“I don’t deserve it,” Shelby tells the general manager. “I’ve only been here for a few months. And I just started school. I’m sure I’ll be at the bottom of the class.”
She may be a nothing, but she’s honest. Doesn’t this company see that she’s worthless? Lately she’s been dreaming about the field again. She loses her way in the tall grass and she doesn’t even care that she’s lost. There are blackbirds above her and the wind comes up and that’s when she spies Helene. That’s who’s been following Shelby in her dreams. Helene is running, calling out to Shelby, but the funny thing is she’s speaking a different language, one Shelby can’t understand. Shelby is always disappointed when she wakes up and sees Ben making coffee and the dogs on their doggy bed, another item she marked down for herself at the pet shop. She wants Helene to be there in the apartment, speaking English, telling Shelby that she forgives her.
The manager’s job pays $250 more a week. She’ll no longer need an allowance from Ben. The thought of herself as independent gives Shelby a little shiver of pleasure. She hasn’t felt that for so long she doesn’t know what it is at first and wonders if she’s coming down with the flu. Shelby will have to do more office work, meaning less time with the customers, which is a definite plus. And she’s good at math, even though she hates it. She can figure things in her head without knowing how she does it. The answer just pops up and presents itself to her. The problem is that Maravelle has been working at the store for two years and supports three children. She’s the one who should be promoted.
“Maravelle should have the job.”
That’s what would happen in a fair and just world, but Shelby can tell from the expression on the general manager’s face they’re not functioning in a world like that.
“Do you know how much time she took off last month?” The general manager isn’t a pet person, he’s an accountant. He isn’t a people person either.
“Her kids had the chicken pox.” Maravelle has twin ten-year-old boys, Teddy and Dorian, and a thirteen-year-old girl named Jasmine. She has photos of them taped up on her cash register. In spite of herself, Shelby knows Maravelle’s life story. There was a bad boyfriend, and drugs and abuse, and then one day Maravelle took her kids and walked out to start a new life. Shelby respects that kind of nerve. She and Maravelle usually take their lunch break together. They’re such opposites, Juan, the king of all nicknames, has taken to calling them Beauty and the Beast. They simply call him Asshole.
“Bottom line, she’s absent too much. She’s not being promoted. If you don’t take it, I’ll hire from outside.”
The general manager stands; he’ll shake her hand or he’ll dump her. Shelby knows that much. So she accepts his offer. She’s self-destructive, not stupid. She doesn’t mention the meeting to anyone, but word gets around fast. At the end of the day, Maravelle comes looking for her.
“I can’t believe this! I’ve been here way longer than you!” Maravelle is pretty and talented, but she got pregnant at sixteen and her life took a detour that keeps on veering from the path she thought she’d be on. “Thanks a million, Shelby,” she says with real bitterness.
“They were going to hire from the outside if I didn’t take it.” Shelby hasn’t had a friend for so long, she supposes Maravelle is the closest she’s got. “Look, I’ll give you half the money.”
“I don’t want half the money!”
“Seriously, I mean it. I’ll share fifty-fifty!”
“You just don’t get it, Shelby. It was about me deserving it.” Maravelle looks as though she’s about to cry. “It was the chicken pox, wasn’t it? All that time I took off?”
Shelby nods.
“To hell with everything,” Maravelle says as she stalks away.
That night Ben and Shelby go to the Half King to celebrate. It’s owned by one of Ben’s favorite writers, a fearless journalist he admires, not that Ben has time to read anything other than pharmacy texts these days. They’re sitting at a table on the street, so they can bring the dogs along. The General stays close to Ben, who is messy, and therefore more likely to drop food, even though the bulldog is one hundred percent devoted to Shelby. Frankly, if the General had been a man instead of a bulldog, Shelby would probably run away with him.
“Every time I see Maravelle I feel guilty,” she tells Ben.
“You just feel guilty period, Shelby. If you want to make things right with Maravelle, then do something,” Ben says.
Shelby puts down her veggie burger and narrows her eyes. Is this merely good advice or the suggestion of some higher power or Helene speaking to her through Ben?
“Such as?” Shelby has again begun to tap her foot whenever she’s anxious, which she did when she had her breakdown. Leave it to Shelby to be upset about a raise. Ben had picked up a bunch of tulips for her after she’d told him the news. She told him she hated tulips before she realized it would hurt his feelings.
“Do something that would be meaningful to her,” Ben suggests. “Something that will show her you’re a true friend.”
“But I’m not,” Shelby says.
She’s certain that it’s guilt, not friendship that drives her to buy two tickets for a Mariah Carey concert at Madison Square Garden, one for Maravelle and one for her daughter. They cost a fortune.
“Scalpers have to make a living,” Ben says when he hands over the cash.
Ben has paid for the tickets, but Shelby is the one Maravelle hugs when she’s called into Shelby’s new office and is given the envelope containing tickets for two seats in the tenth row. “You’re the best,” Maravelle says. She does a little jump for joy. “Not that I’m so easily bought off. But this is a good beginning.”
“It’s a beginning and an end,” Shelby tells her. “My bribery goes no further.”
Later in the week, when Shelby and Ben are in bed, he starts talking about money. Not exactly romantic. He thinks it’s great that Shelby is getting a raise. Look at how expensive the concert tickets were. Then he drops what Shelby considers to be a conversational bomb.
“Think of how much people pay to have weddings.”
Shelby sits up in bed. She can feel the pulse in the base of her throat. She’s read that people who are about to be shot feel that pulse and nothing else. “Who’s talking about weddings?”
“No one. It’s just that people pay a fortune for so much excess, like an eight-layer cake that tastes like white bread, when they could easily elope and spend the money on a trip to Mexico.”
“Are you planning a trip to Mexico?” Shelby is wearing black cotton underwear and a T-shirt. She’s pale and bald and her feet are thin and long and now she’s the manager of a chain store when she doesn’t even believe in chain stores. She’s a mom-and-pop-store kind of person. She starts thinking about her father, who runs the family business. Maybe she’s inherited her entrepreneurial skills from him. Ben is staring at her in some strange, hopeful way. Is he asking her to marry him? “Are you talking about a honeymoon?” she says in a thin voice.
“It’s a what-if situation.”
Shelby grabs Blinkie off the floor and holds him between her and Ben. When Blinkie falls asleep he rumbles. Ben is quiet and dreamless. Or at least that’s what he’s told Shelby. Perhaps he’s dreaming of Mexico, of aquamarine water and white birds, perhaps she’s beside him in his dreams and that’s why he calls out to her. Shelby’s name bursts out of his mouth even though he’s still asleep, but she’s already on the fire escape waiting for the morning. She’s much too far away to hear.
Shelby has decided to go home for Christmas. She plans to bring the dogs, but not Ben. She says she doesn’t want her parents to get the wrong idea.
“What idea would that be?” Ben’s gotten a haircut, and his white neck looks naked and vulnerable. “That we’re a couple?”
“My father’s crazy,” Shelby says, dodging the issue of the meaning of their relation
ship. “He’ll interrogate you.”
“Let him. I don’t mind.”
“I do. Let’s just go to our own homes.”
Ben rents a car and drops her off at her parents’. It’s Christmas Eve and the houses in the neighborhood are strung with lights that flicker and cast red and blue patterns into the snow. There are no lights at Shelby’s, however. The place almost looks deserted. Snow has piled up, and it appears no one has shoveled the walkway.
“Are you sure your parents are here?” Ben squints as he tries to look through the front window.
Shelby points. There’s her mother opening the front door, waving cheerfully. Shelby waves back. “Told you so.” She slips on her backpack, opens the car door, and ushers the dogs out.
“I’ll pick you up tomorrow at three,” Ben calls as Shelby navigates through the snow. “I’ll bring one of my mom’s pies.” Judy Mink is known for her baking. She made a wedding cake for her next-door neighbor that was photographed for Newsday. Unfortunately, Shelby hates pie.
She leaps through the drifts, carrying Blinkie. “Hello, stranger,” Sue Richmond says cheerfully as Shelby stomps her boots on the front porch. Shelby’s mom takes Blinkie and gives him a hug. “He’s so ugly he’s cute.”
“Ben?” Shelby says.
They both laugh, then go inside. There’s no Christmas tree. No decorations. Shelby looks through the pile of cards on the coffee table. A few are from neighbors, others are from her father’s business associates. Then there is a postcard with an intricate drawing of a maze. At the center of the maze is a question mark. Shelby turns it over to read the message.
Want something.
Shelby thinks she sees a tiny photo of herself clipped from a newspaper article about the crash pasted onto the card. The writer knows her so well. When she lost Helene, she lost her desire for life. Who is she to deserve something? How dare she want anything at all? She has a sort of burning feeling in her chest.
“I never really liked decorating the house,” her mom is saying. “It’s too much trouble. Who has time for that kind of thing? I always hated tinsel especially. You can never clean it up. Your dad got to the point where he forbade using it back when you were little.”
Shelby gazes around the room. Something is wrong here. “Where’s Dad?”
Sue is studying Blinkie. “This dog’s eye is infected.”
Nothing like changing the subject. Shelby goes with the flow. “The vet said he needs the eye removed. It costs a thousand bucks for the surgery, so I’m saving up.”
Shelby wishes she could heal Blinkie herself, that she had the skill and knowledge to take away his pain.
Sue decides to pay for the surgery as Shelby’s Christmas gift. Shelby insists she’ll pay it back, she even signs an IOU, but Sue tears it up. “I’m just glad there’s something you want,” Sue says.
Shelby is taken aback. “Did someone tell you to say that to me?”
“You mean like your father? He said he’s not giving gifts this year. He says it’s commercializing the holidays. Meanwhile he’s still at the store.”
“No. I mean like Helene.” That sounds so crazy Shelby adds, “Or anybody.”
Sue links an arm through Shelby’s. “Sometimes I think my mother is talking to me in my dreams. Who’s to say the dead don’t still speak to us and guide us? Maybe Helene does, too.”
It doesn’t feel like Christmas Eve with just the two of them in the dark house. Yet Shelby is glad to be home.
“What kinds of things does Grandma say when you dream about her?”
“She tells me to dump your dad.”
They both laugh.
“Anything else?”
“She says I’m lucky to be here with you and that I should get off my ass and start dinner.”
Shelby takes the dogs out. She sees a snow shovel and decides to make a path from the street to the house. By the time her dad’s car pulls up, she is more than halfway done.
“I usually hire the kid down the street to do that,” Dan Richmond says.
“I guess you forgot.” Shelby is so cold she no longer feels her fingers or toes. “Like you forgot this was Christmas Eve.”
Business is bad at Shelby’s dad’s menswear shop. People go to the mall or to some of the newer shops. It was his father’s store, and he’s always treated the inheritance like a curse.
“Yeah, well, some of us work,” he says.
They can see Sue at the window. She’s lighting a candle, the way she did when Shelby was little, an old tradition said to bring wanderers home.
“What made you fall in love with her?” Shelby asks her father.
“I’m not answering any trick questions,” Shelby’s dad says, and then Shelby knows her parents are married, but not really, and that her dad probably can no longer remember the reasons why. She wishes her mother had listened to the voice of her dead mother. People get divorced, they don’t have to stay together just because their stupid daughter had a car accident and a nervous breakdown and can’t seem to do anything right.
“Why don’t you just take off?” Shelby says to her father. “Close the store. Start a new life. Let her start one, too.”
Dan gives her a look. “My kind of person doesn’t do that sort of thing, Shelby.”
That’s the difference between them. Her kind of person does.
In the morning, Shelby is given her presents—a black sweater, a box of chocolate truffles, and unbeknownst to her father, a check for a thousand dollars so that Blinkie can have his surgery. She’s brought her parents a fondue pot. “I thought maybe you and Dad made fondue when you were first together.”
“I love fondue,” Sue says, hugging her.
When Ben comes to pick her up, he is carrying one of his mother’s apple-cranberry pies. He greets Shelby’s mom with a hug and accepts a cup of coffee. As usual, Shelby’s dad is MIA. “My mom had twenty-two people over last night and I think she had twenty-two turkeys,” Ben reports. “Not to mention all the pies.”
“You don’t celebrate Christmas,” Shelby reminds him. “You’re Jewish.” She has taken the postcard and slipped it into her coat pocket.
“But we celebrate eating,” Ben says. “Good food is part of a family get-together.”
At Shelby’s they’d had vegetarian lasagna and orange sherbet.
“Hey, Mr. Richmond,” Ben says cheerfully when Shelby’s father comes in from the garage, where he’s been sneaking a cigarette. “How’s business?”
“It sucks,” Shelby’s dad says.
“Dan!” Sue doesn’t approve of that kind of language in front of the kids, as she calls them.
“He asked! Do you want me to lie?”
“That’s the great thing about pharmaceuticals,” Ben says. “Business is always good. People always need drugs.”
“Well, Shelby would know about that,” Dan says darkly.
Shelby gives her father a cutting look. “Merry Christmas to you, too.”
Ben defends her. “Not anymore. She’s back in the Straight and Narrow Club.”
“I won’t go that far,” Shelby says.
“Shelby’s great,” Ben says. And they all look at him, a little surprised.
When it’s time to go, Shelby and Ben pile into the car with the dogs and the bags of presents. Ben’s mom has given him a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s books—even though he’s read Cat’s Cradle a dozen times—along with a cutting board that will never fit on their countertop and a coffeemaker they will never use. She sent along Jo Malone cologne for Shelby, a fresh grapefruit scent that Shelby will regift to her mom on Mother’s Day. Ben has to get the car back to the rental company before five and there’s bound to be traffic, so they get going even though Shelby’s mom keeps suggesting they spend the night.
“Your dad seems a little off,” Ben says.
“He’s u
nhappy. But instead of leaving he’s just making my mom’s life miserable. He thinks that’s more honorable.”
“They’ll work it out,” Ben says reasonably.
Shelby studies Ben as he drives. Maybe if she watches him closely enough she’ll understand what makes one person kind and another, herself for instance, mistrustful and hopeless. The more she thinks about her father the more she knows she and Ben are not meant for each other. They stumbled into each other’s lives one cold winter when they were both desperate for warmth, and if they stay together she will be the person who comes home late on Christmas Eve.
CHAPTER
3
Maravelle’s grandmother in Florida has fallen ill. Because she’s in her eighties and frail, Maravelle’s mother has already flown down to Orlando, and Maravelle hopes to join her, if Shelby will help her out.
“Fine, go,” Shelby says when Maravelle asks for time off. “I’ll find someone to cover for you. Take as much time as you need.” Shelby is known to be a soft touch when employees need time for personal reasons. Juan’s mother is getting radiation treatments, and Shelby lets him come in at noon every day so he can take his mom to the hospital.
“My kids will love you,” Maravelle says.
“Kids?” Shelby says, wary. “I don’t like kids.”
“You’ll like mine.”
“Why would I have anything to do with them?”
Maravelle grins. “You’re my babysitter, baby.”
Shelby might have used school as an excuse, she’s taking Advanced Biology, but it’s spring break, there are no classes, and if she doesn’t take a few days off from work she’ll lose her vacation time. Not that this is the vacation she had in mind. She was thinking she would sleep late, go to movie theaters during the day, and spend evenings at the Strand Book Store on Broadway looking for Ray Bradbury books she hasn’t yet read.
“I need you to watch them,” Maravelle insists. “You’re the only one I trust.”
This is probably the moment Ben had mentioned, when Shelby can show Maravelle she’s a true friend. This is beyond concert tickets. This is her life. As soon as she says yes, Shelby is furious with Ben. He always thinks she’s more human than she is. That night as she packs, Shelby won’t talk to him. She tends to blame him for whatever goes wrong.