“Stop!” Nick leaned against a tree, holding his sides. “I ate too much, Abby. Stop making me laugh.”
Abby laughed along with him. “I must say, Mr. I’m-no-good-off-the-cuff, that you handled that very well. What’s your secret?”
Nick chuckled. “I kinda pretended it was like a press conference…you know, a fan conference, where there’s a lot of questions and answers and everything you say is going to end up either in the media or on some Internet message board. Some of my dumbest statements have come from those.”
“Well, you didn’t make any dumb statements tonight, that’s for sure!”
“Oh, I’ve got plenty of time. All of tomorrow and Saturday. And I can probably squeeze in one or two Sunday morning before I leave.”
They walked along together and separately. They each had their hands shoved in the pockets of their coats, even though they were wearing gloves. They breathed in the crisp air and watched the cloudy vapor appear when they exhaled. They walked in silence for awhile, but it was a comfortable one…especially after the verbal barrage that had been dinner.
“Abby, do you have any money of your own?” asked Nick after awhile.
“Yessss,” said Abby slowly.
“I was wondering, do you have enough to…maybe, rent a small apartment…get out of that house…?” Nick motioned backwards with his head in the direction of said house.
Abby thought for a moment. “Yes, I do. And I think maybe I could do that now.” She was quiet for a moment and then said, almost to herself, “I should.”
“I could help you out,” said Nick, “you know, if you couldn’t afford it on your own.”
“That’s sweet, but I can do it,” said Abby, her eyes far away, as the entire paradigm that was her life shifted before her eyes.
“Abby, I don’t get it. Your mom…she’s…” Nick paused, trying to find the right answer. Abby was going to jump in with many amusing and catty suggestions, but she could see that Nick was serious, so she kept quiet. “…she’s classy,” he said at last. “She’s stylish and…” He paused.
“So whatever happened to me?” finished Abby for him.
Nick was afraid he’d offended her. But he really wanted to figure this out. He nodded.
“Let me tell you a story,” said Abby. “Once upon a time there was a girl named Sharon Desmond, who was in love. But not with John Fremont. She was in love with a man named Richard Blaine. I got all this from my Aunt P., by the way. Anyway, her parents wanted her to marry my father. It would be the great social alliance, you see, merging the two families. They said that Richard wasn’t good enough for her and that she would learn to love John. She had huge fights with them about it. She was angry with her mother for years afterward. But they won. My mother gave in and broke off with the man she loved. She married Daddy instead. She didn’t want me to make the same mistake, so she didn’t encourage me to become less ugly than I was. She didn’t want me to fall in love or have anyone fall in love with me before I was supposed to.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” said Nick. “Wouldn’t she want you to have the happiness she didn’t have? Wouldn’t she want it to go the other way?”
Abby laughed. “Now here’s a lesson in irony. Grandma and Grandpa were right after all. Richard turned out to be a lowlife. He made his way through half the heiresses in Chicago before marrying one of them. He cheated on her constantly and ran his family fortune into the ground. And my mother did learn to love my father. They’re very happy together, very affectionate when they think no one is looking.”
“But why?…I mean, you’re twenty-four now…”
“Why did it take so long? Why didn’t she clean me up when I was nineteen or twenty?”
Nick nodded. He wanted to reach out and stroke her face, but knew that would be a seriously wrong move.
Abby laughed, but it was a bitter sound. “Because by the time she decided to make me marriage material, I hated myself and her so much that I refused to change. I reveled in my ugliness. Not consciously, I don’t think. I mean, I don’t really know…I’m only figuring this all out now, you know what I mean, looking at it from this side. Well, you saw me…”
“You were hiding from the world. That’s what I thought when I first saw you, that you were trying to fold yourself inward and make yourself disappear.”
Abby looked at him. “You’re a smart man, Mr. Carter. I think you’re right. It was like…like…” Abby paused and closed her eyes. “It was like ‘Ha! You can’t reject me. I’ve already rejected myself. Ha! Ha! Beat you to it!’”
They had reached the house. Before Abby could open the door, Nick put his hand on her arm. He wanted to say something, to finish the conversation, before they went back in.
“But you know now, don’t you? You’re not a reject.”
Abby gave him an impish grin. “Of course I'm not. I’m dating a Backstreet Boy, aren’t I?”
“Yes, you are,” said Nick with a smile, “and we’re very choosy guys.”
Abby raised an eyebrow. “Even AJ?”
“Okay, you got me there!”
“Ready for some pumpkin pie and the rest of the interrogation?” asked Abby.
“You mean there’s more?”
“Sure! They will have spent this time comparing notes and figuring out what they still have to ask you.”
“They’re nice people, Abby. They really only have your best interests at heart.”
Her face drained of color and he knew he’d said the wrong thing, that he’d thrown her back into the ‘Philip’ time. Then she shook her head to get rid of the thought. “They wouldn’t be paying you to be my boyfriend, would they?” she asked, trying to sound funny, but only sounding bitter.
“You couldn’t pay me enough,” said Nick, not meaning that at all the way it sounded. His eyes got big and he started to stammer. “I…that’s not…I didn’t mean…I meant that I wouldn’t want money…I wouldn’t take…”
Abby put her head down and started to cry. At least, that’s what Nick thought. And then he realized that the choking sobs were actually great guffaws of laughter. She put her hand on his arm to support herself, as the tears flowed down her cheeks. Her laughter was contagious and he joined in.
“I told you I’d say something dumb before this was over,” he said.
Abby swiped at her eyes with her gloved hands. She tried two or three times to form words, but they turned into more bursts of laughter. She could feel the bitter shell that surrounded her heart melting away. She could feel herself forgiving her parents.
“Thank you, Nick,” she said finally.
He wasn’t really sure why he was being thanked but he nodded to her and followed her into the house.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Sharon and John had indeed compared notes when the two young people had gone for a walk. John knew that Sharon did not like the idea of Nick. Not that she didn’t like Nick. She didn’t like the idea of Nick. Someone in the entertainment field, no family pedigree, the mother had written a tell-all book about him, for heaven’s sakes! He had no class. Sharon was not expecting to be impressed.
John had checked him out. Of course, he had checked him out. This was the first man that had ever made his daughter’s eyes light up, and yet she never saw him. John knew about the arrest, the immature behavior as far as his finances and his life went and his propensity for saying stupid things. John was not expecting to be impressed.
They were both wrong. They sat with their coffee in the living room and thought with great surprise how much they liked this young man. He was personable and honest, answering all their questions in a very charming manner. He didn’t try to be more than he was.
“I like him,” said John, putting a toe into what might be very icy waters.
Sharon sat silent, stirring her spoon around her coffee cup, her eyes far away. She was picturing her life with John, what her life might have been with Richard, Abigail and Philip, Abigail and Nick…
“She could do worse,” was Sharon’s definitive statement.
“Shall we give him a break?” asked John with a smile, as he heard laughter from the hallway.
“Yes, why don’t we?” said Sharon, nodding. She wanted to be quiet for awhile. She wanted to observe this relationship.
She observed it through pumpkin pie and part of a football game. Abby had risen in the middle of the second quarter and announced her intention to tidy up the kitchen a bit. Nick was half out of his seat when Abby said, “Stay!” Nick sank back into the chair like an obedient puppy, but at half-time, he found his way to the kitchen.
Sharon didn’t enjoy football, and usually sat reading a book when her husband watched a game. John wasn’t a rah-rah kind of fan, didn’t shout or point at the TV (he saved those sorts of antics for his pals at the stadium). Often, he went over business papers as he watched the game. So it was a pleasant couple of hours spent in the same room, except for the annoyance of the actual football game.
Abigail watched the game with her father sometimes. She must know something about the game, her mother thought, because John was always saying, ‘yes, you’re right’ or ‘good call, Honey’.
Abigail’s departure from the room was precipitated by the sexist observation by John Fremont that women didn’t really understand football. He was trying to get close to Nick in the worst chauvinist way. Nick wanted to please John as well, so forgot completely that Abby and her mother were in the room.
“It’s hard to find a woman who knows what to do on ‘fourth and ten’,” said Nick, all male-chauvinist bonhomie.
“Punt!” said Abby, succinctly, rising from her chair.
“Shit!” said Nick, under his breath, and then he clamped his lips firmly together, in case it hadn’t been ‘under’ his breath.
“I’m going to go tidy the kitchen for Mrs. Smith,” said Abby. “Stay!” she said to Nick, who had risen to his feet. Then she smiled. She wanted the male bonding to continue.
Nick stayed in the living room until halftime. Then he excused himself politely and found his way to the kitchen. Back in the living room, Sharon and John exchanged amused glances.
“She could do worse,” said John, smiling.
“He could do worse,” said Sharon and made her husband fall in love with her all over again.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Abby really wanted to write. It was consuming her. She’d had an idea for another story and she wanted to get it down in her notes before it disappeared. There was no way she could leave Nick alone for long in her parents’ presence. God only knew what they would do to him. And since none of them knew she was writing stories, she could hardly tell the truth.
She grabbed the grocery list pad from the refrigerator and used the pencil hanging beside it to scribble down her thoughts. She tore the paper off the pad and folded it carefully before putting it in her pocket. Then she set to work filling the dishwasher.
“Hey!”
Abby looked up to see Nick leaning against the counter, his arms folded across his chest, one ankle crossed over the other. My God, he’s beautiful, she thought. And he doesn’t even seem to know it.
“Do you know how beautiful you are?” she asked.
He blinked. Twice.
“I mean it,” she said. “It’s an honest question. Do you know? Are you aware of it?”
Nick blushed. It made him even more beautiful. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“Well, I’m fully aware of how I look…okay, okay…looked,” she amended, after he raised his index finger in protest. “My whole life I’ve been aware that I wasn’t…pretty…and that had a big impact on me, even though it shouldn’t have. I wondered if it was the same on the other side, if being gorgeous impacted everything you do or if you just accept it or if you are even aware of it. Do you know how beautiful you are?”
Nick frowned. He didn’t want to say things like that out loud. I know I’m beautiful. How arrogant was that?! “I don’t think about it,” he said. “I mean,” he shrugged, “I guess…people say…fans think…but I don’t live my life like, you know, ‘hey, I’m good looking, be nice to me’.”
Abby nodded thoughtfully. She wondered if the beautiful people got treated better than the rest. She had a suspicion that they did. “Okay, what about when you were fat? Did you think about that a lot?”
Nick flinched from the word ‘fat’. Then he sighed. “Yeah, all the time. Especially when people would look at me and then look at my stomach and then look away.”
Abby nodded in understanding. “Do you think people treated you differently when you were…heavier?” She avoided the ‘f’ word.
Nick thought about it for a moment. “Yeah, they did,” he said finally. Then after a moment, “Is something bothering you, Abby?”
“No,” she laughed. “Just something I was thinking about. Go back to the game. Halftime’s over. I’ll be right there.”
She couldn’t wait for him to get out of the kitchen. She wanted to get back to that notepad. Princess Penelope was about to get a fat friend.
