The Marriage Intervention (2 page)

Although she still had another forty minutes before Paul came home, she turned the music on as she finished chopping, just to get her in the mood. By six-thirty, everything was ready, and she figured she had time to take a quick shower.
 

It had been so long since she prepared for romance that she was giddy with excitement as she soaped up, shaved, and scrubbed her skin to unprecedented levels of softness.
 

She even found some vanilla-scented lotion in the cabinet under the sink, and rubbed it on, letting the anticipation build. Why had she let so much time pass since they were last intimate? This was going to be fun. And Summer was right. It would give them time to talk when they both had their guards down.
 

All of her sexy underwear was crammed into the farthest recesses of her underwear drawer. She dug out Paul’s favorite pair, lacy white boy shorts he said showed off her perfectly shaped rear end, and slipped into them before pulling on a silky nightgown. The sexual energy could build over dinner, she thought with a little shiver.
 

She heard it while she was looking in the mirror, smoothing her hair: the sound of a text message coming in.
 

Paul:
I’ll be late. Just got a tip on a meth dealer coming back from Phoenix with at least an ounce. We’re hoping to knock him off at Sunset Point. I’ll call you when we’re done.
 

For the second time in as many days, Josie felt like crying. Then she felt like kicking herself for feeling like crying. So she reacted like she usually did when she felt sad or disappointed: with anger.
 

She responded to Paul’s text:
Fine.
 

And then she sent a text to Summer and Delaney:
I can’t believe I was stupid enough to follow your stupid advice. Stupid Paul is running late. Again. It’ll be at least a couple of hours.
 

This is why I’ve been pushing him away, she thought. This. Right here. Why do I even try?
 

Josie resolved to stop trying.

She turned off her phone and changed out of her lacy white boy shorts and silky nightie into granny panties and an old t-shirt Paul brought home from one of his innumerable trainings. Then she downed a bottle of wine while listening to the romantic music and went to bed, the steaks still marinating on the counter.

***

Laying in bed, blinking into the dark, Josie Garcia reminded herself that she didn’t believe in romance. For a few minutes, she tried staring at the ceiling, but it spun so quickly she had to shut her eyes. This proved equally dangerous. A kaleidoscope of color swirled behind her eyelids.
 

Her mother, a stern Mexican immigrant who taught herself English and put herself through accounting school, hammered practicality into Josie’s head from the time she was an infant clutching a homemade rattle in her fist. Yes, even her first toy, a rattle made from a baby food jar filled with dried pinto beans, had been practical.

“Don’t look for a man who speaks in poetry and brings you flowers,
mija
,” Carla Garcia said. “Look for a man who gives you a good life. Stability. Poetry and roses don’t put tortillas on the table. They’re false currency.”

But Josie’s mother was gone. She’d died seven years ago of a ruptured brain aneurysm.
 

Almost in a dreamlike state, Josie let her mind rewind to that moment three days after Mama died … the moment when she met Scott Smith and the universe put her mother’s theory to the test.
 

It made absolutely no sense that Scott’s lyrical language and haphazard bouquets of wildflowers had her quivering in her three-inch heels. But they did.

Josie, an orphan at age twenty-seven, sat on a bench downtown, the scorching summer sun making her scalp prickle with sweat.
 

Standing steadfast in the denial stage, Josie expected her mother to walk around the corner any minute, making
tsk
noises about Josie wearing shorts to work.

“It’s summer, Mama,” Josie whispered. “I’m just setting up my classroom.”
 

Tears made the scene before her shimmer. The glittering white courthouse, the leaves dancing in the breeze.
 

It seemed so unfair. Mama dropped dead at her kitchen counter. Why her? She was a good woman. A hard-working woman who raised two children into productive adults, one a teacher and the other a soldier.
 

She didn’t even get to see her grandchildren (not that they were imminent or anything).
 

There must be some mistake, Josie found herself thinking over and over again when it first happened. Some other woman must have been standing in Mama’s kitchen, helping her make tamales or brewing a pot of coffee. Some other woman wearing her ruffled apron, turquoise like the blue bowl she’d brought from Mexico to sit on the kitchen table, full of oranges.
 

Josie found her lying on the floor, hands covered in masa and a streak of it on her cheek. Her hair was wound in a tight, low bun. Her eyes were open, but Josie could tell she was already gone. A sense of calm came over Josie then, and she remembered the ABCs from her CPR class. Airway, breathing, circulation. Mama didn’t seem to have anything in her mouth, and she wasn’t breathing. Her skin was cold. She didn’t have a pulse.
 

Still, Josie refused to believe this was permanent. Even when the ambulance came screeching into the driveway, when the paramedics loaded her mother onto a stretcher after performing CPR, or when they told her there was nothing she could have done.

Mama had to be coming back. This was all a terrible nightmare.
 

She kept picturing herself sitting at her mom’s table drinking coffee, tying the tamales after Mama formed them with her strong hands. Three days had passed, and Josie found herself sitting on that bench at the courthouse square, reliving the scene yet again. They were wrong. Her mother wasn’t dead. It wasn’t true that a blood vessel in Carla Garcia’s brain had weakened, widened and then ruptured. Carla Garcia had veins of steel. She was tough.

The funeral was tomorrow. Summer, of course, helped Josie make the preparations. She put an announcement in the newspaper, chose a dress for Mama to wear and somehow found turquoise flowers for the church. Delaney would drive up from vet school tonight and spend the night with Josie in her childhood bedroom.
 

All Josie knew how to do to bury the hurt was to work. So she’d holed up in her classroom, scrubbing desks, vacuuming the carpet and color-coding folders for her students. Until today. She’d decided to take a break, and walked down to the square in hopes of finding some solace.

Heat waves radiated off the roads in downtown Juniper. The summer sun hung high above the carpet-like lawn. Josie, wearing khaki cargo shorts and a salmon-colored tank top that perfectly matched her pedicured toenails, treated herself to a huge lemonade from the stand on the corner.
 

That moment, the moment she sought refuge from the worst hurt she’d ever experienced, was the moment Scott Smith walked into her life.
 

Maybe that’s why the romance worked wonders.

***

Juniper’s signature fountain bubbled nearby, and a group of kids sat on the low concrete bench surrounding it, their bare feet in the water. Josie smiled as a little boy splashed his older sister, who responded by filling her empty soda cup and dumping it on his head.
 

Her own little brother would have done that very thing, if they’d ever gotten to sit around the fountain on a summer day. The truth was, neither of them had had any free time on a summer day since they were old enough to work the fields with Mama. Sometimes, when no one was looking, Juan grabbed a handful of fat red strawberries and shoved them into her mouth. She’d do the same to him, and they’d giggle like fiends trying to swallow the sweet fruit and wipe its traces from their cheeks before their mother caught them and punished them for being silly.
 

“People watching, huh?” Josie jumped at the voice, which was deep and smooth like a vat of melted chocolate. She loved chocolate.

She looked up, and had to shade her eyes to look at this tall, lanky stranger who interrupted her impromptu break from grief disguised as work. When they made eye contact, the man stepped back.
 

“Wow,” he said. “You’re even more beautiful up close.”
 

Despite the unexpected fluttery reaction in her stomach, and the involuntary flush that rose to her face, Josie’s internal voice whispered,
Poetry. False currency.
 

She smiled coolly. “I was just leaving, actually.”
 

“And your voice,” he said, apparently unaffected by what she thought was a clear shutdown. “It’s like honey.”
 

When she quirked an eyebrow at him, he lifted his hands in surrender and said, “No, seriously. It is.”
 

“I’ve got to get back to work,” she said. She stood up.
 

“That’s too bad. I’m the new guy in town. I was hoping I’d come down here and meet a friendly face, get some recommendations, on, you know, restaurants, grocery stores, whatever. I never imagined I’d find such a beautiful friendly face.”
 

Josie couldn’t help it. She laughed. “You’re good. But I’m afraid you’ve got me pegged incorrectly. I’m not that friendly.”
 

“Even so,” he said, his eyes twinkling with humor and a genuine interest. “Where’s the best place to grab lunch around here?”
 

“The Sand Witch is pretty good,” she said, pointing across the street at the deli. “And if you want Chinese, the Golden Lantern is just a couple of blocks from here. They have a decent lunch special. Their cashew chicken is to die for.”
 

“If you had to choose one, right now, which would it be?” the stranger asked.
 

Josie sipped her lemonade and considered.
 

“The Sand Witch,” she decided after a moment. She took a couple of steps away from him, in the direction of her school, but the stranger didn’t take the hint like she expected him to.

Instead, he looked her in the eyes and said, “You know what would really make my day? Lunch with a lovely lady on this lovely afternoon. My treat. Consider it my thanks for your advice.”
 

“I’ve got to get back to work,” she said again. “I’m setting up my classroom.”
 

He stooped and picked a lone yellow dandelion out of the lawn. He held it out to her, and she noticed his eyes were the color of bourbon when sunlight shone through the glass. “Please. Help a guy out. Don’t make me eat lunch alone on my first day in a new town.”

First poetry, and now a flower. Hear the warning bells, Garcia? Ding ding ding.
It wasn’t even warning bells, actually. It was a buzzer, the kind they put on emergency exits. For some reason, though—probably because she needed something warm and melty and happy to sink into—she couldn’t resist. That’s how they ended up eating lunch together that first day … and spending incalculable time together throughout the remainder of the summer despite the fact they both knew it could never work.

And wasn’t that the story of their relationship? She couldn’t resist him.
 

She couldn’t resist him then, when they decided ahead of time it wouldn’t last. She couldn’t resist him now, either, when there was even more standing between them; including, and especially, her marriage.
 

***

Is it bad juju to daydream about your ex-boyfriend while laying in the bed you share with your husband? Does it still count as daydreaming if you’re half-asleep and completely drunk?
 

Hours had passed since Josie crawled between the sheets in her granny panties, which meant she’d spent hours letting her mind wander to the man with whom things could never work out.
 

Not her husband of six years, but the stranger from the downtown square, the slightly nerdy guy looking for a restaurant tour.
 

Maybe that’s why the conversation flowed so easily during that first meal, that impromptu trip to The Sand Witch.
 

“Now, because you’re a teacher on summer break, I absolutely forbid you from talking about work while we’re at lunch,” Scott said as they approached the deli.
 

Josie wrinkled her nose.
 

“Then what on earth will we talk about?”
 

He opened the door for her, and she felt chills where she imagined he touched her lower back to guide her in.
 

Maybe it’s the poetry. You’re losing it, Garcia.
 

In reality, she knew she had fallen into this guy because it gave her the chance to step out of her current situation, to stop picturing the way Mama looked when she died and to stop wishing she’d hop back up and start making tamales again.

After ordering, they sat at a corner table with a window overlooking the square.
 

“So, let’s pretend we’re total strangers,” he said.

She laughed. “And how shall we pretend we met?”
 

“Let’s pretend I picked you up downtown. At random. Under the guise of being new in town and needing a tour guide. But in reality, wanting a delicious-looking woman with whom to eat lunch.”
 

“And to think I don’t even know the name of this man who is lavishing me with compliments.”
 

Blake, the deli’s owner, called out their order, and the stranger retrieved the sandwiches from the counter. Josie admired his long legs and his broad shoulders. She admired the way his fingers curved around the plastic baskets their sandwiches were served in.

She knew, at that very moment, that she’d sleep with him. And more importantly, she knew she’d like it.
 

“Josie,” she said, extending her hand when he sat back down at the table.