The Good Life

by Susan Kietzman

  “Hey, Lauren!” Lauren turned her head and saw Judd Acker’s black Jeep next to her. The passenger side window was down and he was looking at her from the driver’s seat. She took the few steps needed to reach the car and was met, for the second time that day, by his beautiful face. She smiled at him and said hello, using his name. “What are you doing?”

  “I had a detention, from Mrs. Bennigan,” Lauren explained.

  “Ah, yes,” he said. “No ride?”

  “Nope,” said Lauren. “My brother refuses to be seen in public with me.”

  Judd laughed. “Hop in,” he said. “I’ll take you home.” Lauren took a quick look around to see if anyone could serve as a witness, then opened the car door. She put her backpack down on the floor, sat down, and started memorizing details about the car’s interior so she could tell her friends. “Where do you live?”

  “Foxwoods Lane,” said Lauren. “It’s off Wayward.”

  Judd pulled the car onto the main road. Lauren leaned back against the seat and concentrated on inhaling and exhaling. Sitting in Judd’s car reminded her, somehow, of her grandmother. She couldn’t think of a single reason why that would be true until she saw the flat, yellow cardboard pine tree hanging from the rearview mirror. It was scented, Lauren realized at that moment, like her grandmother. Whenever Gran walked into their kitchen, she smelled sweet and pure and fresh, as if surrounded by a fine vanilla mist. Lauren reached out and touched the tree. “I like it,” she said. “Your tree.”

  Judd turned down the music and looked over at her. “You like vanilla?”

  “Yes,” said Lauren. And before she could stop herself, “It reminds me of my grandmother.”

  “Do you like vanilla ice cream?”

  “It’s my favorite,” said Lauren.

  “Me too,” said Judd. “The people at B&R think I’m crazy whenever I go in there. They’ve got a million flavors, but I get plain vanilla.”

  Lauren laughed. “I do the same thing.”

  Judd slowed the car at a stop sign and looked at his watch. “Do you want to go get some?” he asked. “Do you have time?”

  “I’d love to,” said Lauren.

  Judd drove down Plymouth Street, then took a left onto Elm and parked the car a few blocks from the ice cream shop. He got out, walked over to Lauren’s side as she was unclipping her seat belt, and opened the car door. Warm and flushed, Lauren stepped out of the car and onto the sidewalk next to Judd, who was taller than she’d remembered from their chat at his locker. They walked into Baskin-Robbins, ordered vanilla waffle cones, and took them back to the car. Judd again opened the door for Lauren, then walked around the car and opened his door. He sat back down in the driver’s seat, started the car, and turned on the heat. Instead of shifting into DRIVE, he turned in his seat, leaning his back against the door window. “Is this good, or what?” he asked.

  “Unbelievable,” Lauren managed to say.

  Judd licked his cone and Lauren licked hers, all the while watching him. He ran his gorgeous tongue all the way around the outside of the cone three times. After that, he used it to push the center mound of ice cream farther down into the cone. When the ice cream was even with the top of the cone, Judd took his first bite. “How am I doing?” he asked.

  Lauren blushed and then laughed. “Fine,” she said.

  “I’m teasing you,” said Judd. “I like to watch people eat, too. You can learn a lot about people by their eating habits.”

  “Like what?” asked Lauren.

  “Let’s look at you,” said Judd. “I can tell you really do love ice cream, but you’re trying not to be a pig about it because you don’t know me very well and you’re not that comfortable in this situation. So, you’re eating slower than you’d normally eat, and you’re being especially careful because you’d be absolutely mortified if you dropped something on your jacket.”

  “Pretty close,” said Lauren, blushing again, as if her head were a lighthouse, with a hot red light that shone through her face every sixty seconds. Judd took another bite of his cone, then shifted the car into DRIVE.

  “I’ll take you home now,” he said, pulling out of their parking space. Too soon, he pulled the Jeep into her driveway. Lauren thanked him again for the ice cream and for the ride. He thanked her for her company, but made no attempt to open his door. Did he not want Nate to see him? Lauren grabbed her backpack with her left hand and the door handle with her right and pushed herself out of the car. She shut the door, waved through the window, and watched him drive away. When she walked into the kitchen, her aproned grandmother was chopping celery.

  “Well, hello,” said Eileen. “How was school?”

  “Wonderful,” said Lauren, twirling once before setting her pack down next to the table.

  Eileen stopped chopping. “You’re positively glowing,” she said. “Something marvelous must have happened.”

  “Better than that,” said Lauren, smiling.

  “Did you get an A on a test?” asked Eileen, still holding the knife midair over the half-chopped celery.

  “Gran,” said Lauren, moving closer to the kitchen island and her grandmother, “getting an A on a test and dancing around the kitchen are mutually exclusive.”

  “Not for me,” said Eileen, chopping again. “An A was hard to come by.”

  “Guess again,” said Lauren.

  “You’re in love,” said Eileen. Lauren flashed her grandmother a broad grin. “Is it Josh, Nate’s friend?”

  Lauren’s smile faded. “No.”

  “Oh,” said Eileen. “Well, that just shows you how much I know. I thought you two had feelings for each other.”

  “We do,” said Lauren, her mood sinking like a helium balloon the day after the birthday party.

  “But you have stronger feelings for someone else?” said Eileen, putting the knife down on the countertop. Lauren told her grandmother, again, about Judd Acker, this time in greater detail. She told her she’d essentially been in love with him forever. She told her about his eyes and his voice and his hands and his manners. She told her about that very afternoon, about how he opened the car door for her, about how he bought her ice cream. When Eileen wondered why a modern-day knight like Judd was unattached, Lauren told her about Angel and about the breakup that shocked everyone at school. “If Judd and Angel have just broken up after a three-year relationship, do you think he’s ready to start dating again?” asked Eileen.

  Lauren thought for a moment. “What you’re saying is if Judd is interested in me, it would be nothing but a rebound relationship,” she said.

  “Not necessarily,” said Eileen, scooping the celery with cupped hands into a mixing bowl. “I just think it’s a matter of poor timing.” Lauren’s eyes welled up with tears. Eileen wiped her hands on her apron and then wrapped her arms around her granddaughter, steering her toward the kitchen table. They both sat down on the window seat cushions. “I’ve said the wrong thing,” said Eileen, thumbing away a tear from Lauren’s cheek.

  “No,” said Lauren, looking down at the tabletop. “I think you’re right, but I just don’t want to think about it like that. I want to believe he wants to be with me as much as I want to be with him. Spending time with him today was like a dream come true.”

  “I am glad you had a nice time with him,” said Eileen.

  Lauren looked up at her grandmother. “Maybe he’s different, Gran,” said Lauren. “Maybe he’s been wanting to break up with Angel for a long time but couldn’t because of circumstances in her life.”

  “I thought she broke up with him.”

  “No one really knows,” said Lauren. “The rumor mill is unreliable that way.”

  “Ah,” said Eileen, putting her arm around Lauren’s shoulders. They sat a bit longer before Eileen stood. “Want to help me cook?”

  “Okay,” said Lauren. “What are we making?”

  “I’m making a casserole,” said Eileen, “but you could make the chocolate pudding.”

  “Perfect,” said Lauren.
She got her mother’s apron out of the broom closet. It was made of a sheer pink fabric and had black martini glasses printed all over the skirt. The olives in the glasses were green. It was part of a naughty housewife costume Ann had worn to a Halloween party several years ago. It had never been worn as just an apron until Eileen and Sam moved in. Whenever Eileen and Lauren cooked together, which was now a couple of times a week, Eileen wore the white cotton apron with apples on it that she had brought from Pennsylvania and Lauren wore the pink martinis, the only apron her mother owned. They were both standing over the stove when Ann walked in the door from the garage.

  “What a day,” announced Ann wearily as she tossed her keys into the wicker basket. “If I don’t have a caramel cappuccino immediately, I’m going to die.” She opened the fridge and grabbed a gallon of skim milk. “The Garden Tour Committee is made up of complete idiots,” she said to no one in particular. “That meeting was a huge waste of time. And the line at the Coffee Connection drive-through was backed onto the street. What are you two cooking up for dinner?”

  “Chicken casserole,” replied Eileen, “green beans, and corn muffins.”

  “Oh goodie,” Ann shouted over the noise of her cappuccino maker. “At this rate, we’ll all need cholesterol medication by summer.”

  “I’ve been eating chicken casserole for years,” said Eileen, “and look at me.”

  “The picture of health,” said Ann. God, she had a headache.

  “I like Gran’s casserole,” said Lauren, in defense of her grandmother.

  “Of course you do,” said Ann. “You also like ice cream, Brie cheese, and every chip known to man.”

  Lauren frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

  “It’s supposed to mean you’re a young woman now and you should be monitoring your intake,” said Ann.

  “Nonsense,” said Eileen, spooning the contents of the mixing bowl into a large casserole dish. “She’s an active girl and will probably never need to diet.”

  “She will if she doesn’t want to be a size twelve,” said Ann.

  “There are worse things in life than being a size twelve.”

  “I can’t think of one,” said Ann, pouring her drink into a large ceramic mug.

  “I can,” said Eileen, turning her back on her daughter. Lauren watched her grandmother wash her liver-spotted hands in the sink. She had working woman hands, with large knuckles and thick fingertips. Yet the thin skin that stretched across the bones on top was smooth and soft to the touch. Lauren looked over at her mother’s hands, one of which was reaching for the large plastic bottle of ibuprofen in the cupboard above the coffeemaker. Her hands were smooth, too. Aside from the absence of age markings and the active-length, sweet plum–colored, manicured fingernails, they looked like Gran’s. Lauren looked at her own hands, padded with teenage fat and adorned with silver friendship rings. Her orange nail polish was chipped. Lauren looked back at her mother’s hands, now holding her favorite mug and turning the pages of the new House Beautiful.

  “Do you feel okay, Mom?” asked Lauren.

  “I have a raging headache,” said Ann, not looking up. “I just need a few minutes of quiet.”

  “What you need is some nutrition,” said Eileen. “A good meal.”

  Ann held up her hand. “Don’t start, Mother. It’s been a long day.”

  Eileen joined Lauren at the stove. “How’s that pudding coming along?”

  “It’s starting to thicken,” said Lauren.

  Eileen stuck her right index finger into the pot and tasted Lauren’s creamy brown mixture. “That’s perfect,” she said. “I couldn’t have done better myself.”

  CHAPTER 16

  When Nate hit his teenage years, Mike started paying attention to his birthday. Before that, he had often missed his son’s parties, and not necessarily because he couldn’t extract himself from work. No, on many occasions he had chosen to be working rather than participating in whatever Ann had cooked up for the occasion: a sleigh ride, tobogganing, or ice skating outside and professional clowns, jugglers, and caterers inside. The level of noise and excitement rivaled that at a state fair midway, and Mike wanted no part of it. Nate’s birthday was a day over which Mike had no control—until Nate turned thirteen, and Mike talked Ann into letting him take his son to New York instead of her trying to top the previous year’s and everyone else’s festivities. They flew to Manhattan, just the two of them, on the Dilloway corporate jet, dined at an exclusive men’s club in Midtown, and then strolled the streets of the most powerful city in the world before sitting in the front row at a New York Knicks game. When Nate was fourteen, they went to Houston, where Mike just happened to have a business meeting. The best part for Nate was not the lavish Mexican food and real cowboy boots, but the fact he got to miss school and watch TV in the hotel suite while his father worked. For Nate’s fifteenth, Mike took him to San Francisco for an entire weekend—no business meetings, just periodic cell phone calls and laptop time. They drove up and down the hilly streets, and they visited Alcatraz to hear firsthand the daunting tales of failed escape. They viewed the Golden Gate Bridge from a dozen locations, its color captivating Nate. A red bridge should be in the desert, he told his dad, where it would span a gazillion grains of sand, its hard surface providing temporary relief to travelers weary of the soft, sinking, shifting sand underfoot.

  A European business trip took Mike away for Nate’s sixteenth birthday. He had a five o’clock flight out that Monday morning for a four-day meeting in Zurich, and Nate couldn’t go. Ann didn’t want Nate to miss that much school, although she was also protesting the fact that Mike wouldn’t take her. She understood it was an important event for the company and that Mike would be incredibly busy, but she resented being thought of as a distraction. And if she wasn’t going, certainly Nate wasn’t going. Mike had explained his conflict to Nate the week before and offered him several alternatives, all of which Nate turned down. Mike had seen then that his son would not be bought off cheaply. Nate now expected his father to come through on his birthday, and Mike was not someone who broke his word. A new car would do it, Nate told his dad the day before Mike left for Switzerland. So, that afternoon, Mike picked up Nate from school, drove him to the BMW dealership, and wrote a check for a $55,000 car.

  This year, Nate was turning seventeen, and Mike had rearranged his schedule to take him to Colorado for a long weekend. They would leave Wednesday after school and return Sunday in time for dinner. Eileen told Nate she would make him his birthday dinner, anything he wanted. And while she preferred to serve a birthday dinner on the actual day, Friday this year, she agreed to serve it on Sunday night when he returned with his dad. And so the preparations began. Mike and Nate went snowboarding, and Eileen and Lauren planned, shopped, cooked, and baked. For an appetizer, Nate requested escargot served with toasted French bread. The salad, he said, should not be too girly; no curly misshapen exotic lettuce, no avocados, no pineapple or mandarin oranges, and definitely no roasted pine nuts, the ingredient most restaurant chefs could not stop themselves from sprinkling on the top of their house salads. For the main course, Nate wanted ribs and lots of them. And he wanted potato salad and he wanted real baked beans, nothing out of a can. For dessert, he was clear and resolute. He wanted no part of a cake with candles. Nothing would do except his grandmother’s cherry pie.

  Ann was busy and unavailable Thursday and Friday and then visible and grumpy, what Eileen called out of sorts, most of the weekend. She didn’t want to help in the kitchen, but she didn’t seem to do much else, either. She went to the gym Saturday morning, then hung around the house all afternoon, for the most part flipping through magazines. It was almost five o’clock when Ann, from the living room, and Sam, through the back door, walked into the kitchen simultaneously. Eileen and Lauren were sitting at the kitchen table halfway through a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle called Niagara Falls in the Spring. “Who wants a drink?” asked Ann.

  “I do,” said Sam, taking off his coa
t.

  Ann walked to the refrigerator and took a large bottle of white wine from the bottom rack. There was no need for French champagne tonight. “What would you like, Dad?” she asked, taking the corkscrew from its magnetized home on the wall.

  “I’ll have what you’re having.”

  “White wine?” asked Ann. “I thought you were a scotch drinker.”

  “It’s all the same to me,” said Sam, trying to hang his heavy wool coat on a wall peg. He had already dropped it, but received no help from his wife, who firmly believed he had to do something for himself once in a while.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Ann, swiftly crossing the room and hanging her father’s coat. “They’re not all the same.”

  “It’s alcohol,” said Sam, moving toward the kitchen counter like a windup toy in need of a key turn.

  “Good point,” said Eileen, placing another water piece into the puzzle.

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Ann, pouring herself a glass of wine. “That’s like saying food is all the same. That it doesn’t matter if you have broccoli or ice cream for dessert.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter to you,” said Eileen, standing. “You don’t eat dessert anyway.” Lauren giggled.

  “You’re very funny, Mother,” said Ann, taking a large sip from her glass.

  “Am I going to get my wine or not?” asked Sam, reaching for the bottle.