A Slight Change of Plan

by Dee Ernst

  Other Books by Dee Ernst

  A Different Kind of Forever

  Better Off Without Him

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2013 Dee Ernst

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  ISBN-13: 9781477848227

  ISBN-10: 1477848223

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013909205

  This one is for Toni, Marsha, and Jane, who were with me from that first flush of true love to the final, bitter, Sara Lee days.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  Look out, New Jersey! After living alone for the past few years, I’m ready to take a new chance on love. I already have everything I need—a successful career, a beautiful home, great friends, and three fine adult children. Now, I’m going after what I want—a smart, fun-loving, and adventurous man to share it all with. At 55, I don’t need young and handsome, but I insist on kind, honest, and thoughtful.

  I sound old and desperate.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re overreacting. You sound fine.”

  “I need to take out the part about living alone for a while. And about having three children.”

  “Kate, first of all, it’s not like you have toddlers. Three adult children is a good thing. It sends a signal that they are out of the house, you are alone and independent, and if you run away for a romantic weekend, you’ll have a built-in pet-sitter.”

  She was right there. My youngest son, Sam, was graduating from college in two months with a degree in something to do with computers that I didn’t understand at all, but he assured me it would guarantee him a very good-paying job. My middle child and lovely daughter, Regan, at twenty-five, was getting married sometime in the not-too-distant future, and had already moved in with her intended. My oldest, my son Jeff—a year and a half older than Regan—was living with his soul mate, Gabe, in a West Village apartment which was the only place I could ever see him living. So yes, I was alone.

  Independent? Well, sure. I had to be. I’d been a widow for the past eight years. I’d learned to kill spiders, empty mousetraps, change flat tires, and hook up a cable modem to my computer. If that wasn’t real independence, I didn’t know what was.

  “Then maybe I’ll take out the part about being fifty-five.”

  “Then you wouldn’t have anything.”

  “Exactly.”

  My sister, Laura, smacked the side of my head with her open palm. “Kate, I’m telling you, this sounds amazing. You’ll have men snapping you up like a bright new penny.”

  “Why am I Kate Freemont Everett? I was married way longer than I was single. I’d almost forgotten my maiden name.”

  “In case anyone from your past stumbles over your profile, you need for them to be able to recognize you. I mean, you look pretty good for your age, but I can’t say you haven’t changed.”

  “My past? You make it sound like I left a trail of broken hearts behind me.”

  The truth was, I hadn’t been the breaker of any hearts. If anything, I was the breakee, having been seriously dumped in college by the guy I thought I was going to live happily ever after with.

  “I can’t imagine anyone from high school being remotely interested in me now. And I can’t imagine my being interested in any of them. Not after thirty-seven years. Maybe we should just forget this whole thing,” I suggested.

  Laura is my little sister. After my father died, our mother had to work, often pulling the three-to-eleven shift, leaving me in charge of Laura during the long evenings of her childhood. It was then that she formed a rather distorted view of my life: She thinks I’m perfect. Possibly because I let her stay up as late as she wanted when she was a little kid, or maybe because she grew up on a diet of Coke and Hostess Twinkies, which I think would affect any person’s rational thinking.

  Laura was trying hard. “Honey, fifty is the new thirty.”

  “I bet the thirty-year-olds don’t say that.”

  She sighed. “You need to put in your age, Kate. It’s for everyone’s protection. Do you want men answering you who say they’re sixty when they’re really seventy-two?”

  Trying an online dating service was all Laura’s idea. Let me get that out there right away. My husband, Adam, had died of a sudden heart attack. I was over the pain of his loss and had been quite content in my singlehood. But lately I really wanted somebody who was happy to see me when I got home who didn’t have a separate water bowl. I did not enjoy the solitude as much as I used to. I really didn’t like going out alone anymore—restaurants, movies, places like that. And I was tired of spending long weekends in interesting places when I had no one to share the experience with. I had kind of been hoping a perfect gentleman would somehow fall into my lap, but Laura pointed out that if I wanted somebody, I’d have to go out and find him, and online dating was the quickest and most sensible way to go about that.

  I was moving on to what was generally called “the next phase,” and was looking for things to shake up my life. I was seriously thinking about selling the five-bedroom home I had raised my family in, even though the real estate market was still deader than a doornail. I had my eye on a very chichi townhome in a gorgeous complex that had its own pool, jogging trail, and health club, as well as basketball and tennis courts. And a golf course.

  Maybe, in the “next phase” of my life, I could become a professional athlete.

  Two weeks earlier I had given notice at my law firm that I was planning to cut my hours there in half, starting on May first, which was two months away. As I expected, they immediately offered me a very nice little package to just leave, which is what I had wanted in the first place. I had been sniffing around the possibility of teaching. Because I had an MBA on top of the law degree, I got a sweet offer from a small private college to teach Intro to Tax Law and Business Law 101. It was going to be perfect, and they wanted me to start in the fall.

  Which would leave me plenty of time to work on the professional-athlete thing.

  But for right now, I was unemployed. Which was why I was sitting home in sweatpants and a flannel shirt on a Wednesday afternoon, arguing with my sister.

  “Laura, I’m not comfortable with this. I haven’t been on a date in thirty-two years. Besides, I’m starting to get hot flashes. I have to pee every ten minutes. I’m very short-tempered. I have a very uneven libido. I’m pretty sure that menopausal women are not ideal dating material.”

  “You don’t have to put that in your profile, silly. Besides, most of these men have been married before and have probably been through that once already.”

  “So why on earth would they want to go through it again? Laura, men my age don’t want me; they want twentysomethings.”

  Laura sighed. We looked very much alike, my sister and I. We both had our mother’s dark eyes and wavy hair, our fathe
r’s lean build and square jaw, and the curse of the Freemonts, big, flat feet. Being five years younger, Laura hadn’t started dyeing her hair yet, so hers was a dark, rich brown. Mine was slightly lighter, with hints of auburn that came from trying to cover all that gray with Medium Golden Brown.

  We were both tall and thin and flat chested, another family trait, one that drove my daughter, Regan, to tears of despair as a teen. Not the tall-and-thin part, but being flat chested was something of a trial for her. Poor thing. She swore that she wanted implants for her eighteenth birthday, but that was the year her father had died, and she finally realized what was important to have and not have, and big boobs ended up at the bottom of the list.

  “Listen,” she said. “I have to pick up Wade in twenty minutes. Just go through the site, Kate. Read what the other women have to say. Then read some of the men’s profiles. You don’t have to go live right away, but you’re all set to go when you feel the time is right, okay?”

  She leaned down to kiss my cheek, then scurried away to pick up her son. Laura had two boys in high school, both involved in sports. She was also a fairly successful Realtor, and had mastered the art of sandwiching clients in between ferrying her sons from one ball field to another.

  My two boys had never been involved in sports. Jeff started drawing in crayon at thirteen months and never stopped. He was now a very successful cartoonist, with his strip syndicated in more than fifty daily newspapers. You may have read it—Bennie’s World. It’s the one about the cute little boy who wants to be a ballet dancer, while the world around him thinks he should be a baseball player. And as for Sam, well, Sam was a geek in preschool and never outgrew his love of fantasy action figures, old sci-fi television shows, and math. It was kind of sad, because when he talked about what he loved, my eyes glazed over after thirty seconds and then my hands started to twitch. I couldn’t even tell you what his major was in college. He’d tried to explain it to me several times. He was very patient and always used small words. He was doing something with computers. That’s all I got.

  But not even Sam could explain the attraction so many people have to online dating. I had actually asked him, since he was my only unattached child, and therefore the one most likely to be trying it himself. But he’d just grunted, leaving me to ponder: Is this how people really meet now? Whatever happened to hanging out in bars?

  I did not read anyone else’s profile. I turned off the computer, made a cup of tea, curled up on my couch, and watched the birds in my backyard fight over sunflower seeds.

  I also napped a little, waking up with two cats on my lap and a dog on my feet. Maybe I wasn’t having hot flashes after all. Maybe it was just additional body heat that was causing me to break into a sweat at random times. My cats were rescue cats, both gray. They were named Seven and Eight. Without the kids around to name them, I’d just counted thirty years of family cats on my fingers and came up with the perfect names.

  Seven, by the way, was much friendlier. She would always find my lap. Eight was more typical, seeking only food and a soft, sunny spot, rather than company.

  I also had a dog. Adam had never wanted a dog, but after his death, I went to the local shelter and found Boone. She was a mix, part spaniel, part terrier. She also loved the cats. In fact, I was pretty sure she thought she was a cat, because she was a big fan of soft, sunny spots. She never complained about what I fed her, was always happy to see me, and never argued with me. She was a perfect companion. But whenever the phone rang, she raced over and barked, looking up with eager anticipation. Was she expecting a call?

  I read for a while, napped a little more, and ate some leftover lasagna for dinner. I watched eight episodes in a row of The West Wing. Then I went to bed. Alone. Except for two cats and the dog.

  Maybe Laura was right. Maybe I should start getting out more. So I spent the next morning in my yoga class, where I visualized myself in my new home, hosting a party of attractive and eligible men from my new complex, all of whom were disgustingly physically fit. There was wine flowing and gentle laughter, and I had to make several calls to my adult children explaining that I was going to Cabo, and could one of them take the dog for a weekend?

  There’s an old saying—man plans, God laughs.

  And let me tell you, he has an interesting sense of humor.

  When the holidays come around, my children and I don’t gather around a long, scrubbed pine table, laughing and sipping wine from fragile crystal while fondly remembering the past. I blame Adam for all that. Not that it was his fault that he died—I’m fairly certain that was unintentional—but he was an ob-gyn, devoted to his patients, always on call, and had managed, in the course of our twenty-two-year marriage, to miss every birthday party ever given for his children… and his wife. He also was never around for Halloween, most Thanksgivings, and every other Christmas. I know—women can’t help when they have babies, but I often thought that Adam took on new patients only if he thought they could go into labor at the exact moment he should have been helping his five-year-old daughter blow out her birthday candles.

  The upside to his absence was the fact that he—I mean, we—were rolling in money. Adam earned the money, and I spent it. When I decided to go back to work, it had been on a part-time basis at first. The kids were all little—Sam had just started first grade. I told everyone it was just an excuse to get out of the house and use that fancy law degree I’d spent so much money to get, which was partially true. It was also because I was desperate to have an adult conversation, where PTA meetings, playdates, and the value of organized T-ball were never, ever discussed.

  I had gone into law in the first place because I wanted to be a champion of the oppressed and downtrodden. But when I looked at my three kids, and realized that being a champion was very time-consuming, I got my master’s in accounting and went into tax law. Still big bucks, but no night court to deal with.

  But a few years later I decided that Adam was probably having an affair, and I was thinking about divorcing him. I wanted to make sure I could support myself and the kids if he turned into a major jerk over money when papers were served. That’s when I went full-time. So in addition to Adam never being around, my kids were kind of on their own during the two years prior to his death. It’s not like they were latchkey kids—by then, Sam was in middle school, Regan was a high school sophomore, and Jeff was sending out college applications.

  Sam and I had talked about it a little. He insisted his childhood was a happy one. Of course, Sam spent most of the aforementioned childhood in an imaginary world anyway, where bad things happened to you only if you ran into an orc or evil wizard.

  Regan had always refused to discuss her father. She worshiped him, hated his being away all the time, probably blamed me for it, and still got teary when she talked about him. So I’m just guessing she does not look back fondly on her teenage years.

  Anyway—the point is, I had no qualms about selling the great big house I had raised my kids in. It was not dripping in rich, fond memories. They didn’t even have any stuff left there. Their rooms were not shrines to their youth—no posters or pillows, no snapshots tucked around the mirrors. I had three perfectly good guest rooms, in addition to the original guest room, and, frankly, that’s about three bedrooms too many. I wanted to sell.

  So that weekend, when I called Laura, I mentioned my idea. She immediately drove over, clipboard in hand.

  “How long have you had carpenter bees?” was the first thing she said.

  I stared at her. “You’ve been here hundreds of times. You never noticed before?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t wear my Realtor’s hat when I visit family. But you know they’re a problem, right?”

  Yes, I did know. That’s why I had an exterminator come every month. Which is also why I wanted to sell the house. Five bedrooms, three and a half baths, a three-car garage, pool, and finished basement sounds like heaven on paper, but it requires several people to take care of it, and those several people are all highly tr
ained professionals who want to get paid lots of money.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “No. The outside looks great. But these floors—you should get them all redone. Hardwood’s a plus, but not if it looks shabby. And that red wall in the kitchen—got to go.” She was making notes as she spoke. “You know I love your house, Kate, but in this market, you’ll need to do a lot of work. I was even thinking about a stager.”

  “I don’t want to do a lot of work. I’d be happy to sell it for less than market value.”

  She frowned. “Less? What the hell is wrong with you? And why are you selling in the first place? You love it here.”

  “I know. But now I want to move to Castle Crossings.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Wait a minute. You quit your job. You didn’t fight the dating idea nearly as hard as I thought you would. And now, you’re selling the house. Are you having some sort of midlife thing?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. But I went to an open house at Castle Crossings last weekend, and I loved it. I remember when it was first being built, like twenty-whatever years ago. I fell in love with it then. The condos are still fabulous, there’s a pool and walking trails for Boone, and I’d never have to worry about carpenter bees again.”

  She grinned. “I just listed a three-bedroom over there. Completely redone last year and it would be great for you. And if money is not an issue, I can get this place sold in a month. Are you sure? What do the kids think?”

  “I don’t know what the kids think. Does it matter? They don’t live here anymore; you know that. And I don’t know if I want three bedrooms.”

  “Of course you do. Better for resale. And besides, the two small bedrooms are upstairs. You never have to go in them if you don’t want. And it’s a corner unit, right next to the woods, with a finished walk-out basement.”

  “Why would I need a basement?”

  “To store all your stuff in, Kate. You’re a friggin’ pack rat and you know it. It’s perfect. Gorgeous. Let’s go.”