The Dirty Book Club(23)
“Count me in.”
CHAPTER
Eight
Pearl Beach, California
Wednesday, June 1
Waning Crescent Moon
IF BIRTHDAY CAKES were supermodels, this one would be Kate Upton.
Rich, professionally frosted, and hardly the type to be picked up at a grocery store, the curvy, butter-colored treat was not what M.J. expected to wake up to. How had Dan managed to checker-jump over today, land in tomorrow, and still find her favorite: vanilla pudding in the center and covered in fresh berries? And the card: Thirty-four years ago my future was born, thirty-four years from now I will still be grateful. You are the most beautiful, elegant, intelligent, goof-ass I will ever know. I love you, Dan.
His words expanded behind M.J.’s ribs like the grow-in-water dinosaurs she and April used to submerge in the bath. If it had been written in Dan’s woozy doctor’s scrawl, the surge of adoration might have made her burst. But the tidy rows of block letters suggested the hand of a different kind of professional. One who answered the phone at Pearl Beach Bakery, took dictation, then neatly transcribed the long-distance caller’s sentiments onto the back of the shop’s promotional postcard. Still. At some point between Los Angeles and Hong Kong or maybe Hong Kong and Jakarta, Dan made it happen.
M.J. tried to thank him with a call, a text, an e-mail, a Skype, but if it was close to noon in California, it wasn’t her birthday anymore where Dan was. He had circumvented the occasion, left it somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, where it now hung in hindsight, meaningless as an empty threat.
She should have been lying beside him, nestled inside his warm, croissant-shaped embrace. Their naked bodies swaddled in coarse three-star hotel sheets, their skin carrying the floral scent of complimentary soap. But while booking her ticket, M.J. realized that her passport was still in New York.
“Maybe this is a good time for you to fly back and get the rest of your stuff,” Dan said after she insisted he go to Indonesia without her.
“Not a bad idea,” she said, because it wasn’t. The trip home, the packing, the purging, it would keep her occupied while Dan was gone. But the possibility of her moving back to New York was still too strong. And the only thing more maddening than schlepping one’s entire wardrobe across the country was schlepping it back. So M.J. left it at that, knowing that she’d have ten days to manufacture a good reason why the trip just wasn’t in the cards.
Now, braless and barefoot wearing one of Dan’s unlaundered T-shirts she was staring down the barrel of day one without a single activity in sight. Only a kaleidoscope of blues that shifted from one lonely image to another: the fog outside her windows known as June gloom, the L-shaped tape that outlined the corpse of their futon couch, her birthday cake on the kitchen counter, no candles, one fork.
M.J. hooked her finger around the hair elastic on her wrist and snap! A hot sting radiated up her arm. It was a tactic she’d inherited from her mother. “When you want to bite your nails, pull the rubber band,” Jan had said. The goal was to trick the mind into associating the bad habit with pain so she’d stop doing it, and M.J. was not going to feel sorry for herself. She would celebrate the life her parents gave her. Celebrate the boyfriend who wanted her to feel loved on her birthday. Celebrate this sleepy, uninspired town; her grim existence.
Snap.
M.J. would not think about the contract at the bottom of her suitcase or how easy it would be to sign it and return to the place where honking horns and screaming ambition drowned out the mewls of her mental anguish—anguish that poor Gloria would be stuck with for the rest of her life now that Leo was gone.
Snap.
Then a revelation: Why not share the cake with Gloria?
On her way out, M.J. noticed a black envelope wedged under her front door and immediately thought of her neighbors in #5F; their endless attempts to buy her apartment, and her refusal to sell it. How could she when it was bought with her parents’ life insurance money? Selling the apartment would be like selling them and—
Snap.
Cake box balanced in her open palm, M.J. picked up what appeared to be an invitation to the type of party that required a Latin password and a mask. There was a gold seal on the back flap with the letters DBC stamped into its waxy center; hardly the anchors and starfish she expected from the Downtown Beach Club.
“No, thanks,” she muttered as it landed among the to-go cups and magazines in the recycle bin. She promised to give Pearl Beach a chance but not Kelsey Pincer-Golden. If only she had her paper shredder.
Snap.
* * *
NO LONGER BRALESS, but still barefoot, M.J. scampered across the asphalt of the Goldens’ driveway, wishing that trail of cool soapy water was still trickling down from the garage.
She rang the bell, stepped back onto the bristly WELCOME mat, and waited. If Gloria’s afternoons were anything like M.J.’s in the weeks that followed the accident, she was caught in the grog of last night’s sleeping pill, trying to remember where she left her leg muscles.
The door yawned open.
“Britt?”
“Oh, hey,” she said, eyeing the box. “I didn’t know Mama Rosa’s made cakes.”
“It’s my birthday,” M.J. said with a rise-above-it grin. Because Gloria didn’t need a catfight. She needed compassion and kindness; someone to mind her while she wandered around her bungalow as if searching for lost keys, someone to hold her when she realized that what’s really missing is gone forever.