Stacey McGill... Matchmaker?

by Ann M. Martin

  “My father will always be my father,” she said slowly. “But Watson is my father too, because he’s there every day caring about me.” It isn’t easy for Kristy to talk about this stuff, but Joni and Ewan needed some help.

  Joni turned away from her stubbornly. “I hate Mrs. McGill.”

  “You wouldn’t hate her if you knew her,” Kristy said. “And besides, it’s just one date. Your dad might date lots of women before he remarries.”

  “Yuck,” Ewan said.

  “He might never remarry,” Kristy added.

  This last statement brightened Joni’s outlook a little. “That’s true,” she admitted hopefully. “He won’t ever find another person as good as my mother, no matter how hard he tries.”

  “Maybe not,” Kristy said. “Though, you know, he might find someone he likes in different ways.”

  “He won’t,” Joni said confidently.

  Although she calmed down at that point, Joni wasn’t as confident as she sounded. Kristy said that no matter how hard she tried to distract the kids with games, videos, and stories, Joni’s eyes were glued to the clock. “What’s taking him so long?” she wanted to know at only eight o’clock.

  Ewan fell asleep at eight-thirty. Joni asked to stay up to read, as she had when I was there, and Kristy said yes. By the time Mr. Brooke returned home at twelve-thirty, Kristy was sure Joni was asleep. So she was shocked when Joni appeared on the stairs the moment her father came in. “It’s about time!” she scolded him.

  Mr. Brooke made light of it, but Kristy said he seemed annoyed with his daughter.

  “Stacey,” Kristy said to me later, “if your mother sees him again, you’re going to have to have a serious talk with those kids. They are not going to make this easy. No way.”

  She was probably right. So I began trying to come up with the best possible words to make this okay for them. Mr. Brooke wasn’t the kind of man I was about to let my mother lose just because his kids were making things hard.

  Of course, I didn’t know any of this until after I returned from New York. That Saturday I ice-skated in the afternoon with Ethan. Then I met Dad at his office. (Naturally, he was working on a Saturday.) We had an early dinner together and then Dad said he would drive me home. He had a business meeting in Boston early Monday morning, so he was headed in that direction anyway. He had booked a hotel room in Stoneybrook for that night. He’d drive the rest of the way to Boston on Sunday so he could visit friends there and be ready for his meeting bright and early on Monday.

  As we drove up the Henry Hudson Parkway and left the city behind, I began to think about Mom’s date and the possibility of her remarrying. I wouldn’t be the first of my friends to go through it. Kristy’s mom had remarried and so had Dawn’s. I didn’t think I’d mind having Mr. Brooke as a stepfather. He was so nice. And it was cool that he was a writer.

  “What’s on your mind?” Dad asked.

  I should have been honest with him, but I couldn’t find the words. It might sound as if I were trying to replace him as my dad. That wasn’t it at all, of course. But I didn’t quite know how to talk about Mr. Brooke without hurting Dad’s feelings. “Just daydreaming,” I said instead.

  “What’s your mother been up to these days?” he asked.

  “Uh … the usual.”

  When we pulled up to our house, Dad walked me to the front door. “I’ll come in and say hi to your mom,” he said. But when I unlocked the front door, the house was dark.

  “Mom?” I called. No one answered.

  “Where is she?” Dad said impatiently.

  “She went to a play with a friend,” I told him.

  “A friend?” I nodded but didn’t offer any more information. “Want me to stay with you until she comes back?” he offered.

  “Dad, I’m thirteen. I baby-sit all the time,” I assured him.

  “Lock the door after I leave,” he said. Then he gave me the phone number of the hotel where he’d be staying.

  After he left, I realized I was pretty tired. It was late, and ice-skating with Ethan all afternoon had been a lot of exercise. I went straight upstairs, changed, and flopped into bed. I turned off my lamp and lay in bed in the dark, my eyes wide open. Where was Mom? It wasn’t incredibly late, but in the last year she’d been home by nine-thirty most nights.

  Another five minutes passed and my eyes were still wide open. It was hopeless. I wouldn’t sleep until Mom was home. There was no sense trying. I climbed out of bed, took my copy of Pride and Prejudice from my bedside table, and went downstairs to the living room.

  I’d read only a page of it when I began to think about Elizabeth Bennett. She was ruining everything because she was so proud and had so many issues about Mr. Darcy. I wondered if Mom would be like Elizabeth and throw silly roadblocks in the path of this relationship. For some reason, I could imagine her doing that, though I hoped she wouldn’t.

  At twelve-twenty I heard Mom’s key in the door. “Good night,” she called to Mr. Brooke. “Stacey!” she exclaimed as she shut the door. “You’re still up!”

  “I couldn’t sleep. You’re kind of late, aren’t you?” I said.

  She laughed and came into the living room. “It’s only twelve-twenty.”

  From the smile on her face I could see she’d had a good time. Even so I asked, “How did it go?”

  “It was really fun. The performance wasn’t fabulous, but it wasn’t embarrassing. Not nearly as terrible as John had led me to believe it would be. And everyone made a big fuss over him. I felt like a celebrity myself just because I was his date. We went to the cast party afterward, which was in a very elegant apartment. John signed his books for people and I met some fascinating actors and playwrights.”

  “That must have been great,” I said.

  “It was. It really was.”

  “Are you going to see him again?” I asked.

  She nodded. “This Tuesday. We’re just going to go to a movie. You’ll get a sitting request from him at your meeting on Monday.”

  “I can do it if no one else wants to,” I said as I headed up the stairs. “Are you coming up?”

  “In a minute.”

  I got the feeling she wanted to be alone, maybe to think about the evening. I said good night and went to bed. As I fell asleep, I realized there was a smile on my face.

  * * *

  All that Sunday, Mom was in a great mood. She hummed as she cleaned the breakfast dishes and later she went out to have her nails done. While she was at her manicure, Kristy called and told me how upset Joni and Ewan were. “You know,” I said, “Joni was acting strange last time I sat for them. Now I get it.” I remembered how observant Joni was. She’d realized her father liked my mother at the same time I realized my mother liked her father. That’s what her quiet moodiness had been about.

  I considered telling Mom what Kristy had told me. But when she came home she was still smiling and humming and I couldn’t bear to. Maybe Mr. Brooke would talk to his kids and straighten everything out.

  By the time I arrived at school on Monday, I was looking forward to seeing my friends. Except for my phone conversation with Kristy, I hadn’t been in touch with them all weekend. The first one I spotted was Mallory, far down the hall. Since her mother had met Mr. Brooke first, I wanted to talk to Mal to see if her mother had said anything about him.

  Her arms were loaded with books. She spotted me waving to her and smiled.

  Mal hadn’t noticed Alan Gray, the most obnoxious boy in the eighth grade, walking toward her. But I did. And there was something about the way he was walking that I didn’t like, as if he were up to no good.

  And then I saw exactly what he was up to, and I didn’t have time to stop it.

  I yelled at Mal to look out just as Alan deliberately stepped into her path and knocked her bottom book sharply with his bent elbow, sending all her books hurtling into the air.

  “Duck for cover!” Alan yelled at full volume. “Spaz Girl is on the warpath. Run for your lives!”
/>   Kids in the hallway jumped back, laughing, as the books crashed to the floor around them. Poor Mallory was the only one who really had to duck since the books were dropping all around her.

  I sprinted to her side. Her eyes were red as she held back tears. “Jerk!” I yelled at Alan. He sauntered away, smirking. “Are you okay?” I asked Mallory.

  Mallory took off her glasses and briskly wiped her eyes with the palms of her hands. I scurried around, picking up the fallen books. Turning back to her I saw tears running down her cheeks.

  “Alan is a moron,” I grumbled.

  “It’s not just him,” Mallory said, drying her eyes on her sleeve. “Every day somebody does something like this to me. I can’t stand coming to school anymore.”

  “They’ll forget about it soon,” I said.

  “That’s what I thought last month, but they’re not forgetting about it. The only thing that will help is if I get out of SMS altogether.”

  “Well, you can’t quit school, so there’s no sense —”

  “I can,” she cut me off.

  “What? No you can’t.”

  “I don’t have to go to this school. There are other schools. I’ve talked to my parents. They’re thinking about it.”

  “About changing your school?” I cried. This seemed so drastic. All Mallory’s friends were here.

  “Shannon goes to Stoneybrook Day School. She’s happy there,” Mallory said.

  “That’s a pretty expensive school,” I reminded her.

  “Maybe I could get a scholarship.” I saw she’d given this some thought.

  “From now on make sure you hang out with us, your friends,” I suggested. “No one will bug you then.”

  “I can’t be with you every second,” she argued. (This was true.) “I’d better get to math,” she said, taking her books from me.

  “I’ll walk with you,” I offered, even though my class was in the opposite direction. I had to go with her because I had the awful feeling that if anyone else bugged Mallory just then, she’d walk out of SMS and never come back again.

  * * *

  As Mom predicted, Mr. Brooke called at our Monday afternoon meeting, looking for a sitter. Abby and I were free. Since I didn’t want to hog all the Brooke jobs, I offered it to her. “You better take it,” Abby said. “From what Kristy wrote in the notebook, I think you have to work things out with those kids.”

  So I arrived Tuesday night at the Brooke house, prepared for a long discussion. (Mom dropped me off and left from there with Mr. Brooke.)

  “Hello,” Joni greeted me stiffly as she walked past on her way to the kitchen. She took a bag of potato chips from the cupboard.

  “Want to play Monopoly?” I suggested.

  “I have homework,” she said.

  As she walked out of the kitchen, Ewan came in. “Hi, Stacey,” he said. “Want to —”

  “Ewan,” Joni called frostily from the living room.

  “Excuse me,” he said, with extreme formality. He walked out of the kitchen with his shoulders squared and his back stiff. I smiled, but I wondered what was going on. It seemed that I was being iced out.

  I went into the living room, but Ewan and Joni weren’t there. I decided to look for them upstairs. Ewan wasn’t in his room. Joni’s door was shut.

  “We’re busy,” she called when I knocked.

  I opened the door anyway. Joni sat on the bed with Ewan by her side. His easy reader was on her lap. “When you see t and h together, it makes a th sound,” she explained to him. They didn’t even look up at me.

  Suddenly, I was tongue-tied. What was I supposed to say to them, anyway? They now saw me as their enemy (or at least Joni did) and probably figured I stayed up nights with my mother plotting ways to steal their father from them and replace their mother.

  I was stumped. What can you say when you’re being iced out by two adorable kids?

  Back downstairs, I took Jacob Have I Loved from my backpack. Before I opened it, though, I noticed that the door to Mr. Brooke’s study was slightly ajar. I couldn’t resist the temptation to take a peek inside.

  It was exactly as I’d imagined an author’s study to be. There were two desks against opposite walls. On one sat a computer. On the other was a gorgeous antique typewriter. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covered a third wall. They contained not only Mr. Brooke’s novels but books by lots of different authors. The fourth wall was covered with framed paintings. They were abstract collages, all by the same artist. A framed poster advertising one of Mr. Brooke’s mysteries hung over the computer. There was also a poster advertising the play Mom and he had just gone to see. I stepped into the room to study it. “A new work by acclaimed novelist J. B. Angel,” the poster announced.

  I have to say, I was impressed. Not many people I know have a study like this one. It seemed so sophisticated. It was clear that a creative, accomplished person worked there.

  I wondered what had gone wrong with the Brookes’ marriage. Mr. Brooke seemed so awesome that I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to leave him. He was friendly, caring, smart, handsome, successful — what more did his wife want? Maybe he was the one who wanted the divorce. That seemed more likely. Or maybe it was more complicated than that. As I knew from my own experience, divorce is rarely a simple thing.

  For the rest of the evening, the kids avoided me. Ewan had a hard time — I could tell he wanted to talk. But every time he’d wander close to me, Joni swooped down on him and took him away with her. At last they went upstairs to get ready for bed. I checked on them fifteen minutes later. Ewan was sleeping and Joni was reading.

  Mom and Mr. Brooke were both laughing and happy when they returned at about ten.

  Mr. Brooke asked if I could sit again on Thursday. I could, but I asked him to call the BSC to set it up. The members have all agreed not to book personal jobs on our own.

  He called at 6:10 that next day, Wednesday. We were still hanging around Claudia’s room after the meeting, talking. “Why can’t that guy get the time right?” Kristy complained.

  At school I’d told everyone how weird the job had been so now Mary Anne said, “Do you want to skip it, Stacey?”

  “No. I think I better face this,” I said.

  “Your mother was asking my mother all about Mr. Brooke today,” Mallory said. “It sounds kind of serious.”

  “Does your mother know anything about him?” I asked.

  “Just that his wife left him because she thought being a mother and wife was standing in the way of her career.”

  I was surprised. She’d left him.

  “Ew, that’s cold,” Abby commented.

  “Mrs. Brooke told someone, who told my mother, that she, meaning Mrs. Brooke, said she was tired of standing in her husband’s shadow,” Mallory reported. “She said marriage and motherhood had ruined her modeling career, but she still had a chance to make it in show business.”

  “Those kids should be glad to have your mother around, Stacey,” Abby said. “They’d probably get more care and attention from her than they get from their own mother.”

  “Yeah, but their mother is still their mother,” I replied. “They’re loyal to her. I understand that.”

  I took the job for that Thursday, determined to speak to the kids. The plan was for me to go to the Brookes’ at around four, so that Mr. Brooke could work for a while, then to stay while he picked up my mother and they went out to dinner.

  Once again, I received a frosty hello from Ewan and Joni before they disappeared up the stairs. Mr. Brooke didn’t seem to notice. He was about to go into his study when I stopped him.

  “Could I speak to you, Mr. Brooke?” I asked.

  “Sure. But please call me John. What’s up?”

  “The kids are upset that you’re going out with my mother,” I began. “And they’re not crazy about me these days either, since I’m her daughter.”

  “Come on in,” he said, gesturing toward his study. He offered me the chair in front of his computer. He sat backward on t
he chair by his typewriter. “The kids don’t really understand what happened between me and my wife. They don’t realize that I have custody of them because my wife doesn’t want the responsibility. I didn’t want them to know that. Maybe, though, the time has come to explain some of it to them. Or at least to Joni, who’s old enough to understand, I think.”

  “I don’t want them to be upset,” I said.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be tactful and gentle when I talk to Joni. Thanks for letting me know this.” Mr. Brooke — John — stood up, which gave me the idea he wanted to get to work.

  I left the study, glad that I’d spoken to him. I wouldn’t try to talk to the kids until after their father had a chance to speak to them. Although it was unpleasant, I could stand one more night of the big chill.

  As I sat on the couch with my book, I realized that John was easy to talk to. No wonder my mother liked him so much. I started imagining him as a stepfather. He’d probably be pretty cool. Mom and I would become famous, sort of, since he was famous.

  A pang of guilt hit me. What about Dad? Was I being incredibly disloyal by even thinking about replacing him?

  I pushed away the guilt. Dad was still my dad. And lots of kids had stepfathers and stepmothers. So, I thought, if I were possibly, someday, maybe going to have a stepfather, it might as well be one as interesting and nice as John.

  “It was different for me,” Mary Anne said at our meeting on Friday. “My mother was dead, and I’d never known her. So I didn’t have the feeling that I was replacing someone I loved.” We were talking about what it’s like when one of your parents is dating. As you might guess, I brought up the topic. It seemed to be all I could think about.

  “But it was still weird,” Mary Anne continued. “I was never sure if Dad’s girlfriends liked me or if they were only pretending to like me because of Dad.”

  “Did you feel that way about Sharon?” Jessi asked, referring to Dawn’s mom, Mary Anne’s stepmom.

  “No. I felt she liked me right away. Up until he started seeing her, I didn’t want him to remarry. Dad and I were doing all right by ourselves. I suppose I thought a stepmother would take my father away from me.”