Recipe for a Happy Life: A Novel (16 page)

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Apparently, Monday is
the
night to go out in the Hamptons. I assume this is because no kid whose parents have a house in the Hamptons actually has to work for the summer, so they can go out any night of the week that they’d like. It’s as if they’ve subconsciously chosen Monday as the “it” night to party so as to remind the rest of the world, the ones who actually have to work for a living, just how rich they really are.

The beach is packed with people, and there’s a bar and DJ set up, out on the bluff. Hunter and I grab drinks and walk toward the bonfire. He was right—it’s quite chilly, and I’m glad I put my sweater on.

I spot a group of kids who look to be Hunter’s age, so I suggest we walk over and socialize.

“No, let’s hang here,” Hunter says.

“Don’t you want to meet some people your own age?” I say, careful not to call the people his age kids, even though that’s exactly what they are to me.

“I know those guys,” he says. “They all suck.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I say. “Do you go to school with them or something?”

“Yeah,” he says, and sits down on a log next to the bonfire. Hunter usually can’t keep his mouth shut, but suddenly, he’s monosyllabic.

“Maybe if you got to know them, they wouldn’t be so bad,” I say, and it strikes me how much I sound like my grandmother. What do I care if Hunter hangs out with kids his own age or not?

“I already know them,” he says, downing his cup of beer. “Look, no one will talk to me, okay? I don’t really have any friends.”

“I’m sorry, Hunter,” I say. “I didn’t know.” I feel awful … how could I have not figured that out by the way Hunter’s been hanging on to me all weekend? I flattered myself into thinking that he had a crush on me, but maybe he just didn’t have anyone else to hang out with.

“I
had
friends. I’m not like a freak or something. Those people were my friends, actually. But it’s like since I came back to school after my mom died no one wants to talk to me.” I look at Hunter and he’s looking out at the ocean, acting like he doesn’t care. But I know that he does. I know just how he feels.

“Oh, honey,” I say, “that’s because no one knows what to say to you.”

“What do you mean they don’t know what to say to me?” he says. “It’s just me. I’m not any different now.”

“I know,” I say. “It’s just really hard for people to know what to say in these situations. Even for adults, you know.”

“How hard is it to say, ‘I’m sorry about your mom’?”

“It’s not,” I say. “But for some reason, people get really awkward and uncomfortable when someone young dies. They’re afraid to say the wrong thing to you.”

“I think it would be better for them to say anything, even the wrong thing,” he says. “It totally sucks when people don’t say anything at all.”

“I know exactly how you feel.”

“No, you don’t,” Hunter says, turning to me and looking me dead in the eye. His face is flushed, his cheeks a flaming red. “Fuck you. No, you do not. Don’t fucking say that to me.”

“Hunter, I—” I try to speak, but Hunter is not even listening to me.

“Your mother is alive. I met her this afternoon. Your
grandmother
is even alive. You’re older than me and you still have a grandmother. I don’t have any grandparents or my mother and I’m only fourteen. What the fuck, Hannah?”

With that, Hunter gets up and walks to the bar. I get up and follow him, but I can’t walk as fast as he can in the sand. I feel like I’m in one of those dreams where you try to move quickly, but your feet just won’t carry you fast enough. I’m still thinking about how angry Hunter is when someone grabs my arm. I turn and see two of the girls that were standing in the group of Hunter’s old friends.

“Are you Hunter’s date or something?” the one with strawberry blond hair asks me. At first, all I can think is that, if she thinks I’m young enough to be dating Hunter, then this face soap my grandmother’s been pushing on me must be really good.

“No,” I say, “we’re just friends.”

She turns to the other girl, who has lighter blond hair and says, “Told you so.”

“Are you friends of Hunter’s?” I ask them carefully.

“Yeah,” they say in unison. The one with the lighter hair self-consciously flips her hair back.

“All you have to say to him,” I explain, “is: ‘I’m sorry about your mom.’ That’s all.”

Both girls look at me for a moment as if they don’t know what I’m talking about. “It’s weird,” the one with lighter hair says.

“I know,” I say.

“What the fuck is this?” Hunter says, appearing out of nowhere, and the two girls scatter. And then to me: “Can’t you find someone your own age to hang out with?”

“My husband died,” I blurt out. “I’m a widow, just like my grandmother. That’s why I said that I know how you feel. I didn’t lose my mother, but I did lose the love of my life.”

“Oh,” Hunter says and looks down at his feet. “I’m sorry.”

“Thanks,” I say. “It was years ago. I thought I would die at the time. I mean, I really didn’t know how I’d survive, but I did.”

“Did you just forget about him after a while?” he asks.

“No,” I say. “I’ll never forget him. And you’ll never forget your mom. You’ll think about her every day. But at some point, you’ll begin to move on. You’ll realize that you’re allowed to be happy. That she’d want you to be happy.”

Hunter wipes his eye under the guise of “sand getting in his eye,” and asks me if I want another drink.

“I’ve been irresponsible enough in letting you drive,” I say, taking the cup from his hands. “I’m not going to be letting you drink and drive.”

“Fair enough,” he says.

“Now, I’d like to meet your friends.”

Twenty-three

I thought I had it all figured out. I had graduated law school, started working at my law firm, and gotten married to the man of my dreams. Everything was perfect. Now I can’t even bring myself to ever say his name.

We met on the first day of law school and he proposed on the day of our graduation. He showed up to law school with dreadlocks, fresh off a stint in the Peace Corps, and believed in making the world a better place. Gazing into his enormous brown eyes, he made me believe it, too.

He introduced me to a whole new world. I wasn’t just seeing the world the way my mother photographed it, I was seeing the real world, real people. Real problems. I was seeing the ways I could help make things different. How I could change the world. It was exciting—helping people was a high I’d never experienced before. I finally felt like I belonged somewhere, to someone. Arm in arm, I felt like we were invincible. There was nothing we couldn’t accomplish together.

We planned to work in large law firms just long enough to make enough money to start a not-for-profit that would help children in developing countries: he would pay off his law school loans and I would save up the seed money. The idea of having my grandmother help us out was out of the question for him—he believed in making it on your own, doing things on your own. It was the way he’d been raised, on a farm two hours north of the city. Hard work and an eye toward helping your fellow man. His hands were rough to the touch.

My mother adored him, but she was still very vocal about the fact that I was making a huge mistake in getting married so young. She refused to allow me my romantic fantasy of life.

But my grandmother did. She threw us a small beachside wedding at the Mattress King’s estate, charmed the pants off each and every guest, and joined me for long walks on the beach to tell me how my life was going to change, and how to be a good wife. All the things that she’d learned by being married so many times. She walked me down the aisle in the absence of my mother, who was stuck on assignment in Somalia, and my father, who I’d never met. Truth is, I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

We decided to wait to have children—we both wanted to concentrate on our careers before beginning a family. Then, one day, he simply didn’t wake up. He lay beside me, motionless. I knew from looking at him that he was gone, the color drained from his face like a papier-mâché doll, but I refused to believe it.

I didn’t yell. I didn’t cry. I didn’t even say a word. I was utterly, completely, numb. It took me over half an hour to actually register the fact that he was dead, and that my perfect life was over.

I didn’t realize that happiness was something that can be measured, that it’s not always there to stay. That you should enjoy every second of it, because you’re mere minutes from it disappearing into thin air.

My grandmother was the first person I called. She told me to call 911 while she woke her driver up and was driven to my apartment.

My mother flew in for the funeral. She managed to keep herself from saying anything even approaching
I told you so,
but I could see it on her bedraggled face. My grandmother was the one who stayed with me in my apartment for the entire month after he died. She was the one who helped me wake up every morning and get dressed; was waiting in a chauffered car for me on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday nights, ready to take me to my therapist; and then out to dinner after the appointment.

My grandmother was the only one I could relate to, the only one who could understand.

I quickly got sick of friends trying to make me feel better. As they told me over warm platters of chicken parmesan, “I know how you feel,” it took all the energy I could muster not to scream at them: “Oh really? Did your husband wake up today?”

I stayed in touch with his family for a long time. But every time we got together, it inevitably ended up with his mother crying hysterically and locking herself in a bathroom, so after a while, my therapist instructed me to stop going for my own mental health.

Now his mother runs a twenty-four-hour bereavement hotline for mothers who have lost their children. I used to go there to volunteer, but the evenings always inevitably ended up with me crying hysterically and then locking myself in a bathroom.

I don’t see her much anymore.

I threw myself into my work from the moment my bereavement leave ended (just one month—a policy clearly created by someone who’s never had something to mourn), only taking breaks to see my shrink and my grandmother on her frequent visits to the city. Somewhere in there I met Jaime and decided to give relationships another try, but a love affair should not end with a New York City detective visiting your apartment.

And now I’m out here, hiding from the world. But at least I’m with the one person in the world I love the most. My mother’s gone back to wherever she was before she came out here and now it’s just my grandmother and me again.

“So, how was your date?” my grandmother asks me. We’re laying poolside, waiting for Jean-Marie to set up lunch.

“I don’t think you could really call it a date,” I say. “I was more like his chaperone.”

“Well, I’m glad that you see the difference.”

“Please tell me that’s not something you were really worried about.”

“I just wonder why you’d prefer to spend your time with a youngster when you have your pick of men out here.”

“I wouldn’t say that I have my pick of men.”

“That sommelier was very interested in you, and so is Nate.”

“I’m not really interested in either of them.”

“But maybe if you took the time to go out with them, you might actually find yourself having a nice time.”

“I had fun with Hunter last night,” I say, and my grandmother shakes her head.

“How’s he doing without his mom?” she asks.

“Fine,” I say. “He seems to be doing as well as you could expect.”

“Such a tragedy to lose a parent so young,” my grandmother says.

“I told him that I’m a widow,” I blurt out.

My grandmother doesn’t respond for a moment. She sits still, staring out at the beach.

“Ah,” my grandmother finally says. “So, now he knows your big, dark secret.”

“It’s not a secret, exactly,” I say. “It’s simply something that I’d rather not talk about.”

“I think you’re embarrassed about it.”

“I’m not embarrassed.”

“It’s something you don’t want people to know,” she says.

“Well, I also don’t want people to know that my ex-boyfriend’s mother is having me investigated for attempted murder, but you seem to have no problem telling people that.”

“Yes, dear,” she says, “but that I can’t help. It’s just so funny.”

“Is my being a widow also funny?”

“No,” my grandmother says, suddenly serious. “It wasn’t funny when it happened to me, it wasn’t funny when it happened to you.”

That brings the conversation to a halt. I feel a tear coming to my eye and quickly brush it away. My grandmother puts her hand over mine as she says: “I’d like for you to be more like me in a number of ways, but not that one.”

Under normal circumstances, I’d love to be compared to my grandmother, but I don’t think that being a widow once over puts me into the same category as her: professional black widow. I tell her as much.

“I don’t think that’s fair,” I say, taking my hat off and letting the sun hit my face. “I didn’t actually kill the last one.”

“I didn’t kill
any
of my ex-husbands,” she says, pale blue eyes widening. “But, with those nuts, darling,
you
certainly tried.”

We share a laugh as Jean-Marie comes out with lunch. We decide to stay by the pool and Jean-Marie sets down the tray and leaves us to enjoy our meal. Eating in a lounge chair is an art—you need to position your legs and plate just so in order to avoid a mess. It’s just one of the many important life skills I’ve acquired since being out here.

I lay back in my lounge chair and pick up my chicken salad sandwich, minding my back and legs. Jean-Marie picked up a new batch of chicken salad this morning, so I know we won’t be having a repeat of Sunday’s debacle. I take a bite, take a sip of iced tea, and then the phone rings. My grandmother passes the telephone to me.

“Do you still have food poisoning from the weekend?” my mother asks. I tell her that I was sick the next morning, too, and a little this morning, but I wasn’t too concerned about it. My grandmother furrows her brow, looking over at me. I know she’ll want me to relay this entire conversation to her once I hang up the phone, and she’s getting impatient waiting to hear.