The Trouble with Lexie Read online

  Lexie pushed aside her paperwork and googled Daniel Waite. As expected, he showed up at Museum of Fine Arts fund-raisers, a who’s who list of Boston lawyers, and a few articles in the Boston Globe. There was also a profile in Forbes, and a cover interview with the Harvard Law Review, of which he had been editor when he was a student. In addition, there were countless mentions of him in newspapers from the New York Times to the Globe and Mail in Canada.

  She was about to google Jen Waite when her office phone rang. It was Peter.

  “I thought you were going to get out of there as soon as possible,” he said.

  “I was, but I stopped in my office and did some paperwork.” Lexie squinted and gave herself a little slap on the forehead. She’d never had to lie to Peter before.

  “I’m so glad I never have to do paperwork.” Peter lived outside the world of paperwork. His father, an accountant, did his taxes. Peter never saved receipts or filed for anything, not even a rebate when he bought a new sander.

  “Wait. I didn’t do paperwork. I was going to but I ended up on the computer, googling one of the parents. I’m sorry I lied.”

  Peter laughed. “Well, that was a waste of a lie.”

  “Can we not count it since I confessed right away?” Lexie asked. “Can we say that we’ve still never lied to each other?”

  “Yeah, that one definitely doesn’t count. You think I haven’t googled everyone I’ve sold a guitar to?”

  “Okay, so we’re holding strong!” Lexie felt buoyant, unburdened. “I’m going to leave right this second.” She erased her history and shut down her computer while she spoke. “I’ll pick up a surprise dinner on the way home.”

  “I thought you had dinner with the families. The orphan table.”

  “I did, but you didn’t have dinner, did you?”

  “No.”

  Lexie knew that would be his answer. Peter usually only ate if someone else reminded him to, or handed him something. When he cooked, it was because Lexie had asked him to. He knew how to use a Crock-Pot, and whether it was a humid summer day or they were snowed in like a couple adrift on an ice floe, every meal Peter made was in that one pot.

  “Should we do a guitar lesson when you get home?” Peter had been teaching Lexie guitar for months. Lexie had no natural talent or inclination, but she went along with the lessons because she knew Peter would love it if one day they could play together.

  “I’m kinda tired, babe. Can we do it tomorrow?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  They hung up. Lexie picked up her purse and rushed out the door. She took the long way to her car, walking along the pond and avoiding the spired, Gothic castle of a dorm in which Ethan Waite lived. At the end of these events parents could always be found near the dorms, lingering as they said good-bye to their kids.

  Lexie’s seventeen-year-old brown Saab was parked alone. After three days of parents’ weekend, most of the faculty who didn’t live on campus had fled as soon as dinner had ended. Teaching kids in a boarding school was great—there was an intimacy about it that you didn’t get in day schools. But doing it with the parents around was a whole other social skill. For some, it took the same kind of effort as, say, pretending to be in love, or sitting through a monotonous three-hour play. A silent, ruminating exhaustion.

  Lexie threw her purse onto the passenger seat and turned the key. As had happened a couple days ago, the engine wheezed, sputtered, and coughed. Saabs, especially ones from the previous century, were expensive to repair. With Lexie and Peter’s savings being spent on the upcoming wedding there wasn’t a dime for car-care. Lexie waited a minute as if the car needed to come around to starting in its own time. She spaced out in that Klonopin-headed way and almost forgot what she was waiting for. And then, as if a hypnotist had snapped his fingers, she blinked back into alertness and turned the key again. The car started. Lexie pumped her fist and gave a little woot. Now that the anxiety had been quelled and the lie had been cleared, she was feeling nearly giddy. It was almost like she’d forgotten the panic had even happened.

  THE PARKING LOT AT JAMBOREE RIBS WAS FULL. LEXIE DOUBLE-PARKED behind a pickup with the license plate EAT RIBS. She assumed the truck belonged to someone who worked there, if not the owner. No need to worry about blocking them in.

  Smoking indoors was illegal in Massachusetts but they did it here anyway. Smoke sat in the carpeted room like a sweetened fog—barbecue mixed with tobacco. Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” played out of fuzzy speakers, making even the music sound smoky. Lexie went to the cash register where a girl with bright blue eye shadow stood, staring and waiting. “Can I place an order to go?”

  The girl slowly pulled out a greasy, laminated menu. “We got everything but the Billy Basket.”

  “What’s the Billy Basket?” Scarcity bred desire in Lexie.

  “A basket made of onion rings and filled with chili fries.”

  “Holy moly.” Lexie laughed, relieved that it wasn’t something she or Peter would want. Would the cuff link–wearing Daniel Waite ever eat something like a Billy Basket? Probably not. His stomach was as flat as his son’s. His jaw was cut to the bone.

  Lexie placed her order and waited near the register. She watched as groups of two or three moseyed up to pay their bill. No one moved too fast. Maybe the ribs were laced with some kind of hypnagogic.

  When she finally had her bag of food, Lexie hurried out to the double-parked car. She put the bag on the floor of the passenger seat in case the grease soaked through, and then turned the key. The engine sputtered and died. Lexie waited and watched two tall men in cowboy boots amble to a truck and roar away. She turned the key again. Nothing.

  Lexie picked up her iPhone and played Yahtzee. She had downloaded the game shortly after she had started working at Ruxton, where she found herself entrapped in twice-weekly meetings that had the same prickling effect as sitting in completely stopped city traffic. Try to remain undistracted through an hour-long discussion of the school library’s computers’ printing system. Try not to roll your eyes when the lacrosse coach talks about school spirit and the importance of faculty attending games—even, and especially, away games. Try to sit through a ninety-minute debate about school uniform policy and the ever-expanding definition of a white button-down. Is cream white? Is the palest yellow white? Lexie couldn’t even force herself to care.

  Since her engagement to Peter, Lexie had been playing the game more and more compulsively. Every task connected to the wedding demanded a certain amount of meeting/traffic-like waiting; Yahtzee was the plug that filled the gaping hole of each wait. Lexie had even started making decisions according to what she thought of as the Yahtzee Gods. The wedding cake she’d ordered (vanilla cream with a vanilla cream icing) had been decided by the Yahtzee Gods when a roll of five aces pushed Lexie’s score over three hundred and into the space in which the chocolate cake was a clear and decisive loser. Lately, Lexie had been playing so voraciously that she’d devised a system that brought her repeatedly high scores, scores she insisted on showing Amy (who usually refused to divert her attention to Lexie) during meetings at Ruxton where Lexie concealed the phone under her notebook.

  Lexie glanced up at the EAT RIBS license plate, then looked back down at the phone and worked her thumbs with the same half-paralyzed fervor as the old women she’d once seen lined up on stools in Las Vegas. (Those women had reminded her of giant mushrooms that had grown there—their eyes more lifeless than the spinning bars on the machine six inches from their faces.) When she ended on a low score, Lexie closed the game and dropped the phone onto the passenger seat. She tried the starter again. And again. Once more. And then a fourth and fifth time. Nothing happened.

  Lexie called Peter. She wanted this problem to not be hers. Weren’t nights like this half the reason to get married?

  “I’ve got your dinner from Jamboree all hot and ready but my car won’t start.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah. Maybe you can come down here and figure it out? Give it
a jump?”

  “If it’s doing that whining thing again it’s not the battery. At least I don’t think it is.”

  Lexie turned the key again. “Yeah, it’s doing that whining thing.”

  “Why don’t I drive down, pick you up, we’ll leave the car there and deal with it in the morning.”

  “I’m double-parked. We can’t leave it.” Lexie couldn’t help but hone in on the picture in her head: Daniel and Jen Waite cruising down the highway in a sleek, six-month-old German car that would never, ever, not start while double-parked outside a rib joint.

  “What’d you get me to eat?”

  “Ribs. Biscuits. Cole slaw.”

  “Dang. Well, call Triple A and I’ll drive down there, eat the ribs in the car, and keep you company while we wait for the tow.”

  Lexie’s gut tightened. She didn’t want to wait for a tow. She didn’t want to be a person who owned a car that needed to be towed. The life of towed cars, and cars running out of gas on the center lane of a six-lane freeway, and dented-door cars with windows that were stuck open, and cars with the check engine light continually on, and cars with a rearview mirror hanging from a wire like a loose tooth, was exactly what she thought she’d left behind in childhood. Lexie knew it was entirely irrational, but she was starting to feel as if this whole bad car situation were entirely Peter’s fault.

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, PETER PULLED UP IN HIS WHITE CARGO van. Lexie had always disliked the van, but tonight she hated it. She suddenly realized why: It brought to mind perverts and pedophiles. On the sexiness scale of vehicles, the van lingered in the boggy bottom with sled-back trucks (like what Bert had driven) and ’80s era Ford Fiestas (like what Mitzy had—until she totaled it when Lexie was thirteen). She knew the van was necessary for Peter’s business, useful in that it could haul materials, tools, and guitars. But the utility of it currently felt pointless. All Lexie could see was the fact that as soon as she was married, she would be an official co-owner of that van. You can take the girl out of San Leandro, but you can’t take San Leandro out of the girl.

  Lexie watched Peter walk across the lot. He was all sinew and gristle—a rib bone sucked of its fat. At thirty-five he didn’t have a wrinkle on his face and his hair was a boyish mop of brown curls. She had always loved his youthfulness, his wiriness, his smooth face that only needed to be shaved every third day or so. But in the time she’d waited for him (her Yahtzee game going full force), Peter’s youthfulness had lost its appeal. She was pissed off that they couldn’t afford a better car, and angry that the reason this car was dead was that Peter hadn’t taken it in for her to get things checked out. Lexie wanted Peter to grow up and be responsible. She wanted him to be the man.

  “Hey.” Peter picked up Lexie’s purse and put it in the backseat so he could sit down.

  “Hey.” Lexie tossed her phone onto her purse. She met him halfway between the seats to exchange what she intended to be a quick, angry kiss. But Peter didn’t let her pull away. He took his long, lean arm, wrapped it around Lexie’s head, and guided her in closer for another, softer, kiss. When she tried to pull back from that, he kissed her again. Lexie’s eyes shut and she felt herself exhaling some anger. “Hey,” Lexie said again. She felt a little better about him. About being stuck with a piece of shit Saab and the sex-offender van.

  “This for me?” Peter picked up the bag from the floor, opened it, and pulled out a rib. “What’d Triple A say?”

  “It’ll be at least an hour. I hope that truck won’t be going anywhere until the place closes.” Lexie pointed toward the license plate in front of them.

  Peter held a rib in front of his mouth like it was a flute he was about to play. He read the license plate and smiled. “Owner?”

  “No idea. But they’ve got to work here, right?”

  “Definitely.”

  Lexie watched Peter eat and her head and heart softened further. It was against Lexie’s nature to hold on to bad feelings—an inclination that had helped her coast through her emotionally cluttered childhood with unreasonable alacrity. She knew she was a shit for being irked with him about the cars. She knew he wasn’t callow and irresponsible. For all of her adult life, Lexie believed that a guy like Peter was a dream come true—even if they were sitting in a dead Saab outside a rib joint in nowhere Massachusetts. But the problem with dreams, Lexie had found, was each time she caught up to one, it started to feel less significant, and suddenly she was aiming for more. Time to be grateful, Lexie thought. Who knew how long something this good could last?

  “How were the parents today?”

  “Fine.” Lexie blushed and shook her head as if to expel the redness from her ears. “There was this one dad who I thought was flirting with me. I felt like I was reading his mind and his mind was very dirty.”

  “I’m sure there was more than one dad with a dirty mind.” Peter put the gnawed-down, raggedy bone back in the bag and removed another rib.

  “Well, I was wrong about him flirting with me. He only wants to have coffee so he can pick my brain about his kid.”

  “So you’re having coffee with a Dirty Mind Dad?”

  “Yeah. But I think I misread the dirty mind part.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Who’s his kid?” Lexie often told Peter stories and news about the students. She never shared the confidential stuff, though most of that, she thought, wasn’t pulpy enough to be a real secret.

  “Ethan. My favorite.”

  “Ethan’s your favorite? I thought that girl Hadley was your favorite.”

  “Hadley was last year’s favorite. Ethan’s my current favorite. Of all the kids I see, he’s the most . . . I don’t know, I don’t feel like I’m talking with a kid when I’m with him. He’s a more fully realized human than the others.”

  “You were probably like that as a kid.” Peter pulled apart a biscuit, eating it layer by layer.

  “You don’t care that I’m meeting his dad, do you?”

  “Why would I care?” Peter rummaged in the bag and took out another rib. “It’s your job.”

  “I’m meeting him off campus. He wanted to have coffee at the Inn on the Lake.”

  “Rich people.” Peter shrugged. “Gotta have the best even if it’s just a cup of coffee.”

  “Maybe we’ll be rich people one day.” Lexie leaned in toward Peter and licked a smear of sauce from the corner of his mouth.

  “We’re already rich in love.”

  “Holy shit, my fiancé’s a Hallmark card.”

  “Hell, yeah. If I could draw, I’d draw a kitten crawling out of a red bucket beside a wheelbarrow and I’d say, in calligraphy, you are the wind beneath my wings, the wind in my sail, and the . . .” Peter took another bite of rib.

  Lexie was laughing. Her prior anger had disintegrated into flecks of floating thought she had no interest in following. “And the cold wind biting my face?”

  “But you’re not the cold wind biting my face. You’re the warm wind caressing my—” Peter took another bite.

  “Your silky thighs?”

  “Sounds too much like a Nair commercial.”

  “Your balls?”

  “Too porny.” Peter sucked the rib bone.

  Lexie winced. Sometimes she felt like a pervert compared to Peter. Maybe she should be the one driving the van! “Your cheeks?”

  “Yeah, my cheeks.” Peter leaned in and kissed Lexie on the cheek in a way that made her feel sleazy and oily for having thought of the wind on his balls.

  LEXIE SAT IN THE PASSENGER SEAT OF THE VAN AND ADMIRED PETER’S die-cut silhouette as he drove. The radio was on, classical, and Peter was singing along, la de de de dum dah. Soon, Peter started making up words using an operatic voice. “The car has been toooowed . . .” His alto was so deep that his voice cracked and they both laughed.

  “It was towed, it was towed . . .” Lexie did her best soprano.

  “But we are in the van . . .” Peter continued.

  “The VAAAAAAAN . . .” Lexie held the not
e until Peter laughed.

  In this way, they narrated the night’s adventure: Triple A assessing the car, finding that the starter was broken, hooking it up to the tow truck, and hauling it off to H and M Repair a half-mile away. There was a notice taped to H and M’s door that said they were closed for the weekend because of a family wedding in New Hampshire (THEY’D FLED TO NOUVEAU HAMPSHIRE! Peter boomed dramatically) and so the car had been left there, outside the garage doors, with a note on the windshield.

  When they got home, Lexie went upstairs and ran a bath. She wanted to float in the tub and feel the relief of nothingness. When the mirror was fogged and the room was steamy-warm, Lexie undressed and lowered herself into the water. Everything felt satiny and smooth, like she and the water were a single fluid being. Lexie sank down so that her long hair swirled around her head like golden seaweed. Her knees jutted up, glowing red from the heat. She was almost in a trance, spacing out in the way she’d done since childhood, when Peter came in to brush his teeth.

  Peter rubbed the mirror clear and stared at Lexie’s reflection in the tub. Toothpaste foamed out of his mouth as if he had rabies. “I need a bath, too.”

  She popped up a little and slid forward to make room for him.

  Peter dropped his clothes on top of Lexie’s—a pile of shed fabric skins. He stepped in behind Lexie and pulled her in toward him like the coupling of train cars. Lexie’s thoughts swirled—no edges, nothing clear or articulate, everything flowing until she remembered she hadn’t put in birth control.

  “Pull out,” Lexie whispered, and dutifully, Peter did.

  She didn’t think of Daniel Waite until she and Peter were climbing out of the tub. And then she thought only how odd it was that she was thinking of him at all.

  PETER SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, EATING A BOWL OF OATMEAL Lexie had made for him and reading the Boston Globe on his iPad. It was Monday; he could saunter into his studio whenever he damn well pleased. Lexie was beside him, on the phone with H and M, drinking coffee and eating a bowl of Cheerio’s O by O so that Howie (the H in H and M?) couldn’t hear her chew. She looked at the clock on the oven every few minutes, aware that she needed to hustle and get to Ruxton. When she finally hung up, she didn’t hustle. She stared at Peter until he looked up.