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Window Dressing
Nikki Rivers
Sometimes Reality Bites…Lauren Campbell thought she knew where she was going. After dropping her son off at college, she'd have four years to live out her dreams and plan the future. But she'd been so living in denial, spending her days baking cookies, cleaning the house and going to PTA meetings, that she missed the fine print on her divorce. Now she's about to go from empty nest to no nest because her ex's support has ended!From dressing as a milkmaid at the local grocery to working on window displays, Lauren struggles to make lemonade out of lemons. But a strange thing happens along the way. This "temporary" life starts looking more appealing than the life she's built in her fantasies….
“Don’t tell me you’re so afraid of the empty nest that you’re going to try to win your ex back,” my mother exclaimed.
“Get serious, Mother.”
“Never mind. I don’t want to know.” Bernice stood. “Take a look at what’s in the shopping bag. And don’t be stubborn about it.” She kissed my forehead, then clicked her way to the foyer. “Good luck with…whatever,” she yelled before the door slammed.
I kept glancing over my shoulder at the bag. Curiosity finally won out and I went to investigate.
Another little black dress. I drew it out and held it in front of me. Not bad. Maybe I’d wear it tonight. If it fit. I looked at the tag and was surprised to see that it was actually my size. Maybe Bernice had finally gotten it into her head that I was never going to be a size eight. I grinned. If that was the case, was anything possible?
Nikki Rivers
Nikki Rivers knew she wanted to be a writer when she was twelve years old. Unfortunately, due to many forks in the road of life, she didn’t start writing seriously until several decades later. She considers herself an observer in life and often warns family and friends that anything they say or do could end up on the pages of a novel. She lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with her husband and best friend, Ron, and her feisty cairn terrier, Sir Hairy Scruffles. Her daughter, Jennifer, friend, critic, shopping accomplice and constant source of grist for the mill, lives just down the street.
Nikki loves to hear from her readers. E-mail her at nikkiriverswrites@yahoo.com.
Window Dressing
Nikki Rivers
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
From the Author
Dear Reader,
Don’t you just love a road trip? Music blasting, wind in your hair, brand-new pair of sunglasses perched on your nose? I’ve been taking road trips with my best girlfriend, Deb Kratz, ever since we’ve been old enough to drive. The destinations have changed over the years—and so have we. But we always have a blast.
Window Dressing starts with just such a road trip between Lauren Campbell and her best buddy, Moira Rice. Lauren, divorced for ten years, thinks she knows exactly where she’s going—taking her son, Gordy, to start his freshman year, after which she will do all the things she’d always planned. But, as we all know, the roads we take in life don’t always get us to the destinations we’ve planned on. Too often there are detours.
In some ways, I’m like Lauren. I had my trip planned, too, but found myself on a different highway in midlife. As Lauren does, I discovered that an alternative route can turn out to have an even better view. It’s not easy leaving some of that window dressing behind. After all, it’s not nice to litter on the highway of life—but everyone does. And along the way, we also pick up things—other ideas, other people, other careers. Other ways of living.
Window Dressing celebrates the choices we make in our lives—and the friendships and loves we find along the way.
I hope you will always stay open to the journey.
Nikki Rivers
P.S. I would just like to add that neither Deb nor I ever flashed any truckers on those road trips. Really.
This book is dedicated to friends and road trips and the millions of chips and snack cakes eaten along the way.
I’d also like to thank my editor, Kathryn Lye, for her continued support and encouragement over many years and many journeys. Special thanks to Ron, my husband extraordinaire, who leaves me little treats to find among the manuscript pages on my desk and keeps me fed when I’m on deadline and my daughter, Jennifer, who helps me keep my sanity in this insane process we call writing. Both of them, by the way, are excellent road trip companions.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 1
“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.
