Adult Assembly Required, page 29
It was Asher’s turn to stare. “You do want to?”
She nodded. “I do, yes, but here’s the thing.” She sighed. “I’m happy that you like me, right now, but I have to tell you the truth. I don’t even know who I am. I started drinking when I was pretty young, and doing everything I used to do drunk, while sober, is a surprising challenge. I haven’t gone dancing—what if I can’t dance? I haven’t gone bowling—what if I can’t bowl?” She looked at him, and Asher was surprised to see the beginnings of tears in her eyes. “I was lots of fun, everyone used to say so, and what if I’m no fun anymore? What if I’m not the same Polly everybody used to love?”
“Well,” said Asher, “I don’t know the other Polly, so I don’t have anything to compare it to, but the Polly I know is hilarious and wonderful and about fifteen percent terrifying, so I’m not sure I could have handled the old Polly.”
“Oh,” said Polly. There was a long pause. “Well, if you’re willing to wait, my sobriety date is January the fourteenth.”
“So, dinner on the fifteenth then?” Asher pulled out his phone and put it in his calendar. “I can wait, as long as we can hang out in the meantime.”
She nodded, looking worried.
“What’s the matter?” he asked gently.
Suddenly she stretched up on tiptoe and kissed him thoroughly. Then she stepped back, looking much relieved.
“I needed to check the kissing part still worked,” she said. “I hadn’t done that sober, either.”
Asher’s face was very flushed, and he cleared his throat a little before speaking.
“That part seems to work very well,” he said. “Thanks for checking.”
Polly grinned. “You’re welcome,” she said. “I’m going now.”
Then she turned and walked away. As Asher watched, she leapt in the air and clicked her heels together. Then she kept walking, not even turning around to see his reaction.
He smiled. Things might be weird with Polly, but they were never going to be boring.
THIRTY-NINE
Meanwhile, back inside the house, Laura and Bob—still oblivious to the rolling eyes of everyone in the kitchen—headed into Bob’s room to watch a game and eat candy. It had started over the summer, and now it was a habit, and not simply because of the playoffs.
It was strange; she never invited him to do any of the activities with Nina and Polly, and he never again invited her to come gardening, or go to Denny’s. But they shared their lives with each other. He’d offered to drive her to school every day, back when the fall semester had started. Laura was making a lot of progress in therapy, but still wasn’t quite ready to face Los Angeles traffic. They’d discuss the previous night’s game on the commute each morning, and Laura would catch the bus home. Her workload was pretty heavy and she’d gotten a teaching assistant job in the biology faculty, so she didn’t have much free time. But what free time she had she spent with him, or with Nina and Polly.
She’d never known anyone like him, someone so accepting and calm. He didn’t demand much of her; she didn’t ask much of him. They . . . hung out. They watched the game, whatever game was on, they shot the breeze about this and that, and they slowly discovered they viewed the world in much the same way. Now, as she contemplated his leaving, she realized she looked forward to spending time with him more than any other aspect of her life and was going to be brokenhearted to lose it.
As they settled down on his sofa and popped a couple of beers, Bob looked over at Laura and said, “Did you bring . . . ?”
She nodded, reaching into her hoodie pocket and pulling out a bag of peanut M&M’s. She tore it open and tipped some into her hand. Bob leaned over and picked out a green and ate it, then handed her a few browns.
“How was today?”
Laura rolled her eyes. “I spoke to my mother, or at least I think it was my mother, it might have been an alien pod person.” She smiled and reached for the blanket she often snuggled under while they watched. She threw a fold of it over his legs, too, and wished she was brave enough to snuggle closer. “She was remarkably pleasant and didn’t criticize any of my choices.”
“That is confusing,” he said, reaching for more M&M’s. “Did you eat all the greens?”
“No,” she said, tipping out the bag onto his wide palm. She loved his hands, they were strong and practical, and she watched happily as he moved the candies with his finger, sorting and dividing and sharing. He pushed the remaining browns toward her, and she took them.
“Laura,” said Bob, settling back and throwing M&M’s into his mouth more or less accurately. “Do you think there are fewer greens than there used to be?” He twitched the blanket to a better position, wishing he was brave enough to snuggle closer.
“No,” she replied, realizing she was never going to be able to eat M&M’s again without wanting to keep the greens for him. Or watch baseball games, or shoot hoops, or talk about flowers, or drive to school, or be on the bus, or . . . any of it. His friendship had become the most important relationship in her life, and now she realized it was so much more than friendship to her and she was never going to get up the courage to tell him so. She struggled to find the right words, to not fear another rejection, to be certain of his interest in her.
“So,” he said, smiling, “when do you think your mother was taken by the aliens, and how come they gave her back?”
He watched the corners of her mouth turn up, and wondered if he would ever get tired of seeing her smile. And if he’d ever have the nerve to tell her how he felt.
* * *
• • •
A few days later Laura decided to talk to Polly and Nina about her revelation. They both simply stared at her.
“Sorry,” said Polly. “You’re telling us you’ve realized you fancy Bob?”
They were sitting on the floor in Nina’s apartment, and Nina was sorting books. She’d sorted her books twenty-nine times, each time slightly differently. This time she was sorting by both author and historical chronology, which meant she had to look things up on the Internet. She was as happy as a toddler with a stir stick. Now she pulled her laptop closer. “Sorry, Laura,” she said. “This is not news to anyone.”
“I will say,” said Polly, who was risking unemployment by occasionally—and very successfully—moving a book from one pile to another without Nina noticing, “that you may have missed the boat.” She shrugged and turned her mouth down. “Sorry, but I have to be honest, it’s my code. At first he was definitely interested in you, but lately he seems more . . .”
“Platonic,” said Laura sadly.
Polly nodded. “I’m sure we can find you someone else to play with,” she said. “Bob’s very good looking but he’s not exactly exciting.”
“How do you mean?” said Laura a little defensively.
“Well, you know,” said Polly. “He’s so straight he doesn’t need a ruler.”
“Worst insult ever, Pol,” said Nina, frowning at a stack she thought she’d already finished. “Sorry, but I have to be honest, it’s my code.”
“Fair enough,” said Polly, “but you have to admit, he doesn’t do much. He works, he watches football or whatever, he talks about work or football or whatever, and presumably he thinks about work and football or whatever.” She shook herself. “I like a guy with a bit more fire.”
Laura shook her head. “There’s more to him than that, he’s just not flashy. He’s straightforward. We talk about all kinds of things, about the news, about what we both want to do in the future, about things we’ve done already, places we’ve been. He makes me feel . . . more than enough.”
Nina looked at her. “Continue,” she said.
Laura sighed. “I can’t explain it. He doesn’t interrupt me, because he knows when I’m done talking. He doesn’t expect me to know everything but he doesn’t assume I don’t. If we’re watching a movie, he’ll make the comment I was going to make, or he’ll look at me and I’ll know what he means. He hands me a blanket thirty seconds after I feel cold, he wants a cup of tea at the same time, we’re happy to be . . . hanging out.”
Polly made a horrified face but Nina laughed. “Oh shit,” she said. “You don’t fancy Bob, you’re falling in love with Bob.”
“No,” said Laura, “definitely not.”
“This is serious,” said Polly. “Nina’s right. Although”—she held up her hand—“maybe you’re simply becoming good friends? Do you imagine him naked?”
Laura blushed.
“Do you want to kiss him?” Polly asked these questions as if completing a government form: Do you have anything to declare?
Laura nodded her head, bright red.
Polly rolled her eyes. “Yup, you’re screwed. Thank goodness he’s leaving for a while, we can try to shift your attention to someone else.”
Nina took issue with this. “What’s wrong with her and Bob dating? Why shouldn’t she fall in love?”
“She just arrived!” said Polly, as if stating the obvious. “She’s having fun on her own, with us!” She was unhappy. “If she cuffs up like you and Tom, then who’s going to play with me?”
Laura leaned over and put her hand on Polly’s knee. “Pol, nothing’s going to change, nothing’s going to happen. He’s leaving and you’re right, I don’t want to get cuffed up, which is a horrible, horrible phrase.”
“It’s what the kids are saying these days,” said Polly, her color returning.
Nina was holding a book in each hand and looking confused. “I don’t understand what happened here . . .” She looked from one pile to the other. “This is completely wrong, I’m going to have to start the whole eighteenth century over again.” She looked up at her friends and grinned. “Yay!”
“Not to change the subject or anything,” said Polly, clearly happy to change the subject, “but the children’s Halloween festival at the pumpkin patch is tomorrow, and you should totally come with us.”
“Why on earth would I want to do that?” asked Laura.
Polly replied, “It’ll distract you from Bob. There’s easy pickings, if you like divorced dads and/or hunky pumpkin farmers who come to town for the month of October and make enough money to live like kings the rest of the year.”
“How does a pumpkin farmer live like a king? What would that look like?” Nina wanted to know.
“Gilded tractors?” Polly hazarded.
Laura shook her head. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I’m not a big Halloween person.”
“Not even Reese’s peanut butter pumpkins? They’re the best of the shapes,” said Nina. “It’s the perfect ratio of chocolate to peanut butter.”
Laura looked at Nina with interest. “You really do spend a lot of time thinking about things, don’t you?”
“ ’Fraid so,” said Nina cheerfully, nodding. “It’s what keeps me from gnawing my own fingernails off.”
“Ew,” said Laura. “And have fun at the festival.”
“We definitely will, and so will you,” said Polly.
FORTY
Polly wasn’t wrong. The Larchmont Halloween Festival took place in a small empty lot at the northern end of Larchmont Boulevard. Whatever unicorns are responsible for it do a thorough job, and there were literally dozens of small children rushing about as high as jaybirds on sugar, hallucinating in polyester Disney costumes. There were face painters, bouncy castles, disaffected tweens trying not to have fun—it was bedlam, but fantastic if you didn’t have any kids and wanted an excuse to dress up.
Unsurprisingly, Polly was a huge fan of dressing up, Nina was not, and Laura was somewhere in between. This resulted in the following disparity: Polly was dressed as a banana, complete with a giant foam costume and shoes made of fake banana leaves; Laura was dressed as a monkey holding a banana, which simply meant she was wearing a giant onesie with ears and a tail she’d bought on Amazon; and Nina was eating a banana and making fun of the other two. However, Nina was 100 percent down for the candy and had very strong preferences that were too complicated for Laura to understand. She herself wasn’t a sugar person, so generally speaking Halloween had always been a bit of a bust, plus her parents hated the amount of candy dropped on the street, making the pigeons fat and giving the squirrels ideas.
But one of the things about Larchmont, and in particular the part of it where Nina lived, was that decorating for Halloween was the subject of serious civic competition. The local legend was that decades before, a scenic engineer who worked for Paramount (which is basically in Larchmont) had completely re-created the house from Psycho, largely for the fun of it, and unintentionally started an arms race of cobwebs and plastic spiders. Every year things got a little nuttier, creative types in the neighborhood showed off a little more, and kids came from farther away. These days they came by the busload, and Nina’s only stipulation about attending the earlier pumpkin patch festival was that they needed to be home by six so she could lock her cat inside and hide from the children.
“Hey!” said a small voice, and someone tugged at Laura’s sleeve.
“Hey yourself,” said Nina, leaning across to bop Clare on the nose. “How do you know Laura?”
“She came gardening,” said little Clare, who was dressed as a seagull, which meant a gray baseball hat with googly eyes and a bill made from a yellow pool noodle. Her mom had clearly forgotten till the last minute. “She teaches people to fly and isn’t interested in Bob.”
Laura frowned, but Polly and Nina were used to Clare.
“Where’s the rest of your gang?” Polly asked her.
“Behind me somewhere,” said Clare, looking in her candy bag. “I can see a Reese’s peanut butter pumpkin.” She looked up. “They’re the best of all the shapes, did you know that?” She was asking Laura, but she didn’t really wait for an answer, and Laura knew better than to bother. Catching and holding the attention of an eight-year-old child on Halloween is like trying to catch a hummingbird with a piece of dental floss. It’s theoretically possible, but not very likely.
Lili and Edward showed up with a very small baby in a carrier. The October afternoon had a breeze, and the baby wore a little cream hat with red stitching that made it look like Lili was balancing a baseball between her boobs. Which was also theoretically possible, but not very likely.
Edward was talking to a taller little girl, who was presumably Clare’s older sister. Laura tried to remember her name, but couldn’t.
“Hey, Annabel,” said Nina, saving Laura from asking. “How’s the reading?” Annabel was in Nina’s book club at the store and was responsible for snacks, a job she took very seriously.
“Good,” said Annabel. “I’m on a dragon kick.”
“Strong move,” said Nina. “Eragon? Seraphina?”
“Yes and yes,” said Annabel. She turned to Edward. “I really don’t want to do any of the stuff, can I stay with you and read?”
“Sure,” he said. “Or your mom can stay with you.”
“She has the baby,” said Annabel, who was teetering between wanting to be a kid and wanting to be a teenager, sometimes cycling back and forth many times a day. “You could take the baby.” She looked up at him hopefully. He looked at Lili, who looked at Clare.
Clare looked back at them. “Give me the baby, I’ll keep her busy.”
In the end Lili gave Edward the baby and took Clare off to get her face painted, which didn’t seem to be what Annabel had had in mind, but she accepted it. The baby was asleep, anyway, despite the sonic wall of toddler meltdowns.
Laura was sitting near Annabel and unexpectedly glimpsed Bob between the crowds of kids and parents. He was talking to a tall, beautiful woman who was holding his hands and smiling at him with a great deal of affection. Who was this chick? Not that it mattered, or was any of her business.
Taking a breath and exercising restraint, Laura looked over at the baby. “How old is she?”
“Six weeks,” said Edward, smiling down at the oblivious baby. “Her name is Tess. She smiled the other day.” He looked at Annabel, who looked up at him. “She smiled at you, didn’t she, Bel?”
Annabel looked at Laura and Nina, who was also sitting there.
“She had gas,” she said, and returned to her book.
* * *
• • •
Eventually Clare and Lili reappeared, and Nina got bossy about leaving.
“You don’t understand,” she said to Laura. “One minute it’s all adorable empty streets except for really little kids who will be going to bed shortly, and ten minutes later it’s Mardi Gras without the drunken girls showing their tits.”
“Is it unsafe?”
Nina looked surprised. “Oh, no! It’s totally safe, it’s just solid people from one side of the street to the other, which is literally the backdrop to my nightmares.”
“Really?” said Laura. “My nightmares are always about my accident, or a giant multiheaded spider who wants to wrap me up and suck my juices.”
Everyone stared at her.
“Dude,” said Clare, melted chocolate on her chin, “that’s some dark thoughts right there.”
Edward and Lili were heading to a local family restaurant that had fed more plain pasta and cheese to the children of Larchmont and the surrounding areas than you could ever imagine, and invited the three friends to join them.
Lili, bouncing up and down like you do when you have a baby in a carrier, explained, “We like to pretend we’re feeding the kids so they won’t eat too much candy, but we’re actually having a glass of wine to fortify ourselves before hitting the streets.”
