Mommy Tracked (34 page)

“Are you going to press charges against my wife?” James asked.

“No, we’re not,” Mona Stanwick said. “The value of the item you took was rather insubstantial, under fifty dollars, so we’re going to let you go with a warning, Mrs. Truman. This time. I can promise you that if it happens again, we won’t be so forgiving,” the security guard said, arching her eyebrows for emphasis.

“Thank you,” Chloe breathed, so overcome with gratitude, she was surprised she was able to speak at all. “Thank you so much.”

“All right,” Mona Stanwick said. She nodded at the door. “You’re free to go.”

Chloe staggered out of the door with James following behind her, pushing William’s stroller. Chloe felt woodenly self-conscious as she walked through the store toward the exit.
Are the salesclerks looking at me? Does everyone know?
For a moment Chloe faltered and had to reach out and grab on to a rounder of women’s sale jackets to steady herself.

But then James caught up with her and took her hand in his, which gave Chloe the courage to start moving forward again, putting one foot in front of the other.

It wasn’t until they were outside, in the warm stillness of the afternoon, that Chloe was finally able to speak.

“Thank you,” she said, turning to face him.

“For what?”

“For coming down here.”

“Of course I came. You know I would.” James frowned suddenly. “Don’t you?”

“Yes—well…” Chloe hesitated. “I wasn’t sure you’d want to, after…after everything that’s happened between us.”

“Chloe.” James touched her arm lightly. “You’re my wife. You’re my
family
.”

“But it’s all been so…so
awful
lately.”

James nodded. “You were angry. And rightfully so.”

“But we never fight. We never have before,” Chloe said.

“Maybe we should. Maybe if we actually did, we could work out some of our problems and we wouldn’t get to this point—me living in a trailer in the driveway, you stealing bracelets at Saks. And you were right about everything you said that day. About how I need to step up and be a better dad. Maybe it took you shouting it at me for me to finally hear it. I’m so sorry.”

The relief that rushed through her took Chloe’s breath away. So he had heard her. For once he’d really listened to her.

And yet Chloe hesitated. “But how do I know that things won’t go back to the way they were before? With you off golfing every weekend and me never getting a break from taking care of Wills?”

“They won’t. I won’t.” James smiled wryly. “I’ve learned my lesson. Learned what it’s like to live without my family. I don’t want to ever go through that again.”

“I don’t either,” Chloe said. “And I’m sorry too.”

“You don’t have anything to be sorry for. I’m the jackass here.”

“Well, I’m the one who just got caught shoplifting,” Chloe said, shrugging. She stared down at her feet. “It isn’t exactly something I’m proud of.”

“Why did you do it?” James asked.

“I’m not sure, really.”

James fell silent, and Chloe didn’t have the nerve to look back up at him. Instead, she stared down at William’s sweet round face, still slack with sleep.

How could I have done this when William was with me?
she wondered, and a fresh wave of horror washed over her. What if she’d been arrested? What if they’d taken him away from her? And what if she hadn’t been able to get hold of James? Where would they have put William? It was too awful to consider.

Whatever I have to do to get control of this, I’ll do
, Chloe thought.
I have too much to lose to ever take a chance like this again.

“It’s over. I won’t ever do it again,” Chloe promised. She’d made the promise to herself in the past, but this time she meant it. Saying it out loud, saying it to someone else, made it more than a promise. It was now an oath. “But I think I’ll need help. Maybe I should try talking to someone, like a therapist.”

“I think that might be a good idea. Maybe we should go together and talk about some of the problems we’ve been having.”

“You’d do that for me?”

“Chloe.” When James looked down at her, his eyes were soft. “I’d do anything for you. You and William are my family. I love you.”

“Oh,” Chloe said. “I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t know I loved you?”

“No, I knew you loved me, it’s just…” But Chloe stopped. It was just that she always thought she was the one who loved more. There was always one person in a relationship who did. But maybe she’d been wrong about that. Maybe both people could love equally. Or maybe they could take turns being the one to love more. She looked at James, suddenly feeling shy with him.

“What are you doing now?” Chloe asked.

He shook his head. “Nothing. I thought I was going to take Wills home, so I took the rest of the afternoon off.”

“Do you want to go home and talk?”

James looked at her for a long moment and then reached up to brush a stray curl back from her forehead.

“More than anything,” he finally said.

“Good,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

twenty

Anna

A
nna hadn’t wanted
to fight with her mother. But sometimes the fight just found you. Or at least that’s how Anna consoled herself when she was in a philosophic frame of mind.

The argument had come about when her mom began to question Anna about her relationship—or lack thereof—with Noah.

“When are you going to see Noah with the sexy smile again?” Margo asked.

“First of all, it completely weirds me out when you refer to a man I’ve dated as sexy. Second, you do remember the part about him having four ex-fiancées, right? And third, I’m not going to see him again,” Anna retorted, trying to ignore the way her stomach felt like it was falling out of her body whenever she thought about Noah.

“Four fiancées.” Margo waved her hand dismissively. “It’s not like he’s had four
wives
, for goodness sake.”

“It’s not much better,” Anna muttered.

“Why aren’t you going to see him again? Has he called you?”

“No, but that was my choice. I told him not to.”

“Why the hell would you do something stupid like that?” Margo had asked, her voice sharp.

“Mom, shhh,” Anna said, giving her a pointed look and then nodding in Charlie’s direction.

They’d taken Charlie out to the Orange Cove Grill for dinner and ordered cheeseburgers, fries, and chocolate shakes all around. Anna didn’t want to get into her nonrelationship with Noah in front of Charlie, even if he (a) was only two, (b) hadn’t yet mastered the English language, and (c) was too busy pushing packets of sugar around the table, pretending they were trains, to pay any attention to what Anna and Margo were talking about.

“Choo choo,” Charlie said happily.

Just before her mother had started in, Anna was mulling over an idea for an article:
The Best Cheeseburger in Orange Cove.
The Orange Cove Grill—an overly grand name for what amounted to little more than a burger shack—would top the list. Despite the humble surroundings, the cheeseburgers there were excellent, dressed in dill relish and homemade mayonnaise and served with thick steak fries made from scratch. Delicious. Anna had been savoring her burger, right up to the moment that Margo—who was incapable of letting anything go—had to go and ruin dinner by bringing up Noah.

“Men like Noah don’t come around every day. You know, you won’t always be this young and pretty,” Margo continued mulishly.

“So what are you saying? That I should run out and find a man before my looks fade?” Anna asked incredulously.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

Anna rolled her eyes.
Give me strength
, she thought. “
Mother
. Stop it. My love life is none of your business.”

“What a ridiculous thing to say. Of course it’s my business.”

“No, it’s not,” Anna hissed. “And I’ve already told you, I don’t want to discuss this in public. Charlie, aren’t you hungry? Here, eat some french fries.”

But Charlie, who didn’t share his mother and Gigi’s taste for greasy junk food, just poked disdainfully at his cheeseburger. “Grapes?” he asked hopefully.

“Grapes? I give you french fries, and you ask for grapes?” Anna asked, with a laugh. “Clearly you are not my son.”

“You’re my daughter, and the mother of my grandson. Whom you date is certainly my business,” Margo continued.

Anna sighed, trying—and failing—to swallow her irritation. “Well, then, you have nothing to worry about. Because I have no intention of dating anyone right now or in the foreseeable future. In fact, well past the point when my looks start to go,” she said stubbornly.

Margo looked scandalized. “I didn’t raise you to be a quitter.”

“Quitter? I’m not quitting anything.” Anna set her half-eaten cheeseburger down, her appetite gone. “I’m simply choosing to content myself with my life as a single mother rather than risk exposing Charlie to the sort of men who—” Anna stopped, realizing a moment too late what she’d been about to say.

“Go ahead. You don’t want to expose Charlie to the sort of men I exposed you to,” Margo said, her voice suddenly cold.

Well, I’m in it now
, Anna thought. She sighed.

“Mom, for all that we joke about how off the wall some of those guys were, let’s face it: It’s dangerous to expose your child to strange men. You were taking an enormous risk bringing men that you barely even knew around me,” Anna said.

“I can’t believe you’d say that to me. I would never—
never
—have risked your safety,” Margo said, her voice now quavering.

“But you
did
.” Anna shrugged. “And luckily, nothing ever happened. But that’s just what it was: dumb luck.”

“It was
not
dumb luck. I would never have dated the sort of man who would have hurt you! I can’t believe you’d suggest that I would!”

“How would you know? Do you think pedophiles have a giant P tattooed on their foreheads?”

“Do not patronize me, Anna Catherine.”

“Mom—” Anna began.

“No parent is perfect, but I can tell you this: I did my best, my absolute level best, to keep you safe and happy when you were a child. God knows, your father wasn’t any help, and I had to do it all on my own, but nevertheless, you were always my top priority. And so for you to begrudge me a life of my own—”

“I don’t begrudge you anything,” Anna interrupted her. “All I said was that I wasn’t going to do the same. Aren’t I allowed to make my own choices, to live my life the way I think best?”

“No,” Margo said, suddenly strangely calm. “Not if you’re going to be so stupid about it.”

Anger pulsed in Anna. She struggled to keep her voice calm and level, so as not to upset Charlie. “I see. So you can question my judgment, but I’m not allowed to question yours?”

“That’s right,” Margo said. She buttered a slice of bread for Charlie, who grabbed it from her and jammed it into his mouth.

“Bread and butter,” Charlie chortled, as though he were a Dickensian orphan who’d been subsisting on little more than watered-down gruel.

“And it’s about time you stopped being so rigid,” Margo continued.

“What? How am I being rigid?” Anna yelped.

“Like with Brad. He made one little mistake, and
poof
, you divorced him, just like that,” Margo said, waving an airy hand.

“What do you mean,
poof
? He cheated on me! Besides, you hate Brad!”

“I don’t hate him. Well, okay, yes, I do. But that’s not the point,” her mother said. “The point is you never give anyone a second chance.”

Anna stood. “Mom, I’m sorry, but you’re out of line on this one,” she said wearily. “Come on, Charlie. You can eat your bread and butter in the car.”

Margo didn’t talk to Anna for two weeks, other than to exchange the necessary information about Charlie when Anna dropped him off or picked him up. Anna got so tired of the cold-shoulder treatment, she contemplated avoiding her mother altogether, but she didn’t have the heart to keep Charlie and his beloved Gigi apart.

The price of motherhood
, Anna thought, with a sigh.
I can’t even avoid the people I want to avoid.

Case in point: Brad. Once her temper had cooled, Anna decided to take Grace’s advice and didn’t file for a change in the custody arrangement. But Brad had been annoyingly eager to please ever since Charlie’s big escape. He’d even hired a company that specialized in childproofing to come over and make his house completely Charlie-proof, and he was so excited with the new child safety locks, door alarm, and oven lock that he’d insisted Anna come over to give her approval.

“And look over here!” Brad said, gesturing toward the living room with a flourish. It looked…empty. The leather couches were still there, but not much else.

“What did you do? Where did all of the furniture go?” Anna asked, frowning, as she tried to remember what Brad had kept in his living room. All she could remember was lots of glass and chrome.

“The woman from the childproofing company had me put all of it away. She said that Charlie could easily pull something down on himself or fall on it and cut himself,” Brad explained.

“Oh, right. You know,” Anna said, not able to resist, “I did mention that to you a while ago.”

“Did you? Really? I don’t remember.”

“Yes, I did. Really. Look, this is great, but you probably spent way too much money. You could have gotten most of this stuff from the Home Depot and installed it yourself.”

“I know. But I wanted to make sure it was done right and that I didn’t miss anything. Anyway, now you don’t have to worry about leaving Charlie here again. This place is like a fortress,” Brad said. Anna recognized his tone and the swagger that accompanied it: Brad was just selling again. But instead of selling pharmaceuticals, he was selling himself as a responsible father.

And the most irritating part of it was that it was working.

Anna looked over at Charlie. He was playing with the train table Brad had bought and set up for him in the corner of his living room, giving the whole space a different atmosphere—suddenly it was more Nickelodeon, less Playboy Mansion. She had to admit: Charlie looked happy here. He was confident and relaxed, basking in the glow of his father’s attention.

“All aboard!” Charlie called out happily, waving one of the trains in the air.

Anna turned back to Brad. “Okay. You’ve convinced me.”

“So does that mean…will you actually let me have Charlie over again?” Brad asked tentatively.

And as much as her reaction irritated her, Anna couldn’t help but feel touched that Brad was being so deferential. It was just so thoughtful and considerate—and so completely unlike him.

“Yes,” she finally said. “But I swear, Brad, if anything like that ever happens again…” Her voice trailed off, the implied threats unspoken.

Brad nodded solemnly. “I know you hate it when I promise something, but on this I really and truly do give you my word. I’ll keep him safe, Anna. He’s my son too. I love him more than anything in the world.”

Anna nodded in return, slowly, reluctantly. “Okay. But I’m going to hold you to that,” she said.

When Brad smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkled up. “I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

Despite herself, Anna couldn’t help smiling back at him.

“Come give Mama a kiss good-bye, Charlie,” she said. “Daddy’s going to take you swimming in the ocean! Won’t that be fun?”

Anna did what she always did when she was stressed out: She cooked. A lot. Since the argument with her mom, Anna had made a frittata, two peach pies, carrot cake, a big pot of gumbo, moussaka, lasagna, and a sour-cream chocolate chip cake. She felt like the very hungry caterpillar from Charlie’s picture book, only instead of eating her way through the week, she was cooking her way through it.

Finally, in despair, Anna turned to her fail-safe stress-buster: bread. She spent an entire Saturday morning mixing up two huge bowls full of dough, letting it rise, and then pummeling it, while Charlie and Potato romped underfoot.

Is Mom right? Am I too rigid?
she wondered, as she oiled her big stainless-steel mixing bowl, prepping it for another batch of bread dough.
Was I too quick to end things with Noah?

Noah
. Her heart squeezed. She missed him more than she’d thought possible. It had been so amazing to have something in her life other than Charlie, work, and her friends. She hadn’t even realized there was something missing until Noah came along. And now that he was gone, the hole was back. A Noah-shaped hole.

Yes, it was true he had a worrying history, what with his four ex-fiancées. But that was just it—Anna had believed Noah when he’d explained the scary-high number to her. She had. So if it wasn’t that…well, it wasn’t that. It was her. Her—and Charlie.

Anna looked down at her son, who was now lying on his stomach in the middle of the kitchen floor, happily scribbling in a coloring book with a thick orange crayon. Potato lay next to Charlie, in a nearly identical position, chewing on a blue crayon she gripped with her front paws.

What was it Grace said?
Anna wondered as she leaned over to take the crayon away from Potato.
Charlie will be fine. Kids are adaptable.
Was that true? Was she avoiding Noah not for Charlie’s sake but because she was frightened of being hurt?

This thought startled her with how true she immediately knew it to be. She
was
afraid. Afraid of being hurt, afraid of being left. Afraid of another Brad. Afraid of taking a chance and being let down again.

The doorbell rang, interrupting her thoughts.

Noah!
Anna thought, her heart lurching. Could it possibly be him? Had he somehow sensed that she was thinking about him?

Anna wiped her hands on a dish towel, stepped over Charlie, and hurried to the door, anticipation swelling inside her. She yanked the door open, and—

“Hi, honey,” her mom said.

Of course it wasn’t Noah, Anna thought. She didn’t know why she felt so disappointed. She’d told him to stay away, and he was respecting her decision.

“Gigi!” Charlie crowed happily, rushing forward and flinging his arms around his grandmother’s legs. Potato cavorted after him, yipping happily.

“Hi, Mom,” Anna said.

“I don’t want to fight anymore,” Margo announced. She was holding a plant with a big white bow wrapped around the pot, which she thrust at Anna. “It’s a peace lily. Peace?”

Anna laughed. She shifted the plant to her left arm and hugged her mom with her right, breathing in the familiar scent of her Joy perfume. Margo had worn it for as long as Anna could remember, and the fragrance clung to all of Anna’s childhood memories.

“Peace,” Anna agreed. “Come on in.”

“What smells so delicious?” Margo asked, shutting the front door behind her.

“I’m baking bread,” Anna said, leading Margo—who had picked Charlie up and perched him on one hip—back to the kitchen. “Would you like some coffee?”