What Happens in Suburbia… (Red Dress Ink Novels) Read online

  About five minutes into our romantic evening, our room filled with deafening screams—not mine, and not pleasure. Then came the squealing car-chase tires, cursing and gunfire. Talk about a mood wrecker. Obviously, the kid was tuning in to some cable movie or a PlayStation game that wasn’t rated E for Everyone.

  If you ask me, our upstairs neighbors should be censoring their kid’s audio-video habits.

  That, or we should get the hell out of Dodge.

  You know what? I really think it’s time.

  Because, suddenly, I can’t take it anymore.

  The circus freaks, the cramped quarters, roaches and pesticides, Mitch, the prices, the subway, Gecko, the Mad Crapper, my job, Crosby, the elevators, the lugging and hauling, the bodily contact with strangers.

  When Jack and I first got engaged, I remember, I wanted to move.

  But he said—and I quote: “one major life change per year is my quota.”

  Ever since, there’s been at least one major life change per year. First we were newlyweds, then he got promoted at work, then I got promoted at work…

  Worst of all, in the midst of the job shuffling, my father-in-law died suddenly.

  Jack’s had a somewhat contentious relationship with his father for most of his life, and his parents’ divorce after more than thirty years of marriage didn’t help matters. As the only son, with two older sisters and two younger, Jack has always been his mother’s favorite—and his father’s least favorite.

  Jack Candell Senior was a high-powered ad exec on Madison Avenue for years, and he pretty much pushed his son into the industry when what Jack really wanted to do was go to culinary school.

  I think—no, I know—Jack Senior was hoping his son would become a wealthy, high-profile account-management guy, like he was. Instead, Jack found his way into the Media Department, where he’s great at what he does, but hasn’t become the big shot Jack Senior wanted him to become, and probably never will.

  Over the years, Jack and I maintained regular contact with his father—mostly at my urging. My family is tight-knit and it just doesn’t feel right to me to shut out a parent. I’m the one who made sure we stopped to see Jack’s dad when we were up in Westchester, and I’m the one who invited him—and the woman who was his fiancée at the time, soon to become his wife—to the surprise thirtieth birthday dinner I threw for Jack.

  Did they come?

  No. But his father did write out a big check and stick it into a card with his apologies for being busy elsewhere that night. The card was one of those generic ones you get in a box of cards, not even a “special son” or “thirtieth birthday” one.

  Jack was hurt when he found out I had extended an invite and his father turned it down, and his mother, Wilma, was livid.

  “He’s a bastard,” she told me privately. “I don’t like to badmouth him to my kids. But he always has been a bastard, and he will be to his dying day.”

  Which, sadly, wasn’t all that far off.

  Not long after the party, we got one of those chilling early-morning phone calls: Jack’s sister Jeannie, with the news that their father had suffered a fatal heart attack.

  Jack’s since had a hard time dealing with all that was left unreconciled—or at least, in his perception—between him and his dad.

  He’s thanked me, many times, for trying to bridge the gap, for what it was worth.

  Anyway, time is helping to heal.

  And I think a fresh start is in order.

  We’re a couple of months into this calendar year, and so far, there’s been nary a major life change in the Candell household.

  Yet.

  CHAPTER 2

  The next morning:

  “Happy anniversary!”

  That’s me, to Jack, all kiss, kiss.

  “Er…anniversary?”

  That’s Jack, to me, all deer in headlights.

  I know what you’re thinking: typical male, forgot his wedding anniversary already. This honeymoon is more over than cargo capris. From here, it’s all downhill, like that old Carly Simon song where married couples are fated to cling and claw and drown in love’s debris.

  Well, I, Tracey Spadolini Candell, am here to say: Wrong!

  Of course Jack and I are still happily married.

  And it isn’t our wedding anniversary.

  Jack just thinks it is.

  But not for long.

  “Wait…we got married in October, Tracey. This is March…” Jack’s eyes dart to his watch calendar, just to be sure. “Right. March.”

  He looks relieved.

  “I know.” I perch on the arm of his favorite chair, which he sat in, fresh from his morning shower, newspaper poised and stereo playing, right before I kiss-kissed him. “But it’s the eighth. We met on the eighth, remember?”

  “Of December,” he says, after another brief mental calculation. “We met on the eighth of December.”

  “Right. But this is kind of like our diamond anniversary, if you think about it.”

  Apparently, Jack really is thinking about it, wearing the same expression he had the other day when I asked him what inning it was in the Knicks game he was watching.

  Look, I’m no ditz. I’m not a big sports fan either, but I’ve been married to this one long enough to know basketball games have quarters and baseball games have innings. When I said inning it was a slip of the tongue because I was weak from hunger at the time, and we were supposed to be going out to dinner after the game was over.

  He hasn’t let me live it down. “Hey, guess what, Mitch? Guess what, Jimmy the Doorman? My wife thinks basketball has innings. Har dee har har.”

  Good stuff. I’m surprised Conan hasn’t called.

  “Diamond anniversary?” he echoes now, wearing that same my wife is slightly crazy look.

  It doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it did back when we were newlyweds and I was much more emotional and touchy. Probably because I, too, have a look: the one I flash at him whenever he stands cluelessly in front of the open fridge telling me we’re out of butter, or mustard, or milk.

  Um, no, hello, it’s right here in this gi-normous-can’t-miss-it plastic jug, see? All you have to do is look beyond the week-old container of moo goo gai pan you insisted you’d eat for a snack, and the wee jar of quince jam that came in a gift basket from some Client back in December, which you also claimed you’d eat for a snack, and, voila! Milk.

  Like my friend Brenda once told me, love might be blind, but marriage is no eye-opener.

  “I sway-uh, Tracey, no married guy I’ve ever met can find anything around the house,” she said in her thick Jersey accent, “not even when it’s right in front of his face. Scientists should do some kind of study and find out why that is.”

  I figure scientists are still pretty wrapped up in global warming and cancer, but as soon as there’s an opening, I’m sure they’ll get to it. Because it really is strange.

  You know what, though? I don’t really mind Jack’s masculine faults. In fact, I find most of them endearing. Except for the one where he farts under the covers and seals the blankets over my head, laughing hysterically. He calls it the Dutch Oven.

  I figured all guys also do that. But when I asked my friend Kate about it, she reacted like I’d just told her Jack was into golden showers.

  “What? That’s disgusting,” she drawled in her Alabama accent. “Billy would never do that to me!”

  As if Billy—who is a total douche bag—isn’t capable of flatulence, or, for that matter, far worse behavior where Kate is concerned.

  But I won’t get into that at the moment. So far, I haven’t dared get into it with Kate, either. I’m waiting until the time is right to mention that I saw her husband walking down Horatio Street in the Meatpacking District late one night with a woman who wasn’t Kate.

  Granted, I was walking down the same street at the same hour with a guy who wasn’t Jack.

  However, I had just come from my friends Raphael and Donatello’s place, and the guy, Blake,
was a friend of theirs and while infinitely gorgeous and masculine, not the least bit threatening to my marriage, if you catch my drift.

  Blake and I were both a little loopy from Bombay Sapphire and tonics and were singing a medley of sitcom theme songs when I spotted Billy and the Brunette.

  They weren’t kissing, or groping, or even holding hands, but there was definitely something intimate about the way they were walking and talking. As in, she might have been a colleague but she definitely wasn’t just a colleague, and they might have been coming from a restaurant but they definitely weren’t coming from a dinner meeting.

  And she definitely, definitely, wasn’t his sister. For one thing, I know—and strongly dislike, but that’s neither here nor there—his sister, Amanda.

  For another, if that woman turned out to be some other unlikable Billy sister I haven’t met, then there’s something distinctly Flowers in the Attic about their relationship.

  How do I know Billy and the woman aren’t platonic? Sometimes I just get a feeling about things for reasons I can quite put my finger on, and that was one of those times.

  Blake—who must have met Billy at Raphael and Donatello’s wedding three years ago but probably wouldn’t know him if he fell over him, which was not unlikely in his Bombay Sapphire-fueled condition—was oblivious to the situation.

  He launched us into the theme song from One Day at a Time as I saw the rest of Kate’s life—as a divorcée—flash before my very eyes.

  Maybe I was jumping the gun. Maybe they really were just colleagues.

  Blake elbowed me as I stopped singing and turned to watch Billy and the woman get into a cab together.

  “Tracey, you’re supposed to back me up. Let’s try it again,” Blake said, and sang, “Thiiiis is it…”

  “Thiiis is it,” I obediently echoed in tune, watching the cab make a right turn onto Hudson, heading downtown, instead of continuing on the next short block, making a right onto West Fourth and heading uptown.

  Billy and Kate, of course, live uptown. Shouldn’t he have been heading home at that hour on a weeknight?

  And even if she lived downtown, if they were going their separate ways, shouldn’t they have gotten separate cabs? There were plenty around. Believe me, I checked.

  I know, I know, I said I wouldn’t get into this whole Billy thing at the moment, but I can’t help it. It’s been weighing me down for weeks now and even though I know it could have been perfectly innocent, I also know that it wasn’t.

  Getting back to Jack—who doesn’t know about Billy on Horatio Street and who, I’m absolutely certain, would never be heading downtown in a cab with a strange woman at that hour of the night—he’s still waiting for my explanation about our diamond anniversary.

  “Twenty-five is the silver anniversary,” I explain to Jack as patiently now as I do when he’s being Ray Charles in front of the fridge, “and fifty is gold, and seventy-five is diamond.”

  “We haven’t even been alive seventy-five years,” he says just as patiently in his reasonable Jack way, and looks longingly at the section of newspaper he was about to unfold.

  “Not years—months. We met at the office Christmas party seventy-five months ago today.”

  “Really?”

  He actually looks moved by this news. The fact that he tends to find me endearing is part of the reason I love him so much—and find him endearing in return. Except when he’s Dutch Ovening my head. But I guess there’s a little leftover frat boy in most grown men, Billy aside.

  (Or maybe not, because Billy’s recent behavior—all right, suspected behavior—strikes me as pretty damn immature and reckless. Not to mention immoral.)

  “So it’s our seventy-five-month anniversary?” asks my endearing Jack. “I can’t believe you actually keep track of these things, Tracey.”

  I’ll admit—but not to him—that I actually don’t. Not until this morning at around 6:00 a.m. when, unable to sleep, I glanced at the kitchen calendar and happened to realize what day it was—right around the time the circus freaks kicked into high gear up in 10J.

  “Well…happy anniversary,” Jack tells me. Then, having concluded being endeared by my observation of our milestone, he goes back to reading the sports section of the New York Times.

  “Wait…Jack?”

  “Mmm.” He turns a page.

  “So it’s been seventy-five months since we met. Wow!” I say brightly. “And almost two and a half years since our wedding.”

  “Yup.” He’s reading the paper.

  “Remember when we didn’t want to come back from our honeymoon?”

  He snorts a little and looks up. “Who does?”

  True. But we really, really, really, so didn’t want to.

  Maybe because we had the most amazing honeymoon ever: we went to Tahiti and stayed in one of those huts on stilts above the perfect, crystalline aqua sea. I had been dreaming of doing that but didn’t think we could afford it. Jack surprised me.

  Naturally, we spent much of that week lolling around that lush paradise scheming ways to escape our dreary workaday life. Anything seemed possible there, thousands of miles from this claustrophobic Upper East Side apartment with its water stains and dismal, concrete view.

  The honeymoon flew by and the next thing we knew, we—and our luggage—were careening home from J.F.K. through cold November rain in an airless Yellow Cab that smelled overpoweringly of wet wool, mildew, chemical vanilla air freshener and exotic B.O.

  “Remember how we both wanted to quit our jobs and move away from the city,” I go on, “but you said one life change per year was your quota?”

  “Yee-eess…”

  I have his full attention now, but he’s not letting on. He’s pretending to be captivated by a story about Yankees spring training. Which, ordinarily, really would captivate him. Except, I know he’s suspicious. He must realize where I’m going with this.

  “Then remember how on our first anniversary I asked you about it again—” (I’d have bugged him sooner but I’d gotten over my initial impulse to flee when spring came early and our building was sold and the new owner nicely renovated everything) “—and you didn’t want to talk about it because you had just gotten promoted?”

  This time, he doesn’t bother to answer.

  “You know, I haven’t even brought this up in ages,” I say, “because I’ve been feeling like things are going great and why rock the boat…”

  Renovated apartment, Jack’s promotion to assistant media director at Blaire Barnett, my move to junior copywriter…

  Yeah, aside from what happened with Jack’s father, things have been relatively even-keeled lately. Much more even-keeled than ever before in my life.

  Except…

  The circus freaks moved in overhead, and someone’s shitting all over the building, and we can’t afford to live here, and I don’t think I can take another day of riding the subway or lugging stuff around or brainstorming clever taglines for Abate Laxatives—although I just had a sudden brainstorm. Hmm…

  Mental Note: explore working the Mad Crapper into the Abate campaign.

  “I feel like it’s time, Jack,” I tell my husband, getting back to my other, more palatable brainstorm. “Seriously, we’ve been together seventy-five months and I really feel like we need a major change.”

  “Tracey, we can’t move to Tahiti.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  He sighs and folds the paper, putting it aside. “You want to have a baby?”

  Huh?

  “A baby?” I echo. “No. I don’t want to have a baby—yet,” I add, because presumably I will one day soon wake up with the urge to reproduce.

  At least, that’s what my friends keep telling me. Including Raphael, who is about to become a father at last. Not via the original old-fashioned means, since his significant other—Donatello, his husband—is also ovarian challenged.

  Not via a surrogate, either, which was one of their earliest plans. When I (and every other female they’ve
ever met, plus a good many they haven’t) refused to lend them a womb—not that I don’t adore and wholeheartedly support their efforts—Raphael and Donatello decided to go the more recent old-fashioned route: foreign adoption.

  Sadly, that didn’t work, either. You’d be surprised how many countries forbid a monogamous, healthy, well-off gay couple to adopt from their overflowing orphanages.

  Or maybe you wouldn’t be. Maybe you don’t approve, either. But let me tell you, Raphael and Donatello deserve a chance as much as any stable, loving couple, and they are going to make terrific daddies. I know this for a fact, because they’ve had plenty of practice on the parade of foster kids they’ve been caring for over the past few years. Now one of those kids, Georgie, is going to become their son.

  As for me…

  “My biological clock isn’t ticking yet,” I inform my husband. Then I add cautiously, “Is yours?”

  “Nah. I just figured you’d start thinking about it sooner or later. Or now.”

  You may be wondering why this is only coming up after two-plus years of marriage.

  Well, it’s not. It’s been brought up (by me) and shot down (by Jack) before.

  I actually thought I might be pregnant when I skipped a period right around the time we got married. My ob-gyn said it was probably due to wedding stress. Still, I took a pregnancy test on our honeymoon. Of course it was negative.

  Even then, I wasn’t entirely convinced. When I did get my period, I was actually disappointed, and went through a brief period during our newlywed year when I was gung ho to start a family. After all, hadn’t I always wanted children? Hadn’t I been told enough times by my evil ex-boyfriend, Will, that I have birthing hips? Hadn’t I once even won a Babysitter of the Year award from my hometown Kiwanis Club? (I was seventeen. Which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about my high-school social life.)

  So, yeah, I’ve always wanted to start a family for legitimate reasons.

  Mostly, though, I just hated my job as account executive and I was desperate for a way out.