She left the roses lying in the box, watching her reluctant fingers stretch toward the small envelope, momentarily debating whether or not to open it or simply throw it out. “Oh, look, kids, someone sent us flowers,” she rehearsed, hearing in her mind the barrage of questions that would undoubtedly follow, ultimately tearing open the envelope and pulling the card free.
“Thank you for so many wonderful years,” she read out loud, her eyes clouding over. “Here’s hoping we can remain friends for many more.” She dropped the card on the rattan coffee table in front of her. “Love, Gary.” In the next minute, she was trying to hurl the top of the flower box across the room, but it was still partly secured to its lower half with a strip of adhesive tape, and so it merely bounced into the air and then dangled over the edge of the table threateningly. “God damn you to hell, Gary Schuster,” she cried, bursting into a flood of bitter tears.
She had been avoiding the reality of today since she had first opened her eyes that morning. July 16. Her wedding anniversary. She had ignored the calendar, skipped over the date on her appointment book. She had thrown herself into the mountain of work on her desk, dealing with her phone calls and clients, and confronting the Fosters’ unpleasant lawyer head-on, working right through lunch, avoiding, doing, until it was time to go home. Somehow she had managed to make it through most of the day.
And then the flowers had arrived. Were they Gary’s idea of a joke? Or had the flowers been Suzette’s idea? She stared into the box, amazed as she always was by the natural perfection of roses. Yellow roses were her favorite. Gary knew that, just as
she
knew that it had been Gary’s idea to send the flowers, not Suzette’s. The woman probably wasn’t even aware he had done so, would have been properly horrified at the thought, just as Lynn was horrified at having received them.
She knew Gary well enough to know that he had not intended to be cruel, that he genuinely believed he was doing something nice. The sensitive male of the eighties. Is this really what modern women wanted? Flowers from their exes on what would have been their anniversaries?
Absently, she reached down and fingered the card, which she read again. “Thank you for so many wonderful years,” she repeated aloud, incredulously. She brought her fist down angrily on the table and watched the flowers jump. “If they were so damn wonderful, why did you leave? And who the hell wants to be friends?” She shoved the box roughly to the green carpet, watching the roses spill out in attractive abandon, and then bent over
to scoop them up. “Dammit,” she cried, carrying the box into the kitchen and dumping it into the sink. “What were you thinking of?” she asked, seeing Gary’s smiling face in front of her. “What on earth could have possessed you to send me these?”
And yet, deep down in the part of herself she had been hiding from all day, she had to admit she wasn’t all that surprised. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she had suspected he might do something like this, although for a second before she looked at the card, she had entertained the possibility that the flowers might have come from Marc Cameron.
What was she supposed to do now? Was Gary expecting her to call and thank him? Should she, for God’s sake? What was the proper etiquette in a situation like this?
The hell with him, she thought, reaching for the phone, calling her lawyer instead. “Hello, Renee? It’s Lynn. Gary just sent me flowers. Can you believe it? It would have been our fifteenth wedding anniversary today, and the lunatic just sent me a dozen long-stemmed yellow roses. I’m shaking, I’m so upset. And I have to calm down before the children get home, but I keep looking at the flowers and reading that stupid card. Can you believe it? He hopes we can be friends for many years,” she continued in one frantic outpouring, vaguely aware that the woman on the other end didn’t seem to be giving her her full attention. And then Renee had snapped into action and told her to throw the flowers in the garbage and to make herself a good stiff drink. Somehow she had managed to pull herself together. Had she really carried on that way on the telephone? And what had made her call Renee Bower of all people? This
wasn’t a legal problem. She had other, closer friends whom she could call. And yet, since her separation, she had felt curiously removed from all her old friends, most of whom had always viewed her as one half of a happily married pair. No one, least of all herself, quite knew what to make of her new status. Lynn reached into the sink, pulled out the box, and dumped the beautiful flowers into the trash can under the sink. She was pouring herself the good stiff drink Renee had recommended when she heard the camp bus pull up in front of her house.
“How was camp?” she asked her children as they scrambled past her toward the kitchen.
“Thirsty. I’m so thirsty,” Nicholas growled, clutching at his throat and knocking his plump little knees together, as Lynn reached into the refrigerator and poured both children a large glass of milk. “First taste,” Nicholas said, quickly taking a sip before Megan had a chance to lift the glass to her lips. “It was great,” he answered when his glass was empty.
“It was all right,” Megan said quietly, not even bothering to compete for the first loud gulp of milk.
“Something wrong, sweetie?”
Megan shook her head, finished her drink, and wiped her mouth with a napkin, about to discard it into the trash can under the sink when she saw the flowers. “What are these doing in here?” Megan pulled the yellow roses gingerly from their unorthodox vase. “Mom, why are these flowers in the garbage?” Lynn only shrugged, unable to come up with a suitable response. “Who sent them?”
“Your father,” Lynn said truthfully, then immediately wished she hadn’t. There had been no need to involve Megan in her misery.
“Oh.”
Lynn expected her daughter to react with furious indignation, and watched in amazement as Megan simply returned the flowers to the trash can and shut the cupboard door. “Megan?” she called after her as the girl fled the room in tears. Lynn turned toward Nicholas, who stood watching the scene with eyes like saucers. “All right, what happened?”
“Nothing,” Nicholas answered, averting his gaze to the floor and shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Camp was great …”
“I don’t mean at camp. I mean on Saturday. At the lunch with Daddy. Neither one of you has said a word about it, and Megan’s been especially quiet ever since.”
“Nothing happened.”
“Nicky …”
“Can I have another glass of milk, please?”
“Did Daddy say something that upset Megan?”
“Not Daddy,” Nicholas answered, and then literally held his breath.
“What do you mean?” Lynn realized she was holding her own breath as well. “Was there someone else at the lunch with you and Daddy?”
Nicholas shrugged. “Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“There was sort of this woman there.”
“Do you remember this sort of woman’s name?”
Nicholas nodded. “Suzette,” he said finally, as Lynn had known he would.
Lynn reached over and drew her young son into her arms. “Thank you, sweetheart. I’m sorry you felt you had to keep that inside you.”
“Daddy said he thought it would be better if we didn’t tell you.”
Lynn nodded. I’ll bet he did, she thought, remembering that Gary had agreed not to introduce Suzette into his children’s lives until a few more months had passed. Let them deal with one thing at a time, Lynn had urged, and he had agreed. What had changed his mind? What was going on in that handsome head of his? She pictured the flowers behind the closed cupboard door. “You said you wanted another glass of milk?” she asked her son, surprised, as she always was, by how much he looked the way she herself had as a child. It was ironic, she thought, the word immediately conjuring up the image of Marc Cameron, that sons so often resembled their mothers whereas girls more often looked like their dads. Lynn poured Nicholas a second glass of milk before the boy had time to reply, then excused herself to check on Megan.
Megan was lying on the bedspread of her four-poster brass bed, staring blankly at the ceiling. Her long legs, which were caked with dirt around her bony knees, were stretched out across the soft white of the bedspread, the bottoms of her frayed sneakers making dark creases in the quilted fabric. Lynn approached her daughter slowly, arranging herself at the foot of her bed. “Nicholas told me that Daddy brought a friend to your lunch on Saturday.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Megan whispered, her answer for everything these days.
“Do you want to talk about it, sweetheart?”
Megan stubbornly shook her head.
Lynn knew all the proper things to say at moments like this, soothing phrases neatly laid out in her textbooks, things she would probably say if this were not
her
child, if this weren’t happening to
her.
Instead she simply patted Megan’s knees and said nothing.
Megan suddenly burst into tears, the bed shaking with her heart-wrenching cries. “I don’t want to be a lawyer anymore, Mommy. Do I have to be a lawyer?”
Lynn felt her own eyes once more spilling over. Today is obviously a day for tears, she thought, reaching over to gather the sobbing youngster in her arms. “No, darling, of course not. You can be anything you want to be.”
“I don’t want to be a lawyer.”
“You have lots of time to decide.”
“I want to do what you do.”
“Whatever you want,” Lynn told her, patting her back.
Megan suddenly pulled back, so that Lynn’s arms had to stretch to hold on to her. “And I don’t want to take any more ballet lessons.”
“You’ve always loved ballet,” Lynn said, trying to keep up with the abrupt twists in the conversation.
“I don’t want to take ballet anymore,” Megan insisted.
“Okay. You don’t have to. Maybe you’ll change your mind,” she said as Megan snuggled back into her arms. The sobs, which had momentarily subsided, picked up again with renewed vehemence.
“Why did she have to be there?” Megan demanded angrily. “Why did Daddy have to bring her?”
“Don’t cry, baby. It’ll be all right.”
“I hate her, Mommy. I hate her for taking Daddy away from us.”
“I know, sweetie. I’m not so crazy about her myself.”
Lynn heard footsteps, and turned her head to see Nicholas tiptoeing—as only he could tiptoe—toward them. Soon the three Schusters were curved into a tight
little ball, all arms and legs and tears, swaying rhythmically against the almost unbearable sense of loss that each was separately experiencing.
“I’m glad you called,” he was saying. Lynn lifted her fresh strawberry daiquiri into the air in a silent toast. “I wasn’t sure you would. Why did you? Not that I’m objecting, mind you. Just curious.”
“A writer’s curiosity?” Lynn asked, and Marc Cameron smiled. “It’s my wedding anniversary.”
“Curiouser and curiouser.”
“I thought you’d appreciate the irony.”
His smile grew wider. “So I’m a convenient substitute?”
“I’m not sure what you are, to be honest.” She paused, looking around the small, empty Italian restaurant in Lake Worth where she had suggested they meet. “I was angry and depressed. I just needed to get out of the house for a while. My neighbor said she’d stay with the kids. I probably should apologize in advance. I don’t think I’ll be very good company.”
“You’re doing fine so far. Are you ready to order yet?”
She shook her head. “I’m not very hungry.” She finished the last of her daiquiri in two quick gulps. “I wouldn’t mind another one of these, however.”
Marc Cameron immediately signaled the waiter to bring them each another drink.
“So, tell me about your writing,” Lynn asked, careful to avoid his watchful blue eyes. “Are you working on anything now?”
“I have an idea for a novel I’m tossing around in my head.”
She laughed. “I’ll bet you do. It wouldn’t by any chance be about a recently separated man who gets involved with the wife of the man his own wife left him for, would it?”
“That depends.”
Lynn looked directly into Marc Cameron’s eyes. “On what?”
“Are we involved?”
“Figure of speech,” Lynn said, and cleared her throat. She was relieved when the waiter returned with her second drink. “I don’t much relish the idea of finding myself in the pages of your next book.”
“Most people are thrilled to find themselves immortalized in print.”
“Even the unflattering portraits?”
“Even those. Of course, you have to remember that the bad guys rarely recognize themselves. Besides, what makes you think you’d come off badly?”
Lynn lifted her glass to her mouth and was surprised to see that when she put it down it was half empty. “Women who are dumped tend to be whiners at best, pitiful creatures at worst. I’m not crazy about either of those prospects.”
“Suggest an alternative.”
Lynn pondered the question. In truth, she already knew what her answer would be. “Oh, I guess I’d like to be … oh, what the hell … heroic.” Marc Cameron laughed at her choice of words and she lifted her glass in another silent toast, though she didn’t take a drink. “Shouldn’t heroines be heroic?”
“What makes you think you’d be the heroine?” He smiled, his mouth a crooked grin, his eyes teasing hers, as
if he knew all about her, as if he understood all her secrets, which buttons to push to get the desired results.
“I read
Small Potatoes,”
she said after a slight pause, referring to his last book, and was pleased when she saw the tease in his eyes change to surprise.
“You did? When?”
“I went to the library after our walk on the beach and took it out. I tried to find it in the bookstores, but nobody had it.”
He laughed sadly. “Figures. So?”
“So … I liked it. You’re a man of complicated thoughts.”
This time he laughed out loud, throwing his head back, obviously enjoying her appraisal. “It’s never been put quite that way before. I think I’m flattered.”
“I got the impression that it was very autobiographical, though in a very different way from your first book,
Awkward Pauses.
”
“Now I really
am
flattered. Do you realize that you may be the only person in the state—hell, forget that, in the
country
—who has read both my novels? I don’t think even Suzette got through
Awkward Pauses.”