by Chris Watt
Instead, he preferred to quietly sit in the corner, strumming on his guitar.
Jodie gave the list another look over.
“You don’t think this seems a little elaborate?” she asked.
“Look at it this way,” said Laura, standing up and leaning against the window, “If one doesn’t work, you move onto the next.”
Sean shook his head. Laura noticed and gave him a shrug.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he replied.
“No, come on, what?”
Sean stopped strumming his guitar and looked left and right at both of them.
“Why are you even considering this?”
“Because she saw him first,” said Laura, pointing an index finger in Jodie’s direction.
Jodie nodded, concurring with her friend.
“She’s right. And my mother isn’t right for him.”
“Oh, and you’re a perfect fit?” he asked.
“She hopes, Ha!” snapped Laura, unable to help herself. Sean rolled his eyes.
“Nice, Laura. What I mean is,” Sean turned his attention back to Jodie, “why bother?
You’re going to be leaving next term anyway.”
Jodie smiled, raising the list in the air.
“And, I’ll have the whole summer with him.”
Sean shook his head and went back to his guitar.
“This isn’t going to work.”
Laura leaned across and ruffled Sean’s hair, before returning to the bed, and placing a reassuring hand on Jodie’s knee.
“Don’t listen to him, he’s old fashioned. I say if you want him, fight for him.”
“But, it’s your mother,” Sean added, “Does nobody else see a problem here?”
“They’ve only gone out once. And it’s not like she hasn’t gone through all this before.
Her last few boyfriends were wash outs, right?”
“Complete assholes,” Jodie nodded.
“But Mr. Peer isn’t an asshole. And neither is your mother,” said Sean, beginning to feel like the only adult in this situation.
“He’s also ten years younger than her,” said Laura, which she felt was the ultimate justification, before adding “and call him Rob.” Sean, however, didn’t see it that way
“So what, you’re eight years younger than him.”
“Girls mature faster than guys,” Jodie added, “which means Mr. Peer...I mean, Rob and I are pretty much equals here.”
“Except that he’s dating your mother,” Sean repeated.
Jodie shook her head,
“They’re not dating, okay?”
Sean raised his arms in exasperation,
“They’re going out again, aren’t they?”
“You don’t date until at least the third time you see each other,” said Laura, “Everybody knows that.”
Sean tried to process this, but came up decidedly short.
“That makes no sense whatsoever.”
Laura sighed in frustration,
“We don’t want it to make sense; we want to stop it before it gets to the point where it does make sense. That’s when you know they’re dating.”
Sean said nothing for a moment, before putting down his guitar and getting up out of his chair. Was this really female logic?
“I don’t think I want to know anymore. I’m getting a drink.”
And with that he left the room and headed downstairs.
Jodie went quiet for a moment, thinking things over, before turning to her friend and asking,
“Do you think he’s right?”
“He’s not in your situation, we can’t expect him to understand, bless him. He’s just looking out for you. Y’know, he talks about you a lot?”
“Unavoidable, I guess. I mean,” Jodie motioned out the window, “we see each other every day.”
Jodie looked across to her bedroom window and saw her mother, changing the bed sheets and straightening things up, blissfully unaware of the piece of paper in her daughter’s hand, a piece of paper that was beginning to feel heavier to Jodie by the second. Jodie sighed and crumpled the list up, discarding it to one side. Laura gave her a sympathetic shoulder to lean her head on.
“Well, this was a waste of time.”
Laura put her arm around her friend, reassuring her with,
“We’ll think of something.”
The girl’s sat there for a few moments, in silence, before the silence was broken by the distant sound of a mobile phone ringing. They both looked up, and across to Jodie’s room, where Jodie’s mother had stopped stripping the bed to answer her phone. A big, beaming smile slowly came across her face and she sat down on the end of Jodie’s bed to take the call.
Across in Sean’s room, Jodie suddenly felt a surge of jealousy, a surge which forced her to bend down and pick up the discarded piece of paper and un-crumple it. She looked over it one more time. As someone once said, all was fair in love and war.
THIRTY-ONE
1: Cancel Dinner Reservations
This was an easy one. Jodie knew that her mother was going to meet Rob at Saigon’s restaurant at seven pm tomorrow night. She found the number in the phonebook and rang them up to cancel the dinner. She may have gone a little overboard with explaining why she was cancelling the reservation — do people usually go into that much detail about having food poisoning? To add a little methodical cruelty to the proceedings, she rang the restaurant from Laura’s mobile, so as to kill any trail that might lead back to her in the event of suspicion.
2: Ruin Clothing
Katy had bought a new black dress especially for Friday night. So, armed with this knowledge, Jodie snuck home from school at lunchtime. She had thought about ripping it, but decided against it, feeling that it showed perhaps a little too much aggression on her part. It might have been her conscience getting the better of her. After all, with no one around to witness the crime what would it matter how she did it, except to herself? In any case, she went for the bottle of bleach under the kitchen sink. She then headed upstairs to her mother’s room and carefully took the new dress out of her wardrobe. Laying it on the bed she then took the cap off of the bleach, letting just two drops of the liquid fall onto the front of the dress.
Jodie then put the dress back into the wardrobe and, making sure that nothing else in the room had been disturbed, went back downstairs, putting the bleach back in its place under the kitchen sink, before returning to school, safe in the knowledge that in twenty minutes those two drops would become two white stains, rendering the dress useless.
3: Alter Mobile Number
This had proved trickier. Knowing that when her mother found the stains on her dress, she would quite rightly have to re-think her limited wardrobe options, she would no doubt want to phone Rob and tell him she might be a little late. Jodie’s plan was to make sure the call didn’t take place. The way she would do this was by going into her mother’s mobile phone contacts and altering Rob’s details by one number. But Jodie would have to act quickly, as doing this came with a very real fear of getting caught in the act. She decided to alter the number while her mother was in the shower.
4: Start a rumor
And
5: Create Mysterious E-Mails
were not applicable to this evening, but Jodie kept them at the back of her mind as she placed a tick beside each task she had done that day, then hiding the piece of paper inside her copy of Jude The Obscure, which she had yet to finish. After all, she felt, they might come in handy if the date remained successful. Whereas...
6: If All Else Fails, Fake A Seizure
...on the other hand, might come into play later that night if her mother and Rob ended up on the doorstep again.
When Katy came home from work that day, she was buzzing with excitement. Jodie kept a low profile, while she moved swiftly around the house, getting herself organized for her date. She had laid out her make-up and hair dryer, before jumping in the shower, happily unaware that downstairs her daughter wa
s creeping through her handbag looking for her phone.
Katy allowed herself a longer shower than usual that afternoon, to help her get over the nerves that were coursing through her body. She was thinking about that evening, about what might happen, or not happen. About how much control she would allow herself and how much she was willing to give over to Rob. About how much fun she may or may not have. But really, she was more concerned that she looked good for him that evening.
She felt, for the first time in years, attractive, if only because Rob had asked her out again, despite the added pressure of teaching her daughter. It was the highest form of flattery she had had, at least flattery from someone that she wanted flattery from.
The panic set in when Katy opened her wardrobe and took out her new black dress.
Indeed, Katy didn’t even notice the stains at first, as she laid the dress on the bed and finished drying herself, her hair wrapped neatly in a towel. It was only once she had it on and studied herself in the mirror that she noticed the two white blotches near the waistline.
“Shit,” was the only expression that she could come up with, followed by a “goddamn it!”
Jodie could hear her mother rummaging through her wardrobe from downstairs, but stayed seated in front of the television, while the commotion continued upstairs.
“Jodie!” Katy called from the top landing.
“What?”
“Will you bring me my phone?”
“Sure.”
Jodie got up and walked through to the kitchen. She grabbed her mother’s mobile from her handbag, before pausing, and deciding to elaborate on her strategy, by shouting back to her mother,
“Where is it?”
“It’s in my handbag!”
Jodie then allowed another pause, to give the impression that she was looking for it, before walking through the hallway and up the stairs to pass the phone to her half-dressed mother. Katy returned to her bedroom and tried to phone Rob, to let him know that she might be running a little late. She clicked on his contact and it began to ring. Katy continued to search through her wardrobe as it rang, before a voice answered.
“Hello?”
It was a male voice, but an unfamiliar one.
“Hi,” Katy replied, “Rob?”
“No, this is Paul.”
Katy was confused, but thought that maybe it was a friend of his.
“Oh, sorry, is Rob there?”
“No, this is Paul.”
“So, you don’t know Rob?”
“No. Paul.”
This was clearly going nowhere.
“Oh, I’m sorry...I must have the wrong number.”
“That’s okay. It happens.”
Katy hung up, before looking at the read out on her phone. What the hell was going on? It was definitely Rob’s number, it said so. She had already called him on that number earlier that week, so what was the problem?
She looked at her watch.
“Shit!” She was going to be late unless she moved fast.
Discarding her obviously broken phone, she went back to her dress options. Ten years and only four dates in that time, had not been kind to her fancier clothing, most of her out of work wear verging towards the casual side of tracksuit bottoms. Fortunately, she had a backup plan: her favorite red dress, which while emphasizing her chest area maybe a little too much for a second date, did do wonders for her frame. And under the circumstances, with time definitely not on her side, it was just going to have to do.
Rob was waiting outside Saigon’s restaurant when Katy finally drove up in a taxi, twenty minutes late. He had a look of disappointment on his face as he helped her out of the car.
Katy, seeing this, was quick to make her apologies.
“I’m so sorry, Rob. I had a little crisis at home, I know I’m late, but I did try to call. Did you change your number?”
“Um, no. Everything okay?”
“Oh, fine, fine, just a little clothing crisis, nothing serious. How are you?”
Rob sighed and raised his hands in resignation.
“Well, the restaurant screwed up and they don’t have our reservation.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I don’t know what happened. I’m so sorry, Katy.”
Katy hid her disappointment, feeling that since she had been late, it had probably been her fault and Rob was just being polite by blaming the restaurant.
“Well, what do you want to do?” she asked.
“It’s okay,” said Rob, “it’s Friday night, I’m sure I can find us a table at somewhere nice.
Somewhere classy.”
THIRTY-TWO
Frankie and Benny’s was full. Rob and Katy had tried a few restaurants in town, all of which were packed, so had opted to take the walk down to the beach front to try their luck there. The walk did them good, allowing them time to get the awkward small talk out of the way, so that now, as they took their seats in the corner of the restaurant, next to the kitchen doors, they could be themselves and leave any pretensions out in the night air.
Rob looked around, at the various diners, all of whom made him seem a little over dressed, in his Burton’s suit, for this type of establishment. The worst offender was an overweight man who appeared to be wearing shorts and flip flops, despite the fact it was freezing outside.
“Boy, I’m glad I dressed casual,” Rob joked. Katy, who was sipping at her coke, gave a little laugh.
“You look great,” she reassured him.
“You look really nice, too.”
“Thanks.”
And then, silence, the awkward kind. It was to be expected. Neither Rob, nor Katy had really expected things to go this far, given how the last date had ended, and yet, here they were, dinner reservations or no diner reservations. All it would take now was a little courage and some honest conversation. Rob was the first to break the silence.
“Would you mind if I asked you something? Now that we’re officially on our second date?”
“Sure.”
“What happened between you and Jodie’s father?”
This was a bit of a long shot on Rob’s part and he knew it. Katy, who had been nibbling on a bread stick, stopped chewing, abruptly.
Rob panicked inside; sensing that perhaps being forward had not been the best of tactics.
Good thing for him, Katy was oddly refreshed by this approach, if a little taken aback, so she put down her bland excuse for an appetizer.
“Wow, you know how to ask them. I thought we’d at least get through the second course before we got to that one.”
“If I’m prying, just tell me to piss off,” said Rob, now trying to put the conversation in reverse.
“No, no, it’s fine.” Katy tried to put him at ease. “There’s not much to tell really. I knew him from school. We were together for a few months; we had sex once and...That was it.
When Jodie was born, he stuck around for about a year, out of what I guess he thought was some sort of gesture that he wanted to do the right thing, but really, he wasn’t interested in being a father.”
Rob nodded sympathetically, but somewhere deep inside, buried roughly between idiocy and nosiness he wanted to know more. It wasn’t that he was being insensitive, just a little curious.
“What was his name?”
“Tom. We were married for six months before he left. We never heard from him again.
No birthday cards, Christmas Cards, nothing.”
Rob sat back, his mind racing with various emotions. He looked to Katy, trying to sense some vulnerability, some regret, but there was none to be found. Not on this subject, at least. For the first time in his life, he was sitting opposite a woman. Not a girl, a woman, and a woman that had seen it all.
Probably twice.
“Hey, I was fifteen when we...you know,” she continued, “he was eighteen, he had experience and I made an error of judgment.”
“You don’t regret it though, do you?” asked Rob, still fishing for doubts, though God only knew
why. Katy merely shook her head.
“Not for a second. When Jodie was born, I knew instantly. I wouldn’t change anything I’ve done. Not one thing.” She hesitated, her mouth half open, as if she was going to say more, but all that came out was,
“Except...” She stopped herself, surprised that there had been an exception in there at all.
Rob leaned forward, calling her on it.
“Except?”
She thought for a moment. To Rob, it looked as though she was searching for something, some inner truth that had lain dormant for the last seventeen years and had now been woken by him. But instead, she smiled and offered,
“Maybe I would have had a little more fun.”
Rob sat back and relaxed himself, taking a sip from his bottle of beer.
“Well, there’s still time, isn’t there?”
But rather than agree with Rob, Katy seemed further away now, as if she was feeling guilty for talking about even the slightest hint of regret.
She wondered if Jodie would be understanding of such feelings, or if, indeed, Jodie had any regrets of her own, such as the lack of a man in the house, or a more consistent upbringing, one unburdened by the necessity of grandparents, uncles and aunts. Katy, suddenly full of doubt, added,
“She’s a really bright girl.”
“She is,” Rob nodded, in agreement, before the conversation was plunged back into silence, as Katy continued thinking, while Rob sat back and felt as if perhaps he’d blown it at the final hurdle, by bringing up her past.
Surely this would have been better suited to a few months down the line, he thought.
Katy sighed and took a sip from her coke, before snapping herself out of the stupor she had fallen into. She did this by turning the tables, of course.
“So what about you?”
“What about me?” replied Rob, suddenly surprised by the sound of her voice, as though he’d almost fallen asleep at the table.