Broken Homes & Gardens Read online

  Back in bed, she could hear the muffled sounds of her neighbor’s television. She studied the envelope of her unopened letter. These letters would stop coming, one day—in half a year, to be exact. Then what? Well, she didn’t need to think about it now. It was late, and she deserved a reward for the hard work she’d done. The cavities of the apartment had been scraped out, the baseboards sparkled—even the walls had a special sheen. She situated herself against her pillow and opened the envelope with a box knife.

  4

  after two years, an ocean, and all those time zones

  “I never thought I’d live to see the day when one of my girls married,” Tess Robinson said, overseeing her two daughters at the salon the morning of Laura’s wedding. The sisters sat side by side while Tess paced behind them.

  “So you thought we were un-marryable, or you thought you’d die an early death?” This was Joanna’s attempt at joking around with her mother, but Tess was not listening.

  “And who knows?” Tess said. In the mirror, Joanna observed her mother clutching her chest and smiling up to the ceiling. “I may be next!”

  Joanna tried to catch her sister’s eye in the mirror so they could exchange panicked expressions, but Laura was smiling. “We can’t wait to meet him, Mom,” she said.

  “What?” Joanna wanted to whip around in her chair, but she had to settle for yelling at her mother’s reflection. “What are you talking about? Who are we talking about?”

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Laura said. “Mom is bringing a ‘special guest’ to the wedding.” Again with the smiling.

  “Just wait,” Tess said. “You’ll like him. He’s been wanting to meet you.”

  “How long have you known this guy? Like a month? And already you’re talking about marrying him?”

  “Six weeks,” said Tess. “And we’re not getting married. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Six weeks? Laura, you let Mom bring some stranger to your wedding? Are you sure about this?”

  “Calm down, Joanna. It’s my wedding, okay?” Laura did not appear to be concerned at all. She was checking her phone. “Well,” Laura announced a moment later, “it looks like Malcolm is in Chicago.”

  Joanna dug her fingers into the armrests. “Chicago?”

  “Don’t worry—he’ll be here before we say our vows.” The stylist’s fingers twisted through Laura’s gleaming halo of hair, pinning up strands with sparkly little bobby pins. Laura sat up straight in her chair, admiring her own transformation, as if the late arrival of the best man was of no particular concern to her. “Or at least by the reception,” she added as an afterthought.

  “Are you sure he’ll make it in time? The best man has to do more than show up during the reception. He has to hand the rings over, make a speech …”

  “Don’t worry about it, Joanna. He’ll be here.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Joanna muttered. She was the one who would have to pick up the slack if he didn’t show, and speechmaking was not her thing. Last night she’d shot up in a panic, grabbing on to Nate’s arm. What is it? he’d asked her. How could she be the maid of honor and the best man? She didn’t have the rings. She didn’t have a speech. She wouldn’t have to make a speech, would she? Nate assured her that she wouldn’t. If worse came to worst, he would make a speech. He’d even make it rhyme, he said, patting her hair as she closed her eyes and started to breathe again. Rhyming speeches always go over well.

  “You’re just nervous about seeing him again, aren’t you?” Laura said. “Two years is a long time.” She grinned up at their mother in the mirror.

  Tess’s face lit up. “You know Ted’s best man?”

  “I met him.”

  “They’re like—pen pals,” Laura said.

  “Very romantic!” Tess trilled.

  “I have a boyfriend, in case you two forgot.”

  “Ooh, Joanna, look at you!” Tess pointed at Joanna’s reflection in the mirror. Joanna had barely registered the questions coming from the stylist. Tess had taken over, commanding instructions. So Joanna couldn’t complain when she finally focused on her mirror image and found a wide-eyed version of herself, hair done up in braids and ribbons, dark tendrils curling out in several directions. Then everything disappeared under a cloud of hairspray.

  An hour before the wedding, Joanna stood in a leafy courtyard lined with a hundred white chairs, studying the list Laura had given her. She had assured her sister she’d take care of it. But why did getting married involve so many flowers, so many ribbons, so many place cards printed on 200-pound cotton paper? She walked down the aisle, affixing a beribboned cluster of flowers to the end of each row of chairs. It was perfect wedding weather, a late summer day in Portland, the sky free from rainclouds. Overhead, a canopy of leaves rustled in the breeze.

  “Any idea where this thing goes?”

  At the sound of his voice, she turned around. Malcolm stood no more than a foot away from her, holding a gigantic bunch of zinnias and ferns. After two years, an ocean, and all those time zones, there he was. He set the flowers on the ground and opened his arms. She went in to hug him. He felt bony and breakable.

  “Mm,” he said, pulling her closer to him. “You must have missed me.”

  “I’m just so glad I don’t have to perform all your duties at the wedding.”

  “I thought all we had to do was stand up there and sign the marriage certificate.”

  “Well, there’s a lot more to it than that. Flowers, rings … and if I didn’t have enough to worry about, my mom showed up with some random guy she just met.”

  “That does sound stressful,” Malcolm said. He was grinning down at her.

  “Shut up,” she said. “I’m not cut out to be a wedding planner. And my mom—well, you’d have to know her.”

  “Just met her, as a matter of fact. Jeremy, too.”

  “Jeremy? Is that his name?” Joanna asked, sounding bitter.

  “What’s wrong with Jeremy?”

  She stood back and eyed him critically. If it was possible, he was even skinnier than he was before he left. He’d survived on nothing but boiled starch for two years—or so he had said in his letters. Boiled noodles, boiled potatoes, boiled potatoes with noodles. He was wearing aviator sunglasses and a tuxedo. He looked like he hadn’t shaved in a week. “You look awful,” she said.

  “What did you do to your hair?” He crunched a tendril between his thumb and forefinger. He smiled or smirked—she couldn’t tell which. “So where do I put these flowers?”

  She consulted her list, the panicky feeling washing over her again. “What are those? Zinnias? I don’t see anything about zinnias here. There’s supposed to be something on that birdbath thing under the archway, but this doesn’t say anything about—”

  “Hey, calm down. It’s going to be fine.” He stepped back and assessed her.

  “Stop staring at me.” She tugged her dress up. For months Laura had insisted that she didn’t care at all what Joanna wore as her maid of honor, but then she “fell in love with” a green strapless gown she thought would go so perfectly with Joanna’s coloring. Joanna had spent half the day yanking it back into place.

  “You really don’t have the chest to pull that dress off.”

  She frowned at him. He was still wearing his ridiculous aviator sunglasses. She told him to take them off. He did. He had rings under his bloodshot eyes. “You look awful,” she said again.

  He shrugged. “I know.” They stood on the gravel path, grinning at each other for a moment too long. “Ted said you had the rings,” Malcolm said.

  The rings dangled from her wrist by a thin satin ribbon. After Ted had given them to her for safekeeping, she had struggled to find a place to put them, finally resorting to plucking a ribbon from her hair, threading it through the rings, and then looping it around her arm three times. Paranoid that the knot would come loose, she’d been clutching the rings in her fist. “Here they are.” She lifted up her wrist.

  He took her hand in his and r
aised it up to get a better look. The ribbon wouldn’t slip over her knuckles, so he began to untie the knot. He picked at it with his fingers until it came loose, his face so close to her wrist she could feel his breath on her skin. “There,” he said, unwinding the ribbon from her arm. He pulled the rings off the ribbon and slipped them into the inside pocket of his tuxedo jacket.

  Then he took her hand back in his and turned it over to examine her palm. Her grip on the rings had marred her skin with indentations. “Look at that,” he said, smoothing out her palm with his thumbs.

  When they heard someone clearing his throat behind them, she dropped her arm to her side and took a small step away from Malcolm.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Nate said, coming up to Joanna and putting his arm around her shoulders. “Your sister needs you.” He nodded at Malcolm. Malcolm put his sunglasses back on and gave Nate a little eyebrow raise in return.

  The reception took place on the top floor of a brew pub, with brick walls, exposed ductwork, high ceilings flanked with fir beams, and windows looking out at the twinkling buildings and bridges. It was such a departure from the weddings they’d attended as girls, in casino ballrooms decorated with balloons.

  Sometime before midnight, Joanna found Malcolm sitting on the floor in the corner of the room, his back against the wall. He looked half asleep, his hair shooting out in all directions, his bow tie undone and hanging around his neck. Joanna balanced two cups of coffee on their little white saucers and lowered herself next to him. She set the cups on the ground between them and opened up her hand, which she’d filled with sugar and creamer packets. “I don’t know how you take your coffee,” she said.

  He took one crumpled sugar packet and poured the contents in his cup.

  Joanna stuffed the rest of the packets in Malcolm’s jacket pocket. “I take mine with cream,” she said. “No sugar. You know, if you were interested.”

  Malcolm looked into his coffee. “Where’s the boyfriend?”

  “He left. He had to take my drunken cousin home before she passed out.”

  “And you’re okay with that?”

  “Well, yeah. He’s doing me a favor. I don’t want to spend my sister’s wedding babysitting my twenty-year-old cousin.”

  “Katie, right? Long straight hair, that short prom dress number?”

  “That’s her.”

  “You sure you trust Nate with your little cousin?” He accompanied his question with a lecherous look. Joanna punched Malcolm on the arm, and he winced, pretending to sway from the impact. “Ouch,” he said.

  “You deserved that. You’re disgusting.”

  “I’ve been up for over twenty hours. My jokes are suffering.”

  “Yeah, no kidding. That was not even slightly amusing.”

  “Blame it on lack of sleep.”

  Joanna folded her arms in front of her and stared out at the party. Most of the attendants over seventy had trickled out after the cake-cutting, but a surprising number of guests were still on the dance floor.

  “Hey, Joanna, seriously, I didn’t mean—”

  “Oh no,” Joanna interrupted. She put a hand on Malcolm’s arm to silence him. Jeremy had spotted her and Malcolm sitting against the wall and was making his way over to them. He was good-looking, in a Nevada cowboy kind of way, with rusty curls and an aw-shucks expression permanently plastered on his face. “He’s going to ask me to dance,” she said to Malcolm under her breath.

  “Joanna?” Jeremy extended his hand to her. “Will you do me the honor—”

  Joanna tried to muster an apologetic smile. “Sorry, Jeremy!” She scrambled up to her feet, pulling Malcolm up with her. “Malcolm just asked me. Next time!” She dragged Malcolm to the dance floor.

  “Okay,” she said, throwing her hands around his neck. “Pretend like we’re dancing.”

  Malcolm placed his hands on her hips. “That was rude.”

  “I know. I—I just make it a policy not to get involved with my mom’s love life.” She didn’t need to tell Malcolm that just hours before she had begun half seriously hatching a Shakespearean plot—involving handwriting forgery—to drive her mother and Jeremy apart. If only she could make Jeremy disappear without sending her mother through all the usual breakup-related histrionics.

  “He’s not so bad. Your mom seems happy with him.”

  “It’s just … inappropriate. He’s like, my age.”

  “Your age plus ten or fifteen years, maybe.”

  “I don’t know why he’d be with Tess. And don’t say she’s hot.”

  “I wasn’t going to. Your dad is remarried, right? I’m sure your mom—”

  “It’s more complicated than you think. And I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Okay,” Malcolm said. They were silent for a few measures. “I like that dress on you,” he said after a while.

  “I thought you said I couldn’t pull it off?”

  He smiled. “You can’t.” Joanna looked down. The entire bodice of the dress, stiff with boning, was jutting out inches from her body. Malcolm was staring down at her strapless bra. “That’s why I like it so much.”

  They stopped dancing while Joanna adjusted the dress. She pulled a few bobby pins from her hair and pinned the fabric to her bra.

  He pulled her closer. She didn’t push him back. A new song started up, and Joanna stopped. “What’s wrong?” he said, nudging her. They resumed their awkward swaying.

  “Nothing. I’d just hate to keep you from hooking up with some willing bridesmaid.”

  “You were the only bridesmaid.”

  “You know what I mean. Laura appears to have several available friends for you to prey on.”

  “So that’s what you take me for.”

  “I know how it goes with you. You find some lonely girl at a party, then convince her to make out with you …”

  “Then I write her letters for two years just to prove I’m not a total asshole.”

  “I’m glad to know I’m a special case.”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly what you are.” Their bodies—or rather, the edges of their clothes—were touching, polyester to polyester. A bundle of nervous energy fluttered out of her, but she managed not to fill the silence with breathy laughter. “Hey, your boyfriend’s gone now,” he said in her ear. “We could have a proper reunion.”

  “Ha, ha.”

  “So you and Nate are next then,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For this!” Malcolm waved a hand in the air. “You caught the bouquet, right?”

  “Laura threw it straight at me.”

  “You’ve been together—what, a year?”

  “Longer than that.”

  “Oh wait, I forgot. You two have an arrangement.”

  “It’s not an arrangement. It’s a real relationship. We just agreed we won’t be together forever. We’ll end it when it dies a natural death. No toughing it out, making each other miserable. No messy, expensive divorce. We’re in it because we want to be, not because of some promise we made in the beginning when it was all rosy and new.” Malcolm was regarding her with an amused half-smile. “I don’t believe in marriage,” she continued. “Neither does Nate. I mean—”

  “Joanna.” Malcolm leaned down and lowered his voice. “Marriage exists whether you believe in it or not.”

  “But it doesn’t last! Half the time, anyway. And what about the other half, the ones who stay married? What percentage of them are even happy?”

  “So, Laura and Ted are doomed.” The music stopped, as if on cue. They broke away from each other. When a maudlin romantic pop song began trickling out the speakers, Joanna tipped her head in the direction of the tables, and Malcolm followed her. They sat down at a table.

  “Well, I hope it works out. I like Ted,” Joanna said.

  “Yeah, Laura’s good for him. Big step up from his college girlfriend.”

  Joanna had heard about her. Ted had spent the better part of his sophomore and junior years engaged in screaming matches
with a beautiful—but temperamental—ceramicist. Joanna could hardly imagine Ted in a relationship like that, pottery flying above his head. He was so even-keeled, always wearing that quiet, little smile on his face.

  “There are exceptions to the rule, of course,” Joanna said. “There’s that one percent or whatever that make it work.”

  “One percent, huh?”

  “Your parents are still married. So you tell me: Are they happy? Are you glad they’re still married?”

  “Sure. They’re happy. They seem happy.”

  Joanna paused for a moment. “My parents were crazy about each other when we were young. Now they’re at their daughter’s wedding, and I doubt they’ve even exchanged two words all evening.”

  Malcolm frowned. “This is depressing.”

  “What’s depressing is staying in a horrible marriage for your whole life.”

  Malcolm chuckled. “Have you told Laura all this?”

  Joanna squinted out onto the dance floor and found her sister with her arms around Ted’s neck. She was laughing at something he said. Her golden hair was loose, and she had a flower from her bouquet tucked behind one ear.

  “Nah,” Joanna said. “I’ll let her have her fun.”

  The music slowed again, and the lights dimmed. Ted pulled Laura closer to him. Only a few other couples remained—their dad and his wife Linda, some of Ted and Laura’s friends. Joanna didn’t see Tess and Jeremy; they were probably making out in a bathroom stall like a pair of teenagers.

  “We could probably leave. No one would notice,” Joanna said to Malcolm. His eyes almost fluttered closed for a second. “Hey, do you need a place to stay? I should have invited you to crash at our place, but—”

  “No thanks,” he said. “I have other friends, you know.”

  Joanna felt herself turn red. He probably had a whole slew of ex-girlfriends and future-girlfriends waiting to take him in. “How many pen pals did you have, anyway?”

  Malcolm stared down at her, more awake than he’d looked since the ceremony. “Jealous?”

  She wanted to say she had missed him, or that she was so happy to have him back, but it seemed ridiculous, considering. “No,” she said. “Curious. Just want to know what I’m dealing with here.”