A Slight Change of Plan (9 page)

Good lord.

That was the funniest thing I’d ever heard.

When I finally stopped laughing, Cheryl and I went back into my kitchen and made brownies. As they baked, we scattered seeds in all the clay pots on my deck—the tomatoes and peppers, the hibiscus and Regan’s palm tree. We passed on the impatiens—the seedlings would be noticeable way too soon. We had some more wine as we pulled the brownies from the oven, and, while they were still warm, spread peanut butter on top of them. Then we added a scoop of vanilla ice cream. And some chocolate syrup. And nuts.

Best. Dinner. Ever.

Tom Smith, according to his profile, retired from teaching three years ago and was using his experience as a science teacher/guidance counselor/wrestling coach to privately tutor high school students in college admissions testing and assist them in the application process. So I figured he was smart, compassionate, and well built. He was also charming in his e-mails, and our one phone conversation had lasted forty-five minutes and ended with us agreeing to meet for coffee.

He was short. I’m five eight, and although I know that’s considered kind of tall for a woman, I didn’t consider myself a tall person. But when I stood next to Tom, that was how I felt.

He cracked a smile. “You should have mentioned your years spent on the women’s basketball team.”

I grinned down at him. His eyes were about three inches below mine. “And how long were you in the touring company of
The Wiz
as Munchkin number four?”

We laughed. We had spent the entire time on the phone laughing at each other’s jokes. When we sat down, we were exactly at eye level, and I thought he was pretty cute in person: gray-white hair, lots of it; dark eyes; and olive skin, with big teeth that flashed a great smile. His profile said he was fifty-eight, but he looked younger.

“So, I have to ask,” I said. “Is there a Napoleon complex I’m going to have to deal with later on?”

He shook his head. “Nope. What I lack in stature, I make up for in towering intellect and superior sexual prowess. My self-image and my height are entirely unrelated.”

“Thank God,” I said. “It took me an hour to figure out what to wear to my first date in over thirty years. If you had turned out to be a dud, I’d probably wait another thirty.”

And we were off.

It’s interesting how adult relationships work. I’d had men friends in college, purely platonic men friends with whom I had long conversations about deep, important things, like “Is there a God, and what does he want from us?” and “In the future, will we really be able to beam up?” Once I was married, my men friends morphed into the husbands of my women friends, or business acquaintances. As “wife,” that was all that was allowed. And I had been happy with Adam most of the time, so I never went looking for anything else.

It was great to sit down with a man and know that maybe, just maybe, this so-far-interesting dynamic could become something more. Something better. I missed having a man to talk to. My own sons drove me crazy, and conversations with them usually ended with me thanking God I didn’t have to live with a man anymore. But this was different. Sitting and talking to Tom was nice. It was more than nice. He was a little rough around the edges, looked at things from a slightly different angle, and had a deep, gruff laugh.

We went from coffee to dinner. We both loved Thai. We went from dinner to a drink. We almost went from the bar back to his place, but I shook my head, and he said fine, and then he said he’d call, and when I got home, I was almost regretting saying no. Why shouldn’t I go home with someone if I wanted to? I was a grown-up woman with no emotional entanglements, and if I wanted to sleep with someone, well, I should be able to. And that lost libido of mine had sat up
and looked around sometime after the second white wine. But sex was something I hadn’t had in a while, and I wanted to go slow.

Besides, I hadn’t shaved my legs.

But on the next date, I might.

The monthly spaghetti Saturday had been a tradition at my house for years. It was my one big concession to the whole “family dinner” idea. My kids were always invited, and my sister, Laura, and her family, but there were always other people, like Cheryl, and sometimes neighbors or coworkers to add to the mix. It’s not that I didn’t love my family and want to have dinner with them, but I had other people in my life who I also wanted to have dinner with, too, and why should I have exclusively family versus nonfamily dinners? So I’d make a huge pot of gravy (which is what my Italian mother called her spaghetti sauce), cook a few boxes of pasta, toss a salad, and toast some garlic bread. Then I’d top off the evening with cannoli and other pastries from the Italian bakery in Morristown that was always worth the trip, even if finding parking was the absolute pits.

Laura always got there a little early so we could talk about Mom.

Our mother, Rose Gianelli Freemont, had lived in a seniors’ development outside of Cape May, at the southern tip of New Jersey, for almost twenty years. She had never remarried after Daddy died, and seeing what kind of woman she had turned into was part of the reason I didn’t fight the whole dating thing as hard as I could have.

The two of us had had a falling-out right after Adam had died. She had really loved Adam, and when I had told her
about the cheating, and how I had been thinking about leaving him anyway, she had become very angry. Angry, grieving people should be careful what they say to each other, and she and I had not been careful. We ended up screaming, terrible things leaving our mouths that nothing could ever make right again.

A month after the fight, I called her and apologized. She hung up on me. I drove with Laura to see her. She closed the door in my face. After the third time that happened, I stopped going down. I sent her flowers for her birthday every year, and a basket of fruit for Christmas. She never acknowledged the gifts. I’m pretty sure she got my cards and letters, but she never wrote back. Every month I called, said, “Hi, Mom,” and she hung up on me. It had been going on for so long it didn’t even hurt anymore, because I knew that even though she hung up on me, she had caller ID, which meant she deliberately answered the phone so that she
could
hang up on me, and that meant something. Once my mother found something that worked, she was very reluctant to change.

Laura traveled down every three or four months, and talked to Mom several times a week. My kids had gone with Laura in the past to see their grandmother, and she still sent them birthday and Christmas gifts. Regan, I knew, called her every month or so, and Jeff sent her postcards all the time. Sam wasn’t too good at keeping in touch, but managed a birthday card and a thank-you note at Christmas. I just kept calling and hoping for a miracle.

“Mom’s getting worse,” Laura said, slipping onto a stool by the breakfast bar and reaching for the wine.

I glanced at her. I was chopping stuff for salad. “Worse how?”

Laura sighed. “Her piles are getting bigger. She can’t walk across the room without getting winded. And she’s starting to forget things.”

This was not good news.

My mother was always someone who felt that every single item that came through the U.S. mail was very important. So important that throwing it away was, if not a federal offense, at least a misdemeanor punishable by a large fine and possible prison time. Consequently, there were always piles of opened, read mail all over her house. It was stacked, rubber-banded or paper-clipped, and covered all horizontal surfaces. The last time I had visited her, a few months before Adam’s death, I had been alarmed by the small mountains of paper that had sprung up all over her house.

“How bad is the paper?” I asked.

Laura sighed. “Well, she’s started getting a lot of magazines.”

Okay. Very bad. Magazines had always been, to Mom, sources of profoundly important information that could not be found anywhere else. At one point, Laura and I had to sneak six years’ worth of old
TV Guide
s out of Mom’s house while she was in the shower.

My mother had also spent fifty years of her life smoking. Granted, smoking, for her generation, had been cool and acceptable before it became rude and fatal, but Mom smoked until she was diagnosed with emphysema twelve years ago, and the damage had been too far gone. Her ability to engage in any physical activity had been dwindling for years.

“What about the walker?” I asked.

My sister rolled her eyes and drank some wine. “What do you think?”

Ah, yes. Good old Mom. Denial was her middle name.

“What kind of stuff is she forgetting?”

“Where the garbage can is. Her doctor’s last name. What a can opener is for.”

Well, shit.

At that moment, Laura’s two sons, Devon and Wade, came bounding in from the deck.

“Hey, guys,” I said. “How’s school?”

“Okay,” Wade said. “I like your new house.”

“Thanks. Me too.”

“How’s the driving going?” I asked. Devon was turning seventeen, and had been driving on his permit.

He shrugged. “Okay. I’m a really good driver, but Wade is afraid to drive with me.”

Wade, two years younger, made a face. “I’m not afraid,” he said hotly. “It just makes me nervous because you go so fast.”

“I don’t go too fast,” Devon began, and I immediately jumped in.

“I guess you two want to play Xbox?”

They nodded, disaster averted, and I showed them into the den. I had gotten an Xbox for them a few years ago, because while I enjoyed their company in short spurts, they quickly became bored with plain television and then grew tiresome. Video games allowed them to engage in open warfare without ever leaving the couch. Much better than playing soccer in the living room.

Laura’s husband, Bobby, also came in from the deck. Poor Bobby. He was a quiet, mild-mannered geek, happiest when designing some Internet website, and his two physically overactive sons wore him out.

“I really like your new place,” he said, reaching for the wine. “As the boys pointed out, you could put a basketball hoop at one end of your deck and have enough room for a one-on-one game.”

I smiled. “Yeah, well, I’ll keep that in mind. Did you see Mom, too?”

He looked grave. “Kate, it wasn’t good. But the thing is, she didn’t realize it wasn’t good. She wasn’t at all bothered by the fact that she needed to hold on to something just to walk across the room. It was like an obstacle course; chairs and tables everywhere, so there was always something for her to lean on. And when I offered to take some of her magazines to the recycling center, she said she hadn’t finished reading them, even though they were three years old. All she would let me do was take out all the cardboard. There was a pile by the doorway almost three feet tall. But she’s perfectly happy.”

I signed. “Mom is always perfectly happy as long as things are going exactly the way she wants them to and there’s nobody telling her what she doesn’t want to hear. She’ll be perfectly happy until the roof falls in, and as soon as she figures out how to live in the open air, she’ll be perfectly happy again.”

“We need to do something,” Laura said.

I shook my head. “You need to do something. I’ll be happy to help you help her, but you know how things are, and they’re not likely to change.”

She shrugged and snatched a stub of carrot from the cutting board. “Whatever. I have a feeling that she’s inches away from disaster, and she knows it. So, anyway, what about Sam?”

“He and Alisa should be moving in next week. I think as soon as I find a job, things will be fine. Until then, we’ll just stay out of one another’s way.”

Jeff had come up the stairs and into the kitchen, Regan and Phil right behind him. “What about finding a job?” he asked, placing three bottles of wine on the counter and giving me a kiss.

“My planned excursion into academia has been canceled. So now I have to find something else to do with my life.”

Regan was carrying flowers and more wine. “What happened to the college thing?” she asked.

“Budget cuts,” I said. “This is a lot of wine, even for us.”

Phil was also carrying two bottles. “Stockpile, Kate. Just don’t drink it alone while you’re sitting around all day not working.”

I shook my head. “Not working is not an option. I’ve got to find something, and by the fall. Unfortunately, I’m not qualified for anything but tax law, and that’s what I don’t want to do.” I shook my head again. “On top of the latest Rose report, maybe I do need all that wine.”

“What’s with Grandma?” Regan asked.

I glanced at Laura, who took a deep breath.

“Your grandmother is starting to unravel,” she explained. “She’s forgetting things. I don’t think she can live by herself too much longer.”

Jeff uncorked the first of the bottles he’d brought. “And where else could she live?”

Good question. Once upon a time, about ten years ago, my mother and I had made a major tour of several assisted living places, a few of them so nice that I seriously thought about signing myself up. But nothing was quite good enough for Mom, so she went back to Cape May.

Laura shrugged and looked at Bobby, who carefully avoided looking back. Jeff, watching them both, passed around the glasses and started pouring.

“Well,” he said, raising his glass, “here’s to Mom’s first spaghetti Saturday in her brand-new place. May she have many more.”

We all clinked glasses and drank up. After that, conversation turned away from unpleasant things like dementia and unemployment, and we started talking about Regan’s wedding. We were all getting along just great when Cheryl came in, carrying more wine.

“Thanks, I think,” I said, giving her a hug. “Why are suddenly all the people in my life showering me with wine? Do I need it? Or do you think I have a problem and you’re all turning into enablers?”

Cheryl gave me a knowing look. “What else for the woman who has everything?”

I rolled my eyes and handed Regan some plates and forks. Cheryl immediately started folding napkins.

“The place looks great. Love the new furniture,” she said.

My new furniture had been floor samples, all on sale, so I grabbed them right off the sales floor and had them delivered the day before. I had two love seats, one in a rosy floral with green vines, the other a green-and-white stripe. I also
had two matching slipper chairs in rose with green trim. Everything went with my ivory wing chair and the faded Oriental rug. The effect was feminine but not too sweet. I had tipped the delivery guys an extra fifty bucks each to cart the other furniture upstairs, where I was sure my son and Alisa would appreciate it. I spent the morning buying pillows and throws and cool shabby-chic lamps and candleholders, and was pretty happy with the new arrangement.