“The coolest, smartest, sweetest person you could ever want to meet,” Suzanne finished for her. She squeezed Laura’s hand. “Trust me, these alchies, they are likeable, clever, adorable creatures; that’s how they get away with so much crap.”
“You know, you’re right—you’re exactly right,” Laura marveled, and Suzanne was proud to have found an insight to offer after all. “You’re so fucking smart. UNH is lucky to get you.”
“I always said that about you,” Billy chimed in affectionately. “After high school, after you nearly gave birth in the cafegymatorium, I still always said, ‘that Suzie girl, she might dress like she’s stuck in the nineties . . .’”
“Hey!”
“And she might have a voice like a eunuch with the croup, if you have trig with her first thing in the AM . . . But,” he added sagely, “in spite of all these flaws, and the many others that we haven’t discovered yet, I always said that Suzie girl was smart. And fertile.”
“Fertile?” Sean asked. “You could tell that back in high school?”
Oh, Lord, Suzanne groaned. Here it comes.
“Her water broke at graduation,” Billy informed Sean cheerily, and the expression on Sean’s face was such that they all burst out laughing; so hard, in fact, that Suzanne wasn’t sure, but she thought a little pee might have leaked out.
“I can’t believe I used to have a crush on you,” Suzanne sighed. “What wasted daydreams.”
“You used to have a crush on me?” Billy brightened.
It was Laura’s turn to groan. “Okay, you’ve made not only his day but his year, and I’m going to have to hear about it until the end of time. Haven’t you heard of the chick rule, Thou Shall Not Covet the Ass of Thy Girlfriend’s Future Mate?”
A real live girlfriend. Well, it’s about damn time.
Suzanne tried to remember the last time she’d had a really close girlfriend, and couldn’t. There hadn’t been time to bond with anyone, with two jobs and a full-time child to look after. Two, if you counted her husband.
She glanced over to see how Molly’s “date” was going. To her dismay, the kids had taken off at some point in the past few minutes.
“Did anyone see where they went?”
All shook their heads, and Suzanne tried to shrug casually and push her anxiety away. After all, Molly was eighteen. She didn’t need to be policed twenty-four-seven anymore. And she would surely resent any attempt Suzanne made toward that end.
There are things I don’t need to see and things I don’t need to know, she reasoned. It assuaged her somewhat to realize she would feel this way if Molly just disappeared with a guy.
Molly can take care of herself, she realized. She really and truly can. I can still care about her, but I don’t have to worry about her every second of the day anymore.
No Ava, no Steve, no Molly to look after.
For the first time in eighteen years, this was a night to herself, with a handsome and interesting man at her side. Placed there by her daughter, she discerned with amusement.
Suddenly the cool evening seemed less a night to load herself down with guilt than a night of tingling possibilities.
“So, Sean,” Suzanne asked, “what do you think my daughter had in mind when she corralled you to the bookstore and then dropped you off in my lap?”
“That it’s time to get Mommy laid?” Billy guessed. “You see, this is why you have kids.”
“That’s just it,” Suzanne pointed out. “I’m not sure how comfortable I am having my daughter go trolling for men for me.”
“Well, actually, I’d like to think,” Sean said drolly, “that she saw something in me and thought, ‘Hey, he might just get along with my mom.’ You know, maybe it had a little do with me and my enormous . . . charisma, rather than just my stud services.”
“She’s trying to take care of you,” Laura whispered. “She’s watched you take care of everyone else your whole life; now it’s your turn.”
That’s sweet, that’s thoughtful. That’s pure, one hundred percent Molly . . . But I’m not ready for her to be doing that. No, not yet.
But it looked like the time was here, and there was nothing she could do about it. This was a graduation of a whole other kind.
To stave off the feeling of loss, Suzanne took out another Spirit and dipped her head into Sean’s flame. For the first time since the spark of his touch, her full attention was focused on the man beside her. She was pretty sure Dr. Phil—or any other shrink of the moment—would advise against jumping into any sort of comingling with another member of the sex that she was currently divorcing.
But hey, I don’t have to marry the guy, she thought. In fact, chances are huge he won’t propose before the evening’s out. So maybe it’s okay to enjoy just a nice conversation or two with a man my daughter thought was good enough for me to go out with.
“Okay, Sean, your turn.” She gave her full and complete attention, for the first time, to the handsome man before her. “Give me your Cliff’s Notes, starting with where you know my mother from.” No need to let him know he’d already tipped his hand.
Sean looked at her gravely for a moment and then smiled, bracing himself for the story. “Well, let’s see, just so’s you know where I’m coming from, I should probably tell you, I never met a beer I wasn’t best friends with . . .”
NINETEEN
It was sixteen hours later, and Suzanne was feeling particularly pleased with herself. She had dreaded the meeting with the lawyers—after all, Steve’s mommy’s money brought in a much better lawyer than what little savings she’d had. But Suzanne wanted what was coming to her—which would have been the entire house, since Steve’s mother paid for the occasional dryer or lamp or tank of oil, but the mortgage each month came out of her salary.
On the Seacoast, you didn’t get a $300,000 house without a hefty down payment. She’d used the money her dad’s life insurance left her, determined not to ask Steve’s Mommy for a dime, although Steve had begged her to. (Try as she might, she had never been able to think of Steve’s mommy by her name, or as Mrs. Lauder or Mom L. Aloud, and in her mind, she’d been Steve’s Mommy, period.) After all, he’d argued, a hundred thousand dollars could buy him a lot of newer musical equipment, a van to carry around all this equipment to his nonexistent gigs, and a stageworthy wardrobe for these nonexistent gigs.
“It could be just the break we’ve been waiting for,” he’d argued. “I’ll use your dad’s life insurance money for new equipment, and my mom will take care of the down payment on the new house. You know we won’t have to pay her back.”
But Suzanne wasn’t a starry-eyed eighteen-year-old anymore. After a decade of being bought and sold with Steve’s Mommy’s money, she was very jaded twenty-eight-year-old. She wasn’t about to give that woman one more thing to hold over their heads, one more thing to beat into Steve’s head that he owed her and therefore she owned him.
Furthermore, she saw no reason to invest in equipment and a van when, in the ten years since their marriage, he’d never played out a single time. He insisted he was getting his album ready, but she figured that if he was truly the genius he and his family claimed he was, ten years would have been more than enough time to record an album in his little home studio and start promoting it in some of the local pubs to try to get the attention of a booking agent.
But Steve didn’t do that, had never done any of that. Steve would work and work and work on a song until it was finished, then decide it wasn’t his “vision” and put it away to work and work and work on the next song. A full bong, of course, was always by his side. The only concerts Steve would ever play, she’d realized long ago, were the ones in his head when he was stoned off his ass.
So, her father’s insurance firmly in hand, she’d flatly refused to buy more equipment for Steve’s studio. Steve had had a tantrum that lasted for months. He actually threatened to leave, but when she started packing his bags for him, he’d panicked and dropped that strategy pretty damn fast—it was almost a record.
She put twenty thousand in a trust for Molly’s education—which, it turned out, was totally unnecessary, but it would make a nice nest egg for when she graduated, and that was good to know. The rest, every penny, went for the down payment on the house. She’d thought of it as her house only twice—when she signed the papers and the first day they moved in.
But the only part about the house that was hers was the money that went to sustain it. While she was at work, Steve decorated it with his usual brass Buddhist figurines, loads of plants, and pictures of musicians he admired. She made double mortgage payments whenever she could—she’d read somewhere that would lop years off the time it took to pay it off—but it wasn’t often she could manage that.
Considering all this, she expected the fight to be long and weary, but surprisingly, Steve’s lawyer had made an offer that wasn’t ridiculous. In fact, it was downright generous.
“The value of the house has increased, since you purchased it, from $300,000 to nearly $420,000,” Steve’s lawyer intoned. Portsmouth had developed like mad in the late eighties and nineties, so she’d expected as much. “Mr. Lauder feels,” Steve’s lawyer continued, “that since you provided the down payment on the house, plus all of the mortgage payments, you deserve the entirety of the house’s value, plus equity.”
Suzanne looked at her lawyer, shocked. “This is a trick, right?” she whispered to her counselor fervently. “He’s just going to give me $420,000? Not the Steve I know.”
Her lawyer silenced her. “We haven’t heard what he wants yet. That could make a lot of things clear.”
So she’d sat back, waiting.
“In return, Mr. Lauder asks that since you paid for a great deal of his musical equipment, worth nearly $40,000, that he be allowed to keep said instruments.”
She and her lawyer waited. But apparently, that was it.
“So, he’s going to give me all the money for the house,” Suzanne finally managed to say, “and all he wants is to keep his equipment? What the heck would I do with it?”
Steve’s lawyer shrugged. “He’s trying to be generous,” he explained gently, “as he truly doesn’t want this divorce to go through.”
“So he’s hoping that you’ll melt at the mere mention that he’d be willing to do such a thing,” her lawyer finished.
She was stunned, to say the least. She hadn’t thought—or cared—if Steve still loved her in years. But that kind of money was an awful lot of love, no matter how you sliced it.
I suppose now is the part where I’m supposed to crumble and start crying, call Steve and tell him we can work it out.
It made her sad that he thought such an offer was even possible. Steve was a child, but granted, it wasn’t entirely his fault. First Mommy had catered to his every whim, and after years of trying to get him to grow up, she’d taken over the job. She also supposed she should feel guilty about all of these things. But she didn’t—try as she might, she couldn’t. Steve had sucked so much out of her over the years that there just wasn’t anything at all left to give him. And if that’s a bad thing, I can’t worry about that. Not while I’m looking at a half-million dollar check with my name on it.
“I’ll take the offer,” she said firmly, before Steve or his lawyer or, more likely, his mother could run in and change his or her mind. She signed where they told her to sign, and to her surprise, Steve’s lawyer handed her a check right then and there. Including equity, the amount Steve was paying her was just over half a million dollars.
Suddenly she felt dizzy and leaned over to whisper, “Please get me to my bank. Right now.”
Her lawyer smiled, reading her thoughts. “He’s already signed the papers—he can’t cancel it.”
“I don’t care,” she whispered ferociously. “Take me to my bank. Now.” Then she turned to Steve’s lawyer. “Where did Steve get this kind of money, anyway?”
“He found a buyer for the house,” The lawyer answered smoothly. Suzanne’s heart dropped, just a little. Maybe she had paid for it, but it had been Steve’s house, down to every last throw rug and decoration, not to mention the herbal garden in the well-groomed backyard (it was the one chore he took on without an argument). He was almost always there. It was his little corner of the world where no one could bother him.
“Well,” she said finally, “tell him I’m sorry he’s going to have to move, but . . .”
“Oh, he doesn’t have to move,” Steve’s lawyer said smoothly, and suddenly Suzanne felt like an idiot.
Of course.
Mommy had bought the house, Mommy had coughed up the extra equity, and Mommy was paying for this lawyer. Now that Suzanne was out of the picture, Mommy was probably having to do a lot more attending to her demanding son. Maybe this was her way of telling Suzanne she understood.
Or maybe it’s kiss-off money, making me promise to stay away from him.
She wouldn’t have minded that, and for a moment wondered if she could get it in writing that they would no longer speak to each other. A glance down at the check, however, got her up and moving, and she stood in line at the bank impatiently, waiting her turn to deposit the money. The cashier’s face had gone white at the amount, and Suzanne laughed.
Since Steve’s mom shared the same bank, the transaction would go through immediately. Suddenly her battered bank card, which usually caused her so much stress when she looked at it (wondering if there was enough for a pack of cigarettes before her next shift) suddenly looked like freedom.
This would definitely take a while to sink in.
She floated home in a daze, stopping at a couple of stores, looking at some clothes she would have considered way too expensive. The thought that she could buy them, if she wanted to, made her burst into giggles, right in the middle of the boutique. The salesgirls looked at her warily, and she looked at them apologetically, unable to stop the giggling, and fled the store in search of a latte and muffin at Breaking New Grounds.
She ate while she walked home, sipping slowly, eating in small bites, so when the giggles invariably returned (which they did, a couple of times) she wouldn’t choke to death. A check for over half a million dollars. The thought made her double over with laughter. A concerned mother with two kids in car seats pulled over to ask her if she was okay, if she needed any help.
“I’m fine,” Suzanne said happily. “Better than I’ve been in a long, long time.”
Watching the mom drive away, she realized she truly was better than she’d ever been. Her daughter wasn’t pregnant, her divorce was finally complete, her college years were just about to begin, she had a nest egg to fall back on, and last night she’d had a pseudo-date with a very cute man.
She barely knew what to make of it all.
Could it be that that my life is really working out? Is it? Don’t even think it! she scolded herself. You’ll jinx it! Now, knock wood, turn around three times and spit! She giggled. After all this time, it felt damn nice to be silly again.
As she was thinking these happy thoughts, her nonpregnant daughter and Brandon came up the walk.
“So, what’s up, my darlings?”
She gestured to give each of them a hug and a kiss, but Molly gave her the half-hearted, perfunctory pat on the shoulder. Suzanne didn’t mind; she knew that “hugs from your mom” could be a drag. Nothing, absolutely nothing could dampen her spirits today. She sat back down again, reaching for her cigarettes.
“Where have you guys been?”
“Brandon had never been on the Thomas Leighton.” Molly looked down the road, obviously bored beyond belief. “So we did that, then we had coffee in Market Square and people-watched.”
“You’ve got a huge mix of people in the Seacoast. I used to spend the summers in Maine. It’s so predominantly white there.” Brandon showed Suzanne his sketchbook. “But here you’ve got all kinds. I got some great sketches, I think. Tell me what you think.”
“I didn’t know you drew.” Suzanne flipped through the pages, impressed. “Wow, these are really, r
eally good, Brandon. You even got the guy who drives the horse and buggy. Chris, I think his name is—isn’t it, Molly?”
“Yeah,” Molly answered listlessly. “It’s Chris. Chris, the Buggy Driver.”
“You even got the tiny scar on his cheek down pat,” Suzanne said approvingly. She studied the drawing for a few more moments, then handed it back. “Are you going to be a, what do you call it, graphic artist?”
“Actually, I’m . . .”
“He’s going to be a psychologist, Mother,” Molly snapped. “I told you that on the very first day you met him.”
Suzanne stared at her daughter, startled and a little hurt.
“You’ll have to forgive me, sweetie,” she said calmly, “if I haven’t troubled myself to commit his entire life story to memory.”
An icy tension settled like a fog between the two women.
“Hey,” Brandon said suddenly, “you’re in a really good mood. Does this mean your meeting . . . ?”
“Yes!” Suzanne took Brandon’s distraction gratefully. “Yes, it went well. So much better than well, I can’t even tell you. And it’s over, done, finito!!!” She offered Brandon a high-five, which he matched so hard her hand stung a little. “Wow, you got game for a gay guy.”
“So they tell me,” he said smugly. Molly sighed harshly and rolled her eyes.
“So, now all I have to do is sit back and wait for my information about the January semester to come in the mail and figure out how to spend the next three months.”
“I wish my mom would go back to school,” Brandon said. “She works in the principal’s office at the high school. It doesn’t take as much skill as it does patience, and she comes home completely fried.”
“Yay, Mommy. Good for you,” Molly said. Her tone was blasé.
Suzanne forgot about her sudden windfall. She felt the last of her ebullient mood slip away as she looked at Molly, whose eyes were blazing with things she’d been thinking and was now going to say.
Maybe that’s a good thing, she tried to convince herself. Maybe this is the way we need to do this, to get everything out in the open.
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