What Happens in Suburbia… (Red Dress Ink Novels)

by Wendy Markham

  As I stand at the counter watching him put it into a nice, glossy white box and tie it up with waxed red string, I can’t help but worry a little about the price.

  Then again, it’s a pie. How much can it possibly be?

  I’ll tell you how much.

  “Forty-nine fifty,” the Pie Man tells me, sliding the pie across the counter toward me.

  Okay, compared to the doll, it’s practically a steal.

  Still…fifty bucks for a pie?

  WTF, Pie Man?

  “Is it…I thought it was ten percent off?” I say, convincing myself that forty-five bucks is slightly more palatable.

  Slightly.

  “That’s including the ten percent off,” he informs me ever so gently, at which point I take the pie out of the box and smush it in his face like Curly.

  Okay, not really.

  I want to, though.

  Almost as badly as I want to buy and eat the entire pie in a single sitting.

  I give the Pie Man a taut smile and my American Express card, and five minutes later I am pulling into my driveway, wondering how we can afford to own a house here when we can’t even afford to buy a toy here.

  But I’m sure the doll incident was a fluke. After all, something like that can happen anywhere.

  Well, not anywhere.

  In Brookside, the doll would have been seven ninety-nine. With free gift wrapping and free shipping. But who cares? I don’t want to live in Brookside. And I don’t want to live in Manhattan.

  I want to live right here.

  Here in the overpriced and eerily quiet suburbs.

  There are no signs of life at our neighbors’ houses. On one side is a working couple with older kids; on the other, a younger couple with toddlers; directly across the street, a retired couple who reportedly travels a lot.

  I wonder which house belongs to Cornelia/Angelina. She said two doors down, which means it’s either an adorable cottage with a picket fence or a stately brick colonial reminiscent of Jack’s childhood home, on a smaller scale.

  I’ll go with stately over adorable. I should probably drop her a note in the mailbox for the unpalatable baked good at some point. And—oh, guess what? Now I’m free for that 11:00 a.m. beginners yoga class. Which I might look into. Just as soon as I scarf down this pie.

  It sure is quiet around here, I note as I walk toward the house. Other than my footsteps, there’s not a sound but chirping birds and the distant hum of a lawn mower.

  It’s peaceful in a dangerous kind of way.

  Or maybe more like dangerous in a peaceful kind of way.

  I check the house to make sure there are no serial killers hiding in the closets and under the bed, then hunt through the clutter on the kitchen counter until I find a plastic take-out spork. We still haven’t figured out where—or whether—we packed our silverware.

  Before sitting down with pie and spork, I try Jack again.

  This time, he picks up.

  “Hey,” he says, “are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t sound fine.”

  “I will be. I stopped off on the way home and bought a fifty-dollar pie and I’m going to eat the whole thing by myself.”

  Pause. “Did you say fifty dollars?”

  “Yeah. I know it’s not in the budget, but I needed it. And just think, we’ll be saving, like, three hundred without having to buy a commuter train ticket for me for June!”

  “That’s six pies,” Jack says dryly. “Did you get the doll for Hayley?”

  “I changed my mind. I think Hayley’s outgrown dolls.”

  “She’s two.”

  Oh. Right.

  “If you must know,” I tell Jack a bit huffily, “the doll was more than our gift budget for the entire year.”

  “Gotcha,” Jack says, and I hear another phone ringing in the background. “Listen, I have to go.”

  “Okay. Hey, maybe I’ll get some groceries into the house and make dinner.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be home till really late, with everything that’s going on here.”

  “Oh.”

  Right.

  Overnight, he has a life—a life in the city—and I don’t have one anywhere.

  An hour later, I’m on my hands and knees puking up strawberry pie in the upstairs bathroom—no, I’m not bulimic, just sick as a dog—and I hear a voice downstairs calling, “Knock-knock!”

  It’s Wilma, looking as if she just stepped out of a catalog, as always, well pressed and well accessorized.

  How the heck did she get in here? I know I locked the door right before I checked the house for stray serial killers.

  It turns out Jack made her a key a few days ago. What a sweet thing for a son to do.

  What a lousy thing for a husband to do.

  Turns out Jack also called his mother just now and sent her running over here because he’s worried about me. What a sweet thing for a husband to do. What a sweet thing for a mother-in-law to do.

  Yeah, right.

  Jack and Wilma are suddenly getting on my last nerve, bless their hearts.

  “I thought the worst when I saw the car in the driveway and there was no answer,” Wilma tells me.

  The worst?

  Which is…what?

  Polishing off a second pie?

  Hanging from a noose affixed to a deer-ravaged limb of a Mature Planting?

  Skipping town in a boxcar with Jack’s pay raise?

  “I’m fine,” I assure my mother-in-law. “Really. I mean, I didn’t want to lose my job, but it’s actually kind of a relief to know that I don’t have to get up at dawn and ride the train back and forth to the city every day.”

  She nods dubiously, and I wonder if she’s thinking I’m thinking now I can launch my evil plan to mooch off your hardworking son for the rest of my life.

  I’m sure she isn’t, because like I’ve said a thousand times, Wilma isn’t your typical mother-in-law. I feel as though she loves me just as much as she loves Jack, which probably isn’t true, but I enjoy pretending it is.

  So I should be nice to her right now, even if I’m about as glad to see her as I am to feel the threat of another barforama stirring in my gut.

  Wilma sets her red patent-leather purse gingerly on the listing couch—the only surface that isn’t already covered with stuff—and watches it slide right off.

  “Oopsy!” She catches it before it hits the floor.

  Oopsy? I think.

  “Here,” I say, “let me take that for you.”

  She hands it over and I look around for a place to put it.

  “Sweetie,” she says as I hang the straps of her bag over a doorknob, “between the move and losing your job and worrying about your mother, you’ve been through hell these past few days. How is your mom, by the way?”

  I tell Wilma she’s home and waiting for more tests, and that I’m planning to drive up there to see her.

  “When?”

  “This week,” I say spontaneously. After all, what else have I got to do?

  “By yourself?”

  “Sure, I’ll be fine. It’s not that bad a drive.”

  “Isn’t it five hundred miles?”

  “Almost…”

  “Aren’t there a couple of mountain ranges between here and there?”

  “Ye-es.”

  “You shouldn’t go alone,” Wilma tells me.

  “Jack can’t take off work, and I really kind of need to see my mother.” I can’t help but feel a little prickly.

  “I understand,” Wilma says, and pats my shoulder. “I’ll go with you.”

  The remnants of the cherry pie lurch sickeningly in my stomach. “You…will?”

  She nods decisively. “What else have I got to do?”

  “That’s really…sweet of you, Wilma, but…” I fight the urge to shut my eyes to block out the disturbing memory of my grandmother, clad in hot-pink hot pants she bought at the Montgomery Ward, thrusting a crocheted toilet-paper cozy into Wilma’s
hands.

  No, it’s not my worst nightmare.

  It actually happened, at the engagement party a few years back.

  Wilma was gracious, as always, and she really hit it off with my family, but…well, she was distracted by the other guests, plus that was on her own turf.

  Somehow, I have a hard time picturing her in the land of zau-zage connections.

  True, she flew up to Brookside for the wedding, but that was a wedding. There wasn’t much time for informal familial interaction.

  “We’ll go on a road trip together, just us girls,” she tells me. “Like Thelma and Louise. Won’t that be fun?”

  I’ll admit it’s been a while since I saw the movie, but didn’t Thelma and Louise drive off a cliff and die?

  Sure, one of them got to sleep with Brad Pitt first. But in the Tracey and Wilma version, that’s not going to be me, so…

  “You really don’t have to drive all that way with me, Wilma. Seriously, it’s such a long trip.”

  “Oh, it’s fine. You can’t go alone. I know Jack just won’t have it.”

  As it turns out, he just won’t.

  “You should go,” he says. “It would be good for you, and you haven’t seen your family in months.”

  “I know, but I hate to leave you here alone in a strange place.”

  “I can ask Mitch to come up. He’s been bugging me about it.”

  I’m sure he has. It’s been a whole…what? Four days since we’ve moved?

  “He can help me do a few things around the house, too,” Jack informs me, gesturing at the general chaos that still surrounds us. “He might know what to do about the couch.”

  “Mitch? Is he handy?”

  “Sure,” Jack says vaguely.

  “I don’t know…”

  “Listen, I’m sure you and Mom will have a great time, just a couple of gals on the open road.”

  When I give him a dubious look, he asks, all innocent, “What?”

  “You know what.”

  “Come on, Tracey. It’ll be good. You love my mother.”

  I do. And I love my family. And, seriously, the old highway’s a-callin’: I really do need to get away from my non-life for a few days.

  Still…

  “Trust me,” says my husband, “a road trip to Brookside with my mom is just what the doctor ordered.”

  Turns out he’s right.

  He just neglects to mention that the doctor’s name is Kevorkian.

  CHAPTER 13

  Did I mention that I adore my mother-in-law?

  I did?

  Good.

  Then you won’t think I’m entirely heartless when I say that the woman is a complete moron.

  How could I never have noticed this fatal flaw before? Was I so blinded by Wilma’s maternal affection and fashion forwardness that I just didn’t notice her lack of…well, brain cells?

  Don’t get me wrong…in her element, Wilma is divine. The Hostess with the Mostess, the Life of the Party, the Savvy Shopper, the Style Maven, the Doting Matriarch.

  Out of her element, she’s a Blithering Nincompoop.

  I get my first inkling about forty minutes into our big road trip, when I’m barreling along in six lanes of traffic and ask her to check the map to see which exit I take to get onto Route 86 west.

  “I don’t know,” she says from behind the crinkling, billowing map. “How do I figure that out?”

  I try to explain, but she doesn’t seem to get it. Nor does she seem to realize that it’s important that we figure this out, or we will wind up in Connecticut.

  Which we do.

  Which sets us back a good hour.

  Nor does Wilma get how to put a new CD into the car stereo—“Oopsy! I think I jammed it in too hard and now it won’t come out!”—or work the condiment pumps at the Burger King where we stop for lunch—“Oopsy! Sorry about that mustard, ma’am.”

  When we stop for gas, she insists on paying, and pumping…though she hasn’t a clue how to do it and I have to get out and show her. She sets the gas-tank cap on the roof of the car, and that’s the last I see of it, aside from a fleeting glimpse of it hurtling into oblivion as we merge back onto the highway at sixty-five miles an hour.

  Oh, and Wilma has a freakishly small bladder. She must. Why else would the woman have to pee every hour, regardless of whether there’s a public restroom anywhere within a twenty-mile radius of the exit? At one point, we meander across the state line into Pennsylvania on a two-lane road lined by cow pastures, because Wilma begged me to stop, even though there were no facilities listed at the exit sign.

  “That doesn’t mean there isn’t a restaurant or gas station,” she told me.

  Um…yes, it pretty much does.

  Not only that, but she brought a walk-in suitcase that presumably contains everything from bathing suits to parkas, and for all I know, a rubber raft and snow skis. Yet she keeps asking me if I think she’ll be too cold, or too warm, or too dressy, or too casual.

  Kathleen calls her on her cell phone for the duration of the drive, apparently helpless just knowing her mother has temporarily left the tristate area. She keeps putting the twins on to whine about how much they miss her, and Wilma, predictably, gets all choked up and feels guilty.

  Yup. Here we are, just a couple of gals on the open road, and all I can think is that Thelma and Louise had the right idea when they drove off that cliff. I’m not sure which of them was at the wheel when it happened, but I’m positive the other one had Ashley and Beatrice on speakerphone, saying, “Sing something for Aunt Tracey, girls. She’s driving and she said she wants to hear some beautiful music.”

  Mental Note: shoot Wilma, then self.

  The seven-hour trip takes more than ten, and it’s after dark when we finally pull into my parents’ driveway.

  The whole family is gathered there, waiting to greet me, as they always are when I come home for a visit. My parents, siblings, in-laws, nieces, nephews, grandmother…

  And a total stranger.

  “Tracey, Wilma, this is Stefania,” someone says, and a blond stranger throws her arms around first me, then Wilma.

  “It is so nice meeting you,” she says in broken English. “We have been wait!”

  We?

  Well, well, well. Isn’t that cozy.

  “Nice meeting you, too,” I say politely, noticing that she’s wearing fuzzy pink slippers.

  I mean…it’s kind of unusual for a dinner guest to show up in fuzzy pink slippers, isn’t it? Or any slippers at all, for that matter.

  Yes, that would be unusual…

  But since—as I am about to discover—Stefania has just moved in with my parents, she isn’t technically a guest here.

  I am.

  Wilma is, too.

  But Stefania? Nope, she’s one of the family, padding around in her slippers like she owns the place, even asking me if she can get me something to drink.

  Yes, that’s right: she’s moved in. I learn that bit of news from my favorite sister-in-law, Sara, before we’ve even made our way entirely into the house.

  It seems that Josie Lupinelli’s son is home from college, and presumably wanted his room back. So instead of sending her back to Krakow, Josie shuttled her on over to my parents’, who were glad to have her.

  They put her in my old room, of course.

  Meaning I’ll be bunking with Wilma in my brothers’ old room down the hall.

  “I can’t believe no one told me Ma and Pop are taking in boarders!” I hiss at Sara, trying not to sound pissy.

  “She’s not a boarder, she’s a friend.”

  Maybe…but it seems odd that my parents are hanging around with nineteen-year-old internationals when they could be…

  What?

  Hanging around with you?

  Yeah. That’s it. I’m jealous. I hate that I am, but I can’t help it.

  Maybe it’s because I’ve always been the youngest kid in the family. I guess this is what it must have felt like for my siblings whenever my
parents brought home a new baby to fuss over.

  Except that Stefania’s not a baby, and I don’t even live here anymore.

  Gazing at my parents, I notice that my mother does look a little pale and drawn, and my father has more gray around the temples.

  They’re getting older. And I miss them desperately.

  We walk into the house, which smells—as always—like your favorite Italian restaurant, and is filled with a mishmash of old and new (as in, purchased in this millennium) furniture and a lifetime of mementos. Framed photographs are everywhere: some brand-new and some decades old, some snapshots and some professional portraits. My nieces’ and nephews’ toys are everywhere, and so are the kids themselves, crawling, running, climbing, bouncing on cushions.

  It’s chaotic and it’s cluttered and it’s home.

  No, it isn’t. You have your own house now. Remember?

  “Ma,” I say impulsively, turning to her, “you should drive back with me when I leave on Sunday. You could have a nice change of scenery, see the new house, spend a few days.”

  “Tracey, you just moved. You aren’t set up for houseguests. Do you even have guest-room furniture?”

  “Of course,” I say, wondering if a blow-up air mattress that may or may not have a hole counts. “Anyway, you would take our bedroom.”

  “I couldn’t do that. And you probably haven’t unpacked yet, so…”

  She’s right. I haven’t. There are still boxes everywhere.

  Still…

  “Jack and I would love it if you came, Ma. We have plenty of room.”

  “Not this time,” my mother says, patting my shoulder. “You have your mother-in-law with you for the drive, anyway.”

  “Yes, but we’d love to take you back with us, too. Just a few gals on the open road…wouldn’t it be fun?”

  “Some other time,” my mother says. “When Pop can come, too.”

  “I’m sure he’d be fine here without you for a few days, Ma.”

  She shakes her head. That just isn’t how things are done in my family. The women don’t go off on road trips and leave the men high and dry.

  I sigh inwardly, knowing it’s never going to change; it is what it is. Why can’t I accept that?

  Why do I step over the threshold here and instantly feel so wistful, so guilty, so frustrated, so jealous?