The Bright Side of Disaster Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007 by Katherine Pannill Center

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Center, Katherine.

  The bright side of disaster: a novel / Katherine Center.

  p. cm.

  1. Unmarried mothers—Fiction. 2. Divorced parents—Fiction.3. Chick lit. I. Title.

  PS3603.E67B75 2007

  813'6—dc22 2006051036

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  eISBN: 978-0-345-50248-3

  v3.0_r1

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  The end began with a plane crash. Just before midnight on a Tuesday in February. A girl I’d never met or even heard of died, along with her miniature dachshund (under the seat) and a planeload of passengers in the kind of commuter plane I’ll never fly in again. I’ve pictured it a hundred times now: the quiet hum of the motor, the sleeping passengers, the sudden jolt, the cabin steward thrown sideways before he could finish his instructions. In my mind, it always looks like a movie, because I have nothing else to go on.

  That night, I was asleep, safe on the ground, miles away in Texas in my hand-me-down bed, nestled under a patchwork quilt made out of ties from the seventies.

  Since getting pregnant, I fell asleep before the double digits. It was something my not-quite-yet-husband, Dean, teased me about. He was a night owl. And I had been one, too. These days, a month before my due date, I was in bed with my swollen ankles up on pillows as soon as the dishes were done. He was out in the living room with his headphones on, likely playing air guitar.

  In a slightly different situation, I would have heard about the crash on the news and thought no more about it. I am sure that girl meant many things to many people. And though I didn’t know it at the time, and I would not have recognized her if she’d knocked on my door, she meant a lot to me as well—in a roundabout kind of way.

  The day Dean came home from the office with the news, I’d been out in the garage for hours pricing things with little orange stickers. I’d quit my job at a fancy antiques store a few weeks back at the urging of the owner. She knew I was planning to quit after the baby came, but she decided it didn’t make sense to wait. She took me aside one morning and said that I was, simply, too big. “When you can knock over a piece of Stickley with your belly,” she said, “it’s time to call it a day.” She gave me some coupons for a mani-pedi, promised she’d always give me her dealer discount, and nudged me out the door.

  So I was home. And planning our upcoming garage sale with checklists, spreadsheets, and a color-coded map of my yard. At thirty-six weeks and counting, what else was I going to do with myself?

  When Dean walked in with a pizza, I was slumped over the aqua dinette in our kitchen, drinking orange juice and trying for an end-of-the-day rally. He popped open a beer and swigged down about half of it. His tie was wrinkled. Really wrinkled, like it’d been on the floor of his car for days before he’d discovered it. I wondered if it would be my job to see to such things when we were married.

  He pulled two plates out of the cupboard, and just as I was thinking how much I loved it when Dean brought me pizza, they slid right out of his grip and shattered on the floor.

  “Fuck!” he shouted. “Fuck!” He turned and slammed his palm against the cabinet.

  I didn’t say anything. After five years with him, I knew to lay low. My best friend, Meredith, and I called these moments “occasional eruptions of inappropriate rage.” They were, you might say, a part of his charm.

  He pressed his head against the cabinets, and I set about picking up. I had to bend over my belly to reach the shards, which made great clanks as they hit the metal bottom of the garbage can. When I went for the broom, he moved to his chair and sat down. Then he said, “A girl from work died last night.”

  “Died?” I said. “How?”

  “Plane crash.”

  “Big plane or little plane?” I asked.

  “Puddle jumper,” he said.

  I finished sweeping and leaned the broom against the counter. “Who was it?” I asked, sitting down.

  “Just a girl. She worked in graphics.” He lifted a slice of pizza and took a tentative bite, as if it might not go down well.

  “Was she somebody you knew?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, mouth full. “I definitely knew her.” Her cubicle was around the corner from his, and she—her name was Tara—used to stop in and say hi. She had worked there for a year. She had been planning to come see his band.

  We chewed for a while. Then, not sure what else to say, I shook my head and said, “I thought plane crashes only happened to people on the news.”

  “Well,” he said. “She’s on the news now.”

  After dinner, we sat out on the porch swing, as we did many nights. Our house was in one of the few historic neighborhoods in Houston that hadn’t been bulldozed for townhomes or mini-malls. By some mystery, folks in our neighborhood were restoring their houses instead of replacing them. Living here was like living in another place in time.

  On good nights, we’d go on talking after dinner. But tonight he kept quiet, nursing beer number three. He was holding the memo they’d passed out at work with details about the funeral and where to send donations. It had this girl Tara’s picture on it.

  She was Asian, with shiny straight hair and kissy lips. The picture was from her company ID photo, but even so, she was smiling as if the guy who’d taken the photo had been flirting with her. She certainly seemed very alive. And she was the kind of pretty that wasn’t up for discussion.

  “She’s pretty,” I said, looking over his arm.

  “You think so?”

  “Dean,” I said, giving him a look that said, Come on. At the time, a little lie like that seemed sweet to me. I assumed he was trying to be a good fiancé by pretending not to know she was pretty. Like he only had eyes for me. “Yes,” I said. “She’s pretty.”

  “Was,” he said.

  “Was.”

  I tried to start up some other conversation after that. I told him that Meredith had bought a leash for her cat. I told him about a report I’d heard on a hurricane in the Gulf. I told him I’d heard a woman singing a version of “Hush Little Baby” on the gospel radio station that after
noon, and the sound had brought tears to my eyes. But the words came out of my mouth and fizzled like sparks before they hit the ground.

  Some nights were like this, when Dean just couldn’t rise to the conversational challenge. Meredith said he was moody, which was true. But we all had our shortcomings. Still, if we weren’t going to talk, I wished he would rub my neck, or hold my hand. But he didn’t.

  Dean wanted to take a shower, so I followed him inside. I put on my DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS maternity nightshirt before I headed into the kitchen to clean up, and when I got there, I noticed the girl’s picture was on the fridge. Dean had put it up with butterfly magnets, one placed in each corner. Very few things on our overloaded fridge merited more than one magnet. Not our list of frequently called numbers, not the picture of us at a wildflower garden on our road trip to Austin, not the liner notes for Dean’s band’s only album. But there she was, securely placed and there to stay. I wasn’t sure I wanted her there, and I thought about taking her down and sticking her in a drawer with the take-out menus.

  But I left her. She had the kind of eyes that followed you around the room. I’d thought that happened only with paintings in museums, but here she was, in my kitchen, watching me. While I did the dishes. While I took my prenatal vitamin. While I did a final sweep for pieces of broken plate. She even watched the door for my return while I took the pizza box outside to the trash. Back inside, I turned the dead bolt, started the dishwasher, and stood with my hand on the light switch. We held each other’s gaze for a few minutes, and then I left her in the dark.

  2

  The next day, I adopted Meredith’s cat.

  Meredith had rescued the cat about six months earlier, when he was hit by a car. She took him to a nearby vet, who performed emergency surgery and removed one of the cat’s eyes. The vet, who must have been a softy, did not charge Meredith for the surgery, or the office visit, or the kitty drugs, and Meredith was so grateful that she named the cat after him.

  This was how Meredith came to own a cat named Dr. Blandon, despite her landlady’s nonnegotiable no-pets policy. He had been hiding out in her one-bedroom apartment, which, according to the real Dr. Blandon, likely explained his recent weight gain—eight pounds in six months for a grand total of twenty. The real Dr. Blandon even called him “obese,” a term Meredith found “a little hostile.”

  She had defended her Dr. Blandon, saying, “He looks good. He wears it well. He’s had a tough year.” The real doctor warned her to put him on diet food, but Meredith refused. “I’m morally opposed to that stuff,” she said.

  Meredith, a size 12 herself, was exceptionally pretty, with a heart-shaped face and straight, wholesome blond hair. She was sensitive to issues of size. And she declared that the vet was a “fatist.” “Too bad,” she said. “Because he asked for my number.”

  Dr. Blandon the cat lived with Meredith until her landlady paid a surprise visit to discuss a late rent check and saw him snoozing in his tiger-striped kitty bed. She almost kicked Meredith out on the spot.

  That was when Meredith arrived at my house. I’d already gone to bed. “I’m so sorry to wake you,” she said at the door, tears on her face. Dean was out with the band, and I sat her on the sofa and made her give me the blow-by-blow. Even though she was a very close friend—the kind of friend I could call just to say I was bored—I had never seen her cry before.

  “This pet really means a lot to you,” I said.

  “Some cats are just cats,” she said. “And some cats are people.”

  “And your cat is a person.”

  She nodded.

  “Do you need a place to stay?” I asked, looking at the little duffel bag she’d brought in.

  “No,” Meredith said, unzipping it, “but Dr. Blandon does.”

  She pulled him out and set him on the rug.

  “Oh, no!” I said.

  “Just try him on for size,” she said.

  “I can tell you already,” I said. “He’s too big.” And as I said it, all twenty pounds of Dr. Blandon hopped up onto what was left of my lap and started kneading my belly.

  I pushed him off. “I can’t take him.”

  He jumped back up.

  “He’s indoor-outdoor!” Meredith said. “There’s no litter box! He’s not sick! He just needs love! If I take him to the pound, he’ll be killed!”

  Dr. Blandon was purring like a motorboat. I petted him and couldn’t feel any bones.

  “See how fluffy he is?” Meredith said.

  “Fluffy?” I said. “Or fleshy?”

  “Judge him if you want to,” she said. “But you have to admit, he’s a pleasure to pet.”

  He was.

  I ran through a list of other people she could give the cat to, but she’d tried them all before and been turned down—which is how she wound up living her secret cat-life in the first place. “I never would have come here,” Meredith said, “if you weren’t my last hope.”

  Maybe it was the tears. Maybe it was all my mother-to-be hormones. But I agreed to take Dr. Blandon on a trial basis.

  “I hate myself for asking you,” Meredith said.

  “Dean will have to go for it,” I told her. “And he’s not going to.”

  She nodded.

  “But I’ll tell him we’re cat-sitting,” I said, “and try to sneak him in that way.”

  Meredith didn’t say much about Dean anymore. I had recently created a rule that she was not allowed to say anything about him that wasn’t nice, and now her standard response to any mention of Dean was a closed-mouth silence.

  Meredith and Dean had gotten off on the wrong foot when I’d first started dating him years back—mostly because he was desperately pursuing my friend Nadia for a while after we got together.

  “That’s pretty fucked up, don’t you think?” Meredith had said one too many times.

  My friend Nadia had been a project manager in a power job at Shell Oil. She had a silk-and-leather wardrobe and rectangular glasses that made her look both smarter and cooler than anybody in the room. She was exfoliated, she was plucked, she had glossy black hair, and men were always hitting on her. Hitting on Nadia was a nobrainer.

  And I was almost her opposite. I didn’t own a hair dryer, mostly wore jeans, and had an affection for sneakers that Nadia didn’t understand. In my good moments, I rated myself as “pretty cute,” but I was no match for her. I got hit on myself, sometimes. But never, ever when I was with her. And Dean was no exception.

  He spied us one night at a swanky after-hours restaurant, and when Nadia got up to go check out the bathroom, he sat himself down across from me in her chair.

  “Hi,” he said.

  He was cute. Shaggy hair that had probably been blond when he was a kid. Blue eyes with lashes that sisters always envy on brothers. Teeth that were just crooked enough for character. At that moment, he had a love-struck look to him that made me think, in that instant, against all my self-deprecating instincts, that he was appearing out of nowhere to ask me out. And right then, before we’d even spoken to each other, I felt like the answer to any question he could ever ask me would be yes. Yes, yes—hell, yes.

  “What can I say,” he said then, leaning in, “to get your friend to fall in love with me?”

  “Nadia?” I said.

  “Oh, God, her name’s Nadia,” he said, collapsing backward against the chair like he’d been struck by an arrow. “That’s such a cool name.”

  “Well,” I said, sitting a bit straighter and arranging my spoon on my napkin, “I’m not sure that you’re her type.”

  Her type, in fact, was businessmen. Tall, BMW-driving, occasionally married businessmen.

  “Just give me some tips.”

  “Really, chief, my best tip is to find somebody else.”

  “Give me her number.”

  “I’m not going to do that.”

  “Then do this. Give me your number, let me convince you I’m not a psycho, and then give me her number.”

  “I don’t think you
’re a psycho,” I said. “I just don’t think she’s going to go out with you.”

  “Please,” he said.

  He had a pen out already. He reached his hand across the table and waited, looking at me. I could have rooted in my purse for a scrap of paper, but instead, I took his hand, turned it over, and wrote my number across the palm. Beneath the number, I wrote “Jenny.” Not a name to make anyone fall back in a chair. A name that seven girls in my graduating class had. As he pulled his hand back, I wished like anything that I had written something else—“Jasmine” or “Vivian” or “Delilah.”

  He looked up. “Jenny,” he said. “I’m Dean.”

  He called me the next morning and set about wooing me. Wooing me so that I would go to bat for him with Nadia. He opened the car door for me. He burned CDs for me. He gave me a potted orchid. He rubbed my neck in traffic. He took me to eat the best Vietnamese pho I had ever tasted. At a roadside carnival, he spent thirty dollars trying to win me a bear. And all the while, he asked me question after question about myself, listening to the answers like I was the only person in the world who mattered.

  And I was wooed. I was so wooed that I forgot why he was wooing me. After two weeks of what felt like the beginning of a relationship between the two of us, as we finished dinner at an Indian restaurant and just as I was starting to think I might get a good-night kiss when we got to my house, he said, “So. Can I have it?”

  “Have what?”

  He looked at me like I was nuts. “Her number,” he said.

  What choice did I have? I gave it to him.

  Here was the problem: I liked him. By then, I already liked him. And even though it defied all logic, I knew that, whether he knew it or not, he liked me, too. I could just feel it. We had something.

  What followed with Nadia was predictable. He called her, pursued her, was denied, pursued her harder, was denied and then mocked, and finally gave up. And I consoled him. And one night, after a six-pack of beer and our hundredth conversation in the series How Dean Had Blown It, he said, “You’re kind of pretty, too.” And then we slept together.