The Living Room

by Robert Whitlow

  “What am I doing?” she asked herself.

  “Cutting up stuff for a salad,” Megan responded in a puzzled voice.

  Amy glanced over her shoulder. “And talking to myself. How was school?”

  “Okay.” Megan came into the kitchen and sat at the round table where the family ate most of their meals. “Mrs. Baumgartner is moving to Jacksonville. It has something to do with her husband getting a new job.”

  The history teacher’s husband had been out of work for nine months.

  “I’m glad he found a job but sorry she won’t be your teacher.”

  “The new teacher was in class today. Bethany and I think he’s going to be cool.”

  “A man?”

  “Yeah, he’s from somewhere out west, maybe California or Colorado. I’m not sure. After class I heard him talking to a couple of the guys about surfing and snowboarding. He has gorgeous blond hair and blue eyes to die for.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Mr. Ryan. Bethany and I are going to get to class early tomorrow and grab seats up front.”

  “I just hope he can teach world history.” Amy scraped the tomatoes and cucumbers onto the top of the lettuce in a large white salad bowl. “Do you want a hard-boiled egg in your salad? Your dad and Ian won’t eat any, but I’ll be glad to—”

  “Are you really going to make me quit dance lessons?” Megan interrupted.

  Amy placed the salad bowl on the counter and gave Megan her full attention.

  “You’re a talented dancer, and I know how important dance is to you. The solo jazz routine you did last spring was fantastic. You received the only standing ovation in the entire program. But we’re going to have to discuss what to do about the future.”

  Amy braced herself for an explosion that didn’t come. Instead, Megan spoke slowly and calmly.

  “How would you feel if Dad told you that you had to quit writing books and go back to work because you’re not making as much money as you used to?”

  “Uh, we’d have to discuss that, too.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “We talk about everything.”

  Megan sniffed. Amy knew she wasn’t buying the claim that her parents had a perfect marriage communication model. It’s hard to bluff a fourteen-year-old girl.

  “You have your talent. I have mine,” Megan continued. “Is it fair for you to get to do what you want and I can’t?”

  Hurt welled up inside Amy. She’d sacrificed so much for her children that it stung to have her commitment questioned. The small amount of the recent royalty check made her feel especially vulnerable. But it wasn’t a time to show personal insecurity or wounded feelings.

  “I hear what you’re saying,” Amy replied, hoping her voice didn’t shake. “And I appreciate how much you’ve thought it out.”

  Ian came running into the kitchen.

  “Is supper ready?” he asked.

  Amy glanced at the timer on the oven.

  “Ten minutes. Where’s your dad?”

  “With I. He sent me in here to find out.”

  “With me,” Amy corrected.

  “I didn’t think it sounded right, but that’s not what you told me this afternoon.”

  Ian ran out, and Megan stood up.

  “I hate it when we talk in circles,” Megan said. “It makes me not want to come out of my room to try and have a conversation.”

  “I want to hear what you think,” Amy said. “And if we don’t talk, I’ll have to guess how you’re feeling. Let’s pray together before you go to sleep tonight.”

  Megan gave Amy a look that let her know she doubted God would take time out of his busy schedule to devote his attention to dance class. The nights when Amy and Megan would kneel beside Megan’s bed and pray were a fading memory. Now Amy wasn’t sure what her daughter believed.

  “Nothing will be done about dance until after Christmas,” Amy said quickly. “That’s when the price increase kicks in.”

  “Is that a promise?” Megan shot back.

  “Yes.”

  “Then tell Grandma and Grandpa Clarke and Granny Edwards all I want for Christmas is money for dance lessons.” Megan paused. “And from Uncle Bob and Aunt Pat, too. No gift cards to stores where I don’t shop or lame presents I have to pretend to like.”

  Megan left the kitchen with a lightness in her step. Amy leaned against the counter and tried to figure out how her daughter had so quickly outflanked her.

  three

  Later that night Amy and Jeff sat on the green-plaid couch in the family room. Spread out on a low table in front of them was the royalty check from the publishing company, a printout of their recurring monthly expenses, and several envelopes containing bills. Jeff picked up the statement for the credit card Amy used for household expenses like groceries.

  “What is this charge at Ricardo’s Restaurant three weeks ago?” he asked. “It’s over a hundred dollars.”

  “Natalie, Jodie Walker, and I went out to eat on Natalie’s birthday. It was the Friday night you were doing the job with Butch at the house on the lake.”

  “And you paid for everyone’s meal?”

  “Yes. Jodie forgot her purse when we picked her up. She promised to repay me for her meal and half of Natalie’s food but never did.”

  “Did you ask her for it?”

  Amy swallowed. “I started to bring it up the other day when I ran into her at the pharmacy, but I didn’t have the heart to ask her when she started telling me about her mother-in-law. She has cancer, and the local oncologist is sending her to a specialist at Duke.”

  “I’m sorry about Jodie’s mother-in-law, but we can’t pretend to have enough money to plop down a hundred dollars for a meal without thinking about it.”

  “I thought about it,” Amy said defensively, “but Natalie is my best friend, and I wanted to do something nice for her. You know how much she loves the tiramisu at Ricardo’s.”

  “You ordered dessert?”

  “Yes,” Amy replied with increasing defiance in her voice. “And I don’t think I should have to justify every penny I spend. What do you want me to do? Go back to work at the law firm? That’s not possible. Mr. Phillips gave my job to Emily Ashburn, who’d been scheming to get it for five years. I could try to find a cashiering job, but they don’t pay anything, and I wouldn’t be here when Ian comes home from school. Also, if I get a job, we’d have to find after-school care for him.”

  “Ian is ten years old,” Jeff said, seemingly unaffected by Amy’s tirade. “He can unlock the door and turn on the TV.”

  “And I would go crazy worrying what he might get into when he gets bored or has a buddy come over to play. He’d climb onto the roof of the house if the urge hit him.”

  “You could look for something part-time while the kids are in school. Maybe you could clean houses. That’s what Denny’s wife is doing. She printed up business cards a few months ago and is already working four mornings a week. She averages over fifteen dollars an hour.”

  Amy’s mouth dropped open. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Did Jeff really want her canvassing the neighborhood trying to drum up business as a domestic worker? And her shock wasn’t because the job was demeaning. Cleaning toilets was honest labor. But Amy never volunteered to go door-to-door for charitable projects and barely knew their neighbors on either side of the house. The thought of approaching total strangers to ask for work and then going to their houses on a regular basis made her hands sweat.

  “The mornings are my best writing times,” she said, grabbing the credit card statement from Jeff’s hand. “Why don’t we count the dinner with Natalie and Jodie as my Christmas present? You don’t have to buy me anything else. You spent over two hundred dollars on the necklace you gave me last year. This way you can save a hundred dollars, and I won’t feel guilty for spending an evening with my friends.”

  Jeff stared at her for a few seconds. “Don’t you like the necklace?”

  “Of course I like it. I
wore it on—” Amy stopped. “I wore it Mother’s Day when we went to church. It looked perfect with my light blue dress.”

  “That was five months ago.”

  Amy dropped the credit card statement on the table.

  “Okay, Jeff,” she said. “Where are we going with this discussion? I know our finances have been tight, and I know it’s going to get worse.”

  Jeff didn’t respond but picked up the statement instead.

  “The rest of the charges make sense,” he said after a few moments of additional review. “But didn’t we agree this card was to be used for household expenses only?”

  “Yes, and I handed it to the waiter at the restaurant without thinking.”

  “Then why did you get so defensive when I asked you a simple question?”

  “Because it came across as an attack,” Amy sighed. “And like I told you, I already don’t feel like I’m doing my part to help pay the bills. Your news today about having to pay for our health insurance and the increased charges for Megan’s dance lessons made it worse.”

  “Nothing will change about her dance lessons until after Christmas,” Jeff said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. We couldn’t do anything else after you promised her she could continue.”

  “How did you know—” Amy began.

  “She thanked me while you were cleaning up after supper.”

  “I’m sorry. We should have talked it over—”

  “And I would have agreed to do the same thing. The issue is what to do when everything changes in January.”

  “I want to find a way to let her keep going,” Amy sighed. “But do you really think cleaning houses is the way to do it?”

  A half hour later Amy knocked on Megan’s door. Megan didn’t answer, so Amy knocked louder.

  “What is it?” Megan called out.

  “May I come in?”

  “Yeah.”

  Megan’s room was a mixture of little-girl holdovers and early teen paraphernalia. Dolls on a shelf and a well-loved teddy bear on the bed shared the room with schoolbooks, scattered clothes, and music posters. Megan was propped up in her bed with earbuds in place and a pink MP3 player in her right hand. Her head was bobbing up and down. Amy had given up trying to regulate what Megan downloaded on the device. There was a large pile of shirts and pants on the floor. Amy knew the clothes were clean.

  “I’ll pick them up,” Megan said, following her mother’s gaze. “I was trying to decide what to wear tomorrow. Bethany and I almost matched today, which would have been a disaster. We’re friends, not twins.”

  “I like the purple top with your dark jeans,” Amy offered, picking up the shirt from the pile.

  “Yeah, I might wear that. Bethany is going to wear a yellow top.”

  “Your dad said you thanked him for the dance lessons. We agreed that you can continue through Christmas.”

  “Cool. Ms. Carlton is going to bump me up to the advanced contemporary class next week.”

  “Congratulations. That’s great.”

  “Yeah. Good night.”

  Megan reinserted the loose earpiece and resumed her bobblehead-doll imitation. Praying obviously wasn’t on Megan’s playlist, and at the end of a long day, Amy wasn’t willing to force something that only had meaning when done voluntarily.

  “Lights out in thirty minutes,” she said in a loud voice.

  Megan nodded more vigorously, and Amy backed out of the room.

  Jeff was asleep by the time Amy brushed her teeth. Her husband could lose consciousness faster than a newborn infant with a stomach full of milk. Amy crawled under the covers and stared at the ceiling. At least Jeff didn’t snore. Natalie had confided that her husband, Luke, snored so loudly it sounded like someone trying to break into the house.

  Amy pulled the sheet up to her chin. One solution to their financial pressures would be speedy completion of another novel. The advance for a third book, if the publisher decided to exercise the option contained in the contract, would add enough money to the family budget to take some of the stress off Jeff. And it would help Amy feel like a contributing member of the family.

  Amy calculated how quickly she could complete the first draft of a book. She didn’t write as fast as some novelists who could crank out several thousand words in a single writing session. A productive day for her was a thousand words, and her contract required a book of at least 90,000 words. A Great and Precious Promise and The Everlasting Arms were each around 110,000 words. Amy liked longer novels and believed if readers enjoyed the world of the story and the characters who lived there, they would appreciate a few extra chapters. Multiple e-mails from women who raved about A Great and Precious Promise and begged for a sequel confirmed Amy’s opinion. But she knew she couldn’t average a thousand words each and every day. There were plenty of weekends when family activities kept her from turning on her computer at all. Other days she might write for several hours and then review what she’d written and realize it had no chance of ending up in the final version of the story. Cecilia had suggested she cut several long scenes from her first two novels because the passages didn’t advance the main plot and would be skimmed by most readers. The possibility that readers might not bother to slow down and consider the words Amy had slaved over for hours, if not days, made her sick to her stomach.

  Jeff grunted and rolled onto his back. In the best-case scenario, it would take at least five months for Amy to complete the first draft of a new book. That would be two months faster than it took her to finish The Everlasting Arms. However, turning in the first draft was just the initial step. The editorial process would take another three or four months. Only after the final version was approved would a check be issued. And that could happen only if Dave Coley decided the book was worth publishing at all.

  Amy shut her eyes and commanded her mind to slow down. Being a writer wasn’t supposed to be a grinding job. When she’d worked for the law firm she never lay in bed at night worrying about job security or fretting over whether she’d be paid on Friday. Becoming a novelist was supposed to be the path to freedom. She loved the solitude of the attic, but if her writing career was chained to the financial demands of life, it would be a deathblow to creativity.

  All Amy’s calculations about how long it would take to write another novel were meaningless if she didn’t have an idea for a story in the first place. Cecilia had nixed the possibility for a sequel to A Great and Precious Promise, and The Everlasting Arms didn’t lend itself to another book with the same characters. Rick and Kelli had suffered enough. They deserved to live out their fictional lives in peace and quiet and raise healthy, happy babies.

  Amy slipped out of bed, knelt down, and prayed that God would give her the idea for a new book. And do it soon.

  four

  Amy sipped a cappuccino. She loved the complex smells of different coffees brewing and the relaxed atmosphere of the local coffee shop, but she allowed herself only one or two visits a week. It was hard to justify paying as much for a single cup of coffee as a pound cost at the grocery store.

  While waiting for Natalie, she glanced down at a copy of the local newspaper an earlier customer had abandoned. A headline at the bottom of the first page caught her eye: “Local World War II Hero Dies.”

  Before she read the first line of the article, Amy guessed whom it was about. Sure enough, Sanford “Sonny” Dominick had passed away at the age of eighty-four from complications associated with pneumonia. The reporter summarized the basic facts about the son of a textile worker who worked as a crop duster before volunteering for the US Air Force during World War II. Dominick survived in the jungles of Burma for two weeks after the airplane he piloted developed mechanical problems and had to make an emergency crash landing in a dry riverbed. He and one other crew member, who’d suffered a broken arm, were alone deep in enemy territory. Dominick set the man’s bone, and they followed the riverbed for four days before going cross-country for eleven more days. In the process they avo
ided numerous Japanese patrols and survived by eating insects, tree roots, and raw fish Dominick caught in a trap made from twigs and baited with grubworms. Megan saw a model of the fish trap when she was in elementary school and told Amy all about it.

  Upon returning home to Cross Plains, the war hero went into business and became a multimillionaire who went through almost as many wives as he had millions. Mr. Phillips was Mr. Dominick’s lawyer, and Amy had met the tall, white-haired man with the colorful personality on several occasions. Even though he was very charming and garrulous, there was always an underlying pathos that touched Amy enough that she started praying for him. She finished the article and placed the paper on an empty chair. Sonny Dominick’s medals and millions wouldn’t be relevant wherever he was today.

  While she watched people come into the shop and order drinks, Amy thought again about a visit she’d made the previous night to the living room. It had been a time of needed encouragement after the stress related to Jeff’s job and the family finances. Nothing came out of the dream about another book; however, the experience ended with an unusual twist. As Amy felt herself being pulled away from the room, a quick series of images raced past her eyes. It happened so fast that she couldn’t remember the pictures, and that left Amy puzzled. As she took a drink of coffee, she tried to revisit the scene and slow down the slide show, but it remained a blur. Amy lowered her cup as her petite friend with short black hair and sparkling dark eyes came into the store and rushed over to the table.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Natalie said in her Midwestern accent. “I’m driving car pool this week and had to wait on Braxton Green. It’s a good thing being tardy won’t get you kicked out of kindergarten.”

  “That’s okay. I’ve enjoyed relaxing and watching the people. I’ve been busy this morning, too. I mopped the kitchen floor after Megan and Ian left for the bus stop.”

  “Already? I’m impressed.”

  Natalie slipped off her coat and draped it over a chair. She had two sons. Ben was a second grader at Broad Street Christian School, and Noah was in kindergarten. There was no bus service to the private school.

  “I went through the same thing when Ian and Dallas were in kindergarten together at Broad Street,” Amy said. “Being on time is tough for Kim and her kids.”