Wallflower In Bloom (4 page)

Great. The man who had seen my peanut-M&M’s-and-turkey-sandwich-bloated body in ancient ripped underwear and with toothpaste spewing out of my mouth was Just. My. Type.

I couldn’t seem to move. It was like humiliation had rooted me in place. Even my ankles felt heavy. I glanced down. Something was peeking out from under one pant leg and resting on the inside edge of my shoe.

I did a double take and glanced down again. Yep, it was the corner of my recently removed ripped underpants. I’d been known to leave the house with the occasional T-shirt on inside out, and decades ago I’d gone to high school one day with a sock stuck inside one leg of my jeans, but this was a new low.

“Hey, I’m really sorry,” the guy said, still holding the door.

I took a tiny step toward the elevator door, dragging the leg with the underpants attached to it as carefully as possible.

The guy was still staring at me. I wondered if I could get away with pointing over his shoulder and yelling,
Look!
And as soon as he turned and looked, I’d reach down, grab my underpants, and run.

He shook his head. “You must have been terrified. Listen, I’m sure nothing like this will ever happen again, but just to be on the safe side? You should always make sure you put the chain on as soon as you get in the room, okay?”

I took another ministep. I glanced down again as casually as I could. The underpants were about three-quarters of the way out now.
If I’d been giving birth to a baby from the bottom of my pant leg, one more push would do it.

“Anyway, rest assured that I’m on a completely different floor now.” He ran a hand through his hair as I stayed frozen like a really bad statue. “Okay, well, again, I apologize for the scare.”

I didn’t dare move.

He finally stepped into the elevator with me. “Hey, are you okay? Do you want me to call someone for you?”

I took a deep breath.

I held my head high.

Then I walked away from my torn, stretched-out, decrepit underpants as if they could have belonged to anyone.

The elevator doors hissed closed behind me.

I crossed the lobby and got my new key card. I talked the idiot at the desk into upgrading the free breakfast for the inconvenience into not just a free dinner but a free room-service dinner.

I caught the events person on her way out the door. As we sat in the lobby going over the details for the next day—sound system, security, table and chair placement—I could almost forget about my public underwear humiliation.

It all came back as soon as I was alone again in my hotel room. So I ordered a turkey club complete with bacon, chipotle mayo, Swiss cheese, avocado, and chips. I swallowed it all down along with my embarrassment—and an Ultimate Austin Frozen Margarita.

As what was left of my margarita melted, my cell phone rang. Twice. I ignored it. My room phone rang. I ignored that, too.

A text beeped in. I finally picked up my cell.

You don’t have to be a winner to start, but you have to start to be a winner
.

“Shut up,” I screamed at my phone. At my brother. At my life.

Then I turned on the TV and scrolled through a zillion stupid channels so I wouldn’t feel so alone. I paused long enough to watch
a man in tight jeans teaching the Boot Scootin’ Boogie to a group of laughing line dancers on some country channel. I got up and tried a few steps with them, but being on the opposite side of the screen only made me feel left out, so I clicked the TV off.

I thought about taking a walk. Maybe I’d even go underwear shopping while I was out. I’d read in the in-flight magazine about a cool lingerie store in Austin called Petticoat Fair. Maybe I’d stroll right in like I owned the place and buy a whole wardrobe. So the next time a guy walked in on me, he’d stop and say,
Whoa, baby
.

Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. I’d sunk to a point in my life that my only hope for a good time was to be better prepared in case another hotel accidentally gave somebody a key to my room.

I shoved my suitcase and its splayed contents over to one side of the vast, unnecessary expanse of bed. When I slurped the remnants of my margarita through the straw, the sound it made was so loud I could almost imagine I had company.

“Say, ‘Excuse me,’” I said out loud.

“Excuse me,” I answered in a deep, sexy male voice.

“There’s no excuse for you,” I said.

Then I crawled between the sheets on the other side of the bed and pulled the covers up over my head. Screw the walk.

Morning, noon, and night, my brother is pretty much a chiasmus machine, and a chiasmus machine is pretty much my brother, morning, noon, and night
.

S
o, my life being my life, fast-forward to the next day and there I was at my brother’s Austin gig.

Steve Moretti held out his hand.

I ignored it.

“I thought you looked familiar,” he said.

“Cute,” I said. I tried to will the heat that was creeping into my cheeks back down to wherever it was that it was coming from.

I grabbed my brother’s tunic-clad forearm. “Come on. You should be at the signing table by now.”

Two women with long blond hair pushed their way in front of Steve. “Tag?” one of them said. “Do you remember me?”

A brunette wearing jeans and a T-shirt that read
I BRAKE FOR ANGELS
cut in front of the two blondes. She stood next to my brother and held out her cell phone with one hand to take a picture.

I inserted myself between them and held out my hand to block the shot. “Pictures at the signing table only.”

“Wow, I like your earrings,” she said to me.

I kept my hand up. “Nice try,” I said. People had been kissing up to
me to get to Tag my whole life. I hadn’t fallen for
nice earrings
since the Beatles were still together.

My brother smiled at the woman apologetically, good cop to my bad cop.

I yanked his arm. “Come on.”

Tag yanked back. “Where are you staying?” he called out to Steve.

I pretended I was invisible.

“Right here,” Steve called back.

Tag dragged me a few steps toward him so he didn’t have to keep bellowing. “How about a late dinner? As long as you don’t mind hanging out with my family.”

I gazed off in the opposite direction.

“Wouldn’t miss it,” I heard Captain Underpants say.

The thing about my brother was that he had only two speeds. He was either completely on, or he was asleep. And he couldn’t stand to be alone. Not even for a minute. He collected people, and once he had them, he never let them go.

All by way of saying that I knew there was no way in hell I could get away with skipping dinner with my family and the guy who’d last seen my underpants, so I didn’t even try.

“Ma’am?” the waiter said.

I glanced up from my menu. “The ChocoVine looks good.”

“
The taste of Dutch chocolate and fine red wine
,” Tag read. He shook his head. “It’s like Yoo-hoo with fourteen percent alcohol, Dee.”

I shrugged. “That’s what I’m counting on.”

“So,” my father said once everyone else had ordered a chocolate-free drink, “tell us about yourself, Steve. Always a big treat to meet one of Tag’s old friends.”

“Actually, I think I’ve met some of you before,” my brother’s old friend said.

I looked around for the nearest exit. I didn’t think he’d actually tell our story, but you never really knew what people might do for a laugh.

Steve smiled. “We’d stopped at your house on the way to a party on the Cape one weekend freshman year. Remember, Tag?”

“Hey, that’s right.” Tag laughed like they were still back in college. “I think I remember something like eight of us piled into somebody’s beat-up Ford Falcon?”

The waiter put a glass of wine on the table in front of my mother. She thanked him, then took a moment to center the glass on the cocktail napkin. “As I remember, you dropped off a duffel bag filled with laundry and expected to pick it up fully folded on your way back.”

Tag laughed and picked up his glass. “What can I say? I was out of clean clothes.”

“Spoiled,” I said.

“I know you are, but what am I?” my famous brother said.

“Now, now, children,” my mother said.

“All I remember,” Steve said, “is that you told us all to keep our hands off your three gorgeous sisters.”

“Ha,” Tag said. “Those days are gone. Now this one pays me to try to fix her up.”

“Shut up,” I said.

Tag grinned. “No, you shut up.”

My father leaned across the table toward Steve. “It’s not that she can’t attract them. It’s just that she has a hard time closing the deal.”

“Dad!”

My mother put her hand on my father’s forearm. “That’s enough, honey.” She lifted her wineglass. “Now who wants to go first? Deirdre?”

The sooner we got this part over with, the sooner I could chug my ChocoVine. I lifted my glass. “You can take Salem out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of Salem.”

My brother shook his head. “Nice. Nothing like starting off a meal with an old cigarette commercial.”

My mother leaned into my father. “It’s not the men in my life, it’s the life in my men.”

My father kissed her on top of her head. “Mae West. Who I believe also said, ‘I’d rather be looked over than overlooked.’”

“Which might actually be true when you’re Mae West,” I said. “Can we drink now?”

We all clinked our glasses over the center of the round, white-tablecloth-covered table.

Steve took a sip and put his wineglass down. “Great ritual. Growing up, my family just waited for the meal and said ‘rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub.’”

My mother clicked into teacher mode. “A chiasmus is when the second half of an expression is balanced against the first half, but with the parts reversed. It’s essentially an inverted kind of parallelism. We started encouraging them at the dinner table when the children were quite young.”

“And look how I turned out,” I said. I took another gulp of Choco-Vine.

“We’re a very chiastic family,” my father said. He wiggled his eyebrows. “Sounds almost sexy, doesn’t it?”

“Actually,” Tag said, “they’re pretty much the method to my mojo. They’re amazingly powerful. And totally addicting—once you start coming up with them, you just can’t stop.”

“And don’t think he’s kidding,” I said. “Trust me, I have to write them all down. Morning, noon, and night, my brother is pretty much a chiasmus machine, and a chiasmus machine is pretty much my brother, morning, noon, and night.”

“That reminds me,” my father said. “We’ve got a new product on order for Tag.” When he grinned, his whole face lit up. With his button nose and curly gray hair and eyebrows, he looked like a trimmer, off-season Santa Claus. “And let me tell you, it’s a humdinger.”

My mother shook her head.

My father grinned some more. “Okay, you know the guy who invented the Jesus Toaster? The one that toasts the likeness of Jesus onto the bread like a holy vision?”

My mother let out a puff of air.

“What?” my father said. “It’s tastefully done.” He did his eyebrow thing again. “Get it? Tastefully?”

“Is this in any way related to the likeness of the Virgin Mary that recently appeared on the potato chip?” I asked.

“That’s my girl,” my father said. It was hard to tell if he meant me or Mary.

“I always wanted one of those see-through glass toasters,” Tag said. “You know, so you can get the toast exactly the way you like it?”

“Oh, please,” I said. “When was the last time you made your own toast?”

My father slapped both hands down on the table to get our attention. “Anyway, we’re not going for the Jesus Toaster because”—he held up one hand to block my mother’s view and pointed at her with the other—“you-know-who wouldn’t go for it. But we ordered the peace sign toaster, and the pièce de résistance, the one that toasts a custom imprint of—”