The Do-Over, page 8
It’s fine, McKenna. I attempted to console myself. You’ll never see him again, so you don’t have to worry about any of that. In fact, you’ll never see any of these people ever again. They’ll never come visit you in your igloo in Greenland. Yes. That’s the best place for you now.
“What in the world was that?” Jared asked me quietly as Henry took the stage on the other side of the room.
“I don’t know,” I muttered.
“Did you just say, ‘Go, team!’?”
I buried my face in my hands and let out the frustrated groan of a hungry brown bear that has forgotten the combination to the locker where all the food is being kept. “We have to go.” I pulled my hands away from my face and grabbed his bicep. “Come on.”
He crossed his arms, planted his feet, and refused to budge. “Why would we go? Henry’s just starting to speak—”
I glanced behind Jared up toward the stage where Henry was, in fact, being handed a microphone and speaking into it—though it was impossible to hear a word he was saying over the enthusiastic crowd. But his eyes were on me and the tug-of-war match I was losing against my brother-in-law. He tilted his head and smiled at me as he stopped speaking—again, who knows if he was actually saying anything anyway, but his mouth stopped moving—and he settled onto the stool that had been set on the stage for his question-and-answer session.
“Jared, we have to go,” I implored, speaking through my teeth.
He smirked at me. “Does the unflappable McKenna Keaton have a crush on a boy?”
I could feel the heat rising up my neck, all the way to the tops of my ears. “You’re insane. I’m just . . .” Time was running out. Any second, the crowd noise was going to die down, and anything I said in the ballroom would bounce off the walls. Any second, I wasn’t going to be able to help myself, and I was going to look up at the stage again and probably see that Henry was still looking at me, and any second everyone else in the room would realize he was looking at me too. And then they would be looking at me. Any second, he was going to start speaking into the microphone, and his voice would actually be able to be heard, and I was pretty sure my gelatinous insides weren’t going to be fortified in the face of that development.
Desperate times call for desperate measures.
“I need to deal with female issues, Jared.”
I had never used that excuse in my entire life. I’d never called into work or said it was my reason for being late to a meeting—not that I had ever been late to a meeting, obviously—and never once had I gotten out of an awkward situation in which I had snapped at someone by mentioning anything about female issues. What in the world was happening to me? Quicker than you could say “teakwood,” I had become an unacceptable caricature of who I had always sworn I would never be.
Having said that, it worked. The teasing, determined smirk on his face vanished, and he reached into his pocket and handed me his keys. “I’ll get an Uber.”
I snatched the key ring from his fingers and made it through the door just as Henry said, “Once again, Durham, you’re too kind.”
I didn’t stop to think or breathe or process, and I certainly didn’t stop long enough to wonder what he could possibly have said that was so funny I could still hear the laughter as I exited the Armory. I didn’t stop at all until I was sitting in the driver’s seat of the Piersons’ Honda Pilot, adjusting everything so I could reach the pedals.
The past four days had been the worst of my life. I’d felt betrayed by a company I loved working for, dismissed by coworkers I believed should have known better, and my values system that kept me focused on the hard work and determination to succeed had been rocked to its very core. But in the face of all of that, my beloved brother-in-law had been the one to deliver perhaps the harshest blow of all.
The truth.
The unflappable McKenna Keaton had a major, major crush on a boy.
“I blame Up Close & Personal,” Erica said to me thirty minutes later as we sat on Mom and Dad’s couch.
Charlie’s always-messy hair was splayed across Erica’s lap, and she was combing her fingers through it in an attempt to get her rambunctious youngest child relaxed to the point that his eyes would betray him and close for a few minutes. A few minutes that, with any luck, wouldn’t end until sunrise. He wiggled in resistance between us, so without a word I grabbed his stinky, socked boy feet and wrangled them up on to my lap. I applied just enough pressure that he couldn’t bounce around as easily, and he shot me an expression of betrayal in response.
“The Robert Redford movie?” I asked. “I haven’t thought about that movie in a million years.”
“Well, think about it now. Actually, do you want to watch it now? I bet it’s streaming somewhere.”
I laughed. “No, I really don’t. But I do want you to tell me what some depressing love story from the nineties has to do with my depressing evening out.”
“Well, just think about it for a minute. Close your eyes.” I raised my eyebrow at her, but she remained unrelenting. “Seriously, close your eyes.”
I sighed and shook my head but did as I was told.
“Okay, picture the scene where Robert Redford goes back into the field—”
“Erica, I haven’t seen that movie since high school.”
“It doesn’t matter. Picture it. I know it’s there, in the deep recesses of your mind.” She began talking in a softer, more monotone way that I figured probably meant my nephew was nearly asleep and she was sealing the deal. But I also wasn’t completely sure she wasn’t trying to hypnotize me into an Up Close & Personal trance.
I sighed again. “Okay. Let’s see . . . I remember Michelle Pfeiffer got super successful, and Robert Redford’s masculinity was threatened, so he had to remind the world that he was the man, with the manly job—”
“Good grief, McKenna.” She laughed but still continued to talk in that weird, hypnotic way. Mom skills. Nothin’ like ’em. “Can you put feminism on hold for just a minute and focus on the all-that-is-good-and-wonderful-in-this-world beauty of Robert Redford?”
“I’ll try. But remind me why we’re doing—”
“You’re worse than my kids!” she exclaimed, and I felt Charlie’s feet jerk around on my lap. I added a little extra pressure as she returned to monotone and guided his slumber with skills Joseph Gordon-Levitt could have put to use in Inception. “It’s okay, baby. Mommy and Aunt McKenna didn’t mean to be so loud. Go back to sleep.”
And through it all, I kept my eyes closed because my big sister had told me to. I may have been as obstinate as her kids, but I defied any of them to be as much of a rule follower as I was.
“Now, where were we?” she asked, and I yawned. I couldn’t help it. She had a gift.
“We were thinking about Robert Redford and setting women’s rights back a generation or two.”
“Ah. That’s right. So Robert Redford wanted to go back to work as a reporter—not, in my opinion, because he was insecure in his masculinity but because his partner had inspired him to be the best version of himself—and so he left to go chase a story—”
“Is that when Celine Dion started singing?”
She just ignored me that time. “And then do you remember when Michelle Pfeiffer talked with him on the video feed when he was on assignment and she was in the studio?”
Sadly, I did. I hated to admit it, but I was able to picture it all very clearly. “I think I might have a vague recollection of that, yes.”
I could hear the smile in her voice as she said. “Head-to-toe khaki. A little bit dirty even though we’re used to seeing him in a suit. His hair is ruffled and just so very Redford. And of course—”
“The boots.”
“Yeah. The boots.”
The rest of the Keatons had always been movie people, and when I was forced to join them in the family room for movie night, I usually had something to read and a book light tucked beneath my legs at the ready. But, yeah . . . Up Close & Personal. That hadn’t been a family movie. It had been an Erica-and-me movie. I had been, in retrospect, putting too much pressure on myself as I prepared for the SATs, and I’d begun having panic attacks. Not for the first time in my life, and not for the last, but that bout may have been the most severe. Up until then, the attacks had always been few and far between, brought on by things in my life that made me feel as if I didn’t have any control, or made me fear I couldn’t measure up.
High school, college, and law school presented endless possibilities for me to fear losing control and letting everyone down.
Erica took a week away from college, and Mom and Dad pulled me out of school for a couple days—which at first did nothing to lessen the panic, I assure you, but in the end helped a great deal. Erica’s sole focus was to help me relax. Help me put some things into perspective. To help me remember to breathe. She dragged me to this kitschy retro movie theater in town that featured a different year in movies during the middle of the week. It may have been January 2002, but that week Erica and I spent most of our time in 1996. We watched everything they had showing, from The Birdcage to All Dogs Go to Heaven 2 to Down Periscope. Remember Down Periscope? If not, count yourself lucky.
But it was Up Close & Personal that finally, at least for a couple hours, got my mind off of the expectations and stress that I always strapped onto myself like a Babybjörn filled with dumbbells. Erica and I spent an entire day with Pfeiffer and Redford, sitting through every showtime the theater had on that Tuesday, and each viewing—in which we were more often than not the only people in the theater—got more ridiculous as we quoted every line and sang along with Michelle’s “The Impossible Dream” performance and tried to say things to each other in Stockard Channing’s snarky tone.
So, yes, I could still see the khaki and the ruffled hair and the boots in my mind. I didn’t have to try very hard at all to hear “Because You Loved Me” as I pictured the montage of Warren Justice and Tally Atwater flouncing around in the ocean and driving across the bridge in a convertible. Pretty much every sense was engaged in the memory. Thinking about that day even made me salivate a bit as my taste buds reacted to the mental recollection of nothing but popcorn, Pixy Stix, and Sour Patch Kids for lunch and dinner. The scent was a little bit popcorn and a little bit CK One, which was the only perfume Erica ever wore in those days. (A unisex fragrance that smelled good on a man and a woman? It defied the laws of science!) I chuckled at the memory of the two of us debating what perfume Tally would wear. We had agreed she definitely wasn’t hip enough to wear CK One. She would want to smell like the type of woman she was trying to be, so probably Passion or White Diamonds, or maybe something that came in the trial packages you got with purchases over a certain amount at the Elizabeth Arden counter. Warren was a different story, of course. He was a man. A mature adult. He knew who he was and had earned his stripes, and probably wore something like Givenchy Gentleman. Or maybe that wasn’t rustic enough. He probably smelled like—
My eyes fluttered open and were greeted by the sight of her staring at me with an amused and satisfied expression on her face, and Charlie sound asleep between us.
“Teakwood,” I whispered.
The satisfaction faded for a moment. “What?”
“I was just thinking about how Robert Redford smells—”
“A totally normal thing to do.”
“—and the word that came to mind was teakwood.”
Her eyes wandered off to the side as she thought about that. “Yeah, I can see that. I’m not exactly sure what teakwood smells like, but it sounds super sexy.”
“And earlier, I smelled Henry.” Who was I kidding? I could still smell Henry, and it was mentally intoxicating enough to overpower even my nephew’s feet. “I don’t know what teakwood smells like, either, but Henry smells clean and woodsy and like a man. You know? Sort of like how we said Warren probably smelled in Up Close & Personal . . .” My voice trailed off, as did my thoughts. But then everything jolted back with a vengeance. “Hey! Is that what you meant? When you said you blamed Up Close & Personal? But I didn’t even tell you about teakwood.”
She gently lifted Charlie’s head off of her lap and held it with one hand while she slipped one of the pillows from the couch underneath it with the other. Again, mom skills. I began to lift his feet and he stirred instantly, even though he hadn’t even twitched during the repositioning of his head. I looked at Erica with panic in my eyes, and she took his feet while I slid out from underneath them and then returned them gently to the couch. He let out a sleepy, contented groan and fell back into his rhythmic breathing.
As she stretched her arms over her head and yawned, she said, “I just meant you have a type. And you’ve proven it here tonight.”
I scoffed. “I don’t have a type.”
And I meant that. Not because I had a wide variety of tastes when it came to men, but because I hadn’t just been trying to fool myself or anyone else with all of the declarations I had made through the years. Sure, there were men whom I found attractive for various reasons—because they were smart or funny or had beautiful eyes or smelled good—but crushes and infatuations weren’t things I dealt with. I didn’t have time. I didn’t have the energy.
“You do have a type,” she countered. She headed out of the living room, and I followed her. She leaned her ear toward Dad’s study and listened for a moment.
“Are they still in there?” I whispered.
She nodded and rolled her eyes, and I followed her into the kitchen. “Dad’s hit the jackpot with that little history nerd of mine. Cooper loves that genealogy stuff.”
I reached into the fridge and grabbed us each a bottle of water. “I don’t have a type, Erica. So maybe Robert Redford and Henry Blumenthal both have ruffled blond hair and skin tones that will look good in khaki and smell like what I imagine to be teakwood, but—”
She shook her head as she gulped down her water. “It’s not that. Although . . . yeah. It’s that. But like you said, you didn’t tell me about teakwood. I just know you better than you know yourself, McKenna Keaton, and you have a type. Every so often you come across what you perceive to be the unattainable.” I opened my mouth to protest—or maybe just ask her what in the world she was talking about—but she held up a finger and silenced me. “Not just any guy you can’t have, of course. That used to be Taylor’s type, not yours. Your type has to check all the boxes. He has to be brilliant. He has to be successful. He has to have a good personality and have his head screwed on right. He has to be fiercely independent and accept that you are fiercely independent. Not just accept it—he needs to celebrate that fact. And, yeah, he has to look like he fell out of GQ’s tribute to the Audubon Society or something. He has to, at least metaphorically, smell like teakwood. Of course, all any of that does is draw you in. That simply forms attraction, and you are far too sensible to be swayed by attraction. But when he checks all the boxes and he doesn’t like you. Or he checks all the boxes and he’s a loner. He checks all the boxes and he travels around the world and doesn’t have time for a relationship . . . Well, then he’s irresistible. Because you like knowing from the very beginning that it will never work. That way you don’t even have to waste any time convincing yourself you don’t care one way or another.”
Once again, I opened my mouth to protest, and this time she didn’t stop me. But nothing came out. I sensed I should be offended by what she had said, and I knew that if anyone besides Erica had said it, I would have been. But even then, I was torn between a feeling of How dare you say those things about me? and So? What’s wrong with that? More than anything, I was finding myself stuck in Is that true? Is that really how I think? I shook my head, even though no one had heard my silent question. No. That much I could be sure of. I didn’t think that way. I just wasn’t sure if that ruled out that I was that way.
“I’m going to need examples.”
“You mean besides Warren Justice and Henry Blumenthal?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“Okay, well, first of all . . . guy from work. Your boss.”
If she had ever had the fortune to be exposed to the absurdity and very un-teakwoodness of Ralph Wallis or Ty Monroe, I would have made a joke, but it would have been lost.
“And yet with Jeremiah, I’ve never looked at him as unattainable.”
She waved her hands in front of her and tilted her head back and forth as if to say, “Maybe, maybe not.” “But that’s only because you’ve engaged the long-term planning part of your brain. He’s been an option on the table long enough to where you’ve been able to sort through it all, but you were only able to get to that point because he fit into the original attraction model.”
“He doesn’t wear khaki.”
“But you said he rides the subway and takes off his jacket and tie after hours. That’s the attorney equivalent of khaki.”
The beam of headlights bouncing off the garage shone through the window over the kitchen sink as a car pulled into the driveway, and I felt a flood of emotions. Relief coursed through my veins, knowing that Jared was back and Erica and the kids would be leaving, and I wouldn’t have to talk about any of this anymore. I could finally go to bed. I had been back in Durham for about eleven hours, and I’d somehow managed to survive it without a single cup of cappuccino-fudge coffee from Zabar’s. Enough was enough already.
But I was also filled with dread, certain that Jared would bring news of how great the rest of the evening had been, and maybe even an anecdote or two about how Henry joked with the crowd about his crazy former classmate who had run out of the ballroom like a madwoman. A madwoman who—if you threw in Jared’s explanation of events—was suffering from cramps.
“Hey.” Erica placed her hand on top of mine on the kitchen table. “How long is Henry in town?”
I snapped out of my consternation. “I don’t have any idea. Why?”
A smile crept across her face as she shrugged and feigned innocence. “Oh, I don’t know. I mean . . . you’re here . . . he’s here . . . A man has to eat, and let’s face it, you’re probably going to be dying to get out of this house every so often . . .”
