Tree Climbing For Beginners

by Joyia Marie

  Jillian would only be 33, another thing Helen was right on. Harold had never confronted Jillian about the lie, he contented himself with believing he had just misheard. He still had a beautiful 20 something year old fiancé and how many men his age could say that?

  He opened the door with anticipation, then his face fell. Jillian was showing up in sexy little numbers intent on seduction, but this has been just some jeans and a T-shirt. Not that she didn’t look sexy even in this, but it wasn’t the French maid’s uniform.

  He looked closer and saw Jillian looked determined and a little apprehensive. Her face was pale, her makeup subdued and her hair was pulled back in a simple ponytail. She actually looked younger, but he could think of no politic way to say that.

  He invited her in, gave her a kiss, and started to lead her to the bedroom as usual but she stopped him. “Harold, we need to talk,” she said and he felt his blood pressure drop. Any man who had ever dealt with a woman knows nothing good ever comes out of that statement.

  He allowed himself to be led into the living room and sat in his chair. Jillian took a seat opposite him, her purse in her lap. She twisted her hands nervously. He smiled encouragingly while he reviewed his past behavior, he was clean from what he could figure and if she mentioned the divorce papers, then he’d just pretend he intended them as a surprise.

  “Harold, there’s no easy way to say this so here goes,” Jillian said as she reached into her purse and pulled out a home pregnancy test. His eyes widened as he saw the positive result from where he sat. He took the test with numb fingers, then stared at her.

  “But how?” he said, “you’re on the pill. Or at least you said you were on the pill,” he said slightly accusingly.

  She looked slightly embarrassed and flushed. “Remember a couple months ago when I had that tooth infection and the dentist put me on antibiotics? He failed to advise me that some antibiotics can invalidate birth control pills so congratulations…”she finished looking slightly scared.

  He got up and gathered her up into his arms. “It’s fine,” he assured her as his mind reeled. A baby? With two teenagers? Well looked like he was getting his three kids a little earlier than he anticipated but it was fine. He didn’t really want to be his father’s age with a baby that his father was with him.

  “You’re not mad?” Jillian asked in her breathy voice.

  “How can I be mad when you just made me the happiest man in the world,” Harold asked as his mind spun. Good thing Helen had pushed this divorce through or he’d be in a real fix.

  “Dad, is everything okay?” he heard from the stairs and looked up to see the twins looking at him and Jillian. He was glad Jillian was dressed so conservatively. Tonya would not appreciate the French maid’s uniform.

  “Uh no. Everything is fine,” Harold, said putting his arm around Jillian’s waist. “Jillian and I have been talking and your mother and my divorce is final and Jillian just agreed to be my wife.” He gripped Jillian warningly to keep her still when she started.

  Tonya stared at them for a long moment, then her eyes dropped almost imperceptible to Jillian’s stomach then she smiled. “Great,” she said and her face seemed to agree, but her dark eyes were watchful as always.

  Harold wondered if he’d ever truly understand his daughter, then dismissed the thought. It wasn’t necessary he understand her, just love her and he did. No matter how many came behind, she would always be his first born if only by ten minutes.

  They talked for a few minutes before he sent the twins back to bed as they had school the next morning. Tony said little as always but at least Harold could clearly see his face. He finally broke down and asked Tony what the deal was with the bangs.

  Tony stammered and flushed then admitted he had lost a bet with a friend and this was his penalty but it was over soon. Harold had proudly taken Tony with him to the barber shop and gotten the bangs from hell cut.

  Tonya had sent them with her blessings. Now that she spent so much time shopping with Jillian she seemed more willing to let Tony go his own way as well. It was a proud moment when Harold walked into the barbershop with his son, just as his dad did with him. Not everything his father had done was wrong and Harold was determined to meld the best of the old with the best.

  Harold led Jillian in the bedroom where they made slow passionate love, gently in deference to her condition. They talked for a bit and Harold finally drifted off to sleep holding his soon to be new wife. Things might not have turned out the way he expected, but somehow they still managed to turn out okay.

  Chapter Sixty-Two: Jillian

  Jillian looked at the sleeping Harold and promised to be the best wife and mother she knew how. If possible, she would make Harold happy until the day they divorced, if they divorced a prospect that wasn’t as appealing as it was before. She was really coming to care for Harold and she wondered what it would be like to be with one man, forever and ever amen.

  She silently apologized for forcing his hand with the oldest trick in the female arsenal but she was getting desperate. She had no doubt Harold would have married her eventually but eventually wouldn’t do as long as Helen had that file. She needed Harold locked down and she needed something more powerful than love to guarantee her place. She saw the way he doted on the twins and she knew the way.

  Jillian snuggled down against Harold’s thin chest and felt safe for the first time in a long time. Life with her mother was a case of feast or famine. If her mother had a big fish on the line, then they ate well, lived well, and shopped constantly.

  When her mother was between men, then things hadn’t been so hunky dory. She remembered one winter that they lived in a tiny house with no heat and a constant diet of ramen. She was grateful for the free breakfast and lunch the school provided for poor kids.

  She shuddered when she remembered the shame of handing the lunch lady a slip of paper instead of money like all the rest of the kids. Things got better when everybody free or pay paid by a number, but somehow the pay kids always knew the free kids and made sure the free kids knew they knew.

  “Not for you, baby,” she whispered as she ran a protective hand over her still flat belly. No matter what her baby would never know that kind of shame.

  But she couldn’t really blame her mother, she had done as she was taught. Her mother had the maternal instincts of a feral cat but she had taught Jillian to survive. What else could a child expect?

  Actually, if was her mother who clued her into her perilous position. She had walked around for two days in a cloud of stupidity. She thought she and Helen were friends, especially after Helen got her back in at Raphael’s. The staff had treated her like a queen who had temporarily away. She thought Helen was glad Jillian had taken Harold off her hands.

  Then her mother called and Jillian in a rare burst of honesty had told her everything. Well, not everything as Monica Reynolds couldn’t be trusted with that kind of information, but enough information to give her the story. Her mother listened carefully, tried to pull out the name of Helen’s alter ego, then burst out laughing when Jillian babbled about how she and Helen had reached an accord.

  “Good grief, girl, are you sure they’re not drilling a hole in your head and pouring that bleach in at the salon?” her mother asked scornfully.

  “Let me make sure I have this right. You had the information to put the wife in check and keep her there until you reeled in the husband or better yet walk away with a nice little chunk of change. Instead, you let the wife bluff you out of your proof and keep the proof about your life as a lingerie model? Good night, Irene, I thought I raised you better than that. You had a full house and you managed to piss it away to nothing.”

  Jillian had tried to explain that the ‘proof’ wasn’t as foolproof as Monica seemed to be convincing herself it was but Monica didn’t want to hear that. She mocked Jillian naivety until Jillian finally hung up in disgust.

  “She just doesn’t understand,” Jillian told herself over the next few days, but Monica�
�s warnings and cackling laughter kept echoing through her head.

  Was she being naïve? Maybe because she was trusting a woman, whose husband she had stolen and she had tried to blackmail not to burn her. Said like that it did sound rather naïve. However, what choice did she have? Helen had the jump drive back and Jillian hadn’t made a copy of the book. Not that the book would have made much of a difference.

  Jillian had read the book while she waited, wanting to be the first to read what she truly believed was a Leslie Vandersmoot book, but it wasn’t the same as her other books this book was tame almost virginal compared to a Leslie Vandersmoot book. No one who read it would believe it was a Leslie Vandersmoot.

  Jillian tried to take heart in the fact that Helen had gotten her back into Raphael’s but even that could be given a dark cast. Maybe Helen was just flexing her muscles to show Jillian just how powerful she truly was.

  Finally, one night Jillian decided to make a move. She couldn’t bear the uncertainty. She looked up on the internet some interesting news she had heard about certain antibiotics, making birth control pills not work. She found one usually prescribed by dentists as dental problems usually clear up pretty quickly.

  She had tossed her birth control pills and set about getting pregnant. She had used every trick in her arsenal to get pregnant and in just two months, she achieved her goal. Everything she wanted was at her fingertips.

  She could quit her job and get away from the hateful Mrs. Fitzgerald. She had calmed down some but she still gave Jillian the shittiest assignments and was waiting for the first excuse to fire Jillian, she made no secret of that. Even after or maybe it was, especially after the news of Helen and Harold break up became public knowledge, Mrs. Fitzgerald made no secret she knew Jillian was the instigator of that.

  She could give up her apartment and move in here. It wasn’t the mansion of her dreams, but it would do for now. Maybe once the baby came, she could convince Harold to upgrade. If not, she could be happy here.

  Even the twins weren’t as bad as she thought. As soon as they understood, she wasn’t trying to take their mother’s place they were willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. She and Tonya had bonded to a certain extent over the shared belief in retail therapy.

  Jillian rolled over and renewed her promise to Harold. She fell asleep feeling safe for the first time in years. She smiled a sweet smile she hadn’t smiled since she was a kid and realized just how scary the world could be.

  Chapter Sixty-Three: Helen

  I stared into the full-length mirror at the formal gown and wondered how I had gotten trapped into this. The gown was beautiful as it should be since Aiden’s friend Theo had designed it but it wasn’t me.

  It was pink and I don’t wear pink, but in a show of family solidarity, here I stood in a pink dress about to participate in Barbie’s dream wedding. Good grief, if my life gets any stranger, I will have to go on Jerry Springer.

  Today was the big day where my ex-husband Harold the idiot was joined in unholy matrimony to his child bride Jillian or maybe that should be his child bearing, child bride Jillian.

  I still don’t know why she looked so triumphant when she and Harold pulled me aside a few months ago to tell me about it. I had already had children with Harold so it’s not as if she had accomplished the impossible. I had Thing One and Thing Two to show it was doable. Ah well, far be it from me to figure out the working of the bimbo mind.

  Why was I standing back here about to walk out as her matron of honor instead of sitting out in the chapel with the rest of our family or better yet, sitting in my loft pretending this wasn’t happening as a good ex-wife should? That would be due to the fact, Jillian has no siblings, something we have in common, or any female friends, something we don’t.

  I would have suggested a nice JP wedding and skip attendants completely, but Jillian and Gwendolyn were against that. The first show of solidarity they have ever shown. For some reason, my divorce from Harold has changed me from bad wife and mother to the patron saint of all wives and mothers in Gwendolyn’s eyes. Jillian is the current pariah. Ah well, not my problem.

  I had intended Jillian’s lack of attendants to be not my problem as well. Harold had asked, Jillian had asked, even Tonya had asked. An occurrence that still blows my mind as this would have been Tonya’s dream shot, but she was playing the flower girl at the ripe old age of 13, which still struck me as strange. Tony was acting as ring bearer.

  Gwendolyn had turned the tide. She invited me to lunch and sheer perversity made me go. What could the old bat want, I wondered and that question made me attend this one last lunch.

  Gwendolyn and I used to have these ladies who lunch lunches about once a month while Harold and I were married. During which Gwendolyn would regale me with my failings as a wife and mother. Only my home training of respecting my elders and a remaining affection for Harold kept me from telling this old bat how the cow ate the cabbage to quote Grandma Gert.

  This lunch was a delightful change. Gwendolyn regaled me on Jillian’s failings as a future wife and mother and her shame that Jillian is getting married with a baby under her apron as the old folk used to say. Somehow, Gwendolyn was a lot more fun when you weren’t the focus of her animosity. We drank mimosas and giggled like girlfriends, I had a blast.

  We were settling the check or Gwendolyn was as she insisted on paying when she pinned me with a raptor gaze and pounced. I think it was good strategy on her part to wait until I was blitzed on champagne and orange juice to strike. As blitzed as you can get on one mimosa. Still don’t have any alcohol tolerance. Ah well, guess my days as a party diva are over.

  “Helen, I know I don’t have the right to ask you anything but I’m going to, anyway,” Gwendolyn said in her reedy voice.

  I nodded, agreeing she didn’t have the right to ask me anything. One fun lunch didn’t undo years of her vitriol, but I also understood that wouldn’t stop her either. Gwendolyn was very attuned to how things look and she would do anything to maintain the Peterson name which had taken a beating in the past few months.

  “That girl,” she said, her name for Jillian. Every time she said it, I had to stop myself from laughing, thinking of that old Marlo Thomas TV show. I was ‘that writer’ until the birth of the twins, so Jillian might get her name back on the birth whatever she and Harold had spawned together.

  “That girl,” Gwendolyn repeated, shaking her white head in disbelief, her permed and heavily hair sprayed hair not moving. “She doesn’t have any friends here or from what I can figure out anywhere, and the only one she could call on as her attendant would be her mother. Harold, Jillian, his father, and I rode up to Houston to meet that woman and trust me, we don’t want her here.”

  We don’t? I thought raising an eyebrow. Wow, ‘that woman’ must be something else. Gwendolyn hadn’t been thrilled with Vivian but she hadn’t tried to ban her from the wedding. She probably had visions of her precious baby boy being married by an Elvis impersonator in Vegas to stay her hands, but still, ‘that woman’ must be something else.

  “Now she’s insisting on a formal wedding and I agree. This whole affair has been a scandal and that would only increase if we had some back room, undercover wedding. We have to have a formal wedding, small as it’s Harold’s second, but it has to be formal to show the family is behind this union,” she said, her mouth pruning on the last to show she might be willing but she wasn’t happy about it.

  I am beginning to understand Jillian’s tactic of forcing the matter of getting pregnant. Harold told me that nonsense about antibiotics and birth control pills, but I had my doubts. Jillian was too cagey not to understand all the ramifications of anything she put in her body, but I let Harold keep his illusions. Either way, the baby was coming so conception was a moot point at this point.

  “But why does it have to be me?” I asked for the nth time. This was the question no one had answered to my satisfaction. I get it. Jillian has no family or friends to take the role, but having me the cucko
lded ex-wife seemed like high comedy.

  “Look,” Gwendolyn said, gripping one of my hands in her aged claw. “It’s either you or her mother and I will say this again, we don’t want that woman here. With you, it shows there are no hard feelings.”

  Here her face hardened again, and I realized I wasn’t the only one who was disappointed in Harold. She was his mother so she loved him, but she didn’t really respect him anymore. I felt my heart lurch as I wondered if Harold realized just what his bimbo had cost him.

  I looked into Gwendolyn’s determined face and realized I wasn’t the only one who had done some research into Jillian’s background and Gwendolyn was no more thrilled with Jillian’s dam than I was. I gave a weary smile, then bowed to the inevitable.

  So here I stood in a pink dress about to walk down and be matron of honor to my ex-husband’s new bride. The colors were bubble gum pink and silver so it really was Barbie’s dream wedding and I expected the candy-defecating unicorns to wander through at any moment.

  I walked into the vestibule and saw Aiden. We looked at each other with rueful grins and wondered how we had gotten ourselves into this. I knew how Aiden got tapped. I insisted.

  If I had to be in this farce, then I wanted my best guy as my attendant. Harold had tried to protest and I get it. No bride wants to be upstaged at her wedding so I guess no groom did either but too bad so sad. If I had to suffer, then so did Harold, it was only fair.

  “Please tell me our wedding won’t be anything like this,” he murmured as I took his arm.

  I gave him a glittery smile, then looked at the diamond solitaire gracing my finger. I wore it today, but when I was working it was on a chain around my neck. For some reason, this didn’t bother Aiden the way it had Harold. Then again, as an artist, he didn’t wear any jewelry, normally so he didn’t really have room to talk. I had a feeling his wedding ring would be on a chain around his neck after we married so we’d both look like 50’s teenage girls.