Single in Suburbia

by Wendy Wax

  Digital flashes erupted and the groups were framed and rearranged, until every permutation had been covered. Wyatt stood nearby, snapping pictures when she was too teary-eyed to do it. Then the limo driver rang the bell. Parents issued warnings while kids rolled their eyes and began their good-byes.

  “Wait a second.” Hunter grabbed Amanda by the arm and moved her next to Meghan. Then he motioned Wyatt over and took the camera from him. “Hold on while I get a last Sheridan shot. That’s it, big smiles.”

  Amanda stood between her children and did as she was instructed.

  “That’s great,” Hunter said, his smile genuine and his warmth contagious. “Let’s get one more.”

  This time Amanda looked deep into the camera lens and by extension into Hunter James’s eyes. The contact left her feeling slightly breathless and more than a little daring. In fact, she was in such a good mood, she didn’t even scold Wyatt when he formed his fingers into bunny ears and raised them up behind her and Meghan’s heads.

  chapter 15

  H unter James is famous?” Candace, still looking much too well dressed for concession stand duty, stood beside the grill the next day while Amanda flipped burgers.

  “Evidently.” Amanda smashed the burger flatter and watched the flames flare up. “Wyatt knew all of his statistics from the moment he was drafted into the majors.”

  “I understand his personal statistics are pretty impressive too.” Candace waggled her eyebrows and did a Grouchoesque flicking of an imaginary cigar.

  “We are not even going to go there,” Amanda said.

  “Why not?”

  Amanda rearranged the burgers on the grill. “Because Hunter James is too…attractive. Too…well known. Too…everything. And thanks to Susie Simmons, who has more than a passing interest of her own in him, he’s about to become a client.” She waved the smoke away from their faces with the spatula. “I don’t think he’s looking to get involved with his cleaning woman.”

  “That is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard you say.”

  “Stupider than worrying that the man you’re dating is too kind and too easy to be with?” Amanda asked.

  “That’s different.” Candace retrieved the platter of buns from the prep table and held it out for Amanda.

  “In what way?”

  “Well…” Candace waited while Amanda slipped the burgers inside the buns. “I’m worrying that he may not be enough for me. I’m not worrying that I may not be enough for him.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Here’s the mustard.” Brooke rushed up from the parking lot, clutching a large grocery bag. “I brought extra buns too.”

  Skittering to a stop, she followed Amanda and Candace into the concession stand, where a lone and very ancient box fan circulated air. At a back counter she unpacked the things she’d brought then turned to face Amanda and Candace, who were studying her carefully.

  “What?” Brooke glanced down at the scoop-necked T-shirt she wore and double-checked the zipper on her shorts. “What are you looking at?”

  “You,” Candace said. “You were annoyingly perfect before. Now you’re approaching nauseating. What did you have done?”

  Amanda gave her the once-over, too, but didn’t press. They all knew that was Candace’s forte.

  Brooke shrugged and crossed her arms over her chest. “Nothing major.”

  They continued to study her in silence.

  “Just a chemical peel and a few injections. Collagen here.” She pointed to the spot under her eyes. “Botox there.” She traced her lip with the same finger. “The doctor thought I could wait awhile for the, uh, eye tuck.”

  “Why on earth would you need those things?” Amanda started wrapping the burgers in foil. “That plastic surgeon must have a child headed for college.”

  “I don’t know,” Brooke said quietly. “I was a little surprised myself at all the things Dr. LaPrada recommended. I went in thinking I was pretty solidly constructed and found out I was a fixer-upper.”

  Together they wrapped the burgers in foil and set out the condiments.

  “Well, I think it’s a waste of time and money,” Amanda said. “You look great. So great that some of us don’t even want to stand next to you.”

  Brooke smiled her thanks to Amanda. “I appreciate the vote of support,” she said then averted her gaze.

  “You’re thinking it’s money well spent,” Candace said, and Amanda could tell from Brooke’s start of surprise that Candace was right on target. The poor girl wasn’t yet thirty and had only been married a year and she was already worrying about holding on to her husband.

  “You have so much more to offer than your appearance, Brooke,” Amanda said quietly. “Don’t let Hap miss out on knowing the real you.”

  “That sounds great, Amanda. Your confidence in me is…encouraging. But what if I introduce him to the real me and he prefers the me he married? What happens then?”

  “Well, whoever she decides to be, there’s nothing wrong with keeping up her beauty regimen,” Candace said. “But you better be careful, Brooke. You start all this now and they’ll be lifting your face from your knees by the time you’re forty.”

  Candace’s cell phone rang. Seeing her mother’s number on the caller ID, she groaned aloud, but answered on the fourth ring. “Hello, Mother.”

  Amanda and Brooke shot her sympathetic looks and stepped away to give her privacy.

  “No, I told you I was helping in the concession stand today.” She braced herself for an argument, but her mother surprised her.

  “I know, Candace. And I also know you wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity to say hello to Stanley and Minna.”

  “But I’m—”

  “I told them you had to help out your friends.” The calm reasonable tone told Candace she must already be with the Jacobses.

  “Mother—”

  “And Stanley was able to rearrange his afternoon so that you could join us for coffee and dessert.”

  “But—”

  “We’ve even met you halfway. We’re at The Cheesecake Factory at Perimeter Mall. So it shouldn’t take you long to get here.”

  “Mother, I told you—”

  Candace never got to finish her sentence because Hannah Bloom had already hung up. And, she discovered after trying to redial her twice, had apparently stopped answering her phone.

  Dan arrived at the concession stand just as Candace was getting ready to leave.

  “How’d it go?” she asked as she removed her apron and hung it on a nearby hook.

  “Another heartbreaker.” He came into the stand and moved toward her. “When our defense is on, we can’t seem to connect with the ball. When our bats come alive, we seem to have holes in our gloves.” He shook his head in disgust then took the Gatorade Candace pulled out of the cooler for him. For the first time, he noticed the purse slung over her arm. “Where are you off to? I thought we were going out for lunch.”

  “My mother called. I have to meet her and some friends.”

  He cocked his head. “But I thought you told her you were busy.”

  “I did. But they moved their timetable back and they’re sitting in a restaurant waiting for me.”

  His gaze was calm but assessing. “She doesn’t want you to be with me and she’s manipulating you.”

  “I know. And I know that should make it easier to refuse. But she’s my mother and she needs me.” She went up on tiptoe to give him a kiss. “I can’t just leave her sitting there.”

  With a wave she was out of the concession stand and crossing the parking lot to her car. And then she was on the highway heading south, wishing that she wasn’t.

  Hunter James was the first client who actually looked Solange in the eye, which was very satisfying as a woman and very unsettling as an imposter.

  She rang the doorbell of his impressive Tudor-style home at nine on Tuesday morning, clutching her pail of supplies and vacuum in front of her. She held her breath, hoping there’d
be no answer and that she’d find the key stashed under the mat so that there’d be no need to pantomime and pretend. But the heavy hobnailed door swung open, and she had to crane her neck to stare up into the not-yet-shaven face of Hunter James.

  He was wearing running shoes and shorts. A well-worn T-shirt advertising a baseball bat manufacturer stretched across his chest. And he was staring back, right into her artificially blue eyes.

  Afraid to give him too much time to look and think, she juggled her things and stuck her right hand out in a briskly professional greeting. “Monsieur James? I am Solange. Candace Sugarman has sent me.”

  She clamped her mouth shut as their hands met. Tiny little sparks of awareness fired at the touch making her forget who she was. And who she was supposed to be.

  Dropping her gaze and her hand, she tried to think subservient maid-like thoughts, as opposed to “this is a hot hunk of man” thoughts, but she was still working on it when he invited her in.

  The smell of coffee and a lingering scent of syrup hit her. The morning paper sat open on the counter, a coffee mug anchoring it in place. Three plates and two glasses sat in the sink, rinsed but not yet in the dishwasher, and she thought how like her own morning kitchen it felt. She wondered if he got up and made breakfast for the girls or whether they were the ones who fed him.

  She liked the kitchen. It was larger and newer than her own, definitely more “gourmet,” and yet the room was still warm and lived-in, cozily done. Not the bastion of male chaos she’d been expecting, but not obsessively neat and organized like Susie Simmons’s either. If she’d been Goldilocks, she would have proclaimed this particular kitchen “just right.” Ditto for the papa bear.

  He offered her coffee, which she declined with as few words as possible. And then they stood there assessing each other for several long moments, which she knew was a very bad idea. Her disguise was a good one, and Lord knew she loved Solange like herself, but it was unlikely to stand up to serious scrutiny.

  “Would you like for me to start on zee upstairs or zee bottom?” she asked in Solange’s accent, though she couldn’t help noticing that her attraction to Hunter James left even Solange feeling slightly off-kilter. Remember who you are, she cautioned herself. And remember why you’re here.

  “Your English is very good,” he said.

  Uh-oh. Had he already seen through her? Or was he merely offering her a compliment?

  “Thank you. English is almost like my, how do you say, native tongue?” She shrugged and smiled, trying not to let her eyes lock with his like they kept wanting to. “Thees is such the land of opportunity. A person can become almost anything she chooses to be.” Like a faux French maid, for example.

  There was an exploratory bark from behind a closed door nearby followed by another, more frantic one.

  “Fido’s ready for his run.” Hunter moved toward what she guessed must be the laundry room door and reached for a leash that hung nearby. “Why don’t you start downstairs so I can shower when I get back? That way I won’t mess up your work.”

  She was thinking that Solange would not at all mind being messed up by Hunter James, when he opened the laundry room door and Fido, the crotch-seeking missile, hurtled toward her.

  The Lab’s claws beat a tattoo on the wood floor as he closed the gap between them, barked…happily? then shoved his muzzle directly between her legs.

  “Shit!” she exclaimed in a very un-Solange-like way. “I mean, merde!”

  “Down boy!” Hunter grabbed Fido’s collar and yanked him away. “No!”

  Hunter snapped the lead onto Fido’s collar and held him to heel. Sort of.

  The dog kept lunging toward her, the leash stopping him just short of her promised land. Hunter James was looking directly at her, a considering look on his face. “He’s wagging his tail like he’s met you before.”

  The dog had an I’d-know-that-crotch-anywhere wag?

  “How unfortunate that it is the dog rather than the owner who wishes to stick his face in my crotch,” she quipped in French, while she put space between Fido and herself.

  An expression of surprise passed over Hunter’s face, but he made no comment as he led Fido toward the front door.

  “The basement’s down here.” He stopped to point at a door just past the kitchen.

  “Good,” she said. “I weel begin.” Still flustered, she turned and went through the door and down the carpeted steps. Above her the front door opened and closed.

  “Phew!” Breathing deeply, Amanda looked around the basement trying to get her bearings. It was one large room that seemed to run the length and width of the house and had been arranged into separate areas. One featured a big screen TV opposite a corduroy pit group. Beyond that a regulation-size pool table stood near a pub table and chairs. The bar, which was made of gleaming wood, curved out of one corner and had a mirror with glass shelves behind it; not too flashy or overtly macho, but well stocked for entertaining.

  The far area catered to the teen set. It had Ping-Pong and air hockey tables. Against one wall there was an old-fashioned pinball machine.

  The posters and plexi-cased memorabilia were sports oriented and included a collection of old-time baseball gloves that Wyatt would swoon over, but there was nothing about Hunter James or his major league pitching career. The man evidently didn’t feel the need to toot his own horn.

  By the time she’d finished in the basement and moved back to the main floor, she was feeling a bit more relaxed and starting to hit her cleaning stride. She dusted and tidied the main floor, loaded the dishwasher, then headed upstairs to strip the beds and get the wash started.

  In Samantha’s room, with its telltale bulletin board covered in dance recital programs, a group of framed photos on the nightstand drew her.

  The first was of Hunter James in a Baltimore Orioles uniform with a long-limbed brunette tucked under his arm, both of them achingly young and smiling brightly for the camera. The next was of the brunette, her hair pulled back, the top of a hospital gown visible at her shoulders, as she stared down into the squinched-up face of the newborn in her arms. The next was a family shot, years later, the four Jameses. Hunter was wearing a different uniform this time, and each adult balanced a toddler on one hip, a ballpark stadium she didn’t recognize in the background.

  The last was of the woman, older, but still beautiful, in a studio pose that showed straight white teeth behind a wide smile. Her warm brown eyes shone with what Amanda assumed was happiness.

  The same studio photo sat on Julie’s nightstand along with a different collection of shots, the first and last thing the girls would see when they went to sleep and woke up in the morning.

  While she started the first load of wash, Amanda imagined the James family as it had been when it was whole. Had they been as happy as they’d looked in the photos? Had Hunter James been faithful to the hopeful-looking dark-haired woman? If his wife hadn’t died, would he have traded her in like Rob had traded her? Or would they, even now, be living happily ever after?

  In the master suite, the sound of the shower reached her through the closed double doors. Her imaginings took a different turn, focusing in very concrete terms on the man who slept in the bed she was stripping. And who even now was standing in the shower on the other side of the double doors. Presumably naked. While water sluiced down his body.

  She was still removing the sheets and pillowcases when the shower stopped. The shower door opened and closed with a decided click. Which meant Hunter James was probably rubbing a thick, man-sized towel over his lusciously man-sized—and presumably still naked—body.

  Mouth suddenly dry, Amanda tried not to picture it; told herself not to even imagine it, but she could think of nothing else. She could pretend all she wanted that she was bold and worldly and French, but in reality she was Amanda Sheridan, and the only man she’d seen naked in the past eighteen years was Rob.

  Fido barked, mercifully from outside this time, the kind of mad barking that usually signified a mailm
an or a cat in the yard. The phone on the bedside table beside her rang and the movements in the master bath grew louder and more hurried.

  It was then that she realized that Hunter James was probably going to rush into the bedroom to answer the phone. And that he might still be naked when he did it.

  Frozen to the spot, she cast about for a means of escape. Or camouflage. She wished briefly that she could wiggle her nose like Nicole Kidman in the new Bewitched and disappear altogether.

  But the bathroom door was already opening and Hunter James was striding through it. She squeezed her eyes closed and yanked the sheets up in front of her face. The air moved beside her, giving off a heady whiff of soap and man, and the phone stopped ringing in mid-shrill.

  “Hello?” Hunter’s voice sounded directly beside her. She was still cowering behind a wall of sheets and had no idea what to do.

  “Oh, hey, Marty. Yes, that would be good. Yeah, I’ve got a game schedule. I’ll e-mail it to you.”

  He was quiet for a moment and then he said, “No, not right now. I’ve got something I have to take care of.”

  Deprived of her sight, she could actually hear the amusement slip into his voice like it often did into his eyes. He was probably getting a good-sized yuck out of the fact that his flamboyant French maid was hiding behind his sheets in an effort not to look at him.

  God, she hoped that something he had to take care of wasn’t Solange.

  She began to back up, but she couldn’t see and the way the blood was whooshing through her veins left her disoriented and uncertain of her direction. She took another step. Her shoulder knocked into a wall.

  Of hard naked flesh.

  She froze. And hid behind the sheets like an ostrich with its head in the sand.

  The phone was placed in its cradle. A hand touched one of hers and lowered it, bringing the shield of sheets with it until they were bunched in front of her waist instead of her face.

  Because she really had no choice, she opened her eyes slowly. One at a time. And turned her head.