Lovely You Read online

  “Joey told me that you gave him your bedroom,” Nate mentioned. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “It’s fine,” I dismissed him. “I don’t sleep in there, anyway.”

  “Where do you sleep? There’s no bed in the other room.”

  Joey nudged him. “Boyfriend, Jedi. She’s over at his place.”

  Or couch, Jedi, but I didn’t correct Joey. He kept talking about what they had done that day, his first appointment with the new doctor, some sightseeing, while I filled the dishwasher with the new flatware, plates, pots, and all that shit. I didn’t think I had ever used this appliance but I had to have soap, somewhere. I looked under the sink and in the cupboards before giving up.

  I looked up and met Nate’s eyes. “You really don’t spend a lot of time here,” he agreed.

  I shrugged. “You know how it is,” I said evasively.

  “You don’t eat here much. There wasn’t any food so I got some groceries to make dinner for us. Are you interested? Or do you have plans?” I had forgotten how dark his eyes were. Almost black, like the polished onyx of my mom’s old necklace.

  “No, I don’t have plans. I had bought food for you,” I told Joey, who smiled at me and said thanks.

  “Beer and celery. Fancy crackers,” Nate enumerated my purchases. “What do you eat?”

  “The regular stuff.” Really, I tried not to eat anything. Maintaining the “look” was part of my job, and not consuming carbs, fats, or other caloric material helped with that. “Wait, you cook?”

  “When I want to eat,” he answered.

  Joey announced that he needed to take Pia out and I watched him leave. “Should I have gone with him?” I asked Nate.

  “He’s an adult,” he said shortly, then seemed to relent, his face relaxing a little. “I know you didn’t get a good impression of him when we went out in Hawaii, but he can take the dog for a walk.”

  “Then why did you come here to California with him?”

  He took things out of my refrigerator. “If he needs brain surgery, I want to be here.”

  “Brain surgery?”

  “They need to stop his seizures. They’re going to try new medications and some different things, but surgery is an option.”

  Jesus. I sat down on my counter stool. “They’re that bad? Is that why he has the dog?”

  “Pia has been a lifesaver. Literally. He was incredibly lucky to get her.” Nate stopped chopping. “Has he talked to you about what to do, if he has a seizure here? Although, you just said that you’re not here very often.”

  “No, I should know,” I said, so Nate filled me in while he kept cooking. It smelled delicious and I hunched over a little, my arms over my stomach, so he couldn’t hear it growl.

  “Is that likely to happen?” I asked. “He may have a seizure?”

  Nate sighed. “Yes, unfortunately, and that’s why we’re here.”

  Joey came back in and he and Nate got involved in a big conversation about the local baseball team. “I can get tickets,” I mentioned. “I know one of the players. Former players. He used to party with my sister, back in the day.” I made a note on my phone to ask Zara.

  “Thanks, Scarlett!” Joey said again, for the hundredth time.

  I shrugged. “You don’t have to keep thanking me. I’m not doing anything. I don’t care that you’re staying here, it’s not a big thing for me to get tickets for a stupid baseball game.”

  “Thanks, anyway.” He looked around for a place for us to eat. I didn’t have a table, and only the one chair. “You’re not much for furniture.”

  “More is getting delivered tomorrow,” I told him, and made another note on my phone to make that happen.

  Nate, surprisingly, was not a bad cook. In fact, it was delicious. He and Joey weren’t afraid to eat and after a while I did too, and before I knew it, I had cleaned my damn plate. And had to open the top button on my pants because of it.

  “It was good?” Nate asked, pointing at my empty dish with his fork.

  “It was fine,” I told him. He waited. “Thank you,” I added finally, and he shook his head. But then he smiled, too. It was the one I remembered, that turned up just the one side of his lips.

  “I guess you haven’t been practicing saying it,” he mentioned, and I thought of how many times the words “thank you” had left my mouth in the last few months. I could barely remember saying it at all, until tonight.

  Joey looked back and forth between us. “I’m heading to bed. Unless, Scarlett?” He looked at me, waiting.

  “No, I don’t want to join you,” I told him.

  He actually blushed. “I meant, do you want your room?”

  “Nope. Goodnight.”

  I got up to wash the dishes, because it was a thing, that if one person cooked, the other cleaned. That was how my brother and Lanie did it, not that I wanted to emulate them.

  I finally found the right soap and shoved more plates into the dishwasher, remembering doing the same thing when I was a kid. My mom had loved to cook and so had my dad and the three of us kids had done some clean-up. They had usually made dinner together, talking about their days, laughing, and tasting. When he had died, my mom had cut way back on the cooking. Now she did it up for the holidays, and that was about it. I thought back to all of us eating together around the table in my parents’ old house.

  “Scarlett.”

  I jumped and dropped one of the new plates. It fell onto the tile floor of the kitchen and shattered.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” Nate said, and bent to pick up pieces.

  I did, too. “I’ll get it,” I told him. “I probably have a vacuum cleaner.”

  He sat back on his heels. “Miss Scarlett, in the kitchen, with a vacuum cleaner.”

  “I always had to be her when we played that game as kids. The red player gets to go first,” I remembered.

  Nate stared at me, thoughtfully. “I don’t get you,” he said.

  I sat back too, my hands full of broken glass. “What’s there to get?”

  “Just when I think I have you pegged, you do something different and I realize I don’t know you at all.”

  “Pegged as what? A bitch?” I stood and dropped the shards into the garbage. “That’s about right.” I suddenly felt like I needed some air. “I’m going to go for a run.”

  “Now?” He peered at the windows. “It’s pitch-black. No.”

  “You don’t tell me what to do!” I had to get out for a while. Without the mindless sports shows to distract me, I didn’t want to be here. “I’ll go to the gym.”

  Nate was still watching me, very quiet and still. “We’ll go for a walk,” he announced.

  “You just said it was too dark,” I protested.

  “Too dark for you to go out running, alone. You’re fine with me. Get something to put on. It’s fucking cold in this town.”

  “Tourist,” I muttered. But I was glad when we went downstairs and I had a coat on. It was a beautiful night to walk along the Embarcadero, but the wind was a little chilly after the heat of the day.

  Nate apparently didn’t feel the need to talk, and I had nothing to say to him, so we walked along the wide sidewalk in silence for a while, looking at the water of San Francisco Bay. You could almost, but not quite, see it from my apartment. I felt like I needed it.

  “I saw you watching the waves in Hawaii.”

  I glanced up at him. “Why were you looking at me?”

  “Sometimes you need to rest your eyes on something other than the interior of the refrigerator.”

  I guessed I could converse. “I like the water,” I said begrudgingly. “It makes me feel better. I mean, I makes me feel happy.”

  He nodded in the darkness. “I’m used to seeing the ocean from my house. I don’t like how I can’t in my hotel room.”

  “Where are you staying?” I asked casually, and he mentioned a hotel and where it was, a pretty shitty part of town. A group of men walked toward us on the sidewalk, obviousl
y drunk, and loud.

  “They won’t bother you,” Nate remarked, just as casually. He took my arm and moved me to the inside of him, away from the crowd, and sort of angled his body so that I was behind his back as we walked by them.

  My heart slowed gradually. “What?” I asked, like I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Who?” I swallowed. “Whatever. Why can you stay in a hotel and Joey can’t?”

  “Do you want him out already?” Nate asked me.

  “No! But why can’t he stay with you?”

  He sighed a little, very quietly. “He was insisting on paying for half. He doesn’t have the money.”

  “Oh.”

  “It isn’t right that you don’t have anywhere but the couch,” he said. “Unless you’ll be at your boyfriend’s?”

  I had a terrible, terrible feeling that he knew with his mind-reading that there was no boyfriend. “I ordered more mattresses for the guest bedroom,” I said instead.

  “You’ll have to move out all those clothes racks,” he mentioned. I had rolled them out of the master bedroom and thrown in everything else after them, piles and piles. “You have a lot of stuff.”

  “Yeah, well, you wore a uniform, right? That’s mine. I have to look the part. I have to dress in my uniform, every day,” I said stiffly.

  “Explain your job to me. Joey said some things that don’t make sense.”

  I had mentioned to Joey that I was in PR and that mostly was all I had said, so I wondered what part had been confusing. I told Nate now about what I did all day, trying to make it sound exciting and important. It was not.

  He didn’t answer after I finished. We walked for a while more and then he took my arm again, and steered me in a circle. “What time do you leave for work? Joey said you were gone when he got up.”

  “I run or bike, or swim some mornings, then I go to work. I’m out of the house for good by seven and after work maybe I’ll go to a class or something if I have time. I get back about nine-ish.”

  “That’s a long day.”

  “I’m not some kind of stupid dilettante. I work hard, six or seven days a week. Long hours.”

  “I didn’t say a word,” he said calmly.

  “I know what you’re thinking!” I retorted, but I didn’t, not really. I wished I could know his thoughts. But I guessed that I probably hadn’t made the job sound good enough, and it had seemed like empty, ridiculous fluff.

  Nate sighed again, but now very audibly. “You’re like a cat getting rubbed the wrong way all the time.” He let go of my arm, which I had been allowing him to hold. “Is the problem you, or is it me?”

  It was me, the woman he hadn’t wanted to kiss. “It’s not me,” I said haughtily.

  “I guess that’s our answer.” We walked the rest of the way to my building in silence and he left me at the door. I turned back once I had opened it, but he had already disappeared off into the darkness.

  ∞

  I managed to keep myself extremely busy working, working out, and working on avoiding my house for the rest of the week. If I got up and left extremely early, and got home extremely late, it was like I hardly even lived there at all. I collapsed on the couch when I got home, still clothed, and hit the repeat button for the next day. My sleepless eyes watched the numbers on my phone change to 5:00 as I got up every morning.

  I did the same thing on Saturday, except when I got home that night, Joey was still there, awake. “Here she is,” he announced when I came in. Pia jumped up and wagged her tail, and he had to tell her that he meant me. It was actually pretty cute.

  “Did you work today too, or were you out having fun?” he asked me.

  “Some people think work is fun,” I answered. I was not one of those people, however. “What did you do today?”

  He and Nate had been to the baseball game with the tickets I had gotten. “The seats were awesome. Here.” He took a hat off the table that I had recently purchased. “For you. Since you live here, you must be a Redwoods fan.”

  “Oh, totally,” I told him. “Thank you.” I put it on.

  “Nate got it for you,” he mentioned nonchalantly.

  “Oh.”

  “Are we still going to the party tomorrow?” Joey asked. He seemed very excited by this. I, of course, was not. It was my mom’s party so that meant I would be with my sister and her disgusting husband, my overbearing brother and his weak fiancée, my mom and her endless questions. “Not that I mind hanging with Jedi, but it would be nice to meet some more people. Since I may be here for a while. If that’s ok with you.”

  “You probably don’t want to know my family.” I hesitated. “I mean, they’re not all bad,” I amended.

  “Why don’t you like them?”

  “I don’t like anybody too much,” I admitted. His face kind of fell. “Besides you.” I quickly added.

  That made Joey crack up. “What about Pia?”

  The black dog was watching me. She didn’t seem to miss much. And yes, there was some extra hair around the apartment, but she was well-behaved. “I don’t mind Pia."

  He laughed again. “Um, what is Nate up to tonight?” I asked him.

  “He’s out with a medic we knew.”

  “I thought most of your friends had moved away from here,” I mentioned, and he nodded.

  “Yeah, she really wanted to see him when she heard he was here. She drove like three hours or something so they could go out.”

  She? A funny sensation wound around my throat. “Like, a date, huh?”

  Joey shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “That’s great,” I told him.

  I must have said it oddly, because Joey shot me a questioning look. But all he said was, “What do you usually do on Saturday nights?”

  “Um, I go out,” I lied. “But I’m kind of tired.”

  “Yeah, you work a lot,” he said, admiringly. “Your job must be really important.”

  “Uh...”

  “You should just relax.”

  The three of us—Joey, me, and the dog—settled down on my couch and Joey didn’t mind when I put on a free diving competition in Egypt. Pia started off on his end of the cushions but then stretched out so her head was on my foot. He snapped his fingers at her to move.

  “No, I don’t mind her,” I said again.

  Joey scratched her ears. “She’s a lifesaver, you know? Not just with the seizures. Getting her changed a lot. I couldn’t be a total asshole anymore.”

  “Just partial?”

  “Exactly,” he said, grinning. “Pia needs me, too. I can only be a partial asshole.”

  Gradually the dog worked her way over until she was cuddled against me, her head on my hip and her body curled in the curve of my legs. She was really warm and feeling her heartbeat and breathing was oddly comforting. It made me get pretty drowsy and I let my eyes close rather than fighting to keep them open. I definitely got a few hours of sleep before I woke up with Joey and Pia gone, the blanket over me, and the TV off. I flipped it back on and watched a darts competition until it was light enough to go out for a run.

  I heard Joey on the phone when I walked into the living room after getting dressed when I got home. I had been debating my outfit a lot and had decided to go with something baggy, my hair back into a tight ponytail. Maybe the unflattering look would convince Bradley to keep his paws to himself. Or maybe I would just have to kick him in the balls and lose my sister’s love forever. I hoped the baggy clothes worked and that I could keep my foot out of his crotch.

  “Yeah, a little off today,” Joey was saying to someone. “It’s making Pia anxious.” Silence. “Nah, I still want to go.” Pause. “Scarlett? Sure, I’ll talk to her.” More silence. “Jedi, you’re not my father. Shit, that sounds like a line from one of the movies. But I’m serious, man. I can handle my own stuff now…Yes, yes, I’ll ask her!”

  I had been hiding behind the half-open door, eavesdropping, and I decided that it was time to come all the way out. “Ready to go?” I asked him.
>
  “Yeah.” He looked embarrassed. “Yeah, yeah.” He hesitated. “Can I ask you a favor? I mean, more than you letting me stay free at your house?” He looked even more embarrassed.

  “Sure.” I waited. “Spit it out,” I ordered, when he didn’t continue.

  “They’ve been playing around with my meds a little, and I’m feeling like, uh, I’m feeling a little off.”

  That was what he had just said on the phone to Nate. “What does that mean?” I asked. “Do you mean that you’re going to have a seizure?”

  “I don’t know. Pia sometimes lets me know if I don’t see it myself, and she isn’t alerting like I’m going to, but she’s acting different, too,” he explained. “It could be just that we’re in a new place, doing new things, but it’s making me a little, uh, nervous.”

  “Then we shouldn’t go to my mom’s.” As worried as I was that something was wrong with Joey, I also felt relieved that the party was not happening for me. “We can skip it.”

  “No, of course not. You should still go. I want to, also. I mean, the favor was, would you mind if Nate came too? He’s really worried and I would feel, I guess, more comfortable, you know…” He looked so pained I had to step in.

  “I think it’s better if nobody goes. It’s not a big deal,” I told him.

  “But you’re all dressed up!” he exclaimed, gesturing at my ugly, ill-fitting outfit. “And your mom expects us. If I did that to my mom, told her I was coming and bringing someone and then didn’t show, she would be pissed.” He hesitated. “And you said that your mom has the yard, where Pia could play and relax. That would be nice for her.”

  We both looked over at the dog. Maybe she did look anxious, but I was no dog mind reader.

  “Would your mom care if you brought a second guest, too?” Joey asked me.

  I threw up my hands, disgusted. “Of course not! Bring him.”

  “Seriously?” he called to my back as I retreated into the bedroom to change my clothes and fix my hair.

  “Seriously!” I yelled.

  So that was how I ended up driving Joey, Pia, and Nate over to my mom’s house in Ross, north of San Francisco. They had already walked across the Golden Gate Bridge, freezing in the battering wind and icy fog. Regular summer weather had returned to the city. Joey was completely entranced by the bridge, and he told me about International Orange paint, the weight in tons, how much it could sway, etc., etc., and asked me questions about it too. I neither 1) knew, or 2) cared, but it was kind of fun to see it through his eyes. Maybe I was just the tiniest bit jaded. I told Joey about Marin County, where we were heading, and where I had grown up. “Pia would like it,” I said. “Lots of good places for dogs.” I glanced at her in the back seat and saw her ears perk up.