out of here, but now I felt like I’d just found out my parole had been revoked. 

“How are you managing Billy when I’m not here?” I asked even though I didn’t want the answer.

              “Well you are here.”  Ever Delilah, even knocked up in a parking lot, she pulled her visor mirror down, palmed her face off and unzipped her makeup bag.  I thought of Lindsay Davis and her Hello Kitty pencil case—two very different woman armoring themselves with a little paint.  “And, despite what Little Man might’ve told you we manage just fine—if I’m working the late shift I pack his lunch and leave out his clothes the night before.  He has never missed a single day of school.”  What I didn’t snap back was the diner closed at nine—it was the bars that were open late and a coordinated outfit was the least of what he needed.  It was her one consistent thing, that the three of us looked pulled together when that metal door slammed shut on the mess behind us, no matter the amount of spit-shinning required. No matter that there was nothing to eat for breakfast before we left. “Any luck with the search?” she asked. 

              “No.  And that douche who got me fired—well, technically—friend of douche—just called me.”

              “What did he want?”               

“To ‘make it up to me.’”  I snorted.

              “Well, why don’t you go see what that means?”  She reapplied her foundation, scowling at the wrinkles she had smoked and sunned into existence.  When I was fourteen I asked Grammy how come she didn’t have brown spots or deep crevices around her mouth like her friends and she said, “Don’t smoke, wear a hat.”  I quit that day and put my sitting money toward a bottle of Banana Boat. 

              “Are you serious?”

              She turned to me, hands on the steering wheel like we were going somewhere.  “Mandy, a rich kid offered to do something for you—anything—is better than what we got going on right now—which is nothing.  Life will hand you very few turns on the Ferris Wheel—this might be one of yours.”

We had a few more knock-downs about my calling him, but what I remember is her saying that bit about the Ferris Wheel so that must’ve been the thing that decided it.  Pax invited me to his family’s house four hours away.  On the ocean.  Where I was supposed to just give my name ‘at the booth’.  I’d never been to a house guarded by more than a pit bull before.  I was sure when the uniformed guy asked for my ID I wouldn’t be on the list, but Pax had remembered and I took that as a sign that maybe I wasn’t about to have a bucket of blood dropped on my head. 

              I’d read all of Steven King—I was like that—I’d find something in the stacks and just binge on it, all in a row—but
Carrie
was my favorite.  Only child of a single mother, obviously.  I think it comforted me because with all Delilah’s faults at least she was not
that
.  She wanted me to date.  And she never asked anything so dumb as, “Why don’t you bring ‘em round the trailer?”  She’d just have me swing them by her job where she’d give us a free soda, or whatever, depending on where she was working at the time—and send us on our way.  She talked to the guys I’d bring by like people—didn’t flirt with them or overprotect.  It was kind of her finest hour.  She couldn’t make a parent/teacher conference to save her life, but the boyfriend thing she’d always been good at.  And she didn’t really have anything to worry about—even if she’d been capable.  After watching her, guys were something I held out like a diaper you were running to the pail. 

              Pax’s house was on South Ocean Boulevard, which, I would later learn, is a coveted stretch of coast just down the way from the Lauder family and Donald Trump.  The front gate, high and curlicued, looked like something off the cover of a romance novel.  At my approach it swung open, letting me onto a long drive, at the end of which was the white stuccoed Westerbrook mansion, crawling with help, like a wedding cake left out at a picnic.  I pulled up beside a truck being unloaded of tables and chairs.  On the lawn that rolled down to the surf a parquet dance floor was being assembled.  Taking a breath I hopped out in my cut-offs and flip-flops, which I’d chosen after rejecting every sundress Delilah threw at me, because if I’d shown up there looking like I was trying to impress him and then he was as big a dick as I was expecting the humiliation might’ve finished me off. 

              The entrance had a staircase you could leave a glass slipper on.  The double doors opened and out came a girl about my age wearing a green shift the shade of mint chip ice cream and carrying a clipboard.  With her pointy nose and chin she was very pretty in a tight, controlled sort of way.  “Can I help you?” she asked as she clip-clopped gracefully down in her low-heeled sling backs.  “Which team are you on and then I can tell you where to park.”             

              “Team?”

              “Catering, set-up, bar?”   She flipped her pages.

              “Oh, sorry, I’m here to see Pax, actually.”

              She dropped the clipboard, blushing.  “Apologies.”

              “Hey, honest mistake.  You have a ton of people here.”

              “I think he’s sailing with James.  Is he expecting you?”

              “He said three.  Who’s James?”  We rounded the corner of the truck and she saw the duct tape holding my Honda together.  She tensed back up. 

              “Did he stiff you?”

              “Sorry?” I asked.

              “He does that all the time—running out on bar tabs—or forgetting his credit card—I don’t think he has any malicious intent—I think he’s just wasted.  I can write you a check.” 

I was not there for a handout.  I shouldn’t have been there at all.  “This was a mistake—please tell him Amanda—or actually, don’t.”  I opened my door, silently asking it not to fall off its hinge.

              “Don’t what?”  We turned to see him striding from the back of the house in white shorts, his tan torso bare.  “Hey, you came.”  He smiled at me.  “And you’ve met Pym.”

              “Not formally.”

              “This my step sister, Pym.  Pym, this is Amanda, the girl I was telling you about.”  She and I smiled tightly at each other.  “Why are you dressed like that?”

              “I’m in charge today,” she answered him smugly, “I had to look—commanding.”

              “Where’s Cricket?”

              “You know your mother—she likes to waft in at the last second expecting everything to be running smoothly while she’s been applying her Shalimar and adjusting her Givenchy, but God forbid the table cloths are the wrong length—I’ll be hearing about it until Christmas.”

              “Big event?” I asked.

              “Political fundraiser,” he answered.  “Why are you carrying a clipboard?”

              “Because the fucking wifi is out,” Pym said evenly, “so I’m having to do this all on paper and if you ask me one more question I will shove it up your ass.”  I decided Pym might have some likeable qualities.  “Now I have to go make sure the hors d’oevres are being prepared without garlic—the Senator’s emtire family is allergic.”  She tried to stride purposefully off, but her tiny heels sunk into the grass with each step—she’d have been more ‘commanding’ in flip-flops.  

“So, I’m glad you came.”  He rocked from his heels to his toes and back again while I crossed my arms, to guard against whatever effect he wanted meeting him here to have.  “I, uh, talked to my mother, who talked to the head housekeeper, who thinks we’re about to have an opening.”

              “An opening?” I asked.

              “It’s a good gig because they’re only here less than half the year and with such a large staff you don’t have to clean much.  And if the head housekeeper likes you in a few years you could maybe move up to the Connecticut place—or even Aspen if that’s your thing.”

              “My thing?”

              “Yeah.”  He slid his hands into the back of his shorts, which made all his muscles flex.  “Oh, and you have to submit to a background check, but that’s just standard.”

              Once again I was stunned.  And in total disbelief that I’d spent four hours of gas money for this.  “You’re offering me a job
cleaning up after you
?! 
That’s
how you’re going to make it up to me?”  I spun for my car. 

              “W-well, I just thought, hostess, and, and you brought the cart, and—”

              “Oh my God.”  I threw the door open and flung myself in.  It was by far the best—and only—offer I had going, but there was no way.  Fucking Delilah’s pride.  It made its presence in me known at the most inopportune moments.

              He put his hand on the door.  “I was just trying to help.”

              I looked up at him, struggling to close my gaping jaw and say something.  “
Help
would’ve been stepping in, putting your asshole, yes,
asshole
of a friend in check.  Barring that, help would’ve been maybe
asking
what I wanted to do next.”

              “Well, what do you want to do?”

              “I don’t know yet.”  I was brought up short.  “Look, maybe all I’m qualified to be is a maid—and I will do it with my head held high.  But I would like to have been asked if maybe I was dreaming just a little bit bigger than that.  You look like the kind of people who could put in a word for someone.”

              “Oh, God, we are—we can.  I’m sorry, please stay.”  He seemed genuinely mortified.  “This was a mistake—let me make
this
up to you.”  He waited for my answer, looking like he might jump on the hood of my car to stop me from leaving. 

              “By pimping me—where do we go down from here?”

              He laughed.  Then I laughed.  He placed his palms flat on the car roof, arms outstretched.  He smelled like the ocean.  “Hey, that guy’ll be here.”

              “What guy?”

              “That guy you were Googling at the hotel—Tom Davis—tonight he’s introducing Senator Watkins—we’re hosting a fundraiser for his reelection campaign.  You should stay.”

              “After my background check?”

              “I’m serious.  Stay.”

              “Thanks, but I’m not doing another eight-hour round-trip to get my prom dress.”

              “That’s it.”  He snapped his fingers.  “
That
is how I will make it up to you.  I will take you shopping and introduce you to Tom Davis.”

              “Oh, yeah, that is just like a job.”

              “Great.  Let me grab a shirt.”

              I sat in the drive and waited for him, daring myself to peel out.  But all I could hear was the fairground’s barker beckoning me to get on.

Pax’s sports car was so low to the ground it was hard not to flinch every time an SUV passed—it felt like it would ride right over us.  I looked at him—he was—well, the phrase that came to me was something I’d seen in
Grease
.  He was the living end.  The tan, the car, the sunglasses, the way the wind tussled his hair—he was in those minutes beautiful like a dolphin is beautiful, like certain things in nature attain momentary perfection.  He was perfection.  And I was in the passenger seat of it.

“Mama always told me never to ride with strangers.”

              He shifted gears.  “Well, technically, we’ve seen each other naked so I think that makes us something other than strangers—and I was witness to a life-altering event.”

              “Kind of like you helped me give birth in an elevator.”

              “Kind of.”

              “Only you were the one pressing the emergency stop-button.” 

              He smiled as he turned onto Worth Avenue.  “You hungry?”

              “Always.”  He swerved to a stop in front of a little café and came back a few minutes later with two milkshakes.  “I don’t like to go into these places empty-handed.  It makes them so much more nervous if you’re carrying food.”

              “Where, exactly, are we going?” I asked as he pulled back out and then up to one of the stores down the block. 

              “Wherever Cricket’s charge accounts take us.”

              “Cricket?”  I asked, getting out as he tossed the valet his keys.

              “My Mom.  But I call her Cricket.”

              “That’s funny,” I said, taking a sip, letting him hold the door for me, like this was a date. 

              “What?”

              “I call my Mom by her name, too.”  It was strange to think we had anything whatsoever in common.  “Delilah.” 

              “Does she live up to her name?” he asked of its biblical origins as the air conditioning and scented candles made me shiver, something unsettling about such a sweet fragrance in a simulated winter. 

              “No, sadly, more often the guys are
her
undoing.”  The carpet was Kelly green, the walls a vintage floral.  It felt like a glimpse of the world Grammy had aspired to and Delilah reactively spurned.  “This feels fancy,” I said.  “I don’t need anything this fancy.”

              “Look, if
only
my friend had gotten you fired we’d be at Chicco’s right now.  But this is a double make-it-up-to you.”  He was funny, I admitted to myself as I touched the fabric of the cocktail dresses, trying to imagine wearing anything that cost three month’s pay.  An overly made-up woman eyed us as Pax gesticulated with his shake.