Shop and Let Die (8 page)

I didn’t think it counted
as cheating. But I still felt funny. I often told Seth about my
shops, even when he really wasn’t that interested.

For once, I wasn’t sure
how he would react, despite the fact that I’d been paid what he
would consider a decent wage for what really amounted to a minimum
of work. In fact, I wasn’t sure I would tell him at all. And I
didn’t like that. As annoyed as I get at him, I usually tell him
everything anyway. I’d rather he think I was a flake than a liar
any day.

So far I’ve managed to
ignore my husband’s subtle hints that other wives work
(translation: serve eight hours for a boss who doesn’t want to hear
the phrase “doctor’s appointment” more than once a year—try that
with a toddler who picked up an earache as easily as he stuffed
peas up his nose).

I have politely ignored my
friend’s worried queries about the state of my brain decay (who
says SpongeBob Squarepants is not a scintillating subject for
conversation?) and I have juggled the budget well enough that all
the bills get paid without aid of a steady paycheck made out to me.
Although that’s changing.

Now that the kids are both
in school and sick days are rare—although holidays and teacher
in-service days happen with schedule-twisting regularity—I have
become an odd-job-working-mom. Not a full-fledged, society-defined,
working mom. Bullpatooties…excuse my French.

Within a second I got a
beep to signal new messages. Five—two of them responses to my post
and three offers to enlarge my penis, which I dumped as junk
email.

Snowbelle, a frequent
drive-by poster had snippily replied, “I would never consider a
dating shop. I am a faithful married woman.”

I stuck my tongue out at
the screen as I deleted her email. Snowbelle was always online.
Always. Two o’clock in the morning. Three in the afternoon. Eight
in the evening. If she was faithful to her husband it was only
because she was so busy on the keyboard she didn’t have time for
extracurricular activities.

MysteryK79 was much
kinder. “You have to get to the date part before it is officially
categorized as cheating, honey. I’ve done a couple of those online
date shops—and a few of the five minute dating things which are big
here in San Francisco.”

I was a bit shocked to
read that because MysteryK79 talked about her husband every chance
she got. But the rest of her post explained that.

“
Bruce and I do them
together, and we find it quite…exhilarating, if you know what I
mean .”

Wow. I tried to picture
Seth helping me fill out the profile. We’d probably have ended up
in a bickerfest over whether her hair should be blonde or red and
if it was an unfair disadvantage to give her a bust size of 32
AA—even if it was accurate enough if I was used as a
model.

I shut off the computer
and went to bed, hoping I wouldn’t dream about going on a date with
Seth, and James Connery, the FBI guy with really, really green
eyes.

The next morning, I still
felt a little like a zombie, going through the motions. I avoided
the computer for dishes and laundry until I had to log in to
download my assignment instructions for the day. I saw that my
question had generated at least a dozen replies. I started to read
them, my stomach twisting a little.

Just then the buzzer on
the dryer went off and I jumped up and left the messages for later.
This wasn’t my normal routine—I usually let the dryer buzz like an
annoying mosquito when I was on email.

Even odder, I folded the
clothes while they were still warm, put them away and made
meatloaf, a family favorite—although I wasn’t sure my low-carb
version would get raves. No breadcrumbs, lean sirloin and worst of
all, mustard instead of ketchup to bind it together.

Oh well. We all had to
make sacrifices. And I’d clearly made mine today—avoiding any urge
to check my email to see if the tide had turned and I was now
viewed as a cheating harlot on the Secret Shopper Sisters list. I
suppose there was still a little vestigial guilt going on, despite
the fact I clearly had nothing to feel guilty about.

So I had thought about who
my perfect date might be. I hadn’t gone on a date. No. I had come
home and made dinner for my family.

So I noticed the real spy
had green eyes. So what. Anyone would have stared at him. Even
Seth. It wasn’t like I’d actually applied for a job as a real
spy.

I imagined having to tell
my boss, “Sorry, I lost sight of the terrorists today, sir. My
daughter had the flu and I couldn’t find a babysitter.” No, fake
spying was good enough for me.

CHAPTER SEVEN

One
Temptation Leads to Another

I’d spent a week thinking about the brochures in
my bag. Not reading them, just thinking about them. And maybe
there’d been a few thoughts about the green-eyed Fed, too. But who
could blame me for that?

Every day, Seth asked if
I’d applied to any of the jobs yet.

Every day I said, “not
yet.”

Finally, at breakfast,
before I’d had coffee, when I was at my most vulnerable, he asked
to see the brochures.

I dug them out of my
purse. “Here.”

He shuffled through them.
“The FBI?”

“
Why not? Mystery shopping
could count as experience, couldn’t it?”

He laughed. “Be serious,
Molly.” He held up a brochure from the University Admissions
department. “You would be great at this.”

Oh the mysteries of SAT
scores and extra-curricular activities. I try to discourage him.
“It isn’t academic year. I’d get two weeks vacation and
holidays.”

He shrugged. “We’d deal
with it.”

“
No complaining that we
couldn’t take off for three weeks to visit your mom and dad at
their camp? You promise?”

“
A job is a job,” he
said.

For a second, I believed
him. Until he added, “And there’s probably some way you could work
extra hours for a few weeks and take comp time if we wanted to go
to camp.”

“
I’ll think about it.” I
took the brochure away from him, hoping to bury it deep in a pile
of other papers, where it would never see the light of
day.

For some reason, he wasn’t
willing to let it go. “I can help you with your resume, if you
want.”

“
Okay.” The idea of
writing a resume made my stomach ache. How to describe the last few
years of motherhood and volunteer activities? Never mind the
mystery shopping.

He smiled, happy that I
was seeing things his way at last. “We can do it
tonight.”

“
I have PTA tonight.” I
had told him this, and written it on the calendar, and yet he still
looked surprised.

Fortunately, he needed to
leave for his early morning class, and I needed to get the kids to
school, so the conversation ended without any concrete
decisions.

I put the FBI brochure on
the kitchen counter, where I could see it. And I put on mascara,
which made me feel more powerful for no logical reason
whatsoever.

Maybe I’d be a regular
working mom soon, but today I was still a Supermom so flexible I
could leap sudden bouts of flu and teacher in-service days with
aplomb.

Some days I feel closer to
the Supermom badge than others. Today I was smoking. Organization
could have been my middle name. I vacuumed, ran to the grocery
store for milk and bread, did two quick fast food shops, and was
home again in time to start a load of laundry.

Because the PTA meeting
would be held at 7, I got dinner prepped and in the oven before I
left to pick up the kids.

A true supermom would no
doubt have had it in a slow cooker since morning (and have planned
the menu itself at the beginning of the month). But I was proud of
my own efforts—just a meatloaf, carrots (with a half-a-cup to
remain raw, because Anna liked her vegetables uncooked), and a
green salad.

I even managed to be
first-mom-in-line to pick up the kids. Smoking, Molly, I told
myself, because no one else was going to give me credit.

Knowing dinner was already
in the oven, and my jobs reports were already written, I didn’t
hesitate to ask both of them what homework they had. No matter what
it was, we’d get it done before I left for PTA, I vowed. Supermom
was on the job.

“
Nothing.” Ryan always
tried that line on me, despite the fact I never, ever, believed
him.

“
Reading.” Anna’s school
did not believe in homework for second graders, but many parents
did, so her teacher, a wise veteran of the parent-teacher wars,
assigned her class reading as homework every night.

She had the class write
down the titles and authors of the books they read and kept a
thermometer of books read by her class. She did not break it down
by students, so the parents of the future Ivy Leaguers grumbled
that it was a shame some kids held back the average.

“
What book did you bring
home to read tonight?”

“
When Dinosaurs
Die
.” She hauled out the book to show me,
and I did my best not to let her see my distress.

Anna, a budding
brown-noser, did her part every night. Half of me cringed at her
compliance with the—essentially—busywork and part of me was proud
that she was willing to meet her responsibilities. And all of me
worried at the titles she chose. Death. Dying. Non-fiction on
gruesome topics.

Don’t get me wrong—I
wanted her to read, but I wanted her to want to read, not read for
nebulous brownie points and a higher redline on the reading
thermometer.

And I want her to read
uplifting books that help ease her worries, not add to them. But I
can’t say that to her, because she wants to read these
books.

“
Want me to read it to you
while you make dinner, Mom?”

“
Perfect!” Nothing like
listening to a good dinosaur death book while you’re squirting
barbecue sauce on top of a mostly-cooked meatloaf.

Not that I would say that
to her. The world spends a lot of time sending mixed messages:
don’t worry about what anyone else thinks vs do what other people
tell you is worthwhile. There has to be a happy medium. Somewhere.
I’m determined to find it.

Part of me saw Anna as a
natural Supermom when she grew up. The kind of Supermom who keeps
up with all the latest expectations for Supermom, rather than
trusting her own judgment on the matter. Of course, I wanted
Supermom status for myself, and somehow I’ve always fallen short of
it because I’m aspirationally organized, not
actually
organized.

There are days, like
today, when I’m so close I feel the shining star within reach. But
those days are usually followed by the days when I forget my day
planner and have to call the dentist to see what time an
appointment is scheduled for.

Always humiliating when
said appointment time has just passed and I have to reschedule with
the exasperated receptionist. Ten points off Supermom status there.
Even a balanced dinner doesn’t offset those days.

But, for today, I was able
to do it all, and do it well. To keep my record for the day
gold-plated, I even remembered to retrieve my cell phone from the
car charger and bring it into the house with me.

I was on such a roll there
was even time, after listening to Anna read about dying dinosaurs,
for me to go through Ryan’s backpack with him. Lo and behold, as I
questioned him on the crumpled papers, we created a huge toss pile
and a small-but-significant pile of homework papers that should be
returned. Two of them were overdue. Math. Word problems.

Organized as I was, I
forbade TV until the papers were finished. Ryan spent twenty
minutes with loud sighs and two requests for new erasers before he
declared himself done.

I was free to demand the
papers to check while he protested that he knew how to do his
homework. Not wanting to tarnish my Supermom status today, I did
not point out that the consistent “F” grades do not support that
conclusion. Positive reinforcement was better than negative
reinforcement. Or so his reading tutor told me.

Reading Ryan’s math
homework always made me want to cry. His dyslexia means that word
problems are sheer torture for him. As a result, he pulled the
numbers from the problem and guessed whether to add, subtract,
multiply, or divide. Needless to say, he guessed wrong about eighty
percent of the time.

“
Ryan, come
here.”

He came over with an
annoyed look on his face, as if I were wasting his time. Self
defense. He’d decided if he treated me as if I couldn’t possibly
know how he is supposed to do his homework, I might one day stop
checking.

“
If John had x apples and
gives Sally y, how many apples does John have left?”

He sighed, and answered as
if he was indulging a madwoman. So like his father there. “x -
y.”

“
Then why do you have “x +
y” written down?”

He scowled, determined not
to admit that his dyslexia was responsible. He and I both know that
his IEP calls for him to have word problems read to him, but he’d
rather face water torture or the rack than ask the classroom aide
to read simple problems to him in full view of the rest of his
class. He’d rather get an “F” than ask me. He’d rather die than ask
Seth.