Along Came Zoe

Denny smirked. “Like he’s going to tell mommy anyway.” Gotcha, his expression said. “He’s not gonna tell you nothing.”

“Well, that’s good news,” Zoe said. “That means he’ll be telling me something, right?”

The smirk faded. “Shut the hell up, Zoe. If you were half as damn smart as you think you are, you wouldn’t be selling vegetables.”

Zoe smiled. “If I were half as damn smart as I think I am, I obviously wouldn’t have married you in the first place.” She watched the color creep up the side of his neck. She could almost hear his brain whirring as he struggled to regain the upper hand— Let’s see, how can I really zap her?

“Me and him had a little talk last night,” he finally said. “Man to man, like. ‘Gotta use a condom,’ I told him, ‘or some girl’s going to trap you just like your mom trapped me.’”

BRETT’S MUFFIN POPPED out of the toaster and he spread peanut butter on it. His mom and Rhea were in the kitchen making soup and reading out loud from a cookbook that was propped up against a clay pot he’d made in some art class when he was a little kid. Rhea had been there when he got home from school.

“I don’t see why you couldn’t make this with fresh lima beans,” his mom was saying to Rhea. “Let’s just improvise, okay. I hate following recipes.”

Rhea laughed and winked at him. “Rules, recipes…your mom marches to her own drummer,” she said.

“Yeah,” Brett agreed. Whatever that meant. He screwed the lid back on the peanut butter, put the knife in the sink. His mom was wearing a long yellow skirt—that he’d heard her tell Rhea she’d made out of a tablecloth—and a tight black sweater and her hair was tied up with this Indian scarf. He knew what it was because she had Indian scarves pinned up all over her bedroom, on the ceiling and walls, along with dried roses and big velvet pillows everywhere. Old black-and-white pictures all over the place, lamps with scarves all over them, which drove his grandma crazy because she said it was a fire hazard and one of these days his mom was going to set the house on fire. His grandma said his mom’s room looked like a Gypsy caravan.

Everything his mom did drove his grandma crazy, but his mom said that wasn’t her problem. His mom was kinda different, the way she dressed and acted and everything, but he was used to it—except like this morning when she freaked out about him going surfing. He was still kinda mad about the way she made him feel like some stupid kid in front of his dad, but when his mom got some idea in her head, forget about anything else.

Rhea looked pretty much like everyone else’s mom. Sweats and jeans and normal hair. Rhea was Jenny’s mom. Jenny got hit on her way home from practice by a drunk driver and she died. It was about the worst thing that ever happened in his life. Afterward everyone started talking about how it shouldn’t have happened and taking sides not just about the drunk driver, although everyone including his mom got plently fired up about that, but how it shouldn’t be that kids died because they couldn’t get taken care of and everything. It happened, like about six months ago, but it seemed like there was always more stuff about it on TV or something.

He still couldn’t believe Jenny wasn’t just going to show up one day, like she’d played some joke on them or something. He’d known Jenny practically forever. She’d been like his sister. Well, except she was always claiming he’d kissed her when they were in nursery school. Right. Girls always claimed they remembered dumb-ass stuff like that, but Jenny was cool. They’d been better friends when he was still going to the old high school. She said he was stuck-up now, which even she knew was a bunch of bull because he couldn’t stand stupid Country Day Academy.

Anyway, if it wasn’t Rhea in the kitchen with his mom, it would be someone else. People were always coming over to his house. Friends his mom hadn’t seen for years who just happened to stop by, neighbors he didn’t know but who knew his mom. Some crazy old woman she’d met at the grocery store who had been trying to pay for her stuff with play money. His mom ended up paying for the old lady’s stuff, then bringing her here till some relative could come and take her back home.

He and his mom lived in this big house that his dad said his mom should sell and buy a condominium or something, and it seemed like there was always someone sleeping in the guest bedroom until they got their act together. His mom was pretty cool that way, she’d leave them to themselves—sometimes he wished she’d do that with him, instead of making him feel like some bug under a microscope—listen to them, if they wanted to talk, make them food.

Everyone said his mom had a big heart. For everything. People. Dogs or cats that just showed up one day. A sheep. No kidding. Last year they’d gone to the county fair and she’d bought this sheep because some guy said it was going to be dog food. It wasn’t even like a cute little lamb or anything. It was this huge, woolly pillow-shaped thing that his mom said looked like Tony Bennett, whoever that was.

She called it Svetlana and sang this dumb song to it. “I left my heart,” she’d go, “in Baabaa Frisco.” And then she’d crack up at how funny she was and all her friends would be laughing, too. Except for his dad, who called his mom a head case, everyone thought his mom was really cool. People were always calling her a character and he guessed she was a pretty good mom, except that sometimes she was also kind of embarrassing the way she just said whatever she thought.

“So, Brett—” Rhea scooped onions up in both hands and dropped them into the frying pan “—are you beating the girls off with sticks?”

“He’d better be,” his mom said. “If he isn’t, I will.”

“Omigod, Zoe.” Rhea was looking at the little TV on the kitchen counter. “Look. It’s Phillip Barry. He’s—”

“Shh.” His mom flapped her hands at Rhea. “Listen.”

Brett watched the screen. Dr. Barry wasn’t really doing anything, just walking along some corridor, dressed in blue scrubs, like maybe he’d just come from surgery. His arms and face were tanned and he had bright blue eyes. It was weird knowing who he was because he looked kinda like an actor on ER or something. Now he was taking off this blue paper cap and he had brown hair that was cut way, way short, and some gray in the front. His mom had this thing about Phillip Barry. She knew him from when they were both little kids and she said the whole family was a bunch of snobs. He was some big-shot brain surgeon at Seacliff, and his mom claimed that if he’d been there to take care of Jenny, she wouldn’t have died. He had this truly weird daughter, Molly, who was in his class at Country Day and was always following him around and saying dumb things.

“Taking care of high-risk patients requires you to have a bit of an ego…” Dr. Barry was saying.

“No kidding,” his mom said, all sarcastic, like, duh.

“Mom, when’s dinner?”

“Uno momento, sweetie.”

His mom was still watching Dr. Barry. She had this vegetable in one hand, like a carrot but whitish-brown, and a knife in the other one.

“Idiot, jerk—”

“Shh,” Rhea put her finger over her mouth.

“I have a hot date with a cool babe,” Brett said, just to shake things up. Like what did he care about what Molly Barry’s dad was saying? “Be back around midnight.”

“What?” His mom swiveled around to look at him. “I’ll give you midnight.” She was trying not to laugh. “Go do your homework. Dinner will be ready when you’re through.”

“What are we having?”

“Lima bean and summer squash soup.” She was watching TV again. “Go. I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

Yech. Like he’d want to know.

Upstairs, he lay on the bed. His mom knew that Dr. Barry’s daughter Molly went to Country Day. What she didn’t know was how weird Molly was. Like how she was always following him around and saying she was his girlfriend and if he didn’t start liking her she was going to kill herself.

“ON MANY DAYS, by the time the staff arrives at the office,” the TV announcer was saying, “Dr. Barry and his partner have already performed two surgeries and started rounds at the hospital.”

“It’s hectic, no question about it.” Barry was sitting behind a desk now. “When I first decided to go into neurosurgery, someone I greatly respected said to me, “If you’re going to be a true professional, not just do the job, it’s really difficult to be a decent husband or a father, and you certainly can’t do anything else, like have any sort of social life. It’s a real struggle.”

“My heart bleeds.” Zoe poured away the water the lima beans had been soaking in, and melted butter in the bottom of a pan. “Turn it off if you want,” she told Rhea, now feeling kind of insensitive that she hadn’t turned it off as soon as Phillip Barry’s face appeared on the screen. That morning’s headline still haunted her. Did Jenny Have To Die? Imagine picking up the paper to read that. Like it’s not devastating enough to lose your child, but then you find out that she’s dead because some doctor wants to play golf. She watched as the onions turned transparent. Okay, she didn’t know for a fact that Phillip Barry wanted to play golf, but what doctor didn’t?

“Hey…” Rhea reached over Zoe’s shoulder to turn down the flame. “If you’re going to obsess, I’m gonna pack up my tent and leave.”

“I’m not obsessing.”

“You’ve burned the onions, you pulverized the carrots. Jenny was my daughter, Zoe. If I’m not angry—”

“Okay, okay.” Zoe shook her head. “I’m not angry.”

“I said if you’re going to obsess.”

“I’m not obsessing.”

“Yes, you are.”

“What am I obsessing about?”

“It happened, Zoe.” Her voice cracked. “Look, I know you wouldn’t purposely do anything to hurt me, but I’m trying very hard to deal with everything and your anger doesn’t exactly help, okay? I mean, God, it’s difficult enough—”

“Rhee, I’m so sorry.” Zoe set down the spoon she’d been using and wrapped her arms around Rhea. “I’m sorry, really, I just get on these rampages and…look at me. What can I do?”

Rhea gave a weary smile and shook her head. “Nothing. Just go on being Zoe, but…maybe a teensy bit less angry at the world?”

Later after Rhea left, Zoe cleaned the kitchen and set out cereal and bowls for Brett’s breakfast tomorrow. It was hard not to get angry. She and Rhea had gone over the whole thing so many times. Cried together over innumerable cups of herbal tea, wept over bowls of flax muffin mix, talked themselves hoarse into the wee hours. Rhea, Zoe could tell, was moving toward an acceptance of Jenny’s death that she personally couldn’t master. She was angry, furious. Did Jenny Have To Die? That was the title of the front page article in the paper today. No, she wanted to scream. Not if Dr. Phillip Barry had been there to do what doctors are supposed to do. Reason told her that this was flawed, simplistic thinking, but reason was no match for furious, impotent anger.

CHAPTER TWO