All You Could Ask For A Novel - By Mike Greenberg Page 0,14

her. We bought her, or we tried to. And then she felt bad that we didn’t and let us have her anyway. I should explain.

It was a fund-raiser at the school, and I told Scott we had to pick one silent-auction item and make sure we won it. He selected a session with Pamela, a renowned photographer, so we’d finally have professional photos of the kids and, as he put it, “a decent-looking holiday card.” All evening long he was staked out at the auction table, quickly raising any bid that topped ours. When there were about thirty minutes remaining, it became clear it was down to Scott and one other man, a pleasant-looking fellow with older kids. I watched Scott and this man go back and forth, raising each other and staring each other down as though they were playing high-stakes poker. (Men can be so funny; they were only raising it $20 each time, but the drama was such that I thought one might eventually slap the other across the face with a white glove.) The final blow was delivered by my husband when it was announced that there was one minute remaining. With a flourish, he took the pen and raised the total by $200. The other fellow looked at the bid, looked at my husband, and nodded his head in a respectful concession. It was over. Scott had won.

Then the announcer began the countdown. “Ladies and gentlemen, the auction will be closed in ten seconds. Nine, eight, seven, six, five . . .”

To my horror, a garish-looking bottle blonde with enormous boobs sauntered up to the bid sheet. She scooped up the pen and wrote something down, just as the announcer reached “one.” Then she walked quickly away, her ass swaying tauntingly in too-tight white jeans.

I looked at Scott and saw he was stunned. He literally couldn’t move. So I went to the sheet and saw she had raised him by $5. No previous bid had been raised by any less than twenty, but here she had sloppily written “$605” and her name and that was it. When I went back to Scott’s side, he was shaking.

“Did she top it?” he asked.

I nodded. I really hoped he wouldn’t ask the next question.

“By how much?”

I told him, because I couldn’t get around it, and he turned beet red. “Brooke,” he said, “you’re the debutante, so you know about these things. What’s the etiquette here? Because if that was a guy I would punch him in the face.”

“I think that would be a bit much,” I said.

“Do you mean in this case? Or with a guy? Because if it was a guy I would punch him in the face.”

“Sweetheart,” I said, “you do realize we can hire this photographer for three hundred dollars less than this, don’t you?”

“That isn’t the point,” he said, and he was right. It wasn’t the point.

In the end, it turned out Pamela was at the party and saw what happened and she agreed to accept our bid as well and couldn’t have been sweeter about it. We had a drink with her that night and began a friendship that has meant everything to me. And now here I am, giggling with my friend as I explain to her that because she has shot my children and my husband and me so wonderfully, and produced four sensational holiday cards for us, now I want her to come to my house and take pictures of me naked.

We planned it for a Tuesday—as it turned out, we had to wait a few days after my waxing to allow the redness to fade. (Nothing has ever hurt like that did, by the way. I would rather deliver triplets drug-free in the back of a taxi than go through that again.) Once the children were on the bus, I set about trying to create the proper atmosphere in the house. The first decision to be made was selecting a room. The bedroom seemed the obvious choice, but ours is not the sexiest bedroom. Our bedroom is comfy and very cozy, and I love lying in bed talking with Scott with a fire going, but the bedroom is the place where we have most of our sex, and most of it isn’t fabulously romantic. Mostly it consists of quickies on weekend mornings before the children wake up, and it can never be especially spontaneous, as I have become obsessed with locking the door first because I simply cannot handle