The Romance Reader's Guide to Life

“Pretty well,” I said. She’d been so busy trying to return to something like normal that a lot of my moods were passing by her unnoticed. I hoped this uncertainty I felt about Charles Helbrun and me breezed by her now. I didn’t have any other gentleman callers to compare him to. He turned every female head in the place whenever he stepped into the office. They thought I didn’t know that they asked one another why a guy who looked and walked and talked like Charles Helbrun III was dating a woman who looked and walked and talked like me. This both pleased me and made me feel bad. “He’s great,” I said. “We’re great.”


“Amazing,” Lilly said. “In the end I’m the idiot about men and my hermit sister is the one who gets it right and snags the rich, handsome, smart guy.” She sat down, looking suddenly more like a sack of sand with a good haircut than a gay divorcée. “This is the last I’ll say of it,” she said. “Neavie, I’ve known men who made me a little nervous, but in the end Ricky was … more. I swear I didn’t know there were men like him. And when I should have seen it, I didn’t. Something about him was like a barbed hook set right through my brain, pulling me toward him. I’ll never marry again. I’m bad at it. I’ve got the very worst kind of judgment about men and I’ve got Annie to think about. So I’ve decided to stop making mistakes. No more husbands.”

“I don’t think it works like that, Lilly. You can’t just wave a wand and make yourself different. You love men.”

“I do,” she nodded. “Which makes the whole situation sad.” She lit a cigarette and sighed. Her mascara had raccooned around her eyes, which shone like a child’s with a high fever. “A little magic would help right now,” she said. “Or a facial.”





LILLY

Meat

I moved Annie and me out of the warehouse and into our own apartment a few months after I got back from Reno. I knew Neave wasn’t happy to see us go. I said things to her like I’m a grown-up and a mother to boot. I should be on my own. I leave dishes in the sink and wet towels on the floor and it drives you nuts. Me and Annie get in the way of your social life. The truth is I wanted to live my life without Neave looking over my shoulder. I wasn’t worried about Annie because I knew Jane and Neave and my little flock of daytime babysitters would back me up any time I needed help or just wanted some leeway so I could do a little coming and going. So I moved out and I did some coming and going.

When Neave found the bloody hunk of meat on the warehouse apartment back door I felt a kind of a thud, like something inside me had fallen off a shelf. I was really determined not to know what I knew, so I said things to her like, Some idiot’s idea of a joke, but I knew it wasn’t a joke.

She was pretending not to be rattled, but she was. That kind of surprise can make your blood feel like you got picked up and shaken like a cocktail. When I got to the office she took me upstairs and led me to the back door. The nail was driven through a section of marbled gristle and fat. I’d never noticed how much real blood there was in a piece of meat before you cooked it. A little stream of it had run down the door and puddled at the mat.

“I’m throwing that mat away,” Neave said. “Who would do this?”

She pulled the bleeding meat off the nail and held it away from herself. The thing in her hands looked very much more like part of a dead animal than it looked like the main course in a good dinner. She stuffed it in the trash she’d brought out to the fire escape. “Get some bleach, will you?” she said to me. “And scrub brushes.”

She did most of the cleanup. I was in a good suit and she hadn’t gotten dressed for work yet. But I stood and watched while she worked, the two of us there, the brush scrtchhscrtchh-ing, and the traffic just beginning to wake up and move in the street below. It was cool and sunny, a beautiful day. When she finished scouring, she took off every piece of clothing she’d had on her and stuffed it all in the trash after the meat.

“People in the company come up and down here sometimes if I send them up to get something. People know I live here. Have we fired anybody recently who was kind of odd?”

I said, “Everybody is kind of odd. It was probably some drunk. Somebody who got the wrong door.”

“Lilly, the door has the company name on it.”

“Well. When you’re drunk…” I said.

We were not right with each other all day at work. At lunch Neave said, “You know I’m walking around looking at everybody—our own sales staff, the accountant, the coffee-shop guys in the building next to us, and I’m thinking, Was it you?”

So when we were alone at the end of the afternoon I knew I had to do it. I told her that I’d lied when I said I had no idea who would hang the meat on the door. Neave can get real quiet and she was quiet now.

“I’ve been seeing Ricky. I didn’t tell you because I knew what you’d say.”

“Why would you do something that stupid?”

Which was exactly what I thought she’d say. Neave has always had a habit of looking at things and then telling you what she sees. I said, “Just before Annie and I moved out he called and said just a drink just for old times. I said no. Then I said yes. Then I said yes again. It’s my own business, Neave. I’m a grown woman. The reason I’m telling you is that Ricky has been saying things. Sort of crazy things. And the meat, and the way it’s waiting here on the door, it’s Ricky all over. I think maybe it could be for you. From him.”

“I haven’t seen Ricky Luhrmann since before you divorced him. Why would I even cross his mind?”

The fact was that Neave crossed Ricky’s mind quite a bit and what he said about my sister might, conceivably, have led to this piece of meat on a door: Neave had poisoned our marriage; Neave was jealous of me; Neave did what she wanted with the company and didn’t consult me; Neave had hired a pack of lawyers to keep the company away from him though he was my legal husband and the company was legally his. Part his. The rants began to lead to the same place: she hated men.

“I don’t know why,” I said to her. This was both the truth, and not the truth.

Neave looked at the nail on the door. “So this is a threat?” Her face was pasty white and her lips were just two pencil-thin lines. “Break it off, Lilly. Get rid of him. Now.”

“I can manage things, Neave. Calm him down.”

“Lilly. Remember the night you and Annie jumped out the window.”

“I can control him.”

“Clearly you can’t control him,” she said.

Then Neave said she was going to track that lunatic down and I said that would be the dumbest thing to do when Ricky was in this frame of mind. I knew him through and through, I said, which didn’t end up being accurate. Stay out of it, I told her. I’d talked Ricky Luhrmann down from all kinds of ledges and I could do it again.

I was still stupid enough at that point to think that was the truth. I was wrong.

Neave, I’m so sorry.





BOPPIT

Where We Are, Where I Want to Go

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