Recalculating (5 page)

But why stop at her? Tommy had never liked her body much, he’d made that clear a thousand times over. Maybe she was just a temporary home, one of those long-term apartments you rented while your house was being renovated or bug-bombed. Maybe Tommy had his eye on greener pastures.

“No!” she whispered as she pictured her five-year-old grandson. Ryden—a stupid name, Tommy had opined, and she’d secretly agreed—was a charming, sweet-natured boy who’d slip his grubby little paw into her hand whenever he had to cross a street, who
loved staying in her big bed for sleepovers, especially now that Grandpa Tom was gone. She pictured Tommy moving like a virus, infecting her first, and then infecting Ryden, changing him, turning him from a healthy and happy little boy into what Tommy had been when he’d lived and died. Turning him into a monster. “No!” she said again.

“Shut up,” said the GPS. “Shut up and do as I say.” And just like that, her hand was on the door handle, the door was swinging open, and she was walking, on legs that felt like wood, up to the gravestone with her husband’s name on it. She had spent thirty years doing his bidding, thirty years like a mouse caught on a glue trap, stuck, paralyzed, unable to escape, unable to do anything but hide her bruises and obey her master’s voice, even now that her master was … was …

“You’re dead,” she said. Her voice was a whisper, barely audible … but it was something. “You … you don’t get to tell me what to do anymore because you’re dead.”

Her husband answered her from the GPS. He quoted Monty Python. “I’m not dead, I’m just resting!” Then he laughed. Tommy had always thought Monty Python was funnier than she did. “You think you’re going to California?” the ghost in the machine taunted. “You think you’re going to Arcadia? Pedal your bike around Maine with those fat-ass sisters of yours? You aren’t going anywhere. It ends for you tonight.”

Maureen staggered up a small hill toward the grave, the picture clamped in her hand. With the part of her brain that was still her own, she was trying to remember how to kill a monster. Silver stakes and silver bullets … but were those for werewolves? Vampires? And what was Tommy now, precisely? How did you kill a GPS?

She fell twice on her way up, but eventually she made it to the grave, kneeling on the squelchy dirt, the picture still in her hand. She’d left the car door open, and she could hear the GPS clearly.

“Lie down.” She did. There was a razor blade glimmering on top of the tombstone—a little treat that John had left, she figured. “Pick it up,” said the GPS … but instead of moving up, Maureen’s hand moved down, not toward the razor but toward the piece of candy Sam had pressed on her, the lump of chocolate in her pocket.

“Pick up the razor!” the GPS said. Maureen made herself ignore it. She opened the wrapper and popped the sweet into her mouth. As the taste burst over her tongue—chocolate and caramel, so long denied—she made herself remember every good thing in the world: gossiping with her sister over lunch; watching Liza, eight years old, twirling on the skating rink, or Tommy Junior, dressed in a tuxedo for the prom. She chewed and swallowed, and the noise of her chewing and swallowing drowned out the voice of the GPS. She remembered crying when Liza had placed baby Ryden in her arms, his head in the crook of her elbow, and how good the house smelled when they’d gone apple picking and baked apple pies. She thought about Santa Fe and Carmel-by-the-Sea. “You don’t get to win,” she murmured into the dirt. “Not any more.”

Then, as he’d told her, she picked up the razor. “Right wrist first,” said the GPS. But instead Maureen walked back to the car, the razor glittering silver in her hand. It must have guessed what she meant to do, because the instant before she used the blade to sever the wires, the GPS started screaming all the hateful words he’d ever used to her,
fat bitch
and
dumb ugly cow, selfish
and
stupid
and
worthless.
She ignored them. With the taste of candy still sweet on her tongue and tears on her cheeks, Maureen sliced the wires,
then gouged ridges out of the screen. Still she could hear it, a telltale heart that refused to be still. “Maureen,” it rasped in a strange insectile buzz. “Maureen.”

Finally she heard something else, footsteps approaching through the underbrush, the drunken hoots of laughter.
Mischief night
, she remembered. The cemetery would be full of teenagers, daring each other to sleep in the mausoleums. It gave her an idea. She left the driver’s side door open, left the mangled GPS on the seat, and ran and hid behind a tree. The teenagers—kids, really, three boys and a girl—came stumbling up the path a minute later.

“Holy shit,” said one of the boys. “That’s a car.”

“Good one, Steve,” the girl sneered. Quick as a cat, the girl snatched Maureen’s purse off the car’s floor and began expertly rifling through it as one of the boys picked up the GPS and turned it over in his hands.

Be careful
, thought Maureen.
It pinches
. But she had the idea, quickly turning into a certainty, that the machine wouldn’t hurt them, that it couldn’t hurt anyone but her.

“Maureen!” it croaked.

The boy looked bored. “You hear that?” he asked.

“Prob’ly just a burglar alarm,” said another boy. “Like, it’s programmed to say a name.”

The first boy poked at the screen. “Well, anyway, it’s busted.”

“Yeah, but someone’ll want it,” said the girl.

The GPS made one last attempt, calling her name almost sweetly, as Tommy once had. “Come to bed, Maureen,” it said. “Shuddup,” said the boy. He pulled off his sweatshirt, wrapped it around the GPS, and shoved it in Maureen’s stolen purse, which
the girl had slung over her shoulder. Maureen watched it all, panting, shivering in the woods until she was sure they were gone.

* * *

“You want to hear something funny?” asked Sam. The Halloween decorations in the shop windows had been replaced with crepe-paper turkeys, and the weather, in the last week, had turned cold.

“What’s that?” said Maureen. She had Band-Aids on three of her fingers—collateral damage from when she’d used the razor. A small price to pay, she thought, for what she’d done. She was free now, maybe for the first time since she’d met Tommy. Free.

“That GPS you had. That Ouija.” Sam pronounced it
Wee-jer.
“I looked all over the Internet, but I couldn’t find it anywhere.”

“Oh, I bet it came from China,” said Maureen. “Tommy was always bringing home weird stuff like that.” She put her credit card back in her wallet. “He traveled, you know.”

“Oh, yeah?” Sam sounded mildly interested, but he was probably just being polite.

“Oh, yes,” said Maureen. “Farther than you’d think.” On the first of November, as twilight had ripened into darkness, she’d driven on to the Bucks County Community College, following the direction of the new GPS she’d bought online. Tommy’s friend John held office hours from four to six on Mondays. A few guttural words in his ear in ancient Aramaic, words she’d found by tracing the twisted paths and thorny byways of
her husband’s cached Internet history, which he had thoughtfully left uncleared, and John had dropped to the floor like he’d been kneecapped. A stroke or a heart attack, they’d probably call it. You could tell the man didn’t take care of himself. Just look at his teeth.

“Anyhow,” Maureen said to Sam, “I got rid of the Ouija.”

“You did?” Sam followed her out to her car with his arms full of her clothes, and once the clothes had been stowed away, she showed him her brand-new Garmin.

“That other one, the customer service wasn’t so great. But I got used to it, you know? Having someone … ”
tell me what to do
, she almost said, but she stopped. Once she might have been a woman who liked people telling her what to do, but those days were over.
Over forever,
she thought. “Having someone talk to me while I drive,” she said instead. “I’ve been thinking about taking some trips. Doing some traveling myself. You never know.”

Sam nodded, rubbing his hands on his pants. You never do. So that’d be your recommendation? If I was to get one for my wife?”

“Absolutely. I’ll bet she’ll love it,” said Maureen … and she smiled.

“Have a treat,” said Sam, offering her the orange pumpkin bucket filled with Halloween candy.

Maureen took two.

What if the one you love is the one who got away?

Rachel Blum and Andy Landis are just eight years old when they meet late one night in an ER waiting room. Born with a congenital heart defect, Rachel is a veteran of hospitals, and she's intrigued by the boy who shows up all alone with a broken arm. He tells her his name. She tells him a story. After Andy’s taken back to a doctor and Rachel’s sent back to her bed, they think they’ll never see each other again.

Rachel grows up wanting for nothing in a fancy Florida suburb, the popular and protected daughter of two doting parents. Andy grows up poor in Philadelphia with a single mom and a rare talent that will let him become one of the best runners of his generation.

Over the next three decades, their paths cross in magical and ordinary ways. They make grand plans and dream big dreams as they grow together and apart in starts and stops. Through it all, Andy and Rachel never stop thinking about that night in the hospital waiting room all of those years ago, a chance encounter that changed the course of both of their lives.

In this captivating, often witty tale about the bonds between women and men, love and fate, and the truth about happy endings, Jennifer Weiner delivers two of her most memorable characters and a love story you’ll never forget.

Read on for a sneak peek at Jennifer Weiner’s newest novel,
Who Do You Love

Available August 2015 from Atria Books

Prologue

Rachel

2014

“Rachel?”

I don’t answer. If you build it, they will come. If you ignore them, they will go away.

Knock knock knock, and then my name again. “Rachel, are you in there?”

I twist myself more deeply into the sheets. The sheets are fancy, linen, part of the wedding haul, and they’ve only gotten smoother with every trip through the washing machine. I pull the pillow over my head, noting that the case has acquired a not-so-fresh smell. This is possibly related to my not having showered or washed my face or hair for the last three days. I have left the bed only to use the toilet and scoop a handful of water from the bathroom sink into my mouth. On the table next to my bed there’s a sleeve of Thin Mint cookies that I retrieved from the freezer, and a bag of Milanos for when I finish the Thin Mints. I don’t want to cook. I don’t want to move. It’s spring, and sunny and mild, but I’ve pulled my windows shut, drawing the shades so I can’t see the mom brigade ostentatiously wheeling their oversized strollers down the street, and forty-year-old guys with expensive suede sneakers and beards as carefully tended as bonsais tweeting while they walk, or the tourists snapping pictures of the snout-to-tail restaurants where everything’s organic and locally sourced. The bedroom is dark; the doors are locked; my daughters are elsewhere. Lying on these soft sheets that smell of our commingled scent, hair and skin and the sex we had two weeks ago, it’s almost like not being alive at all.

Knock knock knock . . . and then—fuck me—the sound of a key. I shut my eyes, cringing, thinking that my mother or, worse yet, my Nana will come storming through the door, full of energy and advice and plans to get me out of bed.

Instead, someone comes and sits on the side of the bed, and touches my shoulder, which must be nothing but a lump underneath the duvet.

“Rachel,” says Brenda, the most troubled and troublesome of my clients. Oh, God. I’d given her youngest son, Dante, a key the year before, so he could water the plants and take in the mail over spring break, a job for which I’d promised to pay him the princely sum of ten bucks. He’d asked me shyly if I could take him to the comic book store to spend it, and we’d walked there together with his hand in mine.

“Sorry I missed you,” I mutter. My voice sounds like it’s coming from the bottom of a clogged drain. I clear my throat. It hurts. Everything hurts.

“Don’t worry,” says Brenda. She squeezes my shoulder and gets off the bed, and then I hear her, moving around the room. Up go the shades. She opens the window, and a breeze ruffles my hair and raises goose bumps on my bare arms. I work one eye open. She’s got a white plastic laundry basket in her arms, which she’s quickly filling with the discarded clothing on the floor. In the corner are a broom and a mop, and a bucket filled with cleaning supplies: Windex and Endust, Murphy’s Oil Soap, one of those foam Magic Erasers, which might be useful for the stain on the wall from when I threw the vase full of tulips and stem-scummed water.

I close my eyes, and open them again to the sharp-sweet smell of Pine-Sol. Brenda fills the bucket to the top with hot, soapy water. I watch like I’m paralyzed as she first sweeps and then dips her mop, squeezes it, and starts to clean my floors.

“Why?” I croak. “You don’t have to . . .”

“It isn’t for you, it’s for me,” says Brenda. Her head’s down, her brown hair is drawn back in a ponytail, and it turns out she does own a shirt that’s not low-cut, pants that aren’t skintight, and shoes that do not feature stripper heels or, God help me, a goldfish frozen in five inches of pointed Lucite.

Brenda mops. Brenda dusts. She works the foam eraser until my walls are as smooth and unmarked as they were the day we moved in. Through the open window come the sounds of my neighborhood. “The website said Power Vinyasa, but I barely broke a sweat,” I hear, and “Are you getting any signal?” and “Sebastian! Bad dog!”

I smell hot grease from the artisanal doughnut shop that just opened down the block. The scent of grass and mud puddles. A whiff of dog shit, possibly from bad Sebastian. I hear a baby wail, and a mother murmur, and a pack of noisy guys, probably on their way to, or from, the parkour/CrossFit gym. My neighborhood, I decide, is an embarrassment. I live on the Street of Clichés, the Avenue of the Expected. Worse, I’m a cliché myself: almost forty, the baby weight that I could never shed ringing my middle like a deflated inner tube, gray roots and wrinkles and breasts that only look good when they’re stringently underwired. They could put my picture on Wikipedia: Abandoned Wife, Brooklyn.