For Better Or Worse by Payne, Jodi (read my book txt) 📕

“Would you rather I call you ‘Ralph’?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood a little. Julie burst into tears. I have an uncanny knack for saying exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time, and I have never learned. It’s remarkable really. At least this time she didn’t say ‘you don’t love me’ like she has in her more hormonal moments, or told me to sleep on the couch. It occurs to me now that perhaps Kathleen was right. Julie was a little moody, but in a good way.

I sat beside her on the edge of the tub and put my arm around her shoulders. “You know, I’ve never met your mother before, Jules, but I think, in her own very _odd _ way, she _is _ trying.”

Julie sniffled, but her shoulders stopped shaking so I could tell I had her attention. I babbled on, hoping to say something right for a change. “I mean, to talk about your cousin, and to seem…

sort of happy that it’s… you know,” I sighed.

“No longer taboo to have gays in the family?” Julie asked, with a hint of the sarcasm more often attributable to me in her voice.

Good point. “Well, okay, that was sort of…”

“Ignorant?”

I almost laughed, but I didn’t think Julie would appreciate it, so I stayed the course. “Are you even _trying _ to give her the benefit of the doubt?”

“No.”

I could tell this line of conversation was going to get us nowhere. Julie didn’t want to forgive her mother yet. The tub was filling quickly and I leaned over to shut the taps off. When I stood and tugged off my boots, Julie stood as well. “Can I have the rest of your wine?” she asked, and I nodded.

“Yeah.”

We began to undress in that matter of fact, comfortable way that couples do, but I watched her all the same. I love to watch her. It doesn’t matter what she’s doing, she just does everything with a polished gracefulness that makes me look like a bull in a china shop. I admired the way she

stepped out of her jeans with pointed toes as the denim slid to the floor, and the way her delicate fingers, always neatly manicured, unbuttoned her blouse. She smiled at me then, as we bared ourselves for each other, knowing that I was watching her and liking it, I think.

The water in the tub was hot. I hissed as I dipped my toes into it, but managed to ease myself in slowly. Julie did the same, but had to tell me how hot it was five times in the process, all the while refusing every offer I made to cool it off a little.

I pulled her back against me and we sat in silence for a while, Julie clearly lost in her own thoughts. I enjoyed just holding her, and scooping the warm water up over her shoulders with a washcloth to keep her warm.

It isn’t easy being Julie McHugh, especially not in Vail. My Julie, the stable, well-educated, thoughtful schoolteacher and one-drink-wonder, is actually the fuck-up in her family.

Her younger brother, Robert (and don’t you dare call him ‘Bobby’), recently earned a graduate degree in business from Stanford University and is working as an investment banker. He makes upwards of a hundred and twenty thousand a year and he has no life, no time, and no significant other to spend it on.

Peter, Julie’s older brother and darling of the McHugh household, is a surgeon who got his pre-med undergrad degree from Harvard and his medical degree from Johns Hopkins. This guy doesn’t just _have _ brains, he actually operates on them. You know how people say things like

‘this isn’t brain surgery’? Well Peter doesn’t find that saying funny at all. To him, everything is brain surgery. Including marriage. He very carefully dissected the dating scene, tossed aside prospective wives like he was selecting a tie, and finally plucked from the bowels of the female race a frighteningly perfect woman. Perfect looking, that is; the woman is a mannequin. After seeing a picture of her I had to ask Julie if she was actually smiling or if the perpetually stretched corners of her mouth were some kind of face-lift gone bad.

As for Julie, well, her mother had expected her to go to college, find a nice boy (preferably Catholic) who was majoring in business or medicine or law, and marry him. Then she was supposed to have a few kids named after various family members and maybe a Mercedes and a summer house in Palm Beach.

Instead of Norman Rockwell, Kathleen got Gloria Steinem. Julie shacked up with a woman who (even worse) was a bartender, and instead of being a rich man’s wife she followed her life long dream and became a schoolteacher. Her mother had such heart failure when Julie told her I was a bartender that Julie wasn’t able to get to the part about me being a woman in the same conversation. Julie sat on that for another two weeks until her mother’s Xanax had taken very, very firm hold.

I suppose that all of that sounds funny in retrospect, but at the time it sent Julie into quite a tailspin. She had moved fifteen hundred miles away from her family because she felt that she would never be able to be who she needed to be, a lesbian and a school teacher, if she remained in the shadow of the McHugh estate. So that phone call, the one that sent her mother crying hysterically to a psychiatrist about how wronged she was and how she wanted to kill herself, was the most difficult moment of Julie’s life.

For a solid week she and I argued about whether or not I should just back off. I’d never seen Julie so emotional.

“Don’t make any fucking self-righteous sacrifices on my account!” Julie shouted at me when I suggested that maybe we should slow down a little.

“Baby, I just don’t want to