Love, Suburban Style (30 page)

Keeping a judgmental eye on Brad and his camera equipment at the edge of the field, Olympia informs Meg, “Brooke’s son Austin is a terrific tenor.”

Surprise, surprise.

To Brooke, Olympia says, “Can you just see Austin and Sophie playing romantic leads together? Wouldn’t it just be too much?”

Too much,
Meg thinks.
Definitely too much.

“When are the auditions, exactly?” Kirsten asks.

“Tuesday after school.”

“Let’s squeeze in an extra voice lesson for Sophie on Monday,” Olympia tells Meg, and whips out an electronic organizer. She enters it in before Meg can agree.

Then again, who’s arguing? She can definitely use the money, and what else has she got to do besides unpack boxes and lust after Sam Rooney?

“I’d love to get Austin in on Monday, too,” Brooke pipes up. “Do you have a slot available?”

Meg reaches into her purse and pulls out the freebie calendar she got from the Hallmark store last December. She pretends to check her schedule. “You’re in luck. I’ve got a five o’clock cancellation. Should I pencil you in?”

“That would be terrific.”

Kirsten excuses herself to go have a last word with her daughter, in a red uniform on the sidelines.

“That poor thing,” Olympia says, and she and Brooke shake their heads sadly.

Meg can’t help but ask, “What’s wrong?” Maybe Kirsten is suffering from some horrible affliction. She’s skin and bones.

Then again, her appearance may be more of a fashion statement than a terminal illness. She’s noticed that a number of the Fancy Moms around town are emaciated chic.

Olympia and Brooke exchange a glance.

“I don’t want to bias you,” Olympia says, “but Kirsten’s daughter Victoria is absolutely hopeless.”

“In what way?”

“She can’t sing, act, or dance, and she has a slight overbite.”

Let’s just shoot the poor thing and put her out of her misery then, shall we?

Meg manages to keep from saying that, though.

“She’s insisting on auditioning,” Brooke tells Meg in a conspiratorial whisper, “but I’m not even sure you’ll be able to find a place for her in the chorus.”

“I’m actually not in charge of casting,” Meg reminds her. “So I guess that will be up to—”

“Oh, of course.” Olympia gives a brisk smile and nod. “I just wanted to give you a heads up that the level of talent fluctuates wildly when it comes to these things.”

“I’m sure it does.”

Meg turns her attention to the game, which has just gotten under way. Down on the field, Cosette is running toward the goal in the pack of blue bodies. Meg can’t see her expression from here, but she appears to be playing with more enthusiasm than she did at the practices.

“Meg! Hi!”

She looks down to see Katie waving at her from the base of the bleachers, where she’s tending to one of the toddlers again.

“Hi, Katie!”

“My dad said he’s going over to your house after the game!” Katie announces for all Glenhaven Park to hear.

Even Brett and Laurelle turn their heads, momentarily distracted from their nonstop whispered gossip.

Conscious of her intrigued audience, Meg just smiles and nods.

“Her dad?” Olympia asks. “Isn’t that the coach?”

“Right. Sam.”

Seeing her brow furrow, Meg wonders how to let her and the others know that there’s nothing romantic going on between her and Sam. Well, not anymore. But she isn’t about to let on that there ever was.

“Did she say the coach is going over to your house after the game?” asks Kirsten, climbing back up into the bleachers.

Meg nods. “Yes, but he’s just… checking something for me. He lives next door.”

“Well, that’s convenient.” That comes from Brooke, accompanied by a knowing nod.

“And it explains a lot,” Olympia declares.

“What do you mean?” Meg asks, bristling.

“Just that it’s obvious he’s been coaching your daughter on the side. Look at her.”

Meg follows her gesture just in time to see Cosette kicking the ball toward the goal.

She scores, and a cheer goes up from her team and the crowd.

“Way to go, Cosette!” Meg shouts gleefully, standing to get a better look at that action.

Then she feels the stares of Olympia and her friends, and sits down again. “Sam hasn’t been coaching Cosette on the side,” she says adamantly.

“Oh, come on, Meg, it’s all right. We won’t tell the rest of the team.”

“But he isn’t.”

The others exchange glances.

Brooke asks, “You’re saying she just drastically improved on her own?”

“Well, she used to play in the city. And she was always good. She just wasn’t giving it her all when practices first began. But now she’s into it.”

“Right. Got it. Well, good for her.” Olympia is obviously humoring Meg.

She’s going to believe what she wants to believe.

Annoyed, Meg sits there, tolerating the vacuous small talk, for another few minutes.

Then she stands, and says, “I’m going down to the snack bar. Does anyone want anything?”

“Not unless they’ve put in an espresso machine,” Brooke tells her, and they all get a kick out of that one.

Meg is grateful for the escape and takes her time walking from the bleachers toward the snack bar. It’s the same one that was here when she was a kid. She wonders if they still sell Charleston Chews and Big Buddies. Probably not.

“Hi, Meg.” Katie ambles toward her, a towheaded toddler on her hip.

“Hey, Katie. Are you babysitting?”

“Sort of. I’m watching Catalina for her mom. Isn’t she cute?”

“Adorable.” And her stylish leather baby shoes cost more than everything Meg is wearing, put together. Including her watch.

“Cosette is doing great in the game,” Katie says, bouncing Catalina on her hip. “I guess my brother’s been helping her.”

“Do you think so?”

Katie nods. “He and his old girlfriend used to practice soccer moves sometimes. When they weren’t kissing and stuff.” She snickers.

“Ben has an old girlfriend? I didn’t know that.”

“Oh, don’t tell my dad, okay? Ben didn’t want him to know. He paid me to keep quiet when I caught them together one day.”

“What were they…?”

“They were French kissing on the couch. My dad was at a meeting and Ben was supposed to be watching me and he wasn’t supposed to have anyone over. But he’s good at sneaking around.”

Terrific. “Why does he have to sneak around?”

“Because of our dad.”

Poor Sam. “He doesn’t seem that strict.”

“You don’t think so? He’s always worried about us. Like, always. We don’t like to tell him a lot of stuff that happens because he freaks out. Like one time, this girl was being mean to me every day in the girls’ room at school and I told my dad and he went to the vice principal and made a huge stink. It just made it worse for me.”

“No parent likes to see his child hurt, though, Katie.”

“I know, but… my dad just worries a lot. So we don’t like to give him extra stuff to worry about. Please don’t say anything to him, Meg.”

“About Ben’s old girlfriend?”

“Or anything. That’s her out there, actually,” Katie says, and gestures her head at the field, her hands busy with little Catalina.

“Where?”

“The girl with the long blond hair on the blue team. She goes to Harvey.” That, Meg knows, is a nearby private school. “See her over there? Her name’s Ariel.”

Meg shades her eyes with her hand and scans the opposing players. She zeros in on an athletic-looking blonde running in the herd.

“I wonder if that’s weird for Cosette, seeing Ariel here.”

Yup. That must be what she was so distracted by when they first arrived at the field, Meg thinks. But she doesn’t want to let on to Katie.

“Oh, I don’t think it’s weird for Cosette. She really doesn’t let many things bother her.”

“If I was playing against my boyfriend’s old girlfriend, I’d probably let it bother me.”

Meg smiles at Katie’s candid remark, then asks, with forced nonchalance, “So Cosette and Ben are boyfriend and girlfriend?”

“You didn’t know?” Katie’s wearing an oops expression. “Please don’t say I told you, okay?”

“Ben doesn’t want your dad to know?”

“Probably not. Because my dad would think he was going to get a heartbreak, or get her pregnant, or something. Oh, don’t worry,” she adds hastily, seeing Meg’s expression, “I’m sure nothing’s going on. They’re probably just making out.”

Right. And who knows better than Meg that one thing leads to another?

Climbing the steps to Meg’s porch, Sam finds himself shooting an expectant glance at the corner beneath the light fixture, where he found her—and kissed her—last weekend.

Today, the spot is empty.

But oddly, as he looks at it, the bulb seems to flicker on, then off again.

Was it just the sun, glinting?

No. The porch is almost completely shaded by the wisteria vine on the trellis.

Okay, then… loose connection?

Sam steps closer, watching the light. Nothing.

He reaches up, and gives the bulb a twist. Still nothing. The bulb was already twisted firmly into the socket and the glass is cool to the touch. Then how—?

“Hi, Sam.”

He nearly jumps out of his skin, then looks up to see Cosette watching him from inside the house, just beyond the screen door.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Just checking this fixture. Your mom said the electricity has been acting up.”

“That’s not because of the electricity.”

“It’s not?”

“No. This place is haunted.” Cosette steps out onto the porch.

That again. Sam wants to groan. Instead he says, “What’s been going on?”

“You know… lights going on and off, stuff like that. Mom thinks it’s the wiring… or so she says. I think she just doesn’t want to scare me and admit there’s a ghost.”

“Have you seen it?”

“No,” she admits. “Not since that night we ended up staying at your house. But that was really scary.” She shivers at the memory. “If it happens again, you’ll know it, because Mom and I will be over there in a heartbeat.”

“Anytime,” Sam says congenially. He can think of worse things than Meg Addams popping up on his doorstep to spend the night.

“So where’s your mom?” he asks Cosette.

“She’s upstairs somewhere, putting stuff away. Come on in.” Cosette holds the door open for him, then asks hesitantly, “Is, uh, Ben next door?”

“He’s around there someplace. On the computer, I think.”

“Do you think I could go over? I want to ask him something about school.”

“Sure.”

“Great, thanks!” She takes off across the porch and down the steps like she’s fleeing a burning house.

Watching her go, Sam decides he should have another talk with Ben. He’s said he and Cosette are just friends, but you don’t look at your friends the way his son looks at Meg’s daughter.

“Meg?” he calls, stepping into the dim foyer, the screen door creaking closed behind him.

No answer.

He looks around. It looks better. Not great, but better. There are still random boxes stashed here and there, and no furniture yet, besides a piano visible in the living room beyond the archway. Glancing in that direction, Sam sees a sleeping cat curled in the corner. Then he spies a gleaming statuette on the fireplace mantel.

Overcome by curiosity, he steps into the room to examine it.

He raises his eyebrows when he realizes that it’s a Tony Award… presented to Astor Hudson.

Meg, in another life.

Impressed, intrigued, he realizes for the first time just what she gave up to move back here to Glenhaven Park. Bill Dreyfus alluded to her having had a big career on Broadway. Only now, though, faced with physical evidence of her stardom, does Sam stop to contemplate the implications.

Why did Meg turn her back on that life? What did she seek here that she couldn’t find there?

You came back to Glenhaven Park, too,
he reminds himself. Back home.

Yes, because he sensed, when his life was at loose ends, that this was where he was meant to be. That this was where he could find peace.

Maybe the same is true for her.

Maybe, since we’re both here… we were meant to be here together.

Hearing footsteps, he retreats hastily back to the hall, where he looks up just as Meg appears above.

She looks upset.

“What’s wrong?” he asks immediately.

She shakes her head. “I was just… where’s Cosette?”

“She went over to talk to—”

“Ben. Right. I know,” she says flatly, descending the stairs. “That was so well orchestrated they deserve an award.”

He resists the urge to glance at hers, on the mantel. “What do you mean?”

“They were online talking to each other just now,” she tells him.

“How do you know?”

“Because when Cosette left her room, I went in there to put some of her things away, and I saw that she’d left the computer screen open, and she was signed on. I swear I’ve never done this before, but… I had to look.”

“And…?”

“And she and Ben had been instant messaging about seeing each other as soon as you left the house. They had it planned that she would go over there so that they could be alone together.”

“Doing what?” he asks, his heart sinking.

“Who knows?”

“Well, they aren’t alone. Katie’s there.”

“Ben pays her to leave him alone when he’s with his girlfriends.”

Sam frowns. “What are you talking about?”

“Just… Katie said you worry about them, and that they try to keep things from you so that you won’t.”

“She told you this?”

Meg nods. “But please don’t say anything to her about it. She told me in confidence.”

“My daughter is telling you secrets, and you’re keeping them from me?”

“It’s not like that, Sam.”

He thinks back to the soccer field earlier, when he looked up and saw Katie talking to Meg. That made him feel unsettled, just as it did last week, but he shrugged it off.

Not anymore.

“Listen, my kids are my business,” he tells Meg, seething with frustration and irritation. Seeing the dangerous gleam in her eye, he quickly adds, “I know you mean well, being all maternal with Katie, but it’s not good for—”