The Accidental Book Club (23 page)

T
hey’d all gone for pie after Janet’s confrontation with Rodney. They had stormed Gingham Kitchen, known for its buttery crust, and had each ordered a different kind of pie—strawberry, rhubarb, lemon, blackberry, banana, French silk, mincemeat. When the waitress came, they pushed all the plates to the middle of the table and each took forkfuls from every one until the plates were scraped clean and Bailey had licked her finger to pick up the crust crumbs.

They were giddy. Silly. Best friends.

Janet worried aloud that she would get fired, and Mitzi reminded her that having to get a job with a better manager might not be a bad thing, anyway.

“Besides, you finally stood up for yourself. Doesn’t that count for anything?” Mitzi had added, and Janet had smiled, flushed with happiness. She had a crooked front tooth—in two years of club meetings, Jean had never seen that before now.

“Yeah,” she said. “Actually, it counts for a lot.”

“Okay, okay,” May had finally said when Loretta mentioned needing to get home. “But we need to decide on our next book.”

“Flavian is in training for a marathon right now,” Loretta suggested, and someone threw a wadded-up napkin at her.

“A looove marathon,” Bailey said in a low, sultry voice, and giggled.

“There’s a Jeremiah Manning biography out,” Dorothy said. “I just started it. It’s really good.”

“Jeremiah Manning,” Jean repeated. “Where have I heard that name before?”

“He’s that congressman, you know, the one with the hair?” May said, pantomiming big fluffy hair.

“He’s the one who cheated on his wife with a whole bevy of frat boys,” Mitzi added. “A real bonehead. Why in the heck are you reading that drivel, Dot?”

Dorothy shrugged. “Because he’s an idiot. It’s like a train wreck. Gotta watch it.”

“How are his abs?” Loretta asked.

“Ew. No,” Dorothy said.

“We could read it and then get him to come to our meeting,” Bailey suggested, and this time she was hit by several wadded-up napkins. “You’re right,” she said, giggling pointedly at Jean. “We don’t have enough pot for visitors.”

Bailey was like a new person, Jean noted. She still had her moments. She screamed at her father on the phone pretty much every time he called. She wrote dark and depressing poetry on her bedroom walls with a Sharpie marker. She slept too late and ate too much and never cleaned anything.

But she was trying. And given the girl that she had been at the beginning of the summer, trying was the best Jean could hope for.

They came home after the pie and went to their separate corners as they so often did. Bailey disappeared into her room, and Jean into hers. Out of habit, Jean kicked off her shoes and went straight to Wayne’s top drawer. She pulled it open and fished out an item—this time, a love letter from when they were in college. The paper it was written on was yellowed and fragile, the ink of his pen softened with age.

She carried the letter over to her bed and leaned back against her pillows, unfolding the paper and holding it to her chest. She didn’t have to read it to know what it said. She’d memorized it months ago:

My Lovely Jeanie,

Last night when I proposed, I honestly wasn’t sure how it would go. We’d never even talked about marriage. I had no idea how you felt about it! Maybe you were one of those women who only worried about doing it all for herself, and didn’t want to get married. Maybe you wanted to get married, but not to me. Maybe you wanted to get married, but not now. I was taking a huge risk! Putting my heart out there, leaving it for you to step on and squash.

I knew this, but in the end I decided it was worth it to find out if, by chance, you were one of those girls who did want to get married, and maybe even married to me, right now.

I am over the moon that you said yes. Say it again—yes and yes and yes. Say it on our wedding day. Say it in our home. Say it in every way you can, and say it until death do us part. And even then, say it again. That’s all I ask.

I love you.

Your future husband,
Wayne

Jean circled her hands around the note and pressed it to her chest. “Yes and yes and yes,” she whispered, just as she always did when she revisited this particular letter. “Yes, yes, yes.”

She checked the clock and waited for the tears to come, for Crying Time to begin.

But they didn’t. It didn’t.

She had said yes and yes and yes. She had said it on their wedding day and in their home and in every way she could and until he died and even then again. She had done what he asked. She had been the wife he wanted.

She was finally, just now, sure of it, and the tears never came.

And she knew with a certainty she’d not felt since that first day when that first doctor had looked across his desk at them so solemnly, that her Crying Time was finished. It was time to move on.

And someday it would be finished for Bailey too. And Jean would be there when it was.

Dear Margaret Wise Brown:

My name is Bailey Butler and I’m sixteen years old. I wrote to you a long time ago, but what I didn’t know then was that you were already dead. I just discovered that right now when I was looking for your e-mail address. You can’t e-mail dead people, so I’m just going to write this one longhand. I have no idea where I’ll send it. I wonder where my mom sent my letter all those years ago? Maybe nowhere. Also, I hope it’s not rude to call you “dead.” I’m still learning from my grandma what it’s okay to say about people who’ve died and what isn’t. I think “dead” is okay, though, in this circumstance, especially since you won’t actually ever read this.

You know how sometimes people will ask you what is your favorite book of all time? When people ask me that question, I lie. It’s pretty easy to do. I read all the time, and I really love a lot of the books I read. I used to think I was Ramona Quimby, and I learned spells and stuff like Hermoine, and I have read
Anne of Green Gables
more times than I can count. And each of those books, if you had asked me at the time that I was reading them, I would have told you were my absolute favorite. Or maybe I would have made up something like
Catcher in the Rye
, which I’ve never read, or
The Grapes of Wrath
, which I actually hated, just to sound smart and impress people.

But all of those answers, the true ones and the false, would have been lies.

Your book
Home for a Bunny
is my favorite book of all time. I’ve always known that.

I was obsessed with it when I was a kid. That bunny felt real, like a part of my family. Like the pet I never had. Sitting on my mom’s lap and listening to the story was the coziest I’ve ever felt. Like nothing bad could ever happen to me. Like nothing bad could ever happen to us.

I will admit, I always wondered why the bunny didn’t have a home. Why was he searching? Where was his family? What had happened to his home? And why didn’t he seem upset about it?

It turned out bad things could happen to me. Bad things could happen to us. I wouldn’t be cozy forever. I wouldn’t be in my mom’s lap forever, and it has finally dawned on me that sometimes bunnies just don’t have homes, and they have to go looking for their version of the fluffy snow-white bunny who will take them in at the end. Maybe that was what you were trying to say with your book? Maybe it wasn’t just about a cute woodland animal and words that are fun to read aloud?

I carried that book with me everywhere I went. Nobody knows this, but I even kept it in the front pocket of my backpack every day that I ever went to school. And it would be in my backpack again this year, my junior year, but I’m homeschooled now. But even if I wasn’t homeschooled, I wouldn’t be carrying it, because I gave it away to someone who needs it more than I do. I have found my white bunny to take me in and make me cozy. And now I think I understand the bunny completely.

Thank you for giving me . . . well, everything.

Love,
Bailey Butler

J
ean knocked on Bailey’s door, jarring Bailey out of a nap.

“You ready to go?”

Bailey sat up, spilling her comforter onto the floor next to the bed. She wiped her eyes, feeling cobwebby. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been lying down. It seemed like only a minute. Yet she’d had enough time to dream that her mother had shown up looking pink and healthy and scrubbed clean, asking Bailey if she was ready to go home. She’d had that dream a lot lately. It was always followed by Bailey telling her mother that she was already home. But in the end, Dream Bailey climbed in the car with her mother, feeling sorry and sad and thrilled and hopeful all at the same time. She hated that dream.

“Took you long enough,” she grumbled, stepping into her flip-flops and opening the door. “I’ve been ready forever.”

Her grandmother studied her face and grinned. “I can see you were waiting anxiously. You have a handprint on your face. Was it a nice nap?”

“Whatever,” Bailey said, picking up her string bag by her bedroom door and looping it over her shoulder. She couldn’t help smiling too. “You get lost on your way to change?”

“I tell you every day, it takes a long time to work up the courage to get into a swimsuit when you’re my age,” her grandmother said. “Plus, I had to call Loretta.”

“You look fine in your swimsuit.” Bailey jogged down the stairs. “Kind of hot, actually.”

Grandma Jean laughed as she followed Bailey down the stairs. “Now it’s my turn to say ‘whatever.’”

It was still hot outside, even though it was September, and for that reason the pool had been kept open past Labor Day. Most days Bailey got her schoolwork done on the computer before lunch was over, and she and her grandmother packed up bags of cinnamon sugar popcorn and cans of soda and headed down to the pool before the neighborhood kids got out of school and flooded the place.

“Is she coming? Loretta?” Bailey asked as she plopped into the car, her grandmother handing her the overstuffed pool bag and two towels. She felt dwarfed, as if she could barely see through the windshield, but she didn’t mind. It kind of reminded her of when she was a kid and hid in blanket forts. Back when she enjoyed being invisible.

Her grandmother groaned as she lowered herself behind the steering wheel. “Doesn’t want to pull herself away from La Lounge today,” she said.

“Rave DJ Flavian? Still? I thought she’d finished that one. Don’t tell me she installed black lights into that chandelier like she threatened.”

“Most likely, she did. But she’s moved on to Cruise Captain Flavian. Now she’s navigating the seven seas in nothing but a sailor hat and a compass that always points north. Or at least that’s how she put it.”

“Gross,” Bailey cried, bursting into a belly laugh. Every so often her grandmother did that—surprised her with something really funny or silly—and she was almost shocked by the sound of her own laughter.

They drove the four blocks to the pool and piled out of the car, Bailey trying to juggle the pool bag and towels while her grandmother signed them in. Noah was working the lifeguard table, like always, gazing out into nothing while gnawing on a thumbnail as if his life depended on it.

“Hi, Noah,” Bailey said as she walked by.

“Hey,” he said. He still hadn’t totally warmed up after the cell phone incident, and Bailey felt a pang of guilt every time she saw him pull out an old janky phone, look at it as if it were useless, and sullenly tuck it back into his swim trunks pocket. She didn’t know how to apologize to him, and besides, she wasn’t an apologizing type of person. But she felt bad, and if it counted for anything, she still considered him a onetime friend that she sometimes wished she could hang out with again. Not that Grandma Jean would ever let her hang out with him again, anyway, after the whole pot incident. So she settled on saying hi and leaving it at that.

They went straight to their usual two chaise lounges, the ones they had sat in the very first time they visited the pool, back when Loretta’s raunchy talk had grossed her out completely. The lounges were tucked under a patio umbrella, which Bailey always immediately wound to an open position. If Bailey pulled her feet up, she could be totally shaded. If she stretched out, she could get some sun on her legs. Grandma Jean just preferred the shade.

“You talk to your mom or dad today?” Grandma Jean asked as soon as they got settled. Same question every day.

“Nope,” Bailey said, moving around to get comfortable on her towel. Same answer every day. She supposed one day the answer would change, but she tried not to think about it. She rehearsed in her head all the time what she would say to Curt or Laura Butler if she ever heard from them again, but part of her was scared that she’d never have the guts to actually say it. A part of her feared that, just like in her dream, she would go to them, because they were her parents, and as much as she hated them, she missed them sometimes too. The old them. The ones who laughed when she popped out of her blanket fort, no longer invisible.

And just like every day, she asked her grandmother the same question. “You hear from them?”

Grandma Jean slowly shook her head as she reached into the pool bag. “Not today.”

And Bailey hated it, but that answer always came with a little stab of anger and hurt that, for just a second, made her want to do something crazy like vandalize a car or . . . take her clothes off in the pool. Sometimes she gave in to that anger—there was a closet wall in her bedroom so full of holes she could see insulation behind it—but more and more often she tried to fight it. To not let them do that to her.

Her grandmother pulled out a bag of popcorn for each of them and handed one, along with a can of soda, to Bailey, who immediately tucked it into her lap. She then pulled out two matching books—a lengthy period novel that Bailey was surprisingly into—and handed one to Bailey.

“Where are you?” Grandma Jean asked, crinkling her bag as she dug out a handful of popcorn.

“Adelaide just found out that John has come home from the war,” Bailey said.

“Oh, don’t tell me any more. I’m not there yet. You read so fast,” her grandmother said.

Bailey shrugged. “Lots and lots of practice, I guess. You better hurry up, though. Book club meets next week.”

She pulled her feet up and propped the book on her knees. Her grandmother munched on popcorn and flipped to her bookmarked page. Noah stared off into nothingness and chomped on his thumbnail, and the water softly lapped against the sides of the pool.

And side by side, they read.