The Grass Could Be Greener

by Constance Masters

  “Are you really sorry this time?” he asked gently.

  She nodded. “Yes. Really.”

  “Good.” He leaned over and patted her awkwardly on the shoulder, not really wanting to share the same intimacy of a hug that he would with his wife.

  “Tomorrow’s a new day,” he said warmly. “How about some tea. I’m buying?”

  “You’re going to make it for me?”

  “Yes, I’m going to make it for you. Call it a peace offering. Maybe it’s time we sat and got know each other a little.”

  “I’d like that,” she said. It’d be nice to have a real conversation where they each spoke and listened to each other. So far she felt like all they’d done was talk at each other.

  *****

  Jamie had never been a real tea drinker, especially not hot tea. She was more of a vanilla latte girl. This though was good. It was hot and sweet and creamy at the same time.

  “Would you like a cookie?” Joe asked.

  “I’m allowed to have a cookie?”

  Joe couldn’t help but smirk. “You’ve taken your punishment. I think I can let you have a cookie.”

  Jamie pushed off the counter she was leaning against long enough to take a cookie from the jar that Joe was proffering. “Thanks.”

  “You don’t want to sit down?” he asked with a grin.

  Even though he was being a smart–ass at her expense, she giggled. It was odd. It was like someone took a big sponge and some soapy water and cleared the air. He looked so much younger when he smiled. She bet this was the side that Sarah saw, well some of it at least. He must have something that made her want to prop him up on a pedestal.

  “Penny for them.”

  “Sorry?” Jamie said having been shaken out of her reverie. “Oh, it’s nothing. I was just thinking that you seem younger and happier. Whaling the tar out of me has obviously lightened your mood.”

  “It seems to have lightened yours, too.”

  “Maybe,” she said shyly.

  “Tell me about your life. I mean, you know everything about us and I don’t know much of anything about you.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Do you like your life?”

  That threw her. She expected him to ask about her job or her children, even about Jeremy. “Yes. No... well mostly, sometimes.”

  “Ok. So what exactly are you confused about?”

  “Sometimes nothing and sometimes everything. No one’s totally happy with everything in their life are they?”

  “I am. Are you happy in your marriage?”

  “I thought so,” she said. A wave of misery washed over her as the memory of Jeremy’s secret agreement hit her again. She blew out a breath to try to stave off the tears that were threatening.

  “I’m happy to listen. Sometimes another person’s point of view can help put a different slant on things.”

  “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “You can’t beat the beginning.”

  Jamie sighed. “Okay, but I’m going to need another cookie.”

  Joe chuckled and passed her the barrel. “Help yourself,” he said.

  “We have a good life. We have two beautiful little princesses. We have nice things. I have a job I love. I thought Jeremy was happy with what we have.”

  “What makes you think he’s not?”

  “Can I show you something?”

  “Sure, if you want to. No pressure.”

  “I’ll go get it.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “You don’t have anything that will add a little heat to that tea do you?”

  “No Miss, I don’t.”

  “Just asking.”

  “Just telling.”

  *****

  Jamie picked up the piece of paper and caught sight of the iPad. Her notes. She could spare a minute, she thought.

  Tonight was the night. Joe spanked me. It hurt LIKE HELL. Like a thousand bees had embedded their little stingers on my ass and then died. Strangely though, apart from my sore ass, I feel ok. I’m confused about some other stuff that surprised me but this thing I think is ok. Joe was so mad at me and now, he doesn’t seem to be anymore. He’s being...well nice.

  She went to leave and then came back when she remembered something.

  I have learned at least one thing for sure. Hot sweet tea is very good and I need to learn to make homemade cookies.

  *****

  Back in the kitchen, Jamie took a sip of her tea. “When we talked about doing this, Jeremy wasn’t very into it. He was worried that he didn’t know where I was going or what kind of people you’d be.”

  “That’s a very normal reaction. I was worried about the same thing.”

  “Yeah. Well that’s what I thought too. I told you I didn’t read the contracts.”

  “Hmm,” he said disapprovingly.

  “Anyway, that’s why I didn’t see this when I signed.” She passed him the piece of paper.

  “He sounds bitter.”

  “I know. He sounds like he hates me.”

  “No, I don’t see that at all.”

  “Really?”

  “No. I see the words of a desperate man whose wife won’t listen to him.”

  “That’s not fair!” she said, tears once again springing to her eyes. “Everything is always my fault! How can I listen to a man who doesn’t say anything? Do you know how many times I’ve come home to find him in the guest room? A lot! If he’d told me he was unhappy we could have worked on it but he doesn’t say anything.”

  “Where were you coming home from? Work? It must have been late for him to have gone to bed.”

  “Different places. Work sometimes.”

  “You’re not having an affair!”

  “No! Of course not! I have these friends at work – girls – and they’re single.”

  “Ahh,” Joe said.

  “What ahh?”

  “You go out with your friends to party while your husband is at home with your children?”

  “Well no. Not really party. More like a couple of drinks after work.”

  “After work. So it wasn’t actual work?”

  “Not exactly,” Jamie admitted guiltily when he said nothing but looked dumbfounded. “What?”

  “You know what,” he said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was just relaxing after work.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do say so. Is it so wrong to have a couple of friends to unwind with?”

  Joe raised his eyebrows.

  “You don’t have a right to make me feel guilty.”

  “I haven’t said anything.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “Do you know why that is?”

  Jamie shrugged.

  “You feel guilty not because of anything I’ve said but because you know that you haven’t been taking your husband’s feelings into account.”

  “Well of course you’d think that. You think the husband’s opinion is the only one that counts.”

  “That’s not true. That isn’t even close to being true. Sarah wants me to be the head of the house. It makes her feel safe and gives her the kind of security she always wanted but never felt she had growing up.”

  “Oh.” She’d just assumed Joe had insisted Sarah toe the line. “Did she have a bad childhood?”

  “I think we were talking about you, weren’t we?”

  “I was just curious.”

  “Hmm. Getting back to your problem, I think you and Jeremy need to have a big talk about what bothers him and what bothers you and what’s best for Sophie and Poppy.”

  “I always do what’s best for Sophie and Poppy!” she said. “I want them to have everything they need.”

  “I wasn’t talking about material things.”

  “What makes you think I was? Besides, Jeremy makes sure he’s there in the afternoons so Caroline our nanny can go home.”

  “If you were talking about non–material things, the
n you would be top of the list. Children need both parents. From what you’ve said, Jeremy adjusts his hours to care for the girls. Maybe you need to spend more family time too.”

  “I play with Sophie and Poppy every chance I get.”

  “They don’t need a friend, Jamie. They need a mother.”

  “You and Sarah aren’t perfect, you know. Your kids need to have some fun.”

  “They have fun.”

  “They have good clean fun that is decided on in advance by you and Sarah.”

  “There’s not going to be any other kind of fun but the good clean fun for our kids.”

  “I get that Joe, but if you’ve raised them right, then maybe you could give them the benefit of the doubt occasionally. I’m not suggesting you open the front door and send them into the world to go crazy. Let them pick a fun activity or weekend sport that was just for them. Somewhere they could make friends.”

  “Maybe,” Joe said. “For now though, time to turn in.”

  Jamie got up to help with the cups. “Thanks,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For listening and for being nice.”

  “I have been a bit distant, haven’t I?”

  “Hmm. I don’t know if distant is the word. Plain old cranky springs to mind.”

  Joe chuckled. “Maybe. This hasn’t been easy for me.”

  “I haven’t been that hard to get along with, have I? I’ve tried.”

  “You’ve tried hard, I know that. It’s just that I love my wife and I didn’t want to do anything that would make her feel uncomfortable when she looks back on this one day. I guess I was scared of coming across as too familiar. I’m sorry if I was a bit bossy.”

  “So does that mean you’re sorry you spanked me?”

  “No. You deserved that spanking and you know it,” he said, flicking her with a dishtowel. “Now I’m going to go to bed. I have work tomorrow.”

  *****

  Jamie’s shirt dropped off her finger leaving her naked in front of the full-length mirror on the closet door. Finally able to give in to her curiosity, she turned to have a look at her battered bottom. She was fascinated to find her bottom was a pretty shade of pink with a few darker pink splotches and finger marks. She kind of thought it would be more damaged. It felt like it should be red raw.

  She tugged a nightshirt over her head and picked up her iPad to put down her final thoughts for the night.

  “Joe is not the man I thought he was. He is so much more and so much less. Dare I say it? I may have been wrong about the way these people think. About some of the way these people live.”

  Chapter 8

  Sarah stood with a clipboard in hand ready for the dramatic reveal of her ‘rules’. At times it was easy to forget that this would eventually all be chopped up to make an hour-long program. She was genuinely excited. She’d missed being a stay–at–home mom and now was her chance to show Jeremy what it was like to have a wife that didn’t work.

  “From now on, when you go to work, you’ll concentrate on your work day and make decisions that will further your career. I will take care of things here.”

  Caroline’s eyes widened. “I’m fired?” she asked.

  “No, of course not. Unless you want to retire,” Sarah replied, sounding the older woman out on what the girls had told her. By the end of the week, she’d figured out that most of what they said could be halved to find the truth.

  “No, not entirely,” she said. “But I would love to cut back my hours.”

  “The trouble is, Jamie will come back and things will go back to normal,” Jeremy said.

  “I want to talk to you about that, too. Amy at work has told me that she offered Jamie a schedule that could include her working from home.”

  “She did?” Jeremy asked. “Jamie didn’t say anything.”

  “Hmm,” Sarah said. “That’s part of what I want to talk about. You and Jamie need to be on the same page about everything.”

  “I want that,” Jeremy said. “How to get to that point though is the mystery.”

  “Caroline, I’ll miss you this week, especially since I’m home and we would have had more time to catch up.” She passed her new friend a check to cover her pay to make up for the disruption of her normal routine. It had already been pre–approved by the production company of the show.

  “Thank you, Sarah,” Caroline said, picking up her bag and saying her goodbyes. “Give the girls a kiss for me when they wake up from their naps, will you two?” She patted Jeremy’s shoulder on the way out.

  “Of course. Have fun, Caroline,” Jeremy said with a smile. “You deserve it.”

  “Now that Caroline’s gone, I want to talk to you about something little more personal. You didn’t have any inkling that Jamie could have worked from home if she wanted to?”

  “No.”

  “That’s a worry, Jeremy, and what’s even more of a worry is that I’m not even sure that you’ll even talk to her about that when she gets home.”

  “What can I say? I can’t make her stay home if she doesn’t want to.”

  “You can tell her that you’d like her to work from home at least some of the time. You can tell her that you’re not putting in at work completely because you have to take up the slack at home.”

  “I guess I could do that, but she loves her career and I can’t ask her to give it up completely.”

  “But she can ask you to sacrifice yours? Then there’s Caroline.”

  “What about Caroline?”

  “The fact that she wants to cut back her hours and you and Jamie talked her into staying full time.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Sarah sighed. “I think my information may be a bit off centre but it’s true. She said so herself today.”

  “Who else told you that?”

  “Amy said that your nanny had wanted to retire for a while and you – meaning the two of you – had talked her into staying.”

  “It wasn’t me, if that conversation did take place.”

  Sarah put her hands up in question. “Maybe it didn’t, but how would Amy know anything about it?”

  “Good point.”

  “Look. I think you need to maybe surprise Jamie with an office. Show her that she can work from home at least some of the time and that you’re supportive of her career, but at the same time, you’re not going to take her misusing the truth or manipulating situations and people like puppets. You, most of all.”

  “I try to let her know that I’m not happy with her choices.”

  “No, you don’t. You think you do because you think she can read your mind.”

  “No, she should know what she’s done wrong if she just choses to not come home.”

  “Yes, she should. That doesn’t matter. She still needs to hear it. I’m not telling you that you should spank your wife. Those choices are between you and her and they’re nothing to do with me. I have to tell you though that when my Joe punishes me, the lecture he gives me is a very large part of the whole scenario. By the time he’s finished with even just warning me about something, I am left in no doubt. It is imbedded in my memory banks like nails in a new fence. There’s no way I could ever get away with saying I didn’t know. I know and we both know I do. If I repeat that thing then I’m making a decision to do it at my own peril.”

  “When I sleep in the guest room, I’m not pouting as such. I’m letting her stew in her own juices. Leaving her time to think.”

  “And that works?”

  “Not so much.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Ok. I’ll think about it. You make some good points.”

  “I hope so. You need to put your foot down. The next thing is that this week I’m going to teach the girls some things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “For Sophie, some simple letters and sounds. Maybe some easy to read books. How to write her name.”

  “She’s a little young.”

  “No, she’s not
. She’s not too young to do a few simple chores either. We start our kids from the time they can walk to do little things. It gives them a sense of purpose.”

  “They’re just babies.”

  “I know, but this way doing things for themselves and others, getting that family teamwork happening comes natural. There’s no line they have to jump over when they suddenly reach an age you think they should act differently.”

  “You think?”

  “I know. Your children are adorable sweet little girls, but if you keep treating them like princesses that need to have everything done for them, then they will be entitled spoiled brats by the time they become teenagers. Try pleasing them then or getting them to listen to you.”

  Jeremy blew out a breath. “Ok, I guess it’s worth a try.”

  “That’s right. I’m only here for a week. If you don’t like the changes, you can easily go back to the way you were.”

  “I can guess what you’re going to say next,” Jeremy said, holding up a bottle that was sitting on the counter.

  “Uh–huh. Not just the bottles. Poppy’s diapers as well. The girls will act more grown up and their self esteems will flourish if they aren’t being coddled like babies.”

  “Jamie is not going to like this. She has her own childhood issues.”

  “She wants them to stay babies?”

  “She wants to protect them.”

  “From?”

  “She’s not a bad person, you know. She grew up in a house where there was no money and her parents argued constantly. She wants the girls to have an ideal life.”

  “Then why on earth doesn’t she want to stay home with them?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t get it either, but if I had to guess, then I think I’d say it had something to do with her being frightened that she would turn out like her own Mom. She was mean. She never hit them or anything, but she said mean things. Her Dad would yell at her Mom and then her Mom would yell at Jamie and her sister. She wants our girls to be pampered princesses that never have to see any of that.”

  “That’s so sad. So she would rather deprive them of a mother than see them have a mother who was out of control?”

  “I don’t know, but I think so. Maybe she thinks a snippet of a lovely mother is better than a lot of one that could potentially lose control and say horrible things like her own mother did to her.”