The Whole Golden World Read online

  “Did you break out the rubber hose to get that confession?”

  Dinah suddenly felt so bone tired she wanted to curl up on the couch and sleep there all night, but the floor was still covered with crumbs, so she kept sweeping. “No. He heard his dad and me fighting about it again so he came clean to me. He said he couldn’t stand to hear me defending him to Joe when he’d lied to me. I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach.”

  “Least he told you.”

  “Yeah. Eventually. Look, you know I don’t try to be a bitch, right? It’s not like I set out to be everybody’s enemy number one.”

  “You’re not my enemy number one. You’re probably, like, fourth or fifth.”

  “Gee, thanks. I’m just saying that no one ever listened to me when I tried to be nice. You’ve said it yourself when you’ve filled in for me and tried to get the part-timers to shape up. They tune you out unless you go all General Patton on them. Running your own business is not accomplished with sweet-talking. And parenting difficult kids, yeesh. You’ve gotta gird your loins for those fights.”

  “Gird your loins? From what you’ve told me, sounds like the other people need to do the girding.”

  “Mutual girding. Girding all around. God, I’m tired. I sound like I’m drunk. But I don’t like it is what I’m trying to say. I don’t wake up every day setting out to make everyone hate me.”

  “I don’t hate you. You don’t pay me enough to keeping working here if I hated you.”

  Dinah stuck her tongue out at Janine. She needed to hire more people with a sense of humor. She should put that in a classified ad.

  Dinah put the broom back in the closet and started counting the cash drawer out. The receipts were down again for the month, but at least the last two weeks of 2011 had finished strong. Maybe 2012 would improve. Maybe she and Joe would start speaking again to each other about something other than repairing the snowblower and budgeting for Morgan’s tuition.

  She’d apologized to him after Jared’s confession and called Principal Jackson to apologize to him, too, which tasted like wet sand in her mouth to have to admit he’d been right about her son. To his credit, he was gracious about it. “Perfectly natural impulse,” he called her defensiveness, and he assured her he still thought well of Jared, who was going through the natural adolescent boundary testing.

  Somehow, his kindness made her feel that much worse.

  Joe was somewhat less forgiving. He restrained himself with effort from saying what was scrawled all over his face, posture, and body language. He was a living, breathing, three-dimensional “I told you so.”

  What he’d actually said was, “I know you meant well.”

  And then he’d turned on the TV and was silent the rest of the night.

  “Got any plans for tonight?” Janine asked. “Gonna ring in the new year somewhere?”

  Dinah sighed. “No. Just make some popcorn balls and watch the ball drop on TV. Morgan is staying over at a friend’s house, but the twins are home. I keep trying to rally them for board games or something, but they just want to play Xbox all night.”

  “Sounds thrilling.”

  “You?”

  “I’m going out with my boyfriend to this party at Amici’s. Got a sparkly dress, tacky heels, you know the drill.”

  “I used to know it, anyway. Have fun, be safe. Call a cab.”

  “Yes, Dinah,” Janine said through a sigh. “I will.”

  “All right, scoot on out of here. I’ll finish up. Happy New Year.”

  Janine was gone inside of two minutes, off to go don her sparkly dress.

  Dinah double-checked the locked front door, shut off all the lights, and locked the safe.

  Before leaving, though, she sat back down at one of the cushioned chairs near the front of the café.

  The parking lot lights filtered in through the windows and set some of the tables in a glow. It looked like the set of a play. Any moment an actor would appear in a spotlight to deliver a tender monologue.

  Dinah mentally rearranged the furniture to make way for the karaoke machine in the corner. The microphone for the sensitive songwriter-guitarist, the earnest poet. The Planning Commission would be meeting soon to consider final approval of her request, and once she had that finally in hand, she’d be able to turn around the downward trend.

  Things were yet going to pick up. Roll on 2012, she thought. Let’s do this.

  Dinah walked into her house wanting to scrunch her eyes shut. Lately, each time she crossed the threshold, she was greeted by some horrid disaster or a fight, or Joe’s deep frown.

  It was so . . . quiet.

  “Boys? Joe?”

  “Down here,” she heard Joe call.

  She walked to the downstairs den with a hesitant step, as if she were picking her way across thin ice.

  Joe was by himself in the den. A bottle of Korbel was in a mixing bowl, apparently a quasi–ice bucket.

  “Where are the twins?”

  “I sent them to my sister’s. They haven’t seen their cousins in a while.”

  “You . . . What?”

  Joe gave her a sideways smile. “You heard me. I sent them to my sister’s. When was the last time we were home alone together?”

  His New York was showing again: togeth-uh.

  “Did they . . . Did they want to go? Were they glad?”

  “Geez, Dinah. They whined a little bit, but they’ll get over it. She has video games, too, and they like their cousin Jeff.”

  “They don’t like Lizzie.”

  “Lizzie won’t bother them. C’mere, sit down. They’ll be fine with their aunt Sara and uncle John. She’s gonna let them stay up until midnight and watch movies, and we’ll pick them up tomorrow morning.”

  Dinah drifted over to the couch and sat gingerly next to Joe. Why wasn’t she thrilled? When the kids were younger, she would have given her left tit to have all night with the house to themselves.

  She pushed away her imagined doomsday scenarios: the twins breaking into the liquor cabinet while their aunt and uncle went to sleep, or slipping out of the house just for the thrill of escape, then getting hit by a car, or freezing to death in the snow.

  Joe popped the cork and startled himself, then he laughed, flushing a little pink with embarrassment. Dinah found that endearing, that after all these years he could be embarrassed about anything in front of his broken-down middle-aged wife.

  She smiled gamely and held up her glass as he poured the champagne too fast and it fizzed nearly over the top.

  She was trying to have fun. Yet . . . her kids would be gone all night, and she hadn’t known that was going to happen. With Morgan she’d given her a hug and an “I love you” before she went to work, knowing she’d have gone to her party by the time Dinah got home.

  The last thing she’d said to the boys was something like, “Don’t forget to put your laundry away.”

  “Are you in there, Dinah?”

  “Yeah, sorry. I’m just distracted wondering what the boys are up to.”

  Annoyance flashed across Joe’s face, and he struggled to recover. “They’re fine. Happy New Year, baby.” He clinked her glass.

  She raised the glass and felt the bubbles pop against her nose and smiled at her husband, trying hard to stay in the present, with him on the couch, instead of where her heart was—with her kids, wondering if they were all okay.

  Dinah woke with a start. Her heart pounded and she flailed around in a short panic before she realized she was on the couch, alone. She was wrapped in a blanket. The taste of cheap champagne plastered her tongue. The TV was off. She remembered sitting with Joe and making pleasant small talk about the New Year’s Rocking Eve guests and how old Dick Clark was getting, and he had poured her another glass—or two?—and she remembered stretching out, pleasantly relaxed.

  She blinked until she was able to focus on the digital clock on their old VCR. 1:30 A.M. She’d slept through New Year’s.

  She’d done this any number of times in t
he past. They weren’t big on whooping it up, especially after the kids were born, and with the boys being preemie and clinging to life at first, everything fun seemed trivial to the point of insult. It took her a long time to let herself enjoy a movie, even. She just wasn’t a party person anymore.

  This was different, though. Joe had gone out of his way to set up a romantic evening. There would be fallout.

  She crept up the stairs in search of him and found him snoring in their bed. Well, why shouldn’t he go to sleep? What did she expect, he’d be naked amid strewn rose petals?

  Dinah frowned. This was going to be her fault. He was going to be put out and upset, but he’s the one who sprang this on her and gave her champagne when she was already tired. If she’d known, she would have tried to conserve some energy, in fact she’d have gotten someone to fill in for her at the Den . . . Or suggested another night when she would be less busy working all that day.

  She could almost hear him grousing that she was ungrateful for his gesture. All she did was accidentally doze off. And he didn’t even wake her. Didn’t even rouse her to go to bed so she wouldn’t screw up her back slouched on the sofa.

  She stood there for as long as five minutes, watching him snore, frozen with indecision about climbing into bed or going back downstairs. She wished with the fervent irrationality of a child that she could spin back time, so the twins could be home where they belonged and for all four of them to have played some cards and eaten popcorn balls and gone to bed at 12:01. What was so wrong with that plan, anyway?

  A glow from the hallway light cast Joe and their bedroom in a dark gray. She could make out his features well enough, and at this distance, or maybe it was her half-sleeping brain and the champagne conspiring, he looked like she remembered him when they first met. No worry lines, no middle-aged paunch—though slender was never a word anyone would have used to describe Joe Monetti.

  She’d been hired to wait tables in his uncle’s pizza joint, though most of the time she was on the phone taking orders, or cleaning up. The orders weren’t complicated to take, and the actual delivery of the pie and the Pepsi to the table didn’t take so much time. It was a good job for a girl going to junior college and trying to decide how to spend the rest of her long, unfocused life. No booze at Monetti’s, so the crowd was pretty tame. Mostly neighborhood families and the kids not old enough or naughty enough to sneak off and get drunk.

  Joe came home from college and his family slapped the obvious moniker Joe College on him the minute he walked into Monetti’s. Dinah heard it so often that when someone asked for Joe Monetti on the phone, she first replied, “You mean Joe College?” Joe made the pizzas and sometimes delivered them, and on slow days he and Dinah would sit at the counter stools like customers, she with her Keds swinging loose instead of braced on the stool, always pushing stray pieces of her hair behind her ear because she never took the time to make a nice smooth ponytail. He would always be turned backward on the stool, facing the restaurant, elbows on the counter. She’d sip her Pepsi and listen to him tell college stories, or famous family stories about the Monettis’ first arrival in New York City two generations before.

  She thought of Joe then like a distant male cousin. Nice enough, that was all. But then he went back to college and every day she went into Monetti’s and Joe wasn’t there, her heart hurt.

  He came back over Thanksgiving and confessed he’d missed her every day. Their first kiss was in the alley behind Monetti’s, next to the Dumpster.

  They’d had to close the place when his dad died and none of the kids had the ability to take it, and no buyers wanted to carry it forward. Dinah had cried harder when they closed the place up than she had at Mr. Monetti’s funeral, rest his soul.

  She leaned against the doorjamb of their little house together, pondering all those intervening years. They fell in love accidentally, when they weren’t looking. Could you fall out of love accidentally, too? Sure, she answered herself. Love is hard to find and easy to lose, same as anything small and precious.

  Dinah climbed in next to him and gently squeezed his arm in case he was perhaps half awake, and then at least they could share a New Year’s kiss. Joe simply turned over in his sleep to face the wall.

  22

  Morgan moved through the party with the mindlessness of a shark. Rumbling bass from the speakers seemed to vibrate the whole house. Most of the lights were off, though a few table lamps were still lit, and the kitchen—where the keg was, along with Solo cups and some liquor and fruit juice—was a bright halo of light, a beacon of substance abuse for the young and indestructible. Dark shapes clutching each other filled her peripheral vision, and now and then a high-pitched screech of laughter cut through the generic rap-thumping coming from somewhere.

  Morgan could care less about any of it, but it was better than popcorn balls at home with her parents and idiot brothers. She was supposed to be spending the night with Britney.

  Morgan only wanted to be with him, but they couldn’t make it work.

  It was just too hard for him to find a reason to be away on a holiday. As it was, they’d nearly had a disaster Christmas Day when Morgan had sent him a few texts and the phone vibrated under his wife’s hand.

  At first when he called her, she almost exploded with joy and delight. She’d run upstairs on the pretense of needing the bathroom immediately, only to hear him scolding her as soon as she picked up.

  “You can’t keep texting me today,” he’d hissed.

  “I wanted you to know I was thinking of you.” Her voice came out as a pathetic bleat.

  “Not on Christmas. And not so often.”

  Morgan had tightened her fist so hard she wondered if her palms might bleed from the indent of her nails. “As you wish,” she’d said, suddenly remembering that was from The Princess Bride.

  Then he’d softened his voice. “We’ll see each other soon,” he assured her. And just before he hung up, “I’m thinking of you, too.”

  Morgan waved off a random guy’s offer to refresh her beer. She doubted all those hysterical stories about date rape drugs in someone’s drink were actually true, but all the same, she preferred to be in control of her own consumption. She’d seen what happened to girls who constantly let guys top off their drinks. They behaved like lunatics until they passed out with puke in their hair, or disappeared with some guy in the back room and came out with their clothes on all crazy, not remembering a bit of it.

  No one needed a date rape drug with enough booze around, really.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder and prepared to tell the guy to get lost and found herself looking up at Ethan.

  He bent down to her ear. “Can we talk?”

  She rolled her eyes and looked away.

  “Please,” he said. “I really want to talk to you.”

  The bass throbbed in rhythm with a fresh pain in her temple. And Britney—who she’d been talking to for a while anyway—had gone off somewhere.

  “Fine,” she shouted, and led the way upstairs.

  This house—she wasn’t even sure whose house it was—had many bedrooms. It was one of the fancier homes in town, along the border to the park. They had to pass several locked doors before they found an unused room. There was a bed, but no sheets or pillows. Some boxes were stacked with a dust cloth over them. No curtains on the windows. A corkboard was mostly empty except for a varsity letter and a snapshot dangling from a thumbtack in one corner. A streetlight outside poured a faint glow into the room, and neither Ethan nor Morgan moved to find a light switch.

  She settled on the edge of the bed, choosing a side where her scar would be facing away.

  Ethan settled next to her. “I’m worried about you.”

  She looked at the floor and shrugged. He didn’t know anything about her. None of them did.

  “You don’t seem like you, lately.”

  “What would you know about it? We haven’t even talked since I threw myself at you in the most pathetic crush confession ever, which by
the way, thanks for making me relive that tonight. Feels awesome.”

  “I see you in the hall. I watch for you when I know I’m going to see you, because I miss you lots. And you always look sad. And tired.”

  “Okay, first? If you weren’t gay, that might be romantic, but now it just sounds creepy. Second, you can’t tell about someone just by staring at them. What, you think you were so critical to my health and well-being that I’m rotting away without you?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “I don’t know how you meant it then. I’m seeing someone, actually. And I’m really happy.”

  “You don’t look so happy.”

  “I’m tired. I’m having trouble sleeping. But I am happy, and I don’t have anything to prove.”

  “Why are you so mad at me?”

  Morgan slumped. He hadn’t done anything wrong; he was just being thoughtful, the same way he’d always been. “I’m not. I’m feeling awkward, that’s all. And tired. And wondering where the hell Britney went.”

  “I saw her go upstairs with a guy.”

  “Not David?” David was on vacation in Florida with his family.

  “Apparently not. When the cat’s away, I guess.”

  Morgan snorted. “Maybe they’re not having sex. Maybe they’re only getting high.” She laughed through a sneer. “I just hope she doesn’t abandon me here. I don’t want to drive home in the middle of the night, not after this especially.” She gestured with her cup, which she still held in her hand.

  “You could stay at my place. I’d tell my folks your ride ditched you.”

  “You’re not drinking, yourself?”

  “Nah.”

  Morgan chewed on her lower lip. There was only one place she wanted to be, and it was closed off to her as sure as a medieval castle, complete with moat and alligators.

  Ethan nudged her. “It’s not as if I’m going to seduce you.”

  It was a joke, but it only brought her back to that moment again, with her poetry book lying open exposing every sick thing she was, her lips aiming for his face, his startled recoil.