Everything's Relative Read online

  Raves for

  PRETTY MUCH SCREWED

  “A brilliant blend of smart storytelling and sidesplitting humor.”

  —Janet Evanovich, #1 New York Times bestselling author of One for the Money

  “Jenna McCarthy takes what could have been a standard chick-lit formula—heroine gets dumped, commiserates with her BFF, ventures back into the dating jungle, finds love after a series of complications—and breathes new life into it by giving it her own smart-mouthed-yet-utterly-sweet spin. Sure, her two memoirs were hilarious, but with Pretty Much Screwed, her first novel, she proves she’s a first-rate storyteller too. More, please!”

  —Jane Heller, New York Times bestselling author of Princess Charming

  I’VE STILL GOT IT . . . I JUST CAN’T REMEMBER WHERE I PUT IT

  “Everything you could want in a book or a best friend—blunt, truthful and dead-on hilarious.”

  —Jen Lancaster, New York Times bestselling author of The Best of Enemies

  “Hilarious and spot-on! . . . Made me howl. Her comic timing and quirky wisdom have never been better!”

  —Celia Rivenbark, New York Times bestselling author of Rude Bitches Make Me Tired

  “Jenna McCarthy is Lena Dunham if she had kids and shopped at Costco, or Howard Stern if he had prettier hair and a thing for happy hour . . . Wildly entertaining.”

  —Anna Goldfarb, author of Clearly, I Didn’t Think This Through

  “Aging isn’t funny; it’s tragic and unavoidable and depressing as hell. Aging through Jenna McCarthy’s eyes, however, is a laugh-out-loud ride.”

  —Jill Smokler, New York Times bestselling author of Motherhood Comes Naturally (And Other Vicious Lies)

  “Jenna McCarthy isn’t just funny; she’s an amazingly gifted chronicler of modern life.”

  —W. Bruce Cameron, New York Times bestselling author of A Dog’s Journey

  “Jenna McCarthy is one of a handful of writers who can make me laugh until I wheeze and my eyes tear up.”

  —Robin O’Bryant, New York Times bestselling author of Ketchup Is a Vegetable & Other Lies Moms Tell Themselves

  IF IT WAS EASY, THEY’D CALL THE WHOLE DAMN THING A HONEYMOON

  “If Chelsea Handler and Dr. Phil had a love child, it would be Jenna McCarthy . . . At once profane, irreverent, warm and wise . . . Brilliant!”

  —Celia Rivenbark

  “Hilarious, smart and utterly addicting.”

  —Valerie Frankel, author of It’s Hard Not to Hate You

  “At the end of the day, you’ll recognize yourself in these pages and applaud her honesty.”

  —Lucy Danziger, editor in chief of Self magazine and coauthor of The Nine Rooms of Happiness

  “An uproariously funny, deliciously satisfying and completely accurate take on wedded bliss.”

  —Tracy Beckerman, syndicated humor columnist and author of Lost in Suburbia

  “When Jenna McCarthy turns her wicked wit to the, ahem, challenges of modern-day marriage, hilarity ensues.”

  —Julie Tilsner, author of Mommy Yoga: The 50 Stretches of Motherhood

  “This should be required reading for all brides . . . An enlightening tour of the true realities of marriage.”

  —Alisa Bowman, author of Project: Happily Ever After

  Berkley titles by Jenna McCarthy

  IF IT WAS EASY, THEY’D CALL THE WHOLE DAMN THING A HONEYMOON

  I’VE STILL GOT IT . . . I JUST CAN’T REMEMBER WHERE I PUT IT

  PRETTY MUCH SCREWED

  EVERYTHING’S RELATIVE

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  This book is an original publication of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Copyright © 2016 by Jenna McCarthy.

  Readers Guide copyright © 2016 by Penguin Random House LLC.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY® and the “B” design are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  For more information, visit penguin.com.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-19186-0

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McCarthy, Jenna, author.

  Title: Everything’s relative / Jenna McCarthy.

  Other titles: Everything is relative

  Description: Berkley trade paperback edition. | New York : Berkley Books, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015033425 | ISBN 9780425280690 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Mothers and daughters—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Humorous. | FICTION / Contemporary Women.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.C34576 E94 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015033425

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley trade paperback edition / February 2016

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

  Version_1

  For Laurie and Brian,

  the relatives I’d pick anyway

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  You’re tired. You’re busy. And OMG the Internet. (Did you know the world uploads over three hundred hours of video to YouTube every single minute? The mind boggles.) And yet here you are, giving yourself permission to kick back and enjoy this book. For that, I would like to thank you. I understand there are countless demanding hordes of people and activities vying for your time and attention all goddamned day, and instead of stalking your exes on Facebook or pinning a bunch of crafty shit you’ll never make to your dusty DIY Pinterest board, you decided to spend your precious resources on me. I’m honored and humbled (and honestly, it’s time those kids of yours learned to cook for themselves anyway). Enjoy!

  CONTENTS

  Raves for Jenna McCarthy

  Berkley titles by Jenna McCarthy

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Twenty Years Later

  Jules

  Brooke

  Lexi

  The Sisters

  Jules

  Brooke

  Lexi

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  Brooke

  Lexi

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  Lexi

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  The Sisters

  Readers Guide

  Prologue

  Jules rested the wooden spoon on the edge of the pan she’d been stirring and turned to Brooke. “Will you please call Lexi in for dinner?” It was almost six o’clock and their mother liked dinner on the table at exactly that time, whether she was home herself or not. Of course, it stressed Jules out when she wasn’t, but there wasn’t much she could do about it.

  “Sure,” Brooke said. She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted into them. “LEXI! DINNER’S READY!”

  Jules cringed.

  “YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME,” eight-year-old Lexi called back from somewhere outside. She stuck out her tongue after she said it, even though she knew nobody could see her. That part didn’t matter to Lexi one bit.

  Brooke poked her head out the side door. Her younger sister was out on the small, weed-tangled patio doing her favorite thing in the world: frying ants with a magnifying glass.

  “Lexi, Jules said it’s time to eat,” Brooke said as firmly as she could.

  “Jules isn’t the boss of me, either,” Lexi said without looking up.

  “Please, Lexi, come inside, okay? Jules has been in here sweating her butt off for an hour. The least you can do is come to the table.”

  “I can’t,” Lexi said. “I have two left and I need to kill them. They’re squirrely little shits, too. As soon as I get them, I’ll come in.”

  “If Mom hears you talk like that, she’ll ground you for life,” Brooke said, wondering if any of Lexi’s second-grade classmates had potty mouths. Brooke highly doubted it. Even her own friends weren’t really swearing yet, and they were two whole years older.

  “Then I’ll sneak out,” Lexi said with a shrug. Brooke pulled the door closed.

  “Any suggestions?” she asked Jules.

  “I’ll handle Lexi,” Jules said, sighing as she scraped a pile of seasoned ground beef onto hamburger buns she’d laid open on each of four plates. She arranged slices of apples carefully on each one and brought them to the table. She knew her mom would be annoyed that she hadn’t made a vegetable, but she’d gotten wrapped up in her studying and had lost track of time. She’d made a conscious choice: No vegetable was better than dinner not being on the table when Juliana expected it. The apples would have to do. Without being asked, Brooke filled four glasses with water and set one beside each place setting. She folded four napkins and tucked one neatly under the side of each plate, then added forks and knives. Jules wiped her hands on a towel that was tucked into the pocket of her shorts and opened the door to the patio.

  “Lexi, I mean it, it’s time to come in,” she said sternly. “Mom will be home any minute.”

  “Got ’em! Ha!” Lexi shouted. She stood up, dropped the magnifying glass unceremoniously onto the pile of dead ants and brushed her hands on her dirty cut-offs. It was a blistering Southern California evening and sweat was leaving trails of almost-clean skin down Lexi’s grimy cheeks. “What’s for dinner?” She planted her hands on her hips and blew a chunk of thick dark hair out of her eyes.

  “Sloppy Joes,” Jules told her. “You should wash your hands.”

  “You should mind your own beeswax,” Lexi said. She marched into the house, letting the screen door slam in Jules’s face.

  “Can’t you just be nice?” Brooke whispered at her.

  “Nope,” Lexi replied. She was already sitting at the table, shoveling food into her mouth. Meat was spilling out of the sides of her bun and juice was running down her arm.

  “Brooke, sit. I just heard Mom’s car,” Jules said, squaring her shoulders and self-consciously smoothing down her shirt.

  Brooke nodded and lowered herself into her chair just as Juliana swept into the room.

  “Hey, Mom,” Jules said brightly. “Dinner’s just ready.” She added the obvious last bit as much for the announcement as to deflect attention from her filthy youngest sister.

  “Hay is for horses, and I can see that,” Juliana said, taking in the table and Lexi at the same time. She raised her eyebrows at her youngest daughter. Lexi, naturally, ignored her glare. “May I ask what it is?”

  “They’re Sloppy Joes,” Brooke said in a rush. “We had them at Kylie Bennett’s birthday party and they were awesome. Jules figured out how to make them all by herself. Don’t they smell great?”

  “Unless they can cure cancer, I’d suggest you find a more accurate term than ‘awesome’ to describe them,” Juliana said, taking her seat. “Did you run today?”

  “Four miles,” Brooke told her, beaming. “I’m the only one in my grade who can run that far without stopping.” Juliana said nothing.

  “How was your day?” Jules asked her mom, rushing to fill the awkward silence.

  “Nothing but pure, unadulterated joy,” Juliana replied, the sarcasm dripping from her words. It was no secret she hated her job as a receptionist at the uppity Salon Patine, but the girls routinely wished she would pretend to hate it a little bit less. “Where did you get the meat?”

  “Ralphs,” Jules told her. “It was on sale so I bought a bunch and froze the rest.” Jules walked to Eastridge Junior High each day and there were several grocery stores on her route, so Juliana had turned over most of the shopping duties to her. Jules never complained about having to lug those heavy bags home every other day, not even once.

  Juliana nodded vague approval before shifting her eyes to Lexi, who was licking sauce off of her wrist.

  “I got a one hundred on my history test today,” Jules blurted before Juliana could speak. She was in all honors classes, and spent whatever time she had left after taking care of her sisters with her nose in some gigantic textbook or other.

  “You studied like crazy,” Brooke said. “You should have.”

  “Do your lips ever hurt from kissing butt all the time?” Lexi asked Brooke.

  “Try the meat, Mom,” Jules urged, jumping between her sisters as she always did in the hopes of staving off a scene.

  Juliana used her fork to place a tiny bite of meat into her mouth. Her grimace was small but unmistakable. Before Jules could think of anything to say, Lexi let out a gigantic burp. Her mother and two older sisters watched in disgust as she picked up her plate with both of her filthy hands and licked its entire surface clean. She had sauce on the tip of her already dirty nose, and Jules didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Lexi was such a beautiful girl; her oldest sister ached to tell her to brush her hair and wash her face, but she knew that no words would ever fall on deafer ears.

  “Alexis Alexander, you may be excused,” Juliana hissed through gritted teeth. “You will shower off that filth and then go immediately to bed.”

  Lexi shrugged and scraped her chair back so hard it tipped over. Brooke let out a yelp when it crashed to the ground. She rushed to pick it up as Lexi flounced from the room. Juliana sighed, placed her napkin on her barely touched plate of food and rose from the table.

  “One serving for you tonight, Brooke,” she said. “No seconds.”

  “Okay,” Brooke said, hurt.

  “And please make sure the kitchen is clean before you do anything else,” Julian
a said. She directed this at Jules.

  “Of course,” Jules said.

  “Be careful scraping that pan so you don’t scratch it,” her mother added.

  “I will,” Jules promised.

  “No television tonight for either of you. You can work on homework or read.”

  “Got it,” Jules said. And with that, their mother was gone.

  “Thanks for dinner, Jules,” Brooke said finally. “I thought they were really good. Better than Kylie’s mom’s even.”

  “Glad you liked them.” Jules smiled weakly, rising to clear the table.

  Twenty Years Later

  Jules

  Jules strode through the Northridge Fashion Center purposefully. She had exactly one hour and a twenty-percent-off Sears coupon burning a hole in her purse, a brown faux-leather messenger-style that happened to be on its last synthetic legs. It was time for a new one, and she’d already decided she was going to splurge on genuine leather—if she could find one on sale. Even though she was finally fine financially, Jules could never bring herself to pay full price for anything. She blamed her mother for this.

  As she made her way toward Sears, a navy-and-white sundress in a shop window caught her eye. It had the halter neckline that flattered flat-chested women like Jules, and the horizontal stripes accented the mannequin’s perfectly protruding middle. Jules could just see herself breezing around the neighborhood in it, a tangle of adorably mangy mutts at her feet. In a highly uncharacteristic burst of spontaneity, she ducked into Motherhood Maternity.

  The sundress was on a center rack right in the front, and Jules flipped through the hangers until she found a size small. She pulled it out and inspected it from every angle, amused by the way it hung several inches longer in the front.

  “Can I put that in a fitting room for you?” A grandmotherly saleslady had appeared out of nowhere. Jules blushed furiously. In her size-two flat-front khakis and tucked-in blouse, she was shocked by the question. She figured the salesladies were probably trained not to make any assumptions.

  “Oh, actually I was just looking . . .” Jules said nervously, her face burning. She felt like a kid who had been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.