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“Excuse me.” Irritated, Chessie faced her daughter. “This is our bedroom. Please, knock. And you may borrow my hooded sweatshirt when you return the two tees you took last week.”
“They’re dirty…and out on the lawn.”
“Then I guess you have yard work and laundry to do before the fireworks.”
“Dad?”
“Your mother’s asked you to do two things.” Nick stood firm. “You have time before dark to start both. I suggest you get busy.”
The bathroom door swung open. “Are you guys fighting?” Isabel stood wide-eyed in the doorway. Chessie knew this was her seventeen-year-old’s biggest fear, that something would separate her family as it had too many of her friends.
“We’re not fighting, love,” Chessie denied. “We’re having a discussion.” Seizing the moment, she reached for the sheet of paper on her nightstand. “And I’ll take this opportunity to explain our new cooking schedule.”
Gabriella stepped to her father’s side. “Dad, she’s got that look in her eyes again.”
Chessie ignored the perplexed expressions on her family’s faces. “For a year now I’ve wanted to take the Art Guild’s figure drawing class. Call it career advancement.” She shot Nick a pointed glance. “But it’s Wednesday right while I’m preparing dinner. So I need help. To that end, I’ve made up a meal schedule.” She extended the paper to them, but the other three recoiled. “Each member of the family will be responsible for dinner on two assigned days of the week. Izzy and Gabby, you count as one person. I’ll take the extra day, but never Wednesday. That should free me up to attend class, starting tomorrow. Girls, you begin the rotation.”
“You expect us to cook?” Gabriella, her mouth working, looked like a beached fish gasping its last.
“You can start simple. Peanut butter sandwiches and milk. Carrot sticks. I’m not fussy.”
“Honey…” Nick assumed his official negotiator voice. “They’re just kids.”
“And they’ll remain children indefinitely if they don’t begin to take on some responsibility.”
“Tomorrow Mrs. Weiss promised to take Izzy and Keri and me to the mall.” Keri was the neighbors’— George and Martha’s—daughter and Gabriella’s best friend. “Dad, switch days with us.”
Nick’s eyes widened in dawning recognition. He spread his hands, palms up to Chessie in a conciliatory gesture. “You can’t expect me to—”
“Takeout. As I said, I’m not fussy. Now, I’ll post this schedule on the refrigerator and then I’m assuming fireworks position on the terrace while you girls take care of the laundry in the yard.” Amazed at how light she felt after this first transfer of duties, she smiled broadly. “Dibs on the hammock. But I’ll share with a like-minded romantic.” She could only hope.
Not waiting for further reaction from her shell-shocked family, she made her way downstairs, hoping she would draw Nick to her, not push him away.
“Maaaa!” Gabriella wailed behind her. “You’ve ruined the Fourth of July!”
“Oh, no, my dear,” Chessie called from below. “I hope I’ve honored the spirit of the day.”
“Well, I’m not watching any stupid fireworks now.” Her younger daughter’s grousing wafted down the stairwell, followed by an indistinguishable response from Nick.
Second thoughts stabbed her as she rummaged in the living room for her John Philip Sousa CD. Had she ruined a holiday with unreasonable demands? Had she mistaken wants for needs?
No, dammit.
She hadn’t behaved selfishly today. She’d merely issued a wake-up call for Nick and the girls’ own good, as well as her own. Growing up, she’d observed her workaholic father drive himself to an early grave. As an adult, she’d watched as too many of her friends had spoiled their children to the obnoxious stage. She’d seen husbands and wives grow to be strangers. If she lay down and became a doormat, what kind of a match was she for Nick? What kind of a role model for Izzy and Gabby?
Having found the desired CD, she headed for the furnace room where she tripped over the cat litter box, out of place and full to overflowing. Normally, she would stop what she was doing to clean it for the sake of the cats her daughters had begged to bring home from the shelter. (“We’ll take care of them. Promise.” Right.)
The new Chessie found a scrap of paper, a marker and a broken tomato stick. Skewering the paper with the stick, she wrote, “Yo! This ain’t no toxic waste dump. Clean it up! The Cats.” She jammed the stick in the corner of the litter and left the box in the middle of the floor.
Highly satisfied with no-holds-barred Chessie, she hunted up sparklers, the beach boombox and bug repellent, then forged ahead to the darkening terrace where she immediately began slathering on lotion. Despite the fact that the mosquito seemed to be the Maine state bird, she wondered if her family—should they choose to join her—would think to lather up without a motherly nag.
Ah, but she’d washed her hands of nagging, negotiating, coercing, reminding. She’d now moved into the fluid rinse cycle of mature communication. In the future, she would treat her family as individuals—as she wished them to treat her. She only hoped she hadn’t hung herself out to dry.
Content that she’d protected every exposed inch of skin, she flipped on the Sousa CD. Perhaps if she seemed happy, her family would be lured to join her. She hadn’t meant to drive them away. On the contrary, she was searching for a way to draw them closer. In a more equitable fashion.
She struck a match to a sparkler. The slender wand sprang to life, adding its cheery glow to that of the myriad fireflies dancing in the dusky gardens. Chessie raised her little torch to the heavens.
“Huzzah,” she said softly, not sure whether she felt the proper revolutionary or one rather isolated wife and mother. An exile by her own design.
Footsteps crunched against the stones on the terrace. She turned to see Nick standing behind her.
“Truce?” he asked, his voice weary.
At the sight of him, her heart beat faster. “Care to join me in the hammock?”
“Sure.” He smacked the side of his neck with the flat of his hand, a clear sign he hadn’t put on bug lotion. Oh, well, he was a big boy.
As Chessie sat in the hammock, Isabel called from the kitchen window. “Mom, what did you do with my Zinc Noze Boyz CD? It was in my portable player.”
The sharp pain in Chessie’s backside told her exactly what someone had done with the player and headphones. “Isabel, you left it in the hammock. I hope it wasn’t here overnight when it rained.”
“Criminies!” The teenager’s footsteps echoed through the house.
“Zinc Noze Boyz.” Carefully sitting next to her in the hammock, Nick chuckled. “Now there’s a recording I wouldn’t want ruined.”
Isabel burst onto the terrace, her arms outstretched. “Thanks,” she mumbled, grasping the player and jamming the headphones over her ears. Leaning against the house, she quickly became lost in the music, with only occasional swats to various body parts. No bug lotion. Like father, like daughter.
Nick draped his arm over Chessie’s shoulder, then lay back in the hammock, pulling her with him. “Nice perfume,” he murmured.
Perfume? She never wore perfume. Oh, yeah, the bug lotion. If this was all the romance today’s demonstration had gotten her, she needed to up the ante. Might even have to implement Plan B…
“This is nice,” he added. His muffled words told her he’d be asleep before the fireworks started.
Plan B it was.
“Yes, this is nice,” she agreed. “Emerging starlight. The scent of flowers. A cricket serenade. The closeness of two bodies.” She stroked his thigh. “It’s quite romantic.”
“Couldn’t agree more.” He was fading fast.
“We need more romance in our marriage.”
“Anything…you…say.” He held to consciousness by a tenuous thread.
“And I have a plan.” She walked her fingers up his chest. “I read in your Sports Illustrated that athletes try to imprint positive behavior. Good golf swing. Great slap shot. Terrific slam dunk.”
“Soun’s great.”
“They try to memorize how the positive feels and then block out the negative or the extraneous, both mentally and physically.” She stroked the stubble along his jaw.
“Mmmm…”
“So I thought, since we both agree this romantic feeling is nice, we could work on replicating it. Kind of like the athletes. We’d be in training, so to speak, in our relationship.” She laid her cheek on his shoulder with her mouth close to his ear. “More romance. It could become our mantra.”
His deep intake of breath sounded suspiciously like a snore.
“We need to recognize the difference between real romance and a convenient physical release.” She ran her tongue along the rim of his ear. “Nick, while we’re concentrating on the romance, I think we’re going to have to can the sex.”
On the verge of sleep or not, he sat bolt upright in the hammock. “No sex?” With the wild look of someone with one foot in dreams and the other in reality, he spotted his daughter lost in her music and lowered his voice. “Are you out of your mind?”
She seemed to have his attention now.
“Just till we’re back on track as a couple, hon.” She massaged the tense muscles of his back. “Sex can cloud the issue.”
“Dammit, we’re married.”
“I’m well aware of that. But I’d like to feel as if we were courting. And I, for one, am embracing celibacy until that hearts-and-flowers feeling returns.”
“What are you trying to do to me, Chess?”
“Us, Nick. Us. And I’m trying to make us better.”
Angry, he stood up. “Well, it sure feels as if it’s all about me. And none of it feels good.” He stormed off the terrace, past Isabel, who appeared oblivious to her father’s distress.
Chessie slumped back in the hammock as the first of the fireworks exploded overhead with a tremendous boom and a dizzying display of color.
CHAPTER THREE
TEN HOURS LATER Nick still fumed.
Last night, afraid he might say something he’d regret in the morning, he’d left Chessie on the terrace without discussing her ridiculous challenge. He’d been too frustrated to debate what he didn’t understand. Besides, pure physical exhaustion had caught up with him. He’d headed to bed.
He hadn’t slept, however, and his wife hadn’t joined him in their bedroom.
Morning had dawned with confusion dogging his sleep-deprived brain. Even now, after all the words exchanged yesterday, he didn’t see why she’d become dissatisfied with their marriage. And celibacy after eighteen years together? What a crock. He felt manipulated and hoped the old sofa in her studio, where she’d more than likely spent the night, had been lumpy.
He’d looked forward to reading the morning paper to see if he was still in the same universe he’d been in before the Fourth, but the new paper carrier had tossed it in the birdbath.
Aggravated before the work day had begun, he pounded the steering wheel of his old and cranky Volvo as he prepared to head to school. He empathized with cranky, wincing at the grinding sound the car’s transmission made when he pulled out of the driveway. Not unlike the discordant, grating gears of his once well-oiled life.
He’d stop at Tindall’s Service Center on the way to school and leave the car to be checked. John would give him a ride to work.
His thoughts crowded, Nick scratched the back of his neck in irritation. The mosquitoes had feasted on him last night, and now the nonstop itching was driving him nuts. At least something had been hungry for his body, he thought sourly.
Using extreme caution, he drove the short distance to the service center. As he pulled into the lot, he experienced a pang of envy for the automotive work of John Tindall, his former classmate. With machines, when something went wrong, the problem was real, physical and, for the most part, observable.
Unlike relationships.
As he stepped out of the car, Nick wished he could raise Chessie on a lift, hook her up to a diagnostic machine.
“Nick.” John hailed him from the gas pumps where he was putting out pails of water and windshield cleaning squeegees. “How’s it going?”
Nick shook his head. John didn’t really want to know. “If I leave my car here, could you look at my transmission sometime today? I don’t like what I’m hearing.”
“What I’m hearing,” John replied with a grin, “is that Chessie’s set to reform you.”
Just what Nick needed as he went about the delicate business of hiring new teachers, some new to the area. What if this gossip filtered through his staff to the recruits? How would it affect his image as a professional and a leader?
He spied Abigail, John’s wife and bookkeeper, peeking out from behind curtains in the office window, an unmistakable smile on her pretty face. Nick sighed heavily. “You know Chessie, John. Just some Fourth-of-July hijinks.”
“If you say so.” The mechanic wiped his hands on a rag.
“Oh, hell!” Nick ran his fingers through his hair. “Do you know what women really want?”
John snorted. “Abigail says all she wants is a little bit more than she’s ever going to get.”
“But what exactly is that little bit more?”
“In Abigail’s case, money.”
Nick shook his head. That wasn’t the case with Chessie. Or was it? She’d said she wanted to be romanced. Did that mean expensive jewelry and exotic bouquets? Those things hadn’t mattered to her in the past. But, as far as he’d been concerned, Chessie had seemed content, and look at how wrong he’d been on that score.
“What about romance?” he asked.
“Frankly, Abigail seems to get her kicks from a ledger in the black. But what do I know?”
“You’re saying you haven’t a clue.”
“Not a one.” John raised his hat, repositioned it, then set it back on his head in the age-old male gesture that begged to change the subject. “So, you want a ride to work?”
“Yeah. I hope you’re better at figuring out transmissions than you are at figuring out women.”
At the high school, Hattie St. Regis, his administrative assistant, met him with a fresh pot of coffee and a double-parked agenda. “Restful holiday?” she asked, her eyes betraying no sign of gossip-induced interest.
“Yes,” he lied, trying to focus on the day planner on his desk, obscured with new paperwork.
“Good. We have quite a schedule today.” She poured them each a cup of coffee. “I’m thinking of getting an espresso machine in this place. Regular coffee just doesn’t spark my plugs any more.”
What did spark women’s plugs these days? He didn’t dare ask Hattie’s advice. For the past year the two of them had maintained a strictly professional relationship.
Shuffling papers, he spotted a petition from a large section of last year’s female student body, requesting the addition of an elective course on women’s studies.
“Hattie.” He held up the petition. “I think we’ve been vigilant in updating our curriculum. We’ve tried to include important contributions, events, philosophies from all groups regardless of ethnicity or gender.”
“Yes?”
“So why would we need a separate women’s studies class?” He noted her sharply raised eyebrows. “I mean, if we’re sincerely trying to appreciate the accomplishments of women in the curriculum at large, why would women want to segregate the issue? What do women want or need that’s so different from what men want or need?”
She eyed him sharply without speaking, and he wondered if she didn’t see clear through to his real question.
