6
Jennifer
Sunday, September 12
The first text message came in the middle of their family drive to the mall to get new sneakers.
As Jennifer flipped idly through some paperwork Veronica wanted her to sign, Michael navigated the Camry through the leisurely Sunday traffic and chatted to the girls in the backseat about music. Her husband, with clear intent to torture their daughters, kept commenting on the lyrical relevance of every song that played on the radio. The girls would retaliate by laughing and, in some way or other, insinuate that their dad was a very old man. This was a long-standing game.
“Do young suburbanites use phrases like ‘my crib in the hood’ when discussing their four-bedroom homes in their gated communities?” Michael inquired, his tone thoroughly mocking.
Shelby sniggered. “Daaad! It’s rap. They’re supposed to use street language.”
Michael turned up the volume a notch and listened to the next verse. “Now, see, that phrase is unclear. Was he saying ‘pimping’ or ‘primping’ right there?”
Veronica groaned. “Mom, tell him he’s being obtuse!” She’d been enjoying the use of that word and employed it whenever possible. “That line makes perfect sense to anyone not born in the Pleistocene era.” She sighed loudly. “It’s ‘pimping,’ okay? Gawd.”
“You sure?” Michael smirked and began bobbing his head like an unlikely hip-hop artist. In wild distortion of the lyrics, he rapped, “I’m primpin’ in my car, yo. Gotta get my hair done. All this wind ’n’ rain, yo, is messin’ wid my fun.” He paused and pumped his open palm forward a couple of times. “Yo, yo. Yo!”
The girls dissolved into giggles in the backseat, and even Jennifer couldn’t keep from laughing.
“You’re such a geek, Dad,” Veronica said affectionately. “I’m soooo glad you don’t teach at my school.”
“Oh, c’mon, I’m cool. Right, Shelby? You’d want me to teach in your school, wouldn’t you?”
“Daaad.” Shelby shook her head and rolled her eyes simultaneously, as if one form of negation were insufficient.
He winked at Jennifer and reached with his right hand to squeeze her left. She squeezed back. “What you women need is to hear some good music. A little Joan Baez. A little Santana. They’ve got songs in real English and, if you’re determined to listen to stuff you don’t understand, they’ve got a bunch of Spanish tunes, too.” He began riffling through the CDs in the nook underneath the car radio. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
“Mom!” Veronica cried. “Make him stop before he puts Billy Joel on again.”
“I like Billy Joel,” Jennifer said, because she did but, also, because she wanted to make Michael laugh.
“Finally. An ally,” he said, still searching for a decent CD.
“Besides,” Jennifer continued, “we’ll be at the mall in a few minutes.” She pointed to the sheets Veronica had given her. Permission slips, it seemed, to be part of some Homecoming Dance committee. “So, this is a release to let you get out of study hall every Monday and Wednesday for the next four weeks, and this other one is to agree to let you stay after school for two extra hours every Tuesday night?”
“Yeah. Only until the dance, though,” her fourteen-going-on-forty-year-old daughter said, not giving away any more information than that. “October fifteenth.”
“Why the sudden interest?” Jennifer asked her. “Didn’t you always say how much you hate planning things like this before?” She swiveled in her seat to glance back at the girls.
Veronica shrugged. “But I’m in high school now. I just wanna try it this year. Get involved, you know?”
Shelby had her lips pinched together as if holding back a tide of commentary.
Michael, settling for the Eagles and their The Very Best Of collection, said, “Aren’t you the little joiner. Trying to get in good with the popular crowd?” This was more to hassle her than because he meant it. Unlike Jennifer in junior high and high school, Veronica had always been blessed to be pretty and part of the popular crowd. As far as Jennifer knew, there hadn’t been any recent change of status, although her eldest had been getting mouthier lately. And more secretive. Dressing in a range of clothing that could best be described as “formfitting.” Even moving a bit differently, a bit aggressively, if Jennifer thought about it. Was her daughter getting to be too popular?
“So, are Ashley, Joy and Heather going to be doing it, too?” Jennifer asked. “Because, if so, maybe we can carpool with their parents to pick all of you up.”
There was an unnaturally long silence. “Umm,” Veronica said. “Heather was, uh…thinking about it.”
“Oh, c’mon!” Shelby burst out. “Tell them already.” She poked her big sister and cackled. “Her friends all think it’s lame, but Tim Taylor is on the committee, so she wants to be on it, too.”
Veronica shoved her. “Shut up, Shel!”
“Who’s Tim Taylor?” Michael asked.
“Just a guy in my grade.” Veronica fidgeted with her fingernails and shot evil glares at her sister.
“A guy who likes her. A guy who wants to go out with her. Not just on a date. He wants to be with her forever and ever.”
“Shel. Shut. Up.”
But Shelby did not shut up. “He’s neighbors with my friend Krissie and rides her bus. And he keeps Veronica’s school picture from last year in his wallet. And he talks to his best friend the whole way to school about how beautiful Veronica is and how much he loves her and—”
Veronica slugged her sister.
“Ow!” Shelby bellowed.
“Ladies, stop that,” Michael commanded. Then, after a beat, “You gave this guy your school picture?”
“Arrrrghhh!” Veronica screeched. “Just gimme a break, okay? Is it a crime to wanna try something different? It’s just a stupid committee.”
“It’s not a crime, and you can absolutely try it, sweetheart,” Michael said, his voice soothing. “Has, er, Tim asked you out? To this dance or something?”
Their daughter forced the air out of her lungs like she was under doctor’s orders and, eventually, mumbled, “Maybe. Yeah, kinda.”
Michael grinned and winked again at Jennifer. “Maybe, yeah, kinda, eh? Well, he’s a guy with good taste.” Then, to Jennifer, “What do you think, honey? It seems our daughter has her first real date coming up.”
Jennifer sat paralyzed in the passenger’s seat, her heart pounding, her fingers gripping the permission slips with both hands. “It seems so,” she managed to say.
She stole a peripheral glance over her shoulder at her two girls: Shelby, a look of pride gracing her face, probably thrilled she’d succeeded in outing her sister, but Jennifer wasn’t certain. And, Veronica, wearing an expression Jennifer recognized all too clearly—caginess coupled with a simmering excitement. It was exactly what she’d felt when David asked her out for the first time. For her first date.
“So, you’ll sign the forms?” Veronica asked, trying desperately to appear nonchalant and not remotely capable of pulling it off.
Jennifer nodded, unwilling to grill her daughter yet on her relationship with this Tim guy or launch into the list of necessary cautions for dating teens but, oh, she had many questions and even more warnings. She couldn’t believe how Not Ready she was for this stage of parenthood. She forced herself to release her death grip on the permission slips and reach into the glove compartment for a pen.
The opening strains of “Hotel California” began to play and, for a moment, all four of them paused and listened to the haunting guitar solo that stirred her soul and inspired a sense of wanderlust. As the other instruments joined in, she took a deep breath. She could do this. She could put the past behind her so she’d be able to deal effectively with the present. She clicked the pen and glanced out the window. They were less than a mile from the mall.
Her cell phone beeped, making her jump. “Oh,” she said, laughing uneasily. The girls and even Michael rolled their eyes and shot her amu
sed looks.
“Someone’s texting you on a Sunday?” her husband asked, grinning. “Don’t they know this is a day of rest and mindless consumerism?”
She smiled faintly. “Guess not.” She flicked open her phone and pressed her lips together like Shelby had done earlier, an attempt to keep herself from gasping.
David.
His text message read: Zup? Abt 9-23, r u in? TML8r n LMK. (Translation: What’s up? About September 23rd, are you in? Text me later and let me know.)
“Anything important?” Michael asked.
“No.” She snapped the phone shut. “Just some computer stuff. I’ll take care of it when we get home.”
“Okay,” he said, and she knew he assumed she meant one of her Web design clients. She also knew how easy it was to mislead him.
When they’d pulled into the mall parking lot and finally hunted down a space, Michael and the girls jumped out immediately. Shelby, who was cold and regretted wearing only a T-shirt, wanted to extract her old unfashionable Windbreaker from the trunk, where it was buried under a picnic blanket and a few boxes. With everyone else out of the car and momentarily busy, Jennifer grabbed the opportunity to reply to David’s message.
She texted back: CU on 9-23. TTY 2moro. (See you on September 23rd. Talk to you tomorrow.)
Then she changed the setting on her phone to vibrate.
When the girls were in bed that night, she and Michael sat on the downstairs sofa with a couple mugs of decaf, reviewing their commitments for the upcoming week.
“We’ve got a staff meeting on Tuesday afternoon,” Michael said, “but I should still be able to swing by the school to pick up Veronica. She’ll be done by five?”
Jennifer nodded. “That’s what the form said.” She warmed her hands on her mug. “About this Homecoming Dance and this guy—”
“Tim Taylor,” Michael supplied with a smirk.
“Yes. Tim Taylor. Isn’t she too young for something like this?”
“A dance? Nah. It’s cute. It’s romantic. All of my students have crushes and go to overblown events like this. It’s natural at that age. They ‘date’ for two weeks and break up. And considering how well-adjusted Veronica is socially, I’m surprised there haven’t been more boys asking her out. Though, I guess, they’re doing that group-date thing for longer now.”
Jennifer remembered the many times she’d taken Veronica and her Twilight-loving friends to the movies or the mall only to have them meet up with a group of guys while they were there. They’d all go out for pizza or ice cream afterward, and it was dating of a sort, but it seemed far less worrisome than this one-on-one, formal dance situation. The kinds of things this Tim Taylor guy was saying to his buddy, well, it came across as so…possessive.
“Aren’t you concerned she’ll get too serious too fast?” she asked Michael. “This kid seems really into her. All this talk on the bus to his friend. I don’t know. I don’t want her to end up with some stalker guy.”
He laughed. “I see high school boys every day, honey. And, yes, they’re sex-crazed and insecure, but very few cross the line into stalkerdom.” He shot her one of his typical amused glances. “You’re really funny about this. You know what it’s like to be a teen. One minute you’re ‘in love’ with someone, the next you have no idea what you ever saw in them. I know you dated other people before me—”
“Not in high school, Michael.”
He shrugged. “So, okay, you were shy in high school. And I was awkward. Sometimes I’m still awkward around someone I’m trying to impress.” He shot her a sheepish look, blinked a couple times, then glanced away. “But even in college we were still trying to feel our way with the whole dating game. And we weren’t all that serious about the people we had relationships with back then, even when we were nineteen or twenty.”
Speak for yourself, she thought, but she only cleared her throat.
“And it’s not like either of us ended up getting engaged to anybody or anything,” he added. “Though I think you were a little more into that computer geek guy than I was into my college girlfriends.” He gulped the first half of his coffee. “What was his name again?”
“Who?” she whispered. Then, “David?”
“Yeah. David. I know he was your first real boyfriend and everything, but even you didn’t get all hung up on him forever after it ended. A few weeks, a month, sure, but you got over it. And you two dated for a lot longer than Veronica will probably be with this guy.” He took another slurp of his drink. “I’m not worried.”
Jennifer wished she could be so unaffected. Then again, this was yet another example of how Michael didn’t understand her. Yet another projection about her thoughts and emotions based on his thoughts and his emotions. So, fine. Michael may not have been hung up on any old girlfriends for longer than a week, but Veronica, if she were anything like her mother, could get hung up on a guy for two decades. And these were the kinds of things that Michael would never comprehend. Would never see.
But, of course, it wasn’t as though she could ever explain it to him. She took one sip of her now-tepid coffee and dropped the subject. What was the point?
As a silent reminder of her alternate reality, her phone pulsed in her right back pocket. She’d slipped it into her jeans and could feel it quivering between the denim folds. It’d been vibrating for the past hour, but she hadn’t wanted to steal away to check the message.
She knew it was from David. He’d already sent her two other texts after she’d replied to his first, the intimacy of his tone escalating exponentially, even in electronic form. And she, of course, had responded in private to both of those messages, too.
She feigned a yawn. “Well…good night,” she told Michael, kissing him lightly on the forehead. “You coming up?”
“In a little bit. I’m going to finish my coffee, maybe grade quizzes for a half hour down here.”
“Okay. Don’t stay up too late.”
He laughed, kind of. It was more like a snickery exhale and accompanied by a gaze she couldn’t readily identify. “Yeah, you either.”
She smiled carefully at him. “I’m going to bed right now.”
“What? No final e-mail check for the night?”
She shook her head.
He looked at her as though he wanted to believe her but didn’t. He’d been doing that more often lately, and she wasn’t sure what accounted for it. What signals he was receiving. “Well, okay, then. Sweet dreams,” he said.
“You, too.”
She dumped out her remaining coffee, meandered upstairs and then changed into her nightgown. Finally, when she couldn’t stand the suspense an instant longer, she locked herself in the master bathroom and flipped open her phone.
Cant W8 2 CU. Keep tkg abt it. R U?
Was she thinking about seeing David again? Oh, God, when had she ever stopped? Did lonely, geeky girls ever get over missing the hero who’d ridden into their lives and changed it forever? Who’d rescued them…and then run away?
Hell, no.
She typed: U know the answer. G-nite.
7
Bridget
Tuesday, September 14
“A month?” Bridget exclaimed when Candy told her the news that morning. “Dr. Nina’s going to be gone that long?” She glanced around the dental office. Though the waiting area bustled with patients, she all but hugged herself. Wow, would this place ever be peaceful without The Crab Lady snapping at everyone.
“She needs time to get her head together,” the hygienist explained. “At least that’s what she told Dr. Jim on the phone. And I wish her well but, boy, I’m not gonna miss the drama of last week. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone that pissed off. I thought for sure she’d crack Mrs. Kinney’s crown the way she kept jabbing her Remington Scaler at it. And poor Mr. Ashburg. She practically attacked him with a foot and a half of dental floss.”
Bridget remembered. There’d been a stream of traumatized patients at the gagging end of Dr. Nina’s magnified mouth mirror
last week, and you didn’t want to be anywhere near her number 14 metal probe. “Did you ever meet her husband? Has he come in before?” she asked.
Candy nodded. “A couple of times. Seemed like a nice enough guy, but you never really know about people.”
“True,” Bridget murmured.
Dr. Luke rounded the corner, his eyes crinkling at the corners when he spotted Bridget. “Hey, ladies. Who’s up next?”
“Mr. Ingersole at ten-fifteen,” Candy said.
Dr. Luke shook his head. “We’re racing today, aren’t we?”
Being one dentist short, it was going to be a busy week—heck, a busy month—for all of them but, still, Bridget preferred an absent Dr. Nina to a verbally abusive one. She pulled a sealed Tupper-ware container out of a plastic bag. “I know you won’t have any long breaks, but I brought something for you guys to try whenever you have a free moment.” She peeled the lid off the still-warm container. “It’s chestnut ravioli.” She glanced at their faces and both her friend and her favorite dentist looked bewildered and more than a little reticent. Her heart dropped to her knees. She’d worked for hours on this recipe. “I know it sounds like an…an odd dish, but I saw it in an Italian cookbook ages ago and always wanted to try it. It—It’s okay if you don’t like it or you think it’ll be—”
Dr. Luke clasped his hands together like a priest, reminding Bridget that she wasn’t the only Catholic in the office. “Bless you, Bridget,” he said, sounding very much like the monsignor at her mom’s old church. “You have no idea how much brighter you just made my day, do you?”
“Um,” she said, lost in the kindness of his deep brown eyes.
“I’ve never heard of chestnut ravioli,” Candy murmured, “but you’re putting my boring old ham-n-cheese sandwich to shame. I can’t wait to try it at lunch.”
“The hell with waiting for lunch,” Dr. Luke said, rummaging through one of the drawers for a box of toothpicks. He slid one out of the box and speared a plump ravioli with it.
Bridget watched him as he popped the whole thing into his mouth. She caught every one of his facial expressions as he savored and analyzed the taste—surprise, puzzlement, delight. She remained glued to his reaction as the flavor sensation washed over him and held her breath until he groaned.
Friday Mornings at Nine Page 9
