Country (26 page)

“Why not?” Jean asked her bluntly. “You think Brad is so great, well, good for you. Fred sure isn't. And Steph was unhappy with Bill for the last ten years. She looked like her soul was dead. Now she's alive. Is that really what you want for her now? To be miserable again. Because I sure as hell don't. The best thing that could happen to her was to meet a real guy who loves her, and she has. That's good enough for me. And I don't give a damn what he looks like, where he comes from, or how many tattoos he has. And if you love her as a friend and want her to be happy, that should be good enough for you too,
and
her kids. At least they have an excuse to bitch for a while, Bill was their father. As her friends, we have no excuse to beat her up. How can you be so narrow-minded, just because he works in the music industry and has long hair and tattoos? Who cares? I'd go for him in a hot minute, and maybe you would too if you weren't married to Saint Brad.”

Alyson had been deeply offended by what Jean said and hadn't spoken to her or Stephanie since, in about a week. Stephanie was letting her cool off and mellow out a bit, but Alyson really didn't understand the broader world, or men who weren't traditional or professionals and looked like Brad. She thought the whole world should be like them. And Brad and Alyson were fiercely loyal to Bill. Brad had told Alyson that he didn't approve of what Stephanie was doing either. He thought it was disrespectful to the memory of Bill for her to be dating so soon, and he thought her dating Chase was in terrible taste. His narrow-minded views dictated Alyson's, since she parroted everything he thought and said. She was the “perfect” wife, as Stephanie had been. But Steph couldn't do it anymore, and didn't want to. She had far more respect for Jean, who always said what she thought, whether Fred or other people liked it or not. Stephanie's friendship with Alyson had just taken a heavy hit. But Jean was still there, rooting for her, an outspoken voice of reason, well aware of the compromises and courage it took to get through life.

Stephanie told her about the incident of the broken vase in the living room, and how sad she was about it when she saw how distraught Charlotte was. “Maybe I should have waited a while to start moving things around, but it was so depressing. It looked like Bill was going to come home any minute. It felt like
Groundhog
Day.
Nothing changed, except he never showed up.”

“You can't live in a tomb, Steph. You did the right thing. And the simple fact is you live here and the kids don't. They want to breeze through here when they feel like it, pick up clean laundry and some cash, and find everything the same, particularly you, chained to the wall in your bedroom, waiting for them, even if they only show up for Christmas and Thanksgiving. Well, guess what, life doesn't work that way. Particularly for you, with Bill gone. You have every reason to change things and move on and get a life for yourself. You didn't have one with Bill. You had his life and theirs, and yours as their slave. Now you're free. Use it. My girls aren't much better about changing anything around here. The drapes in their old bedrooms were in shreds, so I replaced them last year. The girls had a fit when they came home for Christmas. And they're twenty-eight and twenty-nine years old, for chrissake, and who cares what color the drapes are? They hadn't been home in two years, since I go to Chicago to see them. But when they saw the drapes, they demanded I put the old ones back
immediately
!” Stephanie felt better as she listened. She always did with Jean. She was so reasonable and practical, and took shit from no one.

“So did you change the drapes back?”

“Of course not. I'd thrown them away. But even if I hadn't, I wouldn't. You have to move forward in life. You can't sit in the same place, unless you want to, that's a choice too. But you can't sit there because someone else says you have to, because your moving forward makes them uncomfortable. This is good for your kids, Steph. It tells them that no matter how much you loved someone, you have to move on. They do too. They can't expect you to sit there and be buried alive with him. That would be really scary. And I'd be worried about you. They're going to have to suck it up sooner or later.”

“Well, the girls sure aren't ready to do that. It nearly broke my heart when I saw Charlotte sobbing in the living room, trying to move everything back. She was crying because she couldn't remember how it used to be.”

“That's my point. And pretty soon the new way will seem normal. And so will Chase if they ever give him a chance. So when am I going to meet him?” She understood perfectly that she hadn't so far. They needed time alone together.

“The next time he's out here, I promise. He wants me to come to Nashville when Charlotte goes back to school.” She sounded worried about it.

“And?” Jean could hear the hesitation in her friend's voice. Stephanie was honest about it.

“Here, we're kind of suspended between two worlds. We have nothing to do except be with each other, and we had a great time in L.A. But in Nashville he has a life, an empire to run, albums to record, rehearsals, concerts, a thousand things to do every day. He takes me with him, but I fit into
his
life, it's not
our
life. I did that with Bill, and I don't want to do it again. I'm scared to lose me. I become no one except some kind of appendage in other people's lives.”

“You're going to have that with any busy guy with a big career. Maybe Bill was particularly self-centered that everything had to be his way and about him, and Chase sounds like he makes a real effort to include you, for now at least. But he has a career, a big world, a huge, successful business. If I still cared and wanted a real life with Fred, I'd have to follow him around. Let's face it, he wouldn't be coming to Botox shots and the hairdresser with me. Sometimes you just have to accept that one person has a bigger life, and you have to go with it. Bill never paid attention to you, so you got lost in the shuffle. I don't get the feeling Chase would do that, from everything you've said.”

“Maybe not.” Stephanie was pensive. She was thinking a lot about it, and what she had to contribute to their life, and Jean had a point about his career and her having to adapt to him. “He said I could handle PR for him if I come to Nashville.”

“So?”

“That's just a made-up job, like helping him write lyrics. He's doing fine without me.”

“Then get a real job in Nashville. But wherever you are, if you're with a big successful guy, you're going to have to accommodate his career. It won't work otherwise. The same would be true if you had a busier career than his. The secret is to find someone who is reasonable about it, not like Bill, who never paid attention to you or cared what you thought as long as you did what he wanted, or Brad, who expects Alyson to be some kind of drone. I think
reasonable
is the operative word here. Fred was pretty good about it, until he started screwing every bimbo in town. He'd be a decent husband if he could keep his pants on. Maybe that's why I stick around. I actually used to like him. It's not just about the money.” Stephanie always suspected that was true, although there was so much bitterness and distance between them now that they really didn't have a marriage, and neither of them made any effort to bridge the gap. Their roles had been set in stone for years. He chased women, and she spent money. But they were both good people. Stephanie was sad for them that things had turned out as they had. And Jean had made the valid point that she would have to adapt to any man's career, since she didn't have one of her own. Her career had been Bill and their kids. She just didn't want to trade it in now and have her career be Chase. She had to have an identity of her own. She was getting there, but the cake wasn't baked yet. She was still in the oven. And it was a shaky time for her to be making big life changes. She didn't want to do anything prematurely. They had waited to sleep together and that had felt right. Now she needed time to adjust to the rest. But Chase wasn't pushing. He just missed her. And she missed him.

After Charlotte's outburst in the living room on the first day, she looked up all her friends and was hardly home after that. She was out all day, went to her friends' homes almost every night. She went to Tahoe for a weekend, went camping for two days in Yosemite, and Stephanie almost never saw her. She flew through the house, and they never had a meal together. Stephanie finally caught five minutes with her in the kitchen when she was waiting to be picked up to go to a concert at the Oakland Coliseum.

“Do you want to get a manicure together tomorrow?” Stephanie asked her pleasantly. Charlotte had been home for a week, and Stephanie wanted to spend at least a little time with her.

“I can't. I'm going to Sonoma. Heather's parents have a new house there.”

“What about the next day?”

“I don't have time, Mom.” She had kept a wall up between them. Officially, it was about Chase, but partially it was her age, and she was still mourning her father. And she blamed her mother for everything on the planet, mostly because she was alive and Bill wasn't. “I want to see my friends while everybody's still home. This is our last summer. Next year after we graduate, everyone will be working, and nobody will come home, and I probably won't either.” Stephanie wanted to say “What about me?” but she didn't. Charlotte was driving the point home that she wanted to spend her time with her friends, not with her mother.

Two days later she was looking for something in a drawer when Charlotte walked into her bedroom.

“Do you know where my tennis racket went?” Charlotte asked her, looking annoyed. She had discovered that her mother had moved the contents of the closets around too, and she didn't like it, even though it seemed to work better. And she'd noticed that some of her father's things were gone, like the old sports equipment he no longer used, and a set of barbells that had been rusting in the garage for years.

“I moved all our sports stuff to the basement closets,” Stephanie said over her shoulder as Charlotte wandered toward her father's dressing room with a sad look. Stephanie didn't say a word as she watched her, and Charlotte opened a door and saw that the closet was empty. One by one she pulled them all open, and saw her mother's winter coats in one, some evening gowns in another. But her father's clothes were gone. She turned to her mother with a look of horror.

“What did you do?” she asked in a choked voice. “Where are Daddy's clothes?” She acted as though her mother had committed a sacrilege, and Stephanie's face was as pale as her daughter's when she answered.

“I gave them away, Char. I had to. I couldn't live with them staring at me in the face every day. I have to live here.” Her daughter said not a word, she turned on her heel and strode out of the room, and a moment later Stephanie heard the front door slam, and the car Charlotte was using drive away. It didn't matter what Stephanie did anymore, she was always wrong. Any sign of life or change or even healing on Stephanie's part was treated as a crime. There was no question in her mind now. They wanted to bury her with him. And as long as she refused to lie in the grave with him, they would hate her.

She talked to Dr. Zeller about it the next time she saw her, and they agreed that to some degree it was normal. Still, her children appeared to be carrying it to an extreme degree, and Chase was such an easy target for their anger at their mother.

“Whatever I do is wrong,” Stephanie said unhappily with tears running down her cheeks. “It's not like I've forgotten their father. I haven't. I loved him. But he's gone, and the truth is for at least the last ten years, we had a lousy marriage.”

“Then why do you feel so guilty about moving on?” her therapist challenged her, and Stephanie thought about it.

“Maybe because they're so angry at me.”

“Or because you think you don't deserve a better life?” Stephanie thought about it for a long time, and then nodded, and blew her nose.

“He never cared about what I thought, or what I wanted. He never asked me. Nothing I said ever made a difference. And now the kids treat me the same way. They don't care that I love Chase and he loves me and he's a great guy. I'm just supposed to sit here and pretend I'm still married to their father. Well, I don't want to be. I did it. It's over. But they won't let it be.”

“Some of that is normal behavior on their part. Most young people really don't care how their parents feel. Parents are a vehicle to meet their needs. And some of their anger over their father's death is normal too. But he set a bad example in how he treated you, and you're trying to change that. It's also normal that they don't like that. Change is hard. But you can't let it stop you from leading your life. You have a right to a new relationship, and if it's the one you want, you have a right to move forward. They'll adjust in time, despite the stridency of their accusations now. You have to seize opportunities as they come along. You can't let them stop you.” Stephanie nodded, and then told her about her concerns about Chase's life in Nashville.

“He has a huge career. I don't know how I'd fit in. Or if I'd lose my identity the way I did with Bill. Chase is larger than life.”

“You can't lose your identity unless you give it up. No one can take it from you,” she reminded her. “And I don't think you'd do that again. Bill and Chase also sound like very different people. Bill was much more autocratic with you, and sounds pretty inconsiderate and indifferent. Chase is always trying to find ways to include you.” What she said was true, and as always, gave Stephanie food for thought when she left her office.

But in spite of what the shrink had said, Stephanie had another big fight with Charlotte that night, because Stephanie wanted to sell Bill's car. No one used it, or ever would. Seeing it every day depressed her, but having it in the garage reassured Charlotte. It was part of the fantasy that her father was still there and would come back to drive it.