Chapter Twelve
Lori
“It’s not that I don’t like the guy,” I told Sam.
“Really? Because you definitely gave off the impression that you don’t like him.”
“It’s nothing personal, anyway. I don’t like most guys. If he knew me better, he would understand that.”
It was late Friday afternoon, and we were sitting in the back office going over our expense reports. Outside, the sun was setting, casting a dusky reddish light over the half-empty parking lot and the courthouse on the opposite side of the street.
We had been arguing about Marshall’s stunt for the last couple days. Sam was the first to point out that he was likely a master at card tricks and that the deck had been stacked against me from the beginning. “I should have asked him to let me see the deck. In a way, this is good, though, because now you have a date.”
“I don’t know whether I should feel excited about a date that I was tricked into going on,” I said irritably. “What exactly is he expecting to get out of this? Why would you insist on a date with someone who has shown no interest in you? Neither one of us is going to enjoy this.”
“No, you’re probably right,” said Sam, setting down her calculator and stretching her arms with a yawn. “But think of it this way: you haven’t been on a date in nearly two years, and this is a great way of dipping your toes back in the waters. You’ve always been the sort of person who relishes comfort and doesn’t like doing hard things unless pushed. Marshall is just giving you a nudge out of the door.”
I ought to have expected this reaction from my sister: nothing that got me dating could possibly be bad in her book. “But have you considered the possibility that maybe some of us don’t want to go on dates?” I asked in a beleaguered tone. “Dating leads to marriage, and marriage leads to babies, and each of those things takes away from valuable time you could have spent reading or learning a foreign language or finishing your masterpiece.”
“Lori, you’ve already read thousands more books than the average person,” said Sam. “I’m not worried.”
“No matter how much you read,” I said darkly, “it’s never enough.”
I motioned to the wall over the sink, where I hung a needlepoint I had bought at the festival. It was a picture of a china mug and a quote from C. S. Lewis: “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
“What have you been reading lately?” asked Sam.
“Still slowly making my way through Norse Mythology.” It had been slow going because I wanted to savor it, but also because I had picked up War and Peace again. Over Christmas, I had read to the part where Pierre learns that Natasha is planning to run away with that scoundrel Anatole and is forced to intervene before she destroys her marriage to Prince Andrei, who doesn’t seem to care much one way or the other. No one could paint a scene or portray a character as vividly as Tolstoy.
It was Sam who had first gotten me hooked on Russian literature, and she couldn’t have been more delighted that I had fallen under Tolstoy’s spell. “Are you loving Pierre?” she asked. “Isn’t he brill?”
“I like him quite a bit better than Andrei, who probably should have taken his first advice and never gotten married. I think my favorite characters are the ones who only show up for a scene or two—like Balaga the troika driver, who kind of reminds me of Hagrid, and Natasha’s uncle’s fat housekeeper who dances and makes merry at Christmas. I just wish I knew how he could conjure the most memorable characters in only one or two lines of description.”
“Kind of makes you jealous, doesn’t it?”
“It really does, and I can’t read more than a few pages at a time because I begin to despair that I’ll ever write anything that matters. The scene with the comet was so good it made me want to throw all my journals into the sea.”
“If you like that, you should check out Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812,” said Sam, referring to a musical that had recently opened on Broadway.
“Oh, it’s just stunning, isn’t it? I’d have given anything to have been in the audience during a live performance.”
“Me, too. The music is great, but I hear it’s the sort of thing you really have to experience live to get the full effect. If they ever go on tour and the show is anywhere close, I’ll take you.”
“That would just be the most fantastic birthday present,” I replied. “Even better than Les Mis.”
Sam went back to her calculating, and I returned to my bills. Because of the attention we had generated at the festival and the recent uptick in customers, it seemed likely that we were going to have a bit of money left over at the end of the month. Sam suggested sinking it back into the business, though we were divided as to how we intended to do this. She wanted to move to a more central location while I was considering remodeling. At some point in the next few weeks, I wanted to visit IKEA and get the bookcase we had been talking about.
When I mentioned this to Sam, she asked casually, “How would you feel about going tomorrow?”
I shook my head. “You know we can’t go tomorrow; we have work. Saturday is always our busiest day of the week.”
“Well, we’re going shopping tomorrow either way. You’re going on a date, and I would love it if you wore a new dress that didn’t immediately suggest ‘English grandmother or librarian.’”
“Nothing wrong with being an English grandmother,” I said defensively. “I’m sure they’re lovely. Anyway, who’s going to mind the shop?”
“I’ve already asked Jamal if he would do it,” she said quietly, eyes lowered to her clipboard. “He said yes.”
My immediate instinct was to feel angry that Sam hadn’t consulted me before leaving him in charge of the shop. He wasn’t employed here, and I didn’t care how much she loved him; I had never trusted anyone except paid employees to be in charge of the register. “Are we sure that’s even legal?” I asked her.
“I don’t see why not,” Sam shrugged. “We’re the ones who own the place, and it’s not like he’s going to steal anything. You don’t have to worry about it.”
“Well, I’m a little worried,” I snapped. “What if something goes wrong, and we’re not here to take care of it?”
“He’ll be texting me, like, every three minutes. We’re not living in the 1980s, where a day trip into the city cuts you off from kith and kin. We have ways of staying connected now, and the moment something goes wrong, we’ll know about it.”
This was hardly reassuring, as it left open the possibility that something could go wrong. “I really wish you had mentioned this to me before planning my whole day. I don’t need a new dress. It’s not worth leaving the store unsupervised for eight hours.”
“It’s not going to be unsupervised—”
“No, but it might as well be!”
I rarely yelled at Sam unless I was truly angry. Setting her pencil down on the table, she glared at me with a mixture of alarm and annoyance.
“I’m sorry,” I said after a long pause. “It’s just, between him tricking me into going out with him and you planning my weekend and leaving somebody else in charge of our store, it feels like my whole life is being taken over by other people. I would just prefer to have some control over my own decisions. If I can’t get it from my date, I thought I could at least get it from you.”
Sam sat quietly staring at her pencil, a look of contrition on her face. “I’m sorry. I guess I should’ve known you would feel that way. If it makes you feel any better, I can text Jamal and let him know we’ll be working tomorrow. You can wear one of your old dresses if it makes you happy.”
Now that I had calmed down a bit, I was beginning to feel bad for having snapped at her. “No, you’ve already made plans. Besides, we haven’t been out in a while, and I would like to visit IKEA—I just hope you won’t be disappointed if I end up buying a dress that reinforces my spinster-librarian image.”
“Knowing you, that’s probably unavoidable,” Sam said with a smile. “Anyway, I hope you know that if you don’t feel comfortable going on this date, you can always back out of it. I’d have your back, and so would a lot of other people. You shouldn’t feel obligated to do something you never wanted to do just because someone tricked you with a sleight-of-hand trick.”
I looked up at her curiously. “But I thought you wanted me to go on this date? You were adamant about it.”
“I do think it would be good for you, but also I only want you to do things that you feel good about. If you would rather spend Saturday up at the library reading about nineteenth-century Russian ballet, then Jamal and I can run the store, and I’ll tell that guy to get lost.”
“Mmmm, that is certainly tempting,” I said slowly. “But since I’ve already agreed to go on the date, I feel like I ought to go, just as a matter of principle. We’ll probably stare at our soup for an hour with one eye on the clock. I’ll make small talk about Tsar Nicholas, and he’ll say he loves Hank Williams, Jr. When I get home, he’ll text me and say he had a great time. I won’t respond, and we’ll hopefully never see each other again.”
“You do know a lot about Tsar Nicholas,” said Sam.
I shrugged. “Someone has to.”
We turned out the lights and returned to the kitchen, where Sam grabbed the broom and began to sweep. I pulled up Spotify on my phone and played the Blue Danube Waltz. Feeling inspired, Sam held the broom at arm’s length and glided through the room like a young lady making her formal debut. After that, we played the Nutcracker Suite and took turns dancing with the broom, who proved to be the best partner a woman could hope for: tall, swift, and silent.