My Favorite Mistake Read online

  “But what happened to Flynn?”

  Her eyes wandered back to the magazine. “I don’t know. He graduated and went off to work. I haven’t seen him much since then, except when you’re around.”

  “I thought he was at the Roof Rat every night?”

  “Not until last week. He’s been in Lindbrook a lot more since you showed up.”

  I tucked this tidbit away for later analysis. “Really.”

  “Yes. Look, I have to get back to the office. Daddy needs me to pour coffee and type memos.” She made a face as she folded her prescription into her purse. “And I haven’t decided about suing, but if you tell anybody about the antidepressants, I’ll name you in the lawsuit.”

  “Uh-huh. So glad we had this little chat.” I watched her stalk out the sliding glass doors, all flaming hair, tasteful twill, and Sigma Psi suburban rage. And then I trailed after her, even more confused about Flynn and wondering if Leah or Skye knew how to reverse hexes.

  Tuesday night at the Roof Rat boiled down to me, Flynn and Ian, who had struck up something of a courtship with Skye after I talked her into rebuffing Lars. Nary a single customer. At nine o’clock, torn between abject boredom and panic over lost profits, my sister decided we needed a distraction. She ran up to the apartment to unearth, from the bottom of a closet, a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle.

  Ian excused himself to go retrieve his pipe and tobacco from his car, whereupon Skye dumped all 500 pieces on the table and announced, “Flynn, I have some excellent news. I told Ian that his college department group thing could have their annual wine and cheese party here next week. Isn’t that exciting?” She squared her shoulders, trying to look brisk and businesslike. “I’m doing it all myself! I am totally becoming a burned-out career woman.”

  “You sure are,” he agreed. “But what about my big event? We’re supposed to be prepping for that.”

  “Don’t worry, we can do both,” she assured him.

  I jerked my head up. “What exactly is ‘your big event’ anyway?”

  “Just a little get-together for the hockey team.” He turned a puzzle piece over and over in his hand. “A little get-together with a lot of alcohol.”

  “Yeah, we might even hire a band,” Skye said.

  “With a bass player and everything.” He smirked at me. “You’ll love it.”

  My sister looked horrified. “Can’t you two just be happy for once?”

  “I don’t know. Can we?” He turned to me, and I knew he was thinking about my abrupt departure from Main Street after he’d kissed me.

  “I don’t know,” I muttered.

  There was a moment of silence you could have cut with a knife and served in slices on little doilies.

  Then Ian clattered back through the door, gazing with adoration at Skye. “Always so lovely, my lamb.”

  She puckered up and gave Ian a tiny, non-lipstick-smearing kiss on the cheek. “Oh, how sweet!”

  As I looked around for a place to vomit, I risked a moment of eye contact with Flynn, who was laughing. But he stopped when I caught his eye and I realized that one little kiss in the rain today didn’t erase the big kiss-off ten years ago.

  12

  On the morning of the English department cheese and wine soiree, I hauled my carcass out of bed after another night of insomnia and headed for the bathroom, but Skye cut me off to usurp the shower.

  She scooched around me and turned on the hot water, shoving me back against the sink. “Ugh. Morning. By the way, your car’s broken.”

  “My car’s broken?” I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “I was trying to get to Cannon Falls to meet Ian—”

  “Yeah, and thanks for borrowing it without asking and then blowing off work, by the way.”

  “—and it kept making these horrible grinding noises. So I called Lars and he said it’s probably your clutch or something and you shouldn’t drive it again until he takes a look at it.”

  “You called Lars? On the way to Ian’s house?”

  “Sure.” She yawned and grabbed a loofah from the shelf above the sink. “He said he’ll come over and fix it this week.”

  “I can’t believe you called Lars while you were on your way to meet Ian.” I shook my head. “Have you no shame?”

  “None whatsoever.” She tossed her towel aside and stepped into the tub. “Now get going, Faithie. You’ve got a million things to do today, and most of them involve cheese-slicing.”

  I put my hands on my hips. “I’ve got a million things to do today?”

  Her voice drifted over the hiss of hot water. “Don’t get snarky, I’ll be working, too. While you slice all the cheese and pour all the wine and clean up for the party…I’ll be at the laundromat.”

  “The laundromat? Are you sure? I wouldn’t want you coming down with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.”

  She laughed. “I’ll even take your clothes and wash them. What do you say?”

  I sighed and grabbed my toothbrush. “I say, bring on the brie.”

  After scouring the local grocery store and Leah and Stan’s bakery, I decided that the Arts and Humanities faculty were going to have to make do with Nabisco, because English water crackers were not going to magically materialize in Lindbrook. Skye, using Lars as her chauffeur, bundled up every scrap of clothing and linen she could find and flitted off to the Lakewood Soap ‘n’ Suds.

  “It’s better than the one in Lindbrook because it has TV and they always have the Soap Opera Network on,” she informed me. “I’ll be back in a few hours. You better start chipping away at that cheese.”

  Four hours, two slabs of cheddar, one wheel of brie and countless wedges of Gouda later, my right arm was aching and my good mood was a distant memory.

  Even on my best days, I was no Nigella Lawson. I unwrapped the crackers, dumped stacks of them in the center of the cheese piles, and called it an artistic choice. Then I checked the clock. Time for some tiara therapy and a little beautification before facing Flynn.

  We hadn’t talked much since our kiss on Main Street, and I wasn’t sure how to interpret his silence. The bar had been busy, but not too busy for basic verbal communication. Was he waiting for me to make the next move? Was he pretending the whole thing had never happened? Was he conspiring with the psychic on Hennepin Avenue to curse me into oblivion?

  I wandered into the bedroom to begin wardrobe selection and realized that Skye had not been kidding when she offered to take all my clothes to the laundromat. Every last one of my shirts, my pants, even my underwear had been trundled off to the Lakewood Soap ‘n’ Suds. My current outfit, the voluminous Cubs T-shirt I’d thrown on for cheese detail, lacked a certain come-hither allure, so I opened the top drawer of Skye’s dresser in the hopes of finding at least a bra that might fit.

  I reached into the deepest recesses of the drawer, hoping I might chance upon a rogue B-cup left over from her middle school days, but my hand closed around a fistful of family photos.

  My throat constricted as I saw my father’s face for the first time in years. I shuffled through the pictures, hypnotized by the images of my sister at seven or eight with pigtails and the same playful grin she had now. She was standing next to my father in one photo, wearing his baseball cap and mimicking his proud posture. And there was my mother, bright and blond and slightly out of focus, on her way to somewhere more exciting.

  When I reached the last photo, I had to sit down on the bed. I stared at the image of myself, grinning and impossibly young in a fancy dress for my senior graduation dance. In the photos taken that night, Flynn and I looked relaxed and happy, probably because we knew that as soon as we left the house, we were heading to the creek instead of the crepe-papered high school gym. The creek bank was where we’d spent every significant high school event, camped out under the stars by ourselves and enjoying the wilderness in our formalwear. That was where, on the night of that graduation dance, we decided to shed all pretext of restraint, along with our clothes. Which had led
to skinny dipping under a huge white moon, which led to sex, which led to the beginning of the end.

  “I’m home!” Skye slammed the front door. I shoved the photos back into the dresser and shut the drawer.

  “I’m in here,” I yelled back.

  She staggered through the doorway, her blue eyes peeking over a mountain of white sheets and lavender towels. “Faithie, we have to be down there in half an hour. Why are you still wearing that T-shirt?” She took another look at my face and froze in place. “What?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing.”

  Her eyes widened with concern. “No, it’s definitely something. What happened?”

  “Nothing,” I repeated, realizing as I said this that it was the truth. The people and places—the potential—I saw in those photographs had evaporated long ago. “Let’s get dressed.”

  Bra-gate, as it later came to be known, began while I was still trying to pull myself together in the bathroom.

  Skye rapped lightly on the door. “Um? Hi?”

  I sniffed my last sniffle into a ball of Kleenex. No more obsessing on graduation dances of yore. “Yes?”

  “I have some good news and some bad news. What do you want first?”

  I braced myself. “The bad news. Always.”

  “Well…remember how I went to the laundromat?”

  I popped my head out into the hall. “The laundromat from whence you returned not ten minutes ago?”

  She shifted her weight. “Yeah. Remember how they have the Soap Opera Network there? They had this really sad episode of All My Children on, and Anthony was in a coma, and…I sort of forgot to bring your stuff back.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “What stuff, specifically?”

  She examined her manicure. “Some of your clothes. Okay, actually, all of your clothes.”

  “All my clothes? Are moldering in Lakewood? Because Anthony’s in a coma?”

  She nodded.

  “Then, Skye,” I said pleasantly, “how exactly am I supposed to get dressed?”

  “That’s the good news.” She beckoned me into the bedroom, pointing out a slim pair of black leather pants draped on the bed.

  “You jest.” I stared at the slinky Pamela Anderson britches.

  “They’re brand new. Bob bought them for me and I haven’t even worn them. Aren’t they the hottest ever?”

  “Hot, yes. Appropriate for an Arts and Humanities faculty party, no. What are my other options?”

  “Not much, because I forgot a lot of my clothes in Lakewood, too. But I did bring the sheets back. And the towels.” She rummaged through her closet. “There’s this.” She held out a ruched gold lamé minidress and a red backless number.

  “Dear God. Can’t we send Lars back to Lakewood?”

  “No. He’s already setting up the bar downstairs.” She gave me her patented “problems are hard” face. “You don’t like the pants?”

  How to put this tactfully? “I love the pants. It’s just that…”

  “Great! Put them on. I’ll wear this”—she held the gold lamé up to the mirror—“and we’ll be the belles of the ball.”

  The problem was not that the pants didn’t fit; the problem was that they fit too well. The pliant leather clung to my every skin cell. After a thorough inspection in the mirror, I had to admit they didn’t look half bad. For a Justin Timberlake groupie.

  “Seriously, Faithie, you look so kick-ass!” Skye dug around under the bed and emerged with a pair of strappy silver sandals. “Try these on. Sensible shoes don’t go with those pants.”

  I sighed. “In for a dime, in for a dollar. Gimme.”

  “Oh, and here.” She handed me a tiny scrap of white cloth, which turned out to be a tube top with the word VIXEN spelled out in red rhinestones across the chest.

  “I’m not wearing that!” I flung the offending hoochie rag to the floor.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I refuse to go down there in leather pants, stilettos, a tube top sized for an eight-year-old boy, and no bra.”

  “Why not?” Her blue eyes sparkled. “Flynn’ll love it.” She shimmied into the gold lamé.

  “Skye. Focus. This isn’t about Flynn. It’s about my personal dignity.”

  “Dignity, schmignity.” She affixed giant gold hoops to her ears. “What’s more important, getting back together with Flynn or your foolish pride?”

  “Whoa.” I sat down on the bed. “Listen to me. There’s no question of us getting back together. Flynn and me? Not gonna happen.”

  “But he kissed you—”

  “A week ago, for about two nanoseconds.” I flopped back against the pillows. “And he’s devoted every spare minute since then to ignoring me.”

  “Well, maybe if you just talked to him…”

  “He doesn’t want to talk to me,” I pointed out. “Which sucks right now, but is probably for the best.” I rolled over to face the wall. “I’d rather he be mad at me than decide to give me a second chance and have me blow it again when I leave to go back to L.A. We’ve already had one apocalyptic break-up. I don’t ever want to go through that again, and neither does he.”

  She pouted. “But if he did give you a second chance, maybe you’d decide to move back here and we could…”

  “Minnesota and me? Definitely not gonna happen.” The look on her face cut me to the quick, but I couldn’t let her nurture the hope that I would suddenly change my mind and settle down here. “Sweetie, I love you and I came out here to help you, but I can’t stay. I will suffocate here.”

  She seemed skeptical.

  I tried to frame this in a context she’d appreciate. “Okay, imagine if you just washed a new sports bra and it shrunk in the dryer and when you put it on, it’s so tight you can’t even breathe.”

  “Ooh, I hate that.”

  “Well, that’s what I feel like when I’m in Lindbrook.”

  She nodded sadly. “Except you can’t take the sports bra off.”

  “That’s right. And speaking of bras, I need to rustle up some appropriate partywear ASAP.”

  I ended up calling Leah. After laughing for about ten minutes, she brought over a flowing white silk blouse for me to try. “You have to remember, I’ve had two kids and no personal trainer. No way are my bras going to fit you. But the shirt’s pretty roomy, so maybe no one will notice you’re going commando.”

  “I hope so.” I glanced at the clock and smeared on some lip gloss. “Either way, I have to get moving. Skye’s already down there setting up the cheese platters and the classy plastic wine glasses.”

  “Good luck. Let me know how it goes.” Leah tried unsuccessfully to hide her smile. “Those pants are so sassy. Flynn will definitely approve.”

  “That’s just what Skye said.” I yanked my hair back into a Health Code–friendly braid.

  “It is a truth universally acknowledged that men love leather pants. Hold still.” She smeared some purple shadow on my eyelids. “Are you nervous about seeing him tonight?”

  My eyelid twitched. “No, I’m through with that drama. He can love me, he can hate me…I don’t give a rat’s ass.”

  “Whatever you say.” She took a step back and gave me a critical once-over. “Stan’s leaving our old pick-up truck in the parking lot. You can borrow it until your car is fixed. You know how to drive stick, right?”

  “Yeah. Flynn taught me, actually.” We had spent entire Sundays steering and shifting and braking, and he never lost his temper. Not when I stalled, not when I kept confusing the left and right turn signals, not when I hit pothole after pothole in my attempt to focus on second gear. He’d just stretched his arm along the back of the bench seat, craned his head around to view the cracked pavement behind us, and nodded. “Good work, Geary. You hit every single one.”

  “Done.” Leah turned me around to face the mirror. “Tell me you don’t look stunning.”

  With the free-flowing white silk shirt, the tight leather pants, and the high heels, I looked like a hybrid of Joan Jett and Edna St. Vi
ncent Millay. “There are no words,” I agreed.

  “Now go prove me right about men and leather pants.”

  13

  Downstairs, the wine and cheese fête had gone terribly awry.

  The Roof Rat was overflowing with beer kegs and hockey banners. The cheese platters, for which I had sacrificed hours of labor and all feeling in my right arm, warred for counter space with bowls of potato chips, pretzels, and some unidentified brown crunchy substance. Flynn, decked out in his customary jeans and T-shirt, was hanging a huge Polecats banner from the ceiling. Skye, teetering in high heels on a flimsy folding chair, tacked a woven medievalesque tapestry over the bar.

  I cleared my throat. “I wasn’t aware the faculty members were such avid sports fans.”

  Skye hopped down from her chair, nearly breaking an ankle in the process. “The hockey stuff is for Flynn’s event.”

  “Wait. I thought that was next weekend?” I turned to him for clarification, but he continued his banner-hanging without sparing me a single glance. “Right now we need to be prepping the place for professors. Think Chaucer.”

  “Um, actually, I kind of need to talk to you about that.” Skye twisted her hands together. “See, Ian wanted to do this event today and I said okay, and then Flynn asked me about doing his event on Saturday, and I thought he meant next Saturday, but he meant this Saturday, so…my bad!”

  “You’ve double-booked? Humanities professors and hockey players?”

  She nodded.

  “Perhaps it strikes you that we now have a crisis on our hands?”

  “Nah. We’ll just combine the parties.” She looked staggered by her own genius. “Wine and cheese and beer and pretzels. Double the money, double the fun!”

  I raised my eyebrows. “And how do you think Ian’s colleagues will feel about this?”

  “They’ll love it! I mean, they’re stuck in some boring office all day grading papers. I bet they’re dying to meet a real live goalie.”

  “Right. Because there’s nothing they love more in the Ivory Tower than a good, toothless brawl.” I snatched up a cube of cheddar and devoured it. “You guys, we can’t do this. We promised Ian that—”