Vintage Page 18

  Betsy set down her teacup. “So if you weren’t referring to the plans for the building, then what is it you wanted to bring up?”

  Violet tried to think about how best to phrase what she had to say about the information she’d found in Betsy’s car. Concluding that there was no good way, she just blurted out, “I know about your cancer, Betsy. I’m sorry. I saw an insurance form or a bill or something in your front seat when I went out to get the clothes last time you came into the shop.”

  Betsy didn’t say anything. The words seemed to hover in the air, above the lacquered coffee table.

  “Oh, no,” Betsy finally said. She reached over and patted Violet’s shoulder. “I didn’t realize I had left that piece of paper sitting out.”

  Violet set down her tea and hugged her arms to her chest, feeling chilled in the air-conditioned room. “I know it’s none of my business, but I’m just so worried about you. I don’t have any family in Madison, so you’ve become kind of like my family here.”

  Betsy’s expression changed from one of sympathy to a smile. “That’s very sweet of you to say, and I can tell you the feeling is quite mutual, but there’s nothing to worry about. I kicked that cancer in the butt. That paper is months and months old. I just haven’t cleaned out the car in a while. I really should keep it tidier. If Walt were still around, he wouldn’t stand for all the clutter I keep in there.”

  Violet sniffled, feeling skeptical. “Really?”

  “Yes, I’m happy to say.” Betsy smiled. “The doctors found a lump in my breast, and I went through radiation treatment and had a double mastectomy. I’ve been cancer-free for over a year.”

  “You were going through all of that and you never told me?”

  “It never came up, and anyway, I didn’t want people to know I was sick because then they’d insist on me taking it easy, and I’ve never been good at that. And, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t want people thinking I was going to die. As you know, I’m involved with several charitable organizations and all of them, naturally, hope I’ll leave them a little something in my will someday. You can bet that if any of them got a whiff of a rumor that I might be kicking the bucket soon, they’d be lined up to kiss my ass, bless their hearts.”

  Violet laughed. “You’re probably right.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe you had a double mastectomy. Jesus.”

  “I’m seventy-six years old. What use do I have for these anymore?” She cupped her hands under her bra line. “I wear falsies now so my clothes still fit properly.”

  “I’m so glad you’re okay,” Violet said.

  “Oh, stop fussing over me. Cancer was no picnic, but it did teach me a thing or two. I learned that there’s no point in mulling over what could have been or what should have been. If you do, you miss out on what’s going on right in front of you, and that’s all there is, really.”

  As Violet drove home that night, her thoughts reverberated inside her skull like it was a kettledrum, and a muddle of emotions fought for space in her heart. There was the shock of learning about the plan for her building, hurt as to why Betsy wouldn’t have told her about it, and relief about Betsy’s being in remission.

  Betsy’s comments about letting go of what “could have” and “should have” been reminded Violet of something Sam had said to her on their first date. She phoned him on her way home.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m glad you called. What are you up to?”

  “I just had tea with my friend Betsy who’s battled cancer. She said something about living in the moment that sounded familiar. So I’m calling to tell you that, at this moment, I want to be with you.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” Sam said.

  “If you want, you can come to my place. It’s probably the last night I’ll be able to really relax this week, since I’ve got the revue coming up in a few days. I’ve got some wine in the fridge for us and a whole lot of musicals on DVD.”

  “I’ll take you up on the wine, but I’ll have to skip the musicals.”

  Violet let out an exaggerated sigh. “I knew you weren’t perfect.”

  “Are you home right now?” Sam asked.

  “I’m on my way. I’ll meet you there.”

  Violet rolled along Johnson Street in her old, wood-paneled Wagoneer. She passed two cars with dripping kayaks strapped to their roofs, probably coming home from an evening paddle in one of the lakes. A Led Zeppelin song played on the radio. The anticipation of seeing Sam put her in a singing kind of mood, and she crooned along with Robert Plant. She parked behind her building and hurried to the back entrance, hoping she’d have enough time to light candles and pour some wine before Sam arrived. Her heels sounded on the worn wood as she ascended the back staircase. When she opened the door, Miles didn’t run to greet her.

  That’s odd, she thought, beginning to worry that something had happened to him.

  “Miles,” she called, reaching for the light switch.

  “Hey, babe,” said a low voice.

  Violet jumped a mile and flicked the kitchen light on to reveal a drunk and drooping—but still formidable—Jed, sitting on the floor against the refrigerator. And petting her dog.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” she asked. She had thought she was done with having to deal with Jed and his benders.

  At the sound of Violet’s shouting, Miles raised his ears but stayed put at Jed’s side. So much for loyalty, Violet thought. Back when they’d adopted Miles together from a rescue shelter, Jed had done little to care for the dog. Walking him, feeding him, and bathing him fell to Violet. Apparently Miles had forgotten all that.

  “I’m just passing through town.” Jed grinned at her, not looking convinced of his own lie. He tried to get to his feet but stumbled. He grabbed on to the counter and pulled himself up.

  “You’re drunk,” Violet said, seething with rage. “Get out of here or I’m going to call the police and report you for breaking in.”

  “The door was unlocked,” Jed said. “I didn’t break in.”

  Shit, Violet thought. She’d been distracted as she left for Betsy’s house. She must have forgotten to lock up. It was easy to forget, in a relatively safe Midwestern city like Madison.

  Jed took a swig from a green, shapely bottle. Violet recognized it as the white wine she’d bought for her and Sam to drink.

  “That’s my fucking wine.”

  “Saving it for something special?” He glanced at the bottle in one hand and, with the other, reached out and grabbed her waist.

  Violet jerked away. He came forward and tried again to grab her, but Violet reached down and slipped off one of her shoes, a leopard-print flat. She hurled it in Jed’s direction. It missed him and clunked against the refrigerator. It was more of a gesture of sheer frustration than anything. Jed had never hurt her, physically anyway, and even if he wanted to, he was too inebriated to pull it off.

  Jed picked up the shoe and examined it with blurry-eyed wonder. “You’ve always had such tiny little feet. Do you remember, Vi? How I used to rub your feet when you were done working double shifts at the Sunshine Café?”

  Violet reached down and took off the other shoe, advancing toward him with it. “Get. The fuck. Out of. My apartment. I’ve got someone coming over, and you better not be here when he arrives.”

  “Ooooh, a boyfriend? He gonna beat me up?” Jed took a couple of wobbly steps forward and collapsed in a liquid heap of loose muscle and spilled wine.

  “You don’t have my permission to be here. I can still call the police,” Violet said. “So you’d better get out.”

  “You won’t call the police.”

  “Try me.” She walked over to the phone on the counter.

  “Okay, okay.” Jed held his hands up. “I’ll go.”

  When he didn’t move, Violet asked, “Where’s your truck?”

  Jed sat up on the wood floor with his knees to his chest. “Wrecked it.”

  “Jesus. Tonight?”

  “Nah, a few months ago.”r />
  “How did you get here?”

  “Lenny sold me his van.”

  Violet sighed. The patience she’d once had for this man had run out years earlier, when she finally realized that, for all of his luminescent charm and fame in high school, things like ambition and happiness died within a mile of Jed Cline.

  “So where’s your van, then?” Violet asked.

  “It’s parked just down the street.”

  “Probably not anymore. It’s a street-cleaning night. The city starts towing cars after seven o’clock,” said Violet.

  “So maybe I should just stay here tonight then.” Jed looked up at her with an expression that was probably intended to be sexy but instead just looked desperate, defeated—the expression of a man holding on to a tiny spiderweb’s thread of hope.

  “No way.” Letting him stay the night was out of the question, but so was letting him drive anywhere. Violet paced the kitchen, not sure what to do. She didn’t know what had spurred him to make the four-hour trip from Bent Creek to see her, but she didn’t have time to find out. She needed to get him out of there before Sam arrived.

  “Get up,” she said. “I’m taking you to the Super 8 on East Washington.”

  “But I need to talk to you. I lost my job.” Jed struggled to stand in his ancient steel-toed boots. “You always used to help me figure out what to do.”

  “I thought you were done making these surprise visits. For that matter, I thought you’d stopped drinking. What happened to rehab?”

  “Fuck rehab.” Jed shook his head like there was a scorpion in his hair. When he stopped, his eyes looked resigned and sad. “Don’t you miss me, Vi? Sometimes I think about when we were first together. We had a lot of fun.”

  Violet did miss some things about their time together but it wasn’t Jed she missed. It was the innocence and hope she’d had in the beginning of their relationship. Rarely had she allowed herself to feel hopeful since. She suspected hope was what Jed was missing, too.

  “Come on. I’ll drive you to the motel,” she said.

  Clutching on to the counter, Jed managed to hoist himself up. As soon as he got to his feet, Miles started barking again.

  “It’s okay, boy,” said Violet. “He’s leaving.”

  Violet heard Jed shuffling behind her as she went out the door. At the top of the back steps, she looked down and saw Sam standing at the bottom.

  “Get back inside,” she hissed to Jed, but he had already spotted Sam.

  “Hey, do I know you?” Jed asked.

  Sam shot Violet a bewildered look, and she held up her hands to show that she was just as surprised as he was.

  “Dude, I asked you a question,” said Jed, louder this time.

  “It’s possible,” Sam replied.

  “You from Bent Creek?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “I was just about to drop him off at a motel,” Violet said. “Please come up and help yourself to anything until I get back. There was some wine”—she glared at Jed—“but that’s all gone now.”

  Sam came up the stairs and Jed grabbed his shoulder. “I want to catch up with my buddy here from Bent Creek. Can’t we stay for just a little while?

  “Listen, man.” Jed leaned toward Sam and, in doing so, wavered on his feet. For a moment, Violet thought he was going to tumble down the stairs. He grabbed the railing. “Have your fun now,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before this bitch thinks she’s too good for you.”

  Sam wound back his fist, about to take a swing, but Violet grabbed his arm. “Please don’t.”

  Sam clenched his jaw.

  “Aw, you still care about me, don’t you, Vi?” said Jed.

  “No,” she said in his direction, then looked again at Sam. “He’s not worth it. One punch and his drunk ass will probably fall down the stairs and we’ll all end up at the police station. That’s not how I wanted to spend this evening.” She gave him the sexiest smile she could get away with while her ex-husband stood behind her.

  Sam dropped his fist and gave Jed a murderous look. “Okay,” he said. He turned to Violet. “You want me to ride with you there? I don’t want you alone with this guy.”

  “Sure, you can come along,” she said. She didn’t want the two men in the car together, but she also didn’t want any more time alone with Jed.

  The three-mile drive to the Super 8 on the east side of town felt like it took hours. Jed babbled in the backseat.

  “I’d been doing real good, going to AA meetings and everything, until I got into a fight with my boss at the factory,” he said. “Man, that guy is a dick.”

  Sam stared straight ahead, looking as though he might jump back there and strangle Jed at any moment.

  “So you came down here after getting fired?” asked Violet.

  “I’m not real sure, exactly. I remember going out afterward, to blow off steam, and then everything is sorta fuzzy after that until I woke up in my car in a rest station parking lot near Eau Claire. I figured I was almost halfway to Madison so I kept on driving.”

  “Jesus, you could have killed someone.”

  “It’s not my fault,” Jed said. “It runs in families, you know.”

  “Right,” said Sam. He leaned a muscular forearm on the armrest and whipped his head around to look at Jed. “Nothing is your fault. You couldn’t stop yourself from driving drunk, or breaking into Violet’s apartment—”

  “Or spending my tuition money on booze,” Violet added.

  “Right. You couldn’t help any of it. You’re just genetically predisposed to being an asshole,” Sam said.

  Violet glanced in the rearview mirror as she pulled into the parking lot of the motel.

  A look of recognition crossed Jed’s face. “Hey, I remember you now. Sam. Sam Lewis. You were all weird and skinny back then. You turned out a lot better than I would’ve thought.”

  “Sorry I can’t say the same for you,” Sam said.

  Jed got out of the car.

  Sam rolled down his window. “You better not come by Violet’s tomorrow or any other day, you hear me?”

  “What am I supposed to do?” Jed asked. He looked at Violet with the same lost look that, years ago, would have hooked her. She had a weakness for anything worn and broken, and she had to fight it constantly in running the shop—curbing the impulse to buy a coat with a torn lining that would cost more to replace than she could ever get for it on the sales floor. But she’d learned, over the years, that some things were beyond repair. Her relationship with Jed was one of them.

  “Go back to Bent Creek, Jed,” she said. “I can’t help you anymore.”

  Jed walked toward the motel entrance with his shoulders slumped. He no longer carried himself with the swagger Violet remembered. Life must have beat it out of him.

  “You okay?” Sam asked as Violet pulled out of the parking lot.

  “I think so,” she said. “Can I stay at your place tonight, though? I’m way too freaked out to go back home right now.”

  “Of course.” Sam reached over and touched her arm at the exact spot her tattoo emerged from the short sleeve of her cotton eyelet blouse.

  Violet glanced down at the open-winged phoenix on her bicep. She’d gotten the tattoo on the day she arrived in Madison five years earlier. Before she even unloaded the boxes from her Jeep into her apartment, she had stopped at Gary’s Tattoo Artistry on Williamson Street and shown the eponymous owner a page in a vintage mythology book she’d always loved. Though her marriage had gone up in flames, she was determined to use her newfound freedom in order to fly.

  “I’m sorry you got dragged into that,” Violet said to Sam. “Thank you for not escalating things into a fight back at my place.”

  “It’s not often I want to hit someone,” he said. “And I really wanted to.”

  “I wouldn’t have blamed you if you did. But I’m glad you didn’t. It would have just made everything messier, and I wanted to get him out of my place as soon as possible.”

 
; Sam ran his hands through his gray-speckled hair. “When he called you a bitch—”

  “It’s not like I’ve never been called that before,” Violet said. “I figure any woman who’s not a total pushover has been called a bitch once or twice in her life. I can take it.”

  They rode in silence for a few moments.

  “Is there still something going on there?” Sam asked.

  At a stoplight, she turned her face toward Sam. “What, between Jed and me?”

  “Yeah. I mean, why would he drive all that way if he didn’t think—”

  Violet squeezed Sam’s hand. “There’s nothing going on.”

  “I don’t know why you don’t just cut him out for good.”

  “I’ve tried, but every time something happens I think it’s going to be the last time. Karen is always telling me I should get a restraining order, and she’s probably right.”

  Sam let out a loud, frustrated breath. “People like that are the reason I never want to have kids. It was bad enough to live through getting made fun of growing up. I imagine it was even harder for my parents to watch me get picked on by guys like him.”

  The light turned green and Violet knew she needed to go, but her brain was stuck on what Sam had just said. He hadn’t said I might not want to have kids or I’m not sure. He’d said “never.”

  Someone behind her honked and she moved her foot to the gas pedal.

  “I thought you said you’ve moved past all that,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, not enough to want to put an innocent kid through it.”

  “But your kid might not get bullied.”

  “Don’t they all? And if they don’t, then they’re the ones doing the bullying, which is even worse.”

  “That’s kind of a cynical outlook, don’t you think?”

  Sam shrugged. “Maybe, but with the world population breaking seven billion, it’s not like anybody is missing out by me deciding not to father children.”

  Violet glanced at Sam’s face in the glow of the streetlights and thought, That’s not necessarily true.