Goodbye To All That (28 page)

“The Old Rockford Inn.” Ruth smiled. “I wouldn’t recommend it, actually. My granddaughter’s having her bat mitzvah there next spring, and they’re giving my daughter a hard time on the pricing. It’s wrong, changing their prices in mid-stream. Anyway, it’s not really a club. It’s an inn with banquet facilities.”

“There’s this club I want to try,” Hilda told her, hands back on her cup as she leaned forward. “It’s in the city, and Wade hates driving in the city. Well, not driving. Parking. Like, the parking costs a lot? But this club I think has valet parking, which would also cost, but at least you don’t have to go cruising for a space, or else go to a garage and hand over your life savings. But when I suggested we try this place, Wade got all, like, freaked out about some valet driving his car.”

What could a valet do to Wade’s car? Add more garbage to the floor? Make the seats even lumpier?

“So, if Wade was willing to go to this club with you, you’d get back together with him?” Ruth asked.

Hilda mulled over her answer. She drank some coffee, gazed past Ruth toward the service counter, spent several long seconds studying the checkerboard tiles on the floor. “If I just made up with him, he’d be like, ‘Well, that was easy.’ I want him to put a little effort into it.”

“Letting a valet drive his car would be an effort for him,” Ruth said.

“Here’s an idea.” Hilda’s eyes brightened, and Ruth conceded that they were, in fact, quite pretty. The rest of her face wasn’t all that special, but her eyes, large and hazel and fringed in long lashes assisted by a generous application of mascara, were lovely. “You could come to the club with us.”

“Me?” Ruth laughed and swiped the idea away with a wave of her hand. “Don’t be silly.”

“No, it’d be cool. We could double-date.”

“Me? Double-date with you and Wade?” She laughed again.

Hilda was smiling, but she wasn’t laughing. “I don’t want to do everything the way I’ve always done it. This would be different. And you’re Wade’s friend, so why not?”

“First of all, I’m too old,” Ruth said, then frowned. Why was she too old? Who said there was an age limit on going out to clubs?

Hilda’s steady stare conveyed that she was thinking the same thing.

“Okay, so I’m not too old. But I don’t have a date.”

“Oh, shit.” Hilda clapped her hand over her mouth. “You’re not one of those old ladies who lives with a bunch of cats, are you?”

“No. But I’m separated from my husband.”

“Well, cool,” Hilda said happily. “Maybe you’ll meet someone at the club.”

Ruth was rendered momentarily speechless. She didn’t want to meet someone. She was enjoying her life alone. If she wanted to be with a man, she’d be with Richard. He was good-looking and she already knew all his faults.

But if she refused to go to the club, would that mean she was too old? Would it mean she was afraid of doing something different?

“Tell you what,” she said. “I can be the designated driver.”

“Oh, that’s no fun,” Hilda argued. “Besides, Wade is always the designated driver. He doesn’t drink at clubs. He says drinking makes him dance funny.”

Ruth would bet he and Hilda would consider her a funny dancer, drunk or sober. But she wasn’t too old. She’d been brave enough to leave Richard, move into her own apartment, buy her own furniture, get a job and figure out how to set the alarm clock so she could open the store. Surely she could be brave enough to go to a club.

“Okay,” she said. “Count me in.”

Only four more weeks and she’d be dealing with Thanksgiving.

How was the family going to manage that holiday? Jill’s parents always hosted the big turkey feast. But now
 . . .
Her mother couldn’t possibly prepare turkey, yams, turnips, cranberry mold, string beans almandine and celery stuffed with cream cheese and chives in that puny little apartment kitchen. For that matter, she couldn’t possibly fit the entire family into the apartment, unless they set up a table for the children in the bedroom. At her parents’ house, the expanded dining room table was long enough to accommodate everyone, all three generations.

But Ruth and Richard Bendel were separated. How could they co-host a family Thanksgiving at the house Jill’s mother had abandoned? Where could a broken family give thanks, and what were they giving thanks for?

Jill realized with a twinge of something—regret, grief, supreme annoyance—that she would get stuck hosting the family’s Thanksgiving dinner. Melissa couldn’t do it; the whole family wasn’t about to trek down to New York City when it was so much easier for her to travel to Massachusetts. Brooke wouldn’t do it because, as best Jill could tell, Brooke didn’t cook. She and Doug always contributed the wine to the annual Thanksgiving feast. Jill traditionally baked the pies and brownies, and Melissa got a pass because she had the burden of traveling two hundred miles.

A cheer erupted among the mothers standing on her side of the field, dragging her attention back to the game. She leaned forward to see a group of boys in oatmeal jerseys jumping up and down near the goal. Apparently someone on Noah’s team had scored. She hoped it wasn’t Noah, because if it was, Gordon would demand a second-by-second description of how the play was set up, who had passed the ball to Noah, which part of his foot—or God forbid his forehead—he’d used to power the ball into the net and exactly how he’d felt when the ball had blown past the goalie. It was up to Noah to report on how he felt, but Gordon would be expecting Jill to supply the other details. “Noah couldn’t see what was going on behind him,” Gordon would point out. “You had a view of the entire field. Where was the rest of his team? Where was the other team’s defense? How did he get around them?”

She could make something up. She was creative. Noah could amend her narration if necessary. Of course, that was based on the assumption that Noah had kicked the goal, which, if she was lucky, he hadn’t.

Did thinking that make her a Bad Mom?

The teams gravitated back to midfield. The woman standing next to Jill, one of those loud, energetic jock types who actually loved standing in the cold and watching kids kick a ball around, grinned and said, “These boys are
fabulous
, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” Jill agreed, despite her belief that winning a soccer game played by ten-year-olds fell a bit short of
fabulous
.

“The Revolution ought to send their scouts this way. I’m telling you, these boys. The talent. The
heart
.”

Jill nodded vaguely. As far as she was concerned,
fabulous
was when Noah aced a math test.
Heart
was when he gave her a hand-made Mother’s Day card. Soccer was just a game.

A muffled trill emerged from her purse. Her cell phone. The woman beside her eyed her purse, then scowled. Clearly she disapproved of anyone who’d leave her phone turned on during something as
fabulous
as a town-league soccer game.

Jill didn’t care what the woman thought. She’d left Abbie home alone, and if Abbie had set the house on fire or cut herself and was hemorrhaging into the kitchen sink or was bored, she had to be able to reach her mother. Jill might be a Bad Mom when it came to paying attention to Noah’s game, but she wasn’t bad enough to turn her phone off when her twelve-year-old daughter was home all by herself.

She dug frantically through the clutter in her bag to find the phone, even though she doubted Abbie had set the house on fire or cut herself. Abbie was calm, sane and generally responsible. Jill had called her at the end of the game’s first quarter and Abbie had rhapsodized about how much she loved having the entire house to herself. “It’s so peaceful,” she’d said. “There’s so much space. When I grow up I want to live all by myself, just like Grandma.”

Jill had refrained from suggesting that Abbie might seek a better role model than her crazy grandmother, who at that very moment was undoubtedly wearing her ugly red First-Rate pinafore and ringing up a box of tampons for a PMS-ing customer.

Her fingers closed around the phone and she pulled it from her bag. The ringing sounded much louder out in the air, and several mothers glared at her.
Bad Mom
, she muttered to herself, forcing an apologetic smile before she moved away from the sideline. Noah had better not score a goal while she was on the phone.

“Hello?”

“Jill? It’s your mother. Have you got a minute?”

Jill sighed. “Actually, I don’t. I’m watching Noah play soccer.”

“I know. I called your house and Abbie told me where you were. She said you had your cell phone and you wouldn’t mind my calling you. I’ll be quick. I’ve only got a ten-minute break, anyway. I have to ask you to do a big favor for me.”

Jill sighed again. “What?”

“I need some clothes from the house. When I moved out, I took only the clothes I thought I’d be wearing for work, because I just don’t have the closet space here. I’m not complaining, the apartment’s fine, but the closet space is on the less than ample side. So I tried to be practical and take only what I would use.”

Jill’s mother seemed determined to expend her entire ten-minute break on this phone call. Jill glanced toward the game, wondering if she was missing anything significant.

“So, wouldn’t you know? I need something I didn’t bring with me,” her mother continued. “I was thinking that turquoise V-neck sweater, the cashmere, you know which one I mean? And the off-white shell, it’s a silk knit, not machine-washable but I love it, so if I have to, I’ll hand-wash it in the sink. Can you pick those things up for me?”

“Why can’t you get them yourself?” Jill asked, hoping she didn’t sound too impatient.

“How can I? I work.”

“I work, too,” Jill pointed out.

“You’re not working now.”

“Because someone had to attend Noah’s game, and Gordon’s
 . . .
”
Working
, she thought peevishly. He couldn’t possibly have left the school building as soon as he was done teaching his last class so he could attend this game, but Jill could put aside the copy she was composing for the open-toed canvas espadrilles, available in a delectable fruit-salad of colors—blueberry, lemon, lime, plum and mango—that would be featured in Prairie Wind’s catalog next summer, and stand outside at the Howland Street Parks-and-Rec complex, freezing her ass off, while Noah’s team played its rescheduled game.

Her mother didn’t wait for her to finish the sentence. “And I can’t go over after work, because your father’ll be home then, and I just think it would be easier if he didn’t have to watch me enter the house and pack some more clothing and take it with me. Oh, and I need shoes, too. Those low-heel black pumps. The high-heeled ones hurt my arches. Can you get me those things?”

Jill’s mother thought it would be easier. For her, yes. Not easier for Jill. “Why do you need this stuff?”