million,” Jo said. Not fellas, either, she thought.
“So just one? Someone special?”
Against her will, Jo thought of Shelley. She remembered Shelley in her arms in the swimming pool, Shelley’s long, dark hair fanned out in the water, the curve of her dark lashes against her pale, freckled cheek. The saucy tilt of Shelley’s breasts, the bossy jut of her chin. Shelley in her wedding dress, her eyes hot and her expression wounded as she watched Jo dancing with Dave.
“Not really,” she said, and prayed that her voice sounded casual, even as she wondered what rumors Dave might have heard. He was, she had learned, a consummate gossip, a man who prided himself on knowing everything there was to know about everyone who mattered. She was thinking of one night in particular, a Halloween party at the Tri-Delt house. Shelley had dressed like a cat, with furry triangular ears glued to a headband and the tip of her nose blackened with eyeliner. In the darkness of the basement, with the music so loud it was almost a physical thing around them, Jo had come within inches of easing Shelley into a corner and kissing her, right out in the open; kissing her until she purred, arching her back and pressing her breasts into Jo’s chest. She’d contented herself with smoothing Shelley’s hair under the guise of straightening her cat ears. In bed with Dave, Jo said very softly, “Not boys.” Her body went stiff, prickling with goose bumps as Dave didn’t answer, and she realized what she’d admitted. Then she thought, Maybe he knew already, and It’s better if he knows. If we’re going to be together, I don’t want to start out with lies.
Dave was still for a minute. Finally, he brushed her cheek with his thumb. Jo let herself exhale. “Listen, lambie,” he said. “Whatever happened before, whoever you were with, that doesn’t matter now. We’re a team. Get it?” He shifted so that he could look into her eyes, and Jo nodded, feeling grateful for this possibility, for the ease with which this door had swung open, revealing another world.
Naked, Dave left the bed, crossed the room, and picked his clothes up off the floor. He had a black velvet box in his jacket pocket. He pulled on his pants first, got down on one knee, and when he asked, “Will you?” Josette Kaufman told him, “I will.”
* * *
There were benefits to marriage that Jo hadn’t even considered when she’d let Dave slip the ring on her finger: for the first time in her life, Jo had managed to make her mother happy. Not just happy: Sarah was overjoyed, flagrantly, embarrassingly, ridiculously pleased. She’d burst into tears when Jo told her the news, throwing her arms around Jo’s shoulders and hugging her for the first time Jo could remember in years. It was probably relief, Jo thought. Jo had been such a disappointment, for so long, and after everything that had happened with Bethie, up to and including her sister’s abrupt departure for California, Sarah was probably understandably desperate for something to go right.
“We just want a small wedding,” Jo told Sarah. She could tell that her mother was working herself into a frenzy, probably preparing to buy an entire trousseau with her Hudson’s discount, borrow money to throw a catered dinner for two hundred, and hire a private detective to find Bethie, who’d sent them a single postcard from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and hadn’t called home in six weeks. “Just a ceremony in the rabbi’s study,” Jo told her mother. A small, quick wedding would make her sister’s absence less noticeable. They would spend a night in a hotel, load up Dave’s car, and be on their way. Dave had a friend who’d moved out to the East Coast to work in a real-estate office in Boston, and had offered Dave an entry-level job.
“Boston?” Sarah asked. “But that’s so far!”
Jo didn’t answer, but she thought that, as far as she was concerned, the moon wouldn’t have been far enough. She was ready to go, ready to leave her job teaching fractious seventh-graders, in a middle school where the hormones formed a palpable fog, ready to leave the little house, where the couch was still covered in plastic, where the bare patch in the kitchen-floor linoleum got wider and the lines in her mother’s face got deeper every year, where every breath of air felt like it had already been in and out of her lungs a