The First Time (33 page)

“Promise,” Mattie pressed. “You have to promise.”

Her mother’s head nodded up and down. “I promise,” she said.

“And you can’t say anything about this to Jake. You can’t say anything—”

“What’s going on?” Kim asked from the doorway.

Mattie spun around in her seat, almost losing her balance and falling off the sofa. She steadied herself with her hand before scrambling to her feet. “How long have you been standing there?”

“I heard you yelling at Grandma Viv.”

“I wasn’t yelling.”

“It sounded like yelling to me.” Kim inched her way into the room, the tiny white puppy still cradled in her arms, fast asleep.

“You know how your mother just gets excited about things,” Grandma Viv said.

“What’s she excited about?”

“Your new puppy, of course,” Mattie answered, walking to Kim’s side. “May I hold him?”

“You have to be very careful,” Kim cautioned, eyes shifting warily between her mother and grandmother as she deposited the puppy in Mattie’s trembling hands.

The puppy was so soft, so warm, Mattie realized with surprise, lifting him to her cheek, rubbing him gently against her skin, her hands shaking visibly.

“You’re not going to drop him, are you?” Kim asked.

“Maybe you better take him.” Mattie returned the puppy to her daughter’s eager hands. She glanced at her mother, red cheeks staining her otherwise pale face, as if she’d been struck. “We should probably get a move on,” Mattie said.

“I’m not going,” Kim announced.

“What?”

“Who’s not going where?” Jake asked, coming into the room, looking from Mattie to her mother, then back to Mattie, his eyes asking if everything was all right.

Mattie nodded, tried to smile.

“I’m going to stay here tonight,” Kim announced. “I don’t want to leave George. That’s all right with you, isn’t it, Grandma Viv?”

“If it’s all right with your parents,” Mattie heard her mother say, her voice an unfamiliar monotone.

“Of course it’s all right,” Mattie said, full of sudden admiration for her only child. “You’re a very sweet
girl,” she told Kim on her way out the front door minutes later, planting a kiss on her daughter’s wary cheek. She understood Kim’s decision to stay was as much about not wanting her grandmother to be alone as it was about not wanting to leave her new puppy.

“Sweet sixteen,” Kim said with a self-conscious curtsy.

“Watch your step,” Mattie’s mother cautioned as Jake took Mattie’s elbow and guided her to the car. “It’s still a bit icy in places.”

“I’ll be in touch, Mom,” Mattie said.

Her mother nodded, a coterie of dogs barking at her feet, and closed the front door.

“So, how’d it go?”

“It was harder than I thought it would be,” Mattie told Jake.

“She’s your mother, Mattie. She loves you.”

Mattie reached over and touched Jake’s hand, knowing how hard that was for him to say. Mothers didn’t always love their children, they both knew. “I think in her own peculiar way, she does,” Mattie acknowledged, leaning back in her seat and closing her eyes as Jake backed the car out of the driveway onto Hudson Avenue. She pictured her mother’s stony expression when she was confiding the news of her condition. Would her mother come through for her? Was it reasonable to expect her to be there for her in death as she’d never been in life? Had it been reasonable to ask? Mattie shook her head, determined not to persevere in something that was out of her control.

“Feel like going to a movie?” Jake asked.

“I’m kind of tired. Would you mind if we just went home?”

“No, that’s fine. Whatever you want.”

Mattie smiled, her eyes still closed. Whatever you want. How many times had she heard her husband say that over the course of the last six weeks? He’s trying so hard, she thought. Home for dinner every night, working out of the den whenever possible, running errands with her on weekends, watching television beside her in bed, even letting her control the remote. When he wasn’t working, he was at her side. When he was at her side, he was holding her hand, or touching her thigh, and when they made love, which they did several times a week, it was as good as it had always been. Was he picturing Honey when he caressed the nape of her neck? Mattie wondered now. Was it Honey’s breasts he suckled, Honey’s legs he parted when he entered her? Mattie quickly dismissed the unwelcome image. As far as she knew, Jake hadn’t seen Honey at all. There were only so many hours in the day, after all. There was only so much energy to go around. Still, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Wasn’t that how the old saying went?

Where there’s a will, there’s a way, Mattie repeated silently, wondering why people knocked clichés. There was something enormously comforting about clichés. They spoke of predictability, of familiarity, of permanence. The more tenuous her health, the more Mattie appreciated their easy truths and sweeping generalities: Love makes the world go round; Love conquers all; Love is better the second time around.

Except there’d never been a first time.

“How about we stop at the supermarket and pick up a couple of steaks?” Jake was asking. “I make a terrific steak, if you recall.”

“Sounds wonderful.” Mattie marveled at the enthusiasm in her husband’s voice. He’d have made a great actor, she thought, then decided that emoting in the courtroom was probably not all that different from emoting on the stage. Or emoting in the bedroom.

The car pulled to a sudden halt, and Mattie opened her eyes to find them parked in front of a medium-size supermarket on North Avenue. “I’ll just be a minute,” Jake said, already half out of the car.

“I’ll come with you.”

Immediately he was at her side, opening her door, helping her out of the car, escorting her inside the brightly lit store. “This way,” Jake directed, guiding Mattie through the produce section, past the aisles full of canned goods and cereal boxes and fruit drinks and paper towels, toward the surprisingly large meat section at the far end of the store. The effortless way he moved, the sureness of his steps, told Mattie he’d been here before. With Honey? she wondered, trying to mask her sudden sadness with a smile.

“You seem to know your way around,” she commented, despite her best efforts to remain silent.

“All supermarkets are pretty much the same, aren’t they?” he said easily, reaching for several steaks, examining them closely beneath their tight plastic wrap, then returning them to the shelf, selecting several more.

“How about these?” Mattie grabbed a couple of
steaks. “These look pretty good.” She was about to offer the steaks for Jake’s inspection when a sudden tremor, like a small earthquake, caught hold of her arm, tossing it into the air as if it were weightless, as if it were no longer connected to the rest of her body. The steaks shot out of her hand and across the aisle, narrowly missing another shopper and knocking over a display of exotic cheeses in a nearby bin.

“What the —?” the woman shopper exclaimed, glaring at Mattie.

“Oh, God,” Mattie cried, burying her hands beneath opposite arms, feeling queasy and faint, panic growing in her gut, threatening to erupt. It was happening again. Just like in her mother’s kitchen. Except she was no longer in her mother’s kitchen. She was in a public place. How could she do this to Jake? How could she embarrass him again by creating a scene in public? She couldn’t bare to look at him. She couldn’t stomach the look of horror and disgust she knew she’d find on his face.

And then another steak went flying across the aisle. And then another.

Mattie’s eyes raced toward her husband, who was leaning over the meat section, gathering more packages into his hands, grinning impishly from ear to ear.

“My God, what are you doing?” Mattie asked, not sure whether to laugh or cry as he sent two more steaks flying across the aisle.

“This is fun,” Jake said, unleashing two more. “Come on. It’s your turn.” The woman shopper ran for cover as Jake dropped another steak into Mattie’s hand.

Before she could give herself time to think, Mattie hurled the packaged steak over her shoulder, hearing it land with a thud somewhere behind her as Jake followed suit with a barrage of lamb chops. By the time the manager arrived with the security guard, the entire meat section lay in scattered bundles across the floor, and Mattie and Jake were too limp with laughter to offer either explanations or apologies.

I
think I could use another drink.” Jake looked around the old-fashioned Italian eatery known as the Great Impasta, silently signaling the busy waiter for another glass of red wine. The popular restaurant was located on East Chestnut Street, just north of Water Tower Place, only blocks away from his office, and was a favorite spot with many of the lawyers in his firm, two of whom Jake noticed dining together with their wives in a dimly lit corner of the room. So far they hadn’t spotted him, for which Jake was inordinately grateful. They were two of his least favorite people—privately, he referred to them as Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dumber—and besides, he’d had enough excitement for one day. He pondered again what strange force had overtaken him in the supermarket, deciding not to overanalyze what was clearly a
simple act of spontaneity. Except that Jake Hart was anything but a spontaneous kind of guy. Honey claimed that even his ad-libs were carefully researched and rehearsed in advance. Honey, he thought, closing his eyes in consternation, remembering he hadn’t called her all day, knowing how disappointed she’d be—with the situation, with the way things were going, with him. (“It just takes a minute to pick up a phone,” he could hear her say. “Really, Jason, I don’t think I’m asking for all that much.”)

Bad boy Jason, bad boy Jason, bad boy Jason!

Badboyjason, badboyjason, badboyjason
.

“Something wrong?” Mattie asked.

Jake opened his eyes, stared across the red-and-white checkered tablecloth at his wife of sixteen years. She didn’t look that much older than the day he married her, he thought, watching as the candle from the middle of the table cast a warm glow on her otherwise pale complexion. Her hair was a little longer than when they’d first met, and she’d lost a bit of weight in the last few months, thinning out the natural oval of her face, but she was still a very beautiful woman, probably one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen. “I just remembered that I forgot our anniversary,” he said, realizing this was true. “January twelfth, wasn’t it?”

Mattie smiled. “Close enough.”

He laughed. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right. You made it up to me earlier.” Her smile widened. “First time I’ve ever been thrown out of a grocery store.”

“I have to admit I rather enjoyed that myself.”

They laughed together, one laugh echoing the other, the two sounds overlapping, intertwining, harmonizing.

“This is a nice restaurant,” Mattie said, looking around. “I love the plastic grapes and the old wine bottles. It’s a nice change from the high-tech look you see everywhere these days.”

“This place has been around forever,” Jake said. “The food is wonderful.”

“Well, I’m looking forward to it. Suddenly I’m starving,”

Jake checked his watch. Almost seven-thirty. Service was very slow tonight. They’d placed their order—angel-hair pasta with red clam sauce for Mattie, beet-filled ravioli and a Caprese salad for Jake—almost forty minutes ago. Jake had already polished off two glasses of wine. He should have ordered a bottle, he thought, although there was something unseemly about ordering a whole bottle of wine when you were the only one drinking. Mattie was sticking to mineral water, which was probably a good idea. It had been quite a day for her. He reached over, took her hand in his, felt the familiar tremble.

“I’m okay, Jake,” she assured him.

He smiled. Wasn’t he the one who was supposed to be reassuring her?

“So you never told me about your interview with
Now,”
Mattie said.

“Oh, God, that.” Jake shook his head. “It was a disaster.”

“A disaster? How so?”

Jake waved his hands in front of his face, as if trying to shoo away an unpleasant memory. “Ms. Isbister—”

“Who?”

“Was
bister.”

“What?”

Suddenly they were laughing, although Jake could tell by the puzzled look on Mattie’s face she wasn’t sure why. “The writer in question,” Jake qualified, chuckling over the image of the startled reporter struggling with her tape recorder as he was kicking her out of his office, “was interested in a more personal angle than I was willing to provide.”

Mattie cocked her head to one side. “How personal?”

“She asked about my parents, my brothers,” Jake said, as the image of Alana Isbister was replaced by the sad faces of his brothers, Luke and Nicholas. He tried to blink them away, failed.

The waiter approached with Jake’s glass of wine. “This one’s on the house,” he said as Jake reached out to claim his glass, “with our sincere apologies for the delay. There were some difficulties in the kitchen, but they’ve been resolved, and your food should be out momentarily.”

“No problem,” Jake said, raising his glass in a mock toast, seeing his brothers’ reflection in the dark red liquid. “Thank you.”

“Pas de problème,” Mattie repeated quietly in French. “Merci.”

“No fair. You’ve been studying.”

“Every chance I get. I can’t believe we’re really going.”

“Believe it, lady. Everything has been confirmed. Everything has been paid for in advance. Five more weeks, we are on our way to Paris, France.”

“You sound excited.”

“I
am
excited,” Jake said, realizing this was true. He’d been pretending to be looking forward to this trip for so long, it had become a reality. And no one was more surprised by this unexpected development than he was. “My brother Luke always talked about going to Europe,” he heard himself say. Why had he mentioned that?

“Anywhere in particular?” Mattie asked.

“Not that I can remember. He used to talk about hitchhiking from one end of the continent to the other.” What was the matter with him? Hadn’t he managed a successful detour away from his past? What was he doing circling around back? Clearly, the events of the afternoon had unsettled him, and the incident in the grocery store coupled with several glasses of expensive red wine had upset his normal equilibrium, loosening his tongue. Jake raised his glass to his lips, took a long sip. Might as well loosen it some more, he thought, as Luke winked at him from the bottom of the glass.