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“He canceled our Christmas cruise because of some project that’s in trouble. He’s so selfish. That’s all he thinks about is work. I spent months shopping for just the right clothes and then he—”
“Wait just a minute,” Nat demanded, putting her fisted hands on her hips. “You’re pulling this scene because your cruise was canceled?”
“You don’t understand. We haven’t been on a trip since our honeymoon in Hawaii last spring.”
“Aw—that’s real rough,” Natalie said, her compassion morphing quickly into ridicule. “Boo-hoo.”
“Nat,” I warned.
“You don’t know what it’s been like,” Gwen shrieked, totally undeterred by her sister’s mocking. “He works all the time. We haven’t even been out to dinner in over a week.”
“Oh, really,” Nat said as she cocked her hip out aggressively and crossed her arms over her chest. She’d been taking the same stance since she was just a toddler. Right after Charlie was killed, the smart-ass started to sprout out of her like someone had fed her liquid fertilizer. “My heart bleeds. Too bad Jeremy’s unemployment ran out or we could take you to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal.”
Gwen abruptly stopped crying. “I simply will not take this kind of attitude from you,” Gwen said with all the dignity of a royal. “Not when you’re taking advantage of Mother the way you are.”
Natalie shifted her weight to the other hip. “Excuse me?”
“She’s practically ready for retirement and your whole family is living off of her,” Gwen told her.
Ready for retirement? I was fifty-two. There was still time. I could still buy a pair of leather jeans and go out and get a life.
“Mom invited us to move in—and we pay our own way as much as possible,” Nat said. “It’s not Jeremy’s fault he’s out of work, you know.”
I could see that Gwen was winding up for a retort that would wound. It was time for some mommy intervention.
“Okay, girls, enough!” I yelled. “Everybody has problems. And everyone’s problems are important—if only to themselves. So let’s show each other a little respect.”
Natalie looked even more sullen, as she always did when she knew I’d hit the mark. Gwen sniffed and started crying silently. The phrase award-winning performance did come to mind. But still, she’d just left her husband. Being self-absorbed didn’t mean you were protected from pain.
“Gwen, honey,” I gently asked her, “are you sure this is what you want?”
“What she wants is for David to come running up here and beg her to come back to him,” Nat said. “Oh, and maybe buy her another hunk of expensive jewelry.”
“Natalie,” I said sternly, even though I knew there might be more than a kernel of truth in that statement. “Please.”
“You can be such a bitch,” Gwen said before she blew her nose loudly into a big wad of tissues she’d pulled from her Dooney & Bourke handbag.
“Look, I’m stuck here living under Ma’s roof again, trying to hold it together with three kids and an out-of-work husband. And you’ve got the nerve to come in here crying because David had to cancel your cruise? Give me a break.”
Maybe Natalie was saying all the things to her sister that I wish I had the guts to say but I was too busy thinking about Nat’s choice of the word stuck. Is that how she felt living with me? I knew it wasn’t an ideal situation, but still the word stuck—well, it hurt, damn it.
“Mother, are you just going to stand there and let her talk to me that way?” Gwen demanded.
Right now I wasn’t sure what was upsetting me the most. Gwen’s self-absorption or Natalie’s anger. I searched for the right words to say. “You know, Gwen, Nat’s going through a hard time right now,” I began.
Gwen dashed tears from her cheeks with an angry swipe of her hand. “Like I’m not? At least she knows where her husband is.”
There was a burp from the doorway. We all looked up. Jeremy stood there, bleary-eyed, scratching his stomach with one hand and brushing his hair back with the other. “Did I miss dinner?” he croaked in a sleep-roughened voice.
“Oh, good,” Gwen said, recovering rather quickly from her last outburst. “I’m glad you’re here. I need help with my bags. If you’ll follow me—”
“You bet, princess,” Jeremy said as he rolled his eyes at us before following her.
“Look at that,” Nat muttered. “She’s taking over already.”
“Nat, come on. Gwen is hurting.”
“I’ll tell you what Gwen is doing. She’s finding a new way to make Christmas all about her. Like the time she had the chicken pox. Or the time she broke up with that guy she thought she was so in love with. She spent the entire holiday season crying her eyes out and refusing to eat. By the time Christmas break was over, she had a new boyfriend and claimed she’d never been so in love in her life. She does this kind of stuff on holidays, Ma. Haven’t you noticed?”
Did she? I knew Gwen could be manipulative and maybe just a touch narcissistic. But chicken pox? “Nat, I don’t think even Gwen could will herself to get the chicken pox.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Nat said as she headed for the front hall. Seconds later she yelled, “Hey, Ma! You gotta come and see this!”
There turned out to be ten pieces of luggage. All matched. Pink crocodile. It made quite an impressive pile in the hallway. I was a little impressed to see Jeremy actually breaking a sweat for a change, too, as he hauled it all in.
“Last one,” he said as he rolled in a suitcase big enough to hold a drum set.
“Mother, which room will be mine?” Gwen asked.
“Well, the only room free is the guest room off the kitchen.”
“That’ll never do,” Gwen said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “It’s barely big enough for my clothes.”
“Well, you’re not getting our room,” Natalie said.
I totally agreed. It would really be starting off on the wrong foot to kick Nat and Jeremy out of the second largest bedroom in the house to give it to Gwen. And we certainly couldn’t have any of the children sleeping downstairs by themselves. So that left—
Me.
“I’ll take the guest room, Gwen. You can have my room.”
Gwen took it like it was her due. “Jeremy?” she said, then picked up the smallest case and started up the stairs.
“If she offers me a tip,” Jeremy muttered, “I’ll kick her in her bony ass.”
“Let’s all help with the luggage,” I hastened to suggest, grabbing a suitcase and starting up before anyone could argue with me.
Later that night, as I lay in the narrow single bed in what my mother had always referred to as the maid’s room even though we’d never had a maid, I could hear Nat and Gwen bickering over the bathroom and, just like that, fifteen years peeled back. It was worse than déjà vu. I mean, I was actually going through it for the second time. But I had been younger the first time, I said to myself as I rolled over and pulled a pillow over my head.
I was feeling a little used and abused. And a whole lot sorry for myself. So Nat felt stuck. How did she think I felt? Did she think this was the life I’d planned to be living when I reached my present age? And Gwen was acting like a child throwing a tantrum. And even though I felt like kicking her in her bony ass myself, I had to be supportive, didn’t I? Wasn’t that part of the deal that came with motherhood?
Frankly, I wasn’t feeling all that supportive of either of my daughters right now. I’d been a widow already by the time I was Gwen’s age. At least she still had a husband who would eventually take her on a cruise. And Nat had Jeremy and the kids. I flopped onto my back again and tossed the pillow aside. The problem was, I wasn’t supposed to be alone in this bed mulling over all this stuff by myself. Charlie was supposed to be here with me. To talk to. To hold me if I cried. To laugh with me over the absurdity of life. Was the restlessness I’d been feeling just a newly resurrected anger at the injustice of it all?
Charlie, always a careful driver, had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’d been on his way home to us from a conference in Green Bay when a semi had gone over the center line. It had happened too fast for Charlie to even react, the police had told me. I could hear the words like they were said just yesterday. “It’s likely he never knew what hit him, ma’am,” the cop had assured me.
Well, I knew what had hit me. Widowhood. Single motherhood. It was as if my life as me, Abby, had just stopped. By now, at the age of fifty-two, I’d thought I’d have Abby back again. But as I listened to the girls still squabbling overhead I knew that my time wasn’t arriving anytime soon. In fact, I was pretty sure the train hadn’t even left the station yet.
“Look,” I said the next morning after listening to my daughters complain about the house having only one bathroom, “we’re just going to have to start making a schedule for the bathroom in the morning and at night.”
“We were here first,” Natalie said tightly. “Let her go to a hotel. She can afford it.”
“That’s not fair! My marriage is crumbling and you want me to go to a hotel? Why shouldn’t Mother be here for me, too?”
“Yeah, your marriage is crumbling because your husband put off a trip to the Bahamas to make another million. Excuse me while I don’t cry.”
“You are such a bitch!”
“Hey—little pitchers,” Nat said sternly as she nodded toward her trio of minors. They were watching the sisters with their mouths dropped open nearly to the table.
Suddenly, Ashley jumped from her chair and ran up to me to clutch my leg. “Why are they yelling?” she whispered as she peered anxiously up at me. “Do Mommy and Auntie Gwen hate each other?”
I smoothed her hair back from her little concerned face. “Do you hate your brothers when you yell at them?”
Ashley solemnly shook her head. “Not really.”
“Then I guess your mommy and your auntie are just acting like children.”
“Would it kill anyone to try to see my side of things, here?” Gwen demanded before she flounced out of the room.
By now the kitchen table was a mess of cereal, spilled milk and whatever other chaos grade school children can cause in a kitchen on a Saturday morning. I went over to the sink and turned on the faucet, waiting for the water in the old pipes to get hot. The kids must have sensed more trouble brewing because they soon drifted off to wreak havoc in the living room.
I shot Nat a look. “You know, you’re not helping matters any.”
She had the grace to look shamefaced, something that always raised patches of bright red on her pale cheeks. “I’m sorry. I guess it’s just that after losing your house it’s a little hard to have sympathy for someone who has to postpone a cruise.”
I put my arm around her shoulders. “Honey, I know. But this is still real to her. She feels let down by her husband. She feels—”
“Abandoned,” Natalie finished for me. “I know. But she’s not the only one who lost her father, you know.”
I squeezed her shoulder. “We all deal with things differently, Nat.” Was now the time to reminded her of her overprotective-ness of Jeremy? Probably not, I decided.
“Mother?”
Gwen had quietly come back into the kitchen. In her long rose-sprigged flannel nightgown with matching robe, her hair in a tangled mess and her eyes red from crying, she looked so much like the girl she’d once been. So when she asked in a small, plaintive voice, “Would you make me some pancakes?” I, naturally, said yes.
She smiled weakly. “I’ll have them in my room.”
“Oh, brother,” said Natalie.
“So you’re late for the Prisoners of Willow Creek Enrichment Society outing because you were serving your daughter pancakes in bed?” Iris asked. “Your thirty-year-old daughter, I might add.”
I grimaced. “You might, but I wish you wouldn’t.”
Iris dipped the tip of her brush in pink paint. “Aren’t we supposed to be escaping our bondage?”
“Yes, of course—”
“Well, I’m seeing you pretty tethered to the ground, honey,” Iris said.
“Well, what am I supposed to do?”
“Kick them out on their asses and tell them to grow up?” Iris suggested tenderly.
“It’s just not that easy,” I whined.
“Oh, don’t pay any attention to her,” Jo said. “She’s never had kids.”
“Making me the smartest woman at this table,” Iris stated.
We’d driven an hour in the snow to sit in the back room of an overheated ceramics shop and paint designs on large coffee cups. I was starting to think that none of the women at this table were very smart.
“This is a stupid way to spend a Saturday,” I blurted out.
Some women at the advanced class’s table who were working on painting little elves swung their heads our way, their faces registering disapproval.
“You trying to get us beat up or something?” Jo hissed.
“They do look a little hard-core,” Iris said.
I started to giggle at the thought of hard-core ceramic junkies. More disapproving looks came our way. I wasn’t sure if it was our conversation or the fact that none of us was wearing a sweatshirt with a barnyard animal, a snowman or sprigs of holly on it.
“Why do I get the feeling,” Jo said out of the corner of her mouth, “that we’re about to get kicked out of here?”
“Just as long as we don’t have to serve detention,” I said.
Iris threw down her paintbrush. “Let’s get the hell out of here. I want a margarita.”
There was a small gasp from a chubby woman at the next table, who was wearing a sweatshirt that featured a row of geese, each with a red ribbon tied in a bow at its throat.
“What’s the matter, lady, would you rather have a rum and Coke?”
“Well, I never—” the woman said.
“Yeah, I’m betting you haven’t,” Iris quipped.
“I think now is the time to leave,” Jo said.
I didn’t argue.
Amid much giggling, we left our half-finished latte mugs where they were, went up front, paid what we owed and headed back to Willow Creek and the only Mexican restaurant in the area.
I ordered a regular margarita on the rocks, no salt, Jo ordered a blended strawberry one and Iris, skipping the niceties, ordered a double shot of tequila.
We were as different as our drink orders—Jo, Iris and I. Always had been.
Jo, the tomboy and the first of us to date, had been on the girls’ hockey team in high school. She was the kind of girl who joined in a game of football with the guys at the park on Saturday afternoons, thus getting to know all the jocks and giving her the inside dating edge. Iris’s high school claim to fame was getting caught smoking in the girls’ room more often than any other girl of the graduating class of 1972. I was the studious, practical one. The one on the debating team. The one who usually followed all the rules.
The unlikely friendship had started when we’d all refused to dissect a frog in freshman biology. We’d all gotten detention as punishment for our stand on animal cruelty. Although I’ve secretly always felt that with Iris, it was more of a stand against the smell of formaldehyde. Jo and I, clearly out of our element, had glued ourselves to Iris, who was more than familiar with the drill and who was friends with nearly every scary boy in the detention room. Afterwards, we’d walked home in the dark together—it had been late fall and the smell of burning leaves had been in the air—griping about the unfairness of the world. We’d been best friends ever since.
