Not Quite A mom

by Kirsten Sawyer

  “Oh my God, Elizabeth. Are you okay?”

  The voice belongs to Daniel McCafferty.

  “Dan?” I ask, needing confirmation.

  Squished in his tight embrace, I look around, actually wondering for a split second if I survived the accident. Could I be in heaven?

  “Elizabeth, I didn’t see you. What are you even doing in this part of town? I can’t believe of all the cars on the road, yours is the one I hit,” Dan says, his voice overflowing with guilt.

  “You’re the one who hit me?” I ask, still completely confused. “Was it my fault?”

  “I don’t know whose fault it was,” Dan says, still holding me (which is adding to my confusion), his voice softening, “but I feel like there is a reason you keep popping up in my life,” he continues. “Maybe we really are meant to be together.”

  Did Dan just say that he and I are meant to be together? “You and me?” I ask, my tears turning to tears of joy.

  “I think so,” Dan says and kisses me.

  My head spins like a top. Here I am, standing on the curb, rush-hour traffic passing me by (and giving nasty gestures as they go), and Dan is holding me tightly.

  I did it. Plan D might not have gone exactly according to plan, but it is a success. I have Dan back—I have my dream life back. I kiss him back. With all the adrenaline and emotion of the morning, I fail to notice that the kiss lacks any of the chemistry that my liplock with Buck had.

  44

  A week later, it’s as if the breakup never happened. Dan and I are back in our routine of red-rose bouquets, date nights, and sleeping apart for convenience. I have put the diamond ring back on my left hand, but aside from the decision that I should do that, we have completely avoided talking about the future. Dan has been politely cold to Tiffany and she has been (barely) civil in return. I am trying to bask in the happiness that my life is falling back into place, but for some odd reason I am completely miserable.

  I don’t know why I can’t work myself out of this rut. Every morning when I go outside and see the navy blue dent on the right side of my car I feel like I want to throw up. At work, things couldn’t be better—aside from the fact that every chance she gets Renee glares at me as if I somehow influenced the studio to turn against her. Please…if I had that kind of power, I would have wielded it ages ago! Things at work are so good that when I leave the building, I am actually feeling good and happy, but then I see my car and the nausea returns. If only it wasn’t Daylight Saving Time and it was dark out when I left the building…I could hang on to the euphoria that comes from finally being a full-time on-air host (and torturing Renee at the same time).

  Once I get home, I have to deal with the nonstop sulking that Tiffany has taken to.

  “You know, you have become the kind of teenager who gives teenagers a bad name,” I tell her while waiting for Dan to pick me up for dinner.

  “Hmmm,” she snips at me before turning the volume up on the TV.

  “I was never going to be with him,” I add.

  The truth is that I’m having a hard enough time not thinking about Buck without Tiffany throwing a fit that the relationship that was never going to happen to begin with didn’t happen. She ignores me when I say this and all I can do is sigh. Dan rings the bell and I head to the door. I open it, hoping that when I see him I’ll have some sort of a reaction that confirms my life choices. There he stands in creased chinos and a dark green Lacoste shirt. His hair is a little messed up from pulling the collared shirt over his head, and he greets me with his adorable grin.

  “Hungry?” he asks

  “Definitely,” I answer, heading out the door without inviting Dan to step inside. The farther I can keep him from Tiffany, the happier everyone will be.

  I feel angry with myself for not feeling differently. I got my wish—my dream came true, so I can’t understand why I am not elated.

  “How was work?” I ask Dan, trying to fill my mind. Unfortunately he has parked across the street, making the white dent on the front left corner of his car the first thing I see when I exit my building. My appetite disappears.

  “Work was work, Elizabeth,” he answers. I used to find this type of answer, “work was work/golf was golf/traffic was traffic,” adorable, but now I find it annoying and bordering on obnoxious.

  “Things are fantastic for me,” I tell him, excited to share all the changes that have happened. Suddenly I have my own dressing room, wardrobe consultant, and hair and makeup person…plus the studio has given me enormous praise for my first full week as cohost.

  “Great,” he says. “Where do you want to eat? Anywhere you want…just not sushi because I had that for lunch.”

  I’m more than a little let down that “great” is all I get in response to my exciting news, but I realize that Dan is probably hungry and tired after a long day at work. “How about Italian,” I suggest.

  He moves his head from side to side, a gesture he makes that signals he is thinking about the information. Like the spinning dial the mouse arrow turns into when a computer is processing, Dan’s head always moves shoulder-to-shoulder. Finally it stops bobbing, “Nah, let’s get Chinese,” he says.

  “Okay,” I concede. (I had Chinese for lunch.)

  After dinner, Dan looks at me with one eyebrow up…I know what is coming. “Why don’t we go back to my place for a little while.” Translation: I want sex, but I don’t want you spending the night.

  He doesn’t even wait for me to respond (my answer is yes) before steering the car toward his small apartment. I follow him upstairs and take a glance around. I haven’t been in the apartment since we reunited. Things look exactly the same, but I can’t help wondering if someone else—Defender Bitch or chubby Martha Wheeler—was here in my absence. I desperately want to ask Dan, but I feel the relationship is too delicate right now to risk upsetting the balance. Dan closes the door behind me and starts to kiss my neck.

  He leads me over to the couch and gently pushes me down. He pulls his shirt over his head, turning it inside out, before climbing on top of me. It’s all very spontaneous for Dan, who normally insists we be in the bedroom where he can neatly fold his shirt and drape it on the chair next to his bed before we do anything. He kisses me on the mouth and neck while unfastening his khaki pants and my jeans.

  “Don’t you want to go to the bedroom?” I ask.

  “No,” is his only response as he grabs at my black lace panties without bothering to notice them.

  I should be incredibly turned on—it’s like he’s lost all self control and just can’t wait to have me—but I’m not. Instead, I’m annoyed that he isn’t even bothering with the uncomfortable foreplay he used to take great pride in, and I’m completely curious about why he doesn’t want me in his bedroom.

  I’m hardly even wet when Dan starts fumbling a condom onto his penis and pushes himself inside me. The latex skidding into my body hurts, but Dan takes my gasping sound to mean I am having as good a time as he is. Thankfully, he is finished in about eight minutes. He pulls out and rolls next to me on the couch, huffing and puffing like he’s just completed a scene for a porno. I didn’t bother to fake an orgasm—there really wasn’t time. In fact, I’m pretty sore, but Dan doesn’t inquire how my experience was, anyway.

  I stand up and retrieve my underwear from the spot on the floor where Dan dropped it. It’s so unlike him to leave clothes crumpled on the floor. I wonder if the new sex style is the preference of one of the women who was here in my absence? Does Defender Bitch like it like this? I pull on my panties and my jeans; Dan looks up at me.

  “Ready to go home?” he asks.

  “Yeah, I think so,” I tell him. “I have an early morning,” I explain, pulling a page from his playbook. Before our split, that was his most common reason for being unable to spend the night with me.

  He stands up and gets dressed, then escorts me out of the room. I feel even worse than before…I’ve really got to snap out of this. I look over at Dan as he drives, the window down and
the wind ruffling his dark hair. He is adorable. He is wonderful. He really is.

  45

  “Things are not good here,” Tiffany pouted into the phone. She sat in the hallway with her back against the wall and her knees bent up against her chest. As she complained, she twisted the old-fashioned spiral cord of the phone.

  “What’s wrong?” Buck asked, genuinely concerned.

  “Plan D worked and she’s back with Dan,” the teenager explained.

  Buck let out a disappointed sigh. He really hadn’t thought this would happen, and now he’s not quite sure how to proceed. “Oh, well,” he answered sadly.

  “No, not ‘oh, well,’” Tiffany snapped. “You have to fight for her.”

  “What can I do? She wanted to be with him all along…she was clear about that.”

  “She belongs with you,” Tiffany answered sternly. “Oh shit, she’s at the door…gotta go!” she quickly hung up the phone, lunged down the hall into her bedroom, and closed the door behind her. Avoiding Elizabeth, especially when she was with Dan, had become Tiffany’s plan of action.

  She was grateful that the guest room/office that had become her bedroom also housed Elizabeth’s iMac, since e-mail was her primary connection with the outside world. Tiffany booted up the machine and immediately went to hotmail.com to check her e-mail. Six new messages were waiting for her. At first, the thought of having six new e-mails since she checked her account a few hours ago was pleasing, but as soon as Tiffany saw that five of the half dozen were from Red, her attitude changed. As if she didn’t have enough drama dealing with Elizabeth’s love life, Red had become an almost constant annoyance. True, he was her boyfriend, since she hadn’t bothered to do anything to change that, but really Tiffany wished he could take a hint a bit better.

  Tiffany knew from the beginning that Red was more interested in her than she was in him, but he wasn’t a total idiot…he knew how recently her relationship with Scott had ended and he should have been able to figure out he was nothing but a rebound. Mind you, he was a total sweetheart. He always paid whenever they went out and did nice things like open car doors and offer her his sweatshirt in the cold. Plus, he never pressured Tiffany for so much as a goodnight kiss, let alone going all the way like Scott had. But still, Tiffany felt about him more like you feel about a friend…and maybe not even that strongly, since she’d missed her girlfriends quite a bit since leaving Victory but almost never thought about Red unless she was reading one of his many e-mails. Maybe she didn’t miss him because he never gave her a chance to do so. He sent so many e-mails per day that Tiffany almost felt she needed a break from him.

  The first of the five e-mails sent that afternoon was one of his generic “I miss you” ones. They were annoying, but Tiffany had grown pretty used to ignoring and rebuffing them, since he usually sent about five per day. The second was the same thing. Things got worse with Red’s third e-mail. In this note, he laid out a “plan” to get Tiffany back to Victory, which involved the two of them getting engaged and living with his parents. The thought made Tiffany feel sick. Besides not being in love with the guy, and only fifteen years old, the truth is that Tiffany wasn’t in any sort of hurry to return to her hometown. Obviously, she missed her life there and living in L.A. wasn’t anything close to perfect, but getting out of Victory made Tiffany feel she finally had space to take deep breaths.

  Tiffany reread Red’s e-mail…she didn’t have a clue how she was going to get out of this without specifically breaking up with him. It was something she knew she had to do, she just hadn’t had the heart to do it yet. She couldn’t help wondering why everybody had to have a plan—Elizabeth’s plan to get back together with Dan, Buck’s plan to win over Elizabeth, and now Red’s plan to bring her back to Victory. Couldn’t anybody just live their life? Red’s fourth e-mail was a follow-up to his third. He wanted to know if she’d read his e-mail and if she wanted him (driven by his father) to come get her that weekend. Ugh…the fifth e-mail was a repeat of the third. At least Tiffany didn’t have to deal with Red calling her all the time, since she had lied and told him Elizabeth only had a cell phone that she could use just in emergencies.

  The sixth e-mail was from her best friend, Laci, and Tiffany was excited to read it both as a distraction from the Red problem and to catch up on the hometown gossip. Instead, it was just a complaint about how Red had started calling her in a frenzy because Tiffany wasn’t returning his messages. Ugh. Tiffany clicked the mouse at the top of the screen and a blank e-mail popped up in front of her. She began to compose a breakup message but then stopped. This was something she had to do in person, and as much as she didn’t want to deal with Lizzie, she needed a ride.

  Tiffany tentatively stepped out of her room and tiptoed a few steps down the hall toward the dimly lit living room, where she could hear the television on low. She found Elizabeth sitting on the couch watching a Friends repeat. She didn’t look happy.

  “Hi,” Tiffany said quietly.

  “Oh, hey,” a surprised Lizzie answered.

  “I need to go to Victory this weekend,” the teenager told her. “I need to break up with my boyfriend.”

  “Okay,” Lizzie agreed. “Why are you breaking up?” she asked.

  “He’s just not the one,” Tiffany told her, not wanting to get into the details.

  Elizabeth nodded her head in understanding. Tiffany toyed with asking her if everything was okay, but she really didn’t want to get into the details of Lizzie’s love life either. Instead, she just said, “thanks,” and returned to her room, where she sent an e-mail to Red telling him that she would be in town soon so they could talk and another to Laci promising to take care of things with Red. Then Tiffany opened a new e-mail and addressed it to Buck. She simply wrote: She’s not happy. We’ll be in Victory this weekend. Figure something out!–T.

  46

  “Hi, sweetie, how about a road trip this weekend?” I perkily ask Dan.

  “Where?” he asks, sounding skeptical.

  “To Eagle Lake. Tiffany needs to go to Victory this weekend, and I thought we could drop her off and then drive up to the mountain,” I explain. I have the whole trip planned out (in my head).

  “Isn’t Eagle Lake a ski resort?” Dan asks.

  “Yes, yes it is…but it’s open all year long. They have fantastic hiking and fishing,” I tell him, sounding like a page from a travel brochure.

  “We don’t hike or fish,” he points out.

  “Right,” I agree, “they also have some beautiful spas.”

  “Look, this weekend really isn’t good for me,” he says almost sounding annoyed. “I have to golf on Saturday.”

  “Oh, there is fantastic golfing around Eagle Lake,” I say, and I sound a bit more desperate than I’d planned.

  I really need Dan to agree to go along on this trip with me. I have to take Tiffany to Victory, but if I stay I’ll see Buck and I just don’t think that’s a good idea.

  “Elizabeth,” he says shifting from annoyed to exasperated, “I am trying to get invited to become a member at Hillcrest. That means that I need to golf there anytime a member invites me. I have been invited by a member to golf there on Saturday and it is important that I attend.”

  “Who is the member?” I ask.

  There is an awkward pause before Dan says, “Chris Cupper.” Chris Cupper is an old friend of Dan’s from law school…this invitation is definitely not a one-time thing.

  “Do you think you could get Chris to invite you next weekend?” I ask sweetly. “This weekend is so important to me…and for us. To celebrate our reunion,” I explain.

  Dan lets out a long sigh before saying, “Okay, if it’s that important to you, I’ll reschedule with Chris.”

  “Oh thank you! You won’t be sorry. We’re going to have the best time.” I am overcome with relief.

  As soon as we hang up, I turn on my computer, open Safari, and start actually planning the trip. Fortunately, the mountain town really isn’t very busy during the summer months
and I am able to secure a nice condo for a good price. I think about booking massages for us but decide to wait until we are up there so we can decide together how to fill our days. I have visions of us walking hand in hand, gazing at the beautiful scenery, lying on side-by-side tables while we enjoy massages, and looking into each other’s eyes while we sip wine under the stars. This weekend is the perfect thing to renew our relationship (and keep my mind off Buck).

  On Friday afternoon we all pile into Dan’s Audi. The long drive with Dan and Tiffany together in the small car is the only downside to my plan. The good news is that I managed to load my belongings and myself into the car without making eye contact with the front left bumper, so I am nausea free. Luckily, the car has an appointment at the body shop Monday morning so I won’t have to worry about seeing the dent much longer. My car, unfortunately, is another story. Dan doesn’t want to report the accident to his insurance company because it will make his rates go up, so I’m going to have to wait a while to get my own car fixed. He thought it made the most sense to get his fixed ASAP and then take care of mine in a few months.

  All three of us are silent almost the entire way to Victory…not a good, comfortable silence, but at least it’s better than bickering. A few times I try to break the quiet by talking about work or even just the scenery, but each time, I am met with an unenthusiastic response. At least Dan and Tiffany have found something in common: they both like to ride along without saying a word. It’s a start. Since Dan is a pretty fast driver, we pull into town before dusk and for a moment I feel embarrassed by my hometown.