Mommy Tracked (2 page)

And then, when Anna dropped Charlie off at his Montessori day care, which he normally loved, Charlie had clung to her like a baby koala.

“Mama has to go to work,” Anna said in a singsong voice, as she attempted to detach him from her legs. “But guess what? Gigi is picking you up today!”

“Noooo!” Charlie screamed, reattaching himself to Anna’s legs.

In the end, the teacher had to hold back a sobbing Charlie while Anna rushed out the door, feeling like the worst mother in the world.

Now, after a long day at work, Anna was stuck going to the Mothers Coming Together meeting. Not that she didn’t normally enjoy the get-togethers; she did. But work had been stressful as she’d rushed to meet a deadline, and she hadn’t slept all that well the night before—Charlie had gotten up twice, once with a wet diaper, once wanting a drink. Now she was so tired, it felt like her eyes had been rubbed over with sandpaper. Sharing a grilled-cheese sandwich with Charlie and then curling up for a few rounds of
Brown Bear, Brown Bear
sounded infinitely more appealing than engaging in the sort of grown-up conversation that took effort. So appealing, she nearly turned her car around.

I promised Grace I’d be there
, Anna reminded herself, and, swallowing back a yawn, she dialed her mother’s phone number.

“Hello,” Margo said brightly when she answered the phone.

“Hi, Mom, it’s me,” Anna said. “How’s Charlie?”

“Hi, honey! Charlie, it’s Mama,” Margo said. “Do you want to say hello to Mama?”

There was suddenly the sound of heavy, stalker-like breathing on the line.

“Hi, baby,” Anna cooed. “Are you having fun with Gigi?”

More heavy breathing. And then a high voice piped, “Mama?”

And just like that, Anna fell in love with her son all over again. It was always this way. One sight of his radiant smile or a whiff of his sweet little-boy aroma, and Anna was overcome with a wave of love and longing.

“Yes, baby, it’s Mama! How are you? How’s my baby?” Anna continued.

Margo returned to the phone. “You’ll never believe what Charlie said to me today. He looked up at me with those big blue eyes and said, ‘Gigi
beautiful
.’ Can you believe that?” She giggled breathily. “At least we know he has good taste.”

Breathe in, breathe out
, Anna reminded herself, as she tried to squelch the irritation that always flamed when her mother went off on one of her narcissistic tangents.

Anna’s editor, Teresa Picoult, had always been great about letting Anna work flexible hours, but Anna was still a single parent, and one with a flaky ex-partner at that. So on days like today, when Anna wasn’t able to pick Charlie up at day care, she had to rely on her mother to fill in for her. And although Margo was great about it—she and Charlie adored each other—Anna felt guilty every time she had to lean on her mother. It didn’t help that Margo could, at times, be the most infuriating woman in the world.

“I thought you had your moms’ meeting this evening,” Margo continued.

“I do, and I’m already late. You wouldn’t believe how bad the traffic is.”

“It’s all the snowbirds down for the season,” Margo said. “What time is Brad picking Charlie up? I thought he’d be here by now.”

“That’s why I called. Guess what?”

“He’s not coming,” Margo said.

“He’s not coming,” Anna confirmed.

“What was his excuse this time?”

“Apparently he went to Tampa and only just now bothered to call and tell me,” Anna said.

Margo made a
pfft
sound. “What a surprise,” she said tartly.

Anna knew that the only reason her mother didn’t launch into an anti-Brad tirade—A Complete List of Brad Lewis’s Faults, Annotated—was that Charlie was close enough to overhear her, and Anna had made her mother promise not to run Brad down in front of Charlie.

Besides, even though Anna shared Margo’s low opinion of her ex, she knew from experience that this conversation would quickly turn into the familiar rant of how Margo had known from the first time she met him that Brad was all fizz, no substance, and how you can never trust a man who pushes out his lower jaw when he smiles, but oh, no, Anna wouldn’t listen, and then she had to go and marry him,
blah blah blah blah blah
.

This was all true, but Anna wasn’t in the mood for a session of
I told you so
just at the moment.

“Supposedly it was a last-minute work thing,” Anna said.

“I just bet,” Margo huffed.

“Mom, I hate to ask, but could you possibly keep Charlie a little later than usual? I promised Grace I’d be there tonight. It’s her first meeting as president, and she says she needs the moral support.”

“Of course. Don’t worry about us at all,” Margo said.

“Thanks, I really appreciate it,” Anna said, feeling a rush of warmth toward her mother. Two-parts gratitude and one-part guilt for her earlier knee-jerk irritation.

“In fact, why don’t you leave Charlie here for the night, and go out and do something fun afterward? Go out to dinner or get a few drinks,” Margo urged her.

“No, that’s okay. I’ll just go to the meeting, and then I’ll swing by to pick Charlie up. I don’t think I’ll be much later than eight or so.”

“I mean it,” Margo said, warming to the topic. It was one of her favorites. “There must be dozens of nice men who’d like to take you out to dinner. You’re still a very attractive girl, Anna. You get that from me. Well. Except for your chin. That’s your father’s, unfortunately. It should have been my first clue as to what he’d be like. Men with weak chins are always unreliable.”

“What’s wrong with my chin?” Anna, horrified, peered at her reflection in the rearview mirror. Had she always had an ugly chin and never known it?

“All I’m saying is that if you just took the time to do something with your hair and makeup, you’d have loads of men interested in you.”

If she hadn’t been driving at the moment, Anna would have banged her head against something hard.

“Believe it or not, I don’t know any nice men. And I doubt I’m going to meet one at Mothers Coming Together,” Anna said wearily. Her phone beeped out a warning. “Look, Mom, I’ve got to go. My phone’s running out of power. Give Charlie a kiss and a hug from me. Bye.”

Anna tossed her cell phone onto the passenger seat. The traffic started to move slowly, reluctantly even. It was as though every driver in front of her dreaded reaching their destination and wanted to draw out the trip as long as possible. The light turned yellow, and although the LeBaron now in front of her could have easily sped up and allowed them both to make the light, it came to an abrupt stop, trapping Anna behind it.

“Oh, come on,” Anna groaned.

She could feel her frustration swelling in her chest, pushing up and out until even her fingers were tense. She drew in a deep breath, then another, opening her throat the way the yoga teacher had instructed at the one class Anna had attended. She’d always envisioned herself as a calm, serene yogi, smugly turning down coffee and capable of wrapping her legs behind her neck. Instead, she found the stretching and breathing…breathing…breathing…for ninety straight minutes to be excruciatingly boring. Afterward, when Anna asked if they offered a shorter class—“Like, maybe one for people on a tighter schedule?” she’d said hopefully—the teacher gave her a pitying look.

Now stuck at the light, Anna glanced around. There was a new strip mall to her right, wedged between a discount furniture store and an auto-parts supplier, that seemed to have gone up overnight. The signs lined up over each new store were uniform—cream rectangles with the names set in a black Engravers font.

P
URRFECT
P
ET
G
ROOMING
. M
AP
W
ORLD.

J
ENNY
K
AY
I
NTERIOR
D
ESIGN
. B
ACCHUS
F
INE
W
INES.

Bacchus
. Anna remembered her editor, Teresa, mentioning the store.

“It’s amazing,” Teresa had enthused. “Very sleek and hip, and they have an incredible wine selection. They’re even set up to host wine-tasting parties. Maybe you should do a piece on it.”

Anna suddenly felt an irresistible urge to go into the store and check it out for herself. She glanced at her clock; she was still late. So would it really matter if she was a little later than usual?

When Anna stepped into Bacchus, a bell on the door signaled her entrance; the reporter in her began to mentally record the details. The dark-stained wide-plank wooden floors. The white walls lined with minimalist shelving. The Spartan yet artful way each bottle of wine was lined up on the shelf, three deep. The long, distressed trestle table sitting in the middle of the room, also displaying wine. The glass-fronted counter along the back wall that held a selection of cheeses, jars of olives, and loaves of pâté. The store was empty of customers, or employees for that matter.

But then a man stepped through the door behind the counter, presumably from a back office or storage room.

“Hi,” he said. “May I help you? Or are you just browsing?”

He was a compact man, neither short nor tall, with an athletic build that ran to thin. His skin was pale, as though he spent most of his time indoors, and his hair was dark and recently cut. His brown eyes were kind behind silver-framed glasses, and his mouth was gentle, which made Anna like him immediately. She’d always thought that the mouth offered the best insight into a man’s character. People learned to shutter their eyes but rarely made the same effort with their lips. Tense and pinched up, or twitching nervously, or turned down in permanent displeasure: All of these were bad signs.

“I’m just looking around,” Anna said.

“Okay. Let me know if you need anything,” he said. He picked up a case of wine and brought it out to the front, where he unloaded it onto the trestle table.

“Thanks,” Anna said, smiling briefly at him before turning to examine the bottles on the shelf. It was an interesting selection, not the standard chardonnays and merlots from the same megawineries you could find in every grocery store.

And then a silver label emblazoned with the black silhouette of an owl caught her eye. Was that…? Could it possibly be? Anna looked closer. It was! A 2003 Snowy Owl pinot noir!

“You have good taste,” the man said, noticing what she was looking at.

“I just read an article about this wine in last month’s
Wine Spectator
,” Anna exclaimed. “The reviewer was raving about it. Said it was one of the top wines of the year.”

“That’s right,” he said, looking impressed. “I was lucky to get a case of it. It’s been in such high demand since the article came out.”

“I’m so glad you opened up. Orange Cove’s really needed a store like this,” Anna said. “How long have you been open?”

“One month,” he said proudly.

Anna had originally estimated that the man was in his forties; now she readjusted it. Between thirty-five and forty, she thought. He was wearing a blue shirt and khaki pants, both crisply pressed, although the shirt was open at the neck and the sleeves were rolled up. He looked like the sort of guy who’d be an architect or lawyer, and she found herself wondering how he’d come to work in a wine-shop.

But she’d been watching him too intently for too long, and she suddenly realized he was looking back at her, his expression puzzled.

Oh, no
, she thought.
He probably thinks I’m coming on to him. Or, worse, that I have some sort of disorder where I stare at people for inappropriate lengths of time.
Like Phillip who used to write obits for the paper, and who never seemed to blink when he spoke to you.

Suddenly, with rising panic, she wasn’t so sure that a staring disorder would be worse. After all, what was worse than being seen as a desperate, man-crazy, lonely divorcée? That was far more pathetic than having a medical disorder that you couldn’t even help.

So Anna did what she always did when she was nervous: She began to interrogate the man. Which, she realized, was probably not the best way to convince him that she wasn’t stalking him.

“Is this your store?” she asked, although she was fairly sure she already knew the answer from the proprietary way he was surveying the stock.

“Yes, it is.” He smiled again. “I was an investment banker in my previous life.”

Aha! I was right
, Anna thought.
He’s the sort of guy who looks naked without a tie on.

“Why did you change careers?”

“Um…well, this was always my dream, I guess,” he said, with a self-conscious shrug, as though he was embarrassed to be talking about his dreams with a stranger.

“Really? That’s interesting. Were you an investment banker here in Orange Cove?” Anna asked.

“No. Palm Beach,” he said. His voice was still friendly, but his brow was crinkled quizzically.

Stop interrogating him
, Anna told herself firmly.

“Oh,” she said. And as she forced herself to squelch her next question—
Why did you open your shop here, instead of in Palm Beach?
—an awkward silence spun between them. Anna waited a few beats, until she couldn’t stand the silence any longer.

“So why’d you open your shop here? Instead of down in Palm Beach, I mean?” she asked. Then quickly she added, “I’m sorry, you don’t have to answer that. You can just ignore me if you want.”

“That’s okay,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t mind. I opened it up here because I thought there was a market for an upscale wine store in this town, and not a lot of competition, whereas the market in Palm Beach is already pretty tight. Glutted, even. Plus it costs a lot less to open a business up here…although that’s probably way more detail than you wanted,” he finished dryly. “I did warn you that I was in finance before this.”