Blueprints
Page 25
“Which is precisely why I put you in daycare way back,” Caroline said. “You were an only child. You needed socialization.”
“Did Dad like my being in daycare?”
“No. He didn’t approve then and wouldn’t now, but it’s no longer his decision. I know that sounds harsh, baby, but it’s true. Tad is yours. So are the decisions.”
And the cleanup when things were a mess. “He’s getting syrup on your table,” she said as she started to rise. Caroline’s hand stayed her.
“It’ll wash off.”
“My condo is a wreck.”
“Your condo is a thing.”
With a happy sigh and a grin, Jamie scrubbed her fingers through Tad’s curls. “See, Taddy? Haven’t I said that a gazillion times?” She sipped her coffee, thinking that half of those gazillion times had been aloud to Brad and had gone right over his head, but that was only one of many problems they’d had. “It was so weird.”
“What was?”
“Last night. I’d been terrified of hurting Brad, but he was fine. Now I’m wondering whether I felt the pain and vulnerability more than he ever did. Did I imagine his sensitivity because I wanted him to be that kind of person?”
“Maybe. Maybe it was pride. Maybe he didn’t want to show weakness, or, God forbid, beg for another chance.”
Jamie had a different thought then and sucked in a breath. “Maybe he was relieved. Maybe he’s drawn to someone else.”
“Would that bother you?”
“Of course it would. We were engaged.” In the next breath, she thought of Chip and was guilt-ridden. “Actually, it would make me feel better,” she admitted. “I like to think our engagement wasn’t working for him either. I know he’s relieved about—” Tad, she finished with a glance. “Maybe he didn’t want to be CEO either. Until the accident, that was hypothetical. Now it isn’t. Maybe he’s glad to be off the hook.”
It was only speculation, though, and had little to do with who or what she was. Chip was never far from her mind. She didn’t understand it. In high school, they had been at opposite ends of the social spectrum. He had a reputation for being fast. She was sure he’d slept around. Not her. But she couldn’t think about much else now.
“So,” she tried again, needing to get to it. “About sex.”
Caroline set down the cup. “Sex? Hmm. Oh dear, let me get something for Tad’s hands and face. He seems to be done.” With a scrape of her chair, she rose and left the room.
Jamie leaned toward Tad. “Was that yummy?”
“Yummmmy.”
“I loved pancakes when I was your age, and Nana Caro makes the best. Mom?” she called, so happy to be a daughter again.
“Yes?”
But Jamie suddenly spotted the fruit bowl. “Oh no,” she said in mock horror, “we forgot raspberries.” She spooned up a bunch. “Strawberries, too?”
“Noooo.” He picked up a raspberry. There were six. Jamie was wondering how long he would take to eat them, and what else might hold his attention while she talked with her mother, when Caroline returned with a damp dishcloth, a pad of paper, and a pencil. The cloth cleaned up syrup; the paper and pencil bought time.
“I need crayons here,” Caroline remarked. “Lead is lethal.”
“It’s okay. Pencils are made of graphite. But we’re watching him. He won’t put it in his mouth. What should he call you? I don’t see you as a Grandma.”
Caroline seemed startled. “Uh, no. Me, neither.”
“Caro would be cute, only I want him to call you something no one else does. When I was talking with him a second ago, I said Nana Caro.”
“Nana Caro. I like that. It feels … fresh.”
Jamie sensed she had been about to say “young” but hadn’t wanted to touch on age again, and Jamie was with her on that. Gut It! lay in wait, just beneath the surface but totally secondary to why she had come. “So, can we talk about sex?”
“Shhhh.” Caroline hitched her chin toward the boy.
“Mom,” Jamie begged, albeit in a hushed voice, “he doesn’t know what sex is. I am not getting graphic, but I need to talk about this, and I have no one else.”
“It could be,” Caroline said, sounding baffled, “that I’m not the best one to ask.”
Because she hadn’t had sex in a while? But Jamie’s questions were hypothetical. “What if I said it was boring with Brad? What if I said I didn’t look at him and start to tremble?” Caroline’s eyes went wide. “What?”
“Nothing.” But she was blushing. “I’m good.”
“Are you embarrassed?”
“No.” She tipped up her chin. “I am not embarrassed. If Brad doesn’t make you tremble, I’d say it’s another piece to the puzzle of why you and Brad weren’t good together.”
“But how important a piece is it? A relationship can’t exist on sex alone. Am I crazy to throw away a guy who may be good in every other way?”
“But he wasn’t,” Caroline pointed out with a nod at Tad.
“He might have eventually come around on that.” Jamie grunted. “Or so I kept telling myself, stupid me. But I need to know about the other.”
“Sex.”
“Am I wrong to want more?”
Caroline considered. “No.”
“How important is chemistry? Am I a sexual creature first? Second? Third? What proportion of a relationship should be dominated by sex?”
Her mother laughed. “Oh, baby. It isn’t about proportions. Sex means more to some people than to others, and its importance in a relationship isn’t static. It changes with life. And with time.”
“I understand that, but shouldn’t it at least start off pretty great? If it doesn’t, what hope is there? I want it to be great, Mom. I want to look at a guy and melt.”
Caroline was suddenly far away, dreamy almost, and, for the first time, Jamie realized she must have had lovers other than Roy. Her mother was sexy in an organic way, and her work constantly exposed her to men. As many times as she had sworn that she and Roy were in love when Jamie was conceived, Jamie doubted the sex had been great. Roy was too into Roy. History had borne that out.
Cautiously, Caroline asked, “Was it never that way with Brad?”
“I thought it would be, because he really is sweet, and he wanted to please me. But sex with him was typical of our relationship—sedate and comfortable and planned. Even when he came—” She winced and waved a hand. “Forget I said that.” Instead, she tried to articulate what she had felt in those moments with Chip. “Maybe I don’t want it to be intellectual. Maybe I want it to be impulsive and hot. What does that say about me?”
Caroline was slow to answer, then oddly puzzled. “It might say that you’re reacting to your father’s early death.”
“I don’t think it’s that.”
“Have you always wanted more than Brad offered?”
“I wasn’t aware that there was more.” Jamie hesitated. How much to say? It could all amount to nothing. Right now, though, it was vividly real, and, even aside from rebuilding trust, she wanted Caroline’s approval. “I met someone.”
“Someone?”
“Chip Kobik.”
Caroline’s face was blank at first. Then her brows rose in surprise. “The hockey player?”
“Not anymore. Well, he runs a summer hockey camp for kids, but mostly he teaches PE at Emory, and he’s a single dad. We met on the playground last week.”
“Last week.”
“I know. It’s wild.” A normal person didn’t meet someone one week and let it change her life the next. Unless she believed in love at first sight. Which was really pushing it. “I mean, he is so not my type—or he wasn’t, but he’s different now. He’s alone and I’m alone—I mean, I really am, Mom, because I haven’t had Brad and I haven’t had you—and I don’t mean that as criticism, because I understand why you think I had a hand in what Claire did, but with Dad gone, if I’m choosing between hosting the show and being a mom, there’s no choice, and if Claire—”
“Well,” Jamie drawled for his sake when Caroline’s hand fell away, “that was a trip. Mamie got totally off-subject. What are you drawing, monkey?” She left her seat to study a havoc of lines. “That’s so pretty!”
“At least he holds the pencil right,” Caroline said appreciatively. “You were slow when it came to fine motor skills.”
“Which is why I took up tennis.” She scanned the coffee tables. “Do you have any old magazines you don’t mind losing?”
“Would a catalog work?”
“Perfect. He decimated my Architectural Records.” Moments later, with Tad on the floor engrossed in a tool catalogue (“Wow, Taddy, I’ll bet Handy Manny uses this!”) and Jamie hip to hip with Caroline on the love seat, she was calmer. “What are we going to do about Gut It!?”
“The show’s on hiatus.”
“Claire will be after me to do advance work.”
“I’m already on it, so it’ll be done for you if you host.”
“She won’t give up. She’ll play dirty.”
“We’ll play dirty back.” Caroline linked their hands. “But we said we wouldn’t talk about Gut It! Tell me more about Chip.”
Jamie didn’t need forcing. “He’s been amazingly helpful, and I don’t just mean giving me lists of resources. He actually, physically, went with me to the daycare center to get Tad enrolled. His son is a year older than Tad, and he’s a great dad. He’s fun to be with and easy to talk to, and when he looks at me”—she drew in a shuddering breath—“it’s there, Mom, everything I never had with Brad.”
“When all did this happen?”
“Yesterday, and I know what you’re thinking,” she added quickly, “and you’re right. I barely know the guy. But it’s electric.”
“Does he feel it, too?”
Piercing blue eyes. A tight jaw. Tell me to stop, Jamie.
“Oh, yeah. So maybe I like him because he’s good with Tad or because he has answers I need or because he’s a bad boy, or was, which makes him a little dangerous, and I’ve never remotely done dangerous. But can you fake chemistry? Isn’t it either there or not?”
Caroline was so long thinking about this that Jamie wondered again about other men in her mother’s life. She was about to ask when a second hand closed around hers and squeezed. “No, you can’t fake it. But it may be dormant, like there without your realizing. If you’re focused on other things and aren’t looking—”
“I wasn’t looking. I swear, I wasn’t. I’ve never seen myself as that kind of person.”
“Me either.”
“My life has radically changed in two weeks’ time. I don’t know who I am anymore. How do I define myself? What do I do?”
“I haven’t a clue.”
“You have to.”
A gentle laugh. “Why is that?”
“Because I need advice.”
Caroline’s laughter was higher this time. “What if I said that the last two weeks have been cataclysmic for me, too, and that my self-image has been turned upside down, so I don’t know who I am either?”
Even without direct accusation, Jamie knew she was responsible for much of her mother’s angst. “I’m not hosting the show, Mom. That’s my final answer. Maybe I would have wanted it once, but no more. It’s too contentious. And I seriously, seriously do not have the time.” That said, she checked the clock on her phone. “I have to go.”
“Will you come again soon?”
“How about, oh, um, eight-point-five hours from now?” Jamie said with a snicker. In the next breath, she was self-conscious. “No. Maybe not.”
“You want to see Chip.”
“He calls himself Charlie. That’s pretty much the only thing I have trouble with when it comes to him. And yes. I want to see him.” Which was why she had so badly needed Caroline. “Am I awful for that?”
“If you’re awful, I’m awful.”
“Then you don’t hate me for going from Brad to Chip so fast?”
“How can I judge you?”
“I need your approval, Mom.”
“Well then, oooo-kay.” She considered for another minute before taking a breath and letting loose an explosion of words. “Passion can take us by surprise, as in hitting suddenly, but maybe that isn’t a bad thing. I’m thinking we can’t overintellectualize life. Sex may be more important than some of us even know, because situations change, and life is a learning experience. Maybe your father’s death is driving us, but if it’s telling us that life is short, it’s right. If we discover something better than we had, does it matter how we got there?”
“Is that an endorsement?”
“Um, yes, I guess it is. But be careful, baby,” she added on a note of caution, “I don’t want you hurt. And it isn’t just you anymore. Now it’s Tad, too.”
nineteen
Brad must have asked the receptionist to buzz him the instant Jamie arrived, because he was at her desk minutes later, leaning over her to talk with the same outward calm he would have shown any other day at work. He looked tired, as if he had barely slept. Heart heavy, she waited for him to say that they were acting too quickly, that he didn’t want to break up, that he couldn’t envision a future without her in his life. In fact, his glasses were straight, his eyes their usual light gray, his voice low and close. But his words were something else.
“I’ve thought this through,” he said, intimate and low. “I want to hold off on making a formal announcement. Have you told anyone?”
Not regret, then. Just stark, cold practicality.
It was for the best, Jamie knew. Still, she was stung by how wrong she had been about Brad. “Only my mother.”
“I doubt she was upset. Did you tell Theo?”
“Not yet. What do you mean, ‘I doubt she was upset’?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s over. But please don’t tell anyone else. There’s no need yet.”
Jamie certainly hadn’t planned on sending an e-announcement. Still, when they had first become engaged, word had spread on its own. “I’m not wearing my ring,” she murmured. “People will notice.”
“You can say you forgot to put it on.”
“What about tomorrow? Or next week?”
“By then, I’ll know what I’m doing.”
That gave her pause. “What do you mean?”
Behind his glasses, his eyes were unblinking. “I’ve always had offers from other companies.”
She was startled, then annoyed. “You never told me,” she had to say, because he had made such a big deal the night before about her not telling him about Tad.
“I didn’t tell you,” he said, “because they were irrelevant at the time, but they aren’t anymore. One’s with a firm in Minnesota. I like the partners.”
“You were entertaining job offers from out of state?” She could understand that he would be recruited by local companies he met through MacAfee Homes, but something out of state would suggest he had been actively soliciting jobs.
He didn’t deny it. “I’ve often thought I’d like to go home.”
“You never told me that.” She had broken up with Brad as soon as she recognized her feelings for Chip. To learn that he had been looking elsewhere while they were engaged, knowing she was tied to MacAfee Homes, knowing that her work, family, and hometown were here, knowing that Theo and Roy were counting on his taking over one day—she was stunned. “You said you didn’t want to be in the same city as your parents. You said you didn’t like Minneapolis.”
“And I believed it, but when I thought about it last night, I realized I had to make myself dislike Minneapolis so I could like Boston. The truth is, I’m a midwesterner. Minneapolis looks pretty good to me right now.”
He was wounded and lashing out. That was the only explanation Jamie could find. She had been engaged to marry the man. She had always thought him down to earth and
totally transparent.
Only it sounded like he’d had this at the back of his mind for a while, like Plan B had been there all along on the chance that Plan A was nixed.
For a split second, she was hurt. In that second, she felt a whole new swell of anger, betrayal, dismay, not the least of it being how easily he had moved on.
But the second passed, and reality returned. She had moved on, too. Her heart wasn’t here. And as she studied this detached Brad—she actually moved her desk chair farther from him—she felt better and better. She had believed him vulnerable for so long that the idea of his being strong and filled with purpose was a huge relief.
“Oh. Okay. I’m glad,” she said and meant it. She had loved him, perhaps not the right way for marriage, but feelings didn’t just vanish.
“So you won’t tell anyone yet?”
There she balked. Feelings were one thing, principle something else. Brad might be moving on from MacAfee Homes, but she wasn’t. She had her own credibility to protect. “I can’t promise it. The best I can do, if someone asks, is to say we’re on hold until things sort themselves out from Roy’s death.”
He studied her with what might have been pique before producing a sad smile. “You’re tough.”
“Apparently,” she replied, sad as well, “so are you.”
She should have known it, of course—should have known that there was a fine line between even-tempered and cool. What kind of man professed to want a family but couldn’t open his heart to a two-year-old orphan who was his future wife’s half brother and, PS, the son of a man who had given him so much and was now dead?