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She ran water into the sink.
“They will,” I said again.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You said good luck.”
She shrugged.
“You don’t think Mike’s going to want to move here after all?”
“I don’t know what Mike’s going to want to do, Beau.” She squirted Palmolive into a pan.
“He’ll want to be with me,” I assured her with confidence.
But what if he didn’t?
What if, for the first time in my charmed life, things didn’t go my way?
In the ladies’ room, I slipped out of my blah black leggings and tunic and into my red dress. Being blessed with a good complexion and nice features, I rarely wore much makeup. But this was a special occasion.
I stood in front of the mirror and outlined my green eyes in dark liner, coated my lashes with black mascara and painted my lips the same color as my dress. When I was finished, I sprayed Obsession in the hollows behind each ear and each knee, and Aqua Net all over my head. I teased my bangs a little higher, sprayed again, and surveyed my reflection.
Perfect.
Okay, not perfect, perfect. I mean, I still looked like Elvis’s Priscilla, but by then Elvis was long gone and his ex-wife had faded from the spotlight. And I wasn’t really a dead ringer for bombshell model Cindy Crawford, despite frequent assurances that I was, from Ramon, one of the show’s security guards.
For one thing, I was almost a head shorter than Cindy. I knew that because Gordy and I spotted her in the Scrap Bar one night when she wasn’t famous enough to be recognized by anyone other than my celeb-crazed friend.
Nor did I have Cindy’s mole, nor Cindy’s voluptuous build.
My figure back then was straight and flat as the Long Island Expressway out East: no boobs, but no pesky hip, gut or thigh padding, either. Sometimes, I fantasized about cleavage, blissfully unaware that it would one day be in store for me—or that it would be bestowed only with cracked, sore, milk-spurting nipples and a baby attached to them 24/7.
Satisfied with my reflection, I snuck out of the studio and into the subway station. Too broke to pay cab fare all the way from Manhattan, I took the jam-packed, un-air-conditioned number seven train out to Queensborough Plaza, descended the elevated platform down to Queens Boulevard, and spent almost fifteen minutes trying to hail a taxi.
By the time I sank into a disconcertingly sticky back seat, my hair had wilted. Luckily, I’d tucked the can of Aqua Net into my oversize black bag, and I’d have plenty of time at the airport to repouf.
Fifteen minutes—and almost fifteen dollars—later, I did just that in a ladies’ room down by the gate.
Unfortunately, the lyrics to “American Pie” were still running through my head. I hoped it wasn’t an omen.
According to the monitors, Mike’s plane was on schedule, but I still had a couple of hours to kill.
Sometimes, even now, I look back and wonder what might have happened that night if I hadn’t forgotten my Danielle Steel novel back at the office.
Would I have plopped down in a chair and plodded my way through a few more chapters of Daddy until Mike’s plane landed?
Probably.
Would I have avoided the chance meeting that turned my life upside down and made me question every choice I’d made since?
I don’t know.
I mean, did I believe in fate?
Did I believe that my life was preordained?
Did I believe that what happened would have happened even if I hadn’t settled on the only vacant stool in an airport bar?
I ordered a gin and tonic, and drank it too fast, still uneasy about Mike’s flight.
Yes. I would look back on that day in years to come and see it as a turning point. Nothing would ever be the same again.
I would wonder time and again what would have happened if the television hadn’t been on above the bar.
Or if it had been a different night, any other night of the year.
Or if he hadn’t been sitting next to me.
five
The present
E-mail is an amazing new invention, don’t you think?
Okay, maybe you don’t think of it as a new invention. Maybe you’ve been online for years, along with the rest of the world beyond my cozy little domestic one.
Me, I’ve been online for three months, ever since my in-laws bought a computer for our family room. Technically, it was a birthday present for Josh, our middle son, and they gave him a shitload of Blue’s Clues and Disney software to go with it.
But Mike and I suspect the real reason they gave us the home PC is so that we can stay in constant touch with them now that they’ve moved to Florida year-round. Until recently, they’ve only spent winters at their retirement condo in St. Petersburg, and even then, they dropped hints that we need to call/write/visit more often.
Okay, not hints. They’ve been known to come right out and say, “You need to call—or write, or visit—more often.”
But Mike only gets two weeks of vacation from his job, and we always spend one in Vermont over Christmas with my family at a rented ski chalet. He doesn’t want to spend the other with his parents in Clearwater Beach. Naturally, my in-laws must assume that I, the daughter-in-law and only non-blood relative in the family, am the holdout.
In truth, I’d be thrilled to spend Mike’s second week off in Florida—or anywhere other than here, working on the house. But Mike doesn’t believe in hiring somebody to do something he can do himself—or misguidedly believes he can do himself.
Two Augusts ago, we dry-walled the basement; last August, we painted all the trim. I say we because although my job was technically to keep the kids out from underfoot and provide takeout pizza and ice water, I eventually wound up on my knees and on ladders right alongside my hapless home-improving husband.
This August, Mike wants to stick a half bath under the stairs. That’s how he says it—“stick a half bath under the stairs”—as though it’s as simple as sticking a magnet over Mikey’s latest crayoned depiction of a dinosaur on the fridge. Yeah. Right. Plumbing is not his forte. Is it anyone’s forte, other than a real live plumber’s?
But Mike doesn’t want to hire one of those. No, he wants to stick a half bath under the stairs all by himself.
Me, I want to stick my feet in saltwater.
Not necessarily the Gulf of Mexico, because according to my in-laws, it’s warmer than a bathtub in August. That, to them, is a positive thing.
That, to me, is not the least bit positive. I’m not sure why. Maybe because if August is so freaking hot in the New York suburbs, I sure as hell don’t want to go someplace where it’s even hotter. Or maybe because warm water makes me think of pee. For that matter, so does the word bathtub. That’s probably because I have a four-year-old who thinks of our tub as a walk-in urinal.
Anyway, re: the saltwater thing…I was thinking more along the lines of the refreshingly chilly North Atlantic.
You know, the beauty of being online is access to vacation information. I’ve been researching Cape Cod “family vacation packages.” For the unenlightened, “family vacation packages” come with accommodations that include bed rails and cribs, kiddie pools, well-supervised day camps and evening baby-sitters so that Mommy and Daddy can eat overpriced shellfish and drink watered-down frozen margaritas.
Yeah, yeah, I know. But trust me, it beats Kraft mac-and-cheese and Capri Sun fruit punch in a pouch.
Which is what I—and my two older boys—had for lunch this afternoon. Now, with the July midday sun too hot to venture outdoors, I’ve opted to keep the kids in the comfort of central air, at least for now. Mikey is building a Lego city in his room with Laura Carson’s daughter, Chelsea, and Josh is captivated by Dora the Explorer on television in the master bedroom and Tyler is dozing in his swing in the living room.
Here I am down in the family room at the computer, checking e-mail for the third time today. Why didn’t anybody warn me that it was so addictive? Every day, I wake up wondering who I’m going to hear from next.
Since I became Beauandco@websync.net, I’ve been in touch with my old friend Gaile, my favorite middle-school teacher and my campus alumni association. I’ve also heard from my in-laws on a daily basis, have deleted countless offers to enlarge my penis, and have been temporarily convinced that if I forward an e-mail to everyone on my list, Bill Gates will send me a dollar.
Since then, I’ve become more savvy about Internet hoaxes and spam, not to mention my mother-in-law. For example, I’ve learned not to respond to her e-mails during hours when she might actually be sitting at the computer, because then she’ll know I’m home and she might decide to call me and I’ll have to answer the phone and I’ll have to talk to her for an hour. More, if she puts my father-in-law on.
Now I know that the best time to respond to her e-mails is at four o’clock, when she and my father-in-law are likely to be at an early-bird special, or after nine o’clock, when they’re sound asleep.
Today, I sign on for the third time, and once again, I’ve got mail. Woohoo!
Okay, maybe not woohoo. I skim past two e-mails from MIL, several spams and a couple of lame jokes from my cousin in Ohio, who forwards everything that crosses her electronic path.
Then it happens.
A legitimate woohoo moment.
There, amid the junk mail, is a screen name that suddenly has my heart beating faster.
Okay, it’s probably spam, I tell myself as I grip the mouse and maneuver the arrow toward HappyNappy64@websync.net.
I mean, it has to be a coincidence. More than likely, a pornographic one. I’ll probably click on the screen name and be treated to a nude twelve-year-old girl reclining on leopard-skin sheets.
I stare at the screen.
HappyNappy64.
It can’t be him. It can’t be, yet I hear his voice echoing in my head from fifteen years and a lifetime ago.
You know what I feel like, Beau?
No, what do you feel like, Mike?
A happy nappy.
Then he’d pull me to the bedroom and we’d make love in broad daylight, then fall asleep in each other’s arms.
Happy Nappy.
That was what he called it, and it always made me laugh.
Somehow, despite all the details that have drifted back to me—especially lately—about the time we had together, I forgot all about Happy Nappy.
Now it comes back to me in a rush, all of it—not just the sound of his voice in my head, but the smell of his skin when I cradled my head on his naked chest, and the sunlight filtering through the crack in the blinds, and the way his mouth tasted when he kissed me after eating chocolate ice cream; his lips and his tongue sweet and cold and luscious.
Happy Nappy.
I forgot all about that, but not all about him.
I could never forget him if I tried.
And I had. Tried, that is. For a long time, I tried to forget him. I thought it would be better. Easier.
Then I realized nothing would ever be easy, and I stopped trying.
Lately, what I’ve been trying to do—maybe subconsciously, I realize now—is remember him. Remember Mike. Remember what we had.
Remember why the hell I was so willing to leave it behind, to leave him.
But for all the things I remember, I can’t remember that and I didn’t remember Happy Nappy.
Now, my heart beating in my throat as I stare at the screen name, I highlight HappyNappy64 and click on it.
Please, I beg silently as the battery-operated swing clicks back and forth behind my desk and animated televised Dora chatters in Spanish from the next room and Mikey and Chelsea argue upstairs over how many Legos are necessary for a properly tall Empire State Building…
Please don’t be porn.
Please don’t be porn.
Please be him.
Be Mike.
The Other Mike.
The Mike I didn’t marry.
The Mike I can’t forget.
Please, HappyNappy64, please turn out to be him.
And it does.
six
The past
“Can I get you another one?” the bartender asked, gesturing at my glass that now contained only melting ice cubes and a sliver of lime.
I contemplated the question. The first drink had gone down pretty easily, and I still had more than an hour to kill in the airport bar before Mike’s plane was due to land. But I didn’t want to be wasted when he got here, and the drinks weren’t exactly a bargain.
“Go for it,” a voice urged, and I glanced up to see that it had come from the guy on the next bar stool.
