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Iris groaned. “I’ve got a great idea. Let’s sleep.”
Jo gave her a look of reproach. We’d formed the Prisoners Enrichment Society several years ago when it became clear that none of us was likely to escape Willow Creek a second time. We may be stuck in Willow Creek but we didn’t plan on becoming stagnant.
“Okay, okay.” Iris gave in under Jo’s look. “Just let’s not go bowling again.”
“If this snow keeps up, why don’t we plan on a hike along the creek?” I suggested. “It’ll be gorgeous.”
“It’ll be cold,” Iris said.
“Besides, Iris doesn’t own a pair of boots with heels under three inches,” Jo pointed out. “Why don’t we drive over to that new ceramics shop near Lake Geneva? They’re having an introductory class. For ten bucks you get to paint your own latte cup.”
“Yippeee,” Iris drawled sarcastically as she lit another cigarette.
“That reminds me,” I asked Jo, “how’s the cappuccino war going?”
Jo was currently working on Mike to buy a cappuccino maker. She had dreams of turning the diner into a café. She felt it would give the town a little dash. We were in an area about halfway between Milwaukee and Chicago and surrounded by towns that had become weekend spots for the upper middle class from both cities. Willow Creek had remained just a small town while many of the neighboring ones had become favorites of tourists looking for a bucolic, small town experience but who didn’t want to travel far from home.
Many in Willow Creek saw the town’s anonymity as a victory and were happy with less intrusion from the outside world. Jo wasn’t one of them. She was constantly battling with Mike to turn the diner into the kind of place that would pull in business from tourists. But I had a feeling that if she ever won we would all miss the geometric-patterned gray Formica countertops, the red fake-leather-covered booths and the old fashioned soda fountain behind the curved counter with its chrome and red stools that spun in place. We’d all been coming here since Mike’s parents were probably younger than we were now—unsettling thought that that was. Most of the girls in town had done a stint as a waitress at Dempsey’s. That’s how Jo first fell in love with Mike.
“Mike still thinks the diner, like his mother, is perfect,” Jo said. “He says why tamper with success. Which is exactly what his mother always said. But, frankly, with all three kids in college, we could use a little more success.” She took a moment to make sure Mike was out of earshot. “I’m sneaking a pasta dish on the menu next week,” she whispered. “And he doesn’t know it yet, but I’m thinking about putting our Christmas club money into a new sign out on the highway.”
“The assault begins,” Iris pronounced.
“I don’t care who wins,” I said, “as long as you don’t switch coffee suppliers or take the donuts off the menu.”
The diner only offered one kind of donut—a plain cake one—but they were made fresh several times daily. The outsides were always just slightly crunchy while the insides were so tender they melted in your mouth. Nearly the entire town was addicted to them.
“So,” I said as I zipped up my parka, “ceramics class tomorrow?”
We both looked at Iris. She took a second drag on the new cigarette then stamped it out in the black plastic ashtray in front of her.
“I can hardly wait,” she said.
Face it, I wasn’t exactly enthralled with the idea of painting flowers on a latte cup, either. But at least it would get me out of the house on a Saturday.
When we first formed the Prisoner’s Enrichment Society, we’d had loftier goals than ceramics or bowling in mind. We’d even planned a trip to Europe once. Went so far as to get our passports. Then my daughter Natalie found out she was pregnant with her second child on the same day Jeremy got laid off from the auto plant two towns over. Suddenly my Europe fund had other, more important places to go. The farthest the Society had ever taken us was a weekend trip to Chicago two years ago. But at least we hadn’t given up completely.
It was snowing lightly when I left the diner. Dark enough, in fact, on this December afternoon for the Christmas lights hanging from lampposts along Main Street to already be lit. I tried to muster up some Christmas spirit at the sight. Who knows? Maybe the snowfall put Jeremy in the mood and he’d gotten off the sofa long enough to put up our outdoor Christmas lights like he’d been promising to do since the day after Thanksgiving.
Luckily, the wind was at my back as I walked the few blocks to my car. I yanked open the door of my slightly rusting station wagon, wincing at the screech, and slid behind the wheel while I sent a silent wish into the frosty air that the wagon would start on the first try. It didn’t. I resisted the urge to pump the gas and tried again. The engine caught and I smiled and patted the dashboard. “Good girl. Now just get us to the grade school then home and I’ll tuck you in for the rest of the night.”
I drove over to the school, contemplating what to fix for dinner. Natalie, my twenty-nine-year-old daughter, and her husband, Jeremy, had moved in nearly four months ago when Jeremy’s unemployment ran out and the bank foreclosed on their house, but I still wasn’t used to planning family meals again. I’d grown accustomed to just grabbing a bowl of cereal or heating up some soup. Now meals were a big, noisy, messy deal again. Not that I didn’t love my grandkids. I loved them like crazy even when they made me crazy.
I pulled up behind a row of cars in front of the elementary school and waited. As usual, eight-year-old Tyler, dark haired and green eyed with a wrestler’s body like his father’s, was the first one to reach the car. “Shotgun!” he yelled while ten-year-old Matt, tall, lanky and sandy haired like his grandfather, tried to shove him out of the way.
“Knock it off, Matt,” I said.
“No fair,” Matt grumbled. “Tyler got shotgun yesterday.”
“You’re right. Tyler, get in the back, it’s Matty’s turn to ride up front.”
“Aww—” Tyler groused as he gave in.
“Where’s your sister?” I asked, craning my neck to get a look at the steady stream of kids coming out of the school.
“Probably giggling with those two morons she hangs around with,” said Matt.
I was just about to send one of the boys to look for her when Ashley broke from the pack and started skipping toward the car, her long blunt-cut auburn hair swinging from beneath her winter hat.
“Hi, Grandma,” she said as she got into the backseat. She threw her arms around my neck from behind and gave me a kiss on the cheek. She was the only one of my grandchildren who still showed me affection in public.
“Get on your own side of the car,” Tyler yelled.
“Dork,” Ashley said with all the indignity a six-year-old can muster.
“Ha! Dork? That the best you can do, loser?”
No doubt about it, Ashley sometimes had a tough time being the only girl.
“Hey,” she squealed, “stop elbowing me!”
Matt turned around and threw his cap at Ashley. “Quit screaming in my ear, weirdo.”
I stuck two fingers in my mouth and whistled. That got their attention. “The next one of you who says anything nasty or pokes, prods, elbows or otherwise harasses anyone gets to do the dishes tonight. All. By. Themselves.”
There were moans of varying degrees, but the dishes deterrent never failed. The three of them settled down. I turned on the radio, perpetually set on an oldies station, and everyone started singing along to “Sweet Caroline.” By the time we got home, we were mutilating the lyrics to “Brown Eyed Girl.”
Home was still the two-story Victorian with a wraparound porch in perpetual need of painting that had once belonged to my parents. I had just gotten around to the idea of selling it when Nat and Jeremy lost their house almost four months ago. What could I do? They needed a roof over their heads and I was still the mom, a role that no longer suited me as much as it used to. I was the grandmother. I was supposed to get to do the fun things with my grandchildren. Instead, I’d become the one who wiped up the spilled milk and broke up the fights.
The kids tumbled out of the car while I checked for any sign of Christmas light activity on the bare branches of the barberry bushes lining the front porch. Not one string was strung. I didn’t see any of the electric candles I’d asked him to put in the front windows, either.
I followed the kids up the stairs and into the house where they kicked off boots and parkas and threw them in the direction of the cobbler’s bench lining one side of the entrance hall. There was a sweatshirt thrown over the banister of the open staircase and a basket full of clean laundry sitting on the bottom step.
The living room was to the left of the entrance hall, while the dining room was to the right. The big family-style kitchen was behind the dining room.
The kids, as usual, clattered through the dining room to the kitchen to raid the cookie jar. I followed to make sure none of them took more than two cookies—homemade oatmeal that Natalie cleverly laced with wheat germ and sunflower seeds—poured milk and got them seated at the table with their homework. Then I headed back to the living room.
Sure enough, Jeremy was still in his flannel pajama pants and an old football jersey, slumped on one of the two matching sofas, his bare feet up on the coffee table between them, his eyes glazed over from watching too much daytime television.
“Jeremy, we need to talk,” I said.
“I’ve already applied every place I can think of, Abby,” he said dully without taking his eyes off the television.
“I know that and that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about anyway.”
His eyes drifted toward mine.
“I just think that maybe it’d be better if you got dressed every day and did something around here. Even just one thing. That’s all I ask, Jeremy. ’Cause I think you’re slipping into a depression.”
This brought his spine upright. “Oh, I can just guess who the topic of conversation was down at the diner this afternoon. I’ll hang the damn Christmas lights, okay?”
“That would be a start—”
His jaw worked, but I’d known him since he was thirteen and first started hanging around on my living room sofa. He was the boy who had cried when he’d lost a wrestling match in high school. The boy who had looked at Natalie with such love in his eyes as she’d walked down the aisle toward him when she was already three months pregnant with Matt. Jeremy could work his jaw all he wanted. It wasn’t about to make me back off.
“—but that’s not what I really wanted to talk to you about.”
He looked wary but defiant and I saw my grandson Tyler in his face. How could I not love this man, even if I sometimes felt like sending the sofas out to be reupholstered just to see what he’d do?
“So, what do you want to talk to me about?” he asked.
“Ma—come on—what were you thinking?” Natalie demanded when she got home from work a few hours later.
“It’s just that my business is going well, I could use the help and it would provide a little security for you and the kids. Since the two of you have been married, Jeremy has been laid off four times. Aren’t you sick of worrying about layoffs and plant closings? Can’t you see how each time it happens, Jeremy finds it harder to deal with?”
“Of course I can see that, Ma. That’s one of the reasons I’m pissed that you talked to him without discussing it with me first. It’s bad enough Jeremy has to depend on his mother-in-law for a roof over his head right now. How do you think he’d feel if you were his boss, too?”
I leaned against the kitchen sink and watched the kids out in the backyard tumbling around in the snow in the glow of the back porch light. A good four inches had already fallen. It didn’t seem to be hurting Jeremy’s manliness to not be out there shoveling snow. I wisely decided to keep that observation to myself.
“So, I’ll sell him part of the business. For heaven’s sake,” I said in exasperation, “the point is, he’d be making money while in training and you wouldn’t have to worry about layoffs and plant closings ever again.”
My daughter Natalie, as usual, looked both sullen and beautiful. Her long sandy hair was tangled, her pale skin was bare of makeup so the sprinkling of freckles on her nose showed. She was as tall as me—five foot ten—but finer boned, leaner, less bosomy. She really took after her father more than me in looks. Of my two daughters, she had always been the more openly rebellious one. Her three kids had come so quickly that Nat still had some growing up to do. But she had a big heart and, in her own way, she was a terrific mother. But, as far as I was concerned, she was still too stubborn for her own good.
“Yeah, Ma, every out-of-work guy wants to be trained by his mother-in-law.”
“Don’t you think you’re being a tad overprotective here?” I pointed out while I picked up a wooden spoon and went to stir the pot of chili on the stove. “He’s got a family to help support.”
“Ma—I do not want to talk about this now, okay?” Nat said through tightened lips. “Jeremy is upstairs taking a nap but he could be down any minute. I’d like to get through dinner without a scene for a change, if you don’t mind.”
I bit my tongue so hard to keep the words down that I was surprised I wasn’t on my way to bleeding to death. I’d had enough scenes in the past months to last me a lifetime. I wasn’t sure which was worse: listening to Jeremy and Natalie fight or listening to them have makeup sex. No wonder the man needed so many naps.
The three kids came tumbling in, cheeks rosy from the cold, trailing snow, spilling milk and getting more chili on the table than in their mouths.
I loved them. I did. But afterwards, as I stood in the middle of the ruins of dinner on the big, square oak table and looked at the puddles of melted snow on the parquet wood floor, I couldn’t help but ask myself isn’t there someplace else I’m supposed to be?
When had this new restlessness started? Was it after Nat and her brood moved in or had it been there all along? And if this wasn’t where I was supposed to be, then where did I belong?
I got out the mop and told myself to get real. I was exactly where I was supposed to be. Where I’d chosen to be. Life wasn’t so bad. So Nat and Jeremy had had to move in for a while. It was happening all over the country. The boomerang generation, they called it. It’d only been a little over three months. And surely having the grandchildren here would rekindle my Christmas spirit eventually, wouldn’t it? Of course it would. Besides, things could always be worse. At least Gwen wasn’t coming home for Christmas this year.
Not that I didn’t love my oldest daughter, Gwen. I loved my daughters equally. Enjoyed being with them equally. I even fought with and was irritated by them pretty much equally. They were only a little over a year apart, but they were as different as peanut butter and steak: both of them delicious, but I’d prefer not to eat them at the same meal.
Nat and Gwen didn’t share the sisterly bond that I imagined I would have shared with my sister if she hadn’t been so much older than me. Basically, my daughters bonded by bickering. It was going to be a relief not to have that added to the cacophony that had become my auditory life. The bonus was, I didn’t even have to feel guilty that Gwen wouldn’t be here. Her husband, David, was taking her on a holiday cruise. Everyone was winning as far as I was concerned.
I’d always known that Gwen was the kind of girl who would grow up to marry the kind of man who could afford to take her on holiday cruises. Not to mention buy her just about anything she wanted. Gwen had lived her life toward that goal since she’d first discovered that she was not only smart but pretty, a phenomenon that had occurred to her around the age of twelve. Cheerleader. Prom Queen. Scholarships to good schools. A career in the city in banking that led to the kind of social life that got her invited to the right parties where she’d meet a man like David Hudson, an architect who was already making a name for himself at the age of thirty-five.
On paper, thirty-year-old Gwen read like the kind of young woman a mother never had to worry about. Yet I worried just as much about Gwen as I did about Nat. They were just different worries. For instance, I sometimes worried that Gwen loved her husband’s money and family connections more than she loved her husband.
David came from a family of old banking money, although both he and his father were architects. I didn’t know much about architecture, but even I had heard of Cole Hudson. I’d met him only once—at Gwen’s wedding in Chicago last spring. Once was enough as far as I was concerned. He was one of those arrogant, larger-than-life types. Full of himself. Very different from David, who was kind and sweet and loving—and easily wrapped around Gwen’s finger. I couldn’t imagine Cole Hudson letting any woman wrap so much as a strand of his hair around her finger.
There was a sudden crash from the living room and Ashley squealed, “Give that back to me!” Then, “Mom!” I sighed. One thing I’d never have to worry about was Gwen moving back in. I was pretty sure she’d jump from its balcony before she’d give up the high-rise condo near Chicago’s Loop—unless, of course, she’d be giving it up for a mansion on Lake Michigan.
I was finishing up the dishes while the kids were in the living room with Nat, who was checking over their homework before letting them watch TV, when I heard a plaintive voice behind me say, “Mother?”
I spun around. Gwen stood there with a look of such raw pain on her face that my heart immediately opened to her. “Honey,” I said as I moved toward her, “what is it?”
“My marriage is over, Mother. I’ve left David and come home for good.”
CHAPTER 2
Through the kind of sobbing that turns into hiccups, Gwen told me that she’d just found out that David never loved her.
“He doesn’t want to be with me, Mom,” she wailed as I took her into my arms.
“Baby, I’m sure David loves you. He’s always loved you,” I said.
She shook her head vigorously. “No. I just fit some kind of ideal that he wanted in a wife. It’s not me he loves. It’s his work. I was just—just arm candy!”
A tiny pinprick of guilt poked at me. I’d so recently wondered the same thing about Gwen’s feelings toward David and now here she was, my brokenhearted daughter, feeling loved only for her facade.
“Oh, my God. What happened?” Natalie said from the doorway.
“David doesn’t love me,” Gwen blubbered.
Natalie shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans as she came all the way into the room. “Oh, come on. We all know David is nuts about you.”
Gwen sobbed more. “I don’t think he’s ever really loved me.”
Compassion was one of Natalie’s more endearing qualities, but she didn’t usually waste it on her sister. Now it warmed my heart to see Nat take her hand out of her pocket to smooth Gwen’s long, expensively maintained, blond hair back from her face. “Come on. Tell us what happened.”
“I just feel so betrayed,” she said in a shaky voice.
Over her sister’s head, Natalie mouthed the question affair?
I shrugged, but, given how crazy David had always been about Gwen, I thought it highly unlikely and I wasn’t going to ask. Not now, anyway.
Natalie had no such compunction. “Did he cheat on you?” she asked.
The question brought Gwen’s head up with a jerk. “What? Of course not. Why would he cheat on me?”
“Then what happened, for heaven’s sake?” I asked, starting to lose patience.
Nat stepped closer to Gwen and put her arm around her shoulders. I hadn’t seen them present anything like a united front since they’d both campaigned to skip school to go to a rock concert in Chicago when they’d been sixteen and seventeen.
Gwen, always the more delicate looking of the two, was only five six to Nat’s five ten. She easily leaned her head on Nat’s shoulder and gave a long, shaky sigh. “He—” she sniffed “—he canceled our cruise!” she finished with a wail.
Nat leaped away from her like she was going for the long jump in the Olympics.
“What?” she bellowed.
