Wallflower In Bloom (14 page)

“Uh-oh,” I said. “Word’s out.” I crossed over to Blythe and gave her a hug, while I peeked over her shoulder into the fridge at the same time.

“That’s an understatement,” Wendy said. “You’re all over the Internet.”

“Are you hungry?” Blythe asked, as if being all over the Internet was nothing so unusual, which was true, I supposed, if you’d been married to Tag. The only thing that made this situation the least bit remarkable was that it revolved not around Tag but around same-old-boring-no-life-of-her-own me.

“Starved,” I said. I simply had to play it cool, and before I knew it the whole
Dancing With the Stars
thing would just blow over the way these Internet things always did. The next time I was sitting in my brother’s kitchen with his two ex-wives, none of us would even remember it.

Wendy reached for a plate and some silverware. Blythe pulled a rectangular pan out of the fridge and started cutting me a big square of Afterwife’s famous spinach-and-portobello lasagna.

Since they seemed to have things under control, I climbed up on a stool at the kitchen island and drained the last drops of my coffee.

“It should still be warm,” Blythe said as she placed the lasagna in front of me. “But let me know if you’d like it heated.”

“Something else to drink?” Wendy asked.

“No thanks,” I said. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble.” I put my napkin on my lap, since I wasn’t alone, and started to eat. My brother’s two ex-wives stood there and watched.

“Delish,” I said between bites.

They both smiled and kept watching. I didn’t get it: two skinny blond women cooking all day and not eating anything. Maybe there was a vicarious thrill in there somewhere, the way I might scroll through page after page of shoes on the Zappos website without ordering and somehow feel satisfied enough when I was finished to just slide on my same old flip-flops again.

“So,” Wendy said. “Just do it. Tag will get over it.”

“He always does,” Blythe said.

“Exactly,” Wendy said.

I looked up. “We’re not talking about eating his lasagna, right?”

They both laughed. They even laughed alike. I loved them like sisters, and liked them even more sometimes, but the nagging possibility that Tag might clone his wives still creeped me out from time to time.

“Oh,” I said. “You mean
Dancing With the Stars
. Yeah, well, I’m waiting to hear back from the producer. I still don’t know anything officially yet.”

Blythe sighed. “Oh, no. You don’t think they—”

“Went with someone else?” Wendy finished.

“Why?” I said, surprising myself by feeling a twinge of disappointment. “Did you hear something I didn’t?”

They looked at each other.

“No,” Blythe said.

“We thought
you
did,” Wendy said.

It was like hearing double. My headache was coming back. And my lasagna was almost gone.

“No,” I said. I thought for a moment. “And I guess I’m not waiting that hard to hear back. The truth is I can’t decide whether or not to go. No. Actually the truth is I can’t even make myself think about whether or not I want to go. And my head hurts.”

Wendy opened Tag’s kitchen drawer and pulled out a pad of paper and a pen. “We’ll make a list—”

“Of the pros and cons,” Blythe said.

Wendy drew a line down the center of a page. Blythe and I watched her write
Pros
on one side and
Cons
on the other.

They looked at me.

“Okay,” I said. “Pros. One: I have no life. Two: I have no life. Three: Tag is coming home to kill me. Cons. One: I have nothing to wear.
Two: I haven’t danced since third grade. Three: If I do go through with it, Tag might kill me more.”

Wendy looked up from scribbling. “Those aren’t the things that matter.”

“It’s what’s in your heart that matters,” Blythe said.

I shook my head. “Do you two rehearse, or do you just naturally finish each other’s sentences?”

They looked at me. Neither of them said a thing.

“Sorry,” I said. “Okay, I think maybe I should do it. But I’m terrified. And it’s probably not going to happen anyway.”

Wendy looked at the paper in front of her as if it were a Magic 8 Ball. “All signs point to—”

“It’s looking like it will,” Blythe said, “so you need to deal with it.”

The lasagna was kicking in. “What I really need to deal with is a nap.”

“Who knows what doors it might open,” Wendy said. “Maybe it’s time to get excited—”

“About your life,” Blythe said.

I yawned. “I think I just want to lay low and hope that it all blows over by the time Tag gets home.”

“No,” Wendy said. “You’re telling yourself what you
should
want.”

“What you
should
be feeling,” Blythe said.

Wendy clasped her fingers together and stretched her seabird wrists up over her head. “When Tag and I split up, my whole family told me to pack up the kids and come back home. It’s crazy to stay, they said. Demeaning. Demoralizing. And I kept trying to convince myself that they were right, to persuade myself that’s what I wanted, but the truth is that Tag is a terrific ex-husband. And a wonderful father. He goes out of his way to get along with anyone I date. So I have a great life here, with or without him, but especially with.”

“Ditto,” Blythe said.

“So what it comes down to,” Wendy said, “is this: It’s not what you’re telling your heart—”

Blythe put one hand at the base of her throat, like a necklace. “But what your heart is telling you.”

I closed my eyes and listened. Then I turned and gazed out through the wall of windows, past the pool and across the vast fields beyond. I didn’t start to whine or try to fill the silence with a flip comment. I actually tried to hear what my heart was telling me.

Some of the leaves on the trees were just starting to change color. Birds and squirrels converged at the bird feeder, all focus and energy as they stocked up for the coming season. The setting sun was hitting the pool in such a way that half of it was in shadow and the other half sparkled with possibility.

I gazed into my brother’s ex-wives’ kind, open faces. Even the Afterwives had taken a bad situation and turned it into an opportunity. Maybe, just maybe, I could, too.

They smiled at me encouragingly.

“I think my heart is telling me to dance,” I said.

Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending
.

—M
ARIA
R
OBINSON

K
aren, the
Dancing With the Stars
producer, was fast. By the time I’d finished my lasagna and pep talk and gotten back to the sheep shed, she’d e-mailed me my e-ticket, as well as the confirmation for my rental car and directions to my temporary apartment.

My heart changed its mind immediately. I clicked Reply and attempted to wiggle my way out with a quick e-mail:
Sorry to last-minute you, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to participate after all. A sudden emergency has come up
.

Karen e-mailed back within seconds:
It’s called stage fright. You’ll be fine
.

I seriously doubted it, but I did what I had to do: I threw my dirty clothes into the washing machine.

I sat on my bed and gazed at nothing. Then I found the little piece of paper Joanie had given me with Steve Moretti’s phone number on it. I stared at it until my clothes finished the spin cycle.
So
, his message probably said,
how about breakfast? I’d like to pick your brain about the best way to present my business proposition to Tag
.

Or maybe it went like this:
Listen, I’m really sorry about that kiss. Let’s just have a nice breakfast and pretend it never happened, okay? Hey, by the way, what’s Tag’s cell number? I forgot to ask him for it and I really need to get in touch with him to follow up on something
.

Maybe it was better not to know what Steve’s message said. But then again, the sooner I found out how bad it was, the sooner I could get over it.

I took everything out of the washer and put it into the dryer. Joanie had said she’d erased all the angry voice mails from Tag and my parents, but by now another stream of them had landed to take their place. I deleted them as quickly as I could but still caught my father’s “Now, honey,” and my mother’s “Deirdre Marie Griffin, what were you—” Tag’s bombardment was relentless as usual and all about how pissed off he was and how ungrateful I was and how I’d better be on top of damage control. I hit Delete, Delete, Delete.

Finally, I found Steve’s message.

Hey, this is Steve. The guy you just kissed and ran away from? Anyway, just in case you’re wondering how I got your number, your father slipped it to me on a folded piece of paper right after your brother told me he’d break my face if I went near you again. So, family dynamics aside, what about breakfast tomorrow? I have an early meeting, so I’m thinking we get up at the crack of dawn and sneak out and find a real authentic Texas Starbucks. How about six thirty in the lobby?

I sat on my bed and played it three more times. The last time I said all the words out loud right along with him, like a duet. At best, it was inconclusive. Maybe he was actually interested in me and not Tag, but
maybe he was just smart enough to wait till we got to breakfast to tell me what he really wanted.

I did the math. At 6:30 that next morning Steve was referring to I was in another lobby in another state. I’d finished a sleepless night at the Sheraton near the Milwaukee airport and had just grabbed my own cup of coffee and a breakfast sandwich and was getting ready to take the shuttle back over to the terminal.

What if I hadn’t turned off my cell phone two nights ago? It could have been like one of those scenes in a star-crossed-lovers movie. I’d be in a taxi headed from the conference center to the airport, tears rolling down my face. Then the taxi driver would drop me off at the Austin airport, and between sobs I’d hand him some bills and tell him to keep the change. I’d run through the airport trying to catch the last plane out, and when I took my shoes off at security, a sprig of lemon basil would flutter to the floor. I’d pick it up and stare at it, hold it to my nose and breathe in the dwindling scent, and burst into tears again. I’d board the plane and take my seat. I’d gaze sadly out the window. And then my cell phone would ring. It would be Steve. Whatever he said would make me laugh. I’d get off the plane just in the nick of time. Music would soar and closing titles would roll and we’d live happily ever after.

An electronic buzzer went off. I jumped as if it were the perfectly timed phone call. But it was only the dryer. Because my life was not a movie. I couldn’t ask for a retake, a rewrite.

The perfect chiastic quote flitted just out of my reach. Something about how you can’t go back and start a new beginning, but you can start today and make a new ending.

As I folded my clothes from the dryer straight into my suitcase, I could almost imagine that new ending. The
Dancing With the Stars
thing would be a fond memory, or at least a distant one. I’d be sitting in my L.A. apartment, which was lovely but not pretentious. I’d have
just come back from a jog and finished showering, and as I slid into a silk robe and wrapped a plush towel around my hair, I’d pick up the phone. Because by then I’d know who I was and what I wanted my life to be, and exactly what I wanted to say to Steve Moretti.

But first, I had a long way to go. The
DWTS
shows lived and breathed by the fans online, that much I knew. And Tag was often referred to as a New Age phenomenon, but in many ways he was really a new media phenomenon. And, truth be told, I was responsible for creating him.

I’d once read that everyone in the movie industry had a number assigned to them based on their value. Nobody ever said the number out loud, but everybody in the know could tell at the drop of a name whether that person was a 45 or a 97 or a –3. Whether acting, directing, or costume designing offers came your way, whether your name made the invitation list for A-list premieres, and even whether or not you could get reservations at the right restaurants was based entirely upon this mysterious, fluctuating number.