In case you were wondering if karma is a thing, I think this proves once and for all that it’s not.
I turn over in bed. The sun is shining in my eyes, and the clock says it’s nine o’clock. Tomorrow is my sixtieth birthday, and I am not happy to discover that I’m closing out my fifties by waking up to think about Victor Steidley, the man whom I got over thirty-five years ago. What the hell is he doing showing up in my head now?
Then I remember. He sent me a text that came in at midnight. First text ever from him. The last time I’d heard from him was seventeen years ago when he’d sent the last child support payment and had written me to congratulate himself on doing his fatherly duty. So what that he’d only bothered to see his daughter three times since the divorce? He was the hero. Father-of-the-Year material in his own mind.
I roll over and get my phone off the bedside table and click it back to life, find my reading glasses, and read it again, just in case I misremembered something about it.
But no. I remembered it perfectly.
juliette is dead
That’s all. No explanation. No emotion. No punctuation or capital letters even. Just this one sentence. You’d think a poet could do a little better than that. But maybe, as usual, he was saving his best stuff for other people. Why even tell me, though? Why now?
I lie back on the pillows, rub my eyes. We used to sleep together in this very room. In fact, I stood right in that doorway over there watching him pack up all his shirts and pants and notebooks, dumping everything into the taupe, glossy, wheeled suitcases we received for a wedding present. Watched him walk down those stairs and out the front door, after he slammed it so hard that the glass rattled.
And after he left—when I heard his car roar off down the street—I gave myself exactly fifteen minutes of wallowing. It was all I had time for, because Louisa, his rickety mother who had already lost a husband and two children, was sobbing, and the baby was cutting some teeth so she was running a fever and wanted to be held all the time, and my mother was wringing her hands and wondering what was to become of me—and so after indulging in a fifteen-minute personal meltdown out on the back stairs, I got busy and threw out all the stuff he left behind, his golf clubs and his cuff links and his stupid tuxedo.
So there, I said. Good riddance to you, Victor Worst Husband Ever Steidley.
Anything he’d touched, anything that had meant anything to him at all—went right into the dumpster behind our house. I stomped back up the walk, squared my shoulders, and I told the moms we’d all be fine. That first night, my grandmother told me in a dream that I should put some salt in the corners, so I did. A week later, I tore down the stained beige curtains and put up new ones with magnolias on them, and then I repainted the living room a bright daffodil yellow, a color Victor never would have allowed.
I set up a new life, learning how to change the oil in the car and how to reason with repairmen. Then I went to work at a variety of crazy-ass, part-time, work-from-home jobs so I didn’t have to be away from Louise. No full-time job for me. I took care of everyone, until Victor’s mom passed away a few years later, and my own mom, who was younger and still had possibilities, moved away to one of the Virgin Islands, where she married a ship’s captain and worked on her lifelong tan.
One night, after both moms were gone, I looked at my daughter’s face, and a truth dawned on me: two people were not enough for a family. Two people weren’t enough even to play a decent game of Go Fish. So I filled the house with new people, waifs and strays and nice folks I met at the bus stop. I started a little freelance taxi service and invited people home, if they were nice. I started cooking and baking for real. The kitchen table got bigger and bigger, with people crowded around it, and I lit candles and strung up fairy lights, and somehow I perfected a pie crust recipe that won some prizes, and I laughed and danced and cried and threw things sometimes, practiced yoga and meditation, got married two more times, was divorced once and widowed once, survived a bout of breast cancer and two rounds of pneumonia. I drew Louise close to me and raised her to be a lovely human being, yada yada yada, and that pretty much brings us to today, the day I am waking up to a text from Victor—and yes, I’ll admit that there is a ridiculous, residual pang of regret, of course there is, but it’s so minuscule a pang that it merely serves to remind me that I’m fine. Better than fine without him. Without all my husbands, really.
So there. I win.
I win because I am still living in the same lovely worn-out, comfortable house, with its wide wooden porch with the swing, its plain, workmanlike clapboard exterior, its oak tree in the front and the little patch of garden in the back.
And I win because I get to share this house with Calvin, who is ninety and has been here for eight years, and also Marisol and Edwin, both of whom are just the latest people to show up and move in while they wait to find out what life has in store for them.
I win because Louise—she of the cinnamon muffin in the hair experiments—is still the most inquisitive creature I know, and she is married now to a photographer named Leo, and even though they don’t seem to be quite aware that if they’re going to have children they should get on with it, they still have a fabulous life, busy being famous on Instagram as the duo @lulu&leo. She is intent on perfection, which can keep a person plenty busy—and if that’s what she wants to do with her one wild, untamable life, then fine for her.
As for me, I won’t even try anymore to be perfect, or to look good for men or chase love or romance or any of that stuff. I don’t believe falling in love is good for people. That’s the true fact of it.
My main win—and the reason I decide to shift my thoughts from Victor’s message and now smile and bound out of bed—is because three months ago I learned something truly life changing. And that is this: you have to follow your impulses, even if one of them showed up on a night you got drunk with your best friend, and the two of you thought up a business that involves you dressing up in a stuffed bunny costume and helping strangers cure their heartbreak by carting away all their sad, lonely mementos. That is exactly the kind of unlikely impulse you should follow. Because life is too short to let it be uninteresting, and anyway, you never know whose life you might save as the Heartbreak Bunny. Maybe even your own.
So, take that, Victor. You, with your pretentious, unpunctuated text messages. I am going to forget that your little bulletin ever came in. And I am certainly not going to tell Louise.
CHAPTER TWO
The cop is young, looks like he’s twelve or thirteen, but then they all do these days, don’t they? I watch him through the rearview mirror as he approaches my car, squaring his jaw and touching his hat with its shiny brim glinting in the sunlight. Damn it. I have total confidence in my ability to charm an old cop—but a young one? He’s so not going to be open to my particular brand of delightfulness.
The red and blue lights are wheeling around on top of his car. Other drivers slow down so they can more properly take in the spectacle of us.
And by us, I mean me.
I’m wearing the bunny head, you see. I make one more desperate attempt to remove it before he gets to my window, although of course he’s already seen it, and it won’t come off anyway.
This was not on my agenda for the morning. I’m on my way to a Heartbreak Bunny client, already in a hurry—and now this. I roll down the window. I still drive my 1971 yellow VW bug, the kind of car that makes a statement. One statement it makes is that it doesn’t go in for those newfangled, push-button, electric windows. You have to earn your fresh air in this car.