How I Came to Sparkle Again (8 page)

“When we’re all done frying the turkey, we make the best grease bombs ever. They look just like miniature A-bombs,” Tom said.

“I put all this work into the food, and all they care about are the grease bombs,” Lisa muttered.

“Not true,” Tom said. “We love them equally.”

Jill held the kettle while Lisa rubbed dish soap on the outside of it so the soot wouldn’t stick and then set it on the fire to boil.

Jill considered just how different this Thanksgiving was from the one she had envisioned, the one where she was nine months pregnant, and together she and David prepared their last Thanksgiving dinner where it would be just the two of them. It was sad. Uncle Howard had taught her at a young age that attachment led to suffering, and she tried for a moment to forget about everything she had hoped today would be and instead recognize that it was actually pretty fun. As long as she didn’t compare it with what she thought it was supposed to be, she could see that it was actually a great Thanksgiving. But attachment is strong and usually needs to be grieved, so the moments where she could let it go and enjoy the day for what it was were fleeting.

“You’re quiet,” Lisa said.

“Just trying to absorb it all, you know—how my life is taking this radical turn. Even this moment is so different from what I thought it would be.”

Tom asked, “What if your husband showed up here with a few dozen roses and said how deeply sorry he was and that he made a mistake? Could you forgive him?”

“If you were in my shoes, could you forgive him?” Jill asked.

“No way,” Lisa said. “My people kill people instead of forgiving them.”

“That’s scary,” Tom said.

“Don’t you forget it,” Lisa replied.

Tom turned to Jill and asked, “What if he told you he still loves you? Would you believe him?”

“I just keep thinking the way I feel now … is this how it feels to be loved?” Jill replied.

“Hell, no. Let’s kill him,” Lisa said as she poured Girls Are Meaner Gewürztraminer from Wines of the San Juan.

“If he said he loved me, at this point I wouldn’t even know what he meant,” Jill answered.

Tom said, “People mean different things when they say, ‘I love you.’ They shouldn’t, but they do.”

“Right,” Jill agreed. “Like in this case, I would believe ‘I love you’ meant ‘I’m attached to you,’ or maybe ‘Please don’t take half of everything.’”

Lisa said, “Tom, you probably tell a hundred girls a year that you love them. What do
you
mean when you say it?”

“Well, Little Miss Presumptuous, I, in fact, do not tell a hundred women—”

“Girls,” Lisa interrupted. “They’re girls.”

“Young women,” Tom corrected himself, “that I love them. There is luv, l-u-v, and there is love, l-o-v-e. There’s a big difference between ‘luv ya’ and ‘I love you.’ Luv just means you feel happy when you’re with them.”

“I call that love,” Lisa said. “That expansive feeling … that’s love to me. When I tell someone I love them, I don’t really mean that I love
them
. I mean I feel expansive in their presence.”

Tom shook his head. “No, l-o-v-e love is when you would give someone a kidney,” he said definitively. “That’s why if David tells you he loves you, Jill, you tell him your kidneys are failing and you need a kidney. If he offers his, he loves you. If he doesn’t, you’re right—he just wants to restore order to his life.”

“Wait,” Lisa said. “So you’re saying there is just one kind of love—kidney love?”

“Yes,” Tom replied.

“I don’t buy it,” Lisa argued. “I think there are lots of different kinds and levels of love. There’s expansive love. There’s I’d-loan-you-money love. There’s I’d-take-good-care-of-you-while-you’re-sick love—”

“Lisa,” Tom stopped her, “all of those are like cents that add up to a dollar, but it still takes a hundred cents to make a dollar. All those steps are significant and made of the same stuff, just like all pennies are money and all dollars are money, but just like you need a hundred cents to have a dollar, you need the willingness to give up a kidney to have love.”

Lisa studied Tom for a minute, and Tom could see the question written all over her face.
Would you give up a kidney for me?

“Yes, I would give you a kidney, Lisa. We’ve been friends for a long time,” he answered.

The look on Lisa’s face shifted. She was obviously wondering if she would give up a kidney for Tom.

Jill decided to save her. “So, Lisa, how long does this take?” she asked.

“Nine minutes per pound, so theoretically, ninety minutes after the oil reaches three hundred and fifty degrees. I always let it go a little longer in case it wasn’t that hot. I don’t want anyone getting sick.”

“Oh,” Jill said, wary of the turkey already.

“Hey, is Jason coming up tonight?”

“No,” Tom answered. “He never does anything anymore. Sometimes we hang out a little at work, but that’s about it.” He turned to Jill. “You met Jason for a moment today. He helped me bring that heart patient down.”

“Jason was Tom’s partner in crime until he got married and broke up with Tom,” Lisa explained to Jill.

“Broke up, Lisa?” Tom said. “Come on, that’s a little harsh.”

“Okay, they weren’t sexual, just inseparable. We used to call them Tason or Jom. You know, sort of like Benifer,” Lisa said. “Yep, it sucks when all your friends grow up and leave you behind.”

“Well, they haven’t all grown up and left me behind. You’re here. Eric and Hans are coming,” Tom replied, and cracked another beer.

Jill didn’t comment, but she mulled over the idea of maturity. She felt so far beyond mature. She felt old. Old and used up. She looked at Tom, playful and full of vitality, and she wondered what was so great about being grown up.

A while later, Eric and Hans joined Tom, Lisa, and Jill in lawn chairs around the fire. Tom lifted the turkey out of the pot with a large hook, set it on a large platter, and carved it. Lisa removed the pots of potatoes and mashed them manually with a potato masher. Jill took the green beans off the fire and began to make a plate for everyone. The Dutch oven containing apple cobbler had already begun to smell good, even though it had been set on the fire only a few minutes ago.

Tom handed out forks. When he handed one to Lisa, she said, “Thanks, baby. I needed a good fork.”

“Oh, Lisa, you know I’ve been dying to give you a good fork for a long time,” he joked back.

“Ten bucks says they’ll be sleeping together by April,” Eric whispered to Jill as he handed her a napkin.

Jill smiled, shook her head, and extended her hand to shake on it. She sipped her wine, looked at the stars, and wondered who she would be today if she had never left this place. Would she be like Lisa? Would she be who she was today, only unbroken? Would she be married to a faithful husband and have a healthy child?

“Nice job, you guys,” Hans said as he took his first bite. “Cajun! I love Cajun!”

“Just like Mom used to make,” Tom added.

“I love crunchy skin,” Eric said. “I know it’s theoretically gross because it’s skin, but I really love it.”

Lisa smiled. “I know how to please my men.”

Jill picked at her dinner to make it look as though she were eating it, but she didn’t have much appetite. Inadequacy curled in her stomach like sour milk. She choked down a few spoonfuls of potatoes and a bite of turkey.

When people had finished, Lisa opened the Dutch oven and spooned steaming apple cobbler onto everyone’s plates, and Tom handed them out.

Something about the smell of apple cobbler comforted Jill. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. It smelled like home. But when she opened her eyes again and looked up at Lisa’s friends, she felt disoriented. It struck her as odd that this mountaintop used to feel like home so long ago, and now she felt like such a foreigner.

Then Tom asked everyone to stand way back as he dumped a can of snow into the hot turkey grease with his long stick, making a huge mushroom cloud of fire. In it, Jill saw this moment of her life. Her old life had been the boiling oil. The other woman was the snow that had propelled her to Sparkle with the same explosive force. For the five seconds the massive cloud of fire burned, Jill was awestruck and felt equally awestruck that she had left David and come here. But when the flash of fire was over, the sky dark and empty again and the turkey grease cool and watery, Jill wondered,
What now?

chapter five

SNOW REPORT FOR NOVEMBER 24

Current temperature: 26F, high of 30F at 2:30
P.M.
, low of 19F at 4:30
A.M.

Partly cloudy with occasional snow showers, winds out of the southwest at 5 mph.

33" mid-mountain, 40" at the summit. 3" new in the last 24 hours. 5" of new in the last 48.

“Lisa,” Jill called out, “Eric invited me to move into Travis’s room in the Kennel. I think it’s a very practical solution to my housing situation.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Lisa shouted back from the kitchen, and then walked into the living room.

“Well, you know, you’re in the middle of this remodel and … I feel like I need a door I can close while I’m going through this … you know, low time. I feel like I need a place to make my own for a little bit.”

Lisa shook her head. “The mere idea of this makes my skin crawl, but if you’re going to go look at it, I’m going with you,” she said.

Although the Kennel was mostly a single-wide mobile home, a sturdy roof had been built over it and a long, narrow addition had been built along one side. It was not pretty. They entered through something like a shed on one end of the addition. Inside, a mountain of skis stood next to the door along with a few shovels, some firewood, and a barbecue. Tom met them there.

“Come here, Bud,” Tom said, and the yellow Lab walked over to him. “This is Hans’ dog, Bud Light.”

“I think anyone who names their dog after beer needs to go to AA,” Lisa said.

Tom replied, “I gave Stout his name because he was stout. You make me sound like such a loser, Lisa.”

Lisa turned to Jill and advised, “If you ever start thinking that any of them are developmentally more mature than a high school boy, just remember they named their dogs after beer.”

The house reeked of stale pot smoke. It reminded Jill of lemon furniture polish and skunk. But surprisingly, the kitchen was clean. Above the table hung a Piston Bully calendar with pictures of snowcats.

Tom led the way down the hall. He stopped at what used to be the back door but was now a door that led to a very short hallway into the addition. There was one room on each side. Tom gestured to one. “Eric’s room.”

“Remember, stay out of there,” Lisa said.

Tom replied, “At some point, she might need a little meaningless rebound sex, Lisa. It’s not your place to judge that.”

Lisa looked at Jill. “I’ll buy you a vibrator.”

Jill blushed.

Inside, Eric’s bed was raised high enough for some boxes and a dog bed to fit underneath. On the dog bed slept an old chocolate Lab, gray around his nose and chin.

“That’s Ale,” Tom said.

Near the dog was a little refrigerator that doubled as a step up to the bed.

Tom’s room was on the other side. For a place that apparently saw so much action, there was nothing particularly remarkable about it.

They passed the bathroom, which, like the kitchen, was surprisingly clean but, unlike the kitchen, smelled like good-smelling men. On top of the toilet sat a little basket of potpourri. Lisa looked at it and made a face. “Okay, which one of you is gay?” she asked.

“You were throwing it out and we wanted our bathroom to smell good,” Tom said.

“You’re kidding, right?” Lisa asked.

“Why would I kid? We’re all crazy about the way you smell. We would walk to the ends of the earth just to smell you. This stuff kind of smells like you, don’t you think?”

Lisa sniffed the basket. “I think it smells like ass and that’s why I threw it out.”

Tom sniffed it and made a turned-on face.

At the end of the hall, Tom said, “Jason’s old room. Hans lives there now.” Lisa patted Tom’s shoulder to comfort him. He clearly still missed the days when Jason lived there.

Jill looked in. Hans’s bedroom looked like the aftermath of an explosion, with clothes strewn everywhere.

And to the right was Travis’s room. It was hopelessly ugly. There was nothing that could be done with dark fake wood paneling or the burnt-orange shag carpet, which undoubtedly housed a microbiological world Jill shuddered to consider. Travis had also hung a large mirror over his old, stained, and visibly sunken bed.

Lisa said, “Oh, Jilly Bean, no. No woman should live like this. There’s got to be something else in Sparkle.”

Tom said, “Lisa, look, she’s got a mirror here that you and I only dream about.”

“Jesus, Tom,” Lisa said. “Don’t you think that’s a little insensitive given her circumstances?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, and seemed to really mean it.

“It’s all right,” Jill said. She looked around the room. “Hey, it’s cheap, functional, and close to you,” she said to Lisa.

“Man, I wish my remodel was done. It won’t be much longer. I’ll have you out of here in two months.”

“Carpenters don’t work on powder days,” Tom reminded her.

“I’ll have you out of here in six months,” Lisa corrected herself. “In the meantime, you can borrow sheets and blankets.” She looked at the mattress and made a face. “I’ve got a space heater, too.”

“Thanks,” Jill said, and followed Lisa back to her place.

They returned to the Kennel an hour later with three Hefty bags full of things Jill needed and Lisa could spare. Lisa helped her make the bed, and Jill was so tired, she crawled right in.

Lisa sat on the other side and then lay down, too.

“Jilly?” Lisa rolled over to face her. “Do you want to talk about anything that happened? I mean, I don’t want to pry, but I care, and I’m here if you want to talk.”