There's Always Plan B (3 page)

If Carly had been able to breathe, she would have laughed. As it was she could only stare in disbelief. She'd come here seeking safety and security, but apparently that was not to be.

“You had all the equity in the house,” Rhonda continued. “Neil had that great job for all those years. I know you probably don't want to tap into your savings, but you'll earn it back. Plus you have the alimony and child support. We'll be fine.”

Carly's chest tightened. “Mom, there's no money. No savings, no house equity. I got half of everything, including half of the debts. I couldn't afford to stay in L.A. That's why I came here.”

“You're
wrong,” her mother said. “There has to be money. You're just being ridiculous, and selfish.” Disapproval tightened her face. “I expected you to be more mature about everything.”

Carly opened her mouth, then closed it. She'd been home all of four minutes. Maybe she and her mother could put off fighting for at least an hour.

“Let's talk about this later,” Carly said with a smile. “Right now I'm just happy to see you.”

Rhonda didn't look mollified but she didn't speak, either. Probably because they could hear Tiffany heading toward them. The teenager clumped down the two back stairs and entered the bedroom.

“Mom, I brought one of your suitcases.”

“Thanks.”

Tiffany shrugged. “It was on top of mine. Anyway, there's tons more stuff.”

They spent the next fifteen minutes unloading the car. Carly went up to Tiffany's room to make sure she had started unpacking, only to be told by her daughter that she wasn't a baby and could manage emptying a suitcase without supervision.

“Feel the love,” Carly murmured as she walked down one floor to her room and stepped inside.

The view captured her attention instantly. She crossed to the window and stared out at the ocean. Living in Santa Monica had meant they were within a couple miles of the water, but nothing compared with living so close to the vastness. She loved how the colors changed with the variations in light and weather. The water could be dark blue one minute, then gray, then nearly black, then almost turquoise. As a teenager, when it had seemed her world would never be right, she could always count on the ocean.

After unpacking her clothes and putting them in the dresser and hanging a few things in the armoire, she walked downstairs and into the main rooms of the B and B. There was a parlor to the left of the big, open foyer. Sofas and chairs sat in groups in a semicircle around the big fireplace. She noted the furnishings were exactly as she remembered, although the hardwood floors looked as if they'd been refinished not that long ago.

On the other side of the foyer was the dining room. A long table that seated fourteen stood in the center of the space. Several smaller tables seating four or six were up against the walls. There were large windows that overlooked the grounds and the ocean beyond. A portrait of Mary hung opposite the window.

Carly ran her hand along the main table, liking the smooth feel of the wood and how the carvings reminded her of days spent doing her homework in this room. Three large chandeliers provided overhead light in the evening—the cut glass casting shadows that had made her think of foreign lands and battles with dragons and being a princess.

So many memories, she thought. Most of them happy. Had that changed?

She walked to the office area and checked on the board. Only four of the twenty-five rooms were occupied. Carly frowned. Sure, it was midweek, but it was spring break. Shouldn't the B and B be more busy?

She headed for the kitchen where her mother had put out two bottles of wine. With so few guests, they wouldn't need more than a couple.

Maybe she could sneak one upstairs into her room and drown her sorrows, she thought glumly. A nice cabernet sauvignon and some chocolate could go a long way to making her feel more perky about her life.

“All settled?” her mother asked.

“I'm unpacked,” Carly said, not sure how long it would take to feel settled. Between Neil walking out, having to sell the house, moving and starting over with a life she wasn't sure she wanted, she didn't think “settled” was on the agenda.

“Something smells good,” Carly said as she moved to the oven and pulled it open.

“Maribel made those this morning,” her mother said. “They should be about done. Do the crusts look brown?”

As Carly checked out the mini quiches, her mouth began to water. “They look perfect.” She reached for the hot pad on the counter and pulled the two trays out of the oven.

“I'm glad Maribel is still working here,” she said, pleased to know there would be at least one friendly face in residence.

“I'd be lost without her,” Rhonda said. “She knows it, too. She's always after me for a raise, and as badly as things are going here, I don't see how she has the nerve.”

Carly took a step back. Okay, not a conversation she wanted to have her first day here. At least not the part about Maribel. But she was going to have to get the rest of it straightened out at some point, and why not now?

“When did things start going badly, Mom?” she asked as she slipped the mini quiches onto a cooling rack. “You never mentioned anything to me.”

“I didn't want to worry you. I knew you had your hands full with Neil. Besides, what could you do from all the way down there?”

Technically there was nothing wrong with what her mother had said, Carly told herself. If she put those three sentences in front of an impartial jury, they would tell her that her mother was being sensitive and stating the obvious. Most likely Rhonda
hadn't
wanted to worry her daughter, and Carly had had her hands full with Neil. As for being far away, it was true, too.

However, this wasn't an impartial jury, and in the momspeak Carly knew so well, what Rhonda had just said was: “You're too busy for me, as always. Sure I could have told you what was going on, but you were always more interested in your husband, who left you, by the way. Of course being so far away meant I was totally on my own. But you're selfish and I'm used to that.”

“You can tell me now,” Carly said, proud of how calm she sounded. “What's up with the B and B? I would have thought it would be more full, what with it being spring break.”

Her mother glared at her. “Oh, sure. Be critical of how I run things. What happened with you? What do you mean there isn't any money from the divorce? There has to be. Neil made a lot of money in his marketing job.”

So they were going to talk about her failure, Carly thought. Might as well get it over with.

“Neil did well,” she admitted. “My job didn't pay so much.” The office manager position with a single-doctor practice didn't pull in the big bucks. “We were careful to put money aside for Tiffany's college, but after that, Neil lost interest. We took all those expensive vacations, then there were the cars.”

Neil had liked to lease a new one every two years. The monthly payment for their last Mercedes had cost more than their food bill. She'd hated that and had protested, but Neil had pointed out that it was important for him to have a car that matched his position in the company. Carly had tried to argue the point with him, but he'd told her she couldn't possibly understand. That had felt so much like being patted on the head, that she'd yelled at him. Then they'd had a big fight. In the end, he'd gotten the car anyway.

“We put in the new landscaping last year,” she said. “There were other things we bought. In hindsight I should have pushed back more on the budget. The bottom line is, by the time we split everything, I owned half of nothing.”

“But the house,” her mother protested. “That had to be worth a fortune.”

“It was. And we owed nearly as much.”

Carly didn't know how to explain that it had been easier to give in to Neil than to fight him all the time.

“You were raised better than that,” her mother said.

“Not helpful,” Carly told her.

“Don't you get alimony?”

“Yes, and no. Neil quit his job. Until he gets a new one, he doesn't have to pay. He owes child support, although that's on a sliding scale. Basically if he gets back into marketing at the level he was at, he's going to be passing about half his salary on to me for alimony and child support. That doesn't give him much incentive to start looking.”

“I think this is all just wrong,” her mother said as she set the serving trays on the counter. “In my day a man knew his responsibilities. Your father never left me. He wasn't that kind of man. You should have thought about that when you married Neil. I never liked him, you know.”

“Mmm.” Carly went for the noncommittal response. What was she going to say? That both her parents had adored Neil from the second she'd brought him home? That for the first two years of their marriage she'd joked that if she and Neil split up, her parents would want custody of
him?

“You used to have a good job,” her mother said. “What happened to that?”

“The events planning? That was a million years ago.” She tested one of the quiches to see if it had cooled enough, then began sliding them onto a serving plate.

“You should never have given up your career,” her mother said. “If you'd kept up with it, you wouldn't be in trouble now.”

“Agreed, but it was too difficult to handle big parties and corporate events once I had Tiffany. I wanted to be home more.”

“At least you got that right,” her mother told her. “You needed to be there.”

Carly felt as if she were in a fun house. Could her mother just pick a side and stay on it? Any side. At this point Carly didn't even care if it was one in which she was the villain.

She handed over the plate of quiche.

“I don't know what we're going to do,” Rhonda said as she set the plate on the tray. “I thought you'd be able to put some money into the B and B. But if you can't…”

She stopped talking and pressed her lips together. Carly watched her. They were family, she thought sadly. Shouldn't they be able to pull together on this?

Obviously her fantasy of coming home and finding everything in her world put to rights wasn't going to happen.

“I suppose I could sell,” her mother said as she walked to the cupboard and pulled down several wineglasses. “I still have a lot of equity in this place. We could use it to buy you something in Las Vegas. Or I could sell my town house and we could buy a larger place together.”

Carly figured she would rather be tied naked to a fire-ant hill. She'd known moving back to the B and B would mean sharing relatively close quarters with her mother, but there had been a time limit. In two years, Rhonda would head off to her retirement. Carly would run the B and B and send her mother a monthly check for her share of the business. It wasn't a perfect solution or one she would have chosen, but it solved so many problems.

However, living with her mother on a permanent basis was something else entirely.

“This house has been in the family for nearly a hundred and fifty years,” Carly said. “You can't be serious about selling it.”

“I'm not sure there's a choice.”

“There has to be another way,” she said, not sure what it could be, but determined to find it. “This is a lot of information. I need to think about it all.”

“Be my guest,” her mother said. “I've been worrying for seven years.”

Carly refused to translate
that
into momspeak.

“Of course you and Neil may work everything out and get back together,” Rhonda added.

“Unlikely,” Carly said. “Not only wouldn't I take him back, but I can't imagine anything making him want to go back to his old life.”

“I'm so sorry, dear.”

Her mother patted her arm.

Carly frowned. “Sorry about what?”

“That Neil left you for someone else. Is she much younger and prettier?”

Carly didn't know if she should laugh or cry. “No, Mom. Neil didn't leave me for anyone. There's no other woman. He just wanted to go find himself.”

 

Carly escaped to her room after dinner. Tiffany was going to watch TV with her grandmother and Carly took the opportunity to sneak away.

It wasn't that she didn't want to be with her family, it was that she needed time to think. Nothing had turned out the way she'd thought and that was going to take some getting used to.

At night the ocean was a blanket of darkness. She opened the windows, and although she couldn't see waves or even whitecaps, the sound of the sea was audible and she could smell the salt air. At least
that
was as she remembered. But the rest of it—not so much.

Carly settled on the window seat and stared into the darkness. At what point had her life taken this unexpected turn? Had there been signs along the way? Had she simply not been paying attention? Sure, things with Neil hadn't been great for a while, but it hadn't occurred to her that divorce was an option. They had a child together; there had been vows. She'd chosen to spend her life with him and a few disappointments along the way hadn't been a reason to change her mind.

So why had he changed his? Had his experience been worse than hers, or had he not believed in the “forever” part of their marriage? Was she a fool for staying so long, or was he a jerk for leaving? Did the truth lie somewhere in the middle?

She wasn't sure it mattered. After all, they were divorcing now and both starting over. Neil had his dreams and she had…Carly sighed. She had no clue what she had. A teenage daughter who would rather live with her father, a mother who had kept the news of the failing business from her only child, and a future that looked far too uncertain.