Wreathed (2 page)

“How’s your salad?” she asked.

“It’s fine,” I said. It was not. It was a gross pile of half-washed iceberg and red onion covered with a greasy vinaigrette dressing. I would rather have had the fried cheese, or the nachos, or two more raspberry mojitos and a cab ride home. It’s almost always a good idea to show restraint, though, and it’s always a good idea not to give my mother the chance to criticize my eating habits if I can manage it. I told myself I could make up the calories at lunch tomorrow.

“You want a bite of my burger?” she asked.

“Not particularly.” She’d gotten a horrible hybrid between a hamburger and a Philly cheesesteak, and just looking at it was making me slightly nauseous. Not nauseous enough to stop craving another raspberry mojito, mind you.

“How about some fries? I will never finish all of this.”

“Mother, if you have something you need to tell me, you can just tell me without bribing me with leftovers off your plate.”

“I was just trying to be considerate,” she said. “My mistake. I apologize.”

Every conversation I have ever had with my mother, even about something as quotidian as who should get to eat the last few remaining French fries from her plate, has always had a hidden barb or tripwire. She has the innate ability to turn any conversational gambit into her advantage, and throw whatever you tell her back in your face, twice as hard and twice as fast. It’s a skill she developed from long years of verbal sparring with my father.

Unfortunately, I am the only one left that she can practice on. My parents got divorced when I was in law school, and my father moved to Myrtle Beach to play golf year round. My older brother, Greg, is a studious, quiet Eagle Scout and is no fun to tease. My sister, Pacey, the middle child, stopped trying to argue with Mother years ago. Mother always walks right over her, and then Pacey turns around and complains to me about it. That means I have to be the one that Mother pushes the hardest, and that means I have to be the one who pushes back.

“Well, then,” I said. “I apologize, too, for assuming that you have a hidden agenda for wanting to have dinner with me.”

“I don’t believe in hidden agendas,” she said. “If I need something from you, I will ask you. Which, as it happens, I need to do. Assuming, of course, you are willing to hear me out without making a sarcastic comment.”

“Who, me?”

“That sort of sarcastic comment. Exactly.”

I moved around the last couple of croutons on my salad. “If you have something you need to ask me, go ahead. If it’s something that doesn’t impact my work schedule, I’ll be happy to help.”

Mother fished a French fry out of the pile on her plate, applied a drop or two of ketchup, and popped it in her mouth. “I have an appointment at ten on Friday morning in Cape May. I hate to ask you for help with this, but I just don’t think I can drive all the way down there and back by myself.”

Cape May is at the southern tip of New Jersey, three hours from where I live. That would trap me in my car with my mother for six hours or so, which did not sound like an ideal way to burn a vacation day.

“Well, it depends on how you want to do it. Are you thinking about getting up early and driving down there and driving back? That would make for a long day.”

“I thought we could stretch it out a little, make it easy,” she said. “We could drive down Thursday, after you get off work, and stay the night at one of the hotels on the beach. Then, after we’re done with my appointment, we could do some shopping or something, maybe get a spa treatment. Stay another night, and come back Saturday evening, if that works for you.”

Put that way, it didn’t sound horrible. It sounded like something a mother and daughter might do together. But “doing things together” had never been Mom’s long suit, unless you counted supposedly fun activities like making brownies for the Honduran resistance-fighter bake sale as “doing things together.” Mother’s idea of fun included things like dragging me out in my Halloween costume when I was five to walk precincts for Michael Dukakis, at night,
in Camden.

Mother wasn’t as involved in heavy-duty political activism these days, but it would be just like her to drag me to Cape May and stick me in a rancid community center to give estate tax advice to the elderly. She wasn’t telling me everything, and I wanted to know all the details before I signed up for whatever it was.

“If you want to do something like that,” I said, “we can try to schedule it and go someplace nice. Not that Cape May isn’t nice, but it’s the middle of March. Not the best time to go.”

“Unfortunately, this is not the sort of thing I can reschedule.”

“Why not? I mean, come on, this is short notice. If you want to do Cape May, let’s do it right. We can rent a house and pick a time that Greg and Pacey and her kids can come.”

“I am not trying to plan a family vacation, Wendy. I have an appointment and I need a ride down there. If you think you can convince your brother and sister to take time off for a family vacation, let me know how that works out for you.”

“You haven’t said what kind of appointment this is,” I said. “And I don’t know why you want me to go, or what ulterior motive you might have.”

“For God’s sake, Wendy. I don’t understand why you insist on treating me like a conniving harridan every time I ask you for a little favor.”

“Experience?”

The waitress came over just then and refilled Mother’s glass of iced tea, and Mother made a production out of squeezing the lemon and adding sweetener before she took a long sip.

“When have I ever asked you to do something like this?” she asked.

“You don’t ask me,” I said. “You ask Pacey, and she does whatever you want.”

”I already asked your sister, if you must know. I asked her and she said no.”

“She did what?” Pacey was thirty-two, a little old to finally grow a spine, but I supposed it had to happen eventually.

“She told me that her children have a birthday party to go to. Some horrible commercialized thing at the mall. She said she couldn’t disappoint them. I told her you couldn’t live your whole life worried about whether you were disappointing your children, which set her off for some reason.”

“I can’t imagine why,” I said.

“So then I asked your brother.”

I was drinking a sip of water just then, and I nearly did a spit-take.

“Problem, dear?”

“Nearly choked on an ice cube,” I said. “You asked Greg? But he’s always super-busy.” Greg is a surgeon at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and has more demands on his time than I feel comfortable thinking about.

“Long story short, he has two different cardiac surgeries to perform on Friday; I think one of them is for a homeless child or something. And, no, before you ask, I don’t have anyone else I can ask to take me. I don’t want to take a car service, and I don’t want to drive all that way alone. I have no one in this world I can ask to do this except for you, and now I’m asking you. Will you do this for me?”

The natural, logical, and reasonable thing to do at this point would have been for me to say yes.

“No,” I said.

“Why not?” she asked.

“You are not giving me enough information to make a decision at this point. If I knew why you were asking me, or why we were going, or what we were going to do when we got there, I would be able to say yes. Until you explain to me just what the deal is, I can’t agree to it.”

Mother sighed. It was one of those artful, well-mannered sighs that you’d expect to hear from an ancient bat at a country-club luncheon, complaining that the tea wasn’t hot enough or that her cucumber sandwich had been cut into little triangles instead of the other way. It was a sigh teetering on the balance between total exasperation and fourth-generation old-money emotional repression—or, to put it another way, between aggressive and passive-aggressive. It was a warning signal, and a familiar one.

“Fifty years ago, I was young and foolish, and I made someone a foolish promise,” she said. “The time has come for me to redeem my word. I can’t tell you any more than that, not here, not in a tacky little strip-mall chain restaurant.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a long story and a private one. If you’re that curious, I can explain it on the drive down.”

I reminded myself to thank her, one day, for the advanced training in negotiations tactics that she has been giving me for my whole entire life. “So you’ll only tell me after I’ve already agreed to go. No thanks. Tell me what I need to know, or else forget about it.”

I expected she would either respond with a counter-offer, or else throw my position in my face. Instead, she sat there for a long minute, as though she was probing for weaknesses. Finally, she picked up a napkin and started dabbing at her eyes.

“Please don’t start that,” I said.

She let out the tiniest, most artificial sob possible, said, “Excuse me,” and got up from the table. She turned her back to me and stalked off in the direction of the ladies’ room.

I leaned against the fake leather of the booth. I knew she wasn’t really that upset. She was using her phony tears to manipulate me, and I wasn’t going to let her do it. The tears were her ultimate weapon, and I was going to defuse it by not letting them get to me.

The waitress came over and took away my sad, limp salad. I had her leave the remnants of Mother’s burger and fries, and ordered a cup of coffee and settled in. This was going to be a long struggle, and I was determined to win.

Chapter 3

There is a name for people who get up from the middle of a meal and run into the bathroom and pretend to cry their eyes out, and that is
blackmailer
.

It is a simple strategy. I’ve used it myself in mediations or in depositions, except that I skip the part where I pretend to cry. If I’m trying to negotiate, every so often I will stand up and tell the other side I need to confer with my client and leave the room. Most of the time I don’t need to do any such thing. I just want the other lawyer and his client to sit there and wonder what we’re talking about. Sometimes the waiting makes them nervous enough that they’ll agree to concessions that they might otherwise not.

Of course, it only works if the other side doesn’t catch on to what you’re doing. Sometimes it turns into a contest over who can wait the other person out, and in that case, it’s just a huge waste of everyone’s time. The trick, as with most things, is to stay calm and not let your nerves get the better of you, and anybody can do that if they’re prepared.

Mother was in the bathroom, and she wanted me to think that she was in there crying. If I played by her rules, I would go in there and try to comfort her. But I had no intention of playing by her rules. I was not going to give in to her unreasonable demand that I take a day off to chauffeur her to Cape May for a vague appointment that I didn’t know anything about. It might have been the nice thing to do, and it was very much the dutiful-daughter thing to do. And if she’d been honest with me, I might have gone along with it. But she’d tried to manipulate me into doing it instead, and I wasn’t willing to cooperate with her the way that Pacey would have.

Except that she hadn’t been able to manipulate Pacey, had she?

I got my phone out and sent Pacey a quick text—“What’s up with Mom?” I didn’t get a response, which I chalked up to it being close to the time she put her kids to bed.

I sat in the booth a bit longer and thought about ordering more coffee, just to give me something to do with my hands. I had no idea how long she was prepared to draw this out. I checked the time on my phone, and it had been just long enough for her to have a nice little cry and wash up and fix her makeup, assuming that’s what she was doing.

Since I had my phone out already, I checked my in-box. I had three e-mails inviting me to attend various continuing legal education seminars, and two e-mails trying to get me to buy shoes. (One was from Overstock.com, which I just deleted, but the other one was about a Nordstrom’s sale that sounded intriguing but outside my price range.) The last one was a LinkedIn request from somebody named Adam Lewis.

I don’t spend a lot of time on social networks, because they’re a huge waste of valuable time I could be spending on important things, such as browsing Pinterest for pictures of shoes I can’t afford. I maybe look at Facebook once a day, if I’m tired or bored or slightly drunk and wondering what certain guys I knew in college are up to now. But LinkedIn is at least arguably work-related and I’ve gotten a couple of clients that way, so I did the responsible thing and clicked on his profile.

LinkedIn is far from an ideal dating site, but it works for me because it tells me the two things I want to know about a man—whether he has a job, and whether he’s cute. I try to weigh both these factors evenly, although the second one is more important. I have no shame on LinkedIn. If the guy’s profile picture is at least marginally cute, I have no problem whatsoever accepting a LinkedIn request—as long as he’s got a decent job. (I try not to be prejudiced about the things that people do for a living, but I draw the line at graduate students in the humanities, freelance art designers, or “social media gurus.”)

The way I figure it, it never hurts to be nice to a cute, employed guy on LinkedIn. My experience is that cute, employed guys tend to know other cute, employed guys, and being linked to one cute, employed guy helps link you up with his network. Obviously, any given cute guy may not be available, or may be gay, or may be unsuitable for all sorts of reasons, such as not liking important things like Indian food or Pedro Almodovar movies or crunchy peanut butter. But the more cute guys you connect with, the more you increase your chances of having one become interested in you, or at least that’s what I kept telling myself.

Adam Lewis was a cute guy. Phenomenally cute, at least from his profile picture. Dark hair, kind eyes, just the suggestion of a smirk on his rugged features. And he was employed, too—he was an investment counselor in Freehold, a couple of hours south down the Turnpike. I mentally categorized him as a definite possibility despite the geographical proximity issue.