The Unexpected Waltz (27 page)

That afternoon was the last time I saw Daniel. I waited a couple of minutes and wrenched open the bathroom door and boom, there was a woman standing right in front of me. I almost screamed. She’d pulled her car around the back of the gas station to put air in her tires and she had turned when she heard the door open. Saw me coming out of the men’s bathroom, me in my suit with my little heels, and she’d known what I was up to in a split second. I could tell by her face. I must have flushed with shame, and she froze for a minute, just gaping, before she turned away. Went back to putting air in the tires of her minivan, where her children were squirming around, poking their fingers out the windows and talking to her over the glass, asking if they could get out and get a Coke.

Tory clicks off the dryer and I raise my head.

“It looks great,” she says.

Jesus. I am way too blond. My hair is as light as hers, uniformly golden. “Oh God, honey,” I say. “This is more than I expected. I’m so—”

“Pretty,” she says. “What you are is pretty and that’s okay, Aunt Kelly. We’ve got about a minute to finish your story before Mom starts screaming again. What happened to Daniel?”

“He packed up his wife and his kids and he left.”

Tory’s eyes narrow. “You never tried to find out where he went?”

“Someday you’ll understand. Everybody’s got a story like this. Mine’s nothing special.”

Another head tilt. “And that’s really all there is to it?”

That’s all there is to it. He left. I waited for him to contact me and tell me where he was and when to follow, but that call never came. I drove by his house after the first awful month and saw the “For Sale” sign in the yard, the empty garage, the curtainless windows staring out at me. Staring blankly, just like the woman who’d been putting air in her tires. What would Elyse think of me talking to Tory like this? I have barely managed to stop short of telling her the true end of the story—that it had been Elyse who drove me to the abortion clinic two months later when the sum total of my stupidity had finally been tallied. Tory had been about six months old and napping in the back of the car. I don’t tell her how on the way home she’d started to cry and Elyse had said to please dig in the diaper bag and find her pacifier, and that when the time came to turn in my seat and put the pacifier in her mouth, I had been unable to do it. She’d been too perfect, too perfectly formed and human, and I didn’t think I could touch her. I had started to cry myself and Elyse had been forced to pull off the road and take care of both of us.

When I had finally sobbed myself out I said, “We will never talk of this, never,” and Elyse had said, “Of course not.” What would Jason and his father make of this little story? I may have told Tory too much today, more than I should have, but I will stop short of telling her the most wildly inappropriate thing of all: that when my grand love affair had finally ended, really and truly ended, she herself had been there.

Tory and I are looking at each other in the mirror. “Don’t be offended,” I say. “But we might need to go back in with some lowlights. Tone it down a bit.”

“It’s perfect,” she says, with that same irritating certainty her mother has, that same self-satisfied little toss of her head. “It’s like you’ve gone back in time.” She begins to gather up the towels, to throw all the little combs and bottles in her plastic bag.

“The omelets are ready,” Elyse yells up the stairs. She’s put on “Santa Baby,” Madonna’s version, and it’s so loud I can barely make out her voice.

I give myself one final glance in the mirror before I push to my feet. Like it or not, Tory’s right. I do look younger.

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

I
T IS THE
Christmas of strange gifts. When she sees the size of the check I’ve tucked inside a card for Tory, Elyse literally throws her hands up in the air. “Kelly,” she says warningly, “you’re too generous.” But the truth is I can’t seem to spend the money fast enough. My checking account is like a bathtub always on the verge of overflowing. I paid Carolina’s mortgage in November and it was lower than my power bill, and I’d asked myself yet again why I have such a big house. Isabel had invited us all over to her apartment one night after group class for a Christmas party. We sat on the fireplace and stairs, balancing paper plates on our knees. And it had been fun, but I still didn’t have the guts to invite everyone to my house the next time and just let them see that okay, yeah, I’m one of those gated-community types.

For Elyse I found a beaded clutch purse on a Hollywood auction site; they claimed it had once belonged to Elizabeth Taylor. She gives me a bowl. The latest theme of her pottery has been Native American gods, mostly Hopi ones based on kachinas, and my bowl shows this knobby little figure that she swears is the god of dance. She has modeled only his face, putting him down in the bowl and looking up, like he is at the bottom of some horribly deep well.

“He looks like he’s screaming,” Tory says, which isn’t far from the truth. Elyse’s pottery has always scared me a little. It’s rough and wild and she often puts odd things together so that her figures come out deformed. Now she launches into one of her long and rambling explanations about how children were initiated into adulthood and this god, whose name is Tunwup, snaps at them with his whip until they dance, and the dance is their transition into adulthood. Or something like that. Elyse’s Native American legends never make any sense, but this one is especially odd and Tory and I sit on the couch passing the bowl back and forth while she talks.

“Well, gee, Mom, that’s just a swell little story,” Tory says when she finishes.

“It’s sort of like a Native American version of Santa Claus,” Elyse persists. “Because the god isn’t real, of course, it’s just some man from the village with the tribal mask on. And he jumps around and flicks at them with his whip and then when it’s over, and they’ve danced, it’s revealed that he’s only a man dressed to represent the god. You know, he takes off the mask and it’s Uncle Joe or somebody. Explain it to her, Kelly.”

“I wouldn’t know where to start,” I say.

“Mom,” Tory says, laughing until she wipes her eyes. “That’s nothing at all like Santa Claus. I can’t believe Aunt Kelly gave you a vintage purse and you gave her some fake uncle god who beats children. It’s not a fair swap.”

“Of course it is,” Elyse says, leaning back against the couch, smiling. “She gave me something from a goddess and I gave her something from a god.”

“No, I get it,” I say. “Dance isn’t easy. I like the part about the whips and the initiation.”

“Precisely,” said Elyse. “You see, honey, your aunt Kelly and I understand each other.”

“And another thing,” I say, smiling over Tory’s blond head at Elyse. “Each time I look at this bowl I’ll remember that the god of dance is really just a regular man in a mask.”

“I still think it’s a weird-ass Christmas present,” Tory says.

TWO DAYS AFTER CHRISTMAS,
Isabel and I meet at the food court in the mall. “I’m worried about Nik,” she says, as we huddle over her Panda Express and my Jamba Juice. “I guess you heard his car got keyed.”

“What?”

“He didn’t tell you? Now see, I thought if he told anyone, it would be you. But maybe that’s not so weird because he was embarrassed about it. He wouldn’t let Quinn call the cops. And Builder Bob keeps showing up at the studio . . . I don’t think he’s going to rest until he gets our boy out of the country.”

I feel like she’s kicked me. “Start at the top. I don’t know half of what you’re talking about.”

“Okay,” she says. “Pamela’s husband is the guy who built the shopping center with the studio, right? Bob Hart. He owns half this side of town.”

“Yeah, I know him,” I say, thinking back to the pasty-faced man leaning on the doorframe of his study, with all those guns lined up behind his head. “He used to be on the board of hospice.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. He’s big noise. Wants to be in the paper all the time and everybody says he’s not the type who’ll just stand there while his wife runs off with some immigrant kid.”

“Bob Hart must be worth millions. I can’t see him keying somebody’s car.”

Isabel took another bite of cashew chicken. “Me either. But he has a bunch of roughnecks working for him and somebody might try to suck up to the boss.” She looks at me archly through the wild tufts of her hair. “And don’t think because he’s always throwing money toward charities that makes him a good guy. He’s already threatened to raise the rent on Anatoly.”

“I don’t think giving to charities automatically makes you a good guy. Are you saying he’s trying to get Anatoly to fire Nik?”

“Well, of course he wouldn’t say that, he’d just announce that it’s time to raise the rent. But Anatoly isn’t stupid. He told Quinn he knew way too many men like that back in Russia and that Bob could just suck his cock. I was standing right there when he said it. I mean, these guys talk like Boris and Natasha chasing moose and squirrel half the time but the minute they cuss, they become completely American. The accent goes right down the drain. When Anatoly said ‘Suck my cock,’ I swear it sounded like he was from Kansas.”

“I don’t understand,” I say. “You can’t have somebody deported because they’re sleeping with your wife. Not even Bob Hart can just call up the government and say ‘I don’t like this guy. Get rid of him.’ ”

Isabel smiles, but there’s an edge to it, a bit of an eye roll. She’s dealt with this stuff a lot longer than I have. “Nik is on a student visa, but he isn’t a student. Ordinarily, things like that can slide, for months or even for years, but if anything happens that draws attention to the person. You know, they commit a crime or get even halfway involved in some sort of trouble . . .”

“What sort of trouble?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. Anything. Anatoly got a stupid speeding ticket last year before he was legal and just about lost his mind. So Bob could inform the authorities that Nik’s student visa was a hoax or even just keep cranking up the rent on the ballroom until . . .”

“You don’t think Anatoly would cave, do you?”

Isabel violently shakes her head. “Builder Bob doesn’t know who he’s messing with. This is Anatoly’s business. His little world. He’s gone through hell and back twice to have his own studio and now he’s the king. And he’s not going to let some redneck, even a rich one, come through his door and tell him who he can employ and who he can’t. No, I’m not worried about Anatoly selling Nik out or even the shit about the car. I’m worried that Nik is going to feel so guilty that he does something stupid.”

“I can see that.” Nik knows how much the studio means to Anatoly. And when it comes to making a dramatic gesture for the sake of Pamela, yes, I can see that too. It’s not hard to imagine plenty of scenarios in which Nik’s fatalism would outrun his common sense.

“He’s a romantic,” Isabel says, spooning up the last of her rice. “And you know what that means. There’s no telling what he might do.”

"I GUESS YOU FEEL
like you have to bail them all out,” Elyse says.

“Bail who out?” I ask warily, although of course I know. I’ve just left the mall and her voice sounds kind of tinny and weird over the car speakerphone.

“Carolina. Nik. All of them. Whenever people get into trouble, you rush in to fix it. It’s just what you do.”

“Rich is the new pretty.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know. But I couldn’t bail them out if I wanted to. It’s tied up.”

“They told you that? Did you ever even ask?”

The light has changed and the car behind me honks, startling me. “I’m not talking tied up in a legal sense. It’s just that I still think of it as Mark’s money.”

“My grandmother always said that whenever a woman marries for money, she ends up earning it in the end.”

“I didn’t marry him for his money.”

“I know you didn’t. I’m just telling you what my grandmother said.”