Shelby, standing a few feet away from her, yawned loudly. “I am so tired.”
“Only because you were up playing World of Warcraft until forever,” her big sister said, snickering.
Shelby shrugged and sauntered into her bedroom, presumably too tired to even answer her sister.
Left by themselves in the kitchen, Veronica helped Jennifer load the dishes into the dishwasher and, while they were clearing the table, Jennifer asked about how the evening went and if the youngsters were well behaved. Typical Mom questions.
Veronica had a wholly different agenda.
“So, what’s going on with you and Dad?” her newly fifteen-year-old daughter asked.
“What do you mean?” Jennifer said, feigning surprise.
“Did you two have a fight or something? It’s really frosty between you.”
Jennifer brushed some stray donut sprinkles into the sink. “It was just a long night. Your dad doesn’t enjoy going to the Wieners’ house, and I’m not that into it either. That’s probably why we both seem a little out of sorts.” Her pulse kicked up a couple of notches. She wasn’t used to being grilled by her daughter and, even worse, blatantly lying to her.
Veronica wasn’t buying it. “Yeah, but you slept on the sofa last night, Mom.” Her long, streaked-blond hair brushed her shoulders as she shook her head in disbelief. “Something’s wrong.”
It was ironic, really, that Veronica was so intensely interested in Jennifer’s relationship with Michael, and so persistent in the pursuit of discussing it, especially given her reticence in disclosing so much as one sentence of worthwhile information about her own romantic affairs. Veronica had kept her own confidence over the last several weeks, particularly in regard to the goings-on at the Homecoming Dance. And, while she’d confessed embarrassment for her antics in Mr. Ryerson’s history class—only when confronted by it, however—she’d been subdued and secretive about what’d transpired between her and the two boys.
According to Shelby, Tim no longer proclaimed his love of Veronica to his pal on the bus. And Erick, who’d made a nuisance of himself with phone calls to Veronica’s cell when she was at home those few days just prior to the dance, hadn’t called at all since then, at least not as far as Jennifer knew. So, Jennifer was almost tempted to make a deal with her daughter: I’ll tell you, if you tell me.
Almost.
“There’s nothing wrong, Veronica,” she said, injecting a half dose of incredulousness into her voice, laced with a few droplets of amusement. Hopefully she didn’t overdo it.
Her daughter blinked at her. “Whatever you say,” she muttered. “I’m gonna watch some TV, okay?”
“Okay.”
And as Veronica sprinted toward the stairs, her slender legs striding away from Jennifer as purposefully as her father’s had a half hour before, Jennifer couldn’t help but fear she’d lost a precious opportunity for connecting with her daughter. But what would she have said? I know what it’s like to be attracted to two very different men, honey. What happened between you, Tim and Erick? Or, even worse: There’s something both worrisome and powerful about being caught in a love triangle, isn’t there, sweetie? Your father and I are experiencing something similar. Wanna trade stories?
For fear she’d blurt out a ridiculously inappropriate line like one of those in a moment of pure desperation, Jennifer took care to avoid conversation with her own children for much of the day. Thankfully, it was a lazy Sunday and both girls preferred to fend for themselves. Too old, they felt, for trick-or-treating, but still young enough to enjoy seeing the kiddie costumes, they dumped bags of candy into Jennifer’s giant Halloween bowl and prepared for the onslaught of neighborhood children that evening.
Several hours later, when Jennifer had thrown together a quick dinner for the girls (Michael, of course, was still resolutely absent), she grabbed a sandwich for herself and hid out in her office, claiming to be working on some Web designs for a client. Meanwhile, her daughters—who’d spent the day reading, napping, watching stupid shows on cable and chatting with the occasional friend on the phone—nibbled on whatever food interested them, answered the door to appease the latest candy-toting ghost or skeleton and, again, kept only each other company at the table.
Jennifer tried to put aside all self-accusations of being a neglectful mother. Not that she didn’t believe it. She just had to make it through this pretense of parental competence (however sub-par) somehow until Michael returned home. Which, it turned out, wasn’t until well after seven.
Upon his quiet reappearance, he bustled into the kitchen and cobbled together some sort of snack. Then, during the remainder of the evening, he once again spoke only to their daughters, although Jennifer made this easy for him by removing herself from the family’s public spaces. Also, taking a page from his book, she made her few announcements very general, as if they were intended for the house at large.
During one of these—“Recycling day is tomorrow. So, if you have anything to toss in the bin, please do it tonight.”—Veronica strolled by and shot her a disbelieving frown face. Soon after, the girls slipped into bed without either Jennifer or Michael being called in for anything, not even their daughters’ usual last-minute queries. The already quiet house suddenly turned morgue-like in its silence.
Jennifer knew the tension between her and Michael couldn’t go on indefinitely and, being that she felt herself to be primarily to blame for its emergence, she worked up the courage to seek him out. Downstairs. Where he was gazing at the TV with complete absorption, despite the fact that it was turned off.
“Michael?”
He sighed and turned toward her. He didn’t say anything, though.
“Michael, is it possible for us to talk now?”
He shrugged, his jaw tense.
She took a few steps closer to him but stopped when his eyes narrowed. “Look, um, I’m very sorry about misleading you yesterday. About the phone. I’d been getting a lot of…messages, and I really just wanted to turn it off.”
He raised his eyebrows slowly. “Misleading? Odd choice of word. Don’t you mean lying, Jennifer?” He crossed his arms and answered his own question. “Yeah. Definitely lying.”
She bowed her head. “I’m sorry, Michael.”
He didn’t acknowledge her response. “And then there’s the whole issue of the nature of your conversation. That was really…something.” He smirked, a very odd facial expression for her husband, and stared hard at the side wall, as if recounting the lines of dialogue he’d overheard.
Her entire body cringed at the memory of that. She took a deep breath and forced her mouth open. She wasn’t certain yet what she’d say, but she owed him an explanation of some kind. “I—”
“Oh, no, Jennifer,” he interrupted. “Don’t even think this is something you can take care of by spitting out a few vague sentences and being done with it.” His eyes bore right into her face. “You weren’t just talking with another man. You were making plans and sharing secrets with that other man. A man whose name I happen to recognize.” He paused. “Unless there’s more than one David in your life.” He paused again. “Was it your old computer geek boyfriend? Answer yes or no.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
He nodded. “Interesting. Really. It’s funny, I’ve been thinking all day today about what you’d told me about that relationship. About the things he said to you. The things he did. How he’d hurt you. And, yet, out of fucking nowhere, he’s calling you. But that’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is that, from the sound of it, it wasn’t the first time. Or even the fifth time. Was it?”
She shook her head slightly.
He laughed, but it was a raw, hurting sound. “I don’t want to stop talking to you either, David,” he mocked. “No, I haven’t told my husband about our super special plans, but I will. And I promise I’ll be there.” He took a ragged breath. “You wanna explain that?”
She swallowed. “Michael, please don’t be so upset—”
&
nbsp; “Oh, I passed upset hours ago.” He pushed himself to standing and began pacing around the room. “What’s the big event that’s happening in a few weeks?”
“It’s just a reunion,” she said. “My old computer club from college is having a reunion, okay? That’s why David first contacted me.”
Something flickered behind his eyes. “How long ago?”
“A few weeks. Not that long, really.”
“Well, it’s October thirty-first today. And I know you’re really good with numbers and dates.” He said this like it was a kind of fungal infection. “How about you tell me exactly when and how he contacted you.”
“August thirteenth,” she confessed, not bothering to camouflage the truth. She knew Michael was intent on nailing her no matter what she said. “Via e-mail.”
“A little more than a few weeks, perhaps?” Again, he didn’t wait for an answer before pressing on. “I knew there was something going on with you. I knew it.” He rubbed his temples briefly. “And this reunion is going to be when and where?”
“November thirteenth. At C-IL-U.”
“Ah. Less than two weeks from now. Also interesting, Jennifer. And a fair driving distance away. When, precisely, were you going to mention it to me? Or weren’t you? Perhaps you were just going to say you were going out with your friends and would be back really, really late.” He studied her expression for a moment, but she had no idea what he saw there. “I wouldn’t put it past you. You’re one of those sneak-around and do-whatever-the-hell-you-want types. So quiet. And so careful. And so full of your little secrets.”
At this, Jennifer could no longer quash her sigh. Granted, Michael wasn’t entirely wrong. She had snuck away to meet David on campus already. It had crossed her mind to make up an excuse for her absence and just go to the reunion without telling him. So, she knew she deserved some of his disdain. But, other than entertaining the notion of what it would have been like to still be with David, she hadn’t acted on a single one of her sexual fantasies. Michael was behaving as if he had caught her cheating on him, and she hadn’t come close to doing that.
Well, not very close.
“I’d rather you didn’t go,” he pronounced.
She squinted at him. She could have shrugged and consented to stay home, but some angry twenty-two-year-old demon inside her just didn’t want to play along. Not with Michael’s dictates. Or with David’s games. How long would they both just push her around if she didn’t set limits somewhere, sometime? And wouldn’t she be to blame if she let them get away with it?
“I can understand that,” she said, working hard to keep her voice even. “But I need to attend.”
His eyebrows shot up to midforehead. “You need to? Why’s that?”
“I need to see everyone for myself. I need closure.”
“What the hell kind of closure could you possibly need after eighteen years, Jennifer? Be honest with me for a change. You just want to be with your ex again. Make out with him. Maybe screw him. Your mind has been on him for months. And, God, I knew it.”
He knew it? How would he have known that? Was he reading her e-mail or something?
She shot him a questioning look, and he laughed—again, that sound like an injured animal.
“I could feel it in the way you’d moved away from me, Jennifer. In the way your attention became so divided. I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but I could sense the hugeness of the problem, and it made me…very nervous.” He looked at her, imploring her to obey his command. “He is a massively bad guy. And I’m telling you, for the sake of our marriage, I don’t want you to go to this stupid reunion. I don’t want you to see that bastard again.”
She could never wrap her mind around this idea of people “just sensing” things. Hard for her to believe that was real and not some projection he had made up. She met his gaze and whispered, “I realize that. But I have to go.”
“No, you don’t have to. You want to. And you don’t care what you destroy.” He puffed out some air, pushed past her and vanished upstairs.
Tamara awoke, sometime after ten on Sunday morning, certain the world was going to spin right off its little axis and hurl itself, in pinball fashion, from the moon to Venus to Mars and, probably, to Saturn and Mercury, too, before it was cast out of the solar system altogether and sent crashing into the nearest spiral galaxy.
God almighty. It’d been a hell of a long time since she’d been this hung over.
She struggled to remember what it was about the night before that had made it so very deadly. There was that bizarre food at the Wieners’ party. And those drinks—what were they? Oh, yeah. Poisoned Appletinis. How very cutesy.
She tried to lift her head off the pillow, but it reverberated in the center, like five-foot-high speakers at a heavy metal concert. And Jon wasn’t helping matters. What a bloody racket he was making in his office. He was always pounding away at something, even on the weekends. Compiling litigation materials for upcoming cases. Organizing bank bonds, CDs and insurance papers. Printing out Excel spreadsheets with stock projections and the occasional Super Bowl prediction. Always living for the future instead of experiencing life in the now.
Not that the now was so great.
She sank back into her pillow. The now was, in fact, pretty damn shitty.
Squeezing her eyes closed, she ran her fingers through the snarls of matted hair at the back of her head. That idiotic Rapunzel wig had been a pain. But she remembered taking it off at some point in the night. Sometime during the hours she was up in the library loft with Aar—
Oh, fuck!
Aaron had been there with her. He’d asked her to take the wig off, right? The details were kinda fuzzy, but there were parts she remembered. At least she thought she remembered. They were talking and laughing. They were drinking weird things. They were playing with some cards on the floor and looking out the window at all the nut jobs in the yard. She vaguely recalled something about foil-wrapped chocolate ghouls. But, it couldn’t have been all true to life because, in her memory, Aaron kissed her, and he didn’t actually do that, did he?
Nope.
She rubbed her head again. She was a mess and, clearly, she’d been hallucinating. She wouldn’t put it past the Wieners to have slipped something illicit into the drinks of their guests. Something that made people mix up their fantasies with their realities.
Damn, drugs were dangerous. She felt like a live-action Just Say No warning commercial.
She slid back into a less-than-restful doze, weaving in and out of sleep like Benji when he was a feverish preschooler. She twisted her body to try to get more comfortable, but she was lying on something metallic—a big button on the side of her costume—that kept jabbing her thigh. It took a few minutes of trying to unbutton it before she remembered that the Rapunzel skirt had a zipper in the back and nothing at all on the side. And it wasn’t until she reached into her pocket, her fingers hot against the cool sleekness of Aaron’s watch, that the reality and the fantasy finally separated…like oil and water…and she remembered.
Everything.
Holy crap, Batman.
Despite her throbbing head, she pushed herself up to sitting and glanced around the bedroom she and Jon shared as if she were seeing it for the first time. The walls were painted a dark, restful blue, the room meticulously uncluttered, the mattress firm but well cushioned with a thick foam pad, high-thread-count linen sheets and a fluffy teal coverlet. It was a place that should be indisputably sleep-inducing and, yet, she strongly suspected she wouldn’t rest easy in this bedroom anytime soon.
She opened the bottom drawer of her dresser and gently placed the watch underneath some of her carefully folded tennis socks. Like Scarlett O’Hara, she decided she’d deal with that unpleasantness tomorrow.
Tamara wandered down the hall to where Jon’s noisy printer was spewing out pages of some document—legal or financial in origin. She peered at him through the slit in the door, his dark eyes so intent on his project she couldn’t h
elp but be reminded of when she’d met him. The intense, incredibly serious law student he’d been, one who lacked the ability to relax even in his early twenties, possessed an earnestness in his expression those years ago that she only caught glimpses of now. But she had once loved the combination of qualities she saw on his face. Solemnity plus industriousness. She had no idea then that they would later manifest as detachment and cool ambition.
Two sides of the same coin, really. Though that was the gift and curse of marriage, too, wasn’t it? Novelty and fascination eventually flips to familiarity and indifference.
“Finally up?” Jon said to her, his voice scratchy from lack of use this morning.
She pushed his office door open a few inches more. “Yeah. I’m not feeling great, though. Too many Appletinis.”
His lips twisted into a small smirk. “I remember you were really swigging them last night. That runner guy down the street looked wasted, too.” Jon shook his head. “People who can’t hold their liquor shouldn’t drink.”
She didn’t comment. Not because she didn’t want to. Jon had had nearly as much to drink as she, and he hadn’t exactly been the poster child for sobriety at other parties they had attended. But the mere mention of Aaron sent her pulse racing and made her throat too dry for speech.
She grunted something about getting a glass of water and drifted away from him. Jon’s facial expression stayed with her, however. A captivating photograph on her mind’s movie screen for one surprising reason: there was no emotional reaction evident in his eyes at all. His serious intensity was not directed toward her. And she, in the kitchen, combating dehydration with a glassful of spring water, found this far more interesting intellectually than she should have.
Jon wasn’t angry with her about lounging in the Wieners’ library loft and pouring Appletinis down her throat for hours while he gallivanted around the party and made contacts. Oh, no. He didn’t care. As long as her behavior didn’t reflect poorly on him. As long as his networking goals weren’t hindered by her in any way. As long as she didn’t publicly embarrass him, he didn’t pay attention to her.
Friday Mornings at Nine Page 26