Books by Celia Bonaduce
Much Ado about Mother
The Merchant of Venice Beach
A Comedy of Erinn
MUCH ado ABOUT Mother
CELIA BONADUCE
eKensington
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Books by Celia Bonaduce
Title Page
Dedication
PROLOGUE - SUZANNA
CHAPTER 1 - SUZANNA
CHAPTER 2 - VIRGINIA
CHAPTER 3 - ERINN
CHAPTER 4 - SUZANNA
CHAPTER 5 - ERINN
CHAPTER 6 - VIRGINIA
CHAPTER 7 - SUZANNA
CHAPTER 8 - ERINN
CHAPTER 9 - SUZANNA
CHAPTER 10 - ERINN
CHAPTER 11 - SUZANNA
CHAPTER 12 - VIRGINIA
CHAPTER 13 - SUZANNA
CHAPTER 14 - ERINN
CHAPTER 15 - VIRGINIA
CHAPTER 16 - ERINN
CHAPTER 17 - VIRGINIA
CHAPTER 18 - SUZANNA
CHAPTER 19 - VIRGINIA
CHAPTER 20 - ERINN
CHAPTER 21 - VIRGINIA
CHAPTER 22 - SUZANNA
CHAPTER 23 - ERINN
CHAPTER 24 - SUZANNA
CHAPTER 25 - VIRGINIA
CHAPTER 26 - SUZANNA
CHAPTER 27 - ERINN
CHAPTER 28 - SUZANNA
CHAPTER 29 - ERINN
EPILOGUE - SUZANNA
MOTHER’S CHICKEN AND APPLES
Acknowledgments
Teaser chapter
Copyright Page
To my nieces and nephews, in order of appearance:
Matthew, Brigid and Chris, John, Dominic, Cecilia, Declan, Isabella, Emily S., Maeve, Andrew, Emily B., Kelan, Dante, Augie, and Lincoln
The world is yours. Take a bite.
PROLOGUE
SUZANNA
It was the first chance Suzanna had gotten to look at herself since she’d been turned into a zombie. The pale skin, the sunken eyes, the stringy and matted hair. Her clothes were torn and stained—disintegrated in the sun. She looked a mess, all right.
And somehow I still look fat.
Her sister, Erinn, came up behind her. Erinn looked equally undead and studied her own reflection alongside Suzanna’s.
“I thought we weren’t supposed to look in the mirror,” Erinn said.
“That’s vampires,” Suzanna replied. “They have no reflection.”
“I know that,” Erinn said, in her tired “I know everything” voice. “I mean, I thought we weren’t supposed to look at ourselves in case we hated the way we look.”
“Dear God, how Hollywood is that? I don’t think you’re supposed to like the way you look once you’re a zombie,” Suzanna said.
A siren sounded and the sisters exchanged a glance. A male zombie in rags lurched past them, out the door of Suzanna’s tea shop and onto the Venice Beach Walk, where he fell into lurch with a group of other zombies: men, women, and children. Suzanna and Erinn got in step behind him, trying not to bump into the doorframe while attempting to match his pace, their arms outstretched and groaning in a low, feral tone. Suzanna felt clumsy as she tried to navigate her walkway. The zombie lurch was not as easy as it looked.
I’m the worst zombie ever.
CHAPTER 1
SUZANNA
It was always stress that sent her soaring.
It had been at least three years since Suzanna had floated to the ceiling, but there she was, bobbing among the porch eaves. She knew if she could just relax she might even enjoy watching over her tea shop below: customers sampling her famous epic scones and drinking a variety of classic and eclectic teas. But she couldn’t relax. She never floated during good times. Nothing in the past three years—the general stress of marriage, new motherhood, and running a thriving business—had so much as lifted a heel off the ground. Not even Zelda, the ancient ex–movie star who held court in the tearoom every Tuesday, ordering one scone and greeting other customers for hours, could get a (literal) rise out of her. But today, clearing the tables on the porch and looking out on the view that never got old, that of the Pacific Ocean, just past the Beach Walk where her tea shop and bookstore stood, she was sure she saw him.
Rio!
Rio, the man who had once elevated Suzanna’s self-loathing to a fine art.
He’d disappeared from her world without a word. He’d been not only her fantasy, but her dance instructor—the dance being salsa—one incarnation seamlessly merging into the next. Rumor had it that he had taken off for New Zealand with a dance student named Lauren. Suzanna hadn’t seen him since she’d gotten engaged, let alone married and had a baby. She never thought of him. Well, she tried never to think of him, which wasn’t the same thing, but she always pushed him out of her mind as soon as he started dancing around in her head. The dreams, well . . . she didn’t really have any control over them, did she?
Nothing had been good, let alone real, about Suzanna and Rio’s relationship—if you could call it that. It wasn’t a relationship at all. The whole thing sort of boiled down to some ill-thought-out grappling at Rio’s convenience. But she never hated him. If anything, she was grateful to him. The months of her obsession with him turned out to be the impetus she and Eric needed to finally admit they had been crazy about each other since high school. Love, marriage, and a baby carriage all fell right into place after that.
Suzanna carefully avoided the cobwebs clustered in the porch eaves as she tried to talk herself down. Maybe it wasn’t Rio she saw Powerblading down the Beach Walk. This was Venice, after all. There were lots of fit men in their late thirties who were either so rich or so self-employed or so unemployed as to be skating in the middle of a workday. And besides, this guy didn’t have Rio’s signature ponytail. He wouldn’t have cut that, would he? No, she decided, it must not have been him.
Then what am I doing up here?
She heard her husband’s voice coming from inside the Rollicking Bun . . . Home of the Epic Scone, where he ran the bookstore part of things. That brought her back to earth. He was deep in conversation with someone, but she couldn’t tell whom. Shaking from her float, she tried to calm her nerves and peeked into the tiny book area they had nicknamed the Nook. There he was, her darling husband, Eric.
She loved to tell people their story, about how they had finally admitted their love and now were living happily ever after.
Well...
Suzanna thought perhaps the phrase “The rest is history” might fit their story better. She was still madly in love with Eric and he, apparently, was still in love with her. They definitely had their passionate moments. But Eric had always been a man with a lot of interests, and he was very easily distracted by a good cause. Suzanna knew better than to think that would change, that he would be consumed with her . . . well, she knew it intellectually. But she had to admit his zeal for life sometimes exhausted her.
She peeked into the Nook. Eric was sitting at a table with Bernard and Mr. Clancy, two guys she and Eric called the Grumpy Old Men. Mr. Clancy was the owner of a brick courtyard a few establishments down the Beach Walk. It was full of shops that probably wouldn’t find a clientele anywhere else in the world. If you were looking for incense, kites, fabric from Bali, or a nice henna tattoo, you’d probably wind up at the humbly named Mr. Clancy’s Courtyard. Bernard, a photographer and general artiste, was one of his tenants. The two of them had battled over the years, mostly over little things such as how much merchandise could be displayed in the windows facing the Beach Walk without looking tacky, but now it appeared that
they were in some sort of war.
Eric loved nothing more than mediating. When it came to keeping harmony on their block, Eric jumped right in. Suzanna and their little girl, Lizzy, hadn’t seen much of Eric these past couple of weeks. She didn’t know what the whole thing was about; she was sure he’d told her, but she got his causes mixed up and had stopped paying close attention.
Suzanna went into the tea shop to get ready for the day ahead. She knew that she was the luckiest woman in the world to have married her soul mate. She knew that Rio was a missed bullet.
But her heart was pounding to a salsa beat.
CHAPTER 2
VIRGINIA
Staring into the kitchen cupboard, Virginia realized she was out of dog food. After several moments of trying to will a bag of Royal Canin Mini Chihuahua Dog Food into existence, she gave up and rubbed a fist-sized area of steam off the window. Squinting into the murk, she watched the snow clustering in the gutters and turning gray. Picturesque snow seemed to be in short supply this winter. Everyone in the city was wearing black, as if in mourning for the glory days of summer—the pollen, the sweltering streets, and the humidity.
The kettle whistled, which startled Piquant, the teacup Chihuahua, as much as it did Virginia. As she made tea, Virginia stared down at the little dog, who looked like a miniature deer. He looked back at her with his wet black eyes.
Blink, damn it.
Virginia had gotten used to Piquant’s disconcerting stare, although he had developed a wheezing cough over the last couple of weeks, which was starting to concern her.
When Virginia’s kids were growing up, they always had dogs, often several at a time. In sprawling, casual Napa Valley, dogs just showed up and stayed. But they were, as her late husband, Martin, always said, “real dogs,” meaning that they were all mixed, usually unfortunate-looking, big animals that could basically fend for themselves. A little food and they were good to go. Martin would surely roll over in his grave if he got a look at Piquant, who not only needed special food, but also a coat for venturing outdoors on all but the most temperate of New York City days. Piquant had booties as well, per the vet’s recommendation. Virginia followed the doctor’s orders: that Piquant was not to venture out in the wintertime without shoes. But she only put them on the dog when she and Piquant were safely outside and no one in the building could see them. Virginia wasn’t sure who felt more foolish, she or the dog.
Momentarily ignoring the dog food situation, she tried to get close but not too close to the radiator, which tended to whistle and spit if it sensed you were getting near enough to access some heat. The radiator was even more skittish than her dog.
Three years ago, Virginia had been a professor of history in Napa Valley in sunny . . . sunny . . . sunny California. Her late husband had taught English at the same university. They both loved teaching, but Martin lived and breathed it. She hadn’t admitted it, maybe she hadn’t known it consciously, but sometimes all those bright young minds wore her down, while Martin’s enthusiasm for his students never seemed to ebb.
Virginia peered out the window again, remembering how her husband would gleefully challenge his students to defend the Oxford comma. He would write: “I walked down the street with a doctor, a lawyer and a stamp collector” on the chalkboard. He would then ask his students how many people were walking down the street with him—two or three? Was the lawyer a stamp collector in his off-hours or were the lawyer and the stamp collector different people?
No one in the history of the world got more joy from the Oxford comma than Martin Wolf.
It’s funny that I seem to remember his work more than I do my own.
Virginia was initially horrified when thoughts like that invaded her head. She was of the hard-core feminist generation, clearing the road for younger women who could now take their professions for granted. Professor? Sure. Doctor? Of course. Astronaut? Why the hell not?
But when Virginia thought about Martin happily arguing with students, he didn’t seem quite so far away, so she cut herself some slack. She had been as good as any man at her job and had nothing for which she needed to apologize. And so she thought whatever politically incorrect thoughts popped into her head about her husband and savored them. Once he was gone, the thought of teaching exhausted her, as much of a sad surprise to her as it was to her dean.
Virginia had been at loose ends since her husband died in a car accident and Suzanna and Erinn, her two girls, had grown and moved to big cities. The sting of irony was certainly not lost on her that she and Martin, who were both born and raised in cosmopolitan eastern cities, had decided to raise their daughters in bucolic Napa Valley, only to have both girls at one time or another pronounce the area boring. Virginia declared she would move to New York, where her husband and she and Erinn, when she was small, had spent a few very happy years. Her girls, both living in Los Angeles by this time, were shocked by the news. Virginia’s goal was to shake things up, and her daughters’ reactions just added a little extra zing to the entire idea.
When she first moved east, Virginia filled her days with museums and theater and other Manhattan-centric activities. She tried all the Chinese restaurants, bagel shops, delis, cafés, and cupcakeries in her neighborhood. Just being new to the city kept the pain of widowhood at arm’s length for several months. But pain did show up. Sitting on a park bench, right in the middle of a fresh H&H bagel, the understanding that Martin was dead finally hit. Really hit. It felt as if she had just been acting the part of the devoted widow and now, in a flash, she was living it. She started to choke on the bagel and was grateful that she managed to swallow the dough before attracting attention to herself. How would she explain that she’d just realized her husband was dead, when his death certificate was already eight months old? Virginia closed her eyes, hoping her reality might somehow change. She was retired. She was three thousand miles from her daughters, and she was, at least for the time being, a New Yorker. It took a while before she could bring herself to open her eyes.
After the bagel incident, Virginia’s love affair with the city started to wilt. She tried to keep herself distracted. On her daughter Erinn’s advice she joined a book club and on her daughter Suzanna’s advice she joined a knitting group. On her own she took up mosaics; she found an old table on the corner and lugged it into her apartment. She had to admit, she had done a pretty good job creating a blazing red, orange, and yellow sunburst, which she realized, after she had finished it, had nothing in common with any other furniture in her apartment. She looked for other things to divert her and now had Mongolian clay pot cooking lessons, jewelry-making, and stained-glass classes under her belt. But nothing brought her any joy. She couldn’t admit it to anyone but she felt trapped and bored by everything.
She was a little sheepish feeling trapped and bored in what was touted as the most exciting city in America, if not the world. She had started putting out feelers to her girls. Her “girls” were now women in no uncertain terms. Erinn was in her forties and Suzanna in her thirties, but to Virginia they were still “the girls.” She would let a gentle hint slip out now and then in phone or e-mail conversations . . . wondering what they thought about her MAYBE moving back out west. She always tried to stress the word MAYBE . . . MAYBE back to Napa. MAYBE somewhere around Los Angeles; it was a big place; she wouldn’t have to crowd them. Mothers know their daughters (like it or not) and Virginia knew that Suzanna would love it if they were closer, geographically. The MAYBE wasn’t for her—it was for Erinn. Virginia’s eldest had always kept her own counsel. Virginia didn’t doubt Erinn’s love for her, but she could always detect a note of exasperation in Erinn’s voice when she felt Virginia was getting too close . . . either geographically or emotionally.
Piquant stood forlornly over his bowl, craning his head to peek passive-aggressively up at Virginia. Virginia sighed. She looked on-line and read that grains were good for Chihuahuas. She poured gluten-free Rice Krispies into the bowl. The dog’s little charcoal briquette of a nose sniffe
d at it. He looked up again. Virginia poured some rice milk over the cereal, hoping that might help tempt the little beast into eating. The cereal lived up to its advertising and let out a loud SNAP, CRACKLE, and POP! Piquant leaped into the air and scuttled under the kitchen chair, shivering in that little-dog way that drove Virginia crazy.
“How do you even call yourself a dog?” she asked.
It was Virginia’s doctor who first suggested she get a furry friend, on the theory that “older people need companionship and something to take care of.” Virginia was a tiny bit affronted at both implications, that she was an “older person” and that she was in need of “something to take care of.” Weren’t raising a family and four thousand college students enough for a cosmic pass into sloth-hood?
She had not consulted her girls when she got the Chihuahua. Why should she? She was her own woman now, not a conscientious professor, a devoted wife, an eagle-eyed mother. With the exception of whisking herself off to New York City, adopting Piquant was her first solo decision. A nurse in Virginia’s doctor’s office announced that he’d found the perfect dog for her (she hadn’t said she was ready to take on a dog, but in all honesty, she didn’t say she wasn’t ready to take on a dog, either). The dog had belonged to a socialite, who carried it around town for photo ops. Then named “Hotstuff,” he apparently was subject to red eye in photographs, and the starlet decided she couldn’t be seen with an un-photogenic dog. Erinn, with her recent television and photography background, explained later that red eye in dogs could not be fixed with the simple application used to fix the problem in humans. The starlet put the word out that she was looking to retire her pooch and hoped for “a quiet home with an elderly woman.”
“Elderly woman” is even worse than “older person.” These people need a lesson in P.R.
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