Mommy Tracked (5 page)

Grace laughed. “I bet.”

“How was the meeting?” Louis asked. He began to scrub out a frying pan crusted with eggs from that morning.

“It was fun. The sexpert seemed to go over well. I don’t know how I’m going to top it next time.”

“I hope you took notes,” Louis said, grinning at her. “It’s been a while.”

It had been months, actually. The last time had been before Nat’s birth. Grace’s libido always went into a freefall while she was nursing. Still, Louis looked so hopeful that she didn’t shoot down the idea immediately.

“I might have picked up a tip or two,” Grace said, smiling back at him.

The phone rang, echoing across the kitchen. Grace picked up the cordless phone and clicked it on.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hey, it’s me.” It was Anna. From the slight delay on the line, Grace guessed that she was calling on her cell phone. “I just wanted to make sure everything was okay. You scooted off so quickly after the meeting.”

Grace cupped her hand over the phone and turned to Louis. “It’s Anna.”

“Say hi from me. I’m going to take a shower,” Louis said. He headed out of the kitchen.

Grace uncovered the phone. “Hey. Louis says hi. No, I’m fine.”

“Oh, good. Chloe was worried she’d offended you when she asked if you worked,” Anna said.

“Oh, no, not at all.” Grace felt a warm trickle of guilt. She should have made more of an effort with Chloe; it was always hard being the new one in a group. “It’s just…”

“What?”

Grace turned and stared out the back window overlooking the pool. The backyard was dark and still, lit only by the small lantern that hung over the back door. Grace reached over and turned on the pool lights, flooding the backyard with light, but then thought better of it and switched them back off. She didn’t want Mrs. Christie—the crotchety old bat who lived next door—to complain, as she unfailingly did whenever they used the pool at night.

“Well, sometimes I do feel like I’m the odd man out around you and Juliet. You both work, have careers. I’m just a housewife.”

“Will you stop with that ‘just a housewife’ crap? I wish I could have stayed home with Charlie, at least for a little while,” Anna said wistfully.

Grace snorted.

“I’m serious,” Anna insisted.

“Anna, you’re a restaurant critic. Which means you have the most amazing job in the world. It’s better than being a rock star. You don’t have to deal with tours, or groupies, or your band ending up in rehab,” Grace said.

“Yeah, well, I love my job, you know that. And I don’t think I could have stayed home full time; I would have been climbing the walls. But still. It’s hard sometimes leaving Charlie all day,” Anna said, and she sighed heavily. “It was especially tough at first when he was a baby. In fact, he was fine with it; I was the one who was a mess at the day-care drop-off.”

Grace thought of Natalie lying upstairs in her crib and tried to imagine leaving her every morning at a day-care center. Just the thought made her stomach roil.

“You’re right, I don’t think I could stand handing my baby over to a stranger like that,” she said.

The silence went on for a full three beats before Grace realized what she’d just said. She slapped her hand against her forehead.

“Oh, shit, Anna, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to sound like such a judgmental bitch.”

“That’s okay,” Anna said, although Grace could hear how hurt her friend sounded, and it made her want to beat herself to death with the telephone.

“Anna, really and truly—I envy you. I wish I had something outside the house and kids that was just mine.”

“Well, you know what I think.”

“Yeah, I know.” In her premom life, as distant as it seemed, Grace had worked as an interior designer. Well, she’d worked
for
an interior designer, anyway, although she had handled a few smaller projects on her own. As much as she loved design work, she’d mostly hated the job. Her boss had been such a demanding diva—she actually snapped her fingers at Grace when she wanted something handed to her—that Grace hadn’t been at all sorry to quit when Molly was born. Occasionally, Grace wondered aloud if she’d done the right thing giving up her career, and Anna had told her time and time again that she could pick up some part-time clients if she wanted.

But the truth was, Grace didn’t think it was as easy as all that. She hadn’t exactly been a huge success in her chosen field. In fact, being a mom was the only thing she knew she was good at. She was the fun mom, the one who played Barbies and dress-up and who baked batches of chocolate chip cookies with her kids and was there to apply
Dora the Explorer
Band-Aids to their boo-boos. She kept the art-project cupboard stocked with glitter and feathers and washable paints, regularly took her kids on outings to the zoo and the children’s museum, and custom-made all of their Halloween costumes (every year, Grace got desperate last-minute calls from other moms, begging to borrow the
Blue’s Clues
costume she’d sewn with fake blue fur or the green tulle fairy-princess outfit complete with gossamer wings).

“So Chloe seemed nice,” Grace said instead, changing the subject. “I think I’ll invite her to our pool party.”

“Yeah, she’s great. Very shy, but sweet. She and her husband just moved into the neighborhood a few months ago. I think they came here from Texas.”

“When is she due?”

“I think in about a month. She looks ready to pop.”

“I thought she looked adorable,” Grace said.

“Yeah. I never looked that cute when I was pregnant. I just swelled everywhere,” Anna said.

“Tell me about it. Only in my case, the swelling never went away. I still look like one of those dancing hippos from
Fantasia
. You know, the ones with the tutus?” Grace laughed—
this is what the fat friend is supposed to do
, she rationalized,
make funny, self-deprecating jokes
—but Anna didn’t join her.

“Don’t do that,” Anna protested. “Don’t run yourself down.”

“I was just kidding,” Grace said quickly.

“Hey, I have to go. I just pulled up to my mom’s house,” Anna said.

“Okay. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“Bye.”

Grace clicked the phone off and continued to stare out the back window into the darkness for a few minutes, mentally going over the day’s events. Her bit introducing Melinda had gone all right—at least, she hadn’t spoken too fast or stumbled over her words. She just wished she’d had more time to get ready. She’d spent the afternoon helping Molly learn about traditional Japanese tea parties for the next Foreign Friends Day at school. Then Hannah had insisted on getting her finger paints out, which had been fun but messy. And Natalie needed to be fed, so Grace had to give up trying to wipe the remaining smears of paint off Hannah’s hands and turn her attention to nursing the baby. By the time Louis got home from work, Grace hadn’t had time to do much more than pull a brush through her hair and swipe a lipstick on before she had to run out the door. The previous president of MCT, Tara McFadden—a thin, elegant woman whose straight ash-blonde hair was always frizz-free—had always looked so polished at the monthly meetings.

Pretty much the opposite of me
, Grace thought unhappily. When had she become so frumpy? It seemed like just yesterday that she was paging through fashion magazines, trying to imitate the styles she found there. Nowadays, she lived in sweats and sneakers.

She looked gloomily down at the now-rumpled linen pantsuit, which she’d already decided to burn, and saw a streak of powdered sugar smeared across the top. Gah. Had that been there earlier? Had she stood up in front of everyone covered in sugar?

Grace turned and popped the lid off the storage container and took out a brownie. Three bites later the brownie was gone, and she took out another one. And when that one was gone, she ate another. Twenty minutes later she looked down and saw that the storage container was empty. She blinked. Had she just eaten…How many brownies had been in there, anyway?

Revulsion surged up inside her, hot and fierce. The brownies felt heavy in her stomach, and suddenly Grace felt like she was going to be sick.

Thank God
, she thought.

She ran to the bathroom. After taking care to turn on the water, so Louis wouldn’t hear, she knelt down in front of the toilet and waited. But nothing happened. Grace panicked. She couldn’t allow her body to digest five thousand calories of sugar, butter, and chocolate. Finally, she did something she hadn’t done since she was in high school—she stuck three fingers down her throat until she began to gag, until her stomach cooperated and began to heave. She did it again, and again, and again, until there was nothing left to purge.

three

Juliet

J
uliet was already
awake when her alarm went off at five a.m., and she hit the buzzer before it woke Patrick. She always woke up a minute before the alarm went off and didn’t know why she even bothered to turn it on every night. Habit, probably. Habit, and the fear that the one time she didn’t set it would be the one morning she’d oversleep. And that would be a disaster. Juliet barely had enough time in the day as it was.

She slid out of bed, shucked off the oversize Tulane Law T-shirt she’d slept in, and pulled on her running clothes. Ten minutes later she was pounding down Ocean Street, the main avenue that ran from downtown Orange Cove to the public beaches on Pelican Island. Duran Duran played on her iPod, and Juliet matched her pace to the music.

It was still dark out, although the sky had the ethereal glow it got just before sunrise, changing so slowly from inky black to sorbet shades of pink and orange that it always took her by surprise when the morning suddenly dawned. She ran past the Dunkin’ Donuts, which was already lit up inside, and the oil-change place, which wasn’t. She sprinted by an assisted-living center for seniors, with its clusters of mod, seventies-built condos, and then past the fences of the few houses that backed against Ocean Street. And then she was running up the bridge that arched over the intracoastal river, connecting Orange Cove to the island. The wind was stronger at the top arch of the bridge and tasted sharply of salt. Juliet tucked her head down as she ran into it.

This was her favorite time of day, the one hour when there were no demands on her other than the physical ones she placed on herself. She didn’t have to think, or be anything for anyone. No one was asking her for the status of a case, or pushing her to stay late at the office, or putting her on a guilt trip for staying late at the office, or begging her to turn on the television so they could watch
Kim Possible
over their morning bowl of cornflakes.

And it was the only time when she wasn’t worrying. Worry had become Juliet’s default state. She worried about
everything
—about the twins, about work, about money. How they were going to swing all of the extras that were constantly cropping up—new tires for Patrick’s minivan, the roof repair they’d been putting off for months, the girls’ dance lessons—on top of the fixed monthly costs. The mortgage. School tuition. Her law-school loans.

She’d turn the rest of the day over to her worries. But not now. Now she just focused on her lungs expanding with the humid salt air, the way her leg muscles strained up the incline of the bridge, and the rhythmic pound of her heartbeat. Juliet ran two and a half miles, which took her just over the bridge, and then turned around and ran back home.

A little less than an hour after she left, she walked in the back door of her house, sweating but not winded. She tossed the morning paper on the kitchen counter, poured herself a cup of coffee, and took it into the office, where she settled down behind her desk and switched the computer screen on.

This was her routine, every day, even when it rained. She knew her friends—Grace, in particular—thought she was crazy to get up so early just to work out, but it kept Juliet sane, made her feel like she actually had a grip on her life.

And her friends would never know just how important that grip was to her.

Juliet opened up her e-mail and sipped the bitter coffee as the messages downloaded from her office account. There wasn’t much in her in-box; she’d checked it last night before going to bed. Mostly spam, and a note from a client asking for clarification on the documents Juliet needed from him to comply with a document request the plaintiffs in his case had made. At this, Juliet sighed. She’d already told the client, Peter Hamilton, what she needed—in explicit detail—three times. Hamilton was a nervous man, so distracted by the sexual-harassment lawsuit that had been filed against him that he needed constant hand-holding. He was her least favorite sort of client.

Juliet knew she wasn’t any good at being emotionally supportive. She lacked whatever gene it was that made people want to reach out to one another, to share feelings, to listen empathetically. It was why she’d gone into the law; no one expected an attorney to be warm and cuddly. Although sometimes she thought that maybe she’d have been better off if she’d become a doctor instead—a surgeon, maybe, where the patients would be unconscious when she saw them.

And then, with an electronic chime to announce its arrival, another e-mail popped up in her in-box. One that made Juliet sit up a little straighter, that made her pulse buzz and her heart give an excited lurch. It was from her boss, Alex Frost. Juliet clicked on it.

TO: COLE, JULIET [email protected]

FROM: FROST, ALEX [email protected]

RE: lunch

Juliet—Are you free for lunch today? We need to go over the status of the D.B. case. I’ll have Gail make a reservation for us at the Treehouse.

Alex

Lunch with Alex! And not just a sandwich in the conference room but an actual lunch out at one of the nicest restaurants in town.

Will it be just the two of us?
she wondered, enjoying the way the thrill fluttered through her.
It must be. No one else has worked on the dead-baby case. Well, no one other than Richard, but he’s only done a few motions here and there.

Juliet’s next thought was an uncharacteristically feminine one:
Oh, my God—what am I going to wear?

She got up abruptly and, carrying her coffee with her, headed up to the master bedroom. The bed was rumpled and unmade but empty. There was the sound of a toilet flushing in the attached bathroom, and then Patrick appeared in the bedroom doorway, wearing a white V-neck T-shirt and striped pajama pants and looking sleepy. His black curly hair was standing up in peaks, and there was a red sheet mark on his left cheek.

“Is that coffee for me?” he asked hopefully, yawning widely.

Juliet shook her head. “Not a chance,” she said, pulling her mug closer, as though he might try to fight her for it.

Patrick’s face fell, and he scratched his side. “How was your run?”

“Fine. Shouldn’t you get the girls up? They’re going to be late for school.”

Juliet stepped past Patrick and into their walk-in closet to appraise her wardrobe. She usually wore tailored pantsuits to work, but lunch with Alex Frost called for something…sexier. Juliet began pushing through her clothes, whipping one hanger over at a time. A tan Brooks Brothers pantsuit. A gray tropical-wool Brooks Brothers pantsuit. A navy-blue pinstriped Ann Taylor pantsuit. Another gray wool Brooks Brothers pantsuit.

Jesus
, Juliet thought.
When was the last time I bought girl clothes?

Masculine was usually her preferred look. Despite articles in the bar magazines about family-friendly law firms, flextime, and paternity leave, the law was still a male-dominated, old-school profession. The only chance a woman had to succeed was if she turned herself into a virtual man, at least during business hours.

She paused at the black strapless Nicole Miller dress she’d worn to a wedding two summers ago. It was sexy, in a tailored, minimalist sort of way.
Would it work if I wore it with a blazer? No, probably not
, she thought, and pushed the dress aside.

Just when she was about to give up and pull out her standard black pantsuit, she spotted the chocolate-brown skirt suit she’d bought at The Limited back when she was in law school, broke, needed something for interviews, and still thought that showing her legs off might benefit her professionally.

Perfect
, she thought. The skirt was short without being slutty, and the jacket nipped in at the waist. Suitable for work but not too masculine. And maybe, just maybe, Alex
would
notice her legs.

Juliet pulled out the suit, neatly hung on a wooden hanger, and retrieved a white oxford shirt that had been crisply pressed at the dry cleaner. She laid the suit and shirt out on the bed, then stripped out of her sweaty jogging clothes. Just as she was tossing her shorts in the clothes hamper, Patrick returned with a steaming mug of coffee. He took in her naked body, looking her up and down, and raised one eyebrow. He suddenly looked much more awake, and his eyes glittered with interest.

“Can you be late for work?” he asked suggestively.

“No,” Juliet said, walking into the bathroom. “Not today I can’t. Did you get the girls up?”

She didn’t wait for his answer. And fifteen minutes later, when she returned from her shower, wearing a fluffy white robe, her legs cleanly shaven and her hair freshly washed, Patrick was back in bed. Asleep.

Juliet closed her eyes briefly and tried to swallow back her irritation. How could he fall asleep? It was almost seven. She had to get ready for work and didn’t have time to get the twins off to school too. Was it really too much to expect Patrick to handle this on his own, without her nagging him every step of the way?

“Patrick!” she said sharply.

“I’m awake. I am.”

“Your eyes are closed.”

He opened one eye and looked at her blearily.

“It’s already seven,” Juliet said.

“Oh, crap. Is it really?”

“Yes. Really. How late were you up last night, anyway?” she asked. Patrick had still been watching a basketball game on television when she’d gone to bed. She hadn’t heard him come up.

“Midnight. Maybe a little later.” He stretched and scratched his chin. His beard was heavy, giving him that scruffy, unkempt look she’d found so sexy when they first started dating. His eyes started to shut again, and Juliet had to clamp down her jaw and count to five to keep herself from doing something drastic, like throwing a glass of cold water at him.

But just as she opened her mouth, ready to calmly but firmly tell him that if he didn’t get a move on they’d be late,
again
, there was knock at the door. Muffled giggles and whispers could be heard outside, and then in unison Emma and Izzy called out, “Little pigs, little pigs, let us come in!”

Patrick’s eyes were still shut, but he grinned. “Not by the hairs on our chinny chin chins,” he yelled back.

Juliet’s irritation started to fade. It was hard to stay annoyed in the face of such silliness. And the twins excelled at being silly. It shimmered from them, infusing everyone they came in contact with. It was impossible to look at their identical faces, at the creamy skin, dancing blue eyes, snub little noses, and not grin.

“Then we’ll huff, and we’ll puff, and we’ll blow your house in!” the twins shrieked.

The door swung open and the girls came running in, their arms waving and their long dark hair streaming behind them. They threw themselves on the bed, landing squarely on Patrick’s chest and stomach, and began tickling him.

“Argh!” Patrick cried out, laughing and grunting at the same time. He curled up to protect his testicles from getting kicked. “Enough! You win!”

But the girls weren’t inclined to grant their prisoner mercy. Giggling, they tussled with their father, elbows flying, bare little feet waving in the air.

“Help!” Patrick yelled to Juliet.

But she just shook her head and grinned at him. “You’re on your own. It serves you right for going back to bed.”

Patrick let out a yelp as Izzy tickled him under his armpit—his most ticklish spot, Juliet knew—and then the three of them rolled over onto Juliet’s side of the bed, right onto her neatly laid-out suit.

“Stop!” Juliet cried, her amusement drying up. “You’re going to wrinkle my clothes!”

She dashed forward to grab the suit, but it was too late. The great huddle of father and daughters was rolling around, oblivious to Juliet’s protests. Arms and knees were akimbo, three pairs of feet, one large and two small, were trampling the suit and shirt. By the time Juliet pulled the garments off the bed, the shirt was crumpled and the skirt had an enormous crease over it. The jacket had mostly escaped, although it did look as though it could use a touch of ironing to freshen it up. Juliet glanced at the clock.
Shit
. She was already late and didn’t have time to iron. Anger flared up inside her, pressing hotly in her chest.

Patrick and the girls were still rolling around, giggling like mad things.

“Hey,” Juliet said tightly.

“No fair tickling Daddy!” Patrick yelped. The twins shrieked with glee and redoubled their efforts.

“Hey!” Juliet said again, louder than she meant to. Her voice was like a whip cracking across the room. All antics immediately ceased, and her husband and daughters looked at her, identical expressions of surprise on their faces.

“Why are you yelling?” Patrick asked her.

“I’m not yelling. I was speaking loudly to get your attention. Girls, get off Daddy and go get dressed. You’re going to be late for school,” Juliet said, fighting to keep her voice calm and upbeat. She hated playing the heavy, hated that the girls would inevitably see them as Fun Daddy and Mean Mommy.

“Okay, Mommy,” the girls chorused. They tumbled out of the room, still giggling and whispering to each other.

Patrick was looking at her as though she were the Bitch Queen from Hell.

“What?” she asked defensively.

“You just seem a little pointy this morning.”

“Look at my suit,” Juliet said irritably. She held up the wrinkled garments. “And I don’t have time to iron. I’m going to have to find something else to wear.”

“I’ll iron it for you,” Patrick said. He swung his legs off the bed and stood up. “Here, give them to me.”

Juliet felt a wash of guilt. Even if she had no intention of actually cheating on her husband, she was wearing the suit for Alex’s benefit.

“No, I’ll do it,” Juliet said, clutching the suit to her chest when Patrick reached for it.