Driving With the Top Down (2 page)

“Nothin’ much…” He runs a hand through his perfect brown hair, leaving it just messy enough. “Uh, so I kinda wanted to ask you somethin’.…”

Prom. Lily was right. He’s going to ask her to the prom! She will have this memory, and the great memories to come, for the rest of her life. This is it—this is her life blooming into full color, like that scene in
The Wizard of Oz
when the house blows out of Kansas and into the Land of Oz.

But this time? No witches.

Just dresses and pictures and limos and dinner and dancing to a song they will always always always remember as their own.

Her mom will take her dress shopping. She will help her do her makeup, working that cool two-color eye thing she was so good at. She’ll get Tam new shoes!

She tries not to grin, biting her lip, responding with a
go on
nod.

“I think you’re the prettiest girl in school, and I think you’re really smart and funny, and … I can’t imagine anyone that I’d like to go to prom with more. Would you … Would you wanna go with me?”

Finally not able or needing to hold back the grin, she nods and says, “Yes!” She throws her arms around him and he responds with his own arms before they both pull away, and they have their first kiss. They stand in each other’s arms under the starry sky, and Tam thinks to herself: Everything is perfect. Everything is perfect.

She is the happiest girl in the world.

*   *   *

MEANWHILE, DEEP IN
Winnington, North Carolina, Wilhelmina Nolan Camalier (formerly “Bitty”—a nickname referring to her trim figure) is speaking on the dais at a DAR meeting, discussing her husband’s great-great-great-great-etc.-grandmother Rose Hampton and her brave acts during the Revolutionary War. Wilhelmina has made a study of the woman’s life and works, and thanks to her efforts, an elementary school has been named in Rose Hampton’s honor in the fine little town of Winnington.

She finishes her speech and asks if there are any questions. Everyone is surprised when the question session goes on longer than the speech itself, leading to a lively chat with lots of laughter and fun sprinkled in.

That’s what everyone says about Wilhelmina Camalier—that she is an engaging public speaker and positively gifted when it comes to interacting with people. In fact, she is in such demand on the DAR circuit, as well as at historical societies in North and South Carolina (and bordering states occasionally), that she says no more often than yes. She has to—she has a family to take care of.

Family comes first.

Always.

She steps down from the podium and makes her way over to the table where her movie-star-handsome husband, Lew, waits for her.

“You are amazing,” he whispers in her ear after kissing her cheek when she sits. He puts his hand on her shoulder and pulls her closer for a moment, heedless of the impropriety of sharing so intimate a gesture in public. “I can’t wait to get you home and into bed. We’re going to have a howler of a night, baby.”

She feels her face flush and knows it looks good on her, because one of the many compliments her husband has given her over the years is how pretty she always is, whether she’s trying or not.

Once, when they were watching
It’s a Wonderful Life,
he even commented that she cried pretty.

“Lew!” she whispers now in mock scorn. “You know the kids are there, we’ve got to be careful.”

“Pfft.” He waves the notion away and continues his own stage whisper. “We’ve got a babysitter and we’re in the nicest hotel in town. Let’s just hire her to stay over with the kids while we get reacquainted.”

She chuckles softly. She’s heard this exact same proposition before. Frequently, in fact. “Didn’t we get reacquainted at the Hilton in Raleigh a few weeks ago?”

“I can’t remember.” He kisses her cheek again, then moves his hand to give her thigh a subtle squeeze under the table. “Guess we’ll have to do it again. And again.”

She can’t help but laugh. “Oh, Lew.”

“Come on, baby.” He takes out the phone and pushes speed dial, then hands it to her. “See if the sitter can stay over.”

Giving him a mock frown, she takes the phone and puts it to her ear, getting up and stepping outside the room to talk in the hall. A small voice answers. Lew Junior. Lewie. “Hi, sweetheart!” she says, her heart filling with a warm, familiar pride.

“Hi, Mommy!” He’s eight. She wonders how long he will continue to be so happy to hear her voice.

“Whatcha doin’?” she asks, lingering in the moment.

“Lara and I are playing Monopoly with Miss Wendy. We both keep winning!”

She speaks for another moment to Lewie, then to Lara, who is every bit as happy with the evening’s events as Lewie is; then she asks to speak with Miss Wendy, who happily agrees to stay the night. The guest room of the large Camalier ancestral estate is very comfortable, so she says she’ll welcome the chance to do her back the favor.

Bitty thanks her and goes back to the dinner, trying to arrange her features into an expression of mock disappointment.

Lew sees right through her. He knows her so well, she can never fool him, she can’t even hide Christmas presents from him; she always asks the maid to do it so she doesn’t know where they are either.

“We’re on,” he says. A statement not a question. He takes her hand in his. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand. I have a wife to adore.”

She is the luckiest woman in the world.

*   *   *

THREE STELLAR EXAMPLES
of the female sex. Three perfect lives. The ones they’d always envisioned for themselves, manifested like magic from their childhood hopes and dreams.

Three certainly happily-ever-afters.

Unfortunately, these are not the lives any of them really ended up with.

CHAPTER ONE

Colleen

Colleen Bradley hung up the phone—a tiny beep at the push of a fake on-screen button, as opposed to the satisfying slam of a good old plastic receiver—and rubbed her eyes in exasperation.

An hour and a half.

An hour and a half she had just spent on hold with that stupid hold music playing, and then the second she got a real person and not a robot, she was transferred, heard half a hopeful ring, and the call got dropped.

In front of her lay a pile of bills and papers. The satellite TV contract was up, and she needed to reup their service, after she first checked to see if there were any unadvertised specials. Last month, their phone bill was higher than it should have been, and she’d had to call and talk to them about it. The dryer was barely working, and she would have to schedule an appointment for someone to come look at it. And to top it all off, the basement carpet was all messed up from her son not letting the dog out before going to sleep, even though Colleen had warned him about that: If he didn’t let him out, the dog would ruin the carpet. Lo and behold … Her life felt like a series of single steps forward and being shoved back three.

It wasn’t that she didn’t love and want her son—of course she did!—but maybe she’d spoiled him and created her own problem. (“Monsters are created,” her mother used to say.) Maybe she’d made it too easy for him not to keep up his end of things, like letting the dog out, and now she was paying the price for the “laziness” of constantly telling him, “Forget it, I’ll just do it myself,” and then not following through in time.

Then again, Jay was the reason she had the life she did. She would never, ever forget that.

She took a deep breath and—determined to clear her in-box and knock at least that one thing off her to-do list—opened her e-mail.

Junk.

Junk.

Coupons for Pottery Barn. As if she could afford that, even with coupons.

Restoration Hardware?

They always lured her in with their beauty, but who could pay that much for a sofa?

An e-mail from her father. She’d read that later.

An e-mail from … Jay’s vice principal?

She hoped it was a group e-mail, school spam, but as she feared, it was addressed to her alone, and about Jay specifically. His lack of motivation, bored attitude in class, failing grades even though he had the intelligence—they all knew that—to be doing much better and excelling in AP classes.

She sighed.

How many times had they had this conversation? A hundred? Two hundred? She felt her own frustrations with the school’s increasing expectation of parental involvement in homework—she herself had always skated her way through junior high and high school doing her homework on her bed, usually while on the phone—but she was still willing to do what was necessary. Yet every time she asked Jay if he had any homework, he said it was done and she believed him.

Maybe it was just easier to believe him.

The truth was, she felt like his poor grades were her own fault. That is, Jay was responsible for his own laziness, but if she’d been hearing this story about someone else’s kid, she’d be saying the mom had to be on top of things, no matter what. Kid failing? No more computer. No more Xbox. No more privileges until he got his grades up. It was obvious.

But what was he doing now? Playing games on the computer with his friends over Skype. She could hear him. She hated the nonstop gaming, but it was easier to pretend she didn’t notice than to have the fight about it.

It was one more ball she was dropping. At this point, she’d dropped so many that in her mind, her life looked like a tennis court after group tennis lessons for ten first-graders.

She had to get her act together and start doing what needed to be done.

Now Vice Principal Richards wanted to meet with her and Kevin (she already knew he’d be too busy at work to show) and
all
Jay’s teachers before the end of term, which was two weeks away.

“Jay!” She yelled down from where she sat and just waited, too tired to get up and summon him for yet another Unpleasant Talk.

Finally, “Yeah?”

“Come here!”

After a longer-than-necessary wait, the tall, lanky fourteen-year-old came sauntering in. “What’s up?”

“Got an e-mail from Vice Principal Richards.” She gestured at the computer screen as if that would put the fear of God into him.

He quirked a smile. “How is he?”

“Not funny. You’ve got D’s in two classes and an F in one.”

“A’s in the other three.”

“You think that makes up for it?”

“It averages out to a mid-C.”

“Jay.” She put her head in her hands for a moment, then looked back at him soberly. “Now I have to go in and talk to every one of your teachers, your guidance counselor,
and
Mr. Richards.”

“Just don’t go.”

“I can’t just
not go
. That’s the attitude—that right there—that’s getting you in trouble. Do the work, Jay. Do. The. Work. It’s almost summer vacation, you’ve got, like, three days to turn this stuff in. Being a student is your
only
job—can you just get it done?”

“Okay, okay. I’ll try.”

“No. No
trying—
just
do
it. Or you won’t be going to Cooperstown with Dad.” Empty threat; they both knew it. There was no way in the world she could cancel that trip now.

But they both pretended to believe it.

“I’m forwarding this e-mail to you, it’s got your missed assignments on it. You can still pass without having to go to summer school. Go work on whatever isn’t done now.”

“Fine.”

He went back downstairs and she waited tensely for a few minutes, then heard exactly what she expected: the sound of the computer starting up again.

So it wasn’t that she was just being a persnickety old Felix Unger when she went into the kitchen and saw the mess; it was that she had completely had it with feeling like she was constantly taking one step forward only to be shoved back fourteen.

“Jay!” she yelled, eyeing the sink, the precarious pile of Fiestaware she’d gotten piece by piece off eBay and in antique and thrift stores, according to what she could afford at any given time. Some of the plates were chipped, one of the bowls had the mold-green remains of what was probably once Life cereal—and that was the one on top, so God only knew what the ones below looked like.

She didn’t want to know.

“Jay!” she yelled again, then went to the top of the basement door and added, “Get up here. Again.”

Her son responded with something muffled and indistinguishable from down and behind the rec room door.

“I can’t hear you, come here!” Usually she had to go to them when she couldn’t hear them, Jay or even Kevin. The onus was always on her to go hear, rather than on them to come be heard.

She waited about thirty beats and was half ready to go stomping down when she heard the door creak and saw Jay coming into the kitchen.

“What is it?” He blinked eyes reddened by what a more paranoid parent would have suspected was drug use, but which she knew were irritated because he’d just been sitting in front of the computer with the lights out.

“The dishes.”

“I brought them up.”

Seemed like such a small thing. She knew it seemed like a small thing. Maybe to another person it would have been. Maybe to her it should have been. But she was weary. Couldn’t do his schoolwork, couldn’t do the dishes, couldn’t do laundry if someone offered to pay him, had no interest in playing organized sports or being in any other way organized. And all of it was a reflection, she feared, of her own laziness.

Or, not laziness—
exhaustion
.

“Okay, one, you have sworn to me for a week that you didn’t have any dishes down there, so I’m not going to have a parade because you brought them back as science projects; and two, I told you not to eat downstairs at all. We’re going to get bugs and maybe critters down there!”

Jay gave a laugh, and even she knew she sounded like a cartoon mom. “There’s nothing down there.”

“How would you know? You were okay ignoring this”—she gestured toward the sink—“atrocity for days!”

“Calm down.”

Never good advice for someone who is angry, by the way. No pissed-off person ever calmed down because the object of their rage told them to. “I don’t need to calm down—you need to listen and do what I say the first time. I shouldn’t have to tell you things twenty times.” Just talking about it again was starting to feel aerobic. “It’s not fair for you to pile extra work on me like this.”