Read Goodbye To All That Online
Authors: Judith Arnold
She’d been dumbfounded. She’d never considered herself particularly beautiful, and she’d never heard such a blunt come-on line before. At the time, she’d been sort of going with Marty Fischbein, but he’d been getting on her nerves, acting like an asshole when he drank too much beer—something he did on a regular basis. And this man, this totally unsuave stranger, had had the cutest smile. So she’d told him she didn’t mind his sitting across the table from her.
She wrapped her arms around him, almost dumping soda down his back, and kissed his cheek. This was the man she’d married, the man she’d chosen to build a life with. She never, ever wanted to picture herself living by herself in a tiny, ugly apartment like her mother. She wanted to love Gordon always, even if loving him meant cleaning up his damn pizza. Even if it meant tolerating his channel-surfing and washing his beard hairs down the sink. She never wanted to reach a point where going to France alone seemed more romantic than going to France with him, even if he called French people frogs.
But they’d been together only sixteen years, married only fourteen. Who knew how she’d feel twenty-eight years from now? Who knew how many leftover pizza slices it took to wind up where her mother was?
And to be in France, alone in that café, with the wine and the music and the Seine flowing past
. . .
Shit. She did want that. France. All by herself.
Brooke’s bay was empty when Doug pulled into the garage. Six-fifteen. Where could she be? Were the girls home? With a baby-sitter? Which one? Ashleigh had gotten really bitchy now that she was a senior in high school—she clearly believed she was too mature and sophisticated for baby-sitting, but she loved the money so she condescended to work for Doug and Brooke when she was in the mood—but the new one, Megan, was kind of young to be left alone with the girls when they were awake. At night, once they were both in bed, they were easier to take care of. God, how Doug loved his daughters when they were asleep.
At six-fifteen in the evening, they weren’t asleep.
He climbed out of the car, rolled his shoulders to loosen them—performing delicate incisions on corneas could tie knots in a person’s muscles—and entered the house. Brooke had probably left a note somewhere, explaining their absence. Maybe she’d also left a nice, well-balanced meal on the kitchen’s center island for him, something that would require five minutes in the microwave to be fully cooked. His empty stomach rumbled in anticipation. He wouldn’t mind eating dinner by himself, as long as the food was good.
Brooke’s culinary skills hadn’t progressed all that much in the years they’d been married, though. “Good” was still a bit beyond her capabilities. And she’d left neither a meal nor a note.
What if she was gone? Really gone, packed-up-the-kids-and-disappeared gone?
Christ. Why would he even think such a thing? Just because his parents, two halves of the most solid, sturdy, unshakable marriage in the world, had split, didn’t mean Brooke would leave him. Just because the inconceivable had happened didn’t mean it would happen again.
He would not race upstairs to check Brooke’s closet, her drawers, the guest-bedroom closet where they stored their luggage. He would not panic. He would not assume—
“Doug? Hi, we’re home!” her voice sang out in the mudroom, accompanied by the clamor of multiple small feet that sounded nothing like pitter-patter. Maybe he and Brooke ought to enroll the twins in ballet classes so they’d learn how to walk without clomping.
At that moment, of course, Madison and Mackenzie’s clomping was the sweetest sound he could imagine, short of Brooke’s lilting voice as she followed the girls into the kitchen.
The girls were babbling, as usual. “Hi, Daddy!”
“We were at Stephanie’s house!”
“Stephanie’s mother gave us oatmeal cookies.”
“I picked out all the raisins!”
“I ate her raisins!”
He nodded and automatically reached down to pat the girls’ shoulders as they wrapped themselves around his legs, but his gaze was glued to Brooke. She looked
. . .
different.
Gorgeous, as always. Maybe even more gorgeous than always. Her hair was changed, though. A little darker, with lighter streaks and fluffy locks and playful strands dancing across her forehead.
Jesus. What had she done? Sure, she looked spectacular, but she looked so fucking
different
.
“Sorry we’re late,” she said, as if she hadn’t transformed from the beautiful woman he loved into this other creature with altered hair. Her arms hugged a wilting paper bag. “We stopped at Colonel Ping’s and picked up some take-out on the way home.”
“Lotus Garden is better,” he said, then shook his head. What was the matter with him? His wife had undergone this profound mutation, and he was quibbling over which Chinese restaurant he preferred.
“Colonel Ping’s was on our way,” she said breezily as she set the bag on the island.
“We got egg foo yong,” Mackenzie announced.
Shit. He hated egg foo yong. Well, not hated, but honestly, all it was a glorified omelet with salty brown sauce and no cheese. For breakfast, maybe, but egg foo yong was not his idea of dinner.
“Don’t worry,” Brooke said, giving him a tolerant smile and a light kiss on the cheek. “We got chicken with cashews, too.”
“And fried rice!” Madison crowed.
He nodded absently, too distracted by Brooke’s scent to pay attention to the evening’s menu. When she’d leaned in and kissed him, he’d smelled something as unfamiliar as her appearance. Whoever had done this thing to her—added infinite shadings to her hair and cut it all those different lengths—had sprayed something onto it as well, or conditioned it, or . . . something. Something that included spices a person didn’t find in egg foo yong.
He felt disoriented. The knowledge that he was overreacting wildly to his wife’s new hairdo made him feel even more disoriented. For God’s sake, it was just a few snips here and there, and some coloring. Back in the old days—for instance, that morning—when she was blonder, he knew that a skilled hairdresser at a salon had contributed to the blondness. He wasn’t opposed to cosmetic enhancement. Hell, he earned a fortune surgically enhancing patients’ eyes so they could jettison their eyeglasses.
But Brooke hadn’t told him she’d be doing this. She hadn’t even hinted that she intended to transform her appearance. Maybe it had been a spur-of-the-moment decision; maybe she’d gone to the salon planning on the usual, and she’d impulsively changed her mind.
Her next statement informed him that it hadn’t been impulsive or spur-of-the-moment. “I had your sister’s friend do my hair. What do you think?”
“Jill has a friend who does hair?” Then why did Jill’s hair always look so uninspired?
“No, silly.” Brooke began to unload lidded plastic containers from the Colonel Ping bag. “Melissa’s friend Luc.”
That guy Melissa had driven up to Massachusetts with, the day Doug’s parents had announced their separation. That guy Melissa shouldn’t have brought with her, that guy Melissa shouldn’t be dating, that guy who screamed
inappropriate
in so many varied ways.
He’d done this thing to Brooke’s hair, this thing that made her look stunning, but not like his beloved Brooke.
“You went all the way to New York to get your hair done? Why?”
“Doesn’t she look pretty?” Madison asked.
“I think she’s beautiful,” Mackenzie added.
“Of course she’s beautiful. She’s your mom.” At Brooke’s perplexed glance, he clarified. “You’d be beautiful even if you weren’t their mom. I’m just saying, you’re the same beautiful person now that you were this morning.”
Aren’t you?
Steam rose from the containers of food, an oily fragrance laced with soy and ginger. His hunger had vanished, however. He considered pouring himself a glass of scotch, but if he did that he’d have to drink it. Right here, in his house, with his yammering daughters and his transformed wife, in a world where the earth kept shifting beneath his feet and people defied expectations and nothing was the way he expected it to be.
“Listen, honey
. . .
I’ve got to go,” he said.
Brooke glanced at him again, looking even more puzzled.
“I got a call earlier today from my father,” he lied. “He asked me to stop by after work.”
She accepted his explanation with a nod. “I’ll go ahead and feed the girls, then. Will you be long?”
“I’m not sure. You eat with the girls,” he urged her. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Still in the dress shirt and tie he’d worn to the clinic, he started toward the mudroom.
“So, you like my hair?” she asked, prying off the lid of the egg foo yong and then sending him a beaming smile as the girls clamored for food.
“You look fantastic,” he said, managing to return her smile before he ducked into the mudroom and out to the garage.
He didn’t take another breath until he was safely ensconced behind the wheel of his Mercedes. He wasn’t sure what was wrong with him: accelerated pulse, icy hands—Reynaud’s, maybe? He was so far removed from his med school classes. Spend enough time doing Lasik surgery and your basic diagnostic skills began to erode.
He backed out of the garage, tore down the driveway and steered away from their subdivision, speeding along winding, tree-shaded roads bearing cloyingly picturesque two-word names that had little to do with the actual topography: Rippling Brook, Silver Hill, Blossom Boulder. By the time he hung a left off Rolling Meadow Lane, past a ghastly Tudor house designed for someone entertaining serious British-nobility delusions, and onto Route 30, his respiration was almost normal.
He pulled into the parking lot of a Dunkin Donuts, braked to a halt and took a deep, cleansing breath. And tried to figure out what was so disturbing about Brooke’s new hair style.
The newness of it, for one thing. The fact that she hadn’t told Doug she was planning this. Most of all, the fact that she’d traveled all the way to New York City—three and a half hours each way—just to have Melissa’s boyfriend do the job.
He tugged his tie loose, unbuttoned his collar and pulled his cell phone from his pocket. He ought to call Melissa and find out what she knew about this.
No, he couldn’t call her. He couldn’t admit he had so little awareness of his own wife’s plans that her jaunt to the boyfriend’s salon had taken him completely by surprise.
He fingered the buttons on the phone. Jill, maybe. She was sensible. She was grounded. She was the rock in the family, the one they all turned to in a crisis. But Doug wasn’t prepared to admit to her that he could be thrown into a crisis by his wife’s new hairdo.
Besides, Jill was a woman.
He’d never before longed for a brother—he’d liked being the only male child in the family; it was a position of privilege—but right now he could use one. He had buddies, but this was too personal to confide to them about. How could a man say, “My wife cut and colored her hair and I feel as if I’m losing her” to a buddy?
Why? Why did he feel he was losing Brooke?
Because if his father couldn’t hang on to his mother after forty-two years, how the hell could Doug hang onto Brooke?
He hit the speed-dial for his parents’ home number. His father’s number now—he’d programmed his mother’s new number into his phone, but he hadn’t assigned her a speed-dial number because he hoped this phase of hers wouldn’t last and she’d be back at the old number before too long.
His father answered on the third ring. “You’re home,” Doug said.
“I answered. Of course I’m home.”
“Can I come over?”
“Now? Sure. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Doug lied, but at least he’d turned the lie he’d given Brooke about where he was going into the truth. “I’ll be there in fifteen.”
It took him less than fifteen minutes to get to his father’s house. He drove fiendishly. If a cop stopped him, he’d say he was having heart palpitations and was on his way to see a cardiologist. Not that he
was
having heart palpitations, but his fingers were still icy, which clearly meant he was suffering some sort of medical emergency involving his circulatory system.
As it turned out, no cops intervened, and in ten minutes he pulled into the driveway of his parents’ house. He knew the driveway’s dips, its frost-heaves, the crack spanning the asphalt just beyond the front walk. How many times had he cruised up this driveway since getting his license more than twenty years ago?
He still remembered steering up the driveway in his first car—actually, his mother’s car, but once he’d gotten his license he’d used it more often than she did. Unlike his mother, he’d had places to go—school, cross-country practices, parties, Lynette Baker’s house. He and Lynette had been quite the couple most of senior year. She’d been his first, and even though she’d been kind of narcissistic and given to the annoying habit of finishing other people’s sentences for them, he’d always remain grateful to her for what he’d learned on the worn tweed sofa in her finished basement.