Helen of Pasadena (11 page)

I’d start worrying in earnest next year, when Aiden went to high school and his new friends might be sufficiently savvy enough to steal pharmaceuticals or beer, but for now his friends seemed more interested in iChatting and going to the movies together than breaking into their parents’ liquor cabinets.

I couldn’t really say the same for that jaded lacrosse crowd. I kept my eye on them.

Before I turned into the headmistress’s office, I took one more look at Aiden. He looked absolutely nothing like Merritt and everything like my brother Des. Merritt had been tall and thick, his features broad and open. He had been handsome in a prep school kind of way: neat, clean, blue-eyed, blue-blazered. Merritt told me once he thought he looked like Ed Harris with more hair. With more hair and less intensity, I concurred.

Marriage is a series of little half-truths and hasty agreements that add up to a life. I certainly wasn’t going to spoil my husband’s vision of himself.

But Aiden seemed to have come entirely from my gene pool in terms of looks. Someday he’d be tall and lean like my brother, with great dark eyebrows and a cute face. Now he was just growing and eating and trying to keep up with all the changes. When Aiden was little, I loved that he looked like my side of the family. I was surrounded by Fairchilds, but Aiden was so clearly a Castor. With Merritt gone, maybe it was too bad he didn’t inherit something other than bad debt from his dad.

“Come on in, Helen!” Adele’s voice broke my reverie. Right, time to talk to the headmistress and accept that board seat.

Adele Arnett’s office was warm and cozy, with dark stained beams, Oriental rugs and a seating area with two brown leather chairs and an olive green chenille couch. Adele was sitting at her large, neat, antique oak desk when I strolled in. Even as involved as I was at Millington, I hadn’t spent much time in Adele’s office. Aiden wasn’t in trouble much, and Merritt and I weren’t the type of parents who complained over every little grade or indignity suffered on the playground.

“Suck it up,” Merritt would tell Aiden when he came home with another horror story about the unfairness of the touch football game at recess. “It’s a dog-eat-dog world. You’ve gotta learn to deal with assholes. You know why you suck it up now? Because someday you’ll be managing those assholes. Then they’ll have to suck it up.”

Classic Merritt.

“So, tell me how the testing went at Ignatius. What did Aiden say?” Adele jumped right into the conversation. I appreciated her efficiency.

“He said it went fine. But he says that about everything, and then we get the C-minus.” I laughed. It was true! “Fine” was the kiss of death for Aiden.

“When’s your interview?”

“On Friday afternoon. I’m nervous,” I admitted. The admission director at Ignatius had put off our interview until the last possible date because of the “circumstances.” Now, after my meltdown with Patrick O’Neill, I was afraid I was going to come across as a complete nut job. Merritt was a master in this type of situation, so I’d usually deferred to him. Now I was on my own.

“Don’t worry,” said Adele. “They’re good people at Ignatius. They understand. And really, the interview is about Aiden, not you and your life.”

That was a lie and both Adele and I knew it. At all of the local private schools, the “interview” was more about checking out the family than the kid. When Aiden had “interviewed” at Millington, he was 5 and really had no opinion about the kinds of questions that we’d been asked, like mounting a successful capital campaign or measuring our commitment to the Millington community. Aiden sat in the corner and played with a dump truck.

The admissions director at Ignatius had already met Aiden on several occasions. Millington was a feeder school that set up private tours for their kids to ensure a high yield of acceptances. It was me Ignatius wanted to see.

Me without Merritt.

“And don’t worry, Helen, we are not going to alert Ignatius about Aiden’s grades. Obviously, he’s just checked out since his dad’s death. Who can blame him? We’ll give him some incompletes for this quarter if it comes to that, and he can make up all the work in the last quarter.” Adele poured herself another cup of coffee from a sleek Cuisinart machine on the antique side table. She splashed in some milk and waited for my response.

I was dumbfounded.

“I’m sorry, Adele. What do you mean, ‘checked out’?”

“Well, you’ve seen the progress reports. He hasn’t turned anything in, hasn’t passed a test. It’s understandable. And we know you have your hands full with everything you’re dealing with. You couldn’t be that much help to him.”

What was she talking about? I hadn’t seen any progress reports, had I? I would have noticed them in my inbox; the teachers e-mailed them every week if there was a problem. And did she really need to add “you have your hands full”? And “not much help”?

Headmistress Arnett’s patented warm voice was starting to sound a little sharp to my ears.

“Adele, I haven’t seen any progress reports, and my hands are not so full that I would ignore Aiden. He is my first priority.”

“Of course. I didn’t mean to imply that. It’s just that we’ve been updating you on Aiden’s lack of effort,” she said, moving over to her desk and pulling up the progress reports on her computer. “Here we go. Three sent in the past three weeks to your
merritthelen
address.”

Of course! I hadn’t checked that address in weeks. One of the first things I did after Merritt’s death was get a new e-mail address. It was a tiny, tiny expression of anger. I didn’t want that old address anymore, the one that Merritt and I had coined when we got our first e-mail account and Merritt never used himself. Only I answered to
merritthelen
. Once I found out about Shelley Sleazy, I wanted a fresh cyber-start.

Obviously, I’d forgotten to inform the school, and the reports were going to the old address. But why hadn’t the school noticed my auto-reply with the new address?

“I have a new e-mail address. This is the first I’ve heard of Aiden’s issues.” I felt myself on the verge of apology, but something cool in Adele Arnett’s expression stopped me from segueing into a sob story. I concluded concisely, “I’ll get on Aiden. We’ll turn it around.”

“Good. We have the greatest sympathy for him, but we can’t let him graduate if he doesn’t pass his classes,
all his classes
. You understand, Helen. We have the school’s reputation to think about. The expectations for our students are very high, because the high schools they will attend will demand it. Aiden cannot be an exception.”

Everything generous thing I’d ever thought about Adele Arnett dissipated in that moment. She was talking about a 13-year-old boy who had just lost his father, not his mind. So he had missed some homework and failed some tests? For God’s sake, he’d been at the school for nine years and now he needed some understanding, not tough love. Aiden was grieving, not selling drugs, threatening teachers or cheating on exams. If he wasn’t an exception, he should be. We were talking about the eighth grade, not medical school.

Sometimes, the years of living with Merritt paid off in unexpected ways. Like right now. I wanted more than anything to pummel her with the big Waterford crystal apple that must have been a gift from one of her exceptional students. But if I killed Adele Arnett, then Aiden surely would not graduate.

I sucked it up.

“Understood. You have the school to think about.”

“Speaking of thinking about the school, Helen, we have a board of trustees meeting tonight. It’s when we nominate new board members for next year,” Adele transitioned so smoothly, I barely had time to grasp the conversation’s new direction.

Was she kidding? Did she really think that after threatening to fail my son, to ruin his entire scholastic career to preserve the reputation of Millington as a top-notch academic school,
a school my money had help to build, by the way
, that I was going to spend one more minute of my valuable time steering the future of her heartless institution? Adele Arnett could go to…

“And we’ve decided to ask Yuri Natarov to fill Merritt’s seat. We hope you understand. We have the future of Millington to ensure.”

I could no longer suck it up.

“No, Adele, I don’t understand. Please explain.”

Then Adele Arnett displayed the mettle that enabled her to stand up to the corporate CEOs on the board. She got nasty.

“We need the seat for someone who can afford to support the school financially in a substantial manner. We need that now more than ever. I don’t believe that is within your capabilities anymore. It’s time for somebody else to have the opportunity.”

I stood up and was grateful that I was wearing the fashionable wide-legged trousers that Tina had picked out at J.Jill, so that Adele Arnett, Headmistress of the Damned, couldn’t see my knees shaking.

But my voice was strong.

“Aiden is going to graduate from this school, regardless of whether he passes
all
his classes or not. And if Ignatius calls, you are going to support his admission. Or else I let it be known to the people who still consider my opinion important, like Candy McKenna, gossip columnist, my good friend Natasha Natarova and my mother-in-law Mitsy Fairchild, who still has a healthy checkbook, what you just said to me. And your reputation, Headmistress Arnett, will suffer. Not mine. I hope
you
understand.”

Headmistress of the Damned raised an eyebrow, then nodded slightly.

Merritt was right about one thing: Someday I would have to manage the assholes.

“Hey, Mom.”

“You ready to go?” I said in a tight voice that I hoped sounded normal. “Hi, guys! Did you learn anything today?” I turned in the direction of Aiden’s buddies, Dex and Connal Ramsey, fraternal twins, IVF-style.

“Not a thing, Mrs. Fairchild,” red-haired Dex answered without missing a beat. Connal, the adorkable one with the brown hair and the high IQ, guffawed. Someday, Dex would host his own late-night talk show, I had no doubt. He was sharp, funny and media literate well beyond his years. Both his parents were TV writers of some fame. Until his turn behind the desk, though, Dex would have to weather the curses of adolescence, bad skin and a giant nose, with a series of Best Sense of Humor honors. “We have a sullied reputation to uphold here at Millington, and we’re doing our part.”

I laughed. “Good for you.”

“What were you talking to Mrs. Arnett about?” Aiden tossed out, trying to act nonchalant. He asked the questions in front of his friends for protection. I’d never laid into him in public, and he knew I wouldn’t do it there in the middle school courtyard.

Under normal circumstances, like a month ago when he had a father and I had money, I would have jumped all over him for a progress report filled with Ds and Fs the minute we got in the car. I would have harangued him the whole way home for his irresponsibility. Today, I wasn’t even going to lay into him in private.

“Not much. I’ll tell you later. Dex and Connal, what are you guys doing now? Do you want to go for some paninis at Porta Viaggio, and then I’ll drop you home?”

Aiden looked pleased, like I was back to my old self, because that is something my old self had done all the time, load up a car full of boys for food and entertainment.

“Sure, Mrs. Fairchild. Let me call my mom. We were just gonna stay after school. We have a Spanish test, but, you know, we can study later. Right, Connal?”

Connal made a sort of thumbs-up, shoulder-groove, head-shake gesture that signaled his approval of the plan. He enjoyed talking about the
Lord of the Rings
and
Battlestar Galactica
, and that was about it.

“Great,” I agreed with Dex. “Paninis now, Spanish later.”

“I think I’ll use that as my yearbook quote, Mrs. Fairchild. Very Judd Apatow.”

“Thanks, Dex.”

When we pulled into the driveway, it did not surprise us to see the light purple Caddie of Rita the Armenian and the familiar white truck of Juan Sanchez. Juan’s team of painters, gardeners and cleaners had been at the house almost daily for several weeks getting everything in tip-top shape. Anything that screamed pre-millennial was transformed into something fresh and “eco-green,” according to Juan. Of course, Juan also boasted that his secret brand of cut-rate paint went on just like Benjamin Moore.