Can I Get An Amen? Read online

  As we made our way down the stairs, I was aware of every footstep, every creak and groan of the steep wooden steps. “These stairs are more like a ladder,” he joked, as he ducked to avoid bumping his head on the low ceiling.

  When we got down to the little café, a plump older woman in purple glasses who looked like a retired elementary school art teacher gave us a warm smile. I assumed that she was the owner’s wife and probably responsible for the children’s space upstairs. “What can I get you two?”

  “I’d like another latte, please,” I said, holding up my mug for her to refill.

  She looked at Mark. “Just a cup of French roast,” he said. He had a boyish smile that was unconditionally charming.

  “Any room for milk?”

  “No. Thanks.”

  We took a seat at a small table for two next to a window that had a view of the alley and the next building. Mark took a sip of his coffee while the steaming wand screeched in the background.

  “I wish you had at least gotten a mocha,” I joked. “I owe you much more than a cup of black coffee.”

  He leaned back in his seat and looked at me warmly. “You don’t owe me anything. I’m just glad everything turned out the way it did.”

  “Me, too,” I said, unable to look him in the eye. “I just want you to know that that wasn’t something I normally do. I don’t usually go to parking garages with men I don’t know.”

  “I didn’t think you did,” he said, subtly shaking his head.

  “And so, do you just roam around at night, looking for damsels in distress?” I instantly regretted the question, the phrasing.

  He chuckled and rubbed his five o’clock shadow. “No, I uh… saw you in the bar,” he admitted. I looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to elaborate. His face turned serious when he went on. “And there was something about that guy that I didn’t like.”

  “Well, thank you. And your instincts.”

  The plump older woman bustled out from behind the counter and set my latte down in front of me. My mug had a Far Side comic on it and Mark smiled as he read it.

  “Do you live around here?” I asked. I had found him. And now I wanted to find out as much as I could about him.

  “Not far, over in Maplewood.”

  He didn’t ask where I lived. He thought he already knew.

  “Did you grow up there?”

  “No.” He chuckled. “Pretty far from there, actually. I grew up in Africa.”

  “Africa. Wow.”

  “My parents were Peace Corps hippies in the sixties. Then they just kind of stayed. They still live there with my little sister.”

  “Where in Africa?”

  “South Africa now. But we traveled around a lot growing up. We spent a lot of time in Ethiopia.”

  I was genuinely interested and pressed him for more information. “And what brought you to the States?”

  “School,” he said. “I went to college and grad school here.”

  I was quickly becoming irrevocably intimidated when he turned the tables. “What about you? Are you originally from New Jersey?”

  “Yup,” I said, my tone a telling indicator that I didn’t expect him to find this impressive.

  “And did you go to college?”

  I nodded, noting that he made no assumption that I had any kind of postsecondary education, a hallmark of a broad worldview. It was the antithesis of the Horton crowd, who took for granted that everyone went to college, and it was only a question whether it was Ivy League. “I went to Northeastern, in Boston. I just moved back from Boston, actually.”

  “Oh, really?” he asked. “What brought you back to New Jersey?”

  For a split second, I considered telling him everything. Telling him about Gary and his leaving and why. There was just something about him that inspired trust. I wanted to believe that I could tell him and that he would still sit across the table from me, offering no pity or judgment. But common sense prevailed. “It’s a long story.”

  He didn’t push it and instead asked me about growing up here. In turn, we talked about growing up in Africa. “I miss it,” he said. “I still have a lot of friends there, so I try to go back twice a year.”

  I studied the fine crow’s-feet at the sides of his eyes and pictured him squinting against the brutal African sun.

  “Have you ever been?” he asked.

  “No,” I answered. The truth was that I’d never really had the desire to go. “It seems like an amazing place, but so… tragic, too.”

  “It is. It’s both. It’s amazing and tragic.”

  He asked me about my family, and I asked about his. We talked through our first cup of coffee and then he bought us each a second. Finally, I saw him glance surreptitiously at his watch.

  “I don’t want to keep you, Mark.”

  He shook his head. “It’s fine.”

  “No, really, if you have somewhere to be…”

  He looked reluctant to move. “Well, maybe we could pick this up another time?” He looked at me with eyes that seemed to see everything. “Say, over dinner?”

  I couldn’t help but beam. “That would be great,” I responded, not hesitating for a moment.

  He pulled out his cell phone and I gave him my number; then we stood and brought our mugs over to the counter.

  “So maybe Friday night?”

  “That’s perfect.”

  He inched closer to me, closer than he needed to. “Maybe you can tell me that long story.” We were inches apart and I felt the electricity of his presence. “I like long stories.”

  . . .

  I walked giddily back up to the children’s floor, smiling and replaying every chord of our conversation. His stack of books still sat next to the mushroom stool, and I picked them up, shuffling through the titles and smiling at his choices. I bought several, including the copy of Goodnight Moon.

  Sitting in the driver’s seat of my car, I shifted into drive and realized that I didn’t know where I was going. Still spinning from seeing Mark, I didn’t want to go home; I was too happy. So I called Jill.

  “Yes, come over!” she practically shouted into her phone. “I’ve been dying to see you.”

  I pulled up to Jill’s house, which was on a cul-de-sac in the sort of development where people had gates at the beginning of their paver-stone driveways lined with kidney-bean beds of bonsai-like shrubs. Along with garden statuary, black leather recliners, and the mispronunciation of the word bruschetta, it was the type of infraction that Kat would categorize as what made Jersey Jersey.

  Jill’s house was an enormous Tudor-style home that was actually one of the more restrained properties in her neighborhood. I rang the doorbell and Jill’s husband, Greg, heaved open the huge, heavy wooden front door.

  “Carlisle!” he barked as he pulled me into a bear hug. Greg Wadinowski could accurately be described as a sweetheart, but he looked like a Russian mobster, an impression that was aided by the long, sinister-looking scar down the side of his face. A knife fight, you might think, but the menacing effect was due to a clumsy trip at the construction site of a new convenience store.

  I reached up and rubbed the top of his head, which I couldn’t help but do every time I saw him. He had admirably begun shaving it at the first signs of baldness, so the only hairs on his shiny Mr. Clean dome were from his very prominent eyebrows. He had a thick neck, and his body, which used to be described as stocky, now looked like it was beginning to stretch the confines of his skin; he wasn’t fat so much as stuffed. He was wearing a hooded Giants sweatshirt and smelled distinctly of salami sub. If he weren’t a very, very wealthy man, Mrs. Larkin would never have approved.

  “Jill’s up in the bathroom. She just went makeup shopping,” he said with playful exasperation. Jill’s favorite thing to buy had always been makeup. She’d come home clutching her bag and head straight upstairs to begin experimentations in shading and application.

  “Oh, I’m in for it, then,” I said, knowing that Jill would insist on at
least doing my eyes, which at the time had only a bit of shadow smeared onto the lid and some mascara.

  Greg patted my back, like I was a buddy he was tagging into a game. Greg adored Jill, and he indulged her shamelessly. He was the type of husband who told her she was beautiful every day, who ordered dessert just so she could have a bite, and who truly believed he was the luckiest man in the world. So what if he came to the dinner table in his boxers?

  I knocked once before opening the door to Jill’s bathroom. She was perched before the double vanity, inches away from the mirror, carefully lining her lips. She squealed when she saw me and jumped down to give me a hug.

  “Elle!” she said, squeezing me hard around the neck. “It is so good to see you!”

  “You, too,” I said, a bit taken aback by the greeting, which even for Jill was what you might call enthusiastic.

  “Oh my God, there is so much that we need to talk about. Should we go downstairs and get a cup of tea or something?”

  “Tea?” I had never known Jill to drink tea outside the sedative atmosphere of a spa.

  She hooked her arm through mine and began leading me out of the bathroom, down the stairs, and into the kitchen, where she quickly closed off the pocket doors leading to their den. Greg was watching a game on their enormous flat-screen and the volume was almost deafening. I took a seat at her massive wooden pedestal table with an ornately carved base. Jill was a big fan of ornamentation.

  “So, Thanksgiving was good?” she asked as she pulled a bakery box off the counter.

  “Yeah, it was fine. How about yours?”

  “Great,” she answered enthusiastically. “I loved having everything here.” This was the first year that Jill had hosted Thanksgiving, which was a big deal in the Wadinowski clan.

  “How many people did you end up having?”

  Jill placed a tray laden with icing-heavy baked goods down in front of me. “Forty-one.” She licked a flake of icing off her finger. She was trying to sound casual about it, but I knew how proud she was that she had pulled it off.

  “Whoa, Jill!” I said, thinking of our quiet group of four. “Forty-one people? Did you do all the cooking?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, smiling, then clarified, “Well, Theresa helped.” Theresa was Greg’s mother, a heavy-bottomed Polish matriarch who was fiercely protective of her family. Her wardrobe consisted entirely of velour sweat suits and big designer sunglasses, which she often wore nested into her spiky burgundy hair. She was known as a shrewd woman and an excellent judge of character, who simply sucked in her cheeks, pursed her lips, and turned her head if she didn’t like you. It took Jill years to be accepted into the fold, but preparing a Thanksgiving dinner together was a sure sign that she was now viewed as a daughter.

  Jill picked up a cheese Danish and took a hearty bite. “Want one?” she asked.

  I had never known Jill to casually eat a pastry. I was surprised enough to see them in the house, but the fact that she was actually consuming one, just helping herself to all those refined carbs and that saturated fat, was astonishing. The only time a Danish ever met her lips was during an all-out feeding frenzy, one that she would punish herself brutally for later with carrot sticks and an elliptical trainer. But this seemed entirely different, as she was simply sitting back and guiltlessly enjoying her snack.

  “Sure,” I said, choosing a chocolate croissant.

  “So tell me, what did you do today?” she asked. She was giddy but trying to hide it, like a fourth grader who just got passed a note from the cutest guy in class. It was very close to how I was feeling.

  “Well…,” I said, letting myself glow, knowing Jill would never tell me that it was too soon, or even mention the word rebound. “I ran into Mark.”

  It took Jill a moment to process his name, but when she did, her reaction appropriately reflected the magnitude of the situation. “Oh my God, this is major!” Her eyes were wide and her voice was a stage whisper. “Where did you see him?”

  “At Back Door Books.” Grinning, I picked off a corner of the croissant. “We’re going out on Friday.”

  Jill hit the table hard with her open palm. “Shut up!” She looked around the room as if considering a vast to-do list. “We have got to figure out what you’re going to wear. Where are you going? Are you going into New York? I’ll bet he’s a first-date-in-the-city type.”

  I shrugged. “I have no idea. He’s going to call to figure out all that.”

  This was apparently news that called for further refreshments, so Jill announced that she was making us lattes. “But I only have decaf espresso, okay?”

  “Yeah, that’s perfect,” I said, buzzing from the three I had just polished off at the bookstore.

  As she pulled a gallon jug of milk from the fridge, I immediately noticed the telltale red label. It was whole milk. This was too much. “All right, Jill, what gives?” I asked, gesturing toward the milk.

  “What?” she asked, pretending to play dumb, though I could see her trying to suppress a smile.

  “Jill… whole milk?”

  “Greg drinks it. I’m out of skim.” While this was surely the truth, it was only part of it.

  “Come on, Jill.”

  “All right,” she said, bustling toward me. She sat down and inched her chair close. “I promised Greg that I wouldn’t tell anyone else until I was at least six weeks, but since his family already knows…”

  All she had to say was “six weeks.” My eyes filled with the sort of happy tears that I hadn’t experienced in what felt like years. “Oh, Jill,” I sputtered as we locked into a hug. “You’re going to be a mom.”

  “Can you believe it?”

  I gripped her shoulders as I began my barrage of questions. “How far along are you?”

  “Like, not far along at all. I found out on Wednesday. We were going to keep it quiet, but then Greg told his mom and you know how it goes.” Her hands moved together in a rolling motion.

  “When are you due?”

  “According to those online due-date calculator things, July twenty-sixth.”

  I felt a brief and fleeting sense of melancholy. I knew those due-date calculators well. I had lived by them when Gary and I were together. If it happens this month, we’ll have a baby in October!

  This brief moment of silence for the past was not lost on Jill. “Elle, is this too… hard to talk about right now?”

  I put my hand gently on her belly. “Are you kidding? I am so, so happy for you.” And I was. My joy for Jill was unadulterated. I have often asked myself if my answer could have been so absolute if I had walked into that bookstore that morning and left with nothing more than a couple of paperbacks, novels on love and loss; if I had never climbed up to that third floor. The answer is that I don’t know. I would have been happy for Jill, but I would have also, on a more tangible level, been sad for myself.

  “So,” I said, “how are you feeling?”

  “Hungry,” replied Jill. She leaned back in her chair and let out a heady, intoxicated giggle. “I am going to get so fat.” And she picked up the last bit of her Danish and ate it with the wide-eyed look of a child who had just done something naughty and loved it. Jill, who had been on a diet since she was eight, whose mother used to send her to slumber parties with preportioned, shelf-stable Slim-Fast shakes, finally had an excuse to eat without remorse.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  It was ten o’clock on Monday morning. My cell phone was placed prominently on my desk, just to the right of my keyboard, stubbornly, deafeningly silent. I was entering the obsessive phase in my wondering when Mark was going to call about Friday. I looked at the phone every few seconds, willing it to ring, all the while trying to temper my expectations and prepare myself for the worst. He was just looking for an easy out, I told myself. Don’t expect to hear from him again, ever. It was a strategy that I had begun to employ late in the days of trying to have a child, beating down my hopes so that on the off chance I got my wish, I would be that much more elated.


  When a phone did ring, cruelly, it was my work line.

  “All right,” began Parker, after the requisite pleasantries, “where are we with the party?”

  We weren’t anywhere with the party.

  “I plan to get to work on it today.”

  Parker barely let me finish. “I would say the florist is the first priority. Then the guest gifts.” I could hear her kids going wild in the back of her car. “Then we need to finalize the head count, of course. And confirm that with Maramar.” Maramar was where the party was being held. It was the rarely used estate of a Moroccan prince that had since been converted to a restaurant, or so the story went. “I mean, this party is in, like, two weeks.”

  “Yup,” I said, pressing hard with my pen into a stack of Post-it notes while trying to sound pleasantly professional. “I’m on it.”

  I hung up the phone and looked over at Brenda. “The Christmas party?” she asked sympathetically.

  “What else,” I confirmed wearily.

  “At least Parker is helping. She is such a doll.” Brenda was careful never to say anything about Parker that might be construed as less than worshipful.

  I felt an almost irresistible compulsion to bang my head re-peatedly on my desk. What else did my job entail besides attending to the needs of Philip and, by extension, Parker Kent? Besides ordering green hydrangeas and buying expensive gifts for business associates? My lack of purpose had never bothered me in the agency environment, but that was when I had other plans for my life. Now I felt as if I’d missed the boat on a meaningful career. As if the smart, hungry girls had put in the long hours and paid their dues while I was preparing for something that was never to be. And now I was doomed to scheduling meetings and making phone calls and eating my lunch alone.

  And that was what I did that morning. Exactly that. As Brenda and I sat at our desks and picked at our lunches—each of us had brought salads with leftover turkey packed at home in Tupperware containers—we made the typical small talk about Thanksgiving. “The kids both came,” said Brenda, glowing. “It was just wonderful to have them home.” Her daughter-in-law was expecting what was to be her first grandchild. “I just wish they lived closer,” she said, explaining that they had moved to Chicago from New York three years ago for her son’s, Jake’s, career. “He has a great job in marketing for Pepsi.” She stared wistfully into her salad as she poked around for a bite that was to her liking. Since Brenda was tethered to her house, she’d have to make do with their twice-yearly visits. “I’ll go on the weekends whenever I can, though,” she said, as she stabbed a grape tomato with her fork, probably knowing that that wouldn’t end up being very often. “Jake has tons of frequent-flier miles from all his travel, so he says that he’ll fly me out.” It was as if she was selling a product that she didn’t quite believe in.