Mommy Tracked (19 page)

Well. So what?
Grace thought, with a surge of rebellion. It wasn’t like they were going out anywhere. Why shouldn’t she be comfortable when they were just going to be sitting around the house all day? Besides, Grace wasn’t in the mood to argue with Alice about her appearance. Today was going to be about spending time together, not just rehashing the same tired, toxic fights they’d been mired in for the past twenty-five years.

No. Today will be different
, Grace thought with a burst of optimism.

“So I was thinking,” Grace said, trying to sound bright and upbeat. “I saw a gorgeous house featured in a magazine last month, and I think it’s a look that would work really well in your house. It had the same type of traditional furniture you have, but they’d updated the pieces with new fabric. Linen on the wing chairs, and an amazing hot-pink chevron stripe on the Queen Anne sofa. And then they had lots of gorgeous accents—coral sconces, a gilded mirror, a modern glass coffee table. We’d have to do a little shopping, but I think the end result would be fabulous.”

“Hot-pink chevron stripes?” Alice repeated, looking at her blankly. “That sounds…bright.”

“It was. But the rest of the furniture was muted, so it worked. The sofa provided a nice focus point for the room.”

“I
don’t
want pink,” Alice said. She sounded definite. Almost defiant.

“Oh. Okay. Well. What were you thinking of?” Grace asked.

Alice handed Grace the fabric samples she’d been clutching. “I was thinking of this for the sofa, and this for the chairs,” she said.

One swatch was striped with light and dark creams; the other was an ivory with cream crewel.

“But…it’s almost exactly like the fabrics that are on there now,” Grace said.

Alice nodded. “I know. I like it, and I already know it works well in here.”

But it doesn’t work well! It’s washed out and boring and bland!

Grace could feel the words bubbling up inside her, propelled by frustration, not just over the living room—it wasn’t her living room, after all—but all of those years of Alice never once taking her word for something. She swallowed hard, forcing them back down.

“Okay. If that’s what you want,” Grace said, handing the samples back over.

Alice looked pleased. “Yes, I think it is. I’m glad you agree.”

Just let it go
, Grace told herself.
It’s not worth it.

And yet…she couldn’t.

“I don’t agree. In my professional opinion, I think you need to bring some more color in here. Some oomph. The room’s too bland, too monochrome. But if that’s what makes you happy…” Grace let her voice trail off and shrugged one shoulder.
If being boring is what makes you happy, what can I do about it?
the shrug said.

Alice flushed and held the fabric up to her chest, as though Grace might rip it out of her hands at any moment.

“This fabric is very expensive,” Alice informed her. “This striped one costs a hundred ten dollars a yard.” She gave a little shrug of her own, only she lifted both of her bony shoulders. “I’m not surprised you don’t like it. You’ve never been one to go for quality fabrics.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Grace asked, so sharply that Natalie—who had just been drifting off—started and looked up at her mother with wide, surprised eyes.

“I did tell you when you bought your sofa that the microfiber wouldn’t wear well. But you wouldn’t listen,” Alice said.

Un-fucking-believable
, Grace thought. Her anger tasted hot and coppery in her mouth.

“The sofa
is
wearing well,” Grace said. Her sofa looked gorgeous, like new, like the day they got it. Well, okay, except for the tiny splash of chocolate milk one of the girls had spilled on it, but that had happened recently, and Alice hadn’t even seen it yet.

“If you say so,” Alice said diffidently.

“Fine. Whatever.” Grace lifted her hands and shrugged, as though she were giving in. Although, as Anna was fond of pointing out, when a woman said
whatever
, it was really just a passive–aggressive way of saying
fuck off
. The sentiment was not lost on Alice.

“Fine,” Alice said coolly. “But, you know, dear, I wouldn’t go around telling people that you’re a professional decorator.”

“What?”
Grace stared at her stepmother, at the face that was more familiar to her than her own. It was a face she had loved and hated in turn. The overplucked eyebrows. The hazel eyes. The narrow nose with the flared nostrils. The thin lips that were rarely, if ever, seen without lipstick. The crepey skin of her neck.

“It’s just that you never really were a decorator. And if you tell people that you were, and they find out that you only worked for one, they’re going to think you’ve just made it up to sound important,” Alice said. She smiled then, as though she were just offering some well-meaning motherly advice.

Grace’s heart began to pound, and she could feel her skin warm as it flushed. But she couldn’t find the words she needed, the words that would make her stepmother understand how much these insults, these gibes, these never-ending digs meant to undermine her self-esteem hurt her. How they instantly turned the clock back and made Grace feel like the chubby, insecure young girl she’d once been, desperate for the approval that was never forthcoming.

Then again
, Grace suddenly realized, the heat of anger suddenly turning cold,
maybe she already knows that
.

Natalie started to fuss, making fretful birdlike sounds and opening and closing her small round hands.

“I think Nat’s hungry. I’d better go feed her,” Grace said.

She turned and padded out of the white living room, away from its awful blandness, away from her over-tweezed stepmother, without saying another word.

ten

Anna

W
hen Noah called
to ask Anna out for a second date, she hesitated.

Four fiancées
, she reminded herself.
That’s bad. Really bad. Like, forty-and-still-living-with-your-mother bad.

So what if he was smart, and handsome, and funny, and had a steady job, and seemed like a genuinely nice person, and, yes, did not actually live with his mother? Finding out that he had four former fiancées was the romantic equivalent of seeing a huge blinking sign by the side of the road that read:

DANGER! ROAD FLOODED AHEAD! TURN BACK!

Which was why Anna was shocked when she heard herself accepting his invitation to dinner when he called a few days after their first date. It was as though the sex-deprived side of her brain had locked up the logical side in a trunk and was now making decisions all on its own.

“Great,” Noah said. She wondered if she imagined the note of relief in his voice.

They met the following Saturday evening at Swordfish. Anna had eaten at the restaurant many times in the past, and although the food was wonderful if a bit idiosyncratic—the restaurant had both a sushi menu and a separate menu with more-traditional fare, like Caesar salads and filet mignon—it took second place to the extraordinary view. The restaurant overlooked the water, and now, as the sky darkened into a smear of hazy purples and smudgy pinks, it occurred to Anna that it was actually quite romantic.

Which was not something she’d planned on. Well, it wasn’t something the rational side of her brain had planned on. God only knew what the sex-deprived side that had gotten her into this in the first place was planning. Noah looked over the wine menu with interest before finally ordering a bottle of Oregon pinot noir.

“Are you reviewing this restaurant for your column?” Noah asked, once the waitress left. He knit his brow, concerned. “I probably should have let you pick the wine.”

“No, I’m not, and besides, you’re the wine expert,” Anna assured him.

“Expert.” Noah gave a self-deprecating snort. “I don’t know about that. I’m sure you know a whole hell of a lot more about wine than I do.”

“I doubt that,” Anna said.

“I didn’t think this date through,” Noah said. “Taking a restaurant critic out to dinner is a tricky proposition. What if I order shrimp cocktail, and it turns out that shrimp cocktail is now considered gauche and horribly out of style?”

“Actually, shrimp cocktail is definitely back in right now, although I’ve never cared for it myself. Too bland,” Anna pointed out.

Noah grinned. He really did have a great smile. One corner of his mouth curled up just a little higher than the other, and his brown eyes smiled with his lips, squinting so that faint lines fanned out from the corners.

“And there’s the benefit of dating a restaurant critic,” he said. “I’m guaranteed to always eat well.”

Anna knew he was joking, and yet his words—and what they implied—caused a jolt of excitement to shoot through her. She pressed her lips together into a smile and tried not to think of the trail of fiancées he’d left in his wake. Although the more she tried not to think of them, the more she did. She was starting to imagine what each one was like—the smart one, the funny one, the demure one, the pretty one. No, they’d all be pretty, of course. But one would be movie-star gorgeous.

The waitress—a zaftig woman with hair dyed the color of black shoe polish—arrived with the wine and a bread basket.

“Do you have any questions about the menu?” she asked pleasantly, after pouring the pinot noir.

“No, I think we’re all set,” Anna said.

Noah had apparently decided against the shrimp cocktail: He ordered a house salad and the crab cakes.

“Good choice,” Anna said approvingly. She also ordered a salad, and the filet mignon.

Once the waitress had left, Noah turned back to Anna, wineglass in hand. She thought he was going to make a toast.

Please don’t let it be too cheesy
, she thought. She didn’t think she could bear it if he was one of those nice-in-theory, cheesy-in-reality guys. It would be such a disappointment.

But instead he said, “I think I owe you an explanation.”

“What do you mean?”

“I got the feeling that you were a little surprised when I told you about my past,” he said.

He’s certainly not beating around the bush
, Anna thought.
Although I guess that’s better than cheese.

“Well. Actually…yes, I was, a little,” she admitted.

“I thought so. And I want to explain.”

“You don’t have to. It really isn’t any of my business,” Anna hastened to add.

“Isn’t it?” Noah looked at her, his eyes dark and inscrutable, and Anna felt another thrill rush through her. There was definitely possibility here—although she still wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

There was something different about Noah tonight, she thought. And then she realized: He wasn’t wearing his glasses. His face looked bare and vulnerable without them.

“I have to admit, I am curious,” Anna said.

The waitress arrived with their house salads. She ground pepper over the beds of lightly dressed baby greens studded with blue cheese and pecans, topped off their wineglasses, and then left again. Anna took a bite.
Delicious
, she thought, and sighed happily. She felt Noah’s eyes on her and looked up.

“Good?” he asked, a smile twitching at his mouth.

“I love this dressing,” Anna enthused. “It has just a hint of citrus in it. I’ve attempted re-creating it at home, but I can never get the flavor right. I’ve tried lemon juice, and lime, of course. But now I’m thinking it’s a bit sweeter than that. Tangerine, maybe.”

Noah laughed, and Anna suddenly felt defensive.

“What?”

“Nothing. I’m not laughing at you. I just like how your face lights up when you talk about food.”

“Oh,” Anna said. She looked down at the beautifully arranged plate, pleased yet self-conscious. “So…you were about to tell me all of your dark, sordid secrets.”

“I don’t have any dark, sordid secrets,” Noah protested. “At least, none that I’m going to tell you.”

“Damn. I was hoping for some good dirt.”

“Alas, my life isn’t that exciting.”

“Four fiancées? That’s not exactly dull.”

“Right, them. Well, where should I start?” Noah asked, carefully spearing some lettuce and blue cheese together on his fork.

“The beginning is always good,” Anna suggested. “How about fiancée number one?”

“Number one. That was Caitlyn,” Noah said fondly. “We met our sophomore year at Brown.”

“Young love.”

“That’s right. We were together all through college, and I proposed to her the weekend we graduated. I was going off to business school, she was going to law school in a different state. I was probably worried that we were going to grow apart.”

“So what happened?”

“We grew apart.” Anna and Noah both smiled. “We broke up during Christmas break. Last I heard from her, she and her husband had just had their third kid,” Noah continued.

“You stay in touch?”

“A bit, although life tends to get in the way. The break was as amicable as they get.”

“So you weren’t heartbroken?”

“No. I already knew by then that the engagement was a mistake. Mostly, I was relieved that she agreed with me.”

“So you’d met someone else,” Anna surmised.

Noah looked startled. “How’d you know that?”

Anna shrugged. “In my experience, people are relieved to get out of a relationship only when they’re either, one, with someone really annoying, or, two, when there’s someone else,” she said.

“Well, okay, you’re right. There was someone else. Nothing had happened yet—”

“But you wanted it to.”

“But I wanted it to,” Noah agreed. “And it did, when school started back up again after the holiday break. Her name was Olivia, and she was in one of my classes. We’d only been dating a few months when she got pregnant. When she told me, I proposed—or I did right after I recovered from the shock.”

This sounded so similar to the beginning of her own ill-fated marriage that Anna nearly dropped her fork. And, wait: he had a kid?

But Noah saw what she was thinking and shook his head before Anna could ask. “Olivia lost the baby early on in the pregnancy. Later, after the miscarriage, Olivia told me she’d reconsidered and had already decided she was going to have an abortion, since she didn’t want to have a baby while she was still in school. And I was angry that she was making decisions like that without me,” Noah said. “It was a lot of stress for a new relationship. We didn’t last long after that.”

“I’m sorry. That’s really hard,” Anna said.

“Then I took a break and managed to get through the rest of business school without proposing to anyone,” Noah said. He smiled sheepishly.

“Which brings us to number three.”

“Maria.” Noah’s smile became a bit dreamy. “She was a professional dancer. She had really long legs.”

“Really,” Anna said, more tartly than she meant to, and decided that so far Maria was her least favorite of the group. Clearly, she was the gorgeous one.

“Yeah. But, unfortunately, she was also really screwed up. We had a brief, very intense affair. I was so convinced she was the great love of my life that I proposed to her after knowing her for only a month,” Noah said. He shook his head and took a sip of wine. “Looking back, I have to wonder if I sustained some kind of a head injury.”

“Why? What happened?”

“I found out she was stealing from me,” Noah said sheepishly. He blushed.

Anna laughed, delighted that Maria—whom she could just imagine, with a long, lithe dancer’s build, flowing dark hair, liquid eyes—was a criminal. “What did she steal?”

“Money, mostly. I couldn’t figure out where all of my cash was going. I’d go to the ATM, take out a hundred bucks, and the next day it would be gone. I thought I was just being really careless. But then I got up one night to go the bathroom and I caught her in the act.”

“What did she say?”

“She cried and said she was sorry. Said she’d lost her job, her rent was due, and she was desperate. So I gave her the money.”

“Sucker. Let me guess—she kept stealing from you?”

Noah nodded. “A week later I caught her sneaking a bottle of vodka out of my apartment. And after we broke up, I realized that a bunch of other stuff was missing. The watch that my parents gave me when I graduated from college. My grandfather’s cuff links. Even small stuff, like groceries and toiletries. She cleaned me out of shaving cream and deodorant. I’m lucky I ended it when I did. Another week and she might have managed to strip my apartment bare.”

“No kidding. And after Maria?”

“And after Maria…there was Jessie. Jessie broke my heart,” Noah said flatly. He stopped eating and rested his fork on the edge of his salad plate.

Anna felt a stab of jealousy. Even if Maria had been sex on legs, she obviously didn’t hold any power over Noah. But Jessie—just the way he said her name made Anna’s mouth taste bitter, as though she’d bitten into a rancid nut.

“When I met her, I thought,
This is it, this is the real thing.
Finally. We dated for two years. I proposed to her in Venice, by the Bridge of Sighs as the sun set. It was a beautiful day, like something out of a movie. We—well, I should say,
she
—planned a huge, formal wedding to be held at her parents’ country club.” Noah’s laugh was a short, humorless bark. He was looking back into his memory now, and his eyes were far away. “She spent months driving me crazy by obsessing over what entrée we should serve. Salmon or chicken? Beef Wellington or beef bourguignonne? Or maybe we should have a buffet, she’d say. Only it wouldn’t be a real buffet—not what I think of as a buffet, with a long table and lots of dishes—but instead stations all over the place. A crepe station, and a sushi station, and a seafood station. And the cake. God, she was obsessed with the cake. We visited four different bakeries, and I had to remember if the lemon chiffon at this bakery was better or worse than the white chocolate at that one. I couldn’t wait for it to just be over, to get the wedding behind us, so that we could start our life together. Buy a house, have a few kids, you know. The usual.”

Anna was starting to regret her curiosity. She didn’t like the hurt flickering in Noah’s eyes, didn’t like the note of bitterness creeping into his voice. If he was still angry with this Jessie, it meant he still felt something for her. And men who had feelings for the women who’d come before were certainly not safe to get involved with.

The waitress came by to pick up their salad plates. Anna hadn’t even noticed she’d finished hers, only now realizing that her fork had been rising and falling mechanically as Noah spoke.

“And then one day I came home to the apartment we were sharing, and my bags were packed and waiting for me by the door. She said it was over. And that was it. It was over. She wouldn’t even talk to me about it.”

“Did you ever find out why?”

“She eventually told me that she knew I’d been cheating on her,” Noah said.

Anna had been lifting her wineglass to her mouth, but at those words she abruptly plunked it back down.
He’s a cheater? I knew he was too good to be true!

“I told her I hadn’t cheated on her—and I
hadn’t
—but she said she didn’t believe me. And just like that, everything was off. The wedding was canceled, the presents were sent back. I had to somehow explain it to everyone. And, of course, no one believed me when I told them I hadn’t been unfaithful to her. I don’t think my parents even believed me, although they said they did,” Noah continued. “I didn’t even know who I had supposedly cheated on her
with
. When I asked her, she just said, ‘I know.’
I know
. But I sure as hell didn’t.”

“Well. It does sound…odd,” Anna said, trying to ignore the siren in her head that was blaring
cheat-er
,
cheat-er
,
cheat-er
. “Were you ever able to sort it out?”