Odd Mom Out (14 page)

We’ve reached her classroom door, and with a huge gulp Eva smoothes her short brown skirt over her long legs and opens the door. We go in.

Feeling oddly out of place (what kind of mom goes to school on the very first day?), I walk with Eva to the back of the room, where Mrs. Shipley is receiving boxes of tissues and zipper plastic gallon-size bags.

I introduce myself briefly to Mrs. Shipley, tell her I’ve never been a room parent before but I’d love to help out, do whatever I could do, and Mrs. Shipley thanks me, asks me to leave my name and contact info, and then that’s that. I give Eva a quick kiss and go.

As I step outside, I walk straight into Jemma and Taylor Young.

“Well, hello,” Taylor says brightly, her straight golden hair brushing her shoulders. “You’re just the person I was looking for!”

“I am?” I’m not sure why I’m so uneasy around women like Taylor Young, women who always look immaculate, women with hair the color of honey who wear pearls at their throats and loafers on their feet.

Maybe it’s because they’re so put together.

Or maybe it’s because I’m afraid they’ll judge me.

“An invite to our annual back-to-school brunch,” Taylor explains, extracting a sheet of paper from her purse. “It’s thirty-five dollars and a must-do. All the moms attend—as well as a couple of the more modern stay-at-home dads. Jill makes fabulous mimosas, and we just have a ball. It’s Thursday at nine-thirty. Hope to see you there.”

It’s not until after she rushes off—she’s just spotted a mom she has to talk to—that I remember Eva’s watch.

In the studio at my desk, I study the invitation.

Brunch at the Belosis!

Champagne, great food, and great conversation.

Catch up with all your friends and hear the exciting news about what’s happening at Points Elementary this year!

I don’t know the Belosi family. But then I don’t know most of the families here, unlike our neighborhood preschool in TriBeCa. There, I knew almost everyone at least by sight, if not by name. Clearly, I’ve played the lone wolf card in Bellevue a little too long.

What the hell, I’ll go to the brunch. What’s the worst thing that could happen? I get food poisoning and die?

I reach for the phone, call the number at the bottom of the invitation—get voice mail, thank God—and RSVP that I will be coming and that I’ll pop a check in today’s mail.

Hanging up, I feel good about myself. I feel fantastic. In fact, I think I’m on my way to Mother of the Year.

Five hours later, I’m still at my desk and so immersed in my work that I’ve lost complete track of time.

At Z Design, we’re in the final stages of putting together the newest proposal for Jet City Coffee, a regional coffee company in the Pacific Northwest. Keller & Klein handled their account two years ago (which means I handled the account), but when Keller & Klein was bought out and the Seattle office closed, Jet City Coffee took their business to another Seattle ad group with disappointing results, so they’re back with me now and I want them happy.

We’re known at Z Design for our quirky designs as well as what we like to call “retro reborn,” where we take a style popular in one time period and reintroduce it with a twist, like the new series for Jet City.

The cheeky 1940s- and 1950s-inspired ads (think Ward and June Cleaver, smiling housewives with aprons, retro Maytag washers, fin-tail Cadillacs) will appear in the big Pacific Northwest newspapers—Portland, Seattle, Olympia, Boise—as well as the regional lifestyle magazines with the biggest circulations. The graphics in these ads are strong, and the colors are bold reds, blues, golds, and bronzes.

I’m still playing with one of the final mock-ups when Eva trudges into the studio, her book bag slung carelessly over her shoulder.

“Hi, Mom. Hi, Chris, Allie, Robert,” she says, greeting my team with a heavy sigh before sinking in a heap at my feet.

This isn’t the nervous but buoyant Eva I dropped off at school this morning. “What’s wrong?” I ask, pushing back from my desk and leaning over to tug on her shoe.

Eva lies back on the ground, closes her eyes. “Nothing.”

“First day didn’t go well?”

She stretches her arms over her head. “No. It’s fine. If you like—” She breaks off, shoulders rising and falling in an evocative shrug. “Being laughed at.”

“You were not,” I say.

She opens her eyes and looks at me. “I had no one to eat lunch with, so the duty made me eat with the boys, and then the girls all laughed and started saying I’m in love with one of them.”

“Are any of the boys cute?”

“No. They’re the grossest guys in fourth grade. They were doing weird things with their food and then talked with their mouths open just to make everyone sick.”

“It sounds like it worked.”

“Yeah, too well.” She slides her arms slowly across the floor, reminding me of a snow angel on a Pergo floor.

I reach for the invitation now buried on my desk. “Well, I have something to tell you.”

“What?” She rolls up, sits cross-legged.

I wave the invitation in front of her before letting it fall into her hands. “I’m going to the back-to-school brunch at the Belosis’ on Thursday.”

“You’re not!” she exclaims, doing an amazing Lindsay Lohan imitation.

“I am.”

“Do you know who the Belosis are? Only the richest family in the whole school.”

I actually think there are other families that are probably richer, but I don’t correct her.

“Devanne’s dad has his own jet,” she continues excitedly, “and when they go on vacation they use his jet, and Jemma’s gone with Devanne in the jet and says it’s so cool. There are no airport security lines and no waiting to board. You just go to this terminal near Boeing Field and get on. How cool is that?”

“That’s pretty cool.”

“I want to go on the jet. I want to go to Aspen or Vail or wherever it is they go for Christmas.”

“I thought everybody went to Hawaii for Christmas,” I tease her.

She sticks out her tongue at me, knowing exactly what I’m referring to. “Well, lots of people do, but the rest go skiing. You know, Whistler or Sun Valley. Aspen. Jackson Hole.”

In New York, Eva had no idea this world of wealth even existed, and now she sounds like a writer for
Vanity Fair
or
Travel & Leisure.

“Can we do that sometime? Go with everybody to a ski resort?”

That doesn’t sound fun at all to me, but I smile, try to appear enthused. “Maybe.”

Behind Eva, Robert and Chris are trying to keep a straight face. The team has heard everything by now, and it’s one of the negatives of working from a home office. We sometimes have too little separation between the personal and professional lives.

Our office, “the studio,” is really a guesthouse I converted into a work space. It was a savage remodel to make it work where I gutted the guesthouse’s kitchen, knocked holes in all the walls, and added skylights to the ceiling, but I now have what I need: a bright, white, light-filled professional space with large windows that overlook the garden.

Eva grabs her backpack. “Well, I’m going to get started on my homework. I’ve got a lot to do. Mrs. Shipley has already assigned an essay we’re supposed to turn in tomorrow.”

She blows kisses to everyone and breezes out.

“Isn’t she the little drama queen,” Chris says, bursting into laughter as soon as Eva’s gone.

“She’s not a drama queen,” Allie defends. “She’s just a girl. If you think she’s intense now, wait until her teens.”

Like that’s not scary at all.

I take a break an hour later and find Eva working diligently at the kitchen table. She’s not writing her essay, though, she’s doing math problems.

“How’s it going?” I ask, coming behind her to drop a kiss on the top of her head.

“Okay. But I hate math. I really do.”

“You’re great at math.”

“I don’t know. Not anymore.” She hesitates. “I think this year I might need help. You know, get some tutoring.”

Tutoring?
Eva
?

I pull out a chair at the table and sit down. “What’s going on?”

“School can be hard, Mom. I don’t get everything, and it’s not a big deal to get tutored. Lots of people I know do.”

“Like . . . Jemma?”

She nods, unaware that she’s just revealed her hand. “Jemma and Paige and maybe even Devanne, although Devanne’s pretty smart. She does really well in most subjects.”

“Eva, there’s no shame in being bright.”

“I know.” But from her swift shrug, I don’t think she knows, and I don’t think she believes it. “Oh.” Eva reaches into her backpack, pulls out a big brown envelope stuffed with papers, and pushes it across the table. “You’ve got to read these and send some back signed tomorrow.”

More paperwork to fill out. Tons of paperwork. Yuck. Sometimes I feel as though school is more work for the parents than it is for the kids. “So what’s your essay about?”

“It’s the usual back-to-school getting-to-know-you stuff.” She flips her carefully organized binder open to the first page, where she has a bright orange, pink, purple, and lime green assignment calendar, and reads aloud her notes. “Five-paragraph minimum. Introductory paragraph. Paragraph about each member of the family—” She breaks off, looks at me. “Guess I’ll have to write about my sperm donor father.”

Ah. I know where she’s going with this, but I don’t rise to the bait. “Tell her we have a small family, or write about why we moved to Washington so we could be closer to Grandma and Grandpa.”

“So I
shouldn’t
tell her that I don’t have a father?”

“You could tell her whatever you want to tell her. It’s your essay.”

“It’s okay then to tell her my mom ordered sperm off the Internet and had it sent to a clinic in New York where they used a cat catheter to transfer the sperm into your—”

“
Eva.
”

She looks at me innocently. “What?”

When Eva was a baby, I dreamed of all the warm, wonderful mother-daughter things we’d do together. Shopping, reading books together, going to the movies, having lunch, trips to the theater to see good plays and the annual holiday ballet,
The Nutcracker.

I never thought about these sparky little mother-daughter talks where daughter makes snide comments to mom. I should have. I specialized in snarky with my mom.

And it hits me all over again that it’s true what they always said, about payback being a bitch.

Which means I’m going to be suffering for a long, long time.

“What, Mom?” she repeats, a little less cocky than before.

“Do you want to write about sperm donors and sperm banks for your fourth-grade essay? Is that what you want to read out loud to the class?”

I don’t even wait for her to answer. “If so, then go right ahead. Educate your classmates. Mention that most women who do this are like me, professional women with the resources to support a family. Mention that the adoption rules are more restrictive for single women than for gay couples. Mention that using a sperm donor is faster, and cheaper, than adoption as well. And while you’re at it, mention that, yes, I short-circuited the traditional method of procreation, but I wasn’t going to wait for Mr. Right. I don’t believe in Mr. Right. I believe in you.

“And that,” I conclude, standing, “should give you at least five paragraphs.”

Eva stares up at me, eyes wide and, I hope, suitably impressed. “Okay,” she says with a little cough. “I will.”

“Good. And then we’ll go to Grandma’s when your essay’s done.”

I head back to the studio via the garage, and as I pass my truck, I spot my bike parked in the far corner, covered with an old paint-splattered dropcloth.

My bike.

It’s been so long since I rode it. So long since I’ve even looked at it.

I open the second garage door bay and let the light stream in. There aren’t any cobwebs in the garage, I keep it too clean for that, but there is a neglected feel in that half of the garage. Nothing’s there but the bike, and that’s hidden.

On an impulse, I strip away the dropcloth and let it fall to the ground. Dust puffs, and the sun catches the particles.

I stand back and admire my bike. It’s a big black muscle bike, far from ladylike, and when I sit on it I feel strong, female, powerful.

In the sunlight, I can see fingerprints on the chrome and more smudges on the black-painted gas tank. Using the hem of my cotton T-shirt, I buff the fingerprints out of the chrome and paint.

Still wiping off smudges, I swing my leg over the seat and sit down. I put my hands on the handlebars. It feels good just to be sitting on the bike again.

Eva appears around the garage door. “Allie’s looking for you.”

“Tell her I’ll be there in a minute.”

“What are you doing?”

“Just checking out my bike.”

“You’re not going to go for a ride, are you?”

“No.” But with my feet on the ground, I stand straight, balance the bike, feeling the weight of it, the heaviness and size. It’s like a very old friend.