An Irreconcilable Difference

by Lynda Fitzgerald

  I had feared my mother would see it as an end to her own life, but I seriously underestimated her zest for living. She went out and got her long expired driver’s license renewed and bought one of the first new Volkswagen Beetles that rolled off the assembly line. With wheels at her disposal, she started working out three times a week and joined a senior’s group.

  “Your father is a wonderful man, but he never wanted to go anywhere or do anything, and he pouted if I went without him,” she admitted once. “Now that he barely remembers me, it doesn’t bother him.”

  Recently she had taken up Tai Chi, which replaced the golf lessons of the summer. She attended a meditation group, watched Star Trek, read romance novels, and went dancing at Johnnie’s Hideaway every Saturday night with a bunch of her “girl friends.” I envied her energy and wondered if I should talk to her about safe sex.

  Her condo was only six miles from my house, but in Atlanta traffic, it took more than the twenty minutes I’d allotted to get there. Mother could have made it in ten.

  She hugged me at the door, and I was again struck by how youthful she looked. Her hair was no longer gray. This particular week it was a soft ash blonde color and beautifully styled by Roger in Midtown to sweep back from her face. She was wearing green eye shadow that exactly matched her eyes, long gold hoop earnings, and was dressed in her signature tunic top and leggings, this particular set in hot pink. She didn’t look a bit like anybody’s old granny, and I told her so.

  She took the compliment in stride as she breezed into the kitchen with me trailing in her wake.

  If my kitchen was a spring morning, hers was a midsummer afternoon. Richly gleaming wood cabinets. Thriving house plants and herbs on every surface and hanging from the ceiling. She had installed fluorescent ceiling fixtures that made it as bright as a sandy beach at noon. It smelled of potting soil and green things and roasted chicken and perked me up immeasurably. I did notice it wasn’t as clean as mine. No one’s was as clean as mine.

  “It’s the hair,” she said over her shoulder as she leaned down to poke the chicken with a fork.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The hair. I told you, Roger’s an absolute wizard. You’ll see. We’re thinking about doing it red next time. What do you think?”

  She glanced up at me before I had a chance to wipe the horrified look off my face, and she cackled. “You’re so gullible, Lou. I love it. Surely you know I have better taste than that.”

  I eyed the hot pink pantsuit and earrings and said nothing.

  I set the kitchen table while she tossed a salad. She had also quit eating beef and gone totally low fat. There was a bit of role reversal in our relationship that I found uncomfortable. She was the one who embraced with gusto each new trend that came along, while I fought change as a matter of course. I loved my mother, but she made me feel wholly inadequate. I still found myself wanting to be like her when I grew up, and at forty-eight, I wondered exactly when that would be.

  She heaped our plates with chicken and salad and settled across from me. To her credit, she let me take a bite before she started on me. “She won’t, you know,” she said as she speared a leaf of lettuce. “Jana. Accept it.”

  I chewed the bite as long as I could in order to avoid answering her, but a one-inch square of chicken has its limits. Swallowed with difficulty. “She might once she thinks about it. I mean, Darren and I were always the odd couple. All her friends’ parents have been divorced and remarried at least once. We were the only ‘originals.’” At Mother’s sharp glance, I said, “Her term, not mine.”

  “The crap these kids come up with,” she muttered, shaking her head.

  “She probably knows we’ve been sleeping in different bedrooms for the last several years.”

  “How would she know that?”

  “I don’t know, Mother.” I stabbed at my chicken. “She’ll accept it. She has no choice.”

  “It won’t be so easy with Greg.”

  The bit of succulent meat I had forked into my mouth turned to tire rubber. No. It wouldn’t be so easy with Greg. Our son made it no secret that he thought his parents were perfect. I suffered chronic vertigo thinking about the height of the pedestal he had us on. When he was growing up, he always brought his friends over for our approval and, I suspected, to show us off to them. He treated me as if I were royalty and he, my loyal subject; and he worshipped his father as the man every other man should aspire to be. I had no doubt that he had pursued a career in architecture as a way of following in his father’s footsteps. Fortunately he was also good at it.

  His obsession with us as model parents wasn’t at the unhealthy level, but it was probably borderline. There was no earthly reason for him to feel that way. Jana’s vision certainly wasn’t that clouded. Then I remembered her words, “Not my parents,” and wondered if maybe it was.

  I sat back in my chair. “Do you have any coffee?”

  She swallowed the last bit of her chicken. Our conversation hadn’t affected her appetite. “It’s already made. Espresso,” she said.

  Why was I surprised? I probably wouldn’t sleep for a week, but it didn’t matter. I hadn’t been sleeping much anyway.

  I poured us each a tiny cup and brought them to the table. “I dread telling him.” My hand shook as I raised the cup to my lips. I took a sip and made a face. “It’s going to destroy him.”

  “Nonsense. Children survive their parents breaking up all the time, but he’ll fight it.”

  “What’s to fight? It’s done. The papers were filed this morning.”

  Mother was watching me over the rim of her cup. “How are you dealing with that?”

  I shrugged. “Fine. I was the one who initiated it.” She stared at me. “Well, pretty fine.” I glanced away. “It’s hard.” I felt my lower lip begin to tremble. “It’s so sad I can’t believe it. It’s breaking my heart.”

  Now she nodded. “That’s more like it. You can’t hide from your feelings, Lou, whether they’re rational or not, any more than you can walk away from a twenty-eight-year marriage without regrets. Not unless your husband was a real bastard, and Darren isn’t that.”

  I fought to get myself back under control. “No. He isn’t that.”

  We sat in silence, eyes on our plates while we contemplated our separate thoughts. Finally, I said, “How’s dad doing?”

  She snorted. “Thinks he’s the King of Prussia this week.”

  I moaned. “That’s so sad.”

  “Nonsense,” she said gruffly. “He’s always wanted to be a king.”

  I had to smile at that, but she couldn’t fool me. She loved my father. It was torture for her to visit him at the center, but she never missed a day.

  “You should go see him,” she said. “It’s easier to deal with it than to hide from it.”

  “I’m not—" Realization washed over me. Yes, I was. I damn well was. I looked over at Mother. “You’re right. I’ll go tomorrow.”

  She blinked—surprised?—and then nodded. “Good. He has a new doctor. Jules Proctor.”

  I took a moment before it sunk in. Then I giggled. “Doctor Proctor? Oh, God, the poor thing.”

  Mother grinned. “That’s exactly what I said; only I said it to him.”

  “You didn’t.”

  She held up three fingers. “Scouts honor. Nice man, though. Ask for him when you’re there. He can answer any questions you have.”

  We put the dishes in the dishwasher in companionable silence. It wasn’t until I picked up my purse that she waylaid me. “You need to find yourself a boyfriend.” My mouth dropped open, but she ignored me. “Maybe then you’d go out, have some fun, develop some outside interests.”

  “I do have fun.”

  “Baloney. You go to work and come home and clean your house.”

  “Work is fun, and I enjoy cleaning.”

  “Work is work and even you can only spend so much time cleaning. Find yourself a man and get—” She broke off abruptly. I swear, I think she was going to say ge
t laid. “And get out of the house,” she finished.

  I hiked my purse up on my shoulder. “Tell you what, Mother. As soon as I have some free time, I’ll go check out all the available men. Okay?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Fine with me. Don’t leave it too late. You’re not getting any younger, you know.”

  I could hear her cackling as I left the house. I was so irritated with her that I didn’t even hug her goodbye. What an absurd idea. Of all the things I needed—and there were plenty of them—the one thing I did not need was a man. And I certainly wouldn’t go out looking for one.

  Little did I know one would find me the very next day.

  Chapter Three

  My office hours were flexible, which meant, of course, that my salary was lousy. That would have to change soon, but for the time being, with the divorce looming and Greg coming home from California and my father’s ongoing illness, it served my purposes.

  I slid into the job when Greg left for college. By then even Darren could see no reason for me not to work. I managed the office for a small architectural firm. It was close to home, and I had known my bosses for nearly all their working lives since they had originally worked with my husband. Jeff Green and Samuel Levin, along with Darren, had been fledgling architects at a firm where I worked as bookkeeper the summer after my freshman year of college.

  I had known Darren since I was three years old. His parents and mine were neighbors and close friends. It had always been assumed, by them at least, that Darren and I would marry one day. He and I laughed at them until that fateful summer when, against company rules, we began dating. When it was discovered, I was fired and Darren sternly reprimanded, but it was too late. Six months later and much to our parents’ delight, we were married. To their credit, the men who fired me looked embarrassed as they presented us with their lavish wedding gift.

  Darren eventually moved out on his own professionally, and Jeff and Sam went into partnership together. There was little competition between the two offices, and they even worked together occasionally on big projects. I hadn’t yet told Jeff and Sam about the divorce.

  When I walked into the office the next morning at ten, Jeff was going through my desk. A burly hulk of a man with riotous gray hair and a florid complexion, Jeff dwarfed my tiny office, which was tucked into a back corner of the big old Decatur house the guys had converted into a studio by knocking out all but the load-bearing walls in the downstairs portion. My bosses felt the place had architectural significance. I thought it looked like a warehouse with hardwood floors. Layout tables filled the center of the huge main room. Drawings hung at crooked angles from steel clamps. More drawings, rolled into massive, heavy tubes three and four feet long, were stacked haphazardly in corners. The result—barely controlled chaos.

  The files and library, such as they were, created a different kind of clutter across the hallway in the old dining room. Two of the upstairs bedrooms were emergency crash sites for Jeff and Sam when they pulled all-nighters, and the third was our dead file area, where we stored files and drawings from long-closed projects. I vehemently refused to do so much as peek into that room. I knew that if I ever took the job on full-time, it would fall on me to give some semblance of order to the place, and the prospect was daunting.

  Jeff closed the drawer and opened another one.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  He spun around. I heard rather than saw his pants rip as they caught on a sharp edge of my desk. “Jeez,” he said, sticking a finger in the tear, “they were my last clean pair.”

  I looked at the ink-stained khakis and withheld comment.

  “Maybe Ceily can bring me some more,” he added absentmindedly, turning back to my desk. Ceily was his wife and a saint, I thought, to put up with him.

  “I thought Ceily was in Boston.”

  He looked at me blankly.

  “Visiting her aunt?” I prompted.

  He looked at the calendar I had hanging on the wall. “What day is it?”

  I sighed. Jeff tended to lose track of time in the middle of big projects, and the shopping center renovation he and Sam were working on was one of their biggest of their career. “It’s Wednesday.”

  Jeff hung his head. “Jesus. She won’t be back until Friday.” He looked around my office as if expecting to find a change of wardrobe hanging in a corner. Then he looked at me from under bushy eyebrows. “I don’t suppose…”

  “I don’t suppose either,” I said, crossing the office and dropping my purse on my desk. “I’m a bookkeeper, not a seamstress. Why don’t you go home and pick up some clothes? Come to think of it, when was the last time you were home?”

  “I don’t know. Saturday? Sunday?”

  I had a sudden horrific thought. “Jeff, where are your children?”

  He looked confused for a moment. Then his face cleared. “Their grandmother,” he answered as if he’d known all along. “They’re staying with Ceily’s mom.”

  “Thank God for that,” I muttered, but he didn’t hear me. He had abandoned my desk and was now going through my files. “What are you looking for?” I repeated my original question.

  “Rolaids. I’m trying to find the Rolaids. Are they in here?”

  “Look under ‘R’.” When he pushed the drawer shut and pulled open the next one, I had to choke back a laugh. “That was a joke, Jeff. They’re in the bathroom. In the medicine cabinet.”

  That took a few seconds to register, and I had to wonder how long it had been since he slept. As he turned to leave, I had a clear view of his yellow boxers peeking out through the three-inch rip in his pants. “What about that?” I asked, pointing.

  He considered it for a moment. “I think we have some duct tape around here somewhere.”

  I watched him go, shaking my head. As I booted up my computer, Sam walked into the office. Sam was Jeff’s polar opposite: dark and compact, with tidy hair and clothing. Sam glided where Jeff lumbered. Sam had a business head where Jeff wouldn’t know a balance sheet from a racing form. It amazed me that they were friends. In fact, it was amazing they hadn’t killed each other in the years they’d been partners.

  Sam’s neat clothes and combed hair did nothing to disguise the dark circles under his eyes. “You too? What’s going on around here? Have you guys been home at all this week?”

  Sam fell into a chair across from me and rolled his shoulders back, wincing. “I have. Night before last, I think. Jeff’s been camping out here.” He pressed two fingers against his forehead. “What’s going on is that asshole Klee. He changed his mind again. He decided he wants another set of public restrooms worked into the plans. Not at one end or the other, you understand. No, Mr. Klee wants them smack dab in the middle of the damned floor plan. We’re going to have to rework all the drawings and get new bids, and he still wants us to come in on schedule. You know Klee. Richer than God, and what he wants, he’s determined to get.”

  Actually I didn’t know Klee, but I nodded sympathetically.

  “He’s a moron,” he finished, staring unhappily at the floor. Then he looked up. “What are you doing here? It’s not Thursday, is it?”

  I smiled. I usually came into the office Monday, Tuesday and Thursdays for several hours to catch up the filing and do the books. This week was unusual. I worked most of the day Monday. Yesterday was devoted to working things out with attorneys and breaking my daughter’s heart. I hadn’t heard from her since then. I was sorely tempted to call her, but I knew it would be wiser to give her some time and space to sort through her feelings. When she was ready to talk, she would let me know. I had told Jeff I was coming in today, but Jeff had undoubtedly forgotten to mention it to Sam—if he even remembered our conversation.

  “Invoices,” I said. “I have an appointment tomorrow that will take most of the day, and Greg is coming home Friday.”

  Sam’s face creased into a smile. “No kidding. I’ll bet Darren’s tickled.”

  I smiled instead of lying. “So I thought I’
d get the bills out today and start on payables next week.”

  “Works for me,” Sam said, pushing himself up out of the chair. “Send out some big ones, will you? We need the cash flow.” He started out of the office, and then stopped, staring across the room. “What’s Jeff doing?”

  I stood up and peered around Sam. Jeff was seated on the bottom step of the cherry wood stairs that led to the second floor. “I believe he’s taping his pants together.” At Sam’s blank look, I added, “He ripped them on my desk, and he said they were his last clean pair.”

  Sam shook his head. “I brought him a suitcase full of clothes yesterday from his house. I swear to God, the guy must have Alzheimer’s.” He looked at me quickly, coloring. “I’m sorry, Lou. Me and my big mouth.”

  I smiled at him. Both Sam and Jeff had known my father for years. As an insurance agent, he was their liability provider until he was unable to work. “It’s okay to say the word, Sam.”

  “How is he, anyway?”

  “About the same. I’m going over to see him this afternoon.”

  “That’s great. Tell him I asked about him.”

  “I will.” Easier to agree than to explain that dad didn’t know who any of us were anymore.

  By skipping lunch, I was able to get out of the office by three. As I let myself out the front door, a car pulled up at the curb, a low, sleek silver Mercedes convertible. Two men climbed out. The driver was a man about my own age, tall and fit looking, with angular features and a deep bronze tan. His well-cut brown hair was unmistakably sun-lightened. The other, gray haired, was tall, too, although at five-three, almost everyone except Sam looked tall to me. He also had an enviable tan and piercing eyes that made me uncomfortable. I didn’t recognize either of them.

  I held my place on the porch until they reached me. “Can I help you?” I asked in my best office voice.

  The brown haired one gave me a once over that made me feel like I should check the buttons of my blouse. “We’re here to see Sam,” he said with a lazy smile. His voice was a deep baritone with just a touch of Texas.