It’s Sunday, the worst day of the week. Or it used to be the worst; now Sundays are the perfect opportunity to rub my hands together and see how far I can push the Roses. Sunday is the new birthday.
It’s not bragging to say that my next move is a masterpiece. I check the clock and count forty-five minutes until my grand reveal. Forty-five long, excruciating minutes in what’s been the slowest day on record. It’s getting hard to hold it in, especially since it’s no coincidence that my Steelers hoodie went “missing” during the move.
I don’t want him to expect what’s coming, so I’m generous with my smiles today. I slip Nicholas polite inquiries, pleases, and thank-yous like Trojan horses. This might have backfired on me, because he looks more suspicious than ever and all his suspicion has put him in a bad mood.
“You’re still in pajamas,” he tells me. I check the clock again. Forty-three minutes to go. If time were moving any slower, it would be going backward.
“So? I’ve got time.”
“So, we’re meeting my parents at the restaurant in forty-five minutes
—”
“Forty-three.”
“—And it takes you an hour to get dressed. Simple math, Naomi.”
It takes fifteen minutes to get dressed, if I haven’t already picked out an outfit. It takes another fifteen minutes to do my hair, followed by fifteen minutes for makeup. Then I have to account for other last-minute stuff like tweezing my eyebrows or clipping my nails. Switching out snagged pantyhose. Foraging for a missing shoe. Getting ready takes an hour.
Getting ready encompasses more than the simple act of pulling on clothing.
I decide to be offended. It’s been a while, and it’s so much fun, so I guide him in the right direction to give me some material I can misconstrue. “It’s fine, I’ll just throw on a sweater and pants a few minutes before we leave.”
“You’re not going to take forever to do your hair and makeup?”
Perfect. Thank you, Nicholas, you’re such a dove. “You think I need makeup, then?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“You’re implying that I’m not presentable in public unless I have a full face of makeup on.”
“No. I absolutely did not imply that.”
“I suppose I should take three hours to curl my hair, too, right?” I make my voice tremble. I am the victim of horrendous misdeeds. “Because I’m not pretty enough the way I am? I suppose you’re embarrassed to bring me around your family unless I conform to society’s impossible beauty standards for females?”
His eyes narrow. “You’re right. Your hair’s an embarrassment in its natural state and your face is so anti–female beauty that if you go out like that, I’d insist on you walking backward and ten feet away from me. I want you to go upstairs right now and paint yourself unrecognizable.” He arches his eyebrows. “Did I do that right? Are those the words you’d like to put in my mouth?”
My chin drops. He lowers his gaze to a newspaper and flicks the page.
He did it for dramatic effect. I know he didn’t get a chance to finish reading the article he was on.
“Actually, I’d like to put an apple in your mouth and roast you on a spit,” I say.
“Go ahead and wear pajamas to dinner, Naomi. You think that would bother me? You can go out dressed as Santa Claus and I wouldn’t care.”
Now I genuinely am insulted. “Why wouldn’t you care?”
He raises his eyes to mine. “Because I think you’re beautiful no matter what.”
Ugh. That’s really low, even for him. I spin away from the liar and go to wash another load of bedclothes. All of our blankets and pillows got streaked with grime in the U-Haul, so Nicholas has been spending all day washing everything while I scrub the rest of the house down with wipes. I have nothing against Leon, and he lived cleanly, but I do feel a little like I need to scrub him out of the house. His eyes are in the walls, following us wherever we go.
I check the dryer and holy god, this man is going to burn us to the ground. “You need to clean out the lint trap! Letting it get this packed is a fire hazard.”
“You’re a fire hazard,” I distinctly hear him mutter under his breath.
“I know you’re used to having a woman do all the housework for you, but I might not always be around. You should listen to me. I’m trying to educate you and help you to grow as a person.”
“How about you put your advice in a pamphlet and I’ll take a look at it when you’re finally gone?” he replies.
I make the trip upstairs as violently loud as I can. Maybe I go a little overboard, because I slip on the edge of a step and save myself by hugging the railing. I glance down, hoping he didn’t catch what happened, but of course he did. His quiet laugh sucks one year from my life span. “Are you all right, honey?” he calls up, sweet as cotton candy.
“Shut up. Go draw your mother a bubble bath.”
“You’re obsessed with my mother.”
I’m sure we’ve traumatized the house. It’s used to quiet, sensitive Leon.
It’s probably never had to deal with this level of vitriol before. Nicholas and I are monsters nowadays and I don’t like either of us, but I definitely don’t like who I was before, the Naomi who kept her mouth shut and didn’t speak her truth, so there’s no going back. Nicholas and I are in a free fall.
I grumble obscenities into my closet, chucking Snoopy and Woodstock pajamas over my shoulder. I’m tempted to keep them on, but I’ve got applications circulating and knowing my luck, a manager at someplace I’m trying to get hired would see me. No one wears Snoopy and Woodstock pajamas to a steak-house unless they’re Going Through Some Shit.
I do, however, carefully choose a bumblebee-yellow shirt that washes me out. I tug my hair into an unflattering low ponytail, bangs sticking straight up like I’ve been electrocuted. I don’t bother to dab concealer under my eyes. As a matter of fact, I dab some faint purple eyeshadow there. I look like a pilgrim with cholera. Mrs. Rose is going to have a field day with my appearance, which I’ll punish her son for after we get home.
My feelings are already so hurt, I can’t help but smile at my reflection.
“Hurry up!” Nicholas complains outside my door. He jiggles the knob and it’s locked, obviously. I’ve just gotten back the luxury of having a bedroom all to myself after a year of sharing and he’s not invited in. “You waited until the last minute, like I knew you would. It’s irresponsible to arrive late! I’ll have to text Mom and tell her what our drink orders are, because you were dicking around all day and couldn’t bother showering or putting on actual clothes until it was almost dark out!”
“I’m basically ready!” I yell back. “All I have to do is put my shoes on and …” I fill the rest of the sentence with low-volume nonsense.
“And what?”
“Get off my back. We’ll get there when we get there.”
“That’s not how civil society functions. How about you grab your makeup bag and put all your crap on in the car?” It’s adorable how he assumes I’m in here making myself pretty instead of smearing a pentagram on the floor in my own blood and casting hexes on him.
I turn fully around to face the door. “How about you go iron your socks like a complete psychopath? Anyway, leave if you want. I’ll meet you there.”
This has been the goal all along. I want him to leave without me.
“If we take separate cars, Mom and Dad are going to think something’s up.”
“Your dad probably doesn’t even know what year it is. Your mom will be grateful for something new to talk about. She’s been beating that Heather-didn’t-send-a-card-for-Mother’s-Day dead horse for eons.”
He hesitates. “Are you sure?”
It’s Sunday evening. The wait for a table will be ridiculous. I picture a line of people trailing out the door, wrapping around the building. Two of them will be in matching sweater vest combos, fuming over the mysterious cancellation of their reservation.
“Go on.”
I watch his Jeep pull away from the house before flying downstairs and grabbing my keys. Leon said he’d meet me at the Junk Yard. After that, I’ve got fifteen minutes to book it to Beaufort and make a spectacle of myself. Nicholas is too good a soldier to bend his will to my plan A and give up on his own. He won’t submit unless his commander forces the order. Up until now, whenever I needled Deborah, it was for the purpose of annoying Nicholas. I knew she’d whine at him about me in private. Whining at him just isn’t going to be enough. Luckily, I can get way worse! I’m going to make myself so obviously unfit to have around that Mrs. Rose will threaten to write Nicholas out of the will if he doesn’t call off the wedding.
My ploy is a beautiful seven-layer cake. I don’t have to cancel the wedding, and neither does my beloved fiancé. We’re going to get his parents to do our dirty work for us: plan D. I’m casually setting fire to everything and it feels awesome.
Plan D is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, which I realize about halfway to Beaufort. In all of my scheming, giddy over the visual appeal of me rolling up to dinner in this Frankenstein’s monster of a car, I failed to remember that my new whip is a stick shift.
I had to feign confidence about this to Leon, because by then he already had the keys to my Saturn and was elated about the trade-up. (“Are you sure? Your car’s in much better shape than mine. Why do you want it? Are you sure?”) In my head, it looked like this: Nicholas bought Leon’s house without consulting me, so I’d go and buy Leon’s car without consulting him. I’d stun Mr. and Mrs. Rose, who are so snobby about cars that they make the landscaper park his rusty pickup in the garage to hide it from the neighbors.
They’ll see Nicholas’s Jeep and know something’s wrong with his brain.
When they see my car, they’ll believe that whatever’s wrong with his brain is me. I’m a lower-class nobody with no shame who doesn’t deserve their son. I’m a madwoman, and I’ll drag him down to my level. No country club in Wisconsin will admit their precious boy when they see what kind of wife he’s shackled to.
I paid attention during Leon’s mini lesson, but even though he told me I have to accelerate at the same time I let off the clutch, when I first tried to get going I didn’t release the clutch quickly enough and the car shot forward, knocking over a dumpster in the Junk Yard’s lot.
The poor start got me rattled, I’ll admit. As I drive jerkily down the road in a car that still smells like pine forest, white-knuckling the wheel and gearshift, my nerves start to clash with the endorphin rush I get when I visualize Deborah’s face as I squeal this monstrosity into a parking space.
I begin to think I’ve made a grave error of judgment here.
I know for sure I have when I clatter and shake into Beaufort and the car stalls at a stoplight. I’ve forgotten to either hold down the clutch or shift into neutral while braking. Or something. I can’t remember Leon’s instructions anymore because there’s a line of twenty cars backed up behind me and the light’s green, but my vehicle is throttling me like I owe it money. I brake and put the car back into neutral, but I’m stressed and my other foot hits the gas. Everything is bad. Panic overwhelms. It’s fight or flight.
I abandon the car at the intersection, leaving the door wide open. People are honking. Someone rolls down their window and yells. I want to go back and shut the door, but adrenaline is burning up my veins and I can’t go back there; I’m never going back to that car for as long as I live, or to Morris, and all I know how to do now is run. Straight down into a ditch and up the other side into the parking lot of a shuttered Kmart, running, running, my nervous system on fire. I’m going to keep running all the way to California. I’ll change my name and start a new life.
This is the sunniest prospect I’ve had in ages.
I don’t pause to catch my breath until I’m on the other side of the Kmart, November air solidifying into ice cubes in my lungs. I’m so thankful for the big, empty building shielding me from all my problems.
One of the drivers who honked at me is undoubtedly on the phone with a 911 operator. The situation will be eagerly described to an officer Who Has No Time For This Shit by ten bystanders, and everyone on the scene will deduce that I’m high on bath salts. They’ll call a tow truck while a cop chases me down with a Taser.
Frankencar’s still registered to poor, well-meaning Leon and he’s going to take the fall for me. I have to go back. I’m never going back.
My thighs are cold and chafed, so the buzzing in my pocket doesn’t catch my full attention until the fourth time it happens. It’s Nicholas, of course.
You’re VERY late. Where are you??
I’m out of your reach, Dr. Rose. I’m in no-man’s-land. Good luck trying to find me out here behind the decaying husk of a superstore.
That’s what I want to reply. But according to my phone it’s fifty-three degrees with RealFeel of forty-eight, and I’m not cut out for a life of consistent exercise. I’m so out of shape that I’m still wheezing, dreams of California dissolving into the wind. I’m going to get stabbed out here. I’m so glad I’m wearing real clothes instead of pajamas.
Save me, I reply instead. I whine it aloud, too.
From what?
You. Your mother. Frostbite.
I snap a picture of the parking lot and send it. Car broke down. I’m stranded.
His phone call cuts me off midsentence: I’ve got Dots candy in my coat pocket. I’m going to leave a trail like Hansel and
“Naomi?” He sounds afraid. “How far into town are you? What happened?”
“That car is crap!” I exclaim. “It tried to kill me.”
“I told you a million miles ago to change your oil and you said it was none of my business.” In his mind, he’s twirling through a field of I-Told-You-So’s. That’s his idea of heaven.
“Not that car. I traded it for Leon’s clunker. It’s a stick shift, Nicholas. I don’t know how to drive a fricking stick shift! Bad things happened and I left it in the middle of the road. Now I’m in a Kmart parking lot.” I kick a rock and squint up at the gray building, then a scattering of other dark buildings with empty parking lots along the same strip. I’m in a retail graveyard. “Maybe it’s a Toys R Us.”
“Jesus Christ.” I can hear cars whooshing by on his end of the line. He’s out on the sidewalk.
“Don’t let me die here. I want to be somewhere warm when I go.”
“Yeah, better ease into those warmer temperatures. It’ll get a lot hotter once you arrive at your destination.” I’m about to wail. “You need to tell me exactly where you are.”
I wring my hands. Nicholas is on the phone, which makes him feel close, so it’s okay to freak out now. He’s going to remain calm no matter what. We’ve always been balanced that way: when one of us loses it, the other can’t. Whoever didn’t call dibs on instant hysterics has no choice but to keep it together.
“The first stoplight when you get into town. I went off, uh, into a ditch.
Not in the car, I mean. I left on foot.”
“I don’t know! It all happened so fast. Give me time to think of a better excuse.”
“I’ll be right there. Go back to the car.”
I don’t go back to the car, but I do tiptoe out from behind the building and stand at the side of the road. There are flashing lights—a police officer and a tow truck. Oh lord, I’m going to jail.
Someone spots me and points, and my instinct is to crouch down.
There’s nothing to hide behind, so I’m crouching for no reason whatsoever.
Forget jail. I’m getting a padded cell.
Out of habit, I’m scouring the road for a flash of gold Maserati, so when Nicholas steps out of a Jeep it takes me a second to recalibrate.
“Nicholas!” I hiss in a loud whisper. It’s no use. I’m drowned out by the commotion of cars whooshing by. I wave my arms like an air traffic controller. He doesn’t see me, striding straight into the heart of the chaos to take charge.
He checks over the abandoned vehicle and shakes his head to himself, seizing my purse from the passenger seat before shutting the driver’s-side door. Holy cow, I left my purse.
Men in uniforms converge on him. I hide my face behind my hands from a safe distance, not wanting to overhear what is sure to be a humiliating story of my stop-and-run. Someone nods in my direction and Nicholas whirls to face me. Even from this far, I discern the odd glint in his eyes and read his mind like it’s typed in a thought bubble over his head.
Well, well, well. How are we feeling about our choices now, Naomi?
Not good, is how I’m feeling. But at least I’m standing on the less policeman-y side of the road.
He says something to the officer, who looks at me, too. Identity confirmed. I’m leaving here in handcuffs, which will tidily accomplish my goal of getting Mrs. Rose to catapult me out of the family tree.
Nicholas calls somebody on his phone and chats for a minute before handing the phone to the officer. They chat for a minute, too; all the while, Nicholas is just looking and looking at me, and there’s nowhere to hide from him. He’s my only ally. He’s my worst enemy.
He’s walking across the road right toward me, wearing the coat I call his Sherlock Holmes coat. It was expensive and the nicest gift I’ve ever gotten him. He wears it from the very beginning of autumn until the very end of spring, with a scarf looped beneath the wide collar. The fact that he hasn’t burned it yet and danced around its ashes seems aggressively kind in my current frame of mind.
His face isn’t grim or smug, but neutral save for the tiny crease between his eyebrows. Concern.
“What happened?” he asks when he approaches.
I shake my head. I can’t talk about it. I’m already pretending this never happened. “Am I going to jail?”
“No.” He looks down at my purse in his grip. “Do you need to grab anything out of the car?”
“No.”
He wants to ask more questions, I can tell. Nicholas gives me a long, searching look, then removes his coat and puts it around my shoulders. His fingers play with the top button, as if to fasten it, but he lets his hand fall.
He steers me to the Jeep without another word. I break into a speed-walk when we pass the police car and tow truck, half waiting for somebody to reach out and snatch me. After I dart a paranoid peek over my shoulder for the umpteenth time, Nicholas smirks. “Relax.”
The single word unlocks the deadbolt on my ability to form coherent speech. “Is Leon going to be in trouble? I haven’t gotten the title switched yet. What’s going to happen to the car? It’s not actually broken down.”
“Of course not. If it were broken down, you’d just fix it yourself,” he says, giving me a sly sideways look.
“Uh.”
“Or maybe not. Wouldn’t want Dave from Morris Auto to start missing you.” He observes my stricken face and turns away so that I don’t see his smile, but I still hear it in his voice. “When Dave had his wisdom teeth removed, the first thing he said when coming out of anesthesia was ‘Don’t tell the dentist about Naomi’s car.’” He pauses to let it sink in that I’ve been had, and my chagrin threatens to shrivel me up into a pocket-sized Naomi. Dave’s really going to hear it from me the next time I get a Rate our service! email from Morris Auto. “Anyway, a tow company’s taking the car home for us. I could drive it myself and let you take the Jeep, but you look a little shaken up.”
My mouth is dry. “It’s a stick shift.”
“I know. I can drive a stick shift.”
The world tilts. “What? Really?”
“Mm-hmm.” The amusement is faint, but it’s there.
I slide into the passenger seat and lock my door to keep out any cops who might change their minds last-minute. “I miss heated seats.”
“I thought you hated the Maserati.”
“I do. Did. Loved the heated seats, though. Just like—”
“Sitting in the devil’s lap,” he says before I can finish, sliding an arm behind my headrest as he turns to check the rear and backs out. He’s so close, I can smell his aftershave, and my heart pangs with an emotion like homesickness. It’s not the same aftershave he’s been wearing lately. It’s Stetson, which I gave to him as a Christmas present. Wrapped in gold foil paper he kept for so long, I can still hear the crinkling.
I love it, he’d said with a big grin. The scent of Stetson will forever link directly to the memory of that grin, and the adoration I’d felt for him.
What if someone I date in the future wears Stetson, and I have to think about Nicholas and his grin every time I look at another man’s face? He’s invaded so many of my levels, there’s no getting rid of him.
Later, after he opened his present, I saw the sort of grooming products he kept in his medicine cabinet and blushed at how nice and expensive they were. The price of his cologne rendered my gift an embarrassment.
But he wore the Stetson every day from then on, even when his grin faded and our relationship transitioned from Before to After. He used up every last drop and didn’t throw away the bottle.
“Did you get to finish eating?” I ask timidly.
“We’d literally just gotten seated when I texted to ask where you were.
They lost our reservation and Mom went ballistic. Made the manager cry.”
I can imagine. Deborah Rose has never exited any establishment without introducing herself to the manager.
“What’d you tell your mom?”
“That you were having car trouble and I needed to go pick you up.”
Oh no. I loll my head from side to side. “I don’t want to go to the restaurant. Please don’t make me go. I have a headache. I have cramps.
And blood clots. They’re the size of golf balls.” I begin to list more ailments but he pats my knee.
“All right.”
I straighten in my seat. “Really?”
“Yeah, I don’t want to go back there, either. Dad left us to go sit at the bar because he couldn’t wait for a table. And Mom …” He shifts. A dark look creeps over his expression. “It’s better if you two aren’t in the same room tonight. She’s had too much time to obsess over that comment you made about never having kids.”
The fact that I struck a nerve with her makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. Anyway, I stand by it. Nicholas’s and my DNA are incompatible for procreation. Mother Nature would never allow it.
I reply with a noncommittal “Mm.”
He swings another look at me. It’s fleeting, and the car’s so dark that I can’t be sure, but I think he’s a little bit sad. The notion makes me itchy.
“We never discussed kids,” he says at length. “That’s probably something we should have done before we got engaged.”
“At the time we got engaged, only one of us was prepared for the proposal to happen, so you’re taking the blame for that one.”
He huffs a laugh. “That’s fair, I guess.”
I don’t want to talk about this. It’ll only make both of us sadder, because there’s no way we’re having kids together. Pregnancy for me at this point would indicate immaculate conception. “I didn’t know you could drive a stick.”
“I’ve told you before. You probably just weren’t listening.”
I don’t want a lecture, either. You Never Listen is the title of a story about my many flaws and failings. There’s no safe ground here.
I try again. “It feels great to be running away from Sunday dinner, not gonna lie.”
He almost smiles. I can see it flirting at the edges of his mouth. “It’s a shame we didn’t get to show my parents your new car.”
“You would hate that.”
“I’d record their reaction on my phone. Messing with them could be fun, Naomi, if I were in on the joke, too. You forget, I know better than anyone what it feels like to be smothered by Deborah Rose.”
I study his profile. He keeps his eyes on the road, but he must be aware of the heaviness of my stare. “You’d mess with them?”
“Of course. They’ve earned it. I mean, they’re my parents and I love them. I’m grateful to them for a lot of things, but they’re also a huge pain in the ass. When I asked you to marry me, I kind of …”
His lips press together.
Nicholas swallows. “I kind of hoped we’d be like partners in crime, sort of. When Mom’s trying to sink her claws into me and I can’t get away on my own, you’d have my back. The two of us, a team.”
“I wanted that, too,” I manage quietly. Past tense. “I didn’t know you did. I’ve felt second place for a long time.”
“I never wanted you to feel like that. But … you didn’t step up. You didn’t become my partner. You left me to fend for myself.”
“Yeah, kind of like when your mother openly insults everything about me and you say nothing,” I say waspishly. “That sound she makes when I say yes to dessert. Tut-tut. Looking down on me because of where I work, and the fact that I only have a high school diploma. A million other things.”
I gaze miserably out my window, but all I see is the reflection of Nicholas, stretched and rounded. The lights of Beaufort are far behind us, and now we’re traveling through a black expanse of nothingness until we reach Morris.
Talking has gradually relaxed my body. Coming down from the high of going full Ricky Bobby running from nonexistent fire has left me with a headache that I’m not making up this time.
“My mother’s difficult,” he says. “It’s hard to stand up to her; she’s had my nerves twisted since childhood. I don’t know how to do it alone.”
I feel for him, I really do, so I stroke my thumb over the back of his hand. Just once. “I know it must be hard to have her as a mom sometimes.
She runs off all your girlfriends and then gets on your case for not being married with five kids already. You’re not alone in that, either. Imagine being the poor daughter-in-law who’s supposed to supply those five kids.”
A passing car’s headlights illuminate Nicholas’s smile. Another car following right behind flashes by, and by then the smile has vanished. I know he’s wondering if I’ll ever be Deborah’s daughter-in-law. I’d have to be crazy to voluntarily marry into his circus, and he knows it. If this goes bust like we both anticipate, he’ll need a mail-order bride. I’m the only woman in the country dumb enough to try my luck with Deborah’s offspring.
My mind keeps rerouting back to the incident at the stoplight. I see myself through Nicholas’s eyes, standing on the other side of the street, hands over my face. Knees bent. A royal mess-maker. I hear what he’s going to say during our next argument so clearly, it’s like it already happened.
You cut off your nose to spite your face. Got rid of a decent car, willingly, and now you have to drive around in this piece of junk you don’t know how to operate. You’re so backward, you’d try to catch honey with flies. Wow, you sure have stuck it to me.
Real Nicholas hasn’t said any of this. But Imaginary Nicholas is an amalgamation of realistic predictions based on callous things he’s said to me in the past, so I easily hear his voice shape those words. It’s not fair to be hurt or angry over something he didn’t even say, especially since the words I put into my own head are all true, but knowing he potentially could say it—and probably will—is enough to make me sink into a dark silence that I don’t rise from for the rest of the ride home.
