Wreathed (3 page)

Having exhausted the possibilities of electronic correspondence, I switched over to
Candy Crush Saga
and settled into my booth. I finished two levels before I realized that it had, now, indeed been a long time since Mother had gone into the bathroom.

Shortly after that I realized that I needed to not drink any more coffee if I didn’t want to make the gutsy call about whether or not to duck into the men’s room.

It was not much longer after that when I realized that I was a thirty-year-old single woman sitting alone in a chain restaurant, sipping coffee and playing
Candy Crush Saga
.

I don’t enjoy eating alone in restaurants. I would rather eat microwave lasagna over the sink than eat at a restaurant by myself, and I have. I like restaurants. I like eating better food than I could ever hope to cook for myself, and I like leaving large tips for the nice people who bring me my food and clean up after me and wash the dishes after I leave. But I detest eating by myself, especially in happy, noisy restaurants full of dating couples and families with toddlers and waiters wishing people a happy birthday.

I considered my options.

I could go and pull Mother out of the bathroom and apologize and give in to her unreasonable demand to drive her down to Cape May for her mysterious appointment.

I could sit and wait for her to pull herself together so we could talk about this, the way that reasonable people do.

I could leave and ask the bartender to call her a cab, maybe slip him a twenty and ask him to pay the cabdriver. Then I could drive home and prepare to spend the rest of my life listening to my mother complain about that time I left her alone in a restaurant.

It wouldn’t be so bad to indulge her, just this once
, I told myself.
Just go in the bathroom and apologize. Take her to Cape May. Maybe you can get a nice meal and a spa treatment out of it. It can’t possibly be as bad as you think it will.

That’s what my inner voice was saying, but I didn’t listen because sometimes your inner voice is an idiot. I finished my coffee and paid the check and sat back in the booth and made a couple of moves in
Words With Friends
. Mother came out of the bathroom just as I was playing VICTOR on a triple-word score to take the lead.

“Are you ready to go?” she asked. “You didn’t pay for dinner, did you?”

“I did indeed,” I said.

“How much was it?”

“If I tell you, you’ll try to give me cash for it, which I’m absolutely not going to take, and then we’re going to just go round and round all over again. I am tired and I would like us to stop arguing and go home.”

She slipped into the booth across from me. “I just want to say one thing before we go.”

“I’m not in a hurry,” I said. “Would you like some coffee or something?” I had won this round, but I didn’t see the point in pressing my advantage further than that.

“It is getting late, and coffee is the last thing I need right now. I’ve had a little time to think about how I’ve behaved tonight, and I wanted to tell you that I’m not proud of myself.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I should have leveled with you right from the start. I’ve had a very distressing day, and I thought I could count on your sister to take me down for the funeral, and when she backed out on me, I didn’t know what else to do.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “The what?”

“The funeral. Friday morning, in Cape May.”

My back stiffened against the booth. “What are you talking about? What funeral? Who died?”

“Nobody you know, of course, or I would have told you about it already. But that’s why I need to go down there, is to go to the funeral.”

“Um,” I said. “Er. Um.” I was frustrated by my sudden inability to master the basics of the English language.
I knew it
, I thought.
Every time she calls me, it means somebody’s in the hospital, or somebody’s dead.

“Are you all right, sweetheart?” Mother asked.

“You could have told me that,” I said.

“I should have,” she said. “And I apologize. It’s just that I remembered that you aren’t really much of a funeral-goer. I thought it would be best not to bring the subject up over dinner.”

“I do fine at funerals,” I said. It came out sounding a little more tense than I wanted it to.

“I just thought you might not be comfortable with the idea right away.”

“That happened one time. I was twelve.”

“I know, dear,” she said. “I remember it very clearly.”

“Mother, is it so much to ask to be treated like an adult? Just one time?”

“Of course not, Wendy. I would be happy to oblige you.”

“That would be nice,” I said. I drank the last couple of drops of coffee in my cup.

“Well, here goes. I have a funeral to go to in Cape May on Friday morning, and it would help me if you could drive me down there Thursday night. Would you be available?”

It took a moment for me to realize what she was doing. This was manipulation under another name. This was giving me the illusion of a victory without the substance. And the worst part of it all was that it was working. I’d been waiting for my mother to treat me like an adult all my life, and now she was doing it, and now it was working against me. The problem with being treated like an adult, it turns out, is that then you have to act like an adult.

“Yes,” I said. “I will drive you down there. I will go with you to this funeral, for whoever it is, because it seems to be important to you. I can take a day off without too much trouble, and I wouldn’t mind taking a nice drive down the Shore.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate it. I know this is difficult for you.”

“It’s fine,” I said.

“I know this won’t be fun for you,” she said. “But when you get to be my age, half your social life revolves around going to funerals.”

“Something to look forward to,” I said. “Come on. Let’s go.”

We gathered our purses and jackets and made our way out to my car.

Chapter 4

The next morning was brutal. I got up at the time I always tell myself I am going to start getting up, but instead of exercising and eating a healthy breakfast, I grabbed a stale cinnamon roll and a bottle of water and headed to the office. I plowed through the two wills I needed to review and managed to gulp down two cups of coffee before my clients arrived.

My clients were perfectly nice people and it wasn’t their fault that they had both inherited generation-skipping trusts with significant estate-tax implications. Three generations of lawyers had worked to conserve the capital tied up in those trusts, and the wills I had drafted were designed to pass that capital down to the next as-yet-unborn generation with minimal loss. Of course, when my clients did manage to add members of that next generation, the wills would have to be redrafted to address their existence, which would result in more billable hours for my firm. (Being an estate lawyer gives you a slightly skewed view of marriage and family relationships.)

The husband was one of the vacant, uninteresting old-money drones I had spent my dating life trying to avoid. His new wife was petite and graceful, with flawless tanned skin and raven hair—in other words, everything I am not. I inherited my mother’s pale-blond hair and delicate bone structure, which would have been fine if I hadn’t also inherited my father’s imposing height. If I were a little thinner, I could get away with being willowy and elegant, but I’m not and I haven’t been willing to do the exercise and starvation needed to make that happen. Additionally, some rogue gene gave me D-cup breasts, which are more of a hindrance than anything else. Women make nasty comments behind my back about plastic surgery, and they strain my back, and they attract the wrong kind of men on top of that.

Setting aside their obvious flaws, though, these particular clients were very nice people, and they were perfectly happy with the will, and they even managed to listen closely and nod in the right places when I explained the various clauses and their tax implications. It was a pleasant enough meeting, and it ended just in time for me to grab a quick sandwich at my desk. I was in the middle of rearranging my schedule so that I could take Friday off when my sister called.

“I just had to say thank you,” Pacey said.

“You are just so incredibly welcome, dear sister,” I said.

“Already with the sarcasm, I see. You must have had a fun evening talking to Mother.”

“A fun evening, and a busy morning.” I would have complained to Pacey about the press of my work responsibilities, but I knew she would respond by telling me about everything that she had to do every day in corralling two active toddlers.

“I know you wouldn’t have wanted to take Mother to this funeral. I would have done it, you understand, but it is just simply impossible.”

“It’s not easy for me, either,” I said. I had plans to spend my evening researching safe conversational topics for the drive down.

“I know, but I appreciate it like you would not believe. Benjy and Simon have been looking forward to this party for weeks. They ask me about it every ten minutes. I ought to drop them off at the U.N. sometime and let them do some negotiating.” Pacey had a graduate degree in foreign policy and used to have a good job with the German consulate in New York. She married a Swiss diplomat named Henri, and they bought a home in rural New Jersey. When Pacey found out she was pregnant with twins, Henri left the diplomatic corps and got a job with one of the big Swiss banks. It was supposed to be a more stable job for him, but he ended up spending almost all his time shuttling back and forth to Geneva. That left Pacey alone at home, tending to two three-year-old boys, who were capable of bouncing off the walls even in good moods. I thought of them as Biter and Smiter, although I would never say that out loud where Pacey could hear me. Of course, I bribed the twins with Hershey’s Miniatures every time I visited, so it was possible I was not seeing them at their best.

“Well, you go to your birthday party, and I’ll go to my funeral, and we’ll see who has the better time. Anyway, so just what exactly did she tell you about this funeral? Because she didn’t tell me squat.”

“She didn’t tell me anything, either,” Pacey said. “I don’t even know the person’s name, whoever it was. I got the impression it was somebody that she had known from high school or something, going back at least that far. Maybe it was a college roommate, but that’s just a guess. All she would say is that it was nobody I knew.”

“She said she would e-mail me the link to the obituary. I guess that would explain at least some of it. She also threatened to tell me the story about whoever-it-was on the way down, and I can’t tell you how excited I am about that.”

“I do feel bad about dumping Mother on you for a whole weekend. How did she talk you into that, anyway?” she asked.

“She cheated. She treated me like an adult.”

“You fell for the reverse psychology bit? Wendy, you should know better.”

“Says the child who never says no to anything Mother asks,” I replied.

“I’m the middle child. I need the attention. Anyway, I can’t imagine what it would be like to have Benjy and Simon in the car all the way to Cape May, and then get them dressed up for the funeral of somebody I’d never even heard of. God knows how they would react. You’d have one of them asking a million questions, and the other one would be screaming and crying, and then they’d change roles halfway through. No thank you. And they’d both want to see the body, of course, and there’s no telling how they’ll react to that.”

“Is this conversation going where I think it might be going?” I asked. “Because I don’t like the way I think this is going.”

“All I am saying is that if you put any kid in an unusual situation that they’re not prepared for, they’re going to react in an unpredictable way. You probably know more about that than I do, of course.”

“Quit it, Pacey. That was a long time ago, and it only happened once, and I can’t believe you are teasing me about it.”

“You have to admit,” she said, “that it was memorable. Most people are touchy around dead bodies, but most people don’t react the way you did.”

“I ran screaming out of one funeral, one time, when I was twelve, and nobody in this family has ever let me live it down,” I said. “It’s not fair. You did all kinds of stuff when you were twelve that you got away with, and nobody ever holds it over your head. If it hadn’t been Great-Granddaddy Borden’s funeral, no one would even have noticed at the time.” Over twenty-four hundred people showed up for that funeral, which goes to show you that there isn’t a better way to ensure a big crowd at your funeral than to have an estate worth over a billion dollars.

“I noticed. Mother noticed. If I remember correctly, the
Philadelphia Inquirer
noticed. It’s just a good thing YouTube hadn’t been invented yet.”

“I don’t want to talk about this. I wouldn’t have freaked, except he looked so different in that box, all dressed up. It gave me the creeps. But I’m a grown-up now. I will not run out of the church hyperventilating just because I see a dead body.” Or I hoped not.

“Do you know if there are cameras in the church?” she asked. “Maybe a live feed? Because if there’s any way to record it, maybe we can put you on YouTube after all.”

“Pacey, you are my sister, and I love you, but there are times when I want to punch you in the face.”

Pacey chuckled at that, an evil sound. “Enjoy your weekend.”

The law office where I work used to be a model of diversity, which is one of the two reasons I enjoyed working there. (The other reason is that there is a movie theater in the same complex, and sometimes they let me mooch a bag of free popcorn.) When I started, there were two other female lawyers, and three female paralegals. The lawyer who recruited me cashed out and took early retirement right after her youngest kid got out of college. The other female lawyer got a job in Philly and I haven’t seen her since. The two remaining partners laid off all the paralegals as a cost-cutting move last year. I am the only woman left in the office, except for the receptionist we share with a firm in another suite on the same floor. This is a roundabout way to explain that I have the women’s bathroom all to myself now. It’s one of the few perks.