Hints of Heloise (4 page)

So Heloise told her sister how she did it, how she covered costs in Turner's Grove, the kind of suburb that almost no single parent could afford. There had been no husband, no accident, no life insurance, inferences that she had let stand uncorrected in the community since she moved there. She paid for it all on her own, through her own work. “Call me madam,” she said, raising her glass, feeling a rare sisterly camaraderie.

Meghan had not been shocked, not at all. She asked several quick questions—
How did you get started, what about diseases, how much do you make? Do you charge more for the really kinky stuff? What's the worst thing you've ever had to do?
—and Heloise deflected all of them, especially those about money, although she was scrupulously honest with the IRS about her earnings, if not their exact source. It was Meghan's very lack of judgment, her matter-of-fact acceptance, that scared Heloise. She realized her sister was filing the information away until it might be useful to her. Meghan had always been a bit of a squirrel, a saver of money and secrets. Since that night, they were uneasy with each other.

“There's Aunt Meghan! And Michael and Mark and Maggie and Melissa!” Scott squeals. Poor Scott, with no siblings and no grandparents, was thrilled with the sudden gift of four cousins, with one, Michael, exactly his age. He waves wildly, but his cousins have their eyes fixed on their laps, probably fiddling with iPods or video games, and Meghan's terrifying gaze doesn't seem to see anything, not even the curving road in front of her, a gorgeously landscaped death trap of a parkway. Heloise remembers a scrap of a childhood story, something in the moldering, fragile books that her father brought with him when he finally divorced Meghan's mother, in which an animal or magical creature had simply torn himself in pieces from his rage. Meghan looks more than capable of doing just that.

 

M
EGHAN
D
UFFY PEERS
at the small print of the insurance policy, squinting. She's only forty, she can't possibly need reading glasses, but sometimes the fine print is truly fine, designed to keep anyone from reading it. “In the case of an accident that results in injury…”

“MOM!” Maggie's thin screech echoes from somewhere out in the family room, put-upon and choked with tears. “Mark changed the channel and it's my turn to pick the program.”

“It was on a commercial and I changed it back,” Mark shouts, and Meghan knows by his tone that he is fudging the facts, as full of shit as his father when trying to avoid her disapproval for some forgotten chore or absentminded error.

“I missed the part where they sing karaoke,” Maggie complains bitterly, and Meghan thinks,
Well, thank your lucky stars.
Because seventy, eighty years from now, when you're on your deathbed, you are not going to be thinking about the day your brother changed the channel and you missed twenty seconds of some stupid pop tart singing karaoke. You are instead going to wonder why you spent sixty of those years married to an idiot who had bad breath and a repertoire of sexual moves that basically boil down to thrust-in thrust-in thrust-in and areyouthereyet?

No, wait, that was Meghan's deathbed. Maggie will have to make her own deathbed and then lie in it.

Meghan shoves the papers back into the cherrywood pigeonholes above her desk, a touch meant to evoke an old-fashioned roll-top. Meghan's work area is really a corridor, a narrow stretch of hallway between the family room and the mudroom that the Realtor insisted on calling “Mom's office.” This not-quite-room is just wide enough to accommodate this built-in shelf, which in turn is just wide enough to hold a computer and a drop tray for a keyboard. “A place for all your work,” crooned the salesman, Paul Turner. No, Meghan had yearned to correct him, Mom's work area is every square foot of this 6,800-square-foot house. What Mom needs is a soundproof bunker in the basement. Meghan would trade the whirlpool in her en suite bath, the laundry room that is bigger and nicer than her childhood bedroom, and even her Portuguese-blue Lacanche range for such a retreat. Especially her Portuguese-blue Lacanche, which mocks her with its smug French competence, its readiness.

She marches into the family room and an uneasy truce settles as soon as she appears, so she moves past, into the kitchen, checking to see what ready-made dishes she can pass off as homemade. Meghan once liked cooking, but the level of rejection possible when making food for five people is simply too staggering. She doesn't take it as personally when the rejected salmon comes from the Giant, when the mashed potatoes are whipped by the folks at Whole Foods. She still winces at the waste, but at least she's spared mourning her own time. Her mom had been one of the last of the mackerel snappers, insisting on fishy Fridays despite the Vatican's relaxed rules—and despite the fact that the Catholic church wanted no part of her, after the divorce. The Lewis children had not been allowed to turn up their noses at her worst concoctions. If you didn't clean your plate in the Lewis household, it just followed you through the next three meals. Until it spoiled, you didn't eat again, not in Mother's sight. This was her father's rule originally, but her mother enforced it even more strictly after he left.

She remembered asking Heloise, in their wine-coaxed moment of candor, if things had worked the same way in her version of the Lewis household. “Not exactly,” Heloise said, refusing to elaborate, infuriating Meghan, for Heloise was clearly implying that her version of the Lewis household was all lovey-dovey, the place where true love triumphed and who cares if the first Lewis family was left in the dirt, with only support checks and occasional visits from Hector. Visits, Meghan knew, where he often banged the first Mrs. Lewis once Meghan was asleep, or so he thought. Her own mother always called the second Mrs. Lewis that-whore-Beth, just one word, said very quickly. Meghan was eleven or so before she realized it wasn't an actual name, Thatwhorebeth, a distant cousin of Terebithia.

She pulls out the plastic boxes of prepared food—salad, a roasted chicken, asparagus—and places them on the broad granite counter where they eat most of their meals. She could put the food on actual serving platters, but why bother to disguise its origins? Brian, who flew to the home office in Atlanta this morning, won't be home until almost ten, and he's the only one who cares if food is homemade, and only because he hates to think she's had a free moment to herself. As if, she thinks, gathering up the pair of Crocs that Maggie has left in the middle of the kitchen floor, then rinsing the glasses and plates left over from the kids' snacks, which almost certainly ruined any appetite they had for dinner. The phone rings. Once, the kids would have vied to grab it, but the two oldest have cell phones and the youngest have IM accounts, so the phone holds no interest for them. She lets it ring, thinking it might be Brian, whining for an airport pickup, which she has no intention of providing, but then notices that the caller ID is displaying her insurance agent's cell number.

“Meghan,” Dan Simmons says. “I didn't think I'd catch you.”

“Oh, I'll always let you catch me, Dan.” More cute than pretty, Meghan has been an outstanding flirt since her early teens. Much better than Heloise, with her ice princess shtick. Does she drop that superior manner when she is with her clients, or is that part of her appeal? Her sister's secret life excites Meghan, a fact she barely admits to herself. On those rare occasions when Brian wants to have sex with her and she manages to muster up the energy, she pretends she is Heloise and he is a client. That she is in charge and he has to leave when they are done, handing her a nice stack of large bills. As if.

“You're working late,” she says.

“Yes and no. I'm in my little home office, returning all my calls, but already starting on cocktail hour, as you can see.”

The Simmonses are next-door neighbors, their house a mirror image of Meghan's, only Dan has availed himself of “Mommy's office.” Sure enough, she looks through the window over her kitchen sink and sees Dan across the way, hoisting a martini. Dan is fun.

“Ah, Daddy's little helper,” she says, walking over to her refrigerator and locating a bottle of wine, suspiciously deep on the bottom shelf. The health education segment at Hamilton Point turns children into anti-alcohol Nazis, and Michael keeps hiding her wine behind the milk. “We'll have a drink together. What's up?”

“You called me,” he reminds her. “Two days ago. Left a message at the office.”

“Sorry. I forgot.”

“Hey, it's a pleasure to have a client who calls me,” he says. “Most people run when they see me coming, like I'm that guy in
Groundhog Day.
”

She laughs, although she has no idea what he is talking about. Movies, sports—most of men's conversational milestones are lost to her, but she pretends to get them. “Well, with four kids and a husband who's on the road three days every week, I have to make sure we have all the coverage we need.”

“Don't worry,” Dan says, “if a plane goes down, you're fine.”

“I worry that the airlines are so broke these days that we won't recover a cent.”

“Well, it's true, if Brian actually died in a plane crash, there probably would be a war of deep pockets, with my company fighting the airlines' carrier over who had to pay out. But it's also true that we're talking about something that has virtually no odds of happening. What you really have to worry about are the kind of mundane accidents that no one thinks about. Slip in the bathtub, a fall down the steps. And cars, don't get me started on those death traps. I think you have adequate coverage for that, but I'll review everything. I know you told me that Brian has a handgun, but it is kept in a safe, right?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Okay, because we require that. Meanwhile, I don't think you have enough disability coverage, but almost no one does. And have you thought about some of the financial products I mentioned to you the last time you both were in—”

Screams rise from the family room, providing her a graceful way to end the conversation. “I better run before blood is shed,” she says. “It's so hard to get out of leather.”

Dan laughs. He probably wishes that his own wife was so chipper and cavalier about household calamities. Lillian Simmons is a big-boned slob who looks ten years older than her age, but she is also absolutely reliable, the go-to mom of Hamilton Point Elementary, the one who can be counted on to bail out any forgetful snack mom. That's the thing about wives. All men want them, they just don't necessarily want the ones they have.

A slip in the bathtub. A fall down the stairs. An accident on the twisty snake that is Old Orchard. A plane falling out of the sky. She should be so lucky. She trips over another pair of Crocs—the things seem to be breeding—and calls the children to dinner, and something in her voice silences the bedlam instantly, bringing them to the table with heads down.
Mom's mad. Walk carefully.
She hates seeing her children like this, controlling them through her anger, but her incipient fury seems to be the only power she has over them, over anyone.

 

B
RIAN
D
UFFY SQUEEZES
into the last open spot at the bar, putting his elbows down before he realizes the wood is still damp from the bartender passing a wet dishrag over it.
As if that filthy bit of cloth could make anything cleaner,
he thinks with a shudder. It takes him several minutes to get the bar wench's attention, and in the time he waits, his order somehow mutates from a defensible light beer to a vodka martini, a double.
Sure, add a quesadilla and some chips.
It's not like he's going to get dinner on the plane and there's never anything waiting for him at home.

Airport bars used to be kind of sexy, based on the movies and television shows he had watched as a kid. Sweeping views of planes taking off and landing, well-dressed people sipping cocktails and speaking low, charged encounters between strangers. Now they tend to be like this one, a cramped windowless room in Atlanta Hartsfield, where you have to fight for every inch of space. On the trip down, he read a paperback that began with a man meeting a beautiful blond in an airport bar and he had found that one detail more far-fetched than the high-tech crime caper that had followed. Airport bars are the new saltpeter.

Look at this one. On his left, two honeymooners, post-honeymooners by all appearances, weary beneath their red-tinged tans, barely speaking to each other as they contemplate the rest of their lives together. To his right, one of those corporate women who travels with a roller bag she can barely lift, the kind of woman who won't make eye contact with a man until she drops her suitcase on his head. A bitch, a ballbuster. Just his type. In fact, she looks uncannily like the woman who fired him three hours ago.

He still can't believe he had to fly to Atlanta to be fired. All the signs were there—the lack of a clear agenda for today's meeting, the fact that they wanted him in and out in a day, when they usually brought people in the night before, put them up at the Ritz-Carlton in Buckhead. Funny, he was the company's de facto executioner for seven years, flying into various branches and firing people under the rubric of “reorganization,” and yet he didn't see his own death coming. “You know we always do these things face-to-face, Brian,” said Colleen Browne, whom he thinks of as Cold-Faced Bitch, a woman he has wanted to bend over a desk since the first time he saw her, and never more so than when she was firing him. He considered it, for a fleeting second, thought about grabbing her, ripping away her little black suit, forcing her facedown onto her BlackBerry so hard that she would end up sending text gibberish to everyone in her address book.

But negotiating a decent severance had seemed more pressing. At least he had the context to do that, to get a good package. Six months' salary, a full year of medical, no small thing with four kids. Still, he thinks of the CEOs who fuck up companies and walk away with ten, twenty million, and he thinks maybe he should have fucked the brunette instead. The country's tiptoeing into a recession; his sector, financial services, is in particularly bad shape. Six months might not be enough, and thanks to Meghan's free-spending ways, they don't begin to have the savings they should. He orders another drink. He can't bear the thought of going home, having to tell Meghan about this. What would happen if he missed his plane? It happens, and he's in Atlanta Hartsfield, so anything is credible.