The Secret Life of Prince Charming (9 page)

“It’s the Jesus freaks who buy all the porno,” Aunt Annie said.

“That’s what I told her,” Liv said.

Finally, Sprout got her ice cream. “Daniel was vomit,” she said.

“Coffee ice cream, we’re going to be up all night,” Grandma said. The idea seemed to please her.

“Look under. Vanilla and butterscotch swirl, too,” Mom said. “Every kind in the fridge. Honey, you’re going to be fine. I know you don’t feel like it, but you will. Us Hoffmans—we’re strong women.”

I hadn’t wanted to cry until then. It was the thought of the Hoffman women that did it, the scattered and wrecked relationships that lay around like pieces of broken china—something beautiful once, now shattered and unrecognizable. My throat got tight. Tears gathered, but I put my palms to my eyes to stop them.

“Oh, honey,” Mom said. She set down her bowl, squeezed in between me and Grandma on the couch.

“Ow,” Grandma said. “You’re squishing me.”

Mom picked up my hand, gripped it hard. “I thought Daniel was foolproof,” I said. My voice was small. It knew enough to be embarrassed, knew enough to hide.

“No one is foolproof,” Aunt Annie said. She was hunting under the coffee ice cream for the butterscotch too, just like Grandma.

“We all make mistakes,” Liv said. “And hey, Daniel was a small mistake! Look at me with Travis. I could have ended up in jail.”

“That Otto gave me a run for my money,” Grandma said.

“You just have to be careful,” Mom said. She was holding
back, you could tell. You could almost hear her adding on to her list in her thoughts.

“Hey, Mom—all I got to say is O-C-D Dean,” Sprout sang. This made me smile.

“Don’t remind me,” Mom said. “We got along fine when I didn’t want to kill him.”

“He alphabetized his underwear drawer. Fruit of the Loom before Jockeys,” Aunt Annie said.

“My car was never clean enough. He always picked lint up off the floor mats like it meant my life was getting out of control,” Mom said.

“Once I caught him looking in the microwave and staring at a little melted cheese like it was a terrorist. I wanted to sock him,” Gram said.

“W. is in alcohol treatment,” Liv said. W. was this guy she dated from a different high school who only went by his first initial.

“You never told me,” I said.

“Too embarrassed. But now that we’re confessing…”

“He was always having a crisis. Car accident, remember? Didn’t he almost run over a crossing guard?”

“Not a crossing guard,” Liv said. “Construction guy. Different orange vest.”

“Is he the one who punched his boss? When he worked at Wendy’s?” Sprout said.

“Were you snooping in on our phone conversation?” I asked. “Were you listening in while I was on the phone?”

“No,” she said.

“Sprout,” Mom said.

“It’s just tempting,” she said.

“Jack Xavier told me we needed to stop and get my coat pressed before we met his friends at a party,” Aunt Annie said. “It was wrinkled. I took it off and scrunched it in a ball and said, ‘You want to see wrinkled? Here’s wrinkled.’”

“Jack Xavier was the biggest narcissist next to you-know-who,” Mom said. Of course we knew who. You-know-who was Dad, and so was HIM and so was we-won’t-say-who-I-mean and so was that-man-I-gave-all-those-years-to.

“Jack Xavier spent more time on his looks than a fashion model. He smelled like frou-frou water. He looked at his
reflection
in the microwave,” Grandma said.

“Maybe we ought to look at a guy’s response to our microwave from now on,” Aunt Annie said.

“Really,” Mom said. “The narcissist looks at his reflection in it, the OCD guy thinks you don’t keep it clean enough, the Antisocial—”

“Puts his fist through it because it reminds him of his father,” Annie said. She’d read all of Mom’s books too.

“And the paranoid one would be jealous of the amount of time you spent cooking,” Mom said.

“Were you using that microwave again? Is something going on between the two of you? I caught you looking right at its
clock
,” Aunt Annie said. They cracked up. You could see the way they’d been when they were two younger sisters, like Sprout and me. “I hope you girls are paying attention.”

“Just because he’s good in bed doesn’t mean you can live with him,” Grandma said.

“Mom,” Mom said.

“Oh, gross,” Sprout said.

“It’s shocking, the things we call love,” Mom said.

“The best defense is a good offense,” Grandma said.

“You sound like ESPN,” Aunt Annie said.

“Daniel was vomit,” Sprout said again. She was stirring her ice cream all up, into ice cream soup.

After a while, Mom eased herself back up and made tea and Liv asked if anyone wanted seconds. She was the only one who could eat more. After she was done, she had to loosen the drawstring of her penguin pants. She was the type of girl who could eat and eat and never gain an ounce, but you didn’t hate her for it because you loved her so much.

“I feel like an alien might burst from my stomach,” Liv groaned.

“God, that was good,” Grandma said. Even her little slippers looked happy.

“Butterscotch swirl never lets you down,” Aunt Annie said. She stretched her legs out.

“You don’t need to hire a private investigator to check up on butterscotch swirl,” Grandma said.

Aunt Annie sat up suddenly. “What?”

“I saw the phone book open on the table after you left the room. I saw the ads. ‘Surveillance begins where trust ends.’ Who uses a phone book anymore?” Grandma loved the Web.

Mom stopped midway back from the kitchen, abruptly halted her tea bag bobbing. She looked at her sister with a look I knew well. It was a look I probably first got when I had a crayon in my fist and was heading for the wall. “Annie, no.”

“I was just
curious
. I would never do that. For God’s sake, people.”

“Why do you need a private investigator?” Liv asked.

“She doesn’t need a private investigator,” Mom said.

“Quentin Ferrill is giving Annie a run for her money,” Grandma said.

“Like I could even
afford
a private detective,” Annie said.

“If you need to pay a private detective to feel like you’ve got the truth on someone…,” Mom said.

“I
know
,” Aunt Annie said. “I wouldn’t do it! I promise.” She sounded like Sprout. “He’s just so freaking secretive.”

“People are secretive when they have secrets,” Mom said.

“Stay clear,” Liv agreed.

Grandma looked at her watch. “Oh my,” she said. “eBay time.” She bolted from the couch, hurried her quilted-robed self toward the office where the computer was.

“Wow, an item must be ending soon,” Annie said.

“I haven’t seen her move so fast since she caught that kitchen towel on fire,” Mom said. She sipped her tea.

“Thanks for making
me
tea,” Annie said to Mom.

“Get it yourself,” Mom said.

“Gram likes those salt-and pepper shakers that look like chefs,” Sprout said. She was petting Ivar with her foot.

Annie leaned back against the couch. “She must suck at the bidding thing.”

“Does she always lose at the last minute?” Liv asked.

“I guess so,” Annie said. “Has anyone ever noticed that nothing comes in the mail? No packages from somewhere in New Jersey or Iowa? Nothing shoved so tight in the mailbox you can’t get anything else out?”

“Yeah, we all remember your purse-buying spree,” I said. “It felt like FedEx headquarters here.”

“Nothing comes,” Annie said. “We should have a kitchen full of mini chefs by now.”

Mom sat down in the rocking chair, gave a few thoughtful rocks. “You’re right.”

“Highly suspicious,” Liv said.

“I think it’s great, personally,” Mom said. “She hardly has any discretionary income. If she won all the time, she’d be into her Social Security check.”

“How many chefs does a person need?” Aunt Annie agreed.

“One would be good because of Mom’s cooking,” Sprout said. “Ah-ha-ha.”

“Let’s get your mom one of those hats,” Annie said. “The poofy white ones.”

“Or cooking lessons,” I said. Mom was actually a great cook.

Mom grabbed a pillow and flung it at Sprout, causing Ivar to flee as fast as Grandma had.

“You’re all hilarious,” Mom said. “Bunch of comedians.”

Liv went home, and we all got up and put our dishes away, except for Grandma, who’d ditched hers on an end table in her rush. I went up to my room. I was suddenly all alone, as if the funeral was over and the people were gone and now it was just me and the knowledge that someone had died. Everyone else had done their job, and it was my job now to do the moving on.

I would miss…I would miss Daniel’s hand. Holding a hand. I would miss him sitting on the couch beside me on the weekend. Wait—weekends. There would be no plans when there were always plans! No more movies, no more filled Fridays and Saturdays. No more nightly phone calls. No more having the spot of boyfriend filled. I was used to having him around, and now he wouldn’t be. He’d had a place in my life, like homework or volleyball practice. It was similar to the feeling you get when it’s summer and there’s no school or home
work and there’s this sudden space where school was. There was a sudden space where Daniel was.

Some kind of construction equipment, a bulldozer, was digging a deep trench in my internal foundation. God, it hurt and I hated to hurt. Hurting made me aware of bad choices, made me feel like I’d messed up, like I wasn’t capable of proper functioning. It suddenly felt like Daniel was really and hugely important to me. Like maybe if I felt like this, I had really loved him after all. I decided I should write to him. Express how I felt. I took out a piece of paper. I’d write him a poem. I’d never written a poem in my life. I don’t even like poetry. I wrote his name at the top.
Daniel.
I looked at all of the white space there underneath. I crumpled up the paper, threw it toward the wastebasket, and missed. I would call him instead. I would call him and tell him how I felt because maybe I had missed my chance at love by being too distant. We could have had something great if I’d have let it be great, instead of…

Instead of not really liking him, I remembered.

I needed to get myself together. I needed to take some action. God, I was one step away from pleading with Daniel for something I didn’t even want! Liv had sobbed over Travis Becker. Aunt Annie had sobbed over Jack Xavier. Mom had sobbed over OCD Dean. I was not going to sob over Daniel Jarvis.

Rejection might make you feel small and crappy, and rejection might call for all those who love you to gather around and prop you up. But rejection could do something else, too. I felt some weird stirring of courage, or maybe just recklessness gathering, building from the night before when Dad put those
brownies in the oven to now, when I refused to make Daniel Jarvis some altar I’d throw myself on.

I had the sense again of being an art film, of pieces of me in some confusing order. I wanted one truth, my own truth. A single diamond.