Mike, Mike & Me (17 page)

Will wonders never cease?

Leaving the macaroni and cheese behind, I tote Tyler into the front hall, where Mike is already stripping off his tie.

“You really are home early.”

“I really am home early.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“I told you I would be. What’s for dinner?” he asks, bending to press a kiss on my cheek, then on Tyler’s.

“Now that you’re here, takeout.”

He laughs. “No problem.”

No problem? He hates takeout almost as much as he hates boxed macaroni and cheese.

“You’re in a good mood tonight,” I say as the baby stretches his arms up toward his daddy.

“I’m always in a good mood.”

I snort at that.

“Hey,” he says, but he’s still smiling.

I’m surprised when Mike takes the beckoning Tyler from me without being nudged to. Usually, he’d rather change his clothes, wash up and spend fifteen minutes on the toilet before he’s ready to take on one of the boys…let alone three.

I watch in disbelief as he plunks himself down on the couch, balancing Tyler in the crook of his arm and cradling Josh on the opposite knee, with Mikey sandwiched in between.

“So what’s up?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re home early and you’re in a great mood. Did you get a raise?” I ask, lowering myself into a wingback chair.

“Nope.”

“A promotion?”

“Uh-uh.”

“You won the lottery and quit your job?”

He laughs.

I notice an incredible amount of dust on the end table and, come to think of it, in the air. It’s clearly visible in the late-day sunlight streaming in through the front window.

Darn that Melina, anyway. She must have skipped the living room, too.

“What’s the lottery?” Josh wants to know.

“It’s a big waste of money,” Mikey tells him. “That’s what Grandma tells Grandpa when he talks about it.”

“Well, I didn’t win the lottery or quit my job,” Mike informs all of us. “I just felt like coming home early to see my family for a change. Not that I don’t feel like doing that every night.”

“So why is tonight special?” I ask him, because I get the feeling that it is. He never comes home in a wonderful mood. Hopefully he won’t notice the dust. Or if he does, he won’t threaten, again, to fire Melina.

Mike informs me, “I have a surprise for you and the boys.”

Said boys erupt in cheers and queries.

“A surprise! Yay!”

“I love surprises!”

“What kind of surprise?”

“Is it candy?”

“Can I have the biggest piece?”

“When can we have it?”

“You can have it in a few days,” Mike says, laughing and throwing up his hands.

“Why do we have to wait, Daddy?” Mikey protests.

“Yeah, no fair. I didn’t even break Mommy’s favorite pink teacup this afternoon.”

“Yes, you did, Josh. Daddy, he did!”

“Not on purpose,” he tells his big brother. “It was an accident. Right, Mommy?”

I sigh. “It was an accident. What’s the surprise, Mike?”

“You know how you’ve been saying you need to get away?”

My breath catches in my throat. “Yes…”

“Well, you’re going to get away.”

I squeal and leap up to hug him as the boys launch into a happy dance. “We’re going to the Cape?”

“Not the Cape…”

“Where?”

He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a folded sheet of white paper, handing it to me across Mikey’s and Tyler’s bouncing heads.

“What does it say, Mommy?”

“Hang on, Mikey, I’m reading….” It’s a computer-generated receipt for plane tickets purchased online this afternoon. Four tickets from New York to Tampa, Florida.

Florida.

My first thought, God help me, is that Happy Nappy Mike lives somewhere in Florida. I don’t know exactly where. I never asked.

Florida is a huge state.

He could be hours from Tampa. He could be out in Key West, for all I know, or on the panhandle, or…

Or he could be in Tampa.

“We’re going to Florida?” I ask, looking up at Mike’s grinning face.

“Yup.” He looks pleased. If he ever knew…

But he doesn’t know.

“That’s awesome,” I say, trying to muster enthusiasm as the boys jump around cheering.

“My parents bought the tickets. They insisted. When I called my mother from the office this afternoon to ask her if they were up for a couple of houseguests next week, she gave me her credit-card number and said the tickets are on them. They can’t wait to see the boys. And you, too, of course.”

“That’s…that’s…great.” I glance down at the itinerary again, then say, “Oh, Mike, we need to get a seat for Tyler, too. It’s dangerous just to hold him on our laps the whole way. We can pay for it ourselves, and—”

“He’s already got a seat.”

“No, he doesn’t. There are only four tickets.”

“Right. For you and the boys.”

Thud.

“You’re not going?” I am incredulous. I haven’t traveled without him in years. I picture myself alone on a plane with three young children and am overwhelmed.

“I can’t go, Beau. My vacation isn’t until the following week, remember?”

“But…the boys and I are going to Florida without you?”

Florida.

Where Mike lives.

“I thought you’d be happy about it.” The twinkle in his dark eyes is fading faster than the August sunlight beyond the picture window.

“I was happy…when I thought it was going to be a family vacation. Not your shipping me and the kids off to your mother’s for a week.”

I’ll admit, I shouldn’t have said that.

I love my mother-in-law.

And Mike clearly believes he’s doing me a favor.

But I can’t help it. I’m just…

Shocked.

And…

Afraid.

Afraid that I might be tempted to look up an old friend while I’m down there.

“I’m sorry,” I tell Mike before he can speak. “I’d just…I’d rather go to the Cape. With you.”

“Cape Canaveral?” shouts Mikey, who studied the space program in school this year. “That’s in Florida. Can we ride on a rocket ship, Mommy?”

“Cape Cod,” I say, still watching Mike’s face.

“What’s Cape Cod?” Josh asks.

“Is it in Florida, Mommy?”

“No, Mikey. It’s in Massachusetts.”

“I want to go to Florida. Daddy said we’re going to Florida. I want to see Grandma and Grandpa and ride on a rocket ship. Why don’t you want to go to Florida, Mommy?”

“It’s not that I don’t want to go to Florida,” I say, mostly to my ominously silent husband. “But me and the kids alone…I’d miss you, Mike. We all would.”

“I want to ride on the rocket ship, too,” Josh announces. “And I want to get cotton candy. Okay?”

“I thought this would make you happy,” Mike tells me, shaking his head, his expression softening. “You said you wanted to get away to the beach.”

“I know, but…I don’t always have to get what I want.”

Yes, you do. You always have. You’re spoiled rotten.

“Well, you aren’t getting exactly what you want, Beau. I’m not about to send you to the Cape alone with the boys. My parents will help you with the kids. You can have some time to yourself. It’ll be good for you, Beau.”

“No, it won’t,” I say, alarmed at what I might be tempted to do with time to myself in Florida. “It won’t be good for me, Mike. It isn’t fair for me to be off in Florida having…time to myself…while you’re up here, working.”

He puts an arm around my shoulders. “You deserve it. You never get a break from the kids. Go to Florida. Let my mother baby-sit. She loves it. And you can go shopping or whatever it is that would make you happy.”

“I
am
happy,” I say, my eyes filling with tears.

I hate myself. I hate that I’ve been e-mailing back and forth with Mike. I hate that I’ve been thinking about him the way that I have.

Most of all, I hate what I did that summer fifteen years ago.

“Why do you think I’m not happy?” I ask Mike, struggling not to blink. If I blink, the tears will fall, and I can’t let him see that I’m crying.

“Hey…why are you crying?”

Yeah. I blinked.

“I’m just…I’m so happy. They’re tears of happiness. I love you so much, Mike.” I bury my head in his shoulder, awash in tears and guilt and regret.

He laughs. “I love you, too. So go to Florida with the boys and have some fun. You deserve it.”

No, I don’t. I don’t deserve it…

And I don’t deserve him.

eighteen

The past

W
hen the phone rang the morning after Mike flew back to Los Angeles, I picked it up without thinking.

“Beau! There you are!”

My heart sank. “Oh! Hi, Mike!”

Yeah.
That
Mike.

I tossed aside the issue of
People
magazine I’d been reading, with its huge cover photo of Rebecca Schaeffer, the
My Sister Sam
actress who had been murdered a few weeks earlier by a crazed fan.

“Wow,” Mike said. “I can’t believe you answered. I expected to get your machine. Or your roommate.”

“Why did you think that?” I asked, my mind racing.

Dammit. Why did I have to go and answer the phone?

I should have screened the call. I should have realized it might be him. Valerie had said he’d left a few messages while I was staying in the hotel the last two nights.

“When you didn’t return my calls, I got paranoid,” he said. “In fact, I wasn’t even going to bother calling you back again, but something made me give it one last shot.”

“Oh…well…”

“You wish I hadn’t called, right?”

Talk about awkward.

“No,” I protested, determined to put an end to this…this…this whatever was going on between us. I was going to be detached, no-nonsense, firm. “Actually, I’m glad you called.”

“Why? You have a thing for stalkers?”

All right, I laughed. I laughed despite the article I’d just been reading in
People
magazine. I couldn’t help it. The guy was amusing.

“Yeah,” I said, “stalkers are definitely my type.”

“Great. So let’s get together and I can stalk you in person. When are you free this week?”

I wasn’t free this week…or ever.

That was exactly what I wanted to say.

So why didn’t I?

Why did I hedge and tell him vaguely that I was going to be kind of busy at work this week?

That left the door open for him to suggest that we get together today, since it was Saturday. Or tomorrow, since it was Sunday.

I couldn’t think of an excuse. I swear, I tried…but I couldn’t come up with anything.

All right, maybe I shouldn’t have been grasping for an excuse. Maybe I should have come right out and told him to bug off.

But didn’t I at least owe him an in-person explanation as to why I could never see him again?

I told myself that I did.

I told myself that agreeing to meet him for a glass of wine tonight was no big deal.

Not even if a glass of wine on a Saturday night sounded suspiciously like a date.

But I knew it wouldn’t be a date. It would merely be my telling him—over a glass of wine on a Saturday night—exactly why he wasn’t allowed to see me, or call me, or stalk me, in the future.

Shortly after we hung up, Valerie came home lugging two Key Food shopping bags. I met her at the door and blurted out, “I just did a really, really crazy thing.”

“You threw water balloons out the window on people’s heads as they walked by down on the street?”

“What? No!”

“Oh. Because I was thinking we should do that later. People would thank us. It’s a freaking heat wave out there. Look at me.”

I looked at her. She was flushed, her face shiny with sweat, her hair plastered to her head in a frighteningly limp do.

“You need a cold drink,” I said. “And I need to tell you what I did.”

“What did you do?” She followed me into the kitchen, which was barely big enough for both of us, the groceries and the open refrigerator door.

“I just told Mike I’d go out with him tonight.” At her blank look, I clarified. “Mike. The guy I met at the airport.”

“Business-card Mike? Cute, available Mike?”

“That’s the one.”

“This is so not fair,” she said, shaking her head as she sidestepped past me to reach for a glass. “I haven’t had a date in months. You have a boyfriend
and
a date.”

“Do you not see why that’s a problem, Valerie?”

She turned on the cold water. “I’d kill to have a problem like that.”

I have to admit, I was getting a little sick of her downplaying all of my troubles. It wasn’t as though my life was perfect. I had plenty of problems—excess weight and a lackluster love life just happened not to be among them. Sometimes Valerie acted as though those were the only two issues that warranted sympathy.

Still, she was my only available sounding board, so I told her what had happened with Mike just now on the phone.

“I’d show up in your place if I didn’t have to work tonight,” she said, sounding half-serious.

“You’re working on a Saturday night?”

“I’m baby-sitting. How pathetic is that?”

Pretty pathetic, I had to admit. My problems suddenly didn’t seem quite as pressing.

Valerie, ever the good sport, suggested, “Maybe you should call him back and tell him you can’t go, then.”

“What would I say?”

“You’d say ‘something suddenly came up.’ It worked for Marcia Brady.”

“No, it didn’t. It backfired on her, remember? Doug dumped her when he saw her bruised nose.”

“Are you sure?”

I gave her a look. “It’s Brady trivia, Valerie.”

Meaning, I was the Grand Poobah of seventies sitcoms.

Valerie shrugged. “Well, I guess you’ll have to just go on this date then, won’t you?”

I guessed that I would.

The truth was, I secretly wanted to. There was nothing worse than staying home alone on a summertime Saturday night. I knew that for a fact, as I had done it one too many times lately.

So Mike and I met at a piano bar on Second Avenue in the East Fifties, according to plan. My plan. That neighborhood was no-man’s land—not on my turf, not on his. We’d be forced to go our separate ways in order to get home at the end of the evening. There would be no awkward sharing of cabs.