Julie and Romeo Get Lucky Page 9

  Why didn’t I think that this was the girl who was moving back? The successful real-estate broker with the good marriage and the Kelly bag? Why did I think that if Nora spent the night in this house, she’d be that seventeen-year-old hellion again, the kind of girl who’d skip town and leave her mother to raise triplets?

  I felt dizzy. I looked at my watch. A couple of hours, she said. Did that mean I had two hours left, or was she being loose with time? Could she have meant three or four? It didn’t matter. I went upstairs to lie down.

  Romeo was in bed with a set of headphones on, staring at the ceiling. When I came in the room he clicked off the tape player and smiled at me. “Al brought me The Confessions of Saint Augustine on tape. He’s been trying to get me to read it since we were in school. It’s actually quite good.”

  I lay facedown on my pillow. “Nora’s moving home.”

  “What?”

  I turned my face to him. “Nora. She has a problem with her cervix, and she has to stay on complete bed rest until the triplets are born. She has to stay on complete bed rest, right here in my living room.”

  Romeo mulled over this information. How could he be sure about which part was so upsetting to me? Triplets? The possibility of losing triplets? The part about the living room? How could he know, when I wasn’t completely sure myself?

  He opted for the safe response. He told me he was sorry this was happening.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Romeo reached down and took my hand. “One day,” he said, “we’re going to go away to an island, just the two of us. And when we leave we won’t tell anyone where we’re going, and when we’re there, we won’t speak about any of our relatives at all. We’ll still love them, but for a week or so we’ll manage to forget about them completely.”

  “Will we drink margaritas and dance in the surf and make love every day at sunset?”

  “Twice at sunset.”

  “Will this happen before or after the triplets are born?”

  “I don’t know for sure. It will depend on whether or not we’re completely bankrupt by the time I get out of bed.”

  Downstairs I heard the doorbell ring, but I didn’t care who it was. All I knew was that it was too soon to be Nora. I heard a brief flutter of voices, then feet on the stairs.

  Sandy tapped on the door. “Mom? There are some men here who say they have a bed for us. Do you know anything about a bed?”

  Nora, it seemed, had been planning on coming home all along.

  Sandy moved in with me six years ago, when Sarah was two and Tony was six. She had meant to stay a couple of months, just until her divorce was final and she could get back on her feet. But nothing in life turns out the way we think it’s going to, and instead of the three of them moving out, she married Big Tony and upped her number to four. I thought that because of the way her life had gone, she’d be sympathetic to the plight of her sister’s cervix. I was mistaken.

  “She can hire someone to take care of her in her own house. She doesn’t need to come over here.”

  Two men wearing matching baseball caps and sweatshirts that said HOME HEALTH EQUIPMENT wrestled a monstrously large metal bed frame covered in gears and levers and different hydraulic contraptions, through my front door. It looked menacing, depressing. It was the kind of bed that made the neighbors think that hospice could not be far behind.

  “Sandy, help me move a couple of chairs. We have to figure out where we’re going to put this thing.”

  She locked her arms in front of her chest as if to say they were closed for business. “No.” She sounded every bit like her eight-year-old daughter. I rolled my eyes at her, and she came over and picked up the other arm of the easy chair I was holding. The last thing we needed in this house was another back injury. “Nora will run us into the ground,” she said. “We’ll be spending all our time cutting up limes for her Pellegrino.”

  We lugged the stuffed chair backward toward the window. “Don’t you have any sympathy for her? After all, she has a real problem. It’s like she’s trying to hold in triplets with a piece of Scotch tape.” Far be it from me to make a case for Nora moving in.

  “Triplets!” Sandy cried. “Nobody said anything to me about triplets!” She dropped her side of the chair, and so I dropped mine in sympathy.

  “I’m sorry. That really is a shocker. I only just found that part out myself.”

  While Sandy wept in the easy chair, the two men came back with the mattress and used X-Acto knives to strip off the endless yards of extra heavy plastic wrap before hoisting it onto the frame. They were big men with thick, bulging arms, and still they leaned against the bed and panted for a minute when it was done. The bed was exactly in the center of the room. No concessions were made for trying to work it into the decor.

  The shorter of the two men held out a clipboard and a pen. “Sign,” he said.

  “Don’t feel too bad,” the big one told Sandy. “My brother’s wife had triplets, and they all turned out just fine. They’re just like any other kids, only there’re three of them.”

  Sandy didn’t look up or stop crying, and so I thanked him for the tip and handed back the clipboard. I asked them to take the plastic wrap with them, but they said they didn’t do that.

  I looked at Sandy and then at my watch. There wasn’t time for everything. I trudged up to get some sheets and pillows and blankets, and Sandy came along behind me, airing her complaints.

  “Why does she get everything?” she said.

  “Meaning what, exactly? That you wish you had triplets?”

  “No, of course not. It’s just the abundance of it all. She has to do everything bigger and better than everyone else. It wouldn’t be possible for Nora to just have one baby.”

  “Did everything go okay?” Romeo called out from his room.

  “Oh, it’s great,” I yelled back, looking to see if there was an extra mattress pad somewhere.

  “Sorry I couldn’t help,” he said.

  “Very funny.”

  “The thing is,” Sandy said, trying to sound a little bit more rational, “with all respect to you, it’s hard to live at home with your mother. It’s hard not to fall into those old roles that you had growing up.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said. The pink sheets were old, and all the flowers had faded off, but they were the softest. I noticed that Sandy had that hurt look on her face again. “All I mean is that the things that are hard for you are probably the same things that are hard for me.”

  “Julie?” Romeo said.

  “Yes, love?”

  “If you could bring a ginger ale up, I’d really appreciate it. No hurry at all, just the next time you’re coming.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “Okay,” Sandy said, “so it’s hard for you, too. I accept that. But we’ve come a long way. We respect each other. We have a good dynamic. I feel like with Nora here…”

  “You’re going to be twelve again and she’ll be sixteen and never letting you in her room.”

  Sandy cocked her head to the side. “Something like that.”

  I took the bedding down and the ginger ale up. I brought the lunch plates down and the read newspaper down and the bendy straws (which I had forgotten) up. Sandy followed me like a tail follows a dog, talking and talking about the family dynamics she had endured as a teenager and how she wasn’t interested in enduring them again in her thirties.

  “Don’t you need to go to work?” I said, as she helped me pull the top sheet tight over the hospital bed.

  “I do. I know I do.”

  But what did it matter? Five minutes later the doorbell rang, and there stood Alex holding Nora in his arms like a bride.

  “This is the new preferred mode of transportation,” Nora said.

  “I’m good for another ten pounds, tops,” Alex said. The way he bounced her up in his arms gave me a little shiver.

  “Put her down, Alex. I don’t want you hurting yourself.”

  “I’m not that much of a cow
yet,” Nora said.

  “You are, actually,” Alex said.

  “Hi, Nora,” Sandy said, trying to make an effort. “Hi, Alex.”

  Alex set his wife on the bed, and she stretched out flat with her arms above her head. On her back, it was clear to see what she had been hiding. There was a significant amount of baby under that baggy shirt, a lot more than what I thought of as nearly four months’ worth.

  “It seems a little weird to have this right in the middle of the room,” she said.

  “The guys who brought it over didn’t do placement, just delivery.”

  Alex left to go get the bags, while Nora gave a couple of bounces on the bed. “It’s pretty comfortable. Did you try it out?”

  “There wasn’t time,” Sandy said.

  Nora looked from me to Sandy and back to me. “So what do we do now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Read a book, watch television. Romeo has some books on tape.” I wondered if Nora would be interested in Saint Augustine.

  “I thought we could talk, spend some time together,” Nora said brightly. Alex came in and set two large suitcases down on the floor, then he left again. “What time do the kids come home?”

  “Not until three-thirty,” Sandy said. “And Nora, no more lottery tickets. Sarah was crushed that somebody else won the pot.”

  “There’s always another pot.”

  “But I’m telling you, really, no more.”

  “Look, I’m in bed. If Mom doesn’t sell lottery tickets in the house, I guess I’m not buying them.”

  “I should get to work,” Sandy said.

  “Do you have to go in today? It’s my first day of bed rest. Can’t we have some fun?”

  “In bed?” Sandy said.

  “Well, it would be awfully boring just to lie here.”

  She was not quite four months pregnant. No one carried to term with triplets, but still that could be three months, even four months, of awfully boring days.

  “I thought that’s what bed rest was all about,” Sandy said.

  Alex came back in the door carrying two more bags.

  “Where are you going to put all of this?” Sandy said.

  “There are still closets here, aren’t there? There’s the closet in my old room.”

  “Sarah lives in your old room,” Sandy said. There was an edge to her voice, but she caught it and held up her watch. “Look at this. Boy, am I late.”

  “You’re not late,” Nora said. “You know the boss.”

  “Late, late, late,” she said, and ran straight into Alex, who was coming back in with a collection of variously sized tote bags and computer cases. She apologized, waved, and was gone.

  Nora looked around the room, taking it all in again from the vantage point of her newly installed bed. “I’m awfully hungry.” She smiled at me very nicely. “Could you make me a cheese sandwich?”

  “I could,” I said, but for some reason the very thought of it made me nervous. I turned and started for the kitchen.

  “Mom?”

  I turned. I waited.

  “It is hormone-free cheese, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t know why it would be.”

  “I just assumed, with the children and all, that you’d be feeding them…” She stopped and looked at me again. “Why don’t you get me a pad of paper and a pen, and I’ll make out a shopping list. There are a lot of things I can’t eat anymore. In fact, you might just want to read What to Eat When You’re Expecting. That could be a lot quicker.”

  “But I probably won’t finish it before I go to the grocery.”

  Alex beamed, so proud of his wife for putting the needs of their little trio first. “I need to get back to the office,” he said, and he kissed her.

  I don’t know why I thought he was going to say, “Let me go to the grocery store for you.” It was wrong of me to hope, but I did.

  “I hate that he has all this pressure on him,” Nora said after he had gone.

  “He can handle it,” I said.

  She tore off the piece of paper and handed it to me. “Let me just have half a cheese sandwich for now. I’ll have a little bit of bad food to tide me over until you get back. And Mom?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Could you take that plastic out of here? I can smell it. It’s making me feel a little nauseated.”

  I sniffed, but I wasn’t pregnant and couldn’t smell plastic. I dragged the enormous, twisted pile of clear sheeting backward with me into the kitchen, where I kicked it down the back steps, making a mental note to do something about it later. Then I made my pregnant daughter a very bad cheese sandwich. I noticed a peculiar little trembling in my hand as I spread the mustard on the bread. I was her mother, and I knew she liked mustard. I folded it over and put it on a plate and took it out to her with a napkin.

  “The bed’s not plugged in,” she said, fiddling with the control box that stuck up from the side on its metal arm.

  “I’ll get to that,” I said. “I’ll need to get an extension cord.”

  She looked at the sandwich and then she looked at me. “Pellegrino?”

  And suddenly the trembling was stronger. My left hand started flopping like a fish against my hip, and I quickly stuck it in my pocket. “I’m out,” I said hoarsely. “Do you want a glass of water?”

  Nora narrowed her eyes at me, or at least I thought she narrowed her eyes: Maybe I was wrong. “Tap?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  “But you’ll put Pellegrino on the list, and some Evian, too. And limes. I’ll need some limes, but make sure they’re organic.”

  I nodded as I was backing away from her. She was asking a question about the remote for the TV, but I was already running up the stairs to tell Romeo I was leaving. I could feel my heart going a million miles a minute in my chest. I stumbled into the room, panting like a coyote in August.

  “Did you run up the stairs?” he said, looking concerned.

  I nodded too vigorously. “It’s good exercise. Nora’s here. I’m going to go and get her some things she needs at the store. Do you want anything at the store?” I tried to quell the caged-animal quality in my tone.

  He thought for a minute, then he nodded at the ceiling. “I’d like some of those little prethreaded floss picks. I don’t know what they’re called. I think they have them at CVS. Would you mind?”

  “Not a problem,” I said. All the air was going out of the room.

  “Hey, Julie,” Romeo said.

  I turned around and gave him a bright smile.

  “Slow down a little. You don’t need to kill yourself.”

  I hadn’t even thought about it until he mentioned it.

  My left hand was still shaking badly, so I drove with my right. I kept telling myself to stay calm, drive slowly, don’t make any mistakes, but everything in me wanted to smash down on the accelerator and jump over the curbs, plow through flower beds and trash cans. I was Popeye Doyle and this was The French Connection. I had to get out of there. It had only been twenty minutes, and no one had been unpleasant, and I had to get out of there.

  I could tell my luck was changing. I hit three green lights in a row, then turned down the alley that took me to the back entrance of Roseman’s. I got out of the car and slipped in the back door, praying that no one would see me. I could hear Sandy in the front of the store, talking to a customer, and I slipped right up to the huge metal door and opened it without a sound. I went into the cooler and sealed myself in.

  Oh, how I love you, cement floors of my youth! How I love you, white plastic buckets. How I love you, endless rolls of cheap roses from Argentina in every conceivable color and tiny pink carnations that really do smell better than anything and huge, dramatic mums and cheerful flat-faced Gerber daisies hanging in cardboard racks—I love you all, even the indestructible leather leaf fern, and the trembling mists of baby’s breath gathered in the corner. I love you, cold air and the sweet sme
ll of living things, and oh, oh, how I love you, cooler, in all your perfectly boxed silence and solitude. All I had needed was the chance to be alone in the place that I knew better than anyplace else in the world.

  All of the trembling went up from my hand and through my chest and into my throat, where it released itself in great, gulping sobs. I sat down on an overturned bucket and cried me a river, not even bothering to cover my face with my hands. I knew from experience that a person could make a lot of noise in a cooler and never be heard. I don’t know how long I would have gone on, if I hadn’t finally felt the light pressure on my knee, a small, warm hand pressing against my leg, then the quiet repetition of my name.

  “Julie? Julie?”

  I closed my mouth and opened my eyes. Through a blur of tears, I made out the outline of a beautiful girl. It was Audrey Hepburn kneeling right in front of me.

  “Hey, honey,” she said when I looked at her.

  “Hey, Plummy,” I said, and hiccupped. “Welcome home.”

  Chapter Nine

  PLUMMY HAD ON A PAIR OF BLUE JEANS WITH THE hem turned up to her knee and an ancient corduroy shirt that I wear sometimes when I’m working in the back. It had been Mort’s shirt, and he loved it, but after he ran off with Lila he never had the nerve to come by the shop and take it back. I thought of that shirt as my divorce settlement. Plummy’s hair was long and heavy and dark, and she had twisted it up and run the twist through with several of those green sticks we used to hold message cards in bouquets. So how did she manage to look like she had just stepped off the runway at Prada?

  “Can I get you anything?” she said kindly over my weeping. “A glass of water? A cup of coffee?”

  I shook my head, sending tears in every direction. “I’m sorry.”

  Plummy reached into her back pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, clean and pressed and embroidered with tiny purple lilacs at each corner. It was completely a gesture from the movies. I couldn’t bear the thought of blowing my nose on it.

  “Go ahead,” she said.