Читать книгу Window Dressing - Nikki Rivers - Страница 9

“Welcome to weirdness,” Moira Rice said as she rode shotgun in my aging Chevy.

“Put on your glasses, Moira. That sign said Welcome To Indiana.”

Moira shrugged her shoulders. She was the only woman I knew who could make a shrug look sexy. It didn’t hurt that she was wearing a turquoise off-the-shoulder sweater and that her long, wavy chestnut hair was pinned loosely on the top of her head.

“Same thing,” she said. “I mean, Lauren, just look—” she jutted her chin toward a steak and waffle house we were passing, “—they don’t even have normal fast food down here. And every other car on the road is a pickup truck. And, have you noticed, they all have gun racks? And every driver is wearing a cap extolling the virtues of farm equipment or beer. Even the women. Like I said, welcome to weirdness.”

I craned my neck so that I could see the backseat in the rear view mirror. “I’m sure Indiana has no more weirdness than any other state and I’d prefer you didn’t make comments like that in front of Gordy,” I said primly.

Moira arched her brow and gave me a sideways look. “Gordy isn’t hearing anything but whatever passes for music these days via that wire attached to his ear.”

It was true. My eighteen-year-old son, Gordy, his head leaning back on the headrest, his eyes peacefully closed, had been hooked up to his iPod since we’d taken I-94 out of Milwaukee just after dawn. He’d only unplugged long enough to order when we’d pulled into a drive-through south of Chicago.

“I just want him to be happy with his choices, that’s all,” I said defensively.

Gordy was going to be living in Bloomington, Indiana, for the next four years while he majored in finance at Indiana University. Like the slightly obsessive mother I am, I wanted him to be enraptured with his surroundings. As much as I was going to miss him, I wanted him to be happy enough to justify my agreeing to let him go away to school.

Moira checked out the backseat. “Looks happy enough to me,” she said. “You know,” she added with a frown, “the kid is starting to look like the shirt more and more every day.”

Moira had been calling my ex-husband, Roger Campbell, the shirt ever since she’d discovered that he had his business shirts custom made. I glanced in the rearview mirror again. Gordy did look like his father—which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Like his father, my son was a brown-eyed blonde—handsome with an athletic body. But I knew that he also got some of his beauty, style and grace from his grandmother. My mother. Who I am nothing like.

“How can he not be nervous?” was my question. The fact was, Gordy seemed as cool as the Abercrombie and Fitch clothes and the hundred and fifty dollar sunglasses he was wearing—all gifts from the shirt.

“Honey, how can you not be relieved?” was Moira’s comeback.

Moira was that rare thing in Whitefish Cove—the suburb of Milwaukee where we were neighbors—a mother who’d managed to completely let go of her children. Kenny and Gina had gone east to school and stayed to work on Wall Street and the Garment District, respectively. They made one trip home every year and Moira and her husband Stan made one trip to NYC every year and everyone seemed satisfied. But here I was having heart palpitations at the thought that I wouldn’t see my son until he came home for Thanksgiving break. I was already planning the first meal in my head.

His favorite meat loaf. Garlic mashed potatoes. Glazed…

The blare of a semi’s horn and the hoots of its driver snatched me from my recipe revelry.

“Nice rack!” the trucker yelled before blasting on his horn again.

“Are you crazy?” I demanded.

“Just trying to liven this funeral procession up a little,” Moira said as she stuffed her sizable boobs back into her sweater.

I frantically checked to see if Gordy had witnessed Moira’s flashing but his mouth was hanging slightly open as he softly snored, oblivious to the recent show. Of course, chances are, he’d already seen something of what Moira had to offer. She was fond of sunbathing topless in the back yard and exercising semi-nude in the living room with the drapes open. Whitefish Cove’s Junior Leaguers didn’t quite know what to make of her. But I liked her. I thought she was funny and audacious—different from anyone I’d ever known. My ex had never shared my appreciation of Moira’s quirkiness so I didn’t start to really get to know her until after my divorce. Now, after a few years of dancing around each other, we were starting to become best girlfriends and I was loving it.

I did, however, expect her to stay completely clothed on interstate highways.

“It’s a wonder you don’t get kicked out of Whitefish Cove,” I snapped as I stepped off the gas and pulled in behind the semi, hoping the driver would see the maneuver as a sign that the show was over.

“That’s the beauty of being married to a brilliant CPA, girlfriend. Half the men in Whitefish Cove have Stan on retainer. Several, who shall remain nameless, of course—”

“Of course,” I hastened to agree.

“—would be peeling potatoes in some country club prison if it weren’t for Stan.”

Although I didn’t know any details, nor did I want to, I knew she wasn’t kidding. Stan might have been the neighborhood savior as far as the men were concerned, but to the women, Moira was the neighborhood thorn. She loved to shock the uptight wives and flirt with the bewildered husbands. More confident in her sexuality than any woman I’d ever met, she made no apology for carrying around twenty extra pounds while I seemed to be constantly apologizing for my extra fifteen. Although on Moira the pounds were mostly in the right place while I tended to be somewhat lacking in the rack area. Under similar circumstances, I was pretty sure that truckers would not be honking in my honor.

“Are we there, yet?” Gordy moaned sleepily from the backseat.

“Such enthusiasm for higher education,” Moira drawled.

“Nah,” my son, the college-bound, said, “I just gotta take a whiz.”

I flicked on the van’s blinker and took the next exit.

A huge bag of potato chips and three diet sodas later, we were there.

Indiana University looked like it had stepped out of central casting. It was that perfect. Big, ancient limestone buildings, gorgeous landscaping and students who didn’t know the meaning of the word acne.

“Stepford U,” muttered Moira.

“Behave yourself,” I hissed as I pulled the van onto the U-shaped drive in front of the residence hall Gordy had been assigned to and claimed a parking space just vacated by a Mercedes. A few dozen kids were lugging trunks and duffels and what looked like several thousand dollars worth of electronics out of upscale SUVs. Gordy spotted his roommate—a boy named Dooley from Michigan that he’d been getting to know via email for the past month—and was out of the car and shaking hands before I even had a chance to turn off the engine.

“Isn’t that cute,” Moira said. “Acting like little men.”

I gave Moira a stern look. “Am I going to have to make you sit in the car?”

“You and what fraternity?” she asked over her shoulder as she got out.

I opened my door and stepped into cloying humidity. “Holy hell,” I gasped.

“You’ve got that right. What floor did you say Gordy is on?” Moira asked as she fanned herself with the empty potato chip bag. “Maybe I’d rather wait in the car, after all.”

I slammed my door. “Nothing doing. You’re hauling. In this heat it’ll be no time at all before you’ll be too dehydrated to open your mouth.”

Close to the truth. Several trips to the second floor later, we were gasping for breath and begging for bottled water from some kids who’d had the foresight to bring a cooler full of drinks.

Moira and I sat under a tree to catch our breath while we re-hydrated and watched Gordy mingling and laughing and acting like this was a homecoming instead of a goodbye.

“I don’t think I was ever that confident,” I said.

“You did a good job, girlfriend,” Moira stated.

“Can it be as easy as it looks for him?” I wondered.

Moira sighed. “In my experience, hon, it’s never, ever as easy as it looks.”

By the time we’d finished unloading, Gordy had gone full sail into his brave new world.

“Call if you need anything,” I said for the hundredth time as I lingered outside the car trying to hold back my tears.

Gordy rolled his eyes. “Mom, if you cry, I swear I’ll—”

Moira, waiting in the car, started to honk the horn.

“I’m just a little misty,” I promised. Moira honked again and I said, “Just take care of yourself, okay?”

“Deal,” he said, then added, “You, too,” and looked at me long enough for me to know he meant it. Finally, he grinned. “See ya, Ma,” he said, then turned and ran from me without a backward glance.

Which was a good thing.

So how come it made me so sad?

I sniffed back tears and went around to the driver’s side of the car.

“Well, that was subtle,” I said when I got in.

“Someone had to save the kid from humiliation.”

I sniffed again, turned the radio to a classical station, which I knew Moira would hate, and started the long drive home.

But I can never stay mad at Moira for long and by the time we pulled off the interstate north of Indianapolis in search of more road snacks, I’d changed the station to oldies rock.

The convenience store/gas station that beckoned us from the night had seen better days. The florescent lighting inside was so cheap it hummed like a tree full of cicadas and I could feel my shoes stick ever so slightly to the badly mopped floor. Apparently, a sweet tooth’s needs override fear of germs because the smeared and cracked self-service bakery case drew us like a couple of flies.

“Are you sure you don’t mind driving right through?” I asked Moira as we peered at a couple of questionable looking donuts hiding behind the fingerprints.

“’Course not,” Moira said. “It’ll be an adventure—speeding across state lines in the middle of the night. Besides, we’re both kid-free now. We can sleep as late as we want to tomorrow.”

I had no intention of speeding and I wasn’t at all cheerful about my new freedom to sleep late. I decided to change the subject. “Is it the bad lighting in here or do those donuts look a little green to you?”

“I consider myself somewhat adventurous,” Moira said, “but in this case I think we should stick to packaged snacks with readable expiration dates on them.”

I agreed and we went in search of the junk-food aisle.

“Cupcake?” Moira asked, once we’d buckled in again.

I grabbed the chocolate cupcake with the white squiggle of frosting bisecting the top and ate it the way I’d been eating them since I was ten—by tearing off the frosting with my teeth. It easily came off in one piece.

“Now that’s talent,” Moira said before downing half a bottle of soda in one chug. Her burp could have rivaled anything Gordy ever emitted.

“That was truly disgusting,” I said as I pulled out of the gas station and into local traffic.

She burped again. “Don’t tell me you’re not acquainted with the car rule.”

I glanced at her then back at the road. “The car rule?”

“Yeah, if it happens in a car, it doesn’t count.”

I hooted. “I bet some guy told you that back in 1978.”

Moira stuck her nose up in the air. “That may well be, but even so it is one of the few known laws of the universe,” she insisted. “Why do you think so many people pick their noses at stoplights?”

I pulled up to a stop light and we both looked to the right then started screaming with laughter. A guy with long greasy hair in the pickup next to us actually did have one of his digits shoved halfway up his bulbous nose.

“Seriously, Mo,” I said after the light had changed and we’d pulled away from digit man and turned onto the ramp that would take us back to the interstate, “what if Gordy isn’t as cool as he pretends to be about going to school? What if he’s really been acting as phony as that knock-off Fendi on the floor at your feet?”

Moira gasped and grabbed her purse. “How did you know?” she demanded as she scrutinized it. “Is it that obvious?” she implored, the threat of handbag humiliation burning in her eyes.

I sighed impatiently. One of the many things Moira and I don’t share is a love of all things fashion. “No, it’s not that obvious. You told me it was a fake—that you’d bought it when you and Stan went to Mexico last spring.”

Moira frowned. “Oh, right,” she said.

“Forget your damn purse, will you? We were talking about Gordy, remember?” I asked her testily, certain that the happiness of my son was more important than whether women more in the know than I would spy that Moira’s bag was a fake.

“Hey,” Moira said, obviously satisfied that the bag would pass inspection as she tucked it back down by her feet, “you’re not allowed to get serious on a road trip. Plenty of time for that once we’re back on Seagull Lane. Here,” she said as she tossed a cellophane bag at me, “have some pork rinds and listen to me sing backup to this song. You’ll swear it’s Cher.”

As long as it didn’t count, I ripped open the bag of pork rinds with my teeth and dug in. The thing was, Moira really did sound like Cher.

Thousands of calories and several dozen oldies later, I was maneuvering the car through the softly curved streets of a dark and sleeping Whitefish Cove.

As usual, Moira had to comment on the street names. Sea Spray Drive. Fog Horn Road. And her all time favorite Perch Place.

“Absurd,” Moira pronounced, “considering you couldn’t see Lake Michigan if you climbed to the roof of the largest Cape Cod in the Cove with a pair of binoculars.”

“But you can sometimes feel it on your skin or taste it on your tongue,” I said, parroting my usual argument in favor of all things maritime.

“Leave it to you to glamorize humidity and lake-effect snow,” Moira said as she stuffed wrappers and half-eaten junk food into a bag so we could dispose of it discreetly and avoid possible ridicule by late-night joggers or carb counting insomniacs.

The Cove was reportedly first settled by fishermen which made the street names somewhat less absurd. To me, at least. Moira, however, was sure that the khaki wearing denizens liked to think of themselves as New Englanders, which made their collective fantasy of being related to the founding fathers doable.

It was true that the Cove had a lot of white picket and waving flags and many of the houses were more than one hundred years old. Which was why I’d been so thrilled when Roger had announced that we were buying our “starter house” in Whitefish Cove. It had looked so stable. So family oriented. Two things, at twenty-two, that I’d craved more than anything.

I pulled into the meager driveway of my two story wood frame cottage. The original clapboard siding was painted white and the window boxes under the first story windows, bursting with red geraniums, were painted the same blue as the front door. I loved the place now as much as I had when we moved in, but I was in no hurry to go inside now that Gordy wouldn’t be there. When I cut the engine, the last of my energy seemed to go with it. I just sat there, arms clinging to the steering wheel.

“You’re going to have to get out and go inside sometime, honey,” Moira said. “Look at it this way, you’ll never have to wait for the bathroom again.”

Not very comforting, but true. My house was probably the only one left in the Cove with only one bathroom. It was one of the reasons Roger had wanted to dump it. Right around the same time he’d decided to dump me. In the years we’d lived there, I had bonded with the house like it was an old friend. I knew every creak. Every draft. But to Roger, the house had been nothing but an investment and, as with me, the time eventually came to trade it in on something that had a higher market value. He’d traded the house for a high-rise condo overlooking Lake Michigan. He’d traded me for a twenty-one-year old flight attendant named Suzie with a z.

Finally, Moira got out of the car and came around to the driver’s side and opened my door. To save her the trouble, I dragged myself out.

“Geeze, girlfriend, you really are in bad shape.” She put her arm around my shoulders. “Come on over and I’ll scramble us some eggs and shake us up some martinis. A couple of those and you’ll forget you have a kid.”

“Tempting, but I think I’ll just go inside and wallow a little.” I didn’t want to forget. At that moment, with the summer coming to an end and my nest newly empty, everything just seemed too precious. What I really wanted to do was put on my oldest, softest pair of cotton pajamas and climb into bed with a couple of photo albums. I truly did intend to wallow.

By late September, with the leaves starting to turn on the maple tree outside my living room window, I began to think there had to be a limit to how much a woman should be allowed to wallow. Not that I hadn’t been out of the house since Gordy had deserted it. And I’m not just talking about the twice-weekly trips to the post office to send fresh baked cookies and care packages to Bloomington.

Whitefish Cove wasn’t exactly a bedroom community, miles from real civilization where the cul-de-sac ruled and there wasn’t a decent restaurant you didn’t have to wrestle traffic on the freeway to get to. We were really a village that was only fifteen miles from the trendy east side of Milwaukee and just a few miles more to downtown. But I’d done the “meeting old girlfriends for lunch” thing to death. Moira, who’d recently started to collect art, had dragged me to every new gallery show in town. I’d gone to enough regional theater performances to fill the bottom of my purse with programs and parking stubs. I hadn’t turned down one single invitation since I’d left Gordy in Bloomington. I’d even issued a few, determined not to become a forty-one year old recluse. But I was quickly becoming sick of hearing about how lucky I was to be divorced with my only child two states away.

“Why, you can do just about anything you want to do,” a friend from my college days exclaimed over her basil, tomato and fresh mozzarella salad. I’d taken the initiative of inviting her and a former roommate to lunch at the latest trendy sensation—an overpriced café in a building that had once been a garage for city buses. The huge door at the front was left open at the owner’s discretion, which was one of the big draws. The excitement! The suspense! It was rumored that he’d opened it during a March snowstorm last year and there was a big buzz going on about whether he’d leave it open for the first snowstorm this year. Personally, I couldn’t get past the fact that I was eating a fourteen-dollar sandwich in a place where someone once drained motor oil from a city bus.

“Like what?” I asked after I’d swallowed a bite of my baby spinach and radish sprouts on asiago foccacia.

“Well—anything. You’re footloose and fancy free,” pointed out the former roommate who was trying to overcome bulimia, so she was eating nothing at all.

“Well, I have been considering finding a new kind of volunteer work—”

My former roommate laughed. “That’s Lauren. Always the good girl.”

These kinds of conversations did not make me feel better about my situation. Neither did spending the money on overpriced sandwiches since Gordy’s support had started going into a trust on the day he started college and the maintenance Roger had to pay me was in nineteen-ninety-six dollars. So I went back to wallowing and baking until Gordy called one afternoon. I was absurdly pleased to hear his voice when I picked up the phone.

“Ma,” he said before I could tell him how happy I was that he called, “you gotta stop sending all the cookies. One of my roommates saw a roach last night.”

“You’re not eating my cookies?” I asked with a modicum of mommy devastation.

“Ma—come on. Who could keep up? We get a package like every three days.”

Perhaps I’d gone a little overboard, I thought as I eyed the two batches of oatmeal cookies cooling on the kitchen counter. “Okay,” I vowed, “no more cookies. So, how are things going?”

“Things are cool, Ma. Gotta go, though. Class. See ya.”

“But—”

But he was gone.

I packed the cookies up and took them next door to Moira’s.

“Listen, hon, I know you’ve got time on your hands,” she said as she chewed on her fifth cookie, “but you can’t bring stuff like this over here. I have to be able to get into my new red dress for that cocktail party next month. CPAs and their wives. Big Yawn. I plan on being the most exciting aspect of the event and these cookies aren’t helping.”

That was the night I started watching the shopping channels on TV. Looking forward to finding out what the deal of the day was at midnight was about all the excitement I was getting. One night I found myself reaching for the phone while the on-air personality rhapsodized about a kitchen tool that would replace just about every other implement in the house—and all for $19.95. I snatched my hand back and vowed right then and there that there were going to be some changes made.

With butterflies in my stomach, the next day I called the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee campus, ordered a catalogue of courses, and made an appointment to speak with a counselor in the department of continuing education.

Two days later, my heart did one of those funny little stalls when I opened the mailbox to find the catalogue had arrived. Oddly, I was not comforted that the postal rules hadn’t changed since I was a twelve. Good things, like free makeup samples, took forever to arrive. Things that you’d just as soon not see, like report cards—and catalogues that were going to force you to start thinking about where your life was going—showed up in no time at all.

I took the catalogue to the breakfast nook, poured myself a cup of coffee, and started to page through it. After a half-hour I was wishing I’d made decaf. I felt lost and nervous as a high school freshman trying to find her locker.

I’d always intended to finish college someday. I’d even taken a college course here and there over the years. I’d sit in lectures thinking about the Halloween costume I could be sewing or the party I could be planning or the soccer game I was missing or the committee I could be chairing. Pretty soon I’d drop out, vowing to go back again when Gordy got older. Well, now Gordy was older and it was going to be different. It had to be. When Gordy graduated from college, maintenance from Roger would stop and I’d have to buy him out of the house if I wanted to stay on Seagull Lane. Which I did. I intended for my grandchildren to someday visit me in my little cottage.

Before I’d dropped out of college to marry Roger, I’d planned to major in elementary education. The prospect of being a teacher no longer interested me, I knew that much. But I had no idea what else I wanted to do.

Hoping to brainstorm, I called Moira but Stan said she’d gone shopping so I switched on the tube, found an old Bette Davis movie and lost myself in how Paul Henreid looked when he held two cigarettes in his mouth, lit them, and handed one to Bette. It wasn’t a bad way to spend an evening. Afterwards, I made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on, horrors of horrors, soft white bread. Since I no longer had to set a good example for my son, cheap white bread had become my new guilty pleasure. I dug in the refrigerator and came out with a can of chocolate syrup. I poured some into a big glass of milk and stirred. Then I tucked the UW catalogue under my arm, picked up the sandwich and milk and took everything up to bed with me. Maybe if I slept with the catalogue under my pillow, I’d dream about what I wanted to be when I grew up.

The phone woke me up the next morning. I sat up and grabbed it on the first ring. The college catalogue, still open in the vicinity of my lap, slid to the floor with a thump.

“Hello?” I croaked as I squinted against the sun filtering through the semisheer curtains in my bedroom window.

“Mrs. Campbell? This is Sondra Hawk from Priority Properties. I’d like to set up an appointment to check out the house. Today if possible. What time would be convenient?”

“Check out the house?” I asked dumbly as I pushed hair out of my face and looked at the alarm clock on the bedside table. Ten a.m. I never slept this late. Ever. I swear. The shame of it made my body go hot all over. I sat up straighter in bed and tried for a more cheerful, wakeful tone. “You want to check out the house?”

“Yes,” Sondra said then gave a little laugh. “You know, get acquainted with its idiosyncrasies.”

“Why would you want to do that?” I asked as I got out of bed. That way if Sondra, whose voice sounded like she was one of those alarmingly well put together women who knew how to accessorize, asked me if I’d still been in bed I could honestly answer no.

But, of course, she didn’t ask.

“We here at Priority Properties,” she explained, “pride ourselves in getting to know a house before we list it. The first step—”

I frowned. “Wait a minute—did you say list?”

“Yes—list.”

“Excuse me, but you seem to be under the false impression that I’m selling my house.”

Sondra didn’t miss a beat. “I have the signed agreement right here in front of me.”

I shook my head. “No—that’s not possible.”

There was a slight pause before she said, “Mrs. Campbell, your husband signed the agreement.”

“Nonsense,” I insisted, knowing this must be a mistake. “I don’t even have a husband. I have an ex-husband,” I conceded. “But he no longer lives here. I live here.”

“But it’s his name on the deed, Mrs. Campbell. It’s his house. And he’s putting it up for sale.”

I told Sondra I’d get back to her and hung up the phone. I started to punch in the number for Weidermeir, Junket and Sloan Associates Engineering but thought better of it. This was something I had to do in person. I showered in record time, pulled on a white T-shirt and an ankle-length, army-green drawstring skirt that was only slightly wrinkled and ran a brush through my wet hair. My dark blond hair is chin length, parted in the middle and tends to be stick straight if I don’t blow dry it. But this was no time to worry about volume. My adrenaline was shooting into high gear. I needed to confront Roger while the anger was still pumping through my veins. I shoved my feet into some brown leather clogs, grabbed my purse, and headed for the garage.

Southeastern Wisconsin likes to keep you guessing about the weather. October had arrived and the leaves on the trees were gold and crimson but the day was as steamy as an August heat wave. I was practically to Roger’s office before the air conditioner in my aging car had any effect on the sweat factor under my T-shirt. I arrived downtown looking as haggard and bewildered as I felt.

The attendant at the underground parking facility wouldn’t let me in. No spaces reserved for ex-wives, apparently. I managed to snag a parking spot on the street five blocks away. Which meant, of course, that I was noticeably damp by the time I reached Roger’s building. The ride up in the elevator made me feel queasy and I wished I’d eaten something before leaving home.

The receptionist didn’t have a clue who I was and looked dubious when I told her my name. She was as crisp and unwrinkled in her tightly tailored taupe suit as I was sweaty and disheveled. I noticed her giving me the once over while she buzzed Roger’s office, making me wish I’d spent some time with a blow dryer and an iron, after all.

“He’s with clients,” the receptionist said as she hung up the phone. “If you’d care to wait—” She waved her hand toward the sumptuous waiting area. But I wasn’t interested in being awed by the Mies van der Rohe knock-off chairs or in paging through this month’s copy of Structural Engineering.

“I really don’t care to wait, thank you. I’ll just go on back.”

She was on her feet and out from behind her desk before I could open the door to the inner sanctum.

“Of course,” she said smoothly, like she was used to managing uncooperative people. “Please come with me.”

I followed her down the plushly carpeted hallway to a small room that wasn’t a conference room, nor was it an office. Perhaps it was the place they led all irate ex-wives to. The Ex Waiting Room. How modern. How sophisticated. How condescending.

“Can I get you anything? Coffee?”

Coffee? I was boiling inside and out. “No, thanks,” I muttered.

“As you wish,” she said, then left.

“As you wish,” I singsonged to myself as I flounced around the room. Her poise was pissing me off almost as much as that immaculate taupe suit she was wearing. I noticed the furniture in the Ex Waiting Room didn’t even bother to be knock-offs of anything. No doubt I’d have gotten my coffee in a plastic cup.

So not only was I getting my house sold from under me, I was now labeled second class at Weidermeir, Junket and Sloan.

Which, of course, was what I was. But having my nose rubbed in it didn’t make me happy. Not that I would ever want Roger back. In fact, every time I saw him I believed just a little bit more in divorce.

I was pacing and mentally counting up Roger’s deficits in the husband department when the door opened and he walked in.

He was still handsome and I suppose you could say he looked intimidating standing there in a suit that probably cost more than the contents of my entire closet and a shirt that was custom made. On the other hand, I knew he got gas from cucumbers and that he had the hair on his back professionally waxed. These things saved me from being intimidated by cashmere or thread counts.

“What is this about, Lauren?” he asked impatiently.

I crossed my arms. “What do you think it’s about, Roger?”

He sighed again. “I take it Sondra called you. She wasn’t supposed to do that. Not until I’d had a chance to warn you.”

“Warn me? About what?”

“Lauren,” he said with that blandly condescending way I’d come to hate when we were still married, “try to focus. I meant warn you about Sondra listing the house, of course. With winter coming, now is the best time to put it on the market. Plus, with interest rates—”

I only partly listened while Roger quoted a raft of statistics.

“Roger,” I finally interrupted, “why does the house have to be put up for sale at all?”

He sighed and looked up at the ceiling before turning back to me. “Lauren, that was the agreement,” he said slowly, like he was explaining something to a child. “I pay you maintenance, child support and pick up the tab for the house until Gordon goes to college. At which time, the house reverts back to me, the maintenance ends and the child support goes into a trust to pay for Gordon’s education and other expenses.”

I stared at him for a moment. Could this be right? I shook my head. “The agreement was until he finished college, Roger. Which means I’ve got four more years until—”

He gave a derisive chuckle. “Delusional, as usual,” he said. “You’ve always lived in your own little dream world, Lauren.”

I gasped. “Me? Are you kidding?” I demanded. “Dream world? I’ve been a single mother for ten years, Roger. I was the one who stayed, remember? I’m the responsible one, while you—”

“Now wait just a minute! If you were really responsible, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. You’d have a career in place and you’d be able to buy the house yourself if you wanted to stay there so badly.”

“My career,” I said tightly, “was raising our son.”

“Fine. But now that’s over.”

“Over?” Okay, maybe I knew that. And maybe I knew that this day was eventually coming. But it made no sense to me that eventually had suddenly become now.

“That house is Gordy’s home, too,” I pointed out. “What do you expect him to do during the holidays? Summers?”

Roger shrugged. “He’ll do what most children of divorced parents do. He’ll spend part of the time at my condo and part of the time at your apartment.”

The word apartment still had the power to make me cringe inside—and not only because, without a job, I couldn’t possibly afford one. The reason I’d fought to stay on at Seagull Lane, fought to bring my son up in exactly the manner he would have been raised had his parents not been divorced, was because he wasn’t going to have my childhood. Not if I could help it.

Roger looked at his watch. “Look, I’ve got to get back to my meeting. This has taken up too much of my time already. I’m sorry the Realtor’s call shook you up, but I think if you check with your lawyer, you’ll see that I’m well within my rights. So don’t try to make me out to be the bad guy, Lauren. I’ve been patient with you long enough.”

After Roger left, I slumped into a chair, fished my cell phone out of my purse and called my lawyer’s office. She was with a client so I asked for her voice mail and left her a message detailing precisely what I needed to know. Namely, was I about to become homeless?

On my way out, I managed to give the receptionist a bright smile and wish her a good day but I was glad once I was back on the street and I didn’t have to hide how scared I was.

I walked without purpose, trying to remember the details of the divorce agreement. Could I have actually gotten wrong something as important as this—a roof over our heads? Bread on the table? Was it possible that my life was about to change even more than I thought it would? Was I going to go from an empty nest to no nest at all?

I started to feel sick. I wasn’t sure if it was lack of food or the humidity or the fear, but when I passed a restaurant, I decided to go in. I didn’t even notice the name of the place. The air conditioner was pumping out cool air and there was food to be had. That was enough for me.

The waitress showed me to a booth and I ordered iced tea. When she left, I opened the menu and immediately honed in on the dessert section. Chocolate Suicide. Yeah, I could use a little suicide, especially if it was sweet. But then I remembered the receptionist’s tight, taupe skirt. When the waitress came back, I ordered the salad of field greens with grilled chicken.

When it came, it was huge and it occurred to me that maybe I should eat half and take the rest home for dinner. I mean, maybe I was going to have to start doing that kind of stuff. Maybe I was going to have to start doling out my food so a loaf of bread would last me a week and a jar of peanut butter would last me a month. I’d have to start putting milk in my coffee instead of more expensive flavored non-dairy creamers. Unless, of course, I ended up living under a viaduct in a discarded washing machine carton where I’d only have refrigeration from October to May.

I nibbled while I thought of the humilities I might have to suffer, but as soon as the food hit my stomach I started to feel stronger.

I was right about this and Roger was wrong. I had four more years to get my act together. Not that I was admitting that I’d been irresponsible. You can’t be irresponsible and serve as PTA president, block watch captain and room mother. You can’t be irresponsible if you tucked your child in every night and made him breakfast every morning.

I stabbed a hunk of something green and ruffly and shoved it into my mouth. I was getting angry again. After all, marriage was a contract. A bargain between two people. Both Roger and I had been up-front before we’d gotten married about what we wanted and expected. I had kept my end of the bargain. Roger was the irresponsible one who hadn’t. It was hard to believe that in the beginning we’d both wanted the same thing.

I met Roger the summer before my junior year of college. I was working at a day-care center and I’d taken a group of seven and eight year olds on a field trip to the Milwaukee Art Museum, perched on the edge of Lake Michigan. We’d brought bag lunches and eaten them on the lawn near some huge, metal sculptures. Afterwards, I’d passed out little disposable cameras, given the kids a quick lesson and told them to get snap happy. It was such a joy to watch them decide what they wanted to shoot. I was grinning ear to ear when Roger came up to me and told me that he’d never seen anything as beautiful as how I was with those children. I was speechless. I mean, here was this terrific-looking man dressed in a gorgeous suit, looking at me like I was the best thing he’d ever seen. He handed me his business card and asked me to please give him a call so he could ask me out to dinner. I watched him walk away then looked down at the card.

An engineer. And at a firm I’d heard of. A firm everyone had heard of. You bet your life I called.

He wanted a traditional wife, he’d told me on our first date. Someone who would stay at home and raise his children. Someone who would care about his career, which was just starting to take off, as much as he did. It sounded like heaven to me. Raised by a single mother, I was a latchkey child before the term was even coined. Being a stay-at-home mother was exactly what I dreamed about being someday. I loved kids. I was only twenty-two, but my biological clock had been ticking ever since I’d started babysitting at fifteen.

After six dates, Roger declared himself enchanted and proposed. How could I refuse? He was offering me everything I ever wanted. This handsome, ambitious man wanted to take care of me and our offspring for the rest of our lives? Blame it on fiercely independent mother backlash, but I was more than happy to let him.

I became pregnant with Gordy when we were married less than a year. We bought the house in the Cove. Bought the minivan and the infant car seat. Life, as far as I was concerned, was beautiful.

Until Roger made partner. The youngest ever in the firm. He started to travel more on business. He started to buy more expensive suits. He started to complain about how I dressed. But the real fighting began when he enrolled us in a wine-tasting club. I just couldn’t get behind the idea of spitting out deliciously expensive wine once it was in my mouth.

By the time Gordy was six, Roger was no longer enchanted. Two years later, we were divorced.

Just as I was signaling the waitress for more iced tea, my cell phone rang. I dug in my purse for it and flipped it open. It was my lawyer.

“So, I’m right, aren’t I?” I asked in a rush of certainty that I really wasn’t feeling in my belly anymore. “I still have four more years.”

There was a moment of silence, then, “Lauren, maybe you should make an appointment and come in so we can discuss this.”

I closed my eyes. “No, give it to me now.”

She sighed as the waitress refilled my glass.

“All right,” she said. “No. You don’t have four more years.”

My mouth went dry. I looked at the retreating waitress in a panic. I didn’t have enough spit to call her back, so I took a gulp of iced tea then yelled, “Excuse me? Miss?”

She turned around and I said two words. “Chocolate Suicide.”