Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige (23 page)

“I know, I know.” He sighed. “I just never expected to feel so powerless, to have so little influence.”

Three years—no, almost three and a half years—and Mike was finally appreciating how much had changed, how much he had lost, when he decided to move out.

So Claudia was going to learn to play golf, one of “Michael’s” favorite sports.

Golf? I say that I will do anything physical, but I can’t stand golf. I don’t mind going to the driving range and whacking away, but all the fiddliness involved in really learning how to play drives
me nuts. If you’re using a cart, you get no exercise, and a round takes way too long for me.

But Jeremy was surprisingly subdued on the phone. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“It’s Cami and this wedding,” he said. “She keeps saying that planning it ought to be fun, but that it feels like a huge burden for both her and her mom.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. The caterers were now urging Guy and Rose to cut a door into the back wall of the garage to facilitate the movement of the waiters. “How do you feel about everything?”

“Fine. Fine. Everything’s fine . . . except, Mom, doesn’t it seem strange not to be getting married in a church? Isn’t a wedding ceremony supposed to be religious?”

“Oh, Jeremy.” I sighed. My forcing him to go to Sunday school had apparently had some impact. “The time for thinking that is long gone.”

Thirty minutes of nudging a ball along a piece of carpet? I would want to hang myself.

“Is this a ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ kind of moment?” I asked my not-entirely-innocent child.

“Not at all,” he said cheerfully. “It’s a ‘there but for the grace of Mom.’ No one was going to bake from scratch, and everyone knew that there was no way there would be any brownie mix in this house.”

I had always known that there was something morally wrong with using cake mixes.

I invited Mike over for dinner on Zack’s birthday. “And I do hope,” I said to Mike, “that Claudia will be able to join us.”

That was a lie. I didn’t want Claudia to join us, and I already knew that she couldn’t. I’d checked her Web site and found out that she was going to be out of town that evening.

I don’t lie. That had kept my mother going through my teen years; if she asked me a direct question, I would answer honestly. So if I hadn’t lied to my mother when I was being stupid and reckless, why was I starting now?

“You want Claudia too?” Mike knew how honest I was; it never occurred to him to doubt me. He paused for a moment. “That’s very good-hearted of you, Darcy. I appreciate it more than you realize.”

I felt like a heel. I wasn’t good-hearted. I was a blog-reading, lying snoop.

Claudia did send Zack a gift, a beautifully wrapped box containing a leather portfolio, more suitable to a graduating law student. But I couldn’t blame her too much. Teenaged guys were hard to shop for.

“My gift isn’t as well wrapped,” Mike said and passed Zack a thick manila envelope.

“Gosh, Dad, some people might say that it isn’t wrapped at all,” Zack said, but his tone was light. He didn’t care about wrapping paper.

“And they would have a point,” Mike answered, “and here’s another copy for you, Darcy.” He slid another envelope across the table to me.

I had no idea what was in it, but waited to let Zack open it first. He took a thick document out, squinted at the first page, and looked puzzled. “What is it, Dad? I don’t get it.”

“Just read it.”

I took out my copy.
Trust Agreement for Zachary Douglas Van Aiken . . . Darcy Bowersett Van Aiken, trustee . . .

Mike had set up a trust fund for Zack. “You didn’t do this for Jeremy,” I said.

“Would someone tell me what’s going on?” Zack asked.

“Well, Zack,” Mike said, “as long as you’re at Stone-Chase and are getting your expenses discounted for academic merit, I will put that amount of money for you in this trust.”

Zack stared at him, disbelieving. He probably thought that it was more likely that Mike would sell him off as an indentured servant than set up a trust fund for him.

“You’ve earned that money, not me. Without this, you reap no benefit from what you accomplished. So the money’s yours, and it’s not for graduate school. We’ll still pay for that. But there are massive strings attached. You can’t buy a van and bum around California. It’s for a down payment on a house or something like that.”

“Wow.” Zack still wasn’t sure what to say. He was so used to Mike being angry at him that he didn’t know how to react. He looked down at the papers again, almost embarrassed to be moved. “I was talking to a guy whose brother is in dental school, and he says that setting up a dental practice is really expensive.”

“Then you would have this,” Mike said. “You can use it for anything that your mother approves of.”

“Why is Mom the trustee? Why not you?”

I had wondered that myself.

“Because there are the massive strings.” And Mike smiled, that wonderful, clear, sweet smile of his. “If you decide you want to fight about it every day from now until you are thirty, you can fight with her.”

Money mattered to Mike; it was part of his vocabulary, his
way of communicating. This trust sent a signal—he trusted me, and he wasn’t trying to control Zack.

And maybe he was even proud of Zack.

Zack hadn’t seen his grandmother since the engagement party in October, so he went up to Philadelphia with Mike and Claudia for Easter. He was not looking forward to the trip, but I’ve got to give Claudia credit. She’d worked hard to find activities that interested him. She and Zack—on their own, without Mike or his mother—spent Saturday afternoon in some strange little art galleries. On Easter afternoon, a new theater was having an open-house fund-raiser, and she’d gotten tickets to that.

Whenever I’d gone to Philadelphia, I’d always tried to distract the boys by taking them outside. We’d go on hikes, play ball, or rent boats. Those were Mike-Darcy-Jeremy activities. Zack had gone along because I’d made him.

But Claudia’s plan had been designed to please only Zack, not the whole family. And it worked.

If she thought Mike Van Aiken hadn’t kept score, then she didn’t know him. He might not have counted her strokes, he
might not have been writing anything down, but in his head he was keeping track of his own game.

That was a bit of a surprise. I couldn’t imagine Annie being happy in such a nonurban setting.

“In fact,” Rose continued, “we got a text message from her late last night, asking if she could stay another day and come home Sunday morning.”

“That’s nice,” I said, and I was about to tell her that Zack had gone up this morning for the college’s annual Spring Fling, but her call-waiting went off and she had to go.

I wondered if Rose and Guy knew about this Spring Fling. Probably not. I picked the phone back up and called Zack on his cell.

“Mom.” He would have seen my number on caller ID. “What do you want?” He wouldn’t like the idea that I was checking up on him.

“I just wanted to let you know that Annie Zander-Brown is on campus,” I said quickly.

“I know. I saw her.”

Annie was hard to miss. “She’s okay, isn’t she?”

“Why wouldn’t she be? Look, can I go now?”

“Sure. I’ll see you tonight. Call me before you leave, okay?”

“Yeah, whatever.”

It was a beautiful day, and I went out to work in the yard, slipping my cell phone into my pocket. As often happens when I’m doing something physical, I lost track of time. It was almost two o’clock when my phone rang.

I pulled it out of my pocket and flipped it open. “Zack? What is it?”

“Mom . . . Mom . . . it’s Annie . . . she’s drinking, she’s drinking a lot. There isn’t supposed to be alcohol here, but there is. So should I do anything?”

“Did you try talking to her?”

“No. She’s with all these guys, they’re Greeks, the fraternity guys . . . I can’t go. . . . I don’t know, she’s not my responsibility, is she? But she’s making an ass of herself. I mean, what do I do if she passes out?”

“Call a security guard. Or take her to Student Health. She’s not a student, but I’m sure they would look at her.”

“But she’ll get in trouble. I don’t want her to get in trouble. I don’t want to be a big dork.”

I paused. I didn’t have a good feeling about this. “Zack, do you want me to come up? I don’t mind being the big dork. I can be there in an hour.”

“Yeah . . . if you want to, yeah, if you want to.”

It took me a little more than an hour to get to Westridge, the little town where Stone-Chase was. As I got close to the campus, I called Zack, and he directed me to the closest parking lot, a few of the best spaces becoming available as families with young children left.

The Stone-Chase campus is always idyllic, with green lawns enclosed by white-trimmed buildings made of rosy brick. Today it was full of people, gathered around fair-type booths. I could “pie a Greek” or “dunk an athlete” if I were so minded. There were also little-kiddie rides, a moon bounce, even a car-crash simulator.

There wasn’t any obvious liquor, no beer cans or kegs, but plenty of students were carrying water bottles that didn’t look as if they were filled with water. Zack took me to one of the smaller quadrangles. It was crowded, but I instantly spotted Annie. She was trying to dance on the rim of a trash can. She was wearing a Stone-Chase T-shirt as a dress; it was sashed with a man’s striped tie.

She was being partnered by a guy who was sitting on the shoulders of another boy. Other kids were trying to help her balance. On the grass around them were a number of thermoses. I doubted that they had been used for coffee.