Best Staged Plans

by Claire Cook

  I devoured some stew and thought about all the times the four of us had sat around our kitchen table eating this meal. Stew was such a great place to sneak in the vegetables that Shannon and Luke would otherwise resist. Luke would make a little hollow in a thick slice of crusty Italian bread, spoon it full of stew, and try to eat it like an open-faced stew boat. It was messy, but creative, just like him. It was funny how your taste buds brought back memories.

  I took another bite. “Delicious,” I said. “There’s something different, though. What did you add?”

  “A bottle of Guinness stout,” Shannon said. “From Chance’s side of the family.”

  “Well, that certainly balances out the apron,” I said. “So, what are your plans for the weekend anyway? Don’t let me get in the way. I have plenty to do.”

  Shannon and Chance looked at each other. I had a sudden feeling they were going to tell me Shannon was pregnant, in which case she’d be in big trouble for both the wine and that Guinness in the stew.

  “I’ve got the whole weekend to spend with you,” Shannon said. “I was thinking you could come with me to Zumba in the morning, and then we’d go shopping and get pedicures.”

  “Great,” I said. It was our mother/daughter tradition that whenever Shannon and I saw each other we shopped and had pedicures. Zumba was a new twist, but I could work with it. I felt totally cutting edge that I actually knew it was a Latin-inspired fitness dance craze, and I wouldn’t have to embarrass myself by asking Shannon to define Zumba.

  Shannon and Chance looked at each other again.

  “What?” I said.

  “I fly to Boston on Monday,” Shannon said. “I just got a promotion, and I have to do this training thing.”

  “That’s wonderful, honey,” I said. “Congratulations. Will you have enough time to visit Dad and Luke while you’re there, or will you have to fly back Monday night?”

  “Actually,” Shannon said, “I’ll be there for almost a month. And I’m staying with Dad and Luke.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I know,” Shannon said. “I totally lucked out. It could have been Houston, and then I would have had to use my hotel allowance on an actual hotel. Not that I won’t take Dad and Luke out for dinner or something to say thanks.”

  The reality of my situation was just starting to sink in.

  I looked at Chance.

  He smiled. “Our house is your house, Mom.”

  CHAPTER 20

  THE GUEST ROOM was the only downstairs bedroom in my daughter’s new house. Under most circumstances this would be an ideal setup, providing plenty of privacy for guests and owners alike to rest comfortably. But home-alone-in-your-daughter’s-house-with-your-son-in-law fell outside the most circumstances category and squarely into other. Once Shannon left on Monday, it would take a lot more than a downstairs guest room to make me feel comfortable here. At least a few more floors, and preferably a separate guesthouse.

  Shannon, and to be fair, possibly Chance, had done a nice job on the room. The walls were painted a restful sage green. The twin beds were small but comfortable. When you’re putting a guest room together, never ever give your guests the worst mattresses in the house. Unless, of course, you don’t want your guests to stay for more than a night. If I walked in and found an old rickety mattress in place of this one once my daughter was gone, a variation on that old short sheet trick from summer camp, I’d know.

  The top two drawers of the old wooden dresser were empty, and the closet had a welcoming expanse of vacant space, too. There was a cozy chair in the corner, which I recognized from Shannon’s college apartment, and a good reading lamp. There was even a bottle of water and a tiny vase filled with fresh pansies on the bedside table.

  Either I’d brought up a spectacular daughter, or she was feeling guilty as hell that she was going to ditch me on Monday.

  I’d been so tired last night I’d broken my own rule about unpacking your suitcase as soon as you reach your destination, so I gave everything an extra shake and filled the empty hangers in the closet with as many clothes as I could fit, doubling up some of them like a new twist on twinsets. I brought my clothes for the day into the bathroom with me so I could steam them while I showered. If that didn’t work, maybe I could ask Chance to iron them for me.

  The guest bath across the hall, with its faux marble Formica counter, avocado toilet, and gold brick linoleum floor, was irrefutable confirmation that the 1970s had, in fact, happened. At least it was clean and had decent water pressure. Always check the water pressure before you buy a house; nothing can ruin your day like an inadequate shower experience.

  I showered quickly and blow-dried my hair while my clothes de-wrinkled some more. I tiptoed into the kitchen and fired up the coffeemaker, then brought a cup back to my room.

  I almost called Greg before I remembered I wasn’t speaking to him. I called Denise instead.

  “Good morning,” she said. “How’s my favorite thief doing?”

  I’d totally forgotten about my heist. Not only was my whole world getting shakier by the minute, but I was also losing my memory on top of it. I wondered if that was a good thing or a bad thing. I took a moment to contemplate the headlines that might appear any moment in the local weekly, which tended to have so little real news that it wasn’t above making up its own: Mother of Two Makes Passes at Reading Glasses. I’d Do It Again in the Blink of an Eye, Unrepentant Matron Cries from Jail Cell.

  “Hello? You called me, remember?”

  I took a quick sip of coffee. “Oh, sorry. You’re not going to believe this. Shannon is going to Boston on Monday.”

  “For the day?”

  “No, for the month. Or almost a month. I can’t stay here—”

  Denise burst out laughing. “With Chance? Of course you can stay alone in your daughter’s house with your adorable son-in-law. You’ll be the talk of Hotlanta.”

  I lowered my voice in case the ceiling wasn’t properly insulated. “It’s not that I don’t like him. It’s just that it’s going to be awkward, since I don’t really know him.”

  “So you’ll get to know him.”

  “Okay, and he called me Mom again. It just seems to me that if someone hasn’t given birth to you or adopted you, you should wait to be invited. Or not.”

  “If you don’t like it, just tell him to knock it off.”

  “Yeah, that would go over well with Shannon.” I loved Denise, but the fact that she didn’t have kids sometimes gave her a limited perspective.

  “It’s all about setting limits and telling people how to treat you. Just say, Chance, I’d prefer it if you called me Sahndra, and in the meantime I’ll call you, I don’t know, Chuck? Buck? WhattheFuck?”

  “Funny. I was thinking I might move into the hotel. How long is Josh staying?”

  “Where?”

  “At the hotel.”

  “What?”

  “Who’s on first?” I said.

  Instead of What’s on second, or even WTF are you talking about, there was dead silence on Denise’s end.

  “Josh is in Atlanta?” she finally said.

  I had the oddest urge to backpedal, to say something like oh, never mind, maybe I dreamed it.

  “You didn’t know that?” I said instead.

  “We’re busy people. It’s not like we tell each other every little thing.”

  I took another sip of coffee to give my brain a chance to catch up. “Oh, wait. He called you. Yesterday from the hotel. You were in a meeting. Or you must have been in a meeting.”

  “What time?” Denise said in her lawyer’s voice.

  “Five. P.M. Approximately. I think.” I hadn’t even done anything, and I was feeling guilty. I could only imagine how fast I’d cave when they came after me for the reading glasses.

  “And I was in a meeting?”

  “Yes. No. Wait. Okay, I think he said he called you and you must have been in a meeting because you didn’t pick up.”

  Denise didn’t say anything.
>
  “Maybe the call didn’t go through. It happens.”

  “So,” Denise said. “How’s the weather down there?”

  ZUMBA TURNED OUT to be less intimidating than I expected. It was really just the choreographed aerobics of the 1980s with a Latin beat. And instead of the younger women baring their tights-covered butt cheeks on either side of a thong leotard, they showed off their naked abdominal muscles between their sports bras and yoga pants.

  I wiped the sweat off my forehead and reached for my water bottle. The woman in front of me was wearing a pearl choker. When it came to workout attire, I shot for a clean T-shirt. I’d once read that body secretions are good for the luster of pearls. Maybe she was working on her luster while I worked on my cellulite.

  The instructor searched for the next song. I watched a glowing Shannon jog effortlessly in place and took a moment to mourn the body I used to have. I wish I’d had more photos taken of it as proof that it had once existed, but the truth was I’d always dodged the camera.

  If a camera had ever loved me, I’d missed the declaration. The only way I’d been able to appreciate my looks was in hindsight. If someone somehow managed to get a photo of me today, I’d probably think I’d looked pretty hot in that Zumba class when I got to be, say, eighty.

  I didn’t really want my old body back, exactly, if it meant I had to go through everything my daughter still had in front of her. But if they ever figured out a way you could store your real body and rent an avatar while you went through pregnancy and childbirth and toilet training and minivan driving and parent/teacher conferences and teenagers staying out late, and then pick it up again later when you could fully appreciate it, I would be totally pissed off that I’d missed it.

  The sudden blast of what sounded like a kind of merengue/hip-hop hybrid made me jump. Given the size of the tiny speakers up by the ceiling, the volume was impressive. Either loud music had gotten louder since the 1980s or my ears had gotten more sensitive. I thought about tearing off pieces of tissue and stuffing them into my ears the way we’d stuffed bigger wads of tissue into our bras in junior high, but I didn’t want to embarrass my daughter.

  I marched in place with the rest of the class, rocking my hips to the quick one-two-three-four beat. We started traveling, four fast step-slide-togethers to the right and then to the left. The instructor had short hair the color of cherry cough syrup and a tattoo of a black rose on the back of her neck. Whether or not you agreed with her fashion choices, they certainly made her easy to follow.

  The trick to Zumba, and probably everything else, is not to expect perfection right away. If you stay relaxed, anything you don’t pick up right away will make more sense the next time it comes around. The only real obstacle I ran into was that my hips didn’t work as quickly as they used to, but I solved that by just doing every other beat during the fastest parts.

  Shannon caught my eye as we turned to repeat the steps to another wall. “Doing okay?” she mouthed.

  “Of course,” I said. “And you?”

  When the song ended, the fifty or so women and two men clapped and hooted. I hit my stride on the next number, which seemed to be a combination of the flamenco and the cha-cha. We pretended to swirl big puffy dresses as we spun around the room and then did a front-back-cha-cha-cha to all four corners.

  My muscles loosened up and I remembered how much I’d always loved to dance. I’d talked Greg into taking ballroom dance classes about a zillion years ago, and he’d hated it. The classes were held in an old community center basement with metal support posts scattered around the room. One day he rammed my back right into one while we were making a pitiful attempt at the fox-trot. He swore it was an accident, but I never really believed him. He’d also accused me of trying to lead, which was probably true, but in my defense, somebody had to.

  I really did love to dance. I had rhythm. I had flair. The progressions of steps actually clicked in my head like the balanced equations that never made sense in math class. With the right partner, I could be tangoing my way across the country right now. I’d have a closet full of sexy dresses and a crazy collection of high-heeled dance shoes. I could spend a season on Dancing with the Stars, or at least So You Think You Can Dance.

  Ah, the things you never thought to ask before you committed to a lifetime with another person. Will you get up with me to watch the sunrise, or will you snore the morning away? Will you write me poetry or take the easy way out with a Hallmark card for every occasion? Will you get the house ready to put on the market when I ask you to? Can you dance?

  I flipped my imaginary flamenco skirt coquettishly. I made a quarter turn counterclockwise and flipped it again.

  Shannon caught my eye on the next quarter turn.

  “I can’t stay there if you’re not there,” I mouthed.

  “Of course you can,” she mouthed.

  I turned and flamencoed right into the woman next to me.

  CHAPTER 21

  “YOU SHOULD SEE the other woman,” Shannon said to her pedicurist over the sound of the waves crashing in the foot soak spa.

  I leaned back in my massage chair. “It was so embarrassing,” I said to mine. “I can’t believe they had to call an ambulance.”

  “She was only bruised,” Shannon said. “The gym just didn’t want to take a chance on getting sued.”

  I checked the lump on my forehead, then adjusted the instant ice pack they’d given me at the gym. “She was definitely at fault, so liability shouldn’t be an issue.”

  Shannon laughed. “I’m pretty sure Zumba collisions are no-fault in this state.”

  Our pedicurists ignored us, completely and unapologetically, and yet my daughter and I continued to act as if this were a four-way conversation. I would also overtip for both of us, even if the pedicures were only so-so. There was something about the inequity of letting another person scrub my feet that really bothered me. And yet I had to admit a pedicure was a lot like having a salad served to you. It was simply better when you didn’t have to do it yourself.

  “You are so not going to make me feel guilty,” Shannon said. “It’s a great opportunity for you and Chance to get to know each other.”

  “Oh, puh-lease,” I said. “It’s going to be ridiculously awkward for both of us.” I looked at my pedicurist for backup, but she was busy scrubbing the calluses on my right foot with a pumice stone.

  Shannon rolled her eyes at the top of her pedicurist’s head. “His mother treats me like a daughter.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Exactly what I said. You don’t like him. Not that I care what you think, but you should at least come out and admit it.”

  “It’s not that I don’t like him. It’s just that I don’t know him very well yet.”

  “Mom, he’s my husband.”

  “How did you get to be so grown up?” I said.

  We watched our pedicurists in silence. Mine went to work on the calluses on my left foot.

  “I think you’re right about that balcony,” Shannon said.

  “Of course I am,” I said. “Your kids won’t be able to resist throwing things from it, or following each other off the edge, like lemmings.”

  “Thanks for the image, Mom.”

  Shannon pushed a button on the arm of her massage chair and leaned back. My chair had been pounding me in the same place since I’d pushed the big green On button, and it was starting to feel like a knife being stabbed repeatedly into my back. I squinted and tried to read the massage cycle options. It was all a big blur, so I closed one eye and then the other, which made no appreciable difference. I leaned sideways and tried to reach my reading glasses in my shoulder bag, but my arm wasn’t quite long enough.

  Being totally dependent on reading glasses to function in the world was the only thing that really drove me crazy about getting older. It was probably just a tiny bump for people who’d always worn glasses, but I hated how helpless no longer having twenty-twenty vision made me feel. I wish I’d taken a mo
ment to appreciate my younger eyes while I had them.

  “Can you read my chair for me?” I asked.

  “God, I used to love it when you and Dad read to us,” Shannon said. “Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me, Pat the Bunny, Make Way for Ducklings.”

  “Never mind,” I said. I pushed a random button. The rollers started moving outward and inward, catching hunks of my back between them. I yelped and hit another button. This cycle was better—kind of a kneading action that worked its way up both sides of my spine and back down.

  “Okay,” Shannon said. “How about this? You help Chance close in the balcony while I’m gone, and I’ll kick Dad and Basement Brother’s butts so the house gets on the market.”

  I was smarter than this. The first thing Shannon would say when she saw Greg and Luke would be, Mom told me to kick your butts and get this house on the market. Then it would be three against one. I’d be the bad guy, and I wouldn’t even be there to defend myself.

  “Dad and Luke are very responsible,” I said. “I’m sure they’ve been working nonstop since I left.”

  “Chance will probably suggest it to you anyway. He loves to surprise me.”

  “Okay,” I said. “A little casual direction might not be a bad thing. Just promise me you won’t say it was my idea.”

  Shannon reached over to give me a high five. “Deal. Just make sure when you finish it doesn’t look like a patch job.”

  “Trust me,” I said. “I’m a professional.”

  “Oh, and can I have that antique trunk out in the garage for a coffee table? You never use it.”

  With my luck, all this kneading would make my back rise. I hit the big red Off button. “Are you going to show me the printouts saying the amount of furniture Dad and I have already given you is below the national average?”

  Shannon pushed another button on her chair. “Ha. Don’t think I couldn’t.”

  Once our newly polished toes were dry, I took a moment to appreciate the fact that March in Atlanta was actually flip-flop weather. It was probably snowing back in Boston, and if we were getting pedicures there, we’d have to sit for a few extra cycles under the toenail dryer before we dared put on our boots.