Finding Mr. Perfect

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“You can’t call it quits over a couple of artichokes. Come on, sugar, admit it was a dumb idea, anyway.”

“Dumb idea!” Sissy put her hands on her hips and stalked over to the door where her husband was clinging to the screen like a moth seeking a lightbulb. “Restaurants everywhere are putting gourmet pizzas on their menus. And if you hadn’t been so all fired stubborn about tasting it you would have seen why.”

“Well, this isn’t everywhere. Most of Timber Bay has probably never even tasted an artichoke. They sure as hell don’t want one on their pizza.”

“You’re impossible, Chuckie Belway,” Sissy yelled before she slammed the kitchen door in her husband’s face. Her bottom lip quivered as she turned to Kate. “Ma, I—I’m sorry if I’m messing things up for Uncle Tuffy, but I—I just can’t stay married to a man who doesn’t appreciate and nur—nurture my—my creativity.” She sniffed and dashed at a tear slipping down her cheek. “H—How can you build a life with a man who won’t even consider artichokes? I deserve artichokes, Ma.”

“Of course you do, dear,” Kate said as she took Sissy into her arms to console her.

Hannah was having a hard time picturing this tender scene on a cereal box. A Moving Back in With Mother edition? She was pretty sure Norman Rockwell never put that one on a magazine cover. She groaned and stood up.

“I can see you could use some time alone and I’ve got some paperwork to do so I think I’ll just go on up to my room.”

Nobody paid any attention so Hannah slipped out and went upstairs to the back bedroom Kate had shown her to earlier.

The room was sweet, with a flowered quilt on the bed and ruffled curtains at the window. The furniture was light oak and there was an old wooden rocker painted white. Soft and simple and feminine. Like a daughter’s room. Hannah should be lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling and dreaming or sitting in the rocker at the window and watching as the soft, summer evening unfolded in the yard below. Instead, she sat down at the little oak desk, opened her notebook computer, and tried to compose her first daily e-mail report to Mr. Pollard. The task seemed to require the kind of fictional skills she couldn’t quite summon at the moment.

She considered calling Lissa. But Lissa had been so upbeat about the whole thing Hannah hated to have to tell her that her inner child was on the verge of having a panic attack.

She closed the mail screen and opened a new document in the computer file on the Walkers. Okay, she thought as she thrust her hands into her hair and stared at the empty screen, no need to panic. Think it through. What exactly are the problems re: The Great American Family?

A fly buzzed around her head and she swished it away while typing meat eaters in the greenhouse. She stared at the line on the screen for a couple of seconds, tempted to delete it. The Venus flytraps seemed almost like a nonissue considering that the second generation Great American Family had been torn asunder over an artichoke pizza. On the other hand, she was pretty sure that Pollard didn’t like weird—in any form. The flytraps stayed on the list of the day’s debacles.

Next, she typed Danny the Devil. He could prove to be worse than the flytraps, since there was no way at all, Hannah was sure, to contain that bad boy persona he was so fond of displaying. She wasn’t going to fool herself that the few glimmers of kindness he’d shown were going to grow into the image Pollard was expecting in the Great American son. She’d just have to try to stay out of his way and hope that he’d lose interest in tormenting her soon. There had to be a girlfriend somewhere—or possibly several—that would eventually occupy his time.

Debacle number three, Sissy and Chuck. She typed and their names appeared on the screen. She stared at the letters, wondering if she could possibly find the money to send them all to Disney World for the duration. Unfortunately, until she got that bonus, she could barely afford to send them all out for an ice-cream cone.

Danny had said that sometimes the split only lasted a few days. So the Sissy/Chuckie problem might very well fix itself in time. But there would be consequences—from this split and from the earlier ones. She’d have to make it a point to spend some time with Susie and Andy so that she could see what kind of negative effects the parents’ problems had on them. There were loads of statistics that showed that there would be some. When she found out what she was up against, she could then develop a strategy to work around any behavior that was less than perfect. They seemed like bright children. Maybe if she coached them a little and—