One #2
Amy missed her more than she would have expected.
She clicked on her phone’s photo app and reversed the lens so she could look at herself from a weird angle, one of her favorite punishments.
Faded circles under her eyes, a curly blond ponytail going gray.
Broken blood vessels on and around her nose.
Once upon a time, in this generally unflappable city, strangers had stopped her on the street to tell her how beautiful she was.
She had her mother’s wide mouth and robin’s egg eyes.
But now she was halfway done being forty-six, and nobody had stopped her in years.
“Judd?” she whispered. “Judd?” She said it a little more loudly, an invocation.
Without Judd, what would have happened to her?
She’d grown up a too-tall, too-poor nineties kid, beset not only with a bitter single mother but also a twin brother who was gay at a time when being gay was not a social asset.
Minnesota winters with the heat turned up to fifty-eight, just enough to keep the pipes from freezing; endless meals of plain pasta with shake cheese.
Free breakfast at school, free lunch at school. The other kids so unceasingly mean.
Even then, her truest companions had been animals.
A small branch of the Hennepin County shelter was around the corner from her house—a couple of cat rooms and pens for the dogs—and she hadn’t walked in with a plan to volunteer as much as she had just escaped there one day, fourteen years old, her mom railing about a doctor’s bill and the electric shut off again.
Looking for rescue herself. The old ladies at the shelter were not kindly, exactly, but they were matter-of-fact: “if you’re going to hang out here, you’re going to make yourself useful.
” And therefore Amy learned to trim claws and wash blankets, to mix up feed.
Every day after school, and some days when she didn’t go at all, she was at the shelter, bottle-feeding the kittens whose mothers had rejected them and trying to comfort the pitties nobody wanted.
Reuniting her neighbors with their lost pets.
The look of gratitude on the owners’ faces, their pets’ licks and sloppy kisses.
And then, seventeen years old, she was finally saved herself at the Mall of America one chilly October morning.
The shelter was closed to volunteers—another ringworm outbreak—but she couldn’t face going to school, so she decided to spend the day trying on sweaters from the sale rack at the Limited.
She assumed the guy who approached her was a truancy officer.
She was willing to take her punishment, call her mother from the PD in the basement of the mall.
“Can I take your picture?”
Oh, not a truancy officer; a perv. “Sure,” she said.
He was tall, shaggy haired, could have been anywhere from twenty-five to forty. He took a few shots with a Polaroid he happened to have in his backpack, pictures of her just standing in the dressing room with the curtain open. Nobody at the Limited seemed to care.
He shook out the Polaroids and they looked at them together as they came into focus. Amy was so tall and so skinny that it was impossible to find an oversize sweater that would hang the way she liked.
“Sorry,” she said. Whatever the man wanted in her he wasn’t going to find.
“Listen, how old are you, nineteen?”
“Seventeen.”
“Seventeen? That’s great—but why aren’t you in school? Okay, who cares, listen, I’m a photographer, I think you have something here.”
“What kind of thing?”
“Modeling—what did you think? Surely you’ve been approached before.”
Amy shook her head, dumbstruck. Modeling. She had a face like a pie plate, huge eyes. The only models she knew were Claudia Schiffer and Cindy Crawford—women who were, above all else, pretty . Whereas in an unofficial vote in the sixth grade Amy had been selected Ugliest Girl at Mondale Middle.
She picked up one of the Polaroids from the bench in the dressing room. What did she see? Unruly blond curls, flat chest, scared expression.
“You can’t see it?”
She shrugged.
“You ever been to New York?”
She barked a laugh.
His name was Scott, and he was really just an aspiring photographer, but he took her to TGI Friday’s and by the time lunch was over, she had an entirely new idea of her future.
Fuck Minnesota, fuck her miserable mother, fuck even—well, it was sad, but she’d have to leave her animals.
She had no other choice if she wanted to be saved.
She left a note for her mother on her eighteenth birthday: I’m taking the bus to New York City, since I’m an adult now. She wondered if her mom would be mad or relieved. She did not call to find out, and then they didn’t speak for three years.
And while the modeling thing didn’t, in the end, exactly take off (a few jobs here or there, a catalog, a stocking ad, and then, for months, nothing at all), in New York she still found herself as happy as she’d ever been.
It turned out that everything that was wrong in Minnesota was right in New York: the music on the streets, the endless variety of people, the ability to be seen or not be seen, depending on her mood.
And there was a shelter right there on Avenue D that needed her to do laundry, to walk dogs, to reunite lost cats with their owners in whatever time she had to spare.
It was one of the ladies at the Avenue D shelter who asked her if she knew how to waitress—her brother’s diner was short-staffed and Amy seemed quick on her feet.
She had never done it before but how hard could it be?
Turned out hard, but not impossible. And then, after three months, one of the cooks OD’d during a dinner shift and everyone was desperate.
Could you try? the owner asked. Turned out she could work fast, didn’t mind sweating, learned knife skills by osmosis—and before she knew it, she was a line cook.
She was skinny but she’d always liked to eat.
She knew how things should taste. She stopped going to pointless casting calls, spent mornings, instead, on her mise en place .
The diner changed hands, so she moved to a Mexican joint; the Mexican joint went out of business.
Then her roommate ditched their lease and her mom still wouldn’t take her calls and her brother sent her twenty dollars after she confessed she was broke.
The twenty left her feeling even more broke.
Nobody at the shelter knew of any openings anywhere.
So, with the courage that came from being out of options, she walked into Le Coin’s glamorous dining room to find a job.
At a table in the back of the room sat Judd, casually riffling through papers. When he looked up at her she fell speechless: those eyes!
What did he see when he saw her? Tall, blond, attractive in an offbeat way, said she could cook.
“Have I seen you before?” he asked.
Amy took a moment before finding her words. “Maybe,” she said. Then: “I doubt it.”
“You’re a cook?”
“Yes.”
“Show me.”
One minute became the next minute, one year became the next. She had never stopped loving him, she was sure.
Roxy drank steadily from her bowl. Judd’s snores receded. After a moment of quiet, he called out from the bedroom.
“Babe? Are you there?”
“I’m here,” she said.
“What? I can’t hear you.”
“I said I’m here.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
He was quiet then, and she knew he was deciding whether or not to believe her. It would be easier to believe her, but: they had been married for years, and had been through this twice before. Still, Judd liked to do what was easy, or what was readily available. She heard him pee with the door open.
“Could you close the door?”
Instead he flushed.
One of the cats leapt onto the kitchen table, Sir Licks-A-Lot, named by Ferry when he was in the fifth grade and now a source of much mirth at the cat’s veterinary appointments.
“Hey Licky,” Amy said as the cat sniffed her coffee.
It wasn’t that she didn’t understand. It wasn’t that she expected better.
She had spent her whole life protecting her low expectations.
Childhood Christmas presents of socks and underwear; the friendless school years; ushered out of modeling before she’d ever really gotten started. She had never asked for much.
But still, she had asked for better than this, and he consistently refused to deliver.
Moreover, just because they’d been through this twice before didn’t make it easier to know what to say to him now.
I’m leaving? She wasn’t leaving. We need to go to counseling?
They’d already tried that. More counseling? What else was there to talk about?
She rejected the obvious choice—to leave, of course—because she was weak (this is what her mother would say).
Or because she loved him, although her mother didn’t believe in love.
And/or because the pain of living through this again was preferable to the pain of losing him forever (again, she was weak).
And she knew that Judd didn’t want a divorce, because down deep in his faithless heart he loved her, too, despite the fact that he was an unrepentant poonhound.
“Hey,” he said softly, standing in the doorway, uneasy.
At least he had the good sense to be uneasy.
He was wearing flannel pajama pants, an unbuttoned shirt, wide hairy belly, wild brown hair standing up in all directions.
He was massive, six-five; he almost filled the doorway, and she had always felt safe in his enormity.
He was the rare man who could make her feel small.
Her initials were tattooed on his forearm amid a wreath of flowers.
“Hey,” she said.
“Want some breakfast?”
She didn’t answer.
“You aren’t hungry?”
“A woman came up to me in the park and told me Roxy was miserable.”
“What?”
“A woman,” she said. “Came up to me in the park. And told me—”
“That’s insane.”
“It was upsetting,” she acknowledged. Sir Licks jumped off the table.
Judd sat down opposite her, reached for her hands.
“I don’t know,” she said, letting her hands go limp in his.
“Know what?”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“You don’t have to do anything,” he said.
“Well I should probably do something,” she said. “This keeps happening.”
“Nothing happened.”
“Judd.”
“Nothing—”
“Please, stop it. I saw what I saw. Stop telling me I didn’t. I’m not a child.”
“I’ll fire her.”
She took a yoga breath. “You could be sued.”
“She’s a shitty employee. And nothing happened between us that could be construed as—”
“I told you to stop saying that.”
He rubbed her fingers with his own meaty fingers. She did not pull away.
Stubble, thick eyebrows, ice wolf eyes. That’s what she told her friends after she first met him at the restaurant, he has ice wolf eyes.
Nobody knew what an ice wolf was but they could imagine those eyes, how crystal their blue.
He had a nose that had been punched a few times, a chef’s bonanza of scars and burns up and down his arms and even on his neck. A deep crease between his eyebrows.
“I wanted to call my mother today,” she said, which was a lie, but Judd was attached to mothers, his own, even Ferry’s—so she knew he’d feel bad when she said that. “I forgot for a second that she’s dead.”
“Ame,” he said.
“She’s been dead for almost a decade.”
“I know,” he said.
“Which is good because if she knew about this it would kill her.”
Heavy sigh. Impossible rogue.
“Amy—”
“You have to fire her.”
“Of course, I know.”
“Someone with that kind of judgment cannot be your employee.”
“I thought you were worried she’d sue.”
“You’ll countersue.”
He was still rubbing her fingers. “Can I make you some breakfast?”
“You forgot how to cook,” she said, which was an old joke between them. She didn’t know why she was relenting; she always relented.
He smiled. “That’s not true.”
Two nights ago she swore she’d never look at him again. Now they were holding hands.
“Ame,” he said, letting his voice go husky, “I know—I know what you saw. I know what it looks like. I know it will be impossible for me to convince you—”
“I don’t know what to do, Judd,” she said. She had wanted breakfast; now she realized she was about to cry. She looked at the table to keep from crying, but still her eyes were starting to sting. “Can you tell me what to do?”
“Just believe me,” he said.
“What would you do?” she asked. “If you were me?”
“I would believe me.”
She had already let him back in. She had already let him sleep in their bed. Was it really so much to ask, to break the promise she had made to herself two nights ago?
On the other hand, she kept breaking promises to herself and this was where she ended up.
Was it such a bad place to end up?
Roxy, asleep in the corner of the kitchen, her usual spot.
The cats lolling. The refrigerator humming in its corner.
The scuffed floors. This beautiful man who still loved her.
Ferry, the child they had raised together, a sophomore at Cornell.
Books, record collections, a million nights in a steamy kitchen, an apartment they had lived in together for seventeen years.
A frightening woman had told her that her faithful dog was miserable.
Perhaps the woman had mistaken Roxy for Amy’s heart.