Claire Knows Best

by Tracey Bateman

Tenderness sweeps over his face. He looks at me as though memorizing every line (and believe me, there are plenty) and every contour. Tears well in my eyes. Before I can avert my gaze, his expression changes and I know he saw the tears. “Bye, Greg.” My heart feels like it’s being ripped from my chest as I walk the twenty yards to my doorstep.

  I feel his eyes on me and, mustering as much determination as I can, I squeeze my hands into fists. Like a well-trained soldier, I force my attention forward. Everything in me screams to turn around and run back to him. But I stand firm.

  I can’t be a pastor’s wife. The price is just too high.

  “Claire, why didn’t you call us? We would have come and picked you up.” Darcy’s voice scolds me over the phone.

  I’ve been trying to be really nice to Darcy lately. During her last ultrasound, her doctor said she’s a few weeks further along than they originally thought. Which is not fair. I always knew about two weeks after I was pregnant. Good for beginning prenatal care, but gee whiz, it makes the wait that much longer. This new date means Darcy was three full months pregnant at Christmastime when she found out. Which means she’s eight months along, raging with end-of-pregnancy hormones, exhausted from lack of sleep, and prone to unexplained and unprovoked tears. Which is why I have been trying to be nicer than usual. “To tell you the truth, Darce, I just called the first person who came to mind.”

  Oh, shoot. There’s zero chance she’ll let that pass without comment.

  “See? You still love Greg.”

  Do I know Darcy or what? I hate being right all the time. “What’s love got to do with it?”

  Hesitation gives silence a chance. I smirk.

  “Are you joking?”

  “A little bit.” But I’m serious, too. “Love isn’t the issue with Greg and me. It’s about where we want to be ten or twenty years from now. And our visions of tomorrow don’t match.”

  “A wife should adapt to her husband.”

  Excuse me while I barf.

  “Precisely why I will not be walking down the aisle with Greg.”

  “Oh, Claire, honestly. Sometimes you’re so stubborn.”

  Okay, enough of this. “Yes, well. I mainly called to let you know about my car situation. You’ll have to bring the kids home after church tomorrow.”

  “Want me to come get you for service? Rick is covering for Sam at the hospital, so he can’t go.”

  It’s on the tip of my tongue to say yes, then I remember Greg said they’d be announcing his departure tomorrow. If I know Pastor Devine, he’s going to make a big deal out of the whole thing. I would spend the entire service in tears.

  “I think I’ll pass. I’m not feeling real great.”

  “Claire,” she says softly. “You’ve missed several services in the past few weeks. Are you all right spiritually?”

  “What?” Irritation builds in me. “Yes, I’m fine. There’s just been a ton of stuff going on. You know that.”

  “Yeah.” It doesn’t take a mind reader to figure out that she’s not exactly convinced. I just can’t face Greg. But there’s no way I can tell Darcy.

  “Hey, look. Since Rick’s working, come in with the kids and I’ll fix us a great Sunday dinner, okay?”

  “I thought you weren’t feeling great.”

  “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, Darcy.” Okay, starting to lose cool. Must end conversation before gasket-blowing commences. “Do you want to stay or not?”

  “You know I’d love to.”

  So we leave it at that.

  The next day Ari shows up driving her dad’s Benz while Darcy drives her SUV. I stand at the door so that not one of my children can get past me without a hug. After all, I haven’t seen them since Friday.

  “Does your dad know you’re driving his car?” I ask after I turn Ari loose.

  “We dropped him at the hospital this morning.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  The boys give their obligatory hugs and run off to do their own things.

  Darcy holds out a set of keys. “Rick and I agree you need a car worse than I do right now. I hate to even get out of bed.” She struggles to sit. “I know Ari isn’t supposed to be driving, but Rick thought under the circumstances it would be okay.”

  I give a “that’s fine” nod, and Ari grins with victory. But no time to deal with Missy Smug-girl. “I can’t drive your SUV.” I can’t believe she’d even loan it to me.

  Shoving herself back so that the recliner footrest flies out, she stretches and grunts. “Don’t be silly. I can barely even fit under the wheel anymore. Rick’s been after me to stop driving until after the baby’s born anyway.”

  I stop just short of an insistent “What part of no don’t you get?” But the practical me realizes this is the ideal solution until I figure out what’s wrong with my van.

  I nod, and from the delicate lift of Darcy’s brow I can tell she expected more fight from me. A smile stretches her lips. “Oh, good. I didn’t feel like arguing.” The smile turns into a yawn. Her eyes close. “Do you need help with dinner?” she asks sleepily.

  I can’t resist a little laugh. The mother-to-be is already asleep, she just doesn’t know it yet. “Lay there and rest,” I say. “I’ll call you when it’s time to eat.”

  “Mmm… ’kay.”

  In a moment I can only attribute to gratefulness over Darcy’s loaning me the SUV, I slip her shoes from her swollen feet and set them next to the recliner. Then I snatch a light afghan from the couch and spread it over her. Being right under the air-conditioner vent, I assume she’ll cool off pretty quickly.

  “That was really nice, Mom.”

  I turn in surprise to find Ari at the bottom of the steps.

  “Well, Darcy’s really nice, too.” I smile at my girl. “Come to the kitchen with me while I finish dinner.”

  To my surprise and delight, she does so without so much as a rolling of the eyes, unless she does it behind my back—which is possible. “So,” I ask, pulling out the ingredients for a salad. “Did you have a good weekend?”

  She gives a little shrug and to my utter shock heads to the cabinet and pulls out the large white ceramic bowl I always use for salad. “I went out with Paddy last night.”

  “You two back together?”

  “I guess.” She takes a knife and the cutting board and sits at the table. I’m wondering if we’re in a real-life version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, because this is not the daughter I left at Rick and Darcy’s house on Friday.

  “Are you happy to be back with him?”

  She grins slowly. “Yeah.”

  Small talk takes over the conversation for the next few minutes until we finish making the salad. I stand and turn toward the oven. I figure the lasagna (homemade, not Stouffer’s) is just about ready.

  “Hey, Mom?”

  Trying to concentrate on not burning off my fingerprints, I give her a distracted “Huh?”

  I kick the oven door closed and feel panic rising as the heat begins to seep through the pot holders.

  “Can I go with Paddy and his parents to Mexico?”

  Good thing I am so close to the rack. I drop the lasagna onto the counter. “You want to go to Mexico?”

  Ari’s hopeful expression clouds over. “They’re going with a couple of other pastors’ families. They’re going to be building a church from the ground up.”

  My skeptical nature rises, along with the disappointment of knowing her true motives for being so nice to me. Darn it. Oh well, it’s not like I’ve actually lost anything. And I got a salad made.

  “If your dad pays for it, I don’t have any objections to you going with them. It’s in July, right?”

  Her face brightens about six shades. How can I be so happy for her after she blatantly set me up with her goodness to me? When she grabs me in a fierce hug, I know why.

  And who knows? Maybe the trip will do her some good.

  This week Emma and I are focusing on my feelings of inadequacy as a parent. Fifteen min
utes into the hour-long conversation and I’m still talking about Ari.

  “I just don’t know how to be close to her,” I’m complaining. “I look at Linda and Trish and they adore each other and sometimes I’m so jealous.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You mean, why am I jealous?”

  “Yes.”

  “Linda has a way of taking bad situations and turning them into learning experiences that Trish actually responds to.”

  For instance, the whole pizza situation. Trish has been good as gold ever since that night. Linda didn’t even have to ground her. Ari was livid with Rick and me about the fact that Trish was only reprimanded. I tell this to Emma.

  “Can you understand why she might be upset when her punishment is so severe and her friend’s is so light for the same offense?”

  I hesitate, because I do see why Ari would be upset. But the girl has done some crazy things. Sneaking out. Changing boyfriends like you’d change socks. I’m worried about her.

  Not the best thing to tell Emma.

  “I think Ari senses you don’t respect her or trust her to make the right decisions. So she automatically chooses the things she knows you wouldn’t want her to do.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  She pauses a second. Then: “You might sit her down and tell her you’re ungrounding her because you believe you can trust her not to behave so irresponsibly in the future.”

  As we hang up, a battle is raging inside of me. A war I have a feeling Ari is going to win.

  When a person’s phone rings at three in the morning, it can mean any number of things—rarely good. So, when mine rings, yanking my subconscious from a warm, comforting, passionate Greg-dream, I’m sorely tempted to ignore said ring. Especially when caller ID won’t reveal the caller.

  I really want to bury my head under my pillow and sink back into Greg’s arms. But then I wonder: Do hospitals show up on caller ID? What if Mom has had a stroke? The thought sends me popping up like a jack-in-the-box. I make a dash for the cordless before the hospital gives up.

  “Hello?”

  “Mom?” A young girl’s voice greets me from the other end. Definitely not a hospital. I breathe a sigh of relief, knowing my own little girl is safely tucked away in her own bed, just down the hall from me, sound asleep.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, in my most sympathetic and motherly (because, doesn’t it take a village?) voice. “I think you have the wrong number, hon.”

  “It’s me, Mom.” I hear tears in this child’s voice. And something familiar in the way she sniffles.

  Ari?

  I never knew it was possible for fear to grip every muscle and tendon of your body in one split second. But that’s what it does as my mind wraps around the fact that while I’ve been blissfully dreaming of being in Greg’s arms, my daughter has not been in her bed where I thought she was.

  “Where are you?”

  A sob bursts from her and she begins to babble, slurring her words and I have not a clue what she’s trying to convey, other than the fact that she’s apparently hammered and in some sort of trouble.

  “Ari! Ari, stop crying and talk to me.”

  She’s so hysterical, she’s making me hysterical, and that’s not going to do either of us any good.

  “Ms. Everett?”

  A male voice. Also familiar.

  “Who is this? If you’ve hurt my daughter, I’ll…”

  “It’s me, Ms. Everett. Patrick Devine.”

  “Paddy? What the heck is going on? Why is my daughter calling me crying in the middle of the night instead of sleeping like I thought she was?” And what do you have to do with it, bucko? But inwardly, I’m relieved to hear she is with Paddy. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to kill them both, but at least I know she’s safe. “Never mind. Just put her back on the phone.”

  “Uh, I can’t.”

  “What do you mean you can’t? You’d better do as I say right now.”

  He clears his throat. Never a good sign. My lungs begin to burn and I realize I’ve been holding my breath. Air leaves my throat with a cool whoosh. “Spit it out, Patrick. What’s going on? And don’t lie to me. I can smell a lie a mile off.”

  “Ari was at a party.”

  “What? You encouraged my daughter to sneak out of the house and took her to a party?” I’m burning up now. No, I’ve passed burning. I’m flat-out burned up. Last year he talked his way out of being caught red-handed kissing another girl, but he’s not going to be able to talk his way out of this one.

  “No, ma’am. I didn’t take her to a party. She called me from the party. She was—uh—dumped by some college guy. And if I ever get my hands on him…”

  “Okay, spare me the macho garbage. There is no way my daughter would go off to a party on her own with someone I don’t know.”

  My mind skitters back to the incident at the pizza place with the college guy. Apparently I don’t know my daughter as well as I thought I did. What is it with her and older men?

  “All right. Let’s start over.” I take a deep breath. “Where is my daughter?”

  “In my car. I’m driving her home as we speak.”

  I imagine Ari passed out in the backseat of this teenage kid’s sports car.

  “All right. Why did she call you instead of me?”

  “Fear?”

  “Fear? Of me?”

  I get a “think about it” silence. I guess I do tend to overreact. Or more precisely, act outside of the norm. I’m not crazy about Patrick driving and talking on the phone at the same time. But I can’t bear the thought of losing this connection to Ari until I can actually see for myself that she’s all right. “How close are you to getting here?”

  “Pulling into the parking lot right now.”

  I glance out the window and, sure enough, the Mustang is pulling into one of the few empty spaces. With all my motherly indignation, relief, anger, and overwhelming joy to see my daughter home safely, I fling open the door. In my SpongeBob SquarePants pajamas and an oversized T-shirt, I run barefoot from my door to Patrick’s car.

  My view of Ari is pretty close to the one I had envisioned, only she’s in the front seat, and not the back.

  “Thanks for bringing her home, Paddy.”

  He nods and motions me aside. With the kind of tenderness normally reserved for men ten years his senior, he leans in, unhooks my daughter’s seat belt, and gently lifts her from the car. I lead the way inside.

  “Lay her on the couch and then come into the kitchen and tell me everything you know.”

  Trembling, I fill the teakettle and set it on a burner. Then I roam the cabinets for anything herbal and non-caffeinated, grab a chamomile teabag, and sit at the table waiting for the kettle to whistle.

  Patrick steps partway into the kitchen and leans against the wall. The kid’s face is white as a sheet and I start to see this whole thing through his eyes. Ari uses him when she’s alone and blows him off whenever she gets a better offer. My Ari? At this moment, I don’t like my daughter very much.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  With a swipe of thick dark hair, he takes a seat in the chair I kick out across from me.

  “Don’t leave anything out,” I warn. “I’ll eventually get it all out of her anyway.”

  He nods miserably. “She called me because…”

  I hold up my hand. “Wait. Back up the story and tell me how she got to a college-boy party in the first place.”

  “She met this guy at the apartment pool. He thought she was in college, too, so he invited her to go.”

  “Oh, gee, I wonder who could have possibly led him to believe she was a coed.”

  His lip twitches a little and I know the poor kid got the joke. I feel a little guilty for rubbing salt into the wound. “Sorry, Paddy. Go on.”

  “That’s about it, I guess.”

  “Do I even want to know how she got to the party? And please, don’t say Trish was there, too.”

  “No.“ He glances aro
und the parking lot and that’s when I notice Darcy’s SUV is missing! I gasp. Oh, she is in so much trouble.

  “The party didn’t even get started until around ten. So it wasn’t in full swing until midnight. She waited until she knew you were settled in for the night and snuck out.”

  That explains that. I was down for the count long before midnight. I groan. “With Darcy’s SUV. Please tell me she didn’t wreck it?”

  “No. At least she knew better than to drink and drive.” He gives me a look of compassion.

  I am amazed at how clueless I am. I’ve always prided myself on my savvy sense of reality. The way I hardly ever take anything at face value, but rather fall back on cynicism and sarcasm as my way of getting to the truth of any issue. Keeping it real, rather than allowing anyone to pull the wool over my eyes. Only guess what? This kid—my sixteen-year-old daughter—has me totally blinded. I’ve been one of those moms. The kind who insists that all the other kids are bad, but my kid would never ever drink or have sex.

  My heart jumps into my throat and forms a boulder-sized lump. “So, this college jerk plied her with alcohol and then what?”

  His jaw twitches and anger flashes in his baby blues. “He took her upstairs…”

  Oh, Lord.

  “Apparently, that’s where the real party was. He tried to get her to do cocaine.”

  Oh, thank God. Wait. What? “Cocaine?”

  “Yeah. Thankfully, she had enough presence of mind to tell him where to get off. Then she called me from her cell. And I made her call you to prepare you for her condition.”

  I am so filled with love and gratitude for this kid. I reach across the table and pat his hand. “Thank you for being there for her.”

  He nods. “I’ll be over tomorrow to see her.”

  Something in the way he says it sends a shot of sadness through me. “Had all you can take, huh?”

  His shoulders lift and lower. “Yeah.” When his gaze reaches mine, I detect a glimmer of moisture.

  Ari, open your eyes, you foolish girl!

  And just like that, she appears, clutching her stomach, her eyes wide with horror as she breezes past us into the half bath right off the kitchen. Patrick and I sit in silence as my daughter hurls in the next room. I hear her moan, and I know she’s dropped to the floor, exhausted and miserable.