Totlandia: Winter (8 page)

Having disposed of her lavender thong, she lifted up her skirt but kept on her four-inch heels. For a week now, she had practiced poses in the mirror and had come to the conclusion that when she bent over the counter
just a little
, her long, lean legs and her S-Factor’ed ass would be seen at their best advantage.

By how quickly Brady entered her and how hard he pounded her, she presumed she was right.

Brady saw it differently. Fucking Kimberley was his penance for getting Oliver into the club. Doing it quickly assured that Jade wouldn’t catch them and walk out on him. Otherwise, the club was no good to him anyway.

Well, he had to hand it to Kimberley, her ass was a beautiful sight. And it was hot that she came without panties.

After she headed out the back door, he was still thinking of her ass. He walked into the media room to take his crying son out of his playpen, but before he could reach for the toddler, Oliver hit him in the eye with the ball.

And laughed as Brady cursed in pain.

11:10 a.m.

For Jillian, it had been an ideal morning. While Addison and Amelia played together in their playpen, she had laid out the dough and the filling for the three pies—pumpkin, pecan, and apple-rhubarb.

Granted, with her broken oven she couldn’t bake them, but she’d get to the Pierces’ bright and early so the pies would be cooling when the turkey went into the oven.

Perfect, perfect, perfect…

Yes, a run would make things perfect, for sure.

And it was a glorious day for it, too. She started down Lyon Street, on the Presidio Park side. Already she was halfway toward Union when her eyes and thoughts roamed upward, toward the cloudless baby blue sky.

I wonder if this great weather will hold out through tomorrow.

Then she tripped.

One knee went down pretty hard on the broken concrete sidewalk. A eucalyptus root was to blame for her fall. But she could only fault herself for forgetting to slip on the cord that held the girls’ stroller onto her wrist.

It was already halfway down the block and careening toward a high curb that ensured a steep drop into the street. Her screams drew a few glances from pedestrians or drivers and passengers in cars that passed by, but their reactions took place in slow motion.

Even the girls' squeals seemed to hang in the crisp bright air on that Thanksgiving Eve.

As they rolled farther and farther away from her, all she could think about was their cries when, finally, they’d be tossed from the carriage. And how bloodied and broken they might be should they survive the fall and somehow miss being killed by a car turning the corner.

They are my life! Oh please, God, please save them because nothing else matters. Not Scott, not the house, not the divorce, nothing but my girls.

Just at that moment, a man strolled out of Presidio Park. He was dressed in some sort of uniform. (What, park ranger? Something like that…) He looked uphill in time to see the carriage just twenty feet away and bearing down on him. By the time it was it was just three feet from him, he had crouched low enough that, as it passed him, he could grab hold of the handle. And he was smart enough to run with the carriage until, slowly, he could bring it to a complete stop.

Jillian was still sobbing when she got to him and the girls. But hearing them giggle as if they had been on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride soon had her crying and laughing at the same time, which made the girls squeal even louder.

When her spasms finally stopped, Jillian took the man’s arm and asked, “How can I ever, ever, ever thank you for saving my girls?”

He looked down at them, then over at her. Finally, he said, “Coffee. You’re buying.”

He was serious, although he was grinning. She could tell by the softness of his sweet brown eyes. His shoulders were too broad, his stomach too flat and his face too weathered for a man who sat behind a desk working on a computer all day. It was a long time since she’d felt she could trust a man, any man, but that was not the case right now. He’d just saved her children. She knew, instantly, she could trust him with her life as well.

She nodded and smiled up at him. “Sure. Coffee. And pie. Homemade! If you can wait until tomorrow. What are you doing for Thanksgiving?”

Thursday, 22 November

8:04 a.m.

“Your turkey is still frozen.” Jillian didn’t know how else to break the news to Jade. She had just put the pies in the oven when, out of habit, she opened the refrigerator and thumped the bagged turkey, fully expecting it to be soft.

Jade, who sat on the floor with Oliver, Amelia, and Addison as they worked on a big giant puzzle, looked up at Jillian. “That’s okay, right? Won’t it defrost when we stick it in the oven?”

Jillian frowned. “Ideally, it would have been thawing in the fridge for the past couple of days. But now…well, we’re going to have to figure out a way to defrost it as fast as possible. What time had you planned on dinner being served?”

“I don’t know. Lunch time?”

“Don’t count on it! We’ll be lucky if we sit down to eat by five.” Jillian tilted the turkey so that she could read the directions on the bag. “It says here that if necessary, we can thaw it in the microwave. That will take ninety minutes, and it will have to be cooked immediately afterward. No problem there, since I presume everyone will be very hungry—”

She was stopped by the tear rolling down Jade’s face. As Oliver patted his mother’s back, the tears came even quicker.

“Oh…Jade, don’t worry! Everything will be alright!”

Jade shook her head. “No, that’s not true! It’s a disaster! Everyone is showing up by noon, and all they’ll have to eat is a frozen turkey!”

“At least by then it will be defrosted. But yes, it will be raw.”

“That’s what I mean! This is a disaster! And to think, if you hadn’t been here early to bake those pies, I’d have never known the difference, and Brady would have been embarrassed. He’s already worried that I might have blown it with Bettina, now that Kelly is her new favorite. If Oliver and I get bumped, he’ll send me back to Los Angeles…”

The torrent of fear flowing out of her ended in a trickle of tears. She had said much too much. Thank goodness Brady was out on a jog.

And yet, it felt good to finally say something, to someone.

“
What?
Jade, what did you mean when you said ‘he’ll send you back?’”

Jade hung her head in shame. “The truth is…our marriage was annulled. When Ollie was five months old. I—I did something bad. Something Brady couldn’t forgive.”

“Nothing could be that bad.”

“It was. Horrible. Just…the worst.”

And that’s how it came out, how she’d left Oliver with her talent manager while she auditioned for a film.

All because she knew she was already losing Brady.

“I love him too much to lose him again,” she whispered. Her sniffling was making the children cry. She peeled an apple and cut it up for them. The sweetness was the perfect distraction.

If only all of life were that way
, she thought.

When she finally looked over at Jillian, she noticed that she was also crying.

She couldn’t help but laugh. “Now don’t you start, too!”

The tears flew off Jillian’s face as she shook her head. “I can’t help it. I mean, no one is at all what they seem. Not you, not me, not Ally—”

“What do you mean, ‘not you?’”

“Why do you think Scott isn’t with us now? I lied! He isn’t out of the country on business. It’s because he ditched us, that’s why! He got his assistant pregnant, and he’s chosen her over us.” Jillian laid her head against the frozen turkey so that the children couldn’t see her cry, too. It felt so cool against the red-hot shame she felt on her face.

“Oh, Jillian, I—I didn’t know.” Jade shook her head in awe. “Wow. Well, I guess it’s good to know I’m not the only one with a big bad lie that can get me kicked out of the club.”

“Ha! Trust me, you’re not. In fact, we should start our own ‘liars’ club,’ you, me and—” She stopped mid-sentence, remembering she had no right to let Ally’s secret out of the bag, too.

“Hey, wait now! There’s someone else with a secret? Who…” Jade’s eyes opened wide. “Ally! Oh my God! Now you’ve got to tell me what it is!”

Jillian’s sigh seemed to go on forever. She closed her eyes, as if maybe doing so was one way in which to escape Jade’s inquisition.

Wrong. When she opened them, Jade was still quivering with curiosity. “Okay, okay, okay! But you cannot—I repeat, you
cannot
—tell her I told you. And you certainly cannot tell Brady. Not about her, or about me either, Jade.”

“No worries there!” Jade motioned with a crisscross over her heart. She loved her new friends. Whatever happened with the club, she believed that they could all stay close, regardless. At least that was her hope. Especially if it were the Pierces who got dumped.

“Yes, it’s Ally. She’s a single mom. Zoe had a sperm donor—her gay best friend. He’s also her attorney, and he got her a super buy-out for her company, Foot Fetish.”

Jade squealed. “Foot Fetish? I
love
that company! I buy all my shoes there!”

“Okay, now you know. Everyone’s secret is safe with everyone else, right?”

“I guess.” Jade stared down at the turkey. “And Lorna knows about you, too? So, what do you think Lorna’s secret is? Did she tell you?”

“Nope. If she has one, I have no idea what it is.” Jillian could imagine, though, that it had something to do with Dante’s much-too-quiet demeanor, but she didn’t say that. She’d already said too much. “Hey, where’s your microwave? If we don’t put it in there now for the next ninety minutes, it’ll never be ready.”

“Over there.” Jade pointed to the far kitchen wall. She ran over and opened the door. “That’s a big bird. Will it fit?”

“One way or another it will, even if we have to shove it in.”

She was right. They had to slam the door tight, but it could still rotate on the carousel.

Jade’s relief came out in a hug. “I don’t know what I would have done without you. Well, I guess worst case scenario, we could have just eaten these beautiful pies.”

5:53 p.m.

“So, what do you think about our wives and this cockamamie club?” Matt had flopped down on the easy chair opposite where Brady was sprawled out on the couch.

“I think…I don’t know what to think. It’s certainly a lot more work than I—I mean, than Jade thought it would be.” He stared at the TV set, but he could care less about how badly the Cowboys were beating the Redskins.

He was having too much fun enjoying Ally and her friends.

More to the point, watching Ally enjoy herself.

When Jade first broke the news to him that she’d invited all the Probationary Onesies for Thanksgiving—well all of them but Kelly, who hadn’t really been hanging out with them anyway—he almost told her to call everyone and cancel. He couldn’t stand the thought of being so close to Ally and unable to do anything about it. But now that the holidays were upon them, he knew it was inevitable that he’d find himself in the same room as Jade and Ally. While he hadn’t expected it to be so soon, or in his own house, Jade’s determination to pull off a Thanksgiving on her own changed his mind.

That, and the thought of being near Ally for practically the whole day.

It was Brady who had answered Ally’s knock on the door. It took all his strength not to take her in his arms and give her a real kiss as opposed to a friendly peck on the cheek. Was that a look of concern on her face? No, it was sadness. Was she sad for the same reason as he, because of the circumstances that kept them together but also pulled them apart?

He wanted to believe that was the case.

And he wanted to believe that someday the situation would allow them to be together, happily and forever.

Happily ever after.

What a pussy I am
, he thought.
Around her, anyway
.

Lorna and her family had come up right behind Ally. Brady had liked Matt from the moment they’d met. What was not to like? No ego, lots of jokes, many at his own expense. He held his son gently but firmly and casually, all at the same time.

“He’s quite a bruiser,” Brady said as he tweaked Dante’s nose.

“Yeah.” Matt nodded. “No tight end here. Linebacker, for sure. Hope the 49’ers feel the same way about him in another twenty years. They’ll need him. Hell, they need him now.”

After football, their GuySpeak ran the gamut: Warriors, Giants, politics, the latest greatest gadgets. That’s how Brady found out about Matt’s hair-brained scheme to raise money for a company that made plasma antennas. He insisted, “They will revolutionize high-speed wireless communications. Hey, and not only that, but also radar apparatus, directed energy weapons—a whole slew of things, really. I’ve been following the blog of this British company, which developed it. I liked what they said, invested in it, and I’m raising money for them.”

“How do you know this stuff is the real thing?” Brady asked. “Do you have a degree in physics or computer engineering?”

“Ha! I wish. Nope, I was just a plain old math major. No masters…well, really I dropped out of Berkeley.”

“Oh yeah? Stanford. Also a drop-out.”

“Didn’t hurt you any.”

“Nope.”

The clink of the beer bottles was the start of a new friendship. That, and when Brady added, “When you get the prospectus together, send me the non-disclosure. I’ll be glad to look it over.”

The Pierces’ last guest was a head-scratcher—some jacked dude carrying two dozen yellow roses. Was it some date for Ally? He breathed a sigh of relief when the guy, Caleb Martin, mentioned that he was a stray invited by Jillian.

I guess what Jillian’s husband doesn’t know won’t hurt him,
Brady thought.

The meal had been awesome. The food had been fine, yes, but the company was what made it. Brady’s ears were tuned in to Ally’s deep-throated laugh, her insightful asides, and her wide-open smiles.

Every third seat was a high chair. Brady made sure that Oliver’s was on one side of him, and Zoe’s on the other. That allowed him to compliment Ally on her sweet potatoes, and to get her riffing about Zoe’s long drawn-out conversations in gibberish.