Grand Avenue (18 page)

A toilet flushed, although no one emerged from any of the stalls. Probably afraid to, Barbara decided, straightening her shoulders, sucking in her stomach, pushing out her impressively augmented bosom. She opened the bathroom door and stepped back into the main part of the restaurant, not surprised to discover that Ron had already left.

“The gentleman took care of the bill,” the waiter informed her.

Barbara smiled, wondering at what precise moment her life had slipped out of her grasp. She’d just turned around for half a second, she thought, and it was gone.

S
usan awakened slowly from a dream in which she was delivering an important speech to the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, her eyes opening at the precise moment she realized she was standing completely naked in front of the large crowd that included the president and virtually his entire cabinet. “Why do I always have to be naked?” she moaned, looking at the clock beside her bed. Seven twenty-nine. Seven twenty-nine! Hadn’t she set the alarm for seven o’clock? Susan reached across her sleeping husband and grabbed at the clock accusingly, forgetting it was plugged into the wall, so that the electrical cord slithered roughly across Owen’s nose and mouth. He immediately bolted up in bed, swatting at his face, frantic fingers trying to pluck the offending object away from his lips. “I’m sorry,” Susan said quickly, trying to calm him. “I was just trying to check what time I set the alarm for.”

Owen exhaled a deep breath of air, scratched at his
balding head. “I was having a dream about being on safari. Suddenly I felt this thing moving across my face. I thought it was a snake.”

“I’m so sorry.” Susan fought the urge to laugh. Her husband always looked so vulnerable first thing in the morning, especially when he’d spent the night trekking through the jungle. “Are you all right?”

Owen leaned over to kiss her just as the alarm went off in Susan’s hands. They both jumped, Susan dropping the clock to the bed, then having to ferret through the billowing white comforter to retrieve it and turn the damn thing off. “God, that’s loud,” she said.

Owen returned the clock to its position on the nightstand. “Seven-thirty on the dot. Same as always.”

“Damn. I meant to change it.”

“What’s the problem?”

“I’m speaking to Ariel’s class this morning about my job. It’s career week or something, and I promised I’d take part. Anyway, I was really hoping to finish up some work before I went into the office.”

“What time did you come to bed last night?”

Susan rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, hearing Barbara tell her to stop that at once. The skin around the eyes is delicate, Barbara would say. Especially as women get older. Didn’t she actually read any of the stories she edited? “I guess it was sometime after midnight. I was working on that article about what makes investment banking sexy.” She laughed, although the work had been slow and tedious. So much of being an assistant editor involved correcting the writer’s grammar, rearranging ill-conceived concepts, trying to organize a series of jumbled parts into a well-constructed
whole. Is that what she’d say to Ariel’s class?

“I’ll bite. What makes investment banking sexy?” Owen asked.

“I think it has something to do with money.” Susan smiled, throwing a white terry-cloth robe over her shoulders and sliding into a pair of fuzzy pink slippers. She shuffled out of the room and down the hall toward her daughters’ bedrooms. The shower in the bathroom between the girls’ rooms was already running.

The door to Whitney’s room was open and her bed was empty, the nine-year-old’s clothes arranged neatly on the bed, awaiting her return. Susan smiled. Whitney was always the first one out of bed in the morning, the first one dressed, the first one finished with breakfast, the first one out the door. In school, hers was the first hand to shoot up in answer to a teacher’s question, to volunteer for a special assignment, to offer to read her composition out loud. She didn’t have to be reminded to wash her hands after she went to the bathroom or to brush her teeth after every meal or to go to bed at the appropriate hour. She was unfailingly polite and sweet-tempered. In every respect, a living doll.

Which was precisely why Ariel hated her.

“She’s an alien,” Ariel regularly scoffed. “Haven’t you noticed how she never spills anything, how her hands are always clean, how she’s always got this stupid smile on her face? She’s not normal.” Ariel would tell her sister to her face, “You’re an alien.”

“You’re just jealous,” Whitney would calmly reply.

“Oh, yeah, right. Like I’d be jealous of an alien.”

Whitney never rose to the bait. She’d shrug and
walk away, which, of course, only enraged Ariel all the more.

“A fat and ugly alien,” Ariel would call after her, but Whitney never looked back.

“Ariel, honey,” Susan called from the doorway to her older daughter’s room, “time to wake up.” A large hand-printed sign taped to the door with a Band-Aid proclaimed: KEEP OUT! PRIVATE! ABSOLUTELY NO ALIENS ALLOWED! Susan knocked gently, then again, louder the second time so that her daughter, who was buried under an avalanche of pink blankets and whose radio was loudly blasting rock music into her ear, might hear. “Who am I kidding?” Susan asked herself, stepping over the threshold and negotiating her way through the clothes littering the floor. “I know there’s a carpet under here somewhere.” Susan tried to find it with her bare toes, thinking, Two children raised by the same two parents in the same house with the same set of values, and they couldn’t be less alike. She reached the bed, lifted the blankets from Ariel’s shoulders while removing the pillow from her head, then leaned down and kissed her daughter’s sleep-warmed cheek. “Wake up, sweetie pie.”

Without opening her eyes, Ariel reached up and grabbed the pillow from her mother’s hands, returning it to her face.

“Come on, sweetheart. Help me out here. I’m already running late, and we have to leave here by a quarter to nine at the latest.”

“Big deal if we’re ten minutes late. Who cares?” came the muffled reply.

“I care. If I’m late for your class, that makes me late
for work and …” She stopped. Why was she explaining herself to a thirteen-year-old girl who obviously couldn’t care less? “Just get up,” Susan said, and walked from the room.

“Hi, Mommy,” Whitney greeted her cheerfully, emerging from the bathroom wrapped in a soft yellow towel.

Susan loved to be called Mommy. Just the sound of the word infused her with pride and joy. In another year or so, Whitney would undoubtedly abandon the word for the less childish Mom or the dreaded Mother, as Ariel had taken to calling her lately. She felt a twinge of sadness, already mourning its loss. “Hi, beautiful girl,” she said.

“She’s not beautiful. She’s an alien,” came the cry from the other room.

Amazing what Ariel could hear and what she couldn’t, Susan thought, folding Whitney into a warm embrace, the child’s skin damp against her cheek.

“Close my door!” Ariel barked. “Something out there smells bad.”

“Get up and close it yourself,” Susan called back as Whitney disappeared into her room to start getting dressed. “Two girls raised in the same household,” Susan muttered, entering her en suite bathroom and starting the shower, “with the same two parents and the same set of values.” She was still muttering as she undressed and stepped under the hot rush of water. “Just let her be out of bed by the time I’m ready to go.”

Of course Ariel wasn’t out of bed, and when Susan finally succeeded in getting her up, she couldn’t decide what to wear, then she couldn’t decide what to
have for breakfast, so of course they were late getting to the school, which meant Mrs. Keillor got to give her speech first, and Susan was forced to sit through an incredibly boring recitation of exactly what was involved in being a dental hygienist, followed by a question-and-answer period that Susan prayed would be brief—surely the woman had covered everything in her speech—but the question-and-answer session proved to be fairly lengthy as well, due in large part to Ariel’s sudden and inexplicable interest in the subject. Question after question on territory already covered, but Mrs. Keillor seemed flattered by the attention, and went over everything with Ariel patiently again.

She’s doing it on purpose, Susan realized, trying not to show any signs of impatience or discomfort. She knows how much I hate being late for anything, and she knows all these questions are going to make me really late getting to work. She hates that I have a job, just like she hated when I went to school. Wasn’t she always sick the night before a big exam? Wasn’t she always the most demanding when I had a big paper due? Had anything changed in the two years since Susan had finally earned her diploma and went to work at Jeremy Latimer’s latest project—a glossy women’s magazine named after his wife?

When it was Susan’s turn, she delivered her speech as concisely and quickly as possible, and none of the students had any questions to ask, least of all Ariel, who’d been talking to the girl beside her or staring out the window the entire time. Susan politely excused herself before Danny Perrelli had a chance to expound
on the joys and sorrows of running a successful dry-cleaning business.

An accident on 1-75 held up traffic a good twenty minutes, so by the time Susan arrived at the stately brown-brick building on McFarland Street that served as home base to the ever-expanding Latimer publishing empire, it was after eleven o’clock and Susan had missed the morning meeting in its entirety. “Peter was looking for you,” a coworker announced from the next cubicle. “He seemed upset you weren’t at the meeting.”

“Great.” Susan glanced toward the wall of glassed-in offices at the far end of the square-shaped room, hoping for a glimpse of Peter Bassett, a handsome string bean of a man in his late forties who’d joined the staff less than a month ago and who was her immediate supervisor. But he wasn’t in his office. Nor could she see him parading up and down the ersatz halls between the cubicles, strutting his skinny stuff and generally making like a cock of the walk, wearing his arrogance like an expensive cologne. What was it about him she found so damned attractive? Susan wasn’t even sure she even liked the man.

The editorial division of
Victoria
, where Susan worked, was comprised of thirty small cubicles, arranged in six rows of five, that were divided one from the other by attractive Japanese-style screens. Floor-to-ceiling windows lined three of the office’s four walls and normally guaranteed plenty of light, but the October sky had turned threatening, and a gray pall was slowly leaking into the room, casting long shadows across the field of computer screens. Susan
rifled through her messages, noted that they included one from each of the three writers whose articles she was working on, one from Carole in the art department, another from Leah, the magazine’s chief fact-checker, one from Barbara, and two from her mother. That was unusual. Her mother never called her at work.

She was reaching for the phone to call her mother when it rang.

“Susan,” the male voice said in a voice that announced it had no time for pleasantries. “It’s Peter Bassett. I was wondering if I could see you in my office in, say, ten minutes?”

“Of course.” Susan replaced the receiver, wondering if she was about to be fired. The magazine was struggling, and one associate editor had already lost her job since Peter Bassett had been brought on board to help turn things around. Rumors had been circulating for weeks that more heads were going to fly in the coming months. Jeremy Latimer might have been instrumental in getting her hired, but that didn’t make her invulnerable. She might have worked her tail off to advance through the ranks to her current position, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t get her ass fired.

Susan loved her job. Despite the daily frustrations and occasional late nights, she felt blessed to be working at something that brought her so much pleasure. Not everyone was so fortunate. Hadn’t she told Ariel’s class as much this morning?

Susan rested her head in the palm of her hand, stared at her blank computer screen. Missing this morning’s meeting couldn’t have helped her cause. She was still
staring at the blank screen five minutes later when the phone rang again.

“The slut is pregnant,” Barbara announced by way of hello. “Can you believe it? They’re married less than six months and she’s pregnant already.”

“Are you all right?” Susan asked.

“I don’t know what I am. I need to vent. Are you free for lunch?”

Susan rubbed her forehead, looked toward Peter Bassett’s office, although her view was blocked by the tall beige partition. “I’m not. I’m sorry. Look, why don’t you come for dinner tonight? We can talk then. Bring Tracey. I’m sure Ariel would love to see her.” Why had she said that? Ariel was never happy to see anyone.

After Barbara hung up, Susan placed a quick call to her mother. She knew something was wrong the minute she heard her mother’s shaky hello. “What’s the matter?”

“Dr. King’s office called,” came her mother’s tentative reply, as if she were speaking a foreign language she hadn’t quite mastered. “Apparently something suspicious showed up on my mammogram. They want me to come in for a biopsy.”

Susan tried to speak, but no sound emerged.

“It’s probably nothing,” her mother continued, saying all the things Susan would have said had she been able to find her voice. “It’s very small, and they said these things are usually benign, so I should try not to worry.”

“When do they want you to come in?” Susan pushed the reluctant words out of her mouth.

“Tomorrow morning at ten.”

“I’ll come with you.” Susan’s calendar indicated another staff meeting for tomorrow at ten, but Peter Bassett would just have to understand. Or he wouldn’t, Susan thought.

“Thank you, dear.” The relief in her mother’s voice was palpable. “I really appreciate that.”

“I’ll pick you up at nine-thirty. Does that give us enough time to get there?”

Her mother agreed it was more than enough time, and Susan said she’d see her in the morning. She hung up the phone and closed her eyes. Please let my mother be all right, she said in silent prayer. “My job doesn’t matter,” she whispered into the cowl neck of her lime green sweater. Take my job, she continued without words. Just let my mother be okay. She felt a trickle of tears sting her cheeks.