The Smart One and the Pretty One (3 page)

“She certainly should have asked you before taking your money,” Nancy said. “But at least it’s for a good cause.”

“See?” Lauren said. “Everyone wins.”

“Except me,” said Ava. “I’m out thirty dollars and Kayla thinks
you’re
the generous one.”

“Oh, who cares?” Lauren said. “She doesn’t even know us.”

“That’s not the point,” Ava said.

“What is?”

“I don’t know,” Ava said. “But if I ever find you in my wallet again without my permission . . .” She didn’t bother to finish the threat, just picked up the stack of dishes and headed into the kitchen.

“Oh, I’m scared now,” Lauren said with a laugh. She looked up to find her father glowering at her. “What?” she said.

“You don’t
think
,” he said. “You don’t ever stop to think.”

There was no answer she could make to that familiar refrain, so she just slumped in her seat feeling misunderstood and waited for someone to serve her dessert.

Another glass of wine took care of any lingering resentment Ava might have had, and a couple of hours later the girls were sprawled out companionably in the family room, their parents already gone up for the night.

“This house is so cozy and wonderful,” Lauren said with a contented sigh. “You’ve never seen my apartment, have you? It’s a studio and it looks out on a brick wall and the whole building smells bad. It sucks, Ava. This is how I grew up”—she gestured around at the pretty, warm, slightly messy room they were in—“and now I live in a shithole.”

“If Dad heard you using that kind of language—”

“He’s asleep,” Lauren said. “And I’m twenty-six years old. And he’s asleep.” She put her wineglass down and hugged her knees to her chest—she was perched precariously on the edge of a low ottoman, despite the fact that there were several comfortable armchairs and a sofa in the room. “The point is, when I come back here and remember how nice it is, I wonder why I’m living there and not here.”

“Uh, maybe because you’re an adult?” Ava said. “Growing up means you stop living with your parents.”

“Guess I’m not grown up, then.”

“You can say that again,” Ava said and then suddenly sat upright. “Wait a second. Are you trying to tell me something?”

“You mean like that I quit my job and I’m moving back home to live for a while?” Lauren said. “Nah. It’s nothing like that.”

“Oh, good,” Ava said. “Because I thought maybe—”

“I got
fired
from my job and I’m moving back home to live for a while. Completely different. Oh, and I also got evicted from my apartment.”

Ava’s mouth fell open. “Seriously? What happened? How did you get fired?”

“My boss found out I had some credit problems.”

“She can’t fire you because of that,” Ava said. “That’s not right.”

“Oh, she didn’t,” Lauren said. “Not exactly.” She unfolded her legs and reached for her wineglass again. “My boss—
ex
-boss—Saralyn—she’s not a bad person, but she can drive you crazy. She thinks she has to turn everything into a morality lesson. I mean, I
know
that if I spend more than I make I’m going to end up in debt. I don’t need some idiot boss lecturing me like I’m four years old.”

“So what did you do? Get mad and quit?”

“Not mad so much as—” Lauren stopped and shrugged. “Well,
she
started the truth-telling, not me. If she wanted us to be brutally honest with each other,
I
certainly wasn’t going to hold back.”

“Oh, God, Lauren. And you also managed to get evicted at the same time?”

“Not exactly,” Lauren said. “That was an exaggeration. But the landlord was getting pretty nasty. He even turned off my hot water.”

“That’s illegal,” Ava said. “Even if you haven’t been paying rent, that’s illegal.”

“Well, it’s also possible I just forgot to pay the gas bill.” She laughed and Ava did too, but the laugh ended in a sigh. “I’ve already shipped all my stuff out here,” Lauren said. “I just shoved it all in boxes and called UPS—Dad paid for that. So I’m out of there.”

“But you love New York.”

“Loved,” Lauren said. “Past tense. I want to try L.A. again.”

“Okay,” Ava said. “If you want to move back home for a little while, fine.”

“Thanks for the permission,” Lauren said with a roll of her eyes, which Ava ignored.

“But you need to have a plan and a definite move-out date. How long do you intend to be here?”

“Jesus, I don’t know,” Lauren said. “I’ll see what happens.”

“I have an idea,” Ava said. “I just need a pen.” She jumped to her feet and tugged a cabinet door open. A bunch of papers flew out and swooped down onto the floor. “Whoa!” she said. The cabinet shelves were bursting with shoeboxes and baskets and stacks of old pictures and drawings and photos and school essays—all the paper relics of their childhood. “What a mess,” she said, shoving a stack of photos back from its precarious placement at the edge of one shelf.

Lauren got up and came over to her side to peer in at the mess. Glancing sideways, Ava noticed that with neither of them wearing shoes—they had both kicked them off at some point that evening—they were roughly the same height. Usually Lauren wore very high heels, so Ava always thought of her little sister as being significantly taller. But she actually wasn’t.

A photo had fallen on the floor. “Look,” Ava said, picking it up. “This is exactly why you shouldn’t be living at home.”

“Why? Who is that?”

“Fiona. Dad’s aunt. Look at her—she was a good daughter who lived with her mother her entire life. When Rose died, Fiona was like fifty-five and had never been married and had barely ever left the house she was born in. She inherited enough money to do whatever she wanted. So what did she do? Stayed in the same house, hardly ever went out, never got married, and died a decade later, the most boring person who ever lived.”

“You give her a run for her money.”

“Shut up. The point is she never had a life because she didn’t have the sense to move out of her mother’s house when she was still young.”

“I’m nothing like her,” Lauren said. “I moved out of my mother’s house and I’ve had plenty of boyfriends. Besides, back in those days, if you lived with your mother, it was because no guy would marry you. Now tons of people move back in with their parents—”

“And never leave again,” Ava said. “It’s not a positive step, Lauren. Learn from Fiona.”

“Fine, I’ve learned.” Lauren snatched the photo out of Ava’s hand and shoved it in the cabinet. “Boring cautionary tale over now. Scary great-aunt goes back in the closet where she belongs.”

“Of course, that could have been the problem right there,” Ava said thoughtfully. “Being in the closet, I mean—it is possible she was gay at a time when that would have been unacceptable.”

“Some girl-on-girl action for Great-Aunt Fi,” Lauren said with a smirk. “Now there’s a thought.”

“Not one I want to dwell on,” Ava said. “Anyway, the point is, if you’re going to move in with Mom and Dad, you have to agree to a checkout date. One you’ll stick to. Which is why we’re going to put it down in writing. If I could just find a pen . . .”

“Forget it.” Lauren slammed the cabinet shut. Some pieces of paper that hadn’t been pushed back far enough got caught in the door and she pulled them out and tossed them on the table. “I don’t need to put it in writing. Do you really think I want to live with Mom and Dad forever?”

“No,” Ava said. “But—”

“End of discussion.” Lauren threw herself onto the sofa—lying down the long way, so there wasn’t room for Ava. “Let’s do you now,” she said. “In the interest of sisterly . . . interest. Let’s talk about how you’re almost thirty and you haven’t had a decent boyfriend or the prospect of one since—when? Law school?”

“Lauren—”

“It
was
law school, wasn’t it?”

Lauren always knew how to push her until she had to rise to her own defense. “Of course not. I’ve had relationships since then.” Ava sat on the little orange slipper chair she always thought of as their mother’s, since Nancy tended to sit in it when they were all in the family room.

“Name one.”

“Michael Rodriguez.”

“Michael Rodriguez?” Lauren’s forehead wrinkled in thought. “Oh, wait. He was the one who did that weird thing with his cat, right?”

“I can’t believe you remember that story,” Ava said. “I can’t believe I
told
you that story.”

“What was it again?”

Ava hesitated, then sighed. “Whenever he took a shower, he’d let his cat lick him dry. Well, parts of him, anyway.”

“Which parts?”

“He was a nice guy,” Ava said defensively.

Lauren laughed. “I never said he wasn’t. So anyway, how long ago was Michael?”

Ava thought. “Three years?” she said after a moment. “Yeah. Three years.” She slid way down in the chair. “I can’t believe it’s been that long since I’ve dated anyone even halfway decent. And Michael
was
a little weird. The cat was weird too, come to think of it. It had these little squinty eyes—” She made a face. “Why are we even talking about this?”

“Let me take you out,” Lauren said, suddenly sitting up. “The night is young. We could hit some bars—”

“Are you
kidding
?”

“Come on, it’ll be fun. The worst thing that happens is you and I have a drink and some laughs. The best thing that happens is you meet some handsome young doctor who falls madly in love with you—”

“Make him a pilot,” Ava said. “I’ve always wanted to date an airplane pilot.”

“We’ll go to a bar near LAX,” Lauren said. “Got to be pilots there.”

“I was joking,” Ava said. “I don’t meet guys in bars, Lauren.”

“That’s because you don’t go to them.”

“No, it’s because I don’t look like you.”

“You look a lot like me.”

“Not in the ways that matter.”

“Let me make you over,” Lauren said excitedly. “I’ll do your hair and face and lend you an outfit. I’ll make you look so hot the guys’ll be lining up—”

“I’m tired,” Ava said. “I just want to go home.”

Lauren stamped her foot. “Why do you always have to be such a loser?”

“Says the girl who’s about to move back in with her parents.”

Lauren stuck her tongue out at her sister.

“A brilliant comeback,” Ava said.

“Sorry. Guess we can’t
all
be straight-A geniuses.”

“Too bad for you,” Ava said. “Good night.”

As Ava left the room, Lauren immediately and automatically reached for the TiVo remote, accidentally knocking off the papers she had tossed on the coffee table earlier. They fell to the floor and she reached down to pick them up.

It was, she thought with amusement as she glanced through them, a classic Mom stack of papers, completely random: there were a couple of childish crayon drawings, a manual for the DVD player, a photo of Lauren on prom night (wearing too much makeup, she had to admit—she had a heavy hand with eye shadow at that age), a page torn from a Spanish-English dictionary, and, finally, some sort of handwritten document that Lauren stopped to examine more closely.

In her mother’s slightly loopy handwriting were the words:

We, the parents of Ava Carrie Nickerson and Russell Douglas Markowitz, do hereby agree that our two children are betrothed to each other and upon reaching maturity, or some semblance thereof, will be joined in matrimony to live Happily Ever After. We also agree to be good in-laws and to share them on the major holidays and not try to make the grandchildren love one set of grandparents more than the other.

The document was signed at the bottom by her mother and someone named Lana Markowitz—presumably Ava’s intended mother-in-law.

Lauren heard footsteps and assumed it was Ava coming back for some reason, so she called out, “You have to see this!” but it was Nancy who entered, wearing the same crimson silk bathrobe she had worn every morning to make coffee for as long as Lauren could remember.

“See what?” she asked with a yawn.

“What are you doing up? I thought you had gone to bed a while ago.”

Nancy flopped down on the sofa next to her. “I’ve been having trouble sleeping since the diagnosis.”

“Are you worried?” Lauren slid closer and leaned her head on her mother’s shoulder.

Nancy put her arm around her and squeezed. “Not in the light of day. It’s just in the middle of the night that my mind runs on and I start imagining crazy things like you girls getting married and having kids without me.” She said it lightly enough, but Lauren’s heart contracted.

“You’ll be there,” she said.

“Oh, I know,” said Nancy. “I expect to be. But, just in case I’m not—?”

“What?”

“Promise me you’ll pick out Ava’s wedding shoes? If she wears a pair of those ugly Aerosole pumps she’s always got on—just in
white
—I swear I’ll come back to haunt you both.”

Lauren laughed. Her mother wasn’t a real clotheshorse, but she did love a beautiful pair of shoes, and it wasn’t the first time she had expressed pain over Ava’s determinedly utilitarian approach to footwear. “I promise,” she said. “But you’ll be fighting that battle at my side.”

“So what
is
that?” Nancy asked, flicking at the piece of paper Lauren was still holding.

“Look.” Lauren handed it to her and Nancy read it, holding it far from her face and squinting at the writing even though the room was fairly bright.

She gave a short laugh. “I had forgotten we did that,” she said, dropping it on the table.

“Who
was
Russell Douglas Markowitz, anyway?”

Nancy pushed off the pretty velvet mules she wore for slippers and curled her feet up under her, snuggling down into the cushions with Lauren. “His father worked with Dad for a while back in the late eighties. Dad liked Jeffrey—he was a very entertaining guy, very smart and funny—so we got together with them a bunch of times, but I never really hit it off with the wife.”

“Why not?” Lauren rubbed her cheek against her mother’s silk-covered upper arm.

“I don’t know. We just didn’t click. She didn’t have much of a sense of humor, for one thing, which, given how funny Jeffrey was, made for an odd marriage and ultimately a divorce.”