Friday Mornings at Nine (27 page)

“Hi,” she said. “May I come in for a moment?”

He nodded and held open the screen door for her. Once she was inside, though, he closed it, locked it and leaned against it as if he wouldn’t be able to stay upright without support.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

He broke into a cautious grin. “Not so much. Are you?”

“Hmm. I’ve been better. Um, Aaron—I have something of yours.” As she dug into her pocket for the watch, an apology for her part in the party debacle was fashioning itself on her tongue, but she wasn’t quite sure yet how to phrase it. First step was getting the watch out of her pocket, which was harder because her hands were inexplicably trembling. Finally, she was able to hold it out to him. “You…you’d, uh, given this to me on Saturday night. You were right about the Wieners’ clocks being off, by the way. Yours was the accurate one.”

His gaze flickered between her eyes and his watch. He reached for it and his fingers grazed hers.
Oh, God.

He inhaled, then exhaled in a rush. “Tamara, I’m so sorry. You were a good sport to put up with me Saturday night. I was really drunk, as I’m sure you gathered, and not behaving at all as I should have—” His speech faltered and she thought,
Wait. I was a good sport? What the fuck kind of comment is that?

“You kissed me,” she blurted instead.

“Yeah,” he said with a heavy nod. “I did. And I’m very, very sorry.” He shoved his watch into his sweatpants’ pocket, as if needing to keep the offending timepiece out of sight. “I can’t even express to you my degree of bad judgment. The only responsible thing I did that night was to walk, not drive, home. It was a helluva long way, but I was actually kinda sober by the time I got here. Sharky took care of me.”

She glanced around the room and listened for the distinctive sound of the dog’s yaps. “Where
is
Sharky?”

“He earned himself a couple of big bones, so he’s out in the backyard gnawing on one now.” Aaron studied her for a moment. “So, am I forgiven? Can we,” he paused, “put this behind us?”

Tamara smothered a laugh, but she couldn’t help wanting to throw her hands up in the air and to start giggling like a brainless teenager. What did a woman say to something like that?
No, you’re not forgiven because you made me want you. No, we can’t put this behind us because I need you to kiss me again, just so I’ll know my feelings weren’t a complete fluke of the night.
These were not ideal answers.

So, instead she shrugged and said, “Sure.”

“Great.” He shot a rueful look at her face and a pensive one at the door. “I don’t want this to come out the wrong way, but I think it probably will, so I might have to ask you to forgive me for something else in a minute.” He swallowed and wet his lips before speaking again. “Have you shared these talks we’ve had with your husband? I mean, does he know you and I get together sometimes? That we…chat? Would he, for instance, be surprised if he found out you were here, at my house, visiting me right now?”

“Oh, um, well—” She thought about it. Had she ever told Jon she’d visited Aaron at his home? Or that Aaron had dropped by their house a few times when Jon wasn’t there? Nope. She’d kept those moments to herself. Precious, jeweled memories that were for her alone. Not that she was going to tell Aaron that. Besides, she had a reasonable excuse, and she figured now was the time to use it. “Jon’s not home that much. Lots of out of town business trips and long hours at the firm downtown. Several days might go by between one of our long chats about gardening or something and the next time I have a chance to catch up with Jon about our week. So, the conversations we have”—she motioned between her and Aaron—“don’t usually come up with him.”

“Don’t
usually,
Tamara, or don’t
ever?
”

She didn’t like the sharpness of his mind at the moment or the gentle firmness with which he was talking to her. She tried to wave it off, but he waited for an answer and, eventually, she was forced to concede that Jon probably had never heard about one of their long conversations, aside from seeing them talking in the loft on Saturday night. “But I’ll tell him what a dork you are about growing broccoli, if it makes you feel better,” she said.

He granted her a strained smile. “You do that. And, until then, maybe you shouldn’t be here without…your husband knowing. That’s kind of a dangerous game.”

“I’m not playing a game, Aaron.”

He chuckled to himself and shook his head ever so slightly. “C’mon.” He led her to the door, his manner not insulting, exactly, just highly principled and annoyingly responsible. Just before she stepped outside, he squeezed her arm lightly and said, “Marriage is hard enough when there are just two people involved. Trust me on this one.”

She shot a look at him over her shoulder as she left, wondering what he meant. Had his ex-wife cheated on him? Had he cheated on her? They did get divorced, after all, for some purportedly good reason. Maybe there was more to their problems than the working-at-home thing. Or, maybe, he was talking about another marriage just now—a couple close to him, like his parents.

She didn’t have a chance to ask, not that it was any of her business anyway, because he’d already shut the door behind her. Couldn’t get rid of her fast enough, could he? Well, he’d certainly left her with a few things to think about, starting with the fact that she hadn’t managed to keep her heart rate under 150 for the past half hour and, except for taking back his watch and squeezing her arm just before she had left, he hadn’t touched her at all.

It was hard to stop thinking about his kiss.

An act, she reminded herself (repeatedly) on her chilly walk home, he had apologized for and was clearly embarrassed about. And—just to keep a sense of goddamn perspective—she also reminded herself (repeatedly) that Aaron was
not
Cupid’s gift to women. He wasn’t involved in a current relationship—must be a reason for that, eh? He had somehow screwed up his marriage—although, to be fair, she was sure Isabelle hadn’t been a little doll the whole time either. And he had all but rebuffed Tamara and their friendship until she came clean about their talks to Jon. What kind of a freakin’ fantasy man was he?

The cold November wind wafted through her like a ghost through a brick wall. The silliness of Halloween was over, the abundance of autumn gone for another year. Her garden lay fallow now, just a collection of brown twigs and stems in need of clearing. She didn’t look forward to the coming months. Nothing grew in winter in this part of the country. Nothing at all.

Wednesday, November 3

T
he trio that gathered at the Indigo Moon Café on Wednesday possessed an unseen sizzle of energy, which surrounded them much like an electric fence and was just as likely to cause a shock if a breach were attempted. But whether this protective measure had been established to keep their secrets contained or to keep others from entering into their sacred circle was, as yet, unclear.

The XM radio songs of the day featured seventies selections from the group Chicago, England Dan & John Ford Coley, a couple of distressingly tender tunes by Michael Johnson (“Bluer Than Blue” and “This Night Won’t Last Forever”—Jennifer rolled her eyes when those came on) and then, when they least expected it, a terribly upbeat number from singer Shaun Cassidy. But even Tamara was too frazzled to make any disparaging comments about “Da Doo Ron Ron” that morning.

“That was some event on Saturday,” Tamara began, taking a couple of hearty gulps from the triple-shot mocha espresso she ordered. After what she’d been dealing with lately, lattes were for children.

Bridget laughed. “Yeah, it was pretty wild.” She, however, was the only one of the three who could laugh with any measure of sincerity about the Hallowiener Party. Not that it hadn’t been a source of trauma for her on that night. Simply that it had not branded her marriage with the lingering negative effects her friends were experiencing. Indeed, in Bridget’s case, the opposite appeared to be true, although she wasn’t yet sure if she should trust Graham’s transformation, or if she should even discuss it with anyone.

Jennifer merely nodded. She’d consented to getting together earlier in the week, on Wednesday morning rather than Friday, because Tamara—who’d claimed to have questions about Jennifer’s work-from-home experiences—had requested it. But there was really no reason Jennifer could imagine that would entice her to jabber about the text messages from David or the marital freeze-out from Michael.

“Did either of you feel a little, I don’t know…ill after drinking those Appletinis?” Tamara asked. “I don’t think they agreed with me.”

Jennifer shrugged. “I didn’t try one.”

Bridget squinted into the distance. “Those pinkish drinks? I only had half of mine. But, really,
none
of the food at their home agreed with me.” And, while she didn’t state this aloud, she’d been proud of herself for tasting only tiny portions of the items available on the table at the Wieners’ house. It’d been quite a spread, but she’d shown surprising willpower. Even later, when she and Graham were discussing Dr. Luke and Witch Nina’s nasty comments, she hadn’t lapsed into her usual bad habit of emotional eating. She was really making progress! Maybe this time she’d trim those extra pounds off for good.

She consciously divided her low-fat blueberry muffin into four sections, determined to only eat two parts of it that morning.

Tamara blew out a slow stream of air, ostensibly so as to cool her already lukewarm coffee, but she somehow had to give vent to the frustration brewing within her. She remained unsure how to ask what she wanted to know, which basically came down to questions pertaining to her growing attraction toward Aaron. Was the man himself responsible for her increasing interest? Or were the drinks the culprit, and the fact that she had been grateful to him for easing the tedium of an otherwise lonely evening?

Bridget, whom she had thought too busy with the dissection of her muffin to be particularly perceptive, was the first to actually hint at the direction of Tamara’s thoughts.

“When I was getting grilled by the dance instructors, I saw you talking with some guy,” Bridget said. “It wasn’t long after Leah and Kip brought out those Appletini things. I remember he was dressed as a prince. Tall. Blondish. Pretty good-looking.” She looked up from her plate, butter knife gripped like a scalpel in her hand. “Who was he? A friend of Jon’s?”

For a split second, Tamara considered trying to feign lack of certainty as to whom Bridget might be referring. She hesitated a beat too long, though, because Bridget smiled and set down her knife, and Jennifer’s thin eyebrows rose to midforehead.

“That was Aaron,” she stated. “My neighbor.”

“
The
neighbor?” Bridget asked gleefully.

Tamara nodded.

“Why didn’t I get to meet him?” Jennifer asked, her tone amused.

“Right place, wrong time?” Tamara suggested, going for flippancy but not at all sure she achieved it, especially given her friends’ watchfulness of her. “I didn’t know he was going to be there.”

“Did you two spend a lot of time together?” Bridget asked. “I didn’t see you after that for the rest of the night.”

Tamara nodded again. “The Wieners have a library, nestled in a loft on the second floor. Aaron discovered it, and it had a nice view of the yard, so we stayed up there and chatted.”

“What an opportune location,” Jennifer commented.

Tamara shot her a sharp look. Had she guessed? “What do you mean?” she managed to ask.

“Just that it must’ve been convenient to see all the nonsense going on outside from a nice, safe distance. Why?” Jennifer said slyly. “Was there another reason?”

“Uh, no. Not really.” Tamara could finally feel the espresso zipping through her veins. About goddamn time. Of course, caffeine made her more fidgety than usual. “He kissed me up there,” she blurted before she could stop herself, and she had the satisfaction of seeing the jaws of both her friends drop and their eyes widen to tennis-ball-sized orbs. Well, she had to tell
somebody
. Might as well be them. “Although I was kind of drunk then.”

“Was
he
drunk?” Jennifer asked at the same time that Bridget said, “Was he any good?”

“Yes,” Tamara replied. “Very.”

“To which question?” Bridget asked, holding her breath.

“To both.”

Her friends exchanged a look.

Jennifer set down her calming chai on a brown paper napkin. “Did Jon find out about this? Did he see you, or did you tell him?”

Tamara shook her head. “This really doesn’t concern him.”

Jennifer, unable to stop ruminating about her own marital crisis or keep herself from playing a compare-and-contrast game between her situation and Tamara’s, still could not bring herself to agree with her friend on this one. “I think it does. But I’m not saying you have to take Jon’s opinion into consideration, or even that you have to confess what happened to him. Just that, from a logical standpoint, he’s involved. Whether or not he knows it.”

“Yeah, yeah. I suppose…” Tamara ran her long fingers through her hair, skimming over the tangles, but they were there nonetheless. “I don’t think telling him about it is a good idea, though. Do you?” She glanced between the two of them. “I mean, what good would it do anyway? It’d only make it harder for us to live with each other.”

“You still want to be with him?” Bridget asked, the emotionally stressful nature of this conversation—even though it didn’t involve her directly—making her nibble mindlessly on her muffin. She had already finished the second section she had cut up and moved on to the third without realizing it.

“Well, yeah,” Tamara said, downing the last of her espresso despite its tepidness. “We have to stay together. For Benji.” She stated this as a given, as if the other two women would accept it without question. And, to a degree, they did. What loving mother didn’t want to do everything she could for the sake of her child?

The problem, from Bridget’s perspective at least, was Jon himself. She’d never liked the guy. The few times she had been in a social situation with him, he acted so smug, so above his company, she always dreaded having to be in the same room with him. Her mom used to say that people who went out of their way to make others feel uncomfortable were just really insecure, so maybe that was it. But he irritated her, and she had never been able to figure out what Tamara saw in the man.

Jennifer was not nearly as mystified. She
got
Tamara and Jon as a couple, or at least she could see how they must have been drawn to each other once. They were both intelligent and outspoken, with a tendency toward sharp edges. If what Tamara had told her about their families was true, neither of them had had particularly strong marital role models growing up, and both desperately wanted to break that pattern. They shared the appreciation for a well-appointed house, a long-held allegiance to moderate liberal politics and an unyielding devotion to their son. These days, though, Jennifer couldn’t help but observe their mutual indifference toward each other.

“It’s important to consider the children,” Jennifer said, thinking of her own daughters and the potential trauma that would be inflicted upon them if she and Michael were ever to separate. The thought of Veronica’s face hardening in anger and Shelby’s falling in dejection made Jennifer shudder.

“Exactly,” Tamara said, although she was starting to believe she had already protested the matter too much. That she was just saying lines from a very old script. However, she couldn’t quite break free of her private fantasies of a capricious escape from the constrictions of her wedding vows. The problem, of course, was she no longer knew how to state her true beliefs about marriage because she had no idea anymore what, precisely, they were.

“You still didn’t tell us about the kiss,” Bridget said. “Other than that it was really good. How did it
happen?
”

Ah. Well, this was concrete. A step-by-step stage direction performed on the library loft’s theater in the round.
This
Tamara knew she could do.

She set the scene for them with eloquent detachment: He was drinking, she was drinking, Jon was elsewhere. It was a dark, secluded, intimate cove, away from the eccentricities of the maddening crowd. And, then, like the climactic moment of a soap opera, she described (to the best of her memory) the instant their lips met, attaching no real emotion to the act and none of the mental confusion. Purposely making light and superficial something her friends knew was, unequivocally, a rather big deal.

“And then what?” Bridget asked. “Did he say anything?”

Tamara snickered. “He ran away, and when I saw him on Monday, he apologized. That was it.”

Jennifer exhaled. This was making her think too much about David. She didn’t have to imagine what it was like to kiss him. She knew. She remembered. “No harm, no foul,” she murmured to Tamara, though she didn’t believe her own words. “If you’re not going to go forward with Aaron, then it’s probably better not to mention it to Jon.”

Although Bridget nodded in agreement, she couldn’t keep from wondering how Jon would be able to miss the signals of restless discontent his wife was sending. Even Graham, who wasn’t known for his intuitiveness, had sensed Bridget’s unhappiness at home and her greater enjoyment at work. Even Graham, once he realized how important Dr. Luke and Smiley Dental were to her, took steps to try to please her. Little steps, sure, but wholly unexpected ones. Like his surprise visit to the office yesterday. To meet Dr. Luke in person.

“Hey, there,” Graham had said, smiling first at both Bridget and her favorite dentist, and then reaching out to shake Dr. Luke’s hand while Bridget held her breath.

“Hello,” Dr. Luke had replied, returning the smile, grasping her husband’s hand and shaking firmly. One man on one side of the dental desk, the other man on the opposite side—with Bridget sitting uncomfortably between them.

Then Dr. Nina had walked by, paused in front of the desk and eyed them all curiously. Bridget resorted to fiddling with her paperwork, Dr. Luke immediately excused himself to go check on a patient, and Graham…well, he just stared the Witch down until she rounded the corner. Then he kissed Bridget goodbye and took off himself.

Even the next day, Bridget couldn’t quite get over the oddness of it. Of Graham’s silent assertion to her coworkers that she had a very present husband and, perhaps, that he supported her and watched over their interactions with her. It pleased her slightly more than it discomfited her but, more than any other reaction, she was surprised.

Might not Tamara’s husband, Jon, if he recognized things in his marriage were amiss, do something unpredictable, too?

Tamara concurred with her friends’ professed opinions and, not being privy to their unspoken ones—nor really wanting to know them—she pushed aside the baffling nature of Aaron’s kiss and moved on to her simmering questions about working from home.

“How do you juggle your day?” Tamara asked Jennifer. “Do you set aside the same hours every week for working on your projects or does it vary wildly depending on what else you have going on?”

Others had asked Jennifer about this a number of times, but she found it interesting that Tamara had never broached the subject before now. Tamara was a different creature from her. Unlike Jennifer, Tamara didn’t spend countless hours loitering in the past or projecting herself into the future. She had an altogether idiosyncratic and immediate relationship with time. If she asked about working from home, it wasn’t a hypothetical matter. The idea must have taken root in Tamara’s present and been of some urgency.

“People have multiple approaches,” Jennifer said carefully. “I’m able to be flexible within any given day, but I try to spend at least four or five hours on designs and updates every weekday. A few hours on the weekends, too, if I need to finish something.” Or, she added to herself, if Michael wasn’t talking to her and she needed a place to escape. “Tomorrow morning I’m meeting with a new client for an hour—Thrifty Gifty, you know?”

The other two nodded. The bargain gift boutique had opened in town just a month ago. To Bridget and Tamara it seemed a cute place, but they’d been too preoccupied with other affairs to shop there yet.

“They have a very basic Web site up already but, now that they’ve settled in and feel established in the community, they’re looking to do more with it. They need a redesign to accommodate additional Web pages, to feature better ads, to optimize the Internet search engines.” Jennifer smiled slightly as she spoke about this, enjoying the undivided attention of her friends. It was simple stuff to her, but very strange to recognize how they considered her an expert in something. Stranger still was the fact that she was finally taking her skills more seriously. She needed to do that. If nothing else, being back in contact with David succeeded in reminding her that she’d fantasized about being an innovator once, and she wanted, even in her more limited suburban-mom way, to do more complicated work than she’d done in years.