Tree Climbing For Beginners

by Joyia Marie

  I looked up when I had that thought and grabbed the phone. I turned it on and saw 15 calls from Harold. Wow, looks like somebody really wants to get in contact with me, I thought with a smirk. As I scrolled through the calls, the phone rang again and I decided to put Harold out of his misery.

  “Hello,” I said cheerily.

  “Where are you?” Harold barked, sounding completely different from the smug, disappearing spouse from the night before.

  I looked around and drawled, “Where did I tell you and the kids I was going last night?”

  “You said the loft, but I was at the loft and it’s an empty field so I ask again. Where are you?” Harold screamed into the phone.

  “Oh,” I said in mock embarrassment, “you’re at the OLD loft. Yes, that loft is no longer there. The man who owned the building sold it to a contractor about five years ago, so I had to find a new loft. So that’s where I am… the new loft.”

  “Where, might I ask, is the new loft?” Harold said through gritted teeth.

  I smiled at the sound, 4 years of orthotics down the drain. Along with my brains, I hoped my kids got my dental genes and so far so good. They had smiles like twin toothpaste ads. I had seen a picture of Harold pre-braces and let’s just say, it’s not pretty.

  I didn’t know it was possible for teeth to be that crooked and still work. I wondered if that is why Harold was so thin. He had never gotten into the habit of eating with that mouthful of mismatched chompers.

  “Helen,” Harold said warningly, reminded me I hadn’t answered his question.

  I smirked, yeah, as if that was going to happen. If Harold was interested in where I did my writing, he really should have asked before I would suspect a drive-by kid drop. Nah, Harold had no idea where I was and I intended to keep it that way.

  “Why?” I asked disingenuously. Oh, I knew why, but I wondered if he had the nerve to say so. My guess was no.

  “Why? Why? Why?” he sputtered like a malfunctioning owl. “Because I’m your husband and I have a right to know where you are. Now, what’s the address? I’m coming over. We need to talk.”

  “About what?” I asked in a purposefully irritating drawl. “As far as you being my husband, according to our talk last night, you don’t want to be my husband anymore. You want to be Jillian’s husband. You do intend marry Jillian and not shack up like the two love-crazy kids that you are? You have to think of the message you’re sending our children, Harold. You must make an honest woman out of Jillian.”

  “I intend to marry Jillian,” Harold huffed, outraged I would even suggest anything else.

  Yeah, like he was a paragon of virtues who’d never do anything wrong, like cheating on his wife. I hope Jillian knew what she was getting into. Like my grandmother used to say once a cheater, always a cheater.

  Cheating was the reason she shot my grandfather. For a free-spirited artist, Grandma Gert had surprisingly old-fashioned views on fidelity. This, my Grandpa John, found out to his detriment.

  The blonde bimbo he was caught shagging was fleet of foot and missed getting a cap in her ass but Grandpa John was not. Fleet of foot, that is, so he did. Get a cap in his ass. Literally. Grandma Gert shot Grandpa John in his ass with her 22.

  He didn’t die and once he recovered, he filed for divorce, gave my grandmother everything her 22 packing heart might desire, and disappeared to parts unknown. The women in my family are not known for our long lasting relationships. I thought I escaped the curse with my 14-year marriage, but I guess I was just fooling myself.

  “Good, that’s settled then,” I said, pulling myself back to the moment at hand.

  I was getting bored talking to Harold and looking at the clock on the wall, he needed to get a move on if he was going to get the kids from school. I wondered how his father was taking him being gone in the middle of the day and then dismissed the thought. Not my problem, Harold brought this on himself.

  “What’s settled?” Harold asked cautiously, sounding as out to sea as he ever did when he tried to match words with me.

  I was a writer, I dealt with words all day every day. I could make those puppies sit up and dance when I wanted to. Harold dealt with paper, lovely silent paper. He was no match for me. I was still trying to figure out how I’d lost the whole child debate, but that was water under the bridge. Harold had the children he wanted and he was keeping them.

  “Well,” I said in mock confusion. “You said you intend to marry Jillian which will make her wife. You said you have a right to know where your wife is and you needed to talk to your wife, so I suggest you find Jillian and talk to her. Why let a little piece of paper stand in the way? You do know where Jillian is, don’t you? I hope so; it would be bad form to misplace two wives in the same day.”

  I raised my brows when Harold growled into the phone. I never heard that sound come from that man in my life. Harold wasn’t a growler. He was a moaner, a groaner, or a whiner. I didn’t figure growling was in Harold’s repertoire. Jillian helped Harold find unexplored depths. Good for her, I thought, mentally toasting of the blond bimbo.

  “Cute, Helen,” Harold said condescendingly, his usual fallback position when he was losing an argument.

  It’s hard to win an argument when your opponent is looking at you like a toddler who just piddled in its pants. I used to take this as a sign of Harold’s maturity and give in because after all, what did I know about how normal people lived? Now, it just irritated me.

  “Now, give me the address, I’ll come over, and we can talk about this like two reasonable adults,” Harold said expectantly.

  I looked at the phone and wondered what Harold was smoking or maybe he’d been breathing ink fumes again. Either way, he had to be high if he thought he was about to receive an invitation to my fortress of solitude. Harold had never been interested in my loft before, content to pretend it doesn’t exist as a shining beacon of his lack of control over me. He could pretend a little longer.

  “Now, isn’t a good time for me, Harold, but make sure and have your lawyer give me a jingle. Actually, it isn’t a good time for you either. You’re going to need to put a little pep in your step to make it to the school in time to get the twins. You saw this morning what the traffic is like in the carpool lane and it’s even worse in the afternoon,” I said complacently.

  “About that, I’m going to need you to pick up the kids. I need to get back to the office to make up all this time I’ve spent looking for you,” Harold said firmly.

  So not going to happen, I thought, not surprised he was already trying to get me back into mom mode. Nope, it’s his turn and it would be his turn until I said differently. Time for him to see how much time these children of his required.

  “Like I said Harold, not a good time,” I said warningly into the phone.

  “Oh, and if I told you I was going back to the office anyway? Then what?” he asked smugly sure he had me over a barrel.

  “Then, I’ll wait for the school to call to tell me you failed in your fatherly duties. Then I would call CPS and report you for child endangerment as I couldn’t pick up the kids from my sunny spot in Florida,” I said smoothly.

  “You wouldn’t do that,” Harold barked, the condescending tone gone. “I know you’re not in Florida. I checked your credit card activity.”

  “You mean the credit card activity for the credit cards you know about. Don’t push me Harold. Women who know tricks you wouldn’t even dream of raised me. Now get off the phone and go get my children or you really won’t like what I do next,” I warned softly before ending the call.

  Chapter Seven: Helen

  I closed the phone and threw it on the futon. I wasn’t worried about Harold or the kids. He’d go get them or get his mom to get them or hell, even try to get Mrs. Gunderson to go get them. I wondered what he had thought about our housekeeper.

  Until today, I’m sure he had no idea she even existed. Why, I don’t know, because I’m a writer not a housekeeper. Therefore, you would think he would have noticed
how clean and tidy the house was since the kids were born. However, he probably just assumed when the motherhood gene kicked in so did the housekeeping gene.

  Ah well, at least I didn’t have to worry about the kids having clean clothes and food to eat. Mrs. Gunderson did the laundry and cooked them a hearty meal every weeknight so that was handled. I do mean hearty, German comfort food was no joke. It took stick to your ribs to a completely new level.

  Mrs. Gunderson probably would take advantage of my absence to clean the kids’ rooms, which was strictly off limits. My kids were to learn to take care of themselves and this included keeping their rooms tidy. If it worked for First Lady Michelle Obama and her kids, it would work for me and mine.

  Mrs. Gunderson hated the untidy appearance of the kids’ rooms so I learned to close the doors in the morning before she got there. I heard a disapproving sniff every time she passed the doors. The kids’ rooms were suspiciously clean when I returned from my long jaunts to my loft so I knew she was doing some clandestine tidying in my absence.

  I sighed and put it out of my mind. I had done what I could to make my children self-sufficient, the rest was up to them. Harold wasn’t a consideration as he still wasn’t self-sufficient.

  He lived with his parents until we got married, then moved into the house they gave us. Rather, the house they put the down payment on for us. Harold was making the payments over the years, but they never let us forget they ‘gave’ us a house.

  I ignored the phone when it kept ringing sure it was Harold and he really needed to keep his mind on his driving. Didn’t he watch the news? Talking on the phone while driving was dangerous.

  Now, before you start judging me, let me explain. I really wouldn’t call CPS if Harold didn’t get the kids. I know from personal experience once you get child protective services involved, you couldn’t get them uninvolved.

  One of the parents of the kids I went to school with didn’t appreciate my mother’s free-spirited ways. They called CPS when she took a trip to China when I was 14 and left me home alone. Good grief, you would have thought it was the first time.

  Anyway, when she got back from China she had to go through the courts to get me back from the foster family they had placed me with in her absence. It was a long drawn out process, but eventually she prevailed. As they say, money talks and my mother had plenty of it.

  After spending a butt load of money, going through counseling and explaining to the court that no, she didn’t know it wasn’t okay to leave a 14 year old alone, and now that she did know she wouldn’t do it again, Mother and I were reunited.

  I was torn. I did love my mother, but the foster family I was staying with was pretty cool. I got my first taste of normal and developed an unhealthy addiction to it, which lead to my marriage to Harold.

  So no, I wouldn’t sic CPS on Harold but Harold didn’t know that. Right now Harold didn’t know what I might or might not do and as long as he didn’t know, he wouldn’t push me too hard. It would be better for all of us if he didn’t push me too hard.

  I was about as understanding and accommodating as I planned to for a while so Harold needed to suck it up and deal as he expected me to while he worked his way up the ladder in his father’s company. How sad was that anyway?

  I can understand his father wanting him to understand the company from the ground up, but he really made Harold work for it. Which was a huge risk on his part, Harold was a menopause baby so his parents were older. Harold Sr. could have died while Harold was still languishing in the mailroom and where would his precious company have been then?

  I perked up when the landline rang. I told you, Luddite. The only people who had that number were my mother and my agent. Everyone else knew to reach me on my cell. I doubted it was my mother.

  The last I heard she was in the Himalayas somewhere taking pictures of some heretofore-undiscovered butterfly. Therefore, that meant it was Sonya, my agent, the best literary agent in the whole wide world in my opinion and also a good friend.

  “Oh, you are there,” Sonya said languidly into the phone. “I had hoped when I couldn’t reach you on your cell.”

  I picked up my cell and saw three missed calls from her and no new ones from Harold. Good, he understood all I had for him were kisses and ass kicking and I was fresh out of kisses. The ass kicking would commence if he failed to retrieve my children on time.

  I was on the other end of a parental no-show on more than one occasion growing up. I would put my arm down his throat, grab his philandering nuts, and jerk him inside out if he put my babies through that.

  I shuddered as I remembered the humiliation of standing there as all the other kids left. Then the car-pool monitor would walk me back inside to call my mother and remind her yet again, she had forgotten me. I got good at catching rides with other kids, but I hadn’t gotten to that with the twins yet.

  “Please tell me you have something lovely and delicious for me to read,” Sonya said, reminding me of her. I appreciated her jerking me out of memory lane.

  I laughed and said, “uh, no, not yet. My next deadline isn’t for two months. Be patient, genius takes time.”

  “I didn’t think so, but I was hoping. Then what are you doing at the loft? It’s too soon for edits and I know you aren’t working on any for me. Your last book is at the printers. Taking a kiddie break?” Sonya said leisurely.

  “Yeah, you could say that,” I said slowly wondering how to put this.

  I knew why I left and I felt perfectly justified, but I wasn’t sure how John Q. Public would see what I had done. Harold had a good reason to assume I would stay with the kids. The whole world would assume that.

  While Sonya was my friend and I had made her a boatload of money, I wasn’t ready to deal with her disapproval. If there was disapproval, with Sonya you could never be sure.

  Sonya was unmarried, had no kids, and at forty showed no inclination to change that much to her family's dismay. Sonya came from a huge family that was in the process of being even huger. Her three sisters all had at least three kids apiece and I think one was pregnant.

  It was hard to keep up. I learned to send a baby gift to her mother about every six months addressed to ‘The Latest Hernandez Addition’ just to keep myself covered. So far, not one was returned and eventually a thank you note would show up from someone.

  Sonya and I were charter members of the no baby club until I had met and married Harold. Then he changed my mind and I had the twins. Sonya sent the requisite baby gifts but she never seemed very interested in being Aunt Sonya.

  She gave the kids money whenever they crossed her path and sent birthday and Christmas gifts but I didn’t know how much of that was genuine affection for the fruit of my loins and how much was good PR to keep her favorite author happy. Either way the kids were happy so I didn’t inquire too closely.

  “I left Harold,” I said, deciding to take the plunge. Sonya would be my most sympathetic audience other than my mother, so if it went badly with Sonya I could work on a spin for the rest of the world.

  “It’s about time,” Sonya said, energy suddenly infusing her voice. “You know I thought that the suburban situation was holding you back. Maybe now you’ll take pity on your poor publisher and do some publicity. So how are the kids taking being away from their father?”

  “Uh,” I said, my mastery of words suddenly deserting me. I knew Sonya hadn’t really been Team Harold but really? Not even a token pat on the shoulder for the death of my marriage? Then I couldn’t figure out which part of her statement to address first.

  Okay, some more backstory. I write erotic romance, yes, scorch your Kindle, and burn your fingers erotic romance. I am very, very successful at it. However, I use a pen name because no, I really don’t need a fellow soccer mom asking me if I had really done everything in my books at the kids’ practice.

  I managed to put Sonya’s lust for a book tour off with my excuse that Harold wouldn’t let me. Consequently, Sonya hated Harold and Harold had no idea why. H
e just learned to avoid Sonya whenever possible and cower when he couldn’t. He thought Sonya was a closet lesbian, and hated all men and I let him believe that. It saved explaining all the way around.

  Now, yes, I had decided to come out of the literary closet and put an end for all time to the mystery of who was Leslie Vandersmoot. Nevertheless, in the clear light of day, I knew I couldn’t. Not yet. I’m not ashamed of what I write, but I do have two kids to consider and I know from personal experience that kids are not predisposed to be kind.

  No, I wouldn’t be subjecting my kids to the teasing that would come if it were known they were the offspring of the reigning queen of erotic romance. Now, once they hit college, hey, it’s every man for himself and God for us all, but not at the tender age of twelve. Adolescence was hard enough without that kind of monkey on their back.

  I used Harold even though Harold had no idea I was Leslie Vandersmoot because I thought Sonya would accept a domineering husband better than she would accept a mother concerned for her kids.

  As a Hispanic woman, she grew up with a domineering father. She got away from him as soon as she could, but kids she didn’t get at all. As far as I could tell, Sonya had no maternal instinct at all.

  I really didn’t think she’d understand if she knew I left the kids with Harold. If I hadn’t cared enough to take them with me, then surely I wouldn’t care enough to save them some embarrassment. Laurell K. Hamilton had kids and they were okay. Yeah, well the queen of vampires could raise her kids, her way, and I’d raise mine my way.

  “Cool your jets, Sonya and yes, I’m handling the demise of my 14 year marriage just fine, thanks for asking. As far as publicity, let’s keep that on hold for right now. I’m going to have my plate full dealing with this divorce and getting this loft livable. Don’t forget I do owe the publisher a book in a couple of months. So don’t say anything to them until I see how this is all going to play out,” I said in an irritated burst.