Best Staged Plans

by Claire Cook

  If you added up all the words Eskimos had for snow and Zulus had for green, and then doubled it, you’d have roughly the same number of inflections Luke had for the single word Mom. Mom, you’re embarrassing me. Mom, you’re in my space. Mom, I’m fine. Mom, I get it. It was a language all its own.

  My concern for my son was possibly a little bit meddle-y, but not unwarranted. Luke was brilliant, but he sometimes missed a clue or two. Lukisms were told and retold in our family until they reached the level of urban legend. Or at least suburban legend.

  One day in preschool he wanted to know how come his classmate got to be a doctor and he didn’t. “She’s not a doctor, honey,” I said. “She’s adopted.”

  Another year he came home from school singing, “Put another dime in the juice box, baby.”

  “Up and at ’em,” Greg said one morning when he was waking him for school. “Who’s Adam?” Luke said.

  In high school Luke would stay up all night reading a book and then remember that he had a biology exam second period.

  The first time we let him drive one of our cars to college, he filled it with diesel fuel.

  I knew he’d find his way, but there seemed to be a slight disconnect between Luke and the rest of the world. It was a mother’s job to worry about these things.

  I gave him a mom hug. “Be careful out there,” I said.

  IN THE UNLIKELY EVENT that they came to arrest me while I was gone, I filled Greg in on my post office caper on the way to the airport.

  He put his blinker on and pulled onto the highway. “Well, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. And look at it this way, at least it got you out running.”

  “Why do you always do that?” I turned in my seat to make sure no one was going to hit us when we merged, as if seeing it about to happen might somehow prevent it.

  “Do what?” Greg hit the accelerator and veered into a ridiculously small gap between two cars. I would have waited for a noticeable break in the traffic. I mean, what was the hurry? We had plenty of time.

  “Miss the point,” I said.

  Greg turned to look at me. “I didn’t miss the point. I was trying to bring a little levity to the situation.”

  “Watch the road,” I said.

  We drove for a while in silence.

  “So,” Greg said. “Tell Shannon I love her. And tell”—he cleared his throat dramatically—“Chance—”

  I burst out laughing. “How the hell did we end up with a son-in-law named Chance?”

  “Our daughter picked him. And he’s a nice guy.”

  “I agree. But that ma’am stuff totally freaks me out.”

  Greg laughed. “How about when you told him not to call you ma’am, and he started calling you Mom instead?”

  I shook my head. “I think it was the champagne talking. But, still, I mean, Mom? It was maybe the third time we’d met. What’s that saying about how in the South everyone is your best friend for that day, and in the North it takes five years before they’ll talk to you on the street, but once they do, you’re friends for life.”

  Greg reached over and turned the radio off. “He really loves her. It’s all over him. He’s a lucky guy, and he knows it.”

  I patted Greg’s thigh. “No bias there.”

  He put his hand on my hand.

  “God,” I said. “How about that engagement party?”

  Greg shook his head. “And that shower thing. I mean, what is it with those people and their zoot suits?”

  “Shannon was into it,” I said. “Any excuse to buy a new dress.”

  “By the time the actual wedding rolled around, I was thinking it was going to be a letdown after all the hoopla.”

  “I know.” I reached into my bag and triple-checked that I had my driver’s license and e-ticket. “I still kind of wish we’d been able to talk her into having the wedding up here. I mean, from the moment we bought our house, I could picture it. Big white tent on the side yard, ceremony under the wisteria arbor. All that planting and weeding for all those years, you’d think we could have at least gotten a wedding out of the deal.”

  Greg took his hand off mine and pulled into the HOV lane. Once we had a concrete barrier on either side to protect us from all the crazy Boston drivers, I relaxed a little.

  “They wanted to have it in Atlanta,” Greg said. “It was their wedding.”

  “It was our dime,” I said.

  Greg put his hand back on mine. “That was one big dime. How about when Shannon e-mailed us those articles and told us our wedding budget was below the national average? I’ll tell you, that daughter of ours is one good negotiator.”

  I shook my head. If I had one brilliant piece of advice for parents whose daughter is getting married, it would be to offer to contribute a specific amount of money to the cause. Then tell the happy couple they can keep whatever they don’t spend. The early months of planning had been fraught with arguments about how much Shannon could pay for her dress and whether they could fly in a live band. Yes, a live band. The minute we told Shannon she could keep the change, poof, the fights went away.

  “You mean, we can spend the money on anything?” she’d asked. “What if we decide to elope?”

  “Great,” I’d said. “We’ll meet you there.”

  We pulled into the drop-off area in front of the Delta terminal. Greg put the car into park and popped the latch on the trunk. He put his hand on the door handle.

  “I still don’t get it,” he said. “You have plenty of work up here. And Denise’s boyfriend could turn out to be a total nut job. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “I can’t have this conversation again.” The click my door handle made sounded like punctuation.

  Greg’s knuckles turned white when he squeezed the steering wheel. “Fine. Well, have a good trip. Wish I were going with you.”

  I blew out a puff of air. “Once we sell the house, we can go anywhere we want to go. And the only way we’re going to sell it is if you get your rear in gear.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to talk about it,” Greg said.

  We looked at each other.

  He leaned over and kissed me. “Call me when you get there.”

  In the gray light of Logan, crow’s-feet crisscrossed the corners of his eyes and tiny cords of loose skin draped his neck like a garland. Looking at my husband was like watching my life flash by.

  “I don’t think so.” I closed my eyes. “You call me, Greg. But not until the house is ready.”

  CHAPTER 17

  “MOMMY,” A GIRL’S VOICE yelled as I stepped into the baggage terminal.

  I turned. A toddler reached her arms up to her twenty-something mother.

  “I saw that,” a voice said behind me.

  I turned around again and fast-forwarded two and a half decades. Shannon gave me a big hug and a kiss on the cheek. She smelled like some new exotic version of my old daughter.

  “Just wait,” I said. “It’ll happen to you one day. Some primitive part of me still thinks every crying baby is somehow my responsibility.”

  Shannon tucked her sleek bobbed hair behind her ears. “Good to know. Chance and I will be sure to put that little nugget to use down the road.”

  I kept my arm around her as we walked over to wait for my suitcase. “Just give Dad and me a year or two to have some fun first. As soon as we unload the house, that is.”

  Shannon slid out from under my arm and pulled her iPhone from an impossibly small bag. Her fingers danced across the screen. “How’s that going?” she asked without looking up.

  “Ha,” I said.

  She scrolled through the urgent messages that had piled up since she last checked, probably thirty seconds ago. I unearthed my clunky BlackBerry from my shoulder bag and turned it on, just so I wouldn’t look like a total dinosaur.

  Shannon was a CPA. I knew that part because Greg and I had financed it. She traveled around the country doing audits for one of those national finance companies everyone has heard of but no one
quite knows what they do. She threw around phrases involving millions of dollars like it was Monopoly money.

  The company paid for her continuing education credits, which were mysteriously called CPEs instead of CECs, which would make a lot more sense, if you asked me. They also took care of her membership in the AICPA, which I had to admit I always got confused with the ASPCA. Shannon’s explanations went in one ear and out the other, though I wasn’t sure if that was my math phobia or the fact that I was becoming increasingly allergic to acronyms.

  I mean, WTF, you could spend your whole day deciphering acronyms. I knew early on Denise was my BFF, but by the time I figured out that LMAO was laughing my ass off, I wasn’t. ROTFLMAO? When was the last time you were actually rolling on the floor laughing your ass off, I mean, really? And I’m not sure I could have a true friendship with anyone who underscores every funny comment with LOL. It’s ridiculous. If you have to cue someone to laugh out loud, you’re simply not being funny enough.

  “OMG,” Shannon said to the text she was reading. “Could you give me like three minutes to hang out with my mother?”

  This was the way things always went with Shannon. Blink and she was gone.

  I grabbed my suitcase from the luggage carousel. “Do what you need to do, honey. Just drop me off at the car rental place and I can meet you at the house later.”

  Shannon tucked her phone back into her tiny purse. “Okay, you can take my GPS.”

  SHANNON HAD BEEN ADAMANT about picking me up. She’d also insisted that I rent a car not at the airport, but at the rental car company closest to the house she and Chance had recently bought. I went along with this because she was my daughter and Atlanta was her territory, but as was so often the case in my life, it would have been a lot easier to do it my way.

  Their new house was OTP, or Outside the Perimeter, which in Atlanta-speak means outside the circle of Interstate 285. For Shannon and Chance, trading their Virginia Highland apartment for the suburbs north of the city meant happy home ownership, a great school system for their penciled-in children, and room to spread out.

  For me today, it meant climbing into my rental car and driving back into the city again.

  I unearthed my recently recovered reading glasses from the bottom of my bag. I held them up and watched the silver metal on the sidepieces twinkle in the hot Atlanta sun. I gave them a quick kiss, then put them on so I could read the address Denise’s boyfriend had e-mailed me.

  I punched the hotel’s address into Shannon’s GPS, then stuck it on the windshield of my rental car. I rolled slowly through the lot while it searched for its coordinates.

  I should have loved the drivers in Atlanta, but the truth was, they made me nervous. Boston drivers are aggressive and nuts. Atlanta drivers are just plain nuts. Given that Atlanta is one of the traffic capitals of the world, it’s ridiculous the way they take their sweet time getting where they’re going. I mean, do they actually want to stay on the highway in their fancy SUVs all day?

  A woman stopped her car and waved me on to the road in front of her.

  “What are you, crazy?” I said out loud.

  She smiled and waved again.

  I followed the sign for Route 400 South and merged onto the highway.

  “Drive point eight miles, then turn right onto Route 400 South,” Shannon’s GPS said in a fake woman’s voice.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’m already here.” Apparently, even GPS machines were slower in the South. I put on my blinker and moved into the middle lane. I’d just take a quick look around when I got to the hotel, maybe make a few notes. Then I’d call Shannon and see if I could pick up something for dinner on the way home.

  “In five hundred feet, turn right onto Route 400 South,” the GPS said.

  “LOL,” I said.

  “Please turn right,” the GPS said.

  “Please shut up,” I said.

  I’d seen Shannon’s new house only once, when Greg and I flew down to check it out after their offer had been accepted but while they still had time to pull out, contingent on the home inspection. The neighborhood was lovely, with ivy-edged sidewalks, mature landscaping, and green manicured lawns. It encompassed a mixed bag of houses that spanned the decades, refreshing in an area where so much was new and cookie-cutter. The house they’d chosen was a 1970s contemporary in desperate need of TLC. I was proud of Shannon for seeing its potential. When you’re house hunting, especially the first time around, always buy the worst house in the best neighborhood you can afford.

  “Please make a legal U-turn as soon as possible,” the GPS said.

  “Please calm down,” I said. “I’ll let you know when I need you.”

  A strange man passed by in the lane to my right and smiled over at me. Possibly because I appeared to be talking to myself. Possibly because he was a lunatic. I resisted the urge to out myself as a northerner by giving him the finger.

  Shannon liked to do things her way, but I couldn’t wait to get in there, see what they’d done so far, and help out with a project or two while I was here. In some crazy 1970s Swiss chalet–inspired fantasy, possibly fueled by too many drugs in the ’60s, the master bedroom actually had shutters that opened onto a tiny balcony overlooking the living room. I mean, what was that architect thinking? All I could picture were kids hurling each other over the edge one not-too-distant day. I was pretty sure removing the balcony and covering the opening with drywall would be something the three of us, plus maybe one or two of Chance’s burly groomsmen, could handle. Then we’d have to figure out what to do with that big expanse of blank wall.

  I passed a woman putting on mascara in her rearview mirror. While I certainly agreed that none of us should be texting or talking on our cell phones while we drive, where was the public outcry about women putting on their makeup while cruising along the highway at breakneck speed?

  “Reverse direction at the earliest opportunity,” the GPS said.

  “Keep it up and I’ll make my daughter return you,” I said.

  “Recalculating,” the GPS said.

  “You and me both, honey. Wait till you get to be my age. And I thought it would be all smooth sailing by now. Ha.”

  “Rerouting. Please stand by.”

  The traffic slowed to a crawl. Maybe the GPS actually knew something I didn’t. It was an interesting thought. Because if it were true, then I wouldn’t have to be in charge. That would be such a nice change. I mean, I was good at being in charge, but sometimes I just wanted somebody else to take a turn. And to know that if I turned over the reins, someone, or I guess in this case, something, else would pick up the slack. Sometimes you just didn’t want to be everybody’s mother.

  I leaned over and turned up the volume. “Okay, girlfriend, give it to me.”

  “Drive three point three miles, then take ramp on right.”

  “Affirmative,” I said. “GPS is my new BFF.”

  I put my blinker on to start gradually merging over to the right. Greg would have waited until the last possible moment, but this was the GPS’s and my show now.

  The traffic inched along and then came to a complete stop.

  “Drive three point three miles, then take ramp on right,” the GPS said.

  “You’re repeating yourself,” I said.

  The GPS was silent.

  Four lanes of traffic sat on the highway like beached whales, not moving an inch. I put the car into park and polished my much-loved reading glasses.

  “Make a legal U-turn as soon as possible,” the GPS said.

  “Make up your mind,” I said.

  We sat forever and then some more. I put on my cheaters and called Denise just to make sure a warrant for my arrest hadn’t been issued, but she didn’t pick up. I thought about calling home, but what was the point of an ultimatum if you didn’t stick to it? I sorted the receipts I was collecting for Josh, arranging them neatly in the clear plastic folder with the Velcro seal I’d brought along.

  “Drive three point three miles, then take ramp
on right,” the GPS said.

  I ignored it. We sat some more. And some more. My stomach growled and reminded me of the lunch Shannon and I hadn’t managed to go out for. I drank some bottled water and rooted unsuccessfully in my shoulder bag for a snack. I always traveled with emergency provisions—mini packages of raw nuts, baby carrots, Kashi bars. My post office heist must have thrown me off my game. They were probably still sitting on my kitchen counter. I hoped Greg and Luke had the sense to eat the carrots before they got moldy.

  “Drive three point three miles, then take ramp on right,” the GPS said.

  I reached over and yanked the cord out of the cigarette lighter. “That’s it,” I said. “That’s all you get. I’m sick and tired of giving everybody second chances.”

  A minute later I saw a zebra galloping down the middle of the highway against the piled-up traffic.

  I took off my reading glasses and looked again.

  A formation of police motorcycles followed the zebra.

  “I guess we’re not in Boston anymore,” I said to the GPS. When the GPS didn’t answer, I almost plugged it back in again. I kind of missed having someone to talk to.

  All around me car doors were opening.

  “WTF,” I said. I climbed out, too.

  “Are you believin’ in that?” the guy next to me said.

  “Did y’all see what I just saw?” a woman in heels and a sundress said.

  “I got it on video with my cell phone,” another woman said. “I already sent it off to CNN.”

  “Must have escaped on the way to Philips Arena,” a guy said. “The wife and kids and I have tickets to the Ringling Brothers circus there tonight.”

  “Talk about taking your act on the road,” the woman in the sundress said. Everybody laughed like they’d known one another for years.

  Two women a few vehicles down opened up the tailgate of their SUV. “Tired old soggy sandwiches aren’t going to do the folks at work any good by the time we get ’em there,” one of them yelled. “Help yourselves, y’all!”

  CHAPTER 18

  EVEN THE GPS was tired by the time I plugged it back in and we finally found the hotel. We would have simply turned around and gone back toward Shannon’s house, but we were more than halfway there when the traffic stopped. Two hours later when it finally started moving again, one of us really had to go to the bathroom.