I'm Not Julia Roberts (9 page)

“That would make a great shirt, don’t you think?” said Britt, reading Lu’s thoughts.
“Since when do you like ham?”

“That’s stupid,” said Devin, oddly angry. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

“What about my shirt!” Ollie yelled, forgetting to whimper.

Lu took the T-shirt gently from Ollie’s hands. “This is a good shirt, but I’m sure we can find something better in another store, don’t you think?”

“When?” Ollie demanded. “When will we find something?”

“Soon,” Lu soothed. “We’ll find something soon.”

Lu put the shirt on the rack with all the others, hoping to make a quick escape, when Devin said, “There’s that guy again.”

They all turned and saw the man from the Gap, handing out his little yellow cards. “What’s he doing, following us?”

“I’m sure he isn’t,” Lu said. “I’m sure he’s just going store to store or something.”

“He’s coming this way,” Britt muttered. “He’s probably going to quiz us on God or something. Get ready, Ollie.”

“I’m ready,” said Ollie.

The man marched in their direction, high-stepping like a majorette. His eyeglasses were huge square affairs that took up nearly half of his face. The strap of his canvas bag cut into his soft belly. “Here,” he said, and dealt Britt, Ollie, and Lu a yellow card.

“But you already gave us these,” Britt said.

The man smiled, a mirror image of his card, and turned to Devin.

“I don’t want that,” Devin said. The man smiled even wider and tucked the card into Devin’s shirt pocket.

“Get your hands off me!” Devin yelped, but the man was already moving on, his canvas bag parting the sea of shirts. Lu marveled at the man’s audacity. Nobody touched Devin. Nobody gave him stuff he didn’t want. Nobody gave him stuff he
did
want. Once, Lu had bought him expensive boots he’d been begging for after watching him slog through the snow in his Converse sneakers, after listening to him complain about his frozen feet. A month later, in a box in the laundry room, she found the boots, lacy with cobwebs.

“Is that guy crazy?” said Britt.

“Now I’ve got one card for each hand,” Ollie said.

“
You’re
crazy.” Devin yanked the card from his pocket and ripped it in half. The two pieces fluttered from his hands like moths.

“Why did you do that?” Ollie said. “Lu, he ripped the man’s card.”

“But he didn’t rip yours, so everything’s okay, right?” Lu could tell that Ollie wasn’t buying her logic, but he chose not to protest. That was a miracle in and of itself.

Devin was glaring at the man’s back as the man stalked off into the lingerie section, handing his card off to two unsuspecting old ladies buying Tummy Tamers. “If that guy comes near me again, if he freaking touches me again . . . ,” he said, trailing off.

“Relax, Dev,” Britt said. “Here. I found a shirt for you.”
Heck is for people who don’t believe in gosh.
Devin yanked the shirt off the hanger and threw it across the men’s department.

“All right, that’s enough!” said Lu. “What’s gotten into you guys?”

Devin didn’t bother to respond, retreating into his usual fog of people-be-gone. Ollie continued to beg for the
This is my clone
T-shirt, making Lu’s gums ache with irritation. Britt merely smiled and held up one last shirt, one with a line she recognized instantly from the movie
Jaws: I think you’re going to need a bigger boat.

Lu led her boyfriends from Carson’s and out into the mall, moving swiftly toward the bookstore. Surely there was something there that the boys could get Ward. A Dilbert calendar, the latest business book that Ward would never open, a crossword puzzle collection. A sign at the entrance of the store screamed author signing today! but no names were mentioned. Lu thought it was pretty funny.

“Look,” she said. “Anonymous author signings!”

“So?” said Ollie.

“What the hell are we doing here?” Britt said.

“Loopy! Britt said ‘hell’!” Ollie blared.

“And so did you,” Britt said.

Lu sighed. “Can we stay focused, please?” she said. “Think: Gifts for Dad, gifts for Dad, gifts for Dad. It’s your purpose, your mantra. It is the central idea around which your life revolves.”

This attempt at humor got another “Huh?” from Ollie and a blank stare from Devin. Britt, however, laughed. Britt the Fork-Tongued, Britt the Berserker, the “problem” child—the one who had gotten himself suspended from school as well as every sports team he joined—had recently become her favorite. And it wasn’t because she recognized herself in him, because she didn’t. As a girl, she had been more like Devin, hard and numb and unforgiving, dragging around her resentment like a club foot. Compared with that, Britt was sort of a macho drama queen: histrionic yet brash, a teen Tarzan. You had to admire him for it.

She watched as Britt scanned the stacks of best sellers, declaring them lame, more lame, and totally lame (not necessarily in that order). If she had been more like him as a child, a fighter, she thought, what kind of person would she be now? If she’d told her own stepmother, hand on hips, “You’re not the boss of me!” If she’d thrown a fit every time her mother tried to paint a wall or rearrange the furniture. If she had demanded from her father extravagant gifts and even more extravagant vacations but kept insisting that no one loved her enough. Perhaps if she had done all her fighting when she was young, she would have a better handle on things now.

Then again, maybe not. Maybe Britt wasn’t any more prepared for his future than she’d been for hers, for this strange job she had. Stepmother. She’d looked it up and found that the word came from some term meaning “to step in,” back in the days when regular old mothers dropped off every two minutes from consumption or exhaustion and other women had to step up to replace them, but Lu thought that it really meant something else. A step
down.
A step removed. A place where the children looked at you and you looked at them and all of you could see way too much.

Speaking about seeing too much, the pink and orange and black words screamed all around her—
How to F&*% Like a Porn Star, How to Stay Fit Forever, Investing for Idiots
—and she had to wonder if the bookstore people put this stuff out just to make all the customers look stupid. And what was with all the management books?
The Three-Minute Manager, Managing for the New Millennium.
Who was doing all this managing, and so very badly? She remembered that Mr. Pink Shirt told her that he’d been accepted to a management program after college. She kept asking, “But what will you be managing?” mostly because he didn’t know the answer and it made him furious.

Lu felt the vibration of her cell phone in her purse and dug around to find it. Here was another problem: these stupid phones making everyone so available to the universe, so beholden to it. She hated that the world could find her, wherever, whenever, that they knew she was like all the rest of them, filled with random thoughts about lunch meats and logistics. There were no secrets anymore. No privacy. No dignity. Every moment was a “funny” T-shirt.

“Hello?” she said, sure it was the Lowickis, clients who disliked every single one of a dozen homes she’d shown them but who still called her every fourteen seconds for an update.

“Hello, Lu. This is Beatrix. Is Devin with you?”

Lu flinched, trying to understand why Ward’s ex was calling on her cell phone when Devin’s was perfectly functional. She wondered if this was going to become a habit.

“Lu?”

“Yes,” Lu said. She felt a familiar churning in her gut, the one she got whenever she had to talk to Beatrix. She once met a woman, a second wife, who hadn’t been acknowledged by her husband’s ex in a decade. Lu knew which of the two situations was
supposed
to be preferable, but . . .

“Lu, can I talk to Devin, please? It’s urgent.”

“Oh! Yeah!” Lu said. “Just a second.” Urgent? What was urgent? Was someone dead? Maimed? Psychologically unglued?

She found Devin leafing through an issue of
Maxim.
“Devin? Your mom’s on the phone.”

Devin rolled his eyes and took the phone. “Yeah?” There was some chatter from Beatrix on the other end, and Devin replied, “No, I can’t.” More chatter, louder, pleading. “I just can’t.” Chatter, sharp and angry. “Because I can’t.” Finally, he pushed the
END
button on the phone and handed it back to Lu.

“What’s up?” Lu asked.

“Nothing,” Devin said. “She wanted me to come for dinner. She’s making burgers. She knows I don’t eat red meat.”

That
was urgent? Lu wanted to say.
Burgers?
Instead she said, “Oh well. You guys can go to dinner if you want. She’ll make you something else.”

“We’re shopping for Dad.”

Peeved, Lu dropped the phone back into her purse. “I know. I mean, I was the one who talked you into coming. But you could have explained that to her instead of just saying, ‘I can’t.’ I’m sure she would have appreciated a reason.”

“I didn’t want to explain. And I don’t care what she’d appreciate.” His face hardened. “Why do you always defend her?”

Lu had the urge to burble an Ollie-like “Huh?” “I’m not defending anyone.”

“You’re doing it right now.”

“I’m just saying—”

“Right,” Devin said, rolling the
Maxim
into a tube and smacking one palm with it. “Are we done with this store yet?”

She felt her body stiffen involuntarily. “In a few minutes. Keep looking.”

Lu left Devin at the magazine rack and pretended to browse among the business books. She told herself that, to him, it must feel as if every adult in the world had gone mad, divorcing, changing jobs, moving, marrying strangers with weird extended families with whom Devin would be expected to make nice. Because of such things, some kids got middle-aged and exasperated before their time, bitching about their parents like soccer moms about their children. Others, like Devin, held on to their resentments, nursing them like orphaned kittens until the resentments seemed to take on their own lives, walked around on needle-sharp claws. Her own experience taught her all this, but it hadn’t taught how horrible it would feel to be on the other side. To be caring for someone else’s kid and have that kid turn around and lump you in with all the other people who have pissed him off or let him down.

She idly picked up a copy of
Who Moved My Cheese?
from the top of an enormous stack. The book, a parable about cheese and mice, was supposed to teach readers how to “manage change” in work and in life. Manage change! How in the hell do you do that? Lu looked around wildly for someone to share her disgust, someone other than a disgruntled teenager. Some grown-up person. A frosty-haired woman in stretch jeans stood next to her, flipping through a picture book written by someone famous, Billy Crystal or Tom Brokaw or Boris Yeltsin. “How is a book about cheese supposed to help a person manage change?” Lu said to her.

The woman took a baby step backward. “I heard that book was good.”

“Good for what?”

She was rattled by Lu’s questions; the woman’s head shook like Katharine Hepburn’s. “My brother read it. He liked it.”

Lu scoffed. “Marry a divorced guy with kids, then talk to me about managing change.” She added a smile, hoping to show the woman she was kidding, but the woman sidled away, slipping into the travel section.
Great,
thought Lu,
I can’t manage my cheese, and I’m scaring all the nice people.

She put the book back on the stack. She might not be much of a fighter, but she wasn’t as fatalistic as she used to be, not really. Hadn’t she traded in all those bad boyfriends for a new set, for Ward and his sons? Before she was aggressively passive, now she was passively aggressive. There was, she told herself, a huge difference between the two.

“Loopy,” Britt said, “I’m not finding anything.”

“I found these,” Ollie said hopefully, holding up some comics.

Lu looked over the comics. “And I guess those are for Dad?”

“Well . . . ,” Ollie said. “He could read them first.”

“Nice try,” Lu told him. “Let’s take a look in the back of the store. If nobody sees anything, we’ll go somewhere else.”

Lu and the boys poked through the histories and the biographies with little luck and no consensus. She was just about to suggest that they move on to Bath & Body Works for rosemary-honeysuckle shaving gel when they stumbled onto the author signing, tucked into a dark corner. A girl, no more than twenty-two or -three, sat at a table piled high with books and not one customer. Over a blue bra, the girl wore a tank top that read,
Hot Young Writer,
something that might have been cute if she hadn’t been so hot and so young and if her eyes didn’t have the guarded, slightly contemptuous look of the terrified. Lu felt a jolt of sympathy for the girl. Maybe she had majored in bad boyfriends, too. Maybe someone had moved her cheese.

No such compassion from the boys. A sneer buckled Devin’s lips. “She’s not hot.”

“Who’s not hot?” Ollie said.

“Shhh!” said Lu. “She’ll hear you.”

“She isn’t so young, either,” Devin added.

“What do you mean?” said Lu. “Of course she’s young!”

Britt patted her arm in the way he did when he thought she needed to have the world explained to her yet again. “Look, Loop.
Mad as a box of frogs
is one thing. But you can’t just go around wearing a shirt like that, okay?”

“But—”

Now Britt’s voice was gentle, pitying. “Even if you wanted her book, you couldn’t buy it. You just couldn’t.”

Out in the mall, the recycled air smelled like Pine-Sol and cloves and feet. They hadn’t bought a single gift; all they had to show for their trip were a few smiley-faced God cards and an issue of
Maxim.
Lu had no idea where to go next, what to try.

“Puppies!” Ollie said, shouting.

“Huh?”
said Britt, just to annoy her.

In the midst of the Christmas chaos, the local Humane Society had set up some sort of pet fair. There were stacks of cages with dogs and cats and rabbits up for adoption, volunteers in matching shirts. Ollie begged to go look at the “doggies,” and Lu relented; they could all use a bit of puppy love.