21 Stolen Kisses Page 7

  *

  “I wish I didn’t know what my mom sounds like having sex,” I tell Caroline as soon as the door to her office closes the next day.

  She brushes her tawny brown hair from her face and gives me a sympathetic smile. “I’m sure. I’m sure you wish you didn’t know what that sounded like at all.”

  “I wish I could erase all the memories of those sounds,” I say, because it’s not just her new beau, Warren, it’s Catey’s dad and Mr. Lipshitz and so very many others. “I mean, I guess you’re supposed to overhear your parents, right? But instead, I overhear my mom screwing other guys. And it’s not like I want to know what she sounds like with my dad, because that is completely disgusting as well,” I stop and look away. “But this is worse.”

  “It’s the sort of thing you aren’t supposed to know about your parents. And the reason it feels so off, the reason it’s got you all out of sorts, is that it’s outside the typical boundaries.” Caroline draws a square in the air, cordoning it off with her hands. “There are boundaries in any relationship, and the things your mom did and the things she is still doing are out here.” She points outside the imaginary box.

  But it’s hard for me to process her comments about my mom, even if she’s right. Maybe especially because she’s right. I press my hands against my belly, and wince. “My stomach hurts.”

  “Does it?”

  I move my palm to my forehead. “My head hurts.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “I love my mom,” I say, because it’s true, and I need Caroline to know that.

  “I know you do.”

  “You think I should hate her, don’t you?”

  She shakes her head. “No, I don’t think that at all.”

  “Well, I don’t hate her,” I say, leaning farther back into the leather couch, suddenly defensive. “I love her. She was the one who was home all the time. My dad was traveling for business. Isn’t this all his fault? If he’d been around more, maybe she never would have started cheating.”

  “Do you believe that?” Caroline asks me carefully.

  “Maybe,” I mutter as I look away.

  “Truly? Do you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he should have been home more. She had so many opportunities. So many chances. Maybe he wasn’t there for her.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t,” she offers, ever the pragmatist, always waiting for me to figure out the crap of my life for myself. Today, it irks me. Today, it feels like an itch in my chest that I can’t scratch but don’t even want to touch. It’s a headache. It’s a bellyache. It’s everything that hurts in my life.

  “I miss Catey,” I say as I play with the three charms on my necklace, dropping them against my shirt over and over. “I learned how to love coffee because of Catey. I became addicted to lattes and espressos and Diet Cokes thanks to her,” I say, then laugh once. I know caffeine dependency is not the barometer for a friendship. But the remnants of the time we spent together still exist in my life, even though she doesn’t. “I became a vegetarian because of her.”

  “And you probably are worried Amanda is going to go the way of Catey?”

  I tap my nose with my index finger, thinking of Lane too, of how he makes this gesture. “Bingo.”

  “Well, what could you do differently so that doesn’t happen?”

  I narrow my eyes at Caroline. “It’s not my fault that friendship ended.”

  “I didn’t say it was your fault. I was simply asking what you could do differently.”

  I don’t answer. I don’t want to answer. Instead, I say, “I think I should go.”

  “Is that what you want to do?”

  I hold up my hands, sharply. “Why are you just asking me questions and spouting platitudes? You’re like the caricature of a shrink right now.”

  She nods thoughtfully. “I understand why you feel that way.”

  “You’re doing it still!”

  She’s silent.

  I point a finger at her, as all my frustration over last night’s sound show unspools in Caroline’s lap. “Ugh! That makes me even crazier!”

  “Now, you’re talking, Kennedy. Now you’re speaking the truth. This is what you should say to your mom.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You just told me exactly what you think of me. Try that with your mom. Tell her how her actions make you feel. Tell her the truth,” she says, with a fierce edge to her tone.

  I close my eyes, slide down farther, my butt touching the edge of the cushions, my back a crushed “C” against the couch. “I can’t,” I say, deflated.

  “You can.”

  “I shouldn’t have lied to my dad,” I blurt out.

  “You can tell the truth anytime.”

  When it’s time to go I leave Caroline’s office and walk past the lobby, knowing Lane is waiting for me outside. I’m not ready to see him. I lean against the wall by the elevators, grateful for a break from talking and from trying to figure out why I’m so messed up about life and love.

  But am I really that messed up? Was it so wrong for me to be with Noah? I’m tired of holding back, tired of waiting, tired of pretending he is not what I want right now, when he is the very thing I want and I need.

  He is the opposite.

  I take out my phone because I can’t resist him right now. I simply can’t not reach out to him.

  Hi. Wish I were with you right now.

  There. I sent it before regret washes over me. There is no regret.

  I punch the button in the elevator, and when I reach the ground floor I feel a buzzing in my back pocket, and the possibility that it could be from him sends a delicious thrill though me.

  I grab my phone and my fingers feel slippery as I slide it open.

  It’s a number I don’t recognize. I pick it up.

  “Hi, is this Kennedy Stanzlinger?”

  It’s a woman’s voice.

  “Yes,” I answer.

  “This is Doreen Lipshitz. I think you may have sent me a letter.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Kennedy

  I want to set Doreen Lipshitz up with my Dad. She is perfect for him. She works at a nonprofit that raises money for arts education. She has a soft but clear voice. Her dark hair is long and curly and her warm eyes are a chocolate brown. I’m sure she is my father’s long-lost soul mate. I can picture them strolling through galleries in Florence together, arm in arm. He’ll point out a painting to her. She’ll share some amazing detail with him. They’ll laugh, sit down in the palazzo, and have cappuccinos.

  The only problem is she’s still married to Craig Lipshitz. She wears her wedding band, a shiny silver thing, and she also has a gigantic rock next to it. I bet it’s a so sorry gift from him.

  “How did you know?” I ask. “How did you know I sent the letter?”

  We’re sitting on a bench tucked inside one of the entrances to Central Park. The start-and-stop afternoon traffic from just beyond is the background music to our conversation. The school day is over; I couldn’t wait for it to end and meet her—she was as kind on the phone yesterday as she seems to be now. She told me she still had my number because she’d saved my contact info long ago from the night I called her to confirm she’d attend the party.

  Mrs. Lipshitz shrugs, a sweet kind of shrug, as if it’s obvious. “It wasn’t that hard to figure out.”

  My face flushes momentarily, and I look away. She places a hand on my arm. “I don’t mean that in a bad way. What I mean is, given the context of the letter, given the handwriting, I was able to put the pieces together.”

  “What does that mean? It looks like it was written by a kid?”

  She laughs, but it’s a reassuring laugh. “No. It looks like it was written by a young woman.”

  Now I laugh. “Euphemism for teenager.”

  “I remember you from your parent’s parties. You were like your mom’s crown jewel. She made sure everyone knew who you were.”

  I should be embarrassed. But ye
t, I feel this strange burst of pride in me. Because even when my mom was on, even when she was the belle of her own ball, she never left me out. “I talked to you at one of the parties. You were nice to me. And I was only in seventh grade then.”

  “You never seemed like a seventh grader. I’m sure you get that a lot, don’t you? People always thinking you’re older? Because you just had this sense about you. A maturity. And that’s why when I received the letter, it had that same sense of maturity, sort of a worldliness. A knowledge about the adult world, about adult matters.”

  Too much knowledge, too much worldliness. I wish I didn’t know the things I know about adults. “Sometimes,” I say.

  “And I appreciate you meeting me. Especially because you didn’t have to do any of this. You didn’t have to say you’re sorry, because my husband was the one who made the mistake.”

  I pull my shoulders in, closer to my chest, as if I’m doing the opposite of a chest-opening, breathe-from-deep-inside yoga move. Because now I’m thinking of what it was like back in seventh grade and it all feels so fresh, and so weird, and so abnormal again.

  Like a faucet turned on high, the memories pour out of me. “I had to have dinner with your husband. I had to listen to their jokes. I had to hear them. I had to see him at my house when I got home from school.” The words spill out, like water or rain. They are remarkably easy to say to her, to someone who isn’t my own mom. It’s so simple for me to tell this woman I hardly know how angry I am at her husband. And he’s nothing to me. Just one of many on my mom’s long, long list. One of many names I have recorded in my notebook over the years. But still, I hate him. “Don’t you look at him and think …” my voice trails off, because I don’t want to reopen her wounds by saying what I think: What scum.

  Mrs. Lipshitz shakes her head. “I don’t hate my husband. I love him. That’s why I stayed with him even when I saw his e-mails, even when I learned what had been going on. It took a lot of work, but I’m glad I did it. And I don’t hate your mom either.”

  A car screeches to a stop somewhere outside of the park, tires squealing against asphalt. The sound jolts me and I key in on what she has said and what it amounts to. Forgiveness. She forgives her husband, she forgives my mom.

  “And your letter was beautiful. It meant so much to me that you’d do that. Really.”

  My letter was beautiful. My amends are working.

  And everything clicks into place, turning one, two, three degrees past where I thought I was going. Because if she can get over what happened, maybe I can too. Maybe I can forgive my mom. Maybe I can let go of the past and my part in it. The possibility feels like floating on the wings of a butterfly. Like freedom and lightness all at once. Like scoring the winning goal in a lacrosse game.

  “Thank you for tracking me down, Mrs. Lipshitz,” I say, my mind already racing ahead to the next one and the next and the next.

  “Please. Call me Doreen. I really hate the name Lipshitz.”

  “It is a pretty awful name.”

  *

  The letters become my new passion project. The next night we hit a block on the Upper East Side, mixing up our repertoire by leaving cut-out red and pink construction paper hearts with lines on them from Beethoven’s famous “Immortal Beloved” love letter, leaving it for Catey’s mom.

  As I position a heart just so on a fencepost, I think of Catey and all we shared when we were younger.

  “Do you know why I don’t eat meat?” I say to Lane while we put the finishing touches on this latest ‘public art’ display.

  He arches an eyebrow. “Are you going to tell me a story? I love stories. Spill.”

  “It’s because of my friend Catey,” I say, then tell him about the day I crossed pepperoni, ham, and chicken off the menu.

  Catey had been raised a vegetarian, and she proudly told me she’d never tasted meat.

  “Not chicken, not fish, not cow, not pig, not anything,” she said one afternoon as we balanced lazily on our boards after school, back and forth on a smooth section of concrete in the middle of Central Park, surfing on the flat asphalt.

  “What about a turkey?” I challenged.

  “No gobble-gobble.”

  “How about a sheep? Ever had a sheep?”

  “A lamb? No way!” she said.

  “Duck?”

  “Quack-quack, no.”

  “Frog legs?”

  “I have no idea if they taste like chicken.”

  “So why are you a veggie?”

  “How could I not be? I mean, I don’t use makeup that was tested on animals, do you?”

  Everything I knew about makeup I had learned from my mom, and she only bought the highest-end stuff from department stores. She never elaborated on whether her mascara had made a bunny cry. “I don’t know.”

  “Eating animals is kind of the same idea, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe.” But I wasn’t convinced yet.

  “Second, you don’t really hear about people getting mad cow disease from eating carrots.”

  I laughed and shifted my weight to the back end of the board. “Very good point. What else? Give me another reason.”

  “Here’s the thing. At the end of the day, do you really want to eat something that can poop?”

  “That is so nasty,” I said with a laugh, and we both cracked up. I went veggie the next day and never looked back.

  Lane stares at me with narrowed eyes. “Is this your way of trying to convert me to your broccoli-loving habits?”

  I laugh and swat his arm as we walk away from our art, leaving it for someone else now to discover. “Maybe. Is it working?”

  He shakes his head. “Never. My love for pepperoni is too strong.”

  *

  Two days later we tackle a block in Gramercy Park. This is a tough one, since the letter is for my mom’s coworker Bailey. Lane and I park our bikes at the end of a block in the East Twenties, hooking our locks together, twisting each through the others.

  As we walk down the block, I half expect him to hook his arm through mine, as if we’re in a 1940s movie, maybe even in black-and-white. I kind of like that image, so I go with it, making the first move. Lane glances down at our arms, linked together, then he raises an eyebrow at me.

  He says nothing; just smiles.

  I wait for the flutter to kick in. For the flip in my belly I’d feel if Noah did this. It doesn’t appear, and maybe that’s because I already exhausted my supply of flips and flutters when Noah wrote back to my last text the other day, when I told him I wished he were with me.

  I would grant that wish if you wanted me to. You know that.

  Right now, I wish I felt half as much for Lane as I do for Noah.

  We stop near the end of the quiet street, outside Bailey’s building, a pretty gray stone structure near a tree-lined corner. She’s the publicist at LGO, and I chatted with her last week at the party at my house when my mom’s show was renewed. Her husband Sean is somewhat of a regular with my mom, the three-or-four-times-a-year guy. Bailey doesn’t know about Sean’s extracurricular habits. So Bailey is just getting a card in the mail—a cool black-and-white photograph of two kids holding hands on a beach. I signed it Best wishes for an everlasting love and I sent it off when we passed a mailbox a few blocks ago. I hope it brings her some happiness.

  With the card on its way, we enter the next phase of our love letter mission.

  Now, we are spies. We are clandestine, scanning her tree-lined street for the thirty-something strawberry blonde. I don’t see her anywhere, so we begin tacking up copies of an excerpt from a letter James Joyce sent to his wife, Nora.

  “I love this letter,” I say as I tape a copy to a street sign. “But my favorite love letters were written by Honoré de Balzac. Only I can’t ever leave his letters. Want to know why?”

  “Why?” Lane asks as he smooths out a page against a railing.

  “Because he was having an affair with a married woman.”

  “Ah, I can see why you wou
ldn’t want to go there.”

  “His letters are the best. But they’re cursed,” I say, then look up at the fourth floor of Bailey’s building. My heart stops. Lo and freaking behold, there’s a blond woman walking over to the window, pulling back the curtain. Peering across the street, then down the block.

  My pulse races.

  “That’s Bailey,” I whisper, grabbing Lane’s arm before Bailey sees us. In a nanosecond, we are off, running once more to the end of the block and around the corner to where we parked our bikes. We unlock them so quickly we could be auditioning for the role of speed demons in an upcoming flick. We race down the sidewalk, then onto the avenue, pedaling away from the scene.

  I’ve done nothing wrong, but spotting Bailey in the window reminds me that there are real people on the other side of the amends. Sure, I desperately want her to feel happiness, but I also don’t want to get caught. No one knew how complicit I was in my mother’s affairs; no one needs to know how I’m trying to extract myself from that guilt. As I ride away, the thought flashes before me: Am I going too far? The first amends felt freeing, the second and third a damn liberation. But now I have to wonder if I’m pushing, needling, worrying away at something better left alone? Like Bailey in the window?

  I don’t have the answer.

  Eventually, we stop at a diner and order fries and diet sodas. As the waitress walks away, Lane reaches a hand toward me. I flinch.

  “It’s okay,” he says gently. “You have grease on your cheek.”

  “Oh, that’s gross.”

  He rubs a finger against my cheek. “Bike grease.”

  “Even grosser.”

  “How do you get bike grease on your cheek?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you know it’s good luck to get bike grease on your cheek?”

  I laugh. “Yeah, right.”

  He touches the tip of another finger to his tongue. Then he presses his finger against my cheek again, wiping off the rest of the grease. He shows me his finger, smudged now. “See?”

  “Now it’s on you.”

  He smears a tiny amount on his cheek. “Then it’s good luck for me too,” he says, and the faintest blush blooms across his cheeks. He flashes me a sweet smile, then holds my gaze, and I feel untethered.