Dad, his smile ramped up to one thousand, “This is Hunter? Well, hello! I’m Phil, Phil Anderson.” He grabs Hunter’s hand and shakes with great, tsunami-like motions and Hunter’s face, still vampire-pale, sinks.
“It’s a pleasure.” Hunter, clearly learning the art of saying something polite and making it sound like kiss off and die from his mother, grimaces as he states, “Well, we wouldn’t want to keep you from your meal.”
They shuffle and Dad smiles at the hostess. I watch them walk away and take a table at the rear of the restaurant in front of the big fieldstone fireplace. Squirming in my chair, I look up at Hunter.
“They’re not dating, right? Like maybe they are just two friends eating.” My words float across the table, hitting Hunter’s now pale, worried face head-on.
“He’s really your Dad? I didn’t know your father was-“
“No, it’s ok. It’s just lunch, right? It’s not like we’re going to be step-siblings or anything.” Okay, so that was maybe not the best of things to say, because now my stomach turns just as Gladys comes to the table with our food.
This is not the most awesome of situations.
“I don’t even know where to start.” He shakes his head. “Let’s just sort of agree to bury our head in the sand on this one and not over-think it.”
I thank Gladys as she places my plate before me and open my mouth, then close it again.
“Piper, about Friday…”
“It’s going to be a working dinner. I need you to know that. I can’t, you’re my boss, and I’m sorry about what happened the other night at the game. It won’t happen again.” My voice is cold and he stares at his food, poking at it like it’s tasteless.
“Of course.” His tone is clipped.
He stares at his steak as if it’s a book. An incredibly interesting book.
My throat tightens as I say, “What happened, at the game, between us. It can’t happen. We were carried away in the moment and that’s fine. But there are some lines I can’t ever cross.”
His foot is soundly on his side of the table. My neck heats as my stomach chills. “Naturally.”
“Good. I knew we’d be on the same page.” I hate this, hate how sick it makes me feel, hate how I have to do it. But I think of Professor Hicks, of how I allowed myself to be blinded once, be taken advantage of by someone who had the same position of power over me. I can’t date anyone under those circumstances again.
I need a partner in life, not a professor or a boss, but an equal, part of a team.
He picks up his fork and knife and cuts into his steak.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Help?
Dear Miss Behave,
I have a daughter that set me on a mystery I just can’t shake. Especially now that my day job consists of watching my husband snooze on the couch (he’s doing great, by the way, and he wants to thank you again for the fruit bouquet). But she won’t return my calls.
What should I do? I believe kidnapping is frowned upon by the authorities. Though I am her mother. I brought her into this world, I should be allowed to drive her where I please.
Love,
Mom
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Relax
Dear Mommy McSnide,
Your daughter has been incredibly busy.
She has spotted Satan’s Beloved Daughter running around town holding hands and committing atrocities of public affection everywhere with her dear old daddy. Which has sent your wayward daughter into something of a snit.
She will call you after work.
-Piper
Ann
“Call me, please. Again, I am so sorry.” She ends the call and stares at her phone, willing Elise to return her calls.
“She’ll get over it, honey. You’ve wounded a lion’s pride, give her some time.” Ted sits on the couch, his back unnaturally stiff before the stack of pillows she’s stuffed behind his back. The doctor released him awfully quickly, but she definitely preferred having him home with her where she can watch him. She brushes the notebook where she chronicles his medication aside and sits beside him. “As will Piper.”
“I haven’t told Piper.” The thought makes her stomach clench.
“I know.” He reaches up, extending his arm up to wrap it around her shoulders.
“What are you doing? You’ll hurt yourself!”
“By what? Putting my arm around my wife? Statistically speaking, it’s a perfectly safe activity given my-“
“Stop it.” She snuggles into his arm, enjoying the way that the hospital scent is wearing off in favor of the spicy clean scent of Ted that she’s grown to love. “You scared me.”
“I know.” He kisses the top of her head, staying so close that his curls tickle her ear. She wants him to know how much she loves him, how she’d never be the same if he wasn’t here, how much he’s become a part of her, but love that big can be so hard to put into words that she opts to wrap her arms around him and stay very still, doing her best to enjoy the moment before its lost. “You have to tell Piper, Annie.”
She blinks away the dampness in her eyes and she pushes back a bit. “I know. I will.”
He nods and with his free hand, reaches for the television remote.
Chapter 11
Power to the Cats and the Ladies who Love Them
Dear Miss Behave,
I recently came home after spending many years working abroad in Japan, where I studied the art of Kibuki Theater. To my great consternation, my attempts to reconnect with an old flame were dashed upon discovery that he is engaged to another woman, my mother. Please advise.
Sincerely,
-There’s No App For This
Dear Kibuki,
There’s really not much I can do here other than share your horror. Your mother is a cougar, and sadly I think the only reasonable thing to do would be to accept that fact and buy yourself a drink.
Love and Much Sake,
-Miss Behave
Mom’s in the car outside when I leave work. For once, I can’t wait to see her. Writing to me in Miss Behave fashion was kind of cute, actually. I never knew she had it in her.
“He’s dating your boss’s mother?” She exhales the second my butt hits the seat.
“Unfortunately. Did you see that letter to the Editor she wrote about me?”
“No.”
“Here, let me read it to you, just so you can get a sense of who it is that he’s dating.”
Pendleton Falls Herald
Letter to the Editor:
To Whom It May Concern,
Our town is losing its beauty. Not our natural beauty, of course, and thanks to the brilliant leadership of the Town Council we have managed to keep the plague of box stores and coffee chains off our shores, but rather we our losing our prestige.
Riff-raff have invaded, and dare I say, are using their perches at this very paper to infest the public with their pro-feline agenda. We are not a community of anti-marriage activists! We are a loving, well-to-do community and should prohibit anyone from renting our properties on anything other than a weekly basis. I understand that week-by-week summer lake-front rentals provide many of us with a source of income. But it’s the longer-term rentals that concern me.
Just the other day, on scenic Bee Pond Road, I saw a woman, bare-footed and dressed in pajamas, drag an indoor chair into her front lawn and then cover it with a carpet.
This is not a sideshow. We are not pro-cat, trailer park people. I suggest that the guilty parties be hunted down and fined.
Sincerely,
S.M.B.
“You’re certain that S.M.B. is Mrs. Brookes?” Mom asks, her hands gripping the wheel.
“Oh yes.”
“And your boss is that Hunter fellow with those green eyes?” Mom keeps her tone steady, but the question beneath her words comes through loud and clear.
“We’re not
dating, mom, relax. But dad and his mother are dating and it’s disgusting.”
“Oh, honey, that’s horrible. But there’s not much you can do about it, really.”
“No.” I shuffle in my seat as we spin through the coffee-shack offshoot of the Grind ‘Em Low near the freeway.
Mom sips her coffee and places it in the drink holder of her car, which I’d swear she’s polished since the last time I rode in it.
I sigh. I couldn’t keep my car this clean if I tried.
“Anyway, I’m sure it’s just a passing fad, right? I mean, Dad isn’t exactly known for his commitment skills.”
“No, but I feel bad for Mrs. Brookes nonetheless.”
My hands ball into fists. “Maybe he’s changed. Maybe after leaving you he’s learned a few things, maybe losing you, losing us, taught him something. You can get better at relationships, right? I mean, you got it right with Ted, so why can’t dad get it right with, well, someone other than Mrs. Brookes?”
“I’m not so sure.” She grips the steering wheel tight with both hands at the top, like an old lady, and I notice the wrinkles around her eyes, how her skin has taken on this almost translucent feel. My throat tightens, when did she start aging?
“Anyway, what are we doing today? Did you figure out where Ms. Leslie Marks is running off to?”
“I think she may be in the current play. Lots of actors come from the community.”
“Great, so how do we find out?” I sip my coffee, steeling myself for interacting with theatre-types. In my experience, it’s best to have coffee before approaching theater people with questions.
“The stage is over in Brinkman, so I’d imagine that’s where we should start.”
And start in Brinkman we do. After parking in the faculty lot a few blocks away, mom and I pull our coats up high and brave the fall wind that whips through campus, beating leaves off their trees and chasing them up and down the walkways.
When I studied here, I remember chasing the floating leaves along the walks to class, enjoying the chase and the crunch beneath my boot as I caught them. As tempting as it is, today I let the lovely crunchy leaves scurry along their merry way.
Brinkman is one of those upcycled buildings that hippies are proud of and religious folks hate. It’s an old cathedral. So it has these grand stairs and vaulted entrances, but the saints were all chiseled off the front and replaced with gaudy gilded comedy and drama masks along with books and all kinds of college crests.
The inside is rather fabulous, though, I have to say. Church pews ripped out and replaced with stadium seating, the center aisle leading to a stage at the crossing of the nave and the transepts.
Unfortunately, the main stage is empty. As are the seats. I call out, “Hello?”
Mom rolls her eyes. “Oh, just go downstairs. If they’re in the middle of rehearsals they could have broken up into groups and scattered all over the lower floor.”
“They’re not Legos, mom.” I say as I stride wistfully past the stage. Because both Ted and mom were employees of the university, all of my sisters and I got to go for free. Huzzah, loan avoidance! Boo, having to see your parents on campus almost daily.
Sadly, I didn’t make it to the theater much in college. I went a few times my freshman year and made out with this actor who was a senior. He was gorgeous and talented and totally and completely wrong for me. For one, he chewed with his mouth open. Said it had something to do with using the muscles of his mouth differently so he could cry better or something. I have no idea. All I know is that when sprayed me with bits of half-mawed broccoli, I knew it wouldn’t last.
He was quite upset when I told him, apparently he was usually the one doing the dumping and who did I think I was, blah blah.
So I didn’t go back to see any plays on the off-chance I would run into him and I could become the subject of one of his improv monologues.
It was bad enough that he burst into tears in the middle of the cafeteria, broccoli bits dribbling down his chin into the folds of his neck, pointing at me and calling me a gussied up harlot.
I kid you not. Gussied up harlot. His exact words. A girl doesn’t forget an insult like that.
Pushing my shoulders back as mom opens the door to the stairs, I take a deep breath. We are looking for Mrs. Marks. That’s all. Finding a mother for a little girl. Done. Find her, get a positive id and a reason for her presence, and get out.
We find action on the stairs. Pairs of actors are huddled in different nooks reading over their lines. I stomp down a few stairs and lean over to look a woman dead in the face. Not her.
“Excuse me, do you know where we can find the director?” Mom asks.
The people stare at me and give me this snotty look.
What?
“Mom…”
“Excuse me, I said, do you know where-“
“Downstairs. Building the sets. Ambroos likes to get his hands dirty.”
“Of course he does,” Mom mutters and I yank her away from them before they assail us with any more snooty looks.
“Why do you have to do that?” I ask, my voice clipped as we make our way down to the lower level. She doesn’t have to stop and ask every single person we meet where the director is. There’s only one other floor in the theater, of course he’s in the stupid basement.
“Do what?”
I take a deep breath, closing my eyes on the wounded look on my mother’s face. I say, “Let’s get downstairs.”
She grabs my arm as we brush past the actors, that stare at us, their greedy eyes ripe and ready to feed off any emotional baggage we may leave behind. “Sweetie, while we’re here, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you-“
“Save it, okay? You caught me, I totally forgot the deodorant this morning but I was out and-“
“Not that.”
“Well, then it can wait, let’s just do this first, okay?” I ask and she nods as we make it downstairs to find the main rehearsal crew.
Set pieces are cast about the cafeteria-like basement like forgotten dreams. Some are half-finished, some are fully painted forests.
Smells of fresh paint and sawdust remind me more of a barn than an old church basement. Still, the fly-rigging attached to the ceiling leaves no doubt as to the usage of the space.
When I was in school, this stage, the second stage, was used for touring indie-rock bands and student-written one-act plays.
A young man all in black beats the top of a set piece with a hammer. Is that supposed to be a tower, maybe? I stride around him and see a group of players sitting cross-legged on the stage. They read their lines with a fluid ease and take notes on their scripts with pencils as they chat.
There are a bunch of girls in the mix, so I motion to mom that we should head over that way. She nods and I climb over the supports for a huge fake volcano. Mom takes the long way around, lifting her feet in catlike precision as she avoids stepping on the mass of wires strewn on the ground.
A hand grips my tricep.
“Who are you and why are you at my rehearsal?”
The voice is high and marked with a thick, fake-sounding European accent.
Armed with a myriad of excuses, my words dry on my tongue as I look into the man’s face. Oh my God! It’s that guy!
The theater guy I made out with and spent the rest of college trying to avoid. Wait, when did he become European? I smack his hand and he releases my arm. “I’m with the Pendleton Falls Herald. Is this any way to treat the press?”
There. That should put the fear on him.
I stare into his blue eyes, noticing the slick blond hair tugged back into a man-bun. Ugh. Of course he wears a man-bun.
Why do people make stereotypes so easy? Couldn’t there be a butchy, lumber jack –ish theater director out there?
“I’m Ambroos, the director.” Of course he is. He straightens his shirt, using pale hands and manicured nails to wipe away any of my sweat that may have accidentally brushed up against him. “Did you call? I wasn’t to
ld anyone from the paper was coming.”
His name wasn’t Ambroos in college.
“Lovely to meet you. That woman over there is my mother.”
“You bring your mother to report on the theater with you?”
Mom stumbles on a power cord and approaches with a large smile on her face.
“Of course, I’m a big fan of the theater.”
She grabs Ambroos’s hand. He takes her hand and shakes it hard. “It’s a pleasure.”
“My daughter, she takes me along” –she shoots me a pointed look and motions to Ambroos with her eyes. What?- “it’s a safety thing, because she’s single, you know.”
Oh no.
My throat tightens.
Tell me I’m hearing things.
Tell me my mother didn’t just say-
“Ah, how lovely that a spinster daughter finds pleasure in her mother’s company.” He locks arms with mom and his eyes roam all over my body, creeping inch my inch over my baggy sweater and clunky boots. “She looks familiar somehow.”
“Oh, yes! That’s because she writes that advice column for the paper, that Miss Behave.”
Shoot me. Someone, please.
“They don’t show my picture on the column, mom.” I give her a look that I sincerely hope conveys something along the lines of shut your mouth. My hands shake as I say, “But I’m here to report on the play. Are there a lot of community members participating in this year’s production?”
“Huh.” He squints as he stares into my eyes, his dyed eyebrows coming together across the pallid planes of his face. I take a step backwards. “Even your voice is familiar.”
Mom tugs him towards the stage. “Are you happy directing the play, Ambroos? Piper’s always telling me about how she-“
“Piper?” His head snaps around and he grimaces.
Lovely, so he’s remembered. Let’s just hope he’ll be mature about it. After all, that was a long time ago now. What can a girl say? I try, “Hey.”
Miss Behave (The Anderson Family Series Book 1) Page 15