Odd Mom Out (41 page)

“I wish I had more,” I say as he finishes off the chow mein and spicy beef. “I should have realized you’d be hungry.”

“It’s okay.” He leans over and kisses me, tasting like Mongolian beef. “I’m just glad to see you.”

Looking into his face and those light blue eyes that I always find so reassuring, I reach up to touch his cheek, and a little spark goes through me. “I could make you something. I’ve got pork chops and ground beef—”

“I’m not that hungry. I’d rather just be with you.”

We sit on the couch and find a cable movie to watch, but halfway through the movie I notice Luke’s fallen asleep. I go to cover him with a fleecy blanket I took from the linen closet, but Luke catches my hand and tugs me back onto the sofa again. “Come here,” he growls, pulling me closer.

I settle in his arms. He’s warm. Hard. Muscles everywhere. I sigh appreciatively. “I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you, too,” he answers, moving my hair off to the side to kiss my neck.

Shivery sensations race up and down my spine. “And I’ve missed that, too,” I breathe unsteadily.

“So I’m not just a one-night stand?” he asks, his voice humming against my skin.

I turn around on the couch to face him and place one hand on his chest. I can feel his heart. His heart beats steady and strong. “You’re
not
a one-night stand.”

His hands slide from my hair to my face. He pushes one long strand back behind my right ear and then another strand behind my left, and all the while he’s studying my face. Then his lashes lower, and I can tell he’s interested only in my mouth now.

Luke pulls me forward onto his lap, so that I feel the heat in his jeans, the rigid length of him, and the sinewy strength of his thighs. He’s aroused, but then so am I.

I take his face in my hands and kiss him, my thumbs stroking across his amazing cheekbones and then down the hollows between cheekbone and jaw. He feels so good. He feels so right.

I love kissing him. I love being this close with him. “You’re not,” I repeat, sitting up to look down at him, “a one-night stand.”

A lazy heat burns in his blue eyes, and color darkens his skin. “Then what am I?” he asks, touching my mouth with his finger.

My lips part, and I touch the tip of my tongue to his finger. The blue light in his eyes burns hotter, brighter.

“Mine,” I whisper wickedly, flicking my tongue across his finger again. “You’re mine.”

Suddenly the door to Eva’s room opens and the girls’ voices sound in the hall. Luke immediately lifts me off his lap and back onto the couch. He picks up a magazine, and I reach for my computer. The girls run toward us with their pillows and sleeping bags.

“Can we watch a movie in here with you?” Eva asks.

I look at Luke. His eyes flash at me.

“Of course,” I answer.

Luke leaves partway through the movie. I walk him out onto the front porch. The rain is still coming down, and it’s cold. I shiver in just my T-shirt. After shutting the door, Luke turns me so that my back is against the house, and as he kisses me, he leans against me, one of his knees between mine.

I can feel his thighs, his hips, his chest, and I hold on to him, my hands clasping the thick cut of his bicep.

“We need more time together,” he says, his voice hoarse.

“I know.”

“How?” he demands.

“I don’t know.”

“Not good enough.”

I reach up, touch his cheekbone. “We’ll find a way.”

But we don’t find a way, at least not anytime soon. The grueling pace continues, but at last it’s now late November and we’re facing Thanksgiving weekend.

After too many hours on airplanes and in hotels, in taxis and in conference rooms, I’ve promised Eva it’ll be a traditional Thanksgiving Day with Grandma and Grandpa and then a girls-only weekend.

“Well, you can invite Luke over,” Eva says. “He’s okay. I just don’t want you to do e-mail and work on your computer.”

“I promise.”

“And no conference calls.”

“Scout’s honor,” I vow again.

Eva looks at me suspiciously. “You were never a Girl Scout.”

“No, I was. For one week. And then they kicked me out.”

“Mom!” She shrieks with laughter, and I just smile with her.

I fully intend to keep my promise to Eva, too. There will be no business phone calls. No e-mail. No faxing. No photocopying. It’s just going to be mother-daughter stuff, girl stuff. Bake cookies and paint our toenails and shop and go see the newest Amanda Bynes movie.

But then Thanksgiving Day arrives and my cell phone and house phone won’t stop ringing.

I’m in the middle of making gravy and trying to mash potatoes, and all I can hear is the telephone ringing, ringing, ringing.

“Eva,” I finally shout, “can you please answer that for me?”

“But what if it’s work?” she answers, emerging from the pantry, where she’s been looking for the perfect set of candle holders for the table.

“It’s Thanksgiving. Can’t be work.”

I’m wrong. It is work. I turn down the heat beneath the gravy, turn off the mixer, pray the potatoes won’t get cold, and go outside to take this call. “What do you mean they’re calling everyone into the office? It’s Thanksgiving weekend.”

“The meeting’s not until Saturday.” It’s Eric, the VP of sales with Trident. “You’ll still have tomorrow off.”

“I’d have to fly out first thing tomorrow to make the meeting.”

“That’s okay.”

I close my eyes and hold my breath, feeling nothing, nothing, because if I stay very calm, this will be a non-issue. “No, it’s not okay. It’s Thanksgiving weekend.”

“It’ll just be a quick turnaround. Out, meeting, home again. No one will notice.”

Not notice? Who is he kidding? “Eric. There’s no way.”

He pauses, and then when he speaks his voice is flinty. “Your attendance is required. Everyone on the team must be there.”

“On a
Saturday.
” My voice drips venom. “Thanksgiving weekend.”

“Sucks, I know.”

“Eric, I have a daughter—”

“We all do.”

You all have another parent at home, too. You all have someone else to be there to comfort your son or daughter. I totally get the whole stay-at-home mother or father thing. One person works, the other stays home so kids aren’t alone. Got it.

But that’s not what I get.

It’s not the path I took, and right now I don’t know how to swallow that when I’m asked to make sacrifices, especially when it’s Eva being sacrificed.

I go back inside. Turn the heat up under the gravy. Finish the potatoes, even though they’re lumpy. It’s okay, Marta, everything’s going to be fine.

But as I dish up the stuffing and sweet potatoes, I glance at Eva, who is putting the finishing touches on our Thanksgiving table, and my heart just falls. I’m letting Eva down again.

The turbulence during the flight from Seattle to New York has us buckled into our seats for three of the four and a half hours.

The cab ride from the airport to the hotel isn’t much better.

The taxi driver has adjusted his rearview mirror so he can look at me while he drives, and he spends more time staring at me than out the window at the road.

I just want to get to my hotel. Alive.

The Saturday meeting goes well enough. Although I still don’t know why I had to be there, as it had very little to do with anything I’m doing for them.

After the meeting I hop on a late night flight back and get home that night, pay the sitter, someone Lori Hunter recommended, and then fall exhausted into bed.

The morning after I’ve returned from New York, Eva and I meet my parents at the club for Sunday brunch, and she watches the families around us with more wistfulness than usual.

On the way home from the club, she turns to me. “Mom, do you ever think I’ll have a brother or sister?”

I tighten my grip on the steering wheel. “I don’t know, Eva. I really don’t know.”

“But if you marry Luke, you and Luke will want a baby, right?”

Oh God. What a question. If I married Luke. If Luke married me. If we even see each other enough to get that far. . . .

“I don’t know if Luke and I will ever be that serious,” I finally answer.

“But you like him. You’ve kissed him.”

“Eva!”

She gives me a long-suffering look. “Relax, Mom. It’s okay to like a man. Especially since you aren’t a lesbian.”

That night after Eva’s gone to bed, I work for a few hours in the studio before turning in. On the way to my room I stop at her door, open it, and peek in.

She’s curled up in a little ball, her baby blanket nestled in her hand.

She’s had that blanket since she was born. It used to be pink. It’s somewhere between gray and grungy now.

I go to her bed and adjust the comforter to make sure she’s covered. Just looking at her makes my heart hurt. I used to think I could never love anyone as much as I love her, but what I’m finding is that what I feel for Eva is so different from what I feel for Luke.

Eva’s my baby. Luke’s . . . my man.

And yet my baby won’t be my baby forever.

One day, this gorgeous, divine human being will leave me.

Sometimes it blows my mind. Imagine falling in love with a man, an amazing handsome loving man who makes you feel like the best thing in the world, who gives your day purpose,
hope,
and yet you know from day one of meeting him that you’ll have only eighteen years with him.

One day, about eighteen years after meeting him, falling in love with him, he’ll go. Move on. Do whatever it is he was meant to do.

And this is my job as a woman, as a mom, to love her, prepare her, and then, once she’s ready, push her out of the nest and make her fly.

Heart in my throat, I lean over and kiss her cheek. She’s so warm, her skin’s soft, and in sleep she’s my baby again.

I watch her for another moment and then go to my room, the master bedroom, the place that says I’m the adult here. I’m a woman. And this woman very much wishes a certain man were here to spend the night with her.

December arrives and I’m scheduled to head back to New York. This time Jill’s mom, Lori, invites Eva to stay with them the four days I’m to be gone. “Are you sure?” I ask Lori. “That’s a long time to have to watch her.”

“When you have three kids, what’s one more?” she answers with a laugh.

Eva isn’t as sad about me leaving now that she’ll be staying at the Hunters’. I, on the other hand, take the separation much harder.

In my hotel room, I sit with my laptop and work on my notes for the Trident meeting in the morning. It’s nearly two New York time, but that’s only eleven West Coast time, so I force myself on.

Yet as I type, inputting changes into the graphs and spreadsheets, I can barely concentrate.

I don’t want to be here.

I want to be home.

I want to be with my daughter.

It’s reached the point that it’s too much. I’m so tired of saying good-bye to her. So tired of not having enough time with her. The experts are wrong when they say it’s not about quantity time, it’s about quality, because I need the quantity, too. I need to be with her more. I literally, physically, miss her.

My body, arms, heart—all of me misses her.

Soon, I tell myself. As soon as we hire another ad guy. As soon as the business is back in a solid position. As soon as I can get rid of this nightmare Trident account. . . .

My second night in New York is worse than the first. I call Shey, thinking we can get together, but she’s taken her brood to France for an impromptu ski trip. I think about all the other friends I used to have here, but frankly, I’m not feeling that sociable.

The problem is, I’m not merely lonely, I’m homesick for Bellevue. I’m homesick for my daughter and my home and my life there.

I don’t want to be in a hotel. I want to be in my own house, tucking Eva in at night and making her lunch in the morning. I want her to bound into my office at the end of her day. I want to see her face and her eyes and her smile.

I want to be a mother again.

To distract myself, I open up my laptop, pull up the Google toolbar, and type in “Luke Flynn, BioMed, Bellevue,” and wait.

It takes less than a second to deliver me not just to the BioMed Web site, but to Luke Flynn’s biography. And there he is. Luke Flynn, co-founder and CEO, Harvard grad, sponsor and organizer of the huge annual bike rally Bikes-to-Tikes.

I exhale and sit back, every nervous, anxious emotion alive and well inside of me.

I’m still staring at his photo when my phone rings.

“Bad time?” Luke asks when I answer.

I’m so glad to hear his voice, I could hug myself. “Not at all. I was just thinking of you.”

“Good things?”

“Very good.”

“So what are you doing?”

“Working on my computer,” I answer, guiltily clicking off his company Web site. Not that he knows I’ve been staring at his photo, but still. “What about you?”