The Smart One (27 page)

“Great, well, that works out for everyone.” Weezy didn’t know how many more years they could realistically keep asking Cathy and Ruth to escort a crabby old lady on a plane.

Weezy and Maureen still alternated who Bets would stay with, and unfortunately this was Weezy’s year. “Tough break,” Maureen said. She didn’t mean it. Bets was a horrendous houseguest. If Will emptied the dishwasher, she commented on Weezy’s lack of housekeeping skills. Once, Weezy put out cocktail napkins and Bets had called her hoity-toity. There was no winning.

They used to invite their cousins the Nugents from Pittsburgh, but thankfully that had stopped after Bets’s sister, Linda, died and all of the children’s children had reproduced so many times that it was impossible to fit everyone in the same house. They were an odd bunch. Linda had once brought a basket of stuffed reindeer to the house, and Weezy assumed (as one might) that she’d brought them for the kids. “How nice of you,” she said. “I’m sure Martha and Claire will be thrilled.” She tried to take the basket away from Linda, who held on tight.

“These are my pets,” she’d said. “Our last dog died and we’re too old to get another one, so now these are my pets.” She’d walked into the house with her basket and proceeded to tell anyone who would listen about each of the reindeer. “This is Misty, she’s shy. Bernie is bossy.” Martha and Claire were six and seven that year, and they’d petted the stuffed animals with wide eyes, as if even at that age, they knew that their great-aunt Linda had really gone bat shit crazy.

Linda was the only person who Bets refused to say a bad word about. She once admitted that she thought her sister had “married down,” but that was all. Bets still went to stay with her sister’s children between Thanksgiving and Christmas, taking the train from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and spending a week or so with each of them. She bought their children gifts and raved about the cooking. “Your cousin Patty really knows how to fry a chicken,” she’d say, while watching Weezy prepare chicken cutlets.

Weezy didn’t really keep in touch with any of her cousins anymore, except for a Christmas card each year, and a call to talk about Bets’s stay. But she was eternally grateful to them for taking Bets for the
stretch between the two holidays. Getting her back and forth from Michigan twice a year would have been a nightmare, and while Weezy suspected that Bets was much kinder and more charming to her nieces and nephews than she was to her daughters, she still couldn’t have been an easy guest.

Maureen was coming over today to talk about menus. Ruth was a vegan, which was a choice that Weezy respected, but it made cooking for her almost impossible. The girl was so nice about it, always brought over a side dish of her own, and assured Weezy that she was getting enough to eat, but Weezy didn’t see how that was possible, considering that pretty much all she could eat was plain vegetables and nothing else. Last year, they’d made a special pecan pie for her, and out of curiosity, Weezy took a bite. She’d made herself swallow, but it wasn’t easy.
Poor, thin Ruth
, she’d thought.
No butter or meat, what a sad life
.

She was happy that none of her children had entered into the world of vegetarianism. Unless you counted the two years in high school when Claire refused to eat red meat, but even then she’d eat chicken occasionally. She was just doing it to be difficult, really. Even Cleo ate meat, thank God. Not that she considered Cleo one of her children—it was way too early for that. So at least she had that much to be thankful for, that her children were getting enough protein. Ruth should probably be taking iron pills, and Weezy made a note to ask her about that.

Maureen was late, which was not unusual. In fact, it was almost expected. It surprised Weezy how Maureen could be so organized and efficient in her work, and have none of that spill over to her personal life. Maureen was an executive assistant for John McLaughlin, one of the VPs at Price Waterhouse. She had been there for over twenty-five years and as he got promoted, she went with him. He called Maureen his “right-hand man” and he meant it. She kept his schedule, was loyal to him, and always had her ear out for talk among the assistants of any rumblings in the company. She kept his office running tightly and smoothly, and you would never know that she often ran out of dishwasher detergent at home and forgot to replace it for weeks.

Maureen had gone back to college after her husband left, and it had taken her almost three years, during which Cathy and Drew spent a lot
of nights eating dinner with the Coffeys, and sometimes spent whole weekends there so that Maureen could make it to class and study. But she’d done it, and landed the job with John right after she graduated.

“You went back to college to be a secretary?” Bets asked when she got the news. “I was a secretary for years, and I didn’t need to go to college.”

“An executive assistant,” Maureen corrected her. Bets had rolled her eyes, but her job was one thing that Maureen never doubted. She loved working for John. She was friendly with his wife, attended his children’s first communions and graduations, and accepted his investment advice. Maureen loved everything about her job, feeling in control and having lunch with her friends in the office. Hearing her talk about it always made Weezy a little jealous.

Now, John was over sixty and his role in the company was getting smaller. He wanted to retire. He and his wife wanted to move to Maine full-time. For the time being, he still had an office at the company, but he’d been moved to a small office, and while Maureen went in every day, she was done by one o’clock at the latest. There just wasn’t much to do. She set up his golf games and answered e-mails and phone calls about when he would be in the office. Sometimes he came in and they organized files or went over things. But by next year, he would be gone, and Maureen would be retired as well. She wouldn’t need to work, thanks to the investments she’d so wisely listened to him about, but she wasn’t looking forward to it.

“All those days, stretching on, spending them all by myself,” she’d said. “It seems so definite.”

“You’re not by yourself,” Weezy told her. But she knew what Maureen meant.

Maureen kept suggesting that they start a business venture together, but she was just talking, just trying to grasp at something so that she wouldn’t feel lost. She’d mentioned a dog-walking business and a paint-your-own pottery store in the same sentence, and Weezy knew that she was just going a little bonkers over the change.

The feeling of loss was understandable. It was like Max and his hockey. He’d played since he was four years old. He took to skates right
away, a natural, which surprised Will and Weezy, since neither of the girls liked it at all. The few times the girls had gone skating when they were little, Weezy and Will had to drag them around on the ice, their little mittened hands gripping their parents’ tightly.

But Max stood up on his own right away. It was really something to see. For a while there, Weezy was convinced that he was going to be an Olympian or a professional athlete. It was amazing, to watch this little boy glide on the ice, forward and backward, like it was nothing. And then, when the Pee Wee coach handed him a stick, he just smiled. It was like he’d always been holding it.

They threw him into the sport wholeheartedly. Will loved hockey, and Max’s being the star of the team was just a bonus. What Will and Weezy learned about the sport very quickly was that they were required to be just as involved. There were club teams and tournaments. There were day camps and sleepaway camps. Soon, their weekends were filled with driving Max to different locations (often different states) to play hockey.

Weezy loved watching Max play. Her sweet, even-tempered baby turned into something else on the ice. He was fluid and graceful and also could be ruthless and sneaky, coming up beside someone, checking them with his shoulder, and then skating on, like nothing had happened.

Hockey took up almost all of their time, and they often grumbled to each other about it, but it was too late to back out. It was exhausting and it seemed that they were always trying to schedule around a hockey game of some sort. Holidays were cut short, and long weekends were spent in Canada and Michigan.

And then, just like that, it was over. Max went to college and decided that he didn’t want to try out for the team. He didn’t think he’d start, he told them, and it seemed like a lot of time and work to sit on the bench. He decided to play on the club team, which was really just a bunch of boys getting together at eleven o’clock at night to play around on the ice and drink.

After that, Weezy felt like part of her life was missing. Did she really miss the hours in the car? The nights spent in questionable hotels in random Canadian towns? No, she told herself, she couldn’t
miss that. But there was a loss when it was gone. And so Weezy understood it when Maureen talked about missing work. Even if the whole point of a job was to be done with it someday, to be able to relax, it could become a part of you, it could become how you saw yourself. And when it was gone, it left a hole.

MAUREEN LET HERSELF IN THE
back door, apologizing before she was even inside. “I know, I know,” she said. “I’m sorry, I got stuck talking to someone at work.”

“That’s okay,” Weezy said. And it was. They didn’t have all that much to go over, actually. She’d spread the cookbooks out on the table, and had the lists of what they’d made for the past five Thanksgivings.

“So, Cathy and Ruth are all set with Bets?” Weezy asked.

“Yep. They’re leaving Ohio on Tuesday, and they’ll stay over with Bets that night, and they all fly out bright and early on Wednesday.”

“God bless them.”

“No kidding. But you know, I’m paying for their tickets, so it’s not like they’re getting nothing out of the deal.”

“Still.”

The two of them talked about the pies that they wanted to make. Pumpkin, of course. Pecan was Max’s favorite. Bets always wanted something with chocolate in it, and then there was an apple-cranberry crisp that looked good.

“Four desserts?” Weezy said. “That seems like a lot, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Maureen agreed. “I guess we’ll lose the crisp?”

Weezy nodded. The crisp was actually her favorite, but there was nothing else that could be cut from the list without a lot of whining and complaining from the group. And none of them needed four desserts. Especially not Weezy or Maureen, who were starting to both look just a little barrel-shaped in the past five years, no matter how much they exercised.

“So this is the trade-off?” Maureen had asked, when she’d started to go through menopause, just a year and a half after Weezy. “No more cramps, but now I’ll just be hot as hell and fat?”

Weezy couldn’t even find it in herself to tell her it would get better.
Her hot flashes had persisted, well past the time when she thought they should have stopped. “How long will this go on? How many years is normal?”

“I don’t like the term
normal
,” her doctor had said. Weezy told him that was too bad, because she did like the term
normal
, loved it even, and so she would be getting a new doctor.

Will and the kids had learned not to say anything when in the middle of winter she’d open the back door and stand there, while the rest of them shivered and moved to the front of the house. She was glad when Maureen started, just so she could have someone to complain with. Weezy’s new doctor had told her that there was a slight chance that she’d have hot flashes for the rest of her life. Maureen never had hot flashes like Weezy. She did, however, have raging mood swings that once caused her to tell Bets to go fuck herself on Christmas Eve.

WEEZY FILLED IN HER CALENDAR.
She entered in when Max and Cleo would arrive, when Bets would get in, who needed to be picked up at the airport when. She woke up every morning and went for a walk, then came back and a few times a week went to that weight-lifting place with Maureen, the one that was made just for menopausal women and had popped up in every suburb across the country.

She was trying to keep herself busy, to keep away from the computer and the wedding blogs and websites. Thanksgiving was a good excuse, she figured. During the day, she did pretty well. But it was at night, when she couldn’t sleep, that she crumbled.

Her favorite wedding blog was called WeddingBellesandWhistles.com and featured a different DIY project every day. It was also filled with tips, and once a week a guest bride wrote an article about an aspect of her wedding. That night, Weezy read about a bride who’d been left behind at the venue, after all of the buses that they hired to take the guests back to the hotel (forty-five minutes away!) had driven off. “Oh no,” Weezy whispered out loud. “What a nightmare.”

Weezy told herself that staying away from weddings during the day was a good start. It was like the patch for smoking, and she felt virtuous when, at the end of the day, she hadn’t checked in even once.

She went to the store and stocked up on all of Max’s favorite foods. She got his room ready for Cleo, washing sheets, vacuuming and dusting, airing everything out. She set Max up in the basement, which was a shame really, that he wouldn’t be able to stay in his own room when he came home, but they couldn’t very well put Cleo down there. She got everything that was on Bets’s list: creamer for her coffee, bran cereal, pistachios, and hard caramel candies. Bets had called several times to go over the list, and Weezy assured her that it was all taken care of.

Maureen had offered to have everyone over for dinner on Wednesday night, which was a nice thought, but just made extra work for Weezy since she’d have to make everything at her house, then pack it all up to take over. Maureen didn’t cook, and she’d suggested ordering pizzas—“Why make it complicated?” she’d asked—but Weezy had shot her down and told her she’d whip up some meatballs.

By the time Max and Cleo arrived on Wednesday morning, everything was ready. Claire was at work for just a half day, and Martha was working all day, so Weezy was the only one there to greet them. She was so happy to see her son, her Max, who walked right in and gave her a huge hug.