Best Staged Plans (11 page)

I don’t know what made me do it, but I reached for the door handle and pulled.

It opened.

“Are you still there?” Denise said into my ear.

“Shh,” I whispered. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do, but if someone nice came out, maybe I’d say I lost my reading glasses and ask to see the Lost and Found. I mean, who knew, maybe Ponytail Guy put them back at the end of the day.

There was no one in sight.

I took a step into the room.

I couldn’t believe it. There, sitting right on top of the postage scale, were my favorite reading glasses.

“Sandy, what’s going on?”

“I think I’m going to steal my reading glasses back,” I whispered.

“Ha,” she whispered. “Do it.”

“What happens if I get caught?”

“Did they cost less than two hundred and fifty dollars?”

“Ha,” I said. “Way less.”

“Then, worst-case scenario, it’s only petty larceny.”

I took another step forward. “What’s best-case scenario?”

“Uh, you get away with it?”

Behind some partitions I heard a woman laugh.

I tiptoed forward. Randomly, I flashed back to all the Nancy Drew mysteries I’d read as a kid. I pictured myself in black and white, moving stealthily and sleuthfully with a flashlight clasped firmly in one hand. I was channeling Nancy in
The Secret of the Original Cheaters.
Or maybe it was
The Mystery of the Traveling Reading Glasses
.

I reached out a shaky hand and grabbed my readers.

Ponytail Guy came around the corner.

My heart skipped a beat, then started thumping wildly.

“Stop,” he said, even though I wasn’t moving.

I looked at him.

His eyes met mine. They were cold and hooded, almost reptilian.

He took a slow step back.

I turned and shoved the glass door open.

Just as I reached the second door, the alarm went off.

“Uh-oh,” Denise said into my ear.

I ran. I ran as hard and as fast as I could, squeezing my BlackBerry and post office box key together with one hand, and carefully holding my long-lost reading glasses in the other. All I wanted was to put some distance between that ridiculously loud alarm and me.

Three cars drove by without stopping to make a citizen’s arrest. When I ran past a guy walking his dog, neither of them made a peep. Maybe I was blending into suburbia and looked like just another morning jogger, though I’d made the unfortunate choice of wearing ballet flats so I wouldn’t have to change my shoes before I left for the airport.

I stopped and ducked behind a tree to get a pebble out of my shoe.

“Uh-oh?” I repeated. I panted while I tried to catch my breath. “That’s the best you can do? What kind of lawyer says ‘uh-oh’?”

“Calm down and tell me what’s happening.”

Just as I peeked around the tree trunk, the
whoop-whoop
of the alarm cut off abruptly. A dog barked from inside someone’s house, as if to say thank you. Everything was so suddenly quiet that I noticed the sun was shining. A patch of snowdrops was blooming in front of the tree next to mine. The world was a beautiful place when you were free.

“Nothing,” I whispered. “Nothing’s happening. I think I made a clean getaway. Do you believe Ponytail Guy actually pulled the alarm? I mean, how twisted can you get?”

“It’s all about power,” Denise said. “Guys with small ponytails just can’t get enough of it.”

“What do I do next? I’ve never been a thief before.”

Denise laughed. “Relax. Go to Atlanta and forget all about it. If anything happens, I’ll take care of it. Listen, I have to go. I’ve got a meeting in five.”

“What if—”

I heard a click, and my best friend was history.

CHAPTER 16

I
KNOCKED ON
the door of the bat cave.

Luke opened it a crack. I could hear the splash of the shower running in the little bathroom over the blare of the Syfy channel playing on the huge flat-screen TV he’d bought with his first paycheck.

Just in case my plane crashed, I decided to skip the conservation lecture so it wouldn’t be the last thing he remembered about me. “Just give me a good-bye hug, honey. I’m on my way to Atlanta.”

He didn’t move. “Okay, bye, Mom.”

My mother used to say she had eyes in the back of her head. Maybe I had X-ray vision.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Nothing,” Luke said.

I waited.

“Raven is taking a shower.”

I took a moment to ponder whether a girlfriend in the shower was better than no girlfriend at all.

“Raven,” I said finally. “That would be the girlfriend we haven’t met yet?”

“Mom,” he said.

“Just tell me you’re using birth control,” I said.

“Mom, you put condoms in my stocking at Christmas when I was sixteen.”

“You’re not still using them, are you?”

“Mo-
om
.”

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

“M
OMMY,” 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.