The Perfect Mom

by Janice Kay Johnson

  Kathleen wished she could be as sure.

  SHE AND LOGAN ENDED UP going out for Chinese food, choosing several dishes to share. It being a weeknight, the restaurant was almost deserted. The nearest diners besides them were a couple of Asian men talking intently over tiny cups of tea half a dozen booths away.

  Sipping his wonton soup, Logan listened as Kathleen told him an abbreviated version of the counseling session.

  “At least that suggests she admires you.”

  “Resents me is closer to it, I think.”

  He made a “maybe” motion with his head. “The way we feel about our parents is probably always complicated.”

  The way she’d felt about her own parents certainly was. She, of course, had been sure she could do a better job raising her own child. She’d give her all the advantages, including a mother who didn’t have to work full-time and leave her kids with a neighbor or, later, as latch-key kids, Kathleen responsible for her little brother.

  “You haven’t mentioned your parents,” she said. “Are they alive?”

  “My mom is. My dad…who knows?” Logan almost succeeded in sounding indifferent. “My parents broke up before I was born. They were just kids themselves, and my father wasn’t up to the challenge. Mom tried, but she wasn’t, either. Eventually she dumped me on her big brother. Uncle Pete raised me from the age of eight or nine.”

  “And you let me whine about my parents?” she exclaimed. “Why didn’t you tell me to shut up and count my blessings?”

  Logan laughed, an easy sound. “Just because your parents were there doesn’t mean they were perfect. I love my uncle Pete, but I’ve been known to grumble about him.”

  “For instance?” Kathleen challenged.

  “He’s…” Logan hesitated, setting down his spoon. “He doesn’t have much to say. Or maybe, it’s that he doesn’t say much.”

  “There’s a distinction?”

  “He conveys most of his opinions with a grunt, a raised brow, a nod. When you’ve disappointed him, you know it. When you’ve pleased him, you know that, too. What Uncle Pete was never much good at is giving advice.”

  “You mean…he really doesn’t talk much? Or, I mean, um…”

  Logan laughed again. “Oh, he can talk. He’s not mute or anything like that. I remember my mother telling me that he had a speech impediment when he was a kid, and people made fun of it, so he pretty much just shut up. As he’d put it, he’s not much for chattering.”

  Kathleen nodded, fascinated by this glimpse into Logan’s childhood. “Your mother—do you ever see her?”

  “She has another family now,” he said matter-of-factly. “She’d like to include me more, but…” His big shoulders shrugged.

  “But?”

  “It’s too little, too late.”

  “You won’t forgive her.”

  He raised one eyebrow, rather, she guessed, as his uncle Pete might have. “I don’t know that forgiveness is the issue. She’s a stranger. I don’t give a damn.”

  “Are you sure?” Kathleen asked shrewdly. Little as she liked her father, little as they had in common, she couldn’t just cut herself off. In his own way, he loved her. Maybe, in her own way, Logan’s mother loved him, too.

  When she suggested as much, he shrugged again. “Maybe. I speak to her. I’m not rude. I just don’t go over to join the family for Thanksgiving or Christmas.”

  “How does Uncle Pete feel about her?”

  Kathleen realized she was being nosy, but for some reason questions kept slipping out.

  Logan gave a crooked grin that made an almost homely face sexy as all get out. “He’s okay with her. He goes over for Thanksgiving dinner sometimes. My uncle Pete is a philosophical man. He figures people do what they can do, and if they don’t measure up to someone else’s standard, well, who set the standards anyhow?”

  Kathleen winced at the parallels with her troubles with Emma. When Logan noticed, she said weakly, “I suppose we each set our own. Or maybe our parents do it for us.”

  Oh, dear, she thought in dismay. Had she somehow held herself up as an ideal to her small daughter? Or, worse yet, had she held up as the shimmering, never attainable ideal the person she had always so desperately wished she’d been, the one she’d spent twenty years or more trying to become? The rich girl, the princess, the snob?

  Logan seemed to read her mind. “You’re trying to think of a way to blame yourself, aren’t you?”

  “Who else is to blame?” she asked, with bitterness she couldn’t disguise.

  “Your ex? Your parents? Their parents?” He spread his hands. “Maybe nobody. Schizophrenia used to be blamed on somebody, too, before doctors figured out that the causes are physical or chemical or something. We’re beginning to accept that alcoholism is a disease, maybe hereditary, but probably not caused by the way your mom raised you. Who’s to say eating disorders aren’t the same? Would you be blaming yourself if Emma had early on-set diabetes, or leukemia?”

  Tears filled her eyes. “No. Maybe. Every parent looks for ways she’s failed her child. But…” Her smile wavered. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it isn’t my fault.”

  “Good girl,” he said, eyes warm with approval. “Now, eat.”

  “Is that an order?”

  Once again he managed to steer conversation to entertaining if innocuous topics while they ate Mongolian beef and chicken with pea pods and heaps of rice. He insisted on trying to eat with chopsticks, absurdly small in his big hands.

  They argued amiably about a growth management initiative that was to be on the fall ballot, about how the Seattle mayor had handled a near-riot at a Mardi Gras celebration, about the merits of vitamin C in cold prevention, and whether the state effort to produce a standardized test that all students must pass to graduate from high school was a boondoggle or a praiseworthy objective.

  On the way home, in the darkness of Logan’s pickup, he reached out and took her hand. “The Mariners are at home Friday night. What do you say to that game?”

  She turned inward for an instant, expecting a complex internal battle, and found no antagonist. She couldn’t see Emma every day, even if the sixteen-year-old wanted or needed her mom’s presence. They had a counseling session Saturday, but there wasn’t a reason in the world that Kathleen couldn’t go out with a sexy man on Friday night.

  “Okay.” She realized how tentative she’d sounded. “Sure,” she said more strongly. “That’ll be great.”

  “Dinner first?”

  “Yes, but I feel guilty when you keep insisting on paying. Why don’t we have dinner at the house first?”

  “Okay,” he said agreeably.

  “I wonder…” She stopped herself.

  His thumb made a circle on her palm. “You wonder?”

  “What Emma would think of you,” Kathleen said in a rush.

  He was silent, and she realized she must have offended him. Will think of you, was what she should have said. But they’d only gone out twice! She didn’t know if this had even a short-term future. It might be weeks before Emma came home. She and Kathleen had enough to fight about without adding a man who might have vanished from the scene in a couple of weeks to the mix.

  “I’m usually considered inoffensive,” Logan said, with so little inflection she realized that she had hurt his feelings.

  Kathleen turned her hand in his to squeeze back. “I didn’t mean it like that. Only…only that everyone else will be there, but not Emma. I’d like you to meet her.”

  He gave her a look, unreadable in the darkness now that he’d turned onto her street, overhung with big old trees. “The time will come.”

  Would it? Did she really want Emma to meet Logan? How would he compare in a teenager’s eyes to her father? Would she think the idea of her mother dating this…this carpenter, with his calluses and high-school education and shaggy hair, was ridiculous?

  Feeling a hot flush of shame burn her cheeks, Kathleen turned her head quickly to look out the side window.

 
Emma would never think those things. She, Kathleen, was the one thinking them, and trying not to. She hated the idea of running into Ian, say, and having him eye Logan with disdain. Expensive suits and haircuts and intense, high-paying jobs shouldn’t be the measure of a man, but for her they always had been.

  If she hadn’t been…oh, reexamining herself lately, she never would have considered going out with some guy who’d happened to show up, sweat under his arms and dirt under his fingernails, to build kitchen cabinets.

  And that was why she was ashamed of herself.

  Ashamed—and not sure she could really let go of her old prejudices and stereotypes. What if she and Logan were ever in a situation where she was embarrassed by him, or for him?

  What kind of shallow person was she? she wondered unhappily. He was a nice man, sensitive, patient and caring. He was intelligent, articulate and he liked her. How could she be worrying about how he’d compare to Ian if the two men came face to face?

  “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  Kathleen started. They were pulled up to the curb in, wonder of wonders, a spot only one house down from hers. The neighbor’s teenager, who usually parked here, must be out for the evening.

  “I’m sorry!” she exclaimed. “My mind was wandering.” She gave a laugh she hoped didn’t seem faked. “Obviously.”

  “Question is,” he said quietly, “where?”

  “Oh, Emma, of course,” Kathleen lied, with compunctions she hadn’t known she would feel. “How our session tomorrow will go.”

  He studied her with unreadable eyes. “If you want to talk afterward, call.”

  Despising herself in the face of his kindness, she tried to smile and failed. Darn it, she felt like crying again, out of grief she hardly understood.

  “Hey.” He rubbed a thumb across her cheek, and she realized that she was crying. “Stop that,” Logan murmured, voice a soft burr. “I have faith your Emma will be fine.”

  Kathleen nodded. She took a swipe at her own tears. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m sorry!”

  “Quit apologizing.” For a moment he sounded angry, bringing her head up. The next instant, he was kissing her with a heat and intensity that both shocked her and brought sleeping needs to life.

  She made a shuddery sound and opened her mouth to him. His tongue drove in, passionate, demanding and somehow angry. She melted, and thought, This is why.

  Why she’d gone out with an uneducated cabinetmaker, why she’d felt that warm glow at simply knowing she was to see him again. For some unknowable reason, her body responded to him as it hadn’t to anybody. Ever.

  He was overmuscled and not altogether graceful and not really handsome, but she didn’t care. If he’d unbuttoned her shirt and slid his hand over her breast right here, parked along the curb one door from her house, she would have moaned with pleasure.

  Shocked by the image and by the way her abdomen was cramping with longing, she gasped when he lifted his mouth.

  For an instant they stared at each other, his breathing harsh and audible, his eyes dark. Then he abruptly released her.

  “I’m sorry. That was…” He swallowed. “I don’t know where it came from.”

  “I…” She moistened her lips. “It’s okay. I actually, um…” On the verge of chickening out, she made herself say it. She owed him that much, after her snobbish thoughts. “I like it when you kiss me.”

  A muscle jerked in his cheek. After a moment, he said, “If it weren’t a weeknight, I might do it again. And then take you home with me.”

  She wanted, oh-so-badly, to go home with him right then. Please, she wanted to whisper. She thought she might like how he looked without clothes. His solid, even blockish build might not be designed to show off a suit to best advantage, but naked… Then, he would be powerful, broad, unmistakably male.

  She quivered and made a small sound.

  He reached out and cupped her cheek. With his thumb and forefinger, he caressed her lips, tugged gently at them, until she sucked lightly on the tip of his finger.

  She saw the shudder rack him. “Damn,” he said in a harsh whisper.

  She had to go—now. Before she couldn’t make herself.

  “Good night,” she whispered, and fumbled for the door handle.

  “I’ll walk you up…”

  “Don’t. Please.” Scrambling to the ground, she turned back to give him a shaky smile. “I might want to sit on the porch swing and make out with you all night, and then somebody would be sure to catch us. Maybe we can…take this up Friday night.”

  “Count on it,” he said softly, just before she slammed the door and hurried up the sidewalk.

  Inside her house, she locked up and then, knees weak, leaned back against the door.

  Well! She, who had been contentedly celibate for darn near two years now, would be going to bed for the second time in a week feeling needy and sexually frustrated.

  But if she went home with him Friday night, as she so badly wanted to do, then what? She wasn’t a teenager, to satisfy an itch without thought for the consequences. When she had so many doubts, so many fears, when life was so complicated, did she really want to start something like that?

  Eyes closed, Kathleen gave a shaky laugh.

  The answer seemed to be a resounding, Yes.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  KATHLEEN HAD had a seriously lousy day. She had set out for work ten minutes late, after discovering a run in her panty hose on the way out the door and rushing back to change. She’d gotten wet just hurrying to the car, with rain pouring from a charcoal sky. Not three blocks from home, the car had lurched and begun thump, thump, thumping. A flat tire, of course. Kathleen couldn’t remember the last time she’d even thought about checking her tires.

  Naturally the block was as deserted as the tumble-weed strewn street in a ghost town, which meant no chivalrous male rushed to her aid. After a minute, she remembered that she had a can of the mysterious stuff you could squirt into a tire that was supposed to reinflate it. She popped the trunk, thought longingly of her umbrella, in the closet at home and leaped from the car.

  Only to discover that she hadn’t unloaded the soap-making supplies she’d bought two days before. Swearing under her breath, Kathleen dug under bags and boxes, feeling the slanting rain drenching her nylon-clad legs and wool skirt. By the time she found the damn can, crouched beside the tire and connected it to the valve, hearing a hiss as the tire mysteriously inflated, she was soaked to the bone and shivering.

  In the car she debated between home and a hot bath, work and the service station. The service station won, given that she had no idea how long the tire would hold what air—or gas, or whatever—was in it. They informed her that the tire was punctured and they could fix it—but it wasn’t worth fixing. The tread was all but gone.

  Several hundred dollars poorer, she drove home on four new tires. From there, she phoned work, found out someone else had called in sick, threw away yet another pair of panty hose, took a rushed and unsatisfactory shower, dried her hair, dressed and started out again.

  Because the office was understaffed, she never took a lunch break. The bagel and latte she had stopped for on her way to Bridges wasn’t curtailing her growling stomach. Her patience was in short supply.

  Emma was being sulky again. What else was new? Kathleen thought wryly. The teenager was shrugging at everything Sharon asked, her entire attention seemingly fixed on plaiting a stringy strand of her hair into a thin braid.

  “Emma,” Sharon prodded, “I thought we had agreed that tonight we were going to explore further your seeming anger at your mom.”

  Emma rolled her eyes, reached the end of the braid and let it drop, then reached for another strand.

  Kathleen stood. “You know what? My day has sucked. If you’re not going to talk to me, I’m going home to take a nice long bath.”

  Even the counselor looked startled. Kathleen didn’t care. She marched toward the door.

  “I didn’t say I wouldn
’t talk to you!” Emma cried.

  Kathleen turned. “No? Well, you aren’t, which is the same thing.”

  “I just…” Emma was halfway to her feet, too. “I don’t like all these questions!”

  “Sharon wouldn’t be asking them if you and I had done so great on our own.”

  “What would you say to your mother if I weren’t here to ask questions?” the therapist interjected.

  “That’s a question!”

  “Yes, it is,” Kathleen agreed mildly. “But I’ll ask it, too. Is there anything you do want to talk about?”

  Emma’s huge blue eyes widened, and she sank back into her chair. “Um…not really.”

  Frustration and hunger weighed heavily on Kathleen. She sighed. “You know, you make constant, biting remarks.” She mimicked her daughter. “‘You’re so perfect.’ But when I call you on them, you’ll never tell me what I’m doing wrong. We both know I’m not perfect. So what am I?” When there was no immediate answer forthcoming, she shook her head. “You know what? I’m going home.”

  Sharon didn’t say a word. Emma let her mother get halfway out the door before she cried, “You’re too perfect!”

  Kathleen froze, then slowly turned. “What?”

  Her daughter’s elfin face was alive with a tangle of emotions that included grief and resentment. “You never make mistakes! You’re always, like, organized and pretty and you never gain weight and everybody likes you.” In a rush Emma finished, “And I’m really scared I can’t be like you!”

  In the thundering moment of silence that followed, mother and daughter stared at each other, both stunned in different ways.

  Then, aching, stiff and feeling old, Kathleen returned to her chair. Groping for the right answer, or perhaps just for honesty, she said slowly, “I have two things to say. The first is, you don’t have to be like me! You shouldn’t even try. You’re a different person.”

  Emma’s expression of anguish didn’t alter. She wasn’t convinced, maybe never would be.

  Her weariness deepening, Kathleen said, “And second, I make plenty of mistakes. If I didn’t make any, why are we here?”