Chapter 8 Zombies #4
Chow Chow Wendy picked up the bottle and emptied the rest of the wine into the huge glass that was sitting unused on the coffee table, filling it almost to the brim.
Blair shot Jack an amused look and sat down next to her friend. “What happened, hon?”
“What happened was he dumped me. We went trick-or-treating, we got back to his house, he sent Bluey inside with her candy, and we stood on the porch in our dog costumes and he told me it wasn’t working anymore.”
“What? Why?” Blair glanced at Jack again, and he somehow knew that was his cue to leave.
“I’ll get out of your hair.” He stood. “Thanks for dinner.”
“You’re welcome,” Blair said.
Chow Chow Wendy sat up from her slouching position and surveyed the remains of their dinner. She looked back and forth between Blair and Jack. “I’m glad you’re keeping Blair company, even if I do think you’re a bit of a—”
“See you later, Jack!” Blair interrupted, speaking in a tone that struck him as artificially chipper. Blair was often genuinely chipper, but this was not that. And yes, it disturbed him to realize he could tell the difference.
They watched episode two the next night. After their morning walk, Blair seemed to be assuming Jack would want to continue with the show. He didn’t not want to, so he went along with it.
“Let me order dinner, though,” he said, not wanting to get into a situation where she was cooking for him all the time. “Though I do want that tomato and cheddar pie sometime.”
“No, no, I’ll cook. I do most nights anyway. But not the pie. Piecrust requires mental preparation. And lard. Mental preparation and lard: Is that the key to success in life? Is that what I’m doing wrong?”
What did that mean? Did Blair Kellermoon do anything wrong? From his vantage point, it didn’t seem like it, even if she had different priorities than he did.
“I’ll make something simple,” she said.
When he slid open the door from the pool at the appointed time, he heard the sound of an incoming FaceTime. Then Blair’s voice: “Hi, honey.”
“Hi, Mom. What are you doing?”
It was a girlish voice, so it must be Blair’s daughter, Esme. Jack turned to go, intending to come back later.
“Making dinner. I have a friend coming over.”
The fact that Blair thought of him as a friend gave him pause. He thought, for some inexplicable reason, of her thigh on the sofa last night.
“Tiffany?” Esme asked.
“No.”
“One of those assistants from your office whose names I always forget?”
“No. You don’t know him.”
“Him!”
“It’s not like that.”
“Oh, it’s not?” Esme asked in a singsong voice.
“It is not,” Blair said firmly. “It’s Jack Branksome.”
There was a pause. “The author you hate?”
“I don’t hate him.”
“You acted like you did. You said he humiliated you.”
Humiliated her. Those were strong words.
Were they incorrect, though?
“He did,” Blair said. “He totally did.”
He should go. He shouldn’t be hearing this. He didn’t want to hear this.
Something kept him pinned in place, though, frozen in the mudroom.
“I’m over it,” Blair said. “You just have to accept that he’s kind of an asshole generally. It’s not personal.”
Ha. That made him feel a little better.
“Mom, don’t take this the wrong way, but your whole speech when you and Dad split up was about not settling, about how it’s better to be alone than to be with someone who doesn’t light you up.” Esme made a gagging noise Jack interpreted to be about the phrase light you up. He shared her disdain.
“Esme. There is nothing going on between us. We’ve struck a truce. He’s visiting because he’s in need of a change of scenery for the book he’s writing. He’s coming over for dinner. Can you chill out, please?”
“Why would I be able to chill out? What kind of role model for chilling out have I ever had in my life?”
Jack had to stifle a chuckle. Esme was funny. Like her mom.
“We’re watching The Last of Us. That’s the point. Dinner is incidental. It’s incidental dinner, not date dinner.”
“You’re watching a scary show together. I don’t know, Mom, sounds like the perfect opportunity to get cozy on the couch.”
He thought of last night, when she’d moved closer to him to show him her phone. He thought of his dismay when she moved back. He thought of his own subsequent migration.
Which meant he was thinking about her thigh. Again.
“Am I going to have to hang up on you?” Blair asked.
“What are you making?”
“Just grits I’m throwing rotisserie chicken on top of.”
“Oh, OK then. That’s not a date meal.”
“Thank you. But also, I don’t know why it wouldn’t, theoretically, in a different circumstance with a different person, be a date meal. Mimi’s grits are legendary.”
“They’re great, but they’re grits. A bowl of slop. Not date food.”
This was ridiculous. He had to stop eavesdropping. He had been paused with the sliding door still open, so he closed it hard, making as much noise as possible, and called, “Hello?”
“Jack, hi, come on in.”
“Do I need to do anything to lock this door other than close it?” He should have asked yesterday. He’d observed how seriously she took making sure the exterior gates were secure.
“It locks automatically, but you could slide the dead bolt over, too.”
When he made it to the kitchen, she beckoned him over to where she had her phone resting against a serving bowl. “Come meet my daughter.”
He came to stand next to her and peered at the phone, on which appeared a younger clone of Blair, except with her hair in two long braids à la Pippi Longstocking.
“So you’re the famous author.”
“So you’re the famous daughter.”
She grinned. “You’re watching TV with my mom. You must have passed the test.”
“I didn’t know there was a test.” He swung around to look at Blair, who was on her way into the mudroom. “Have I passed the test?”
“You have passed the test,” she called. She was checking to make sure he’d locked the door. “You passed last night.”
“What’s the test?”
“My mom can’t stand it when people talk during TV shows or movies,” Esme said. “She’s broken up with friends over it.”
“I have not!” Blair protested as she reentered the kitchen. “I’ve just changed the parameters of certain friendships to be more focused on things other than the joint consumption of screened entertainment.”
“Back when you had friends,” Esme said.
Blair stiffened and said, “I have friends.”
“You never hang out with them anymore. You never go out. It’s like you’re hiding at home. Is it because you think people are judging you for the divorce?”
Yikes. “I’m with your mom on talking during movies,” Jack said, aiming to derail this line of interrogation, which he felt certain should not unfold in front of him. “I hate it when people ask questions about what’s going to happen. I don’t know, maybe watch and see? Find out when we all find out?”
“Yes!” Blair said.
His deflection worked. They talked a little more but about benign things.
Esme matter-of-factly told Blair about a “stupid assignment” she was enduring and breathlessly told Blair about having discovered a local band she loved while Blair stirred a pot of what he assumed, based on the conversation he’d overheard, were grits.
Feeling like an idiot standing there while she did all the work, Jack held up the bottle of wine he’d brought and raised his eyebrows.
She nodded and pointed to a cupboard that housed the wineglasses, both the objectionably large ones and the stemless ones.
He filled two of the reasonably sized ones.
“Jack!” Esme called, and he went back over and peered at the screen. “I hope you’re keeping my mom from moping around the house.”
Blair didn’t strike him as the sort to mope. Though Tiffany had said yesterday that she was glad he was keeping Blair company. Hmm.
“It’s not his job to babysit me,” Blair said. “And I’m not moping.”
Jack took the wine to the living room. He paused when he heard something about a tabloid article Esme had read. “Don’t believe everything you read,” Blair said.
“Yeah, but there were pictures, Mom.”
Jack unpaused himself. Enough eavesdropping. He settled in with Morticia, and as he sipped his wine, he thought about what Blair had said. That he’d humiliated her.
He wasn’t proud of that.