Much Ado About Mother (19 page)

“What did you do?” Erinn asked.

“What did
you
do?” Virginia replied, indicating the torn jeans and purpling kneecap.

“Occupational hazard.” Erinn swept the question away. She was too embarrassed to admit she fell off a shoe. “Come on, Mother! I've been trying to get rid of those pests for days.”

Virginia was obviously enjoying herself. She had a little smile on her face as she stirred the fudge. Dymphna jumped up.

“Erinn, can you walk to the backyard?” Dymphna said. “I'll show you!”

“Oh, Dymphna, don't make Erinn get up!” Virginia said from the stove.

Erinn got up. “No, no . . . whatever it is, I want to see it!”

Erinn and Dymphna headed into the backyard, passing Blu, who stood in the doorway with her arms crossed.

“You want to come with us?” Erinn asked her.

Blu didn't answer but unfolded her arms. She followed the two women into the yard.

“Look at the pens,” Dymphna said.

Erinn limped over to the rabbit cages and let out a gasp. The rabbits were bald!

“They look gross,” Blu said.

“That's the idea,” Dymphna said. “Your mom got the idea from looking at Caro's lion's cut. She figured if we sheared the rabbits and showed them to the news guys the show would be over! It took all day but it worked. I sheared six of them and your mother sheared four. I didn't even have to help her.”

Erinn was affronted that her mother didn't think Caro looked handsome. She went back into the house just as her mother was pouring the liquid fudge into pans.

“Mother, how did you learn how to shear rabbits?”

“YouTube, dear,” her mother said. “How else?”

CHAPTER 21

VIRGINIA

V
irginia remembered her own mother and mother-in-law weighing in on her fights with Martin. It was always grim. She knew better than to interfere. Obviously, Suzanna hadn't tripped on the tree root on purpose. Virginia's motherly instinct was to check her daughter's palms on a daily basis to see the progress of healing. The sight of that flyer had sent Eric into a snit, but she ignored the iciness between the couple when the three of them were together.

Virginia admired Eric's determination to stay above the fray. Because she was a child of the 1960s, she couldn't resist taking sides, but having been a professor at a university she understood, all too well, the undercurrents of local politics.

“Eric isn't being fair,” Suzanna said to her mother as they bathed Lizzy in the claw-foot tub.

“Every community needs an arbitrator. Eric's role is really important.”

“I know. But it doesn't help if the community's arbitrator has a mother-in-law running around shaving rabbits to help save a tree,” Suzanna said, sitting back on her heels to look at her mother. “I mean, that's a little too perfect, isn't it? Cute animals
and
a tree?”

“It doesn't help the community's arbitrator if his wife goes tripping over tree roots, proving it's dangerous,” Virginia said, feeling just a touch guilty. She didn't actually believe it was Suzanna's fault.

A wet sponge slapped Virginia in the face.

Virginia sucked in her breath. Had her own daughter slapped her with a sponge? Suzanna stared at her mother in horror. Lizzy was squealing and clapping her hands.

“Yay, me!” Lizzy said, patting her chest.

Suzanna stared at her soggy mother, then turned to Lizzy.

“Good girl,” Suzanna said to Lizzy, and all three started laughing and clapping.

After Lizzy was put to bed, Suzanna and her mother sat at the kitchen table, sharing a tea Suzanna had created, a blend of chamomile, valerian root, and cornflowers. She had worked long and hard to come up with a tea that would put you naturally to sleep. This was as close as she'd come. As Suzanna said, “It's soothing, but it ain't NyQuil.”

Suzanna called the tea Twilight since it made you sleep like the undead.

Eric strode by the kitchen, stopping in the doorway.

“Hey, guys, I'm going down to the Nook to get more books for Bernard's Little Library,” he said.

Virginia jumped up and said, “I have a few paperbacks I just finished. Do you want them?”

Before Eric could answer, Virginia was out of the room. She stayed down the hall, trying not to listen in on the conversation in the kitchen.

“How long are you going to punish me?” Suzanna asked.

“I'm not punishing you,” Eric said. “You've just made things harder around here. I'm sorry if I'm not jumping around saying it's OK, because it's not.”

Virginia scooped up the books as fast as she could and headed back down the hall.

“Eric, I wasn't—” Suzanna stopped when her mother entered the room.

Virginia briskly plunked the books down in Eric's hands. “Here you are,” she said.

Virginia wasn't sure if stopping this conversation was a good idea or not, but she went with her instinct.

Eric kissed one then the other on their cheeks and headed downstairs.

“I don't know what to say to him,” Suzanna said, absently touching the spot on her cheek. “I . . . I feel bad about everything.”

Virginia went to the kitchen counter and got out the cookie jar. Soothing tea was one thing, but this conversation required the big guns: homemade peanut butter cookies.

“I mean, Eric is wrong to accuse me of choosing sides,” Suzanna said.

“I don't think that's what he meant,” Virginia countered carefully. “I think he just meant it's harder to give the appearance of neutrality when one side can use damaging photos of the supposedly neutral arbitrator's wife to their advantage.”

“That isn't my fault,” Suzanna said.

“But . . . ,” Virginia offered.

“But,” Suzanna said, wiping away a tear. “Maybe I shouldn't have been there in the first place. If I hadn't been in the courtyard, I wouldn't have tripped, and Mr. Clancy couldn't have taken that picture of me.”

Virginia sat up straight.

“What makes you think it was Mr. Clancy who took the photo?”

“Who else?” Suzanna sniffled.

“Well, he's not alone in this. There are other merchants who think the tree is a hazard.”

“Mother! Who cares? Who cares who took the stupid picture?”

Virginia focused on the crisis at hand.

“You were saying you shouldn't have been at the courtyard,” Virginia said and took a wild guess. “Why not?”

Virginia was caught off guard as Suzanna let out a sob and put her head on the table.

“Dear!” Virginia said, scooting her chair closer to her daughter. “Do you want to tell me what is going on?”

“Remember when I was taking dance lessons?” Suzanna asked. “Well, I know I made it sound like I just wanted some exercise . . . but I . . . I was in a weird place. I was chasing my dance instructor all over the city. I threw myself at him. It was pitiful.”

“I don't understand,” Virginia said, and then suddenly she did. “Was this dance instructor Rio?”

Suzanna gulped and nodded.

“When he showed up at the tea shop after being gone for years, I just . . . I just . . . I don't know. I know I'm the luckiest woman in the world and I must seem completely ungrateful, but part of me has felt like . . . like I'm asleep. Just seeing Rio made me feel awake again. God! I sound like something out of a bad fairy tale.”

Virginia got up and poured more tea, not because she wanted any but because she knew she had to choose her words carefully and she needed time to think.

“OK, we're going to have to take off the mother-daughter suits right now, because I'm going to tell you something you probably don't want to hear from your mother.”

“If you're going to tell me you had an affair, you're right,” Suzanna said, blowing her nose. “I don't want to hear it.”

“Oh, honey, I worked at a university surrounded by brilliant men. I would have had to have been dead not to want to take those flirtations further.”

“How much of this do I have to listen to, Mom? I really don't want to know that.”

Virginia put her hand on Suzanna's arm and squeezed.

“I hope mothers stop reading fairy tales to their little girls,” Virginia said. “Because even the good ones are bad for you. You think once you get married to the love of your life, you'll never be attracted to another man as long as you live. That's just not true.”

“I wish it
were
true,” Suzanna said, biting into a cookie. She didn't even think about her skinny jeans.

“Don't we all!” Virginia said, sitting back in her chair. “I was young, but I already had Erinn, when your father and I started working at the university. I was overwhelmed with being a teacher, being a wife and mother, remodeling that old barn so we'd have a place to live. On top of that, I felt invisible to the men of the world. Then, one day I was making copies in the Xerox room and this handsome professor of visual arts came in. He bent me over the copier and kissed me!”

Suzanna's eyes widened. “You're kidding.”

“I'm not,” Virginia said, sounding giddy. “It was crazy. He finally let me up and we both went on making copies of our assignments as if nothing had happened.”

“Do I want to know the rest?”

“That was it. That's the whole story. But I felt great afterward! I felt beautiful and mysterious! When I went home that night, I looked over at your father, who was feeding your sister some macaroni and cheese. I'll never forget it: a normal family, a father, a daughter, macaroni and cheese, and a mother who just got kissed in the Xerox room. And I knew that it was OK to keep a part of myself to myself.”

“Please, Mom, I feel like I'm going to pass out. . . .”

“Yes, well, everything took a little while to figure out,” Virginia said, looking up at Suzanna, who was looking very pale. “I decided that I could have
one
affair, in my whole married life. So what I had to decide every time I was attracted to a man was: Is this the one? Is
this
the one?”

Virginia looked Suzanna in the eye. Woman to woman, not mother to daughter.

“Do you need another cookie?” Virginia asked.

Suzanna shook her head.

“And nobody was just right. In all honesty, it took less time deciding to marry your father than it did deciding if I was going to sleep with this man or that man.”

“I can't believe we're having this conversation,” Suzanna said.

“Well, I might have saved you some pain—or at least some guilt—if we'd had it earlier. The progression was always something like this: I would meet a man I found attractive. Every so often, the feeling would be mutual and I would find myself thinking,
Maybe he's the one.
It was so exciting! I would find myself comparing your father to him and thinking,
Oh, if Martin were only a little more like this . . . or a little more like that
. As I was deciding if this was going to be my grand affair, I would get to know the man a little better and, after a while, I would think,
Oh, if only he could be a little more like Martin, he'd be perfect.
Then, of course, I knew he wasn't the one.”

“Mom,” Suzanna said. “That's nuts.”

“Oh, it gets nuttier,” Virginia said, stirring her tea. “After a while, I realized that I could never have an affair with someone I knew well, since he'd never measure up to your father, so I changed the rules and decided I'd have to have an affair with a complete stranger.”

Suzanna gasped so loudly that Virginia looked up.

“Should I stop?” Virginia asked.

Suzanna seemed incapable of speech. She shook her head again.

“I won't go into the gory details,” Virginia said.

“Thank God!” Suzanna said, finally pushing out the words.

“But I finally thought I'd found the guy. He was foreign. I couldn't understand a word he said, so it wasn't any of the Romance languages. But as we were leaving the bar—did I mention we were at a bar? Anyway, as I was leaving the bar, I realized that I could never sleep with a man who would knowingly have sex with a married woman. I couldn't believe this man would enable me to cheat on your father! I was outraged! So I just turned away and went back into the bar alone. He probably thought American women are very strange.”

“Is that the end?” Suzanna asked.

“Yes. I kept my option open, because just knowing I had one made me feel . . . just a little bit . . . free. I always felt I had a Get Out of Jail Free card. Just in case. And you know what?”

“Apparently, I don't know anything!”

“When your father died, I was really glad I'd never used it.”

“I'm not sure what to make of all this.”

“Make of it what you will.” Virginia took another sip of tea, kissed Suzanna on the head, and went to bed.

The following morning, Virginia was up early, buckling Lizzy into the Baby Jogger. She didn't really want to be in the kitchen when Suzanna appeared. That woman-to-woman chat seemed a little more embarrassing in the light of day. Besides, Virginia had something she needed to do. She stopped at Piquant's dog bed.

“Do you want to go out?” Virginia whispered, but was given the Chihuahua stink eye, so she left him to sleep.

She took the few steps to Mr. Clancy's Courtyard slowly. She wanted to know, needed to know, if Mr. Clancy had taken the damning photo of Suzanna. She could understand his take on the tree and felt she had been more than fair in hearing him out. But all that open-mindedness would come to a screeching halt if she found out he was behind that flyer. She found this bothered her more than she thought it would. She had grown very fond of Mr. Clancy.

She noticed Donell setting up his sage stand with one hand and talking on his cell phone with the other, business as usual. He waved absently and turned his back to her. Virginia was perplexed. Donell had become increasingly standoffish. Was he upset that the tree situation seemed to be escalating? That would be odd, since more and more people were stopping by and checking out the tree for themselves. That had to be good for business. Hadn't she mentioned that to him before? Donell had his own way about him, that was for certain.