The Other Mothers' Club
Page 22
About the check. (What a mug, Mandy thought, although, if she’d been honest, she suspected she might have done the same, aged eighteen.) Too proud to bank his family’s guilt offering, no matter how much she’d needed it.
Mandy already knew about Will’s letter.
But Clare told her more. About his phone calls and the meeting in the coffee shop.
And, finally, about the row yesterday, after Mandy had left. The terrible things that Lily had said. How Eve had first sided with Lily, instead of her best friend.
As she listened, Mandy wished with all her heart she’d stayed that extra half an hour. You couldn’t have changed it, she told herself. You wouldn’t have had the nerve to stand up to Lily.
But maybe she would have. There had been times lately, since her split with Dave, when Mandy had surprised herself. She never knew how much she was capable of until push came to shove.
“What do you think?” Clare asked. “What would you do in my shoes?”
“The trouble,” said Mandy, “is what I think and what I’d do are not necessarily the same.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“I’d think, Bastard, where the hell do you get off…”
“I’m with you so far!” Clare managed a laugh that finished as abruptly as it started.
“But what I would do,” Mandy said, “is roll over, probably.”
Clare remained silent.
“So,” Mandy asked when several seconds had slid past without a response. “What do you think?”
“What do I think…?” Clare paused. “Bastard. Where the hell do you get off…?”
“And what will you do?”
This time, there was no humor in Clare’s laugh. “Roll over, probably.”
“Is that how you see it? Giving up?”
“To a certain extent, yes.” Clare sighed. “And a bit of me knows Will isn’t a bastard, not really. He was a coward, but he was also young, stupid and terrified. And frankly I was stupid to be in that position at all. All my fantasies of living happy every after, Will running his practice and me writing novels from the kitchen table, with a brood of baby Will-and-Clares playing around my feet. Like we were hobbits or something. It was never going to happen.”
“And?” Mandy prompted.
“You think they’re right, don’t you? Lily and Eve.”
Mandy did, although she wasn’t about to say so. “It doesn’t matter what I think,” she said. “What matters is what you think.”
Clare swallowed hard. “I know they’re right. I don’t have a choice, much as I want to take it to court…much as I want to throw up at the thought of Lou standing next to Will, looking like his mini-me. I stand more chance of losing Lou if I try to stop it.”
Right answer, Mandy thought.
Twenty-three
Anyone would think the queen was coming…” Grace was grinning as she put a cup of herbal tea on Melanie’s desk.
“Thanks,” Melanie said. She meant for the smart-assed comment, not the tea, but Grace could take it whichever way she liked. Melanie was nervous. She doubted she’d be more nervous if the queen had been coming. Everything Eve had said about meeting a knee-high firing squad now made sense. This one small person—or not so small, since Ellie was apparently ten going on fifteen—held Melanie’s hopes in her hand. One squeeze and she and Vince were history.
A soft knock on the door took Melanie by surprise. No one ever knocked.
“Hello? Anybody home?” Vince’s head appeared around the door. Melanie pasted a smile onto her face. Showtime.
“Hi there.” She started to stand up, then sat down again. What was she meant to do? Was she allowed to hug Vince, or did she have to shake hands? Was she supposed to hug Ellie? Where was Ellie? Why hadn’t they discussed this in more detail? Why hadn’t Vince even realized they would need a plan?
Her eyes met his, and she wasn’t reassured by what she saw. Naked terror.
“Hi,” she repeated. “How are you?”
“Good,” he said. “You?”
“Yes, good, great, thanks.” Melanie wanted to scream.
“Vince!” The voice that came from the corridor belonged to Grace. “It’s so good to see you,” she said, and kissed him warmly on the cheek. He kissed her back, and Melanie felt a pang of envy. She’d had no idea they were such good friends. But then it occurred to her that she knew little about Grace’s private life. She’d never asked.
“It’s been too long,” Grace said. “And who’s this? You must be Ellie…. Hello, it’s nice to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you. To tell the truth, your daddy goes on about you all the time! I’m Grace. I work here with Melanie.”
Melanie tried not to scowl. Her office manager was making it all look so easy. It was all right for Grace; she had nothing to lose.
“Nice to meet you.” The girl who stepped around Vince couldn’t have looked less like her father if she’d tried. She was small and slightly stocky, her body still that of a child. Her thick, wavy, shoulder-length hair was a money-can’t-buy-the-dye strawberry blonde, and a smattering of freckles speckled her nose and cheeks. They were the kind of looks women would envy and men would love when she grew up. When being the operative word. Right now they probably earned the poor kid the kind of nicknames that would scar her for life. She was also wearing a rather ugly pair of synthetic navy trousers and V-neck sweater for which there was no conceivable excuse.
For crying out loud, Vince, Melanie thought, you could have at least let her change out of her school uniform first.
“Good to see you, Vince,” she said, following Grace’s lead and giving him a casual hug.
“Hi, Ellie, I’m Melanie, but you can call me Mel if that’s too much of a mouthful.”
“Like Eleanor,” Vince put in unhelpfully. And Ellie scowled.
Shut up, said the look both she and Melanie gave Vince. And Melanie grinned, ice broken.
Melanie put out her hand and Ellie shook it. “Nice to meet you,” Ellie said. Then she stepped back and looked Melanie up and down, almost professionally, as if she’d been doing it her whole life. Which, as a seasoned survivor of the playground, she probably had. Melanie could see her taking in the T-shirt, black jacket, jeans and sequined sneakers. She felt herself hold her breath.
“I like those,” Ellie said finally. “Amy Bronson at school has Converses, but I’m not allowed them until I’ve saved my pocket money.”
An hour later it was all over, and Melanie felt as if she’d been run down by a preteen truck.
Vince had left with a big smile on his face. When Grace had taken Ellie off to find the ladies, he’d hugged Melanie and told her over and over again how happy it made him to see “his girls” getting on. And Melanie, caught up in his euphoria, had hugged him back with an adolescent fervor she barely remembered feeling in the days when she’d been one.
Ellie had left with a smile on her face too, carrying the distinctive pink personalshopper packaging wrapped around a pair of slightly too big, red, sequined Converses. She’d found her vocation. When she grew up, Ellie had announced as she’d skipped down the stairs behind her father, swinging her spoils dangerously close to his head, she was going to be Mel’s assistant, so she could spend all day in an aircraft hangar–sized wardrobe playing with clothes. If that was work, she couldn’t wait to leave school….
As the door to the street had slammed behind the child, Melanie had smiled. There was plenty of time for the truth when Ellie grew up.
The girl was adorable, in a precocious way that seemed to be the new standard, according to the other women. In fact, if Eve’s experience was anything to go by, Melanie had gotten away incredibly lightly. If not her father’s daughter in looks, Ellie certainly was in temperament. She loved her mom and she loved her dad, and she seemed to have little trouble accepting that while they no longer loved each other, they still loved her. Vince had explained that countless times to Melanie already; she just hadn’t believed it.
But when had kids
gotten to be so exhausting?
Melanie was sure she hadn’t been so labor-intensive at that age. Maybe it was her own strict upbringing, or maybe it had nothing to do with that at all. Maybe, back when she’d been growing up in the eighties, parents who’d stayed together—out of love or duty or financial need—hadn’t felt they’d had to justify themselves to their children constantly. In fact, if Melanie’s experience was anything to go by, they’d felt you’d had to justify yourself to them by living your life according to their hopes, dreams and ambitions once you were grown up. Unless that was simply Chinese ones. Absence of guilt certainly equaled absence of presents/treats/outings. Kids today, Melanie thought, realizing too late that she sounded like her mother, had it made.
Or possibly not.
Brought up to be seen and not heard, Melanie had spent most of her early life with her nose buried in a book. American classics, usually. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Little Women, What Katy Did, The Little House on the Prairie. School-approved texts her parents had encouraged, but which, ironically, had created and fed her wilful streak. Well, Melanie had reasoned, much to her mother’s disgust, you wouldn’t catch Jo/Laura/Rebecca living within the confines of their time, so she wouldn’t either. There would be no nice Chinese-American husband for her. It had caused a hundred rows over the years, and more than one protracted period of non-speaking.
But here she was, Melanie Cheung, successful entrepreneur, three thousand miles from home, successfully faking an intimate knowledge of Gossip Girl, Twilight and Bebo with a ten-year-old whose upbringing was a world away from her own.
Three thousand miles from home.
The thought made Melanie nostalgic. What were her parents doing right now? Her Manhattan girlfriends? Her brother and her niece and nephew? OK, so they’d thought she shouldn’t leave—Boston in her parents’ case, New York in her friends’. And there’d been many times she’d feared they’d been right. But now she wanted them to see…not that they had been wrong exactly. This was not about one-up(wo)manship, but how happy she was. She wanted to show them that things could go right after all. That Melanie had made her own life and she was finally ready for them to be part of it.
On a whim, she picked up the phone.
“Come to Boston,” she said when Vince answered his cell phone.
“You what?” He sounded dazed.
“Sorry, I wasn’t thinking. Is now a good time? Is Ellie still with you?”
“No, no, I just dropped her off with her mom. I’ve literally just got back in the car. She loved you. Was absolutely full of it.”
“I bet her mom loved that.”
“She’s cool,” Vince said. She could hear the shrug in his voice. Ancient history, it said. Water under the bridge. Was it ever? Melanie certainly hoped so.
“Anyway,” he said. “What did you just say?”
“I said…” Melanie took a deep breath. Was she about to do the maddest thing ever? “Let’s go to Boston. It’s about time you met my family.”
Twenty-four
You’re kidding me, right?”
Clare looked into her daughter’s dark eyes and wished she hadn’t. She didn’t think she’d ever seen such hostility. Hostility tinged with disbelief.
“Right?” Louisa repeated, her arms folded tightly across her skinny chest. “How can I have a dad, just like that?”
Sighing, Clare closed her eyes for the briefest of seconds and braced herself for the inevitable onslaught.
“I’ve told you before,” she said patiently. And she had; Louisa had known all about her dad as soon as she was old enough to grasp that other children had a mommy and a daddy and she didn’t. When she’d started infants, and juniors—whenever the dad thing had reared its head—new questions had come and Clare had done her best to answer honestly.
Admittedly, the version Lou knew was censored; young love gone horribly wrong, Will going on with his life, Clare deciding to go it alone.
What Lou didn’t know, because Clare hadn’t known and couldn’t possibly have told her, was that her father might one day return, bringing with him a whole new extended family—grandparents (two of them), a stepbrother and sister…
The big family that Lou had always wanted.
“Will, your dad, wrote to me. He wants…he wants to see you. To…” The words almost choked Clare. Why should she have to do this for him? Then she chided herself. Will hadn’t asked her, didn’t yet know that she had decided to. “He wants to make it up to you.” The words came tumbling out, tripping over each other. “If you’d like to see him, that is.”
Crossing her fingers under the table, Clare said a silent prayer that Lou would say no. But Louisa just stared at her, dazed. The hostility had faded. In its place was not fury or even euphoria, not even tears.
Just…nothing.
“I’m going to my room for a bit,” she said eventually, pushing the chair back with her long Will legs until it butted up against the wall. “I need to think.”
“Lou…” Clare started to get up.
“Mom.” Lou turned in the doorway. “S’OK, really. I just need to think.”
Clare swallowed hard and nodded. Her baby sounded so grown-up.
“But do me a favor, just leave me alone for a bit. No toast, no tea, no pizza. I don’t want anything, OK? And no checking how I’m doing or if I need to talk. I don’t. OK?”
Clare waited for her daughter’s bedroom door to slam and the music to start, but the gentle click of its catch was barely audible, and the crunch of guitars never came. Staring hard at the scarred kitchen table, Clare willed herself not to cry. Right now, she would give anything (anything at all, except Lou) to turn back the clock to the moment Lou had stomped into the kitchen and Clare had suggested that she sit because Clare had something to tell her. Let Will do it. Let him live with the memory of that look on her daughter’s face. But it was too late now.
What had she done?
What had begun as low-level anxiety in the pit of Melanie’s stomach when she’d woken up that morning grew to full-blown nausea when the pilot told the cabin crew to take their seats for landing. Melanie wasn’t travel-sick, she was homesick. And not in the usual sense. Not sick for home. Sick at the very thought of it.
She glanced at Vince. She wasn’t sure about the pod seats they had in club class on British Airways. When the dividing partition was down, as he’d insisted for the entire flight, eye contact was almost compulsory. It was disconcerting. Vince looked exhausted, his skin waxy from the eight-hour trip, his eyes baggy and bloodshot. Could be the flight, the endlessly recycled air, took its toll on even the most scrupulously kept skin. Alternatively, it could be Vince’s over-enthusiastic champagne consumption when they’d boarded. Either way, they’d both need a good night’s sleep before going to see her family.
Catching her eye, Vince grinned and reached across to squeeze her hand. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll be down soon. Never had you pegged as a nervous flier.”
She wasn’t about to disabuse Vince of his notion.
What was the point? How could she even begin to explain? Vince knew that Melanie’s relationship with her parents was rocky at the best of times. She hadn’t been home for three years, not exactly a telltale sign of a close family. And she could hardly expect Vince to understand the intricacies of the culture she’d grown up in. Its ancestors and ghosts, and family shrines. The obsession with duty, and its certainty that women took second place. She barely understood it herself.
“They should be proud of you,” had been his only comment when she’d tried to explain why there had been no point in telling her parents that personalshopper had been shortlisted for an award.
Should be? Maybe.
Would be? Not a chance.
They would have been proud of her if she’d married David Deng and given them grandchildren; preferably grandsons, although a granddaughter wouldn’t have hurt in the mix. The Ivy League university, the law degree, the promising career as a corporate lawyer. A
ll that was so much and nothing, at least as far as her mother was concerned.
That was just one of the many reasons Melanie loved Vince. His laissez-faire attitude. You live your life and let them live theirs, and somewhere along the line you’ll meet in the middle; that was his mantra.
In her dreams.
Inviting Vince to Boston had been the easy part. Within days of suggesting it, flights had been booked and hotel reservations made. They would fly into Boston Logan and out of New York Kennedy, spending two days in Boston with her parents before getting the Acela to Manhattan, for a weekend of shopping and sightseeing, as Vince had put it.
And recovering, Melanie wanted to add.
The only stumbling block had arisen when Melanie had insisted on paying for the flights herself.
“My treat.”
“But I’ve got a ton of air miles,” Vince had protested. “Let’s use those.”
“No way.” Melanie had tried to keep her tone light. “I really want to do this!” For a minute, the spat had teetered precariously on the brink of becoming a full-scale row, then Vince had pulled back.
“All right,” he’d said, putting up his hands. “You feel that strongly, you pay! I’ve heard about these women who are prepared to fight to the death to pay the bill. Just never met one before. If you’re that desperate to be two grand poorer, my love, you be my guest.”
Put like that, he’d been right. It had sounded ridiculous.
What he hadn’t understood was that on the many times Melanie had flown across the Atlantic before—from her first parent-funded trip as a student doing Europe one summer, knees tucked under her chin in the back row of economy, through endless expense-account business trips, to the last flight she’d taken, first class, funded by Simeon—Melanie had never, ever paid for her own ticket. That she’d put these flights on her credit card had assumed almost mythological significance for her. It had been a sign. Of what, she hadn’t been sure, but it had definitely been a sign. Why should she have expected Vince to understand that?