ZANE AND ALICE had been together for almost nine years. When they broke up, Alice got the Volvo, their split-level ranch in the suburbs, and their old dog, Bud. Zane got a 1982 Subaru with body rot and a pale-pink-and-mint-green-flowered sofa bed. Alice liked pastels and small floral patterns. Colorless, Aurora called her. Then she’d say, “She’s ecru, she’s taupe. You, Beth, are purple. Bright purple.”
When Zane left me, he left the sofa bed behind. Like most things since I got pregnant, it made me feel nauseous. I hated that sofa bed. I hated pink, except in extreme cases like Pepto-Bismol. When I first went back inside after Zane drove off, I tried sitting in the family room. But that sofa bed glared at me, mocking. Upstairs, our bed with its happy rumpled sheets made me feel like crying. So I went back outside and stretched out on our front lawn. I stayed there, not thinking, until it got dark and the Milky Way appeared above me.
Then I went inside and called Aurora. It wasn’t until I heard her casual “Hello” that I started to cry.
ALL THE BAKING had begun with those pumpkins in our yard. Whenever I tried to carve happy faces on them, I ended up with jack-o’-lanterns that looked like the Elephant Man. Finally, I threw out the ghoulish shells and tried to figure out what to do with all the leftover pumpkin flesh. Pies, I thought. Ten pies, four dozen pumpkin cookies, and six loaves of pumpkin-spice bread later, I was a baking maniac. Now it was winter, and I had moved on to holiday baking—eggnog cheesecake, Swedish sugar cookies, Noel date bars.
“What you need,” Aurora told me as she nibbled a lemon-hazelnut biscotto, “is to make lists.”
“Lists,” I repeated. In the past when my heart was broken, I would drink jug zinfandel and eat lots of chocolate. This time, I couldn’t do either. I concentrated on my gingerbread people. Man, woman, child, all with happy icing clothes and wiggly smiles. A happy family.
Aurora wiped the crumbs from her chin and pulled out a pad and pen. “You need a lawyer. You need child support.” She glanced at my bulging stomach. “You need a birthing partner,” she said. She was starting to scare me. “Wait,” I said. “You’re assuming he’s not coming back.”
She cleared her throat, then patted my arm. “How could he choose someone so horsey over you? How could he choose a woman who buys furniture from furniture showrooms? You have Mexican antiques! You have folk art! You have style!”
That was when I really started to cry. I had everything, I thought, feeling the strange flutterings of our baby’s first movements. Everything except Zane.
WHEN I MET Zane, he and Alice had just split up. I had just split up with my boyfriend, Matthew, and had gone to Boston for the day to shop. Zane was in Crate and Barrel buying glassware. I was buying dishes. He came up to me, holding a wine goblet as if he were making a toast. “Your dishes,” he said, “and my glasses make a good combination.”
Zane was tall and blond, like a guy in a toothpaste ad. He looked too good: I was suspicious. But by the time we left the store and went for Italian food at the kind of restaurant people in movies go to—red-and-white-checked tablecloths, a candle dripping from a chianti bottle, a waiter whispering, “Ah . . . amore!” my suspicions had gone the way of all the wine and fettuccine Alfredo we’d had.
“Do you believe in love at first sight?” Zane asked me that night as he left me at my front door.
“Absolutely not,” Aurora told me the next morning when I told her the story. “Love at first sight is a myth. A line.”
The next time I saw Zane, we sat in my bathtub until our skin wrinkled, and told each other our life stories. He told me about Alice. I told him about Matthew. We discovered we both liked Indian food. We both loved the Isle of Skye. We both knew all the lines to The Graduate by heart. We both wanted to move to the country and have babies.
“Alice got indigestion from beef vindaloo,” Zane said, nuzzling my neck.
“Matthew said he could never be more than three miles from a building over ten stories high,” I told him.
“Alice thought Skye was too cold and rainy.”
“Matthew can never stay awake long enough to see when Benjamin and Elaine Robinson have their date,” I said.
Then Zane said exactly what I was thinking. “Beth,” he whispered, “we’re perfect for each other.”
“You’re nuts,” Aurora told me, as I packed all my belongings into liquor store boxes. “You’ve known this guy a week?”
I didn’t have a logical answer. All I could do was hum “Mrs. Robinson.”
FOR THOSE FIRST few months after Zane left, I thought about how foolish I had been. I was glad Aurora never said, “I told you so.” I walked around our old farmhouse and touched our things to remind myself these past months had been real. Here were our beeswax candles, our wreaths of dried herbs, our wedding vows framed in wood.