What’s Not True: A Novel Read online

  Hoping his diversion wasn’t too obvious, he reckoned Karen had a point. He’d never officially proposed to her.

  When neither Kassie nor Chris were a donor match, Karen shocked him when she offered to be tested. Once the test results confirmed she was a match, chaos ensued. Before he knew it, they shared more than a hospital room. While recovering, they joked that even if they weren’t legally married, their kidneys were physically joined for his eternity.

  “Don’t you think a-kidney-for-a-kidney is the ultimate sacrifice deserving a ring around my finger?” Karen had posed that question to the doctors, nurses, candy stripers, phlebotomists—anyone who had ears. He guessed she kept asking because no one answered.

  And it didn’t stop once they were released from the hospital. Talk of marriage seeped into their daily intercourse, in and out of the bedroom. Mike’s gratitude toward Karen left him no choice. He’d gone along for the ride, but without the ultimate commitment—a proposal and a ring.

  Now, as the i’s were dotted and t’s crossed on his divorce settlement with Kassie, his mortality, not marital status, occupied his mind more often than he figured mindfulness experts would agree was healthy. Coming to grips with his almost, but not quite, near-death experience and the demise of his super-long marriage competed for his precious few remaining brain cells. When he added the prospect of getting married again at his age to the equation, he began to have doubts. Who wouldn’t?

  “Later, maybe?” Karen interrupted his quiet self-flagellation.

  “Why wait? Hand me my phone.”

  Karen dug into her backpack. “I meant, are you ever going to ask me to marry you, silly.”

  “Oh, right. Sure. When you least expect it, my dear.” He rubbed her back as they approached the water lapping onto the shore.

  Mike picked up a pebble and skipped it across the water. Karen stood back fiddling with the phone, rotating it in different directions, holding it close to her body, probably in search of shade.

  “Looks like there’s no cell service out here.”

  “No, but we can take pictures.” Mike reached for the phone. “Where’s mine?”

  “Guess I left it in the car, in my purse.”

  Pissed, but unwilling to be a prick about it, he coaxed Karen to stroll along the coastline with him, stopping to take panoramas of the barren beach, videos of a colony of seagulls cawing and dive-bombing for fish, and selfies of the two of them with the bluest of blue seas and whitest of sails in the background.

  Karen stretched out on the sand, offering Mike a come-hither look. He lowered himself above her, push-up style. Her fingers found their way up the leg of his cargo shorts.

  “Later . . .” He leaned down, kissed her breast, and sat beside her. “Tell me, what was that all about this morning?” He picked up a shell and tossed it toward the water.

  “When?”

  “At the diner. I’ve never seen you that pushy before.”

  “You mean, when I got us a table so we didn’t have to wait in line for an hour?”

  “A bit rude, don’t you think?”

  “We wouldn’t be here right now if I hadn’t done that.” She sat up and brushed sand off the back of her arms, some of which landed in his lap. “And, if you recall, I politely thanked people for letting us get to the head of the line.”

  “Did you think it may have embarrassed me?”

  “It never embarrassed Barry.”

  “So this was a repeat performance. Something you’re skilled at.”

  “Oh, come on. It was fun.”

  “Ya think?”

  “Growing up, my mother encouraged me to break a rule every day—do something out of the ordinary, unexpected.”

  “Except when it came to marrying an Italian Catholic.” He chuckled as he tossed another shell, and his annoyance, toward the sea.

  “You got me there.” She laughed so loud she scared the seagulls.

  They looked away from each other, lost in their own private worlds. He wondered if she were thinking, as he was, about what their lives would have been like had they broken the rule, defied her parents, and gotten married when she was pregnant with Chris.

  “What other extraordinary things did you do when you were married to Barry?”

  “You really want me to show you?” She took his hand and placed it low on her lap.

  That wasn’t what he meant, but the stirring in his shorts confirmed an intense desire to unzip her shorts in front of God and the seagulls. Instead he rubbed her inner thigh. “Now that’s an infraction that would cost us more than what you paid those families at the diner this morning.”

  “You’re no fun.” She pushed him away.

  “Really?” He flipped over a smooth, weathered pink rock he’d been massaging as they’d sat there, and rolled to one knee as best he could.

  “Sweetheart, to me you’re my beacon of light. The flame was lost for a while, but it’s burning brightly now. I never want it extinguished again. Will you marry me?”

  He lifted Karen to her knees and pulled her so close to him he could smell a mixture of vanilla and sea spray.

  “I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to give you a diamond until after my divorce. But here, take this rock instead.”

  “What the . . .” She shoved him, knocking him on his ass. “You bastard. Is this your idea of a joke? You’re making fun of me?” She marched away in a sandy huff.

  “No, Karen. I’m serious.” He caught up with her, grabbed her arm, and spun her around. “I’m doing something unexpected. Isn’t that what you want?”

  “How can I believe you?”

  He wiped a tear that followed the same path her sweat had moments before.

  “Look. Here.” He twisted off his wedding band and cupped it in his hand as if he was going to hurl it into the ocean.

  “Don’t,” she gasped.

  He held the ring close to her face. “As long as I live, I’ll never wear this ring again.” He tucked it into a pocket of his shorts and zipped it. “That’s the best I can do.” He put his hands in his pockets and bowed his head.

  “YES,” she wrote in the wet sand as a lonesome wave crashed on the beach and ebbed toward the sea, whisking away her promise.

  If they were teenagers again, they’d have collapsed right there on the beach and screwed their brains out—damning the rules. Instead they giggled, held hands, and hotfooted their way back to his SUV as fast as their sexagenarian calves could maneuver the broiling afternoon sand and seemingly unending rolling hills.

  Once at the car, sharing not a word, only a knowing glance, they kicked off their crunchy shoes, banged them against the tires, and brushed off their feet. Mike placed the sunshades against the windshield and side windows and, with the rear window shade already lowered, created a den of iniquity.

  Karen climbed into the back seat and wrestled off her shorts and shirt that were soaked with anticipation. He was glad she’d left her bra and panties for him to remove. Which he did, as she tugged off his shorts.

  All was said and done in ninety-five seconds. They might as well have been nineteen again.

  They straightened themselves up, changing into the clean clothes they’d brought with them. As Mike pulled out of their parking space, a large gray SUV flew by bearing a sign, Sam’s Dune Tours.

  “Tours? You mean we could’ve taken a tour?”

  “Um. Sure. But then you wouldn’t have that special pink rock. You still have it?”

  Mike caught Karen searching each pocket. “Tell me you didn’t lose . . .”

  She unbuckled her seat belt and reached into the back seat. “Thank goodness. Here it is.”

  She held the rock up to the sunlight shining through her window. “Do you think a necklace can be made with this?”

  “I know just the place.”

  Mike wanted to show Karen there was more to Provincetown than sand, sun, dunes, and sex. Well, at least the first three. There could never be too much sex in P-town, where fuck—whatever its p
art of speech—was not an unspeakable four-letter word. Good thing. Given their recent escapade and afterglow, they’d fit in nicely among the uninhibited denizens of Commercial Street.

  Mike opened the car door for Karen and escorted her to the crowded sidewalk filled with vacationers, day-trippers, and the cadre of folks who called this celebrated LGBTQ community home.

  “I bet you’ve never seen anything like this in New Mexico?”

  He could tell she was baffled as to where to set her sights first: on the bare-chested, tattooed man passing her, wearing a neon-orange G-string and chaps; on the extremely tall woman across the street with long straight white hair, parading confidently in an extremely short fire-engine-red negligee and five-inch yellow patent leather platform shoes; or on the two bearded men strolling down the middle of the street, arms snaked together, wearing pink and green matching tutus with sparkling tiaras on their bald heads?

  Rescuing Karen from culture shock, Mike clutched her hand and dragged her, dropped jaw and all, into Guy’s and Dolly’s Galleria of Jewels. The wood-carved sign over the door read, “Handmade jewelry for handy-guys and handy-dolls. You know who you are.”

  Truth be known, after half a day on the sun-drenched dunes and their steamy after party, the blast of icy air conditioning on Mike’s sun-tinged skin provided much welcome relief.

  “A restroom. Please, Mike.” Karen tugged at him while rubbing the goosebumps on her arms.

  “No problem. Hey, Guy, how are ya?” Mike shook Guy’s hand. “Before we look around, could we impose?” Mike tilted his head toward the rear of the room. “Gotta go.”

  There was only one bathroom, so Mike moseyed around the showroom admiring the handcrafted silver, bronze, and white-gold jewelry while Karen did her thing. It’d been a couple of years since he’d been in the shop. Not much had changed, except for Guy, who’d replaced the robin’s-egg-blue streaks in his chin-length chestnut hair with alternate strands of lime green and Barbie pink.

  Mike introduced Karen as his lifesaver and blamed his surgery for the reason he hadn’t been in the store for a while. He chose not to complicate their reunion by getting into the pending divorce or anything at all about Chris.

  “Looking for something special today?”

  “We found something special. I’m hoping you could make it into a necklace for Karen.” Mike gave her a friendly tap on her back.

  Guy oohed and aahed over the unusual smooth pale pink rock and speculated as to how it got its lovely, unique color. “Perhaps from the blood of a whale or from a slain pirate. Wouldn’t that be a luscious story, especially a gay pirate?”

  Karen didn’t hide her grimace at Guy’s conjectures, but she assured the two of them that she loved the rock as long as the blood wasn’t hers.

  Mike and Karen turned from the glass case as a fellow dressed identical to Guy in white linen pants, scuba blue Birkenstocks, and a black collared polo shirt approached from the rear of the store. The man with “Dolly” embroidered in rainbow colors on his shirt greeted them with “Did I hear there’s a gay pirate here to rob us blind? Arrr!”

  “Hey, man, how are ya?” Mike slapped Dolly on his back. “It’s been way too long. A pirate perhaps, but not gay, I’m afraid.”

  “Don’t ever give up the ship, mate. It’s never too late, Mikey, to come out into the sunlight. It took Guy here decades.” Dolly bear-hugged Guy. The three men laughed. Karen stared at the basket weave seagrass rug, shifting from one foot to another.

  It took her less time to choose a medium-weight eighteen-inch Argentinean silver snake chain and a simple circular setting to house the pink rock than it did for her to order breakfast that morning.

  As Mike and Guy settled the bill, Dolly slid around the counter and stood next to Karen, who had her eyes fixed on diamond rings displayed on black velvet. “You’ve got excellent taste.”

  “How’s that?”

  “In jewelry, men . . .” Dolly winked toward Mike. “And hair.” Dolly flipped Karen’s hair in one swift expert motion. “Love the color. Would you email me the formula? I’m ready for a change. Amethyst is so last year, don’t you think?”

  Mike interrupted the chitchat. “Hey, Karen, should Guy ship the necklace, or would you like to come back in two weeks?”

  “Oh, let’s come back.” Karen perked up, still hovering near the display of diamond rings. “He proposed to me today,” she stage-whispered to Dolly.

  “Congratulations, old man.” Guy seemed to catch on to Mike’s tiny head shake cluing him not to go down that path much further. “Come see me when you’re ready to seal the deal, and I’ll fix you and this lovely lassie right up.”

  After fist pumps and air kisses all around, Mike shooed Karen out the door as the chimes announced their exit.

  “Did he call me Kassie?”

  “He didn’t. You hungry?”

  “Starving. But I think he said Kassie.”

  “You’ve got sand in your ears. The word was lassie, Miss Sassy. You ready to take in one more P-town tradition?”

  A mere three-minute stroll up the street from Guy’s and Dolly’s sanctuary on Commercial Street, Larry’s Lobster Landing had a line out the door and around the corner to rival all lines. In their quest to find the end, Mike and Karen passed a potpourri of patrons who seemed to care less how long their wait would be. There were the obvious residents sprinkled among a slew of families whose kids sat on the curb feasting on ice cream cones and, for whatever reason, thought it would be super fun to put cotton candy in each other’s hair.

  Karen offered the woman in front of them a pack of hand-wipes from her purse and asked how long the wait was.

  “That was nice,” Mike whispered in Karen’s ear. “Look what we missed. At least forty-year-old children are better behaved.”

  “Ninety-minute wait. What do we do now? Should we go someplace else?”

  Mike got out his wallet and handed Karen three twenties. “Here, mama. Go work your magic.”

  13

  Hello Dolly

  Never once had Mike called her that. “Mama.” Finally, someone had recognized her for what she was. Thank God for small favors.

  Karen thanked herself for an even bigger one. Feeling emboldened, she’d created her own path around and through the quirky queue. “Excuse me. Pardon me.” Get outta my damn way. Despite the where-does-she-think-she’s-going murmurs, she arrived unscathed inside the restaurant’s front door, where an attendant in a black miniskirt and lobster-red T-shirt keyed names into an iPad.

  In reverse this time, she gave a barely believable song-and-dance about being on a short leash to catch a flight back to LA—“You know, Hollywood’s my home”—But she really, really must eat at this esteemed and fabled establishment that Matt Damon had insisted she and her bodyguard give a whirl. She crossed her fingers hoping no one, like the owner or a bartender who’d worked there for twenty years, would pipe up and call her bluff. It didn’t occur to her anyone would doubt her preeminence.

  With total gratitude—“I’ll be sure to give Matt your regards”—she slipped the red-shirted lady and the woman first in line each a twenty and stuffed the third in her pocket.

  Karen leaned out the door and gave Mike a wave, a thumbs-up. “Remember, you’re my bodyguard, so act like one.” She backhanded his chest.

  This time they weren’t relegated to a back room. Instead they were seated at a square table large enough for four but set up for two, overlooking Provincetown Harbor, a.k.a. Cape Cod Harbor from days of yore. See, I listen.

  “Why is it that restaurants that claim to be traditions are all the same? Crowded, noisy, with un-fucking-believable menus.”

  “Watch your language, lady. Children . . .”

  “You’re kidding. You think anyone can hear me?”

  “I can. As your bodyguard, cough cough, I’m protecting you. And me. Don’t want to be tossed after spending sixty bucks just to get in here. You did pay for this table, right?”

  “Yup. Look at this. There
must be thirty ways to cook lobster. Broiled, steamed, grilled. With or without stuffing. Spicy lobster pasta. Bland lobster pasta.”

  Karen caught Mike’s head tilt.

  “Joke. It’s a joke, Mike. But wait, there really is more. Block Island lobster salad. Where the hell is Block Island? And lobster stew. Fra diabolo. Pickled. Soup. Rolls. Tails. With shrimp, steak, scallops. Whatever happened to just plain boiled lobster with butter?”

  “First of all, you sound like Forrest Gump discovering shrimp.”

  “Or Paul Simon. Do you think there are really fifty ways to leave a lover?”

  “I don’t know. Never thought about it.”

  The waiter took their order. Two boiled lobsters with butter, baked potato, broccoli. A bottle of wine and two bibs.

  “Now, about Block Island,” Mike lectured. She sipped her wine. “It’s a quaint resort island off Rhode Island, though you can’t drive there like Rhode Island or Long Island.”

  Karen freaked, afraid Mike was about to launch into the history of Block Island and recommend she read a book Kassie most assuredly had tucked neatly into her super-organized library at the house.

  Which reminded her. “Why did that guy call me Kassie?”

  “You mean Guy. Not that guy.”

  “Whatever. Why did he—”

  “He really didn’t. He referred to you as lassie. Though he may have been thinking about Kassie.”

  Oh great. Here we go. She squeezed the handle of the lobster cracker, which was really a nutcracker. Lobster cracker, nutcracker. Provincetown Harbor, Cape Cod Harbor. Rhode Island that’s not really an island. Give me a break.

  “Guy worked for me years ago, about five years after I opened the business. First as an intern from Emerson, then full time. Graphic design.”

  She fought with a small clear cellophane bag of oyster crackers, the kind often served with soup—why didn’t I order chowder?—finally using her teeth as scissors. Half of the half-smashed salty round devils spilled down her bib and onto the red paper placemat. As she brushed the crumbs to the floor, Mike handed her another pack he’d opened for her.