Along Came Trouble(33)

Good riddance, Nana had said when Carly told her. And Carly had cried. But the tears didn’t last as long as she’d expected.

She ought to have known better than to have married a man named Mitchell. It was like marrying a Duane or a Conrad. Born losers, all of them. Marrying Mitch had been a form of late-adolescent rebellion. At twenty-two, she’d taken the plunge into matrimony as a way of thumbing her nose at Nana’s Second Wave feminist stance on patriarchy.

Stupid of her to try to rebel. She should have used Nana’s life as a template. Her grandmother had more fun than anybody Carly had ever met. If she’d followed Nana’s lead, maybe she’d be in Amsterdam right now with some hot guy named Sven, working her way through the Kama Sutra positions one at a time, instead of pregnant and trapped in Nana’s house with Caleb Clark for a protector.

She gave the Wombat a pat. “Don’t take it personal, Wombat. I still want you.” Before Jamie, her life had focused down to the point that the Wombat was the only thing she’d wanted. Jamie had helped remind her there were other things in life than babies and needles, scumbag husbands and online friendships.

Sex, for example. Fun. Music.

She pulled a plate from the soapy water in the sink and began to wash.

At least on the name front, she’d done better with Jamie Callahan. Not that he was marriage material, but he did have a great name. A girl could be confident that a guy named Jamie Callahan would show her a good time.

And oh, man, had he ever shown her some good times. Once, he’d even made her see stars—honest-to-goddamn stars circling her head after a colossal orgasm, and he hadn’t even been nailing her into the headboard. Jamie had been far too considerate of her delicate condition to nail her into anything. It hadn’t kept him from nailing her, over and over again, but he’d been a real sweetheart about it. A raunchy, clever, dirty-minded sweetheart.

She took her hands out of the warm dishwater and dried them off so she could fan her face. Bad idea to think about Jamie. Thinking about Jamie either made her hot or it made her cry, and sometimes it did both at the same time. She’d almost cried in front of Caleb, which would have sucked. Caleb had never seen her cry, and he wasn’t going to. He was a good guy and a good friend, but he wasn’t that sort of friend.

Jamie was that sort of friend.

“Oh, shut up,” she told herself, exasperated. Jamie was over. The fight they’d had about her blog was stupid, but it had needed to happen.

Jamie Callahan smiled like a god, and he had some fantastic moves in the sack. He’d made her laugh like she hadn’t laughed in years. And for four incredible months, he’d made her dancing-in-the-f*cking-tulips happy. But he was the kind of boy you played around with for a little while and then sighed over after he broke your heart. He wasn’t serious.

Jamie had been Impulsive Mistake #786, the latest in a lifetime of failures to look before she leapt. She’d sailed over the cliff, thinking despite knowing better that maybe this guy would catch her, because she really was a complete moron. Naturally, she’d broken both legs.

“De nada,” she told the Wombat. “That’s Spanish. You say it to mean ‘You’re welcome,’ but it really means, ‘It’s nothing.’ Learned that from my worthless prick of a husband.”

It’s nothing. The bruised heart. The memories that weren’t fading yet. The way she’d cry whenever one of Jamie’s songs came on the radio. De nada.

“Don’t you worry about Mama, Wombat. When you’ve taken as many falls as I have, you learn to pick yourself up and dust off your own butt.”

The Wombat acknowledged this wisdom by kicking her in the kidneys.

“Ugh.” She rubbed her back with one hand as she put the last plate on the draining board. “Dish it out, you little weenie. I can take it.”

She could take it. She could take getting kicked by the Wombat and losing Jamie and a thousand times worse if she had to.

And if sometimes, late at night, she wished she didn’t have to, well, tough.

She made her own luck.





Chapter Nine



“Sweetie, that fire truck is huge, and you haven’t played with it for a week. You’re not taking it to Grammy Maureen’s house.”

“Henry take that one.”

“No, not that one either.”

Ellen scooped her son’s last four clean T-shirts out of the drawer and added them to the bag. The Thursday afternoon packing-for-Grammy’s had simplified as Henry grew out of the tiny-baby stage, but it remained a challenge due to his newfound desire to “help” by bringing her countless precious objects that he insisted had to come with him. Tongs from the kitchen. All of his fire trucks from the living room play area. The plunger from the bathroom. No, no, and eww.