Not Quite A mom Page 4

  She is the most dramatic and impulsive person I know, the type of girl who can turn lemons into lemonade effortlessly and even make you forget you had lemons to begin with. Prime example: following Ajay Dhir all the way to India, determined to show him that they were meant to be together. When he finally was able to convince her that they were not (something, in Ajay’s defense, he had been trying to do for three months in Los Angeles before traveling home for his grandmother’s funeral), Courtney turned it around and made the trip one of the most fabulous shopping sprees I’ve ever heard of. If anyone can prevent me from becoming suicidal over this, it’s Courtney. Plus even though she’s not practicing, she did graduate from law school and pass the bar, so she should be able to figure out how to get me out of this mess from a legal standpoint.

  “Court,” I say, feeling both relieved to have connected with her and terrified that by speaking the words aloud my situation will somehow become more real than it already is. “Something awful has happened.”

  “What’s wrong?” she asks, and I know that even surrounded by a designer lunch and countless celebrities, she is giving me her undivided attention.

  “Remember I told you about Charla?” I confirm, because while Courtney is brilliant and wonderful, she is known to have her share of “blonde moments.”

  “Right, the dead girl,” she says in the same tone a person might confirm a girl had brown hair or was in dental school.

  “She left me her daughter,” I spit it out. I don’t know how to sugarcoat it and there is no point beating around the bush.

  “Oh my God!” Courtney exclaims, and I feel comforted that her sentiment is the same one I’ve been having since Buck Platner hung up the phone. “That’s so exciting!” she continues, and I am momentarily shocked before quickly realizing that she is in fact having a major blonde moment.

  “No, Court, I am this kid’s legal guardian. I don’t have the papers or anything yet, but I’m pretty sure I have to raise her.”

  “I’m so jealous!” Courtney continues, and I realize that she must be talking to someone at the party and not to me.

  “Courtney!” I command—whatever starlet she is talking to is going to have to wait. “I need your undivided attention right now!”

  She is the only person I can talk to. Besides Courtney, I don’t have many other friends. I’m friendly with people at work—like the days that I actually have the time to take a lunch break, if I’m not racing around to the dry cleaner or eyebrow waxer, I don’t have to eat alone; but there isn’t anybody else who knows about Victory. I’ve even been vague on the details with Dan. Needless to say, it’s a past I’ve worked all of my adult life to overcome and not something that I’m very happy to share with the world.

  Daniel McCafferty is exactly the type of person I have always wanted to marry and I never wanted to take any chances with the relationship. He grew up in an affluent midwestern family and then followed his two older brothers to Princeton. After Princeton, he went to USC law school because he knew he wanted to practice in Los Angeles. Now he is an assistant district attorney and living in Beverly Hills. The apartment is in 90212, not 90210, but that’s because he has chosen a life of service as an ADA. Honestly, he would be making so much more money if he were working in a private firm, but he likes to give back to people. I know he wants his wife to be a certain type of person—to fit a certain image—and I’m not sure that person comes from Victory. I’ve simply said that I grew up in a small town and I’m not that close with my family. It’s all true, it’s just not very detailed, and thankfully that doesn’t seem to bother him, since we are officially engaged now. The plan was really going so well up until now. Our engagement arrived exactly when I wanted it to—give or take eight months—but if we plan the wedding in one year and then are married for a year and a half (instead of two years) before getting pregnant, we can catch up and be right on schedule. Dan and I may not have the passion or the sex life of fairy tales, but he is exactly what I have always wanted and I am positive (I really am) that I will be happier with him than with someone who can give me an orgasm—I can do that myself.

  “Can I tell you, I was just thinking about getting inseminated,” Courtney starts chatting. “I’ve been playing with little Roman and thinking to myself, ‘Courtney, this is what life is all about. The children really are our future,’ but then I started getting freaked out about stretch marks and labor. You are so lucky. This is ideal!”

  I’m about to explain to Courtney how far from ideal my situation is when my pacing takes me by the window and I see Dan getting out of his car. “Oh my God,” I exclaim, looking down at myself and realizing that I am still in pajamas. “Dan’s here!”

  “He’s going to be so excited!” Courtney cheers.

  “I’ll call you back,” I frantically explain, not even taking a second to clue Courtney in about how far off base she is.

  I glance out the window and see Dan making his way around the front of the car, stopping briefly to rub a spot on the hood with his elbow, before running to my bedroom to put myself together.

  In record time, I am able to get dressed, brush my hair and teeth, and make my bed, and I am just placing the final decorative throw pillow when Dan knocks at my door. I take a deep breath to try and calm my heaving chest before answering his knocks. When I open the door, Dan is leaning against the sill with a bouquet of pink tulips in one hand and the broad grin that melts my heart on his face.

  “For my fiancée,” he says, handing me the bouquet.

  See? I am the luckiest girl in the world. Clearly, he is the most wonderful man ever to walk the face of this earth. I am so taken with him at this moment that I am able to put the Tiffany situation out of my head and wrap my arms around his slightly sweaty neck.

  “How was golf?” I ask, heading into the kitchen to get a vase for the flowers. My Saturday night roses are always in the center of my dining room table in a vase from Baccarat, but luckily I have a plain vase I got at Crate & Barrel to give a girl at work as a wedding present before realizing that I wasn’t invited to her wedding. I unwrap the vase, feeling grateful that I hadn’t gotten around to returning it yet, and arrange the tulips.

  “Golf was golf, Elizabeth.” Dan launches into an anecdote about his game as I return to the living room and set the flowers in the middle of the coffee table, moving this month’s InStyle and a stack of coasters out of my way to do it. “But enough about golf,” Dan says, turning to me and smiling. “I want to ask you something…something important.”

  “Don’t you think you’ve asked me enough important things this weekend?” I tease, flirtatiously.

  “Elizabeth, let’s move in together. What do you think?”

  I smile, a smile reminiscent of the smile that spread across my face when he proposed, and say, “Definitely.”

  “Excellent!” Dan booms. “Because here’s what I’m thinking. We’re engaged, but there’s no reason to rush to the altar. Right?”

  “Right,” I agree wholeheartedly, but I start to feel a little confused by the direction of our conversation.

  “So we’ll move in together and then when it feels right, we’ll start thinking about setting a date. Marriage definitely isn’t something we want to rush into.”

  “No, of course not,” I say, but my mind is thinking that an engagement generally means the time feels right to start planning a marriage.

  “And kids are so far off. I mean, you’re young, I’m young; we both have careers. Of course we’ll have two kids down the line, but not for quite a while. Am I right?”

  “You’re definitely right,” I say, the smile on my face starting to feel plastic and pinched.

  “So, I think you should just move into my place since I’m in the 90210,” Dan says with an enthusiastic grin.

  “90212,” I correct him. My heart is sinking all the way down to my stomach, causing the feeling of extreme nausea I suffered from most of the morning to return with a thud.

  “You know what I me
an. I’m going to jump into the shower and then I think we should celebrate this ‘next step,’” Dan says looking at me with one eyebrow up, a look I know means he wants sex.

  I couldn’t be less in the mood for the three minutes of uncomfortable poking that Dan considers foreplay and the seven minutes of thrusting that Dan considers making love, but I smile seductively and say, “We should definitely celebrate.”

  I concentrate wholeheartedly on not vomiting until I hear the shower water, and then I pick up the phone and dial Courtney’s cell phone again.

  “Is Dan so excited?!?” she answers.

  “Oh my God,” I moan for the umpteenth time since Buck Platner’s call this morning. “It’s so much worse than I even realized.”

  7

  “Shit,” Buck says again, this time out loud. “What am I gonna do now?” he asks Wildcat, who is still asleep on the unmade king-size bed.

  His first problem is the now homeless teenage girl asleep in his guest room. The second is explaining his repeat bungle to his father. Not to mention the fact that he, once again, screwed up with Lizzie Castle. While trying to think of ways to put a positive spin on this to both Tiffany and Larry S, he stands up and heads to the door of his bedroom. Much to Buck’s surprise (horror), Tiffany is standing in the hallway.

  She jumps slightly at seeing him, and Buck can tell that her brain is trying to calculate if he has seen her or if she can duck back into the guest room. It’s obvious that she had been listening to his conversation.

  “How’d you sleep?” Buck asks, deciding to pretend that the awkwardness that accompanied him into the hallway doesn’t exist.

  Tiffany does not follow his lead. “She doesn’t want me, does she.”

  It’s a question, but she says it like a statement. Unfortunately, it’s a statement Buck knows for certain to be true.

  “That’s not true at all,” Buck lies, hoping Tiffany can’t see through him. “She’s so concerned about you and your well-being. She just needed the weekend to collect herself.”

  “I thought she needed the evening to collect herself.” Tiffany counters.

  This is why people hate teenagers, Buck thinks to himself. This is also why he shouldn’t lie. “The evening, the weekend…it’s like twenty-four hours’ difference. Let’s have some breakfast.” Buck quickly changes the subject and lumbers down the hallway toward the kitchen.

  The house is small—too small for a wide receiver like Buck Platner, but technically big enough for one person—and since Buck couldn’t justify a bigger house for just himself, he squeezes himself in like Alice in the rabbit hole. Once inside the messy kitchen, Buck opens the old refrigerator in hopes that fresh food has magically appeared overnight. No such luck. Starting to live like a grown-up is constantly on Buck’s list of things to do…it just never gets done. Instead of containing breakfast staples like coffee and Nutri-Grain bars, Buck’s shopping cart always ends up with marshmallow cereal, which he often has to eat dry since it seems his milk is perpetually past its sell-by date. To say that this home needs a woman’s touch is the understatement of the year.

  Buck peers into the fridge, easily looking through the sparse contents—beer, mustard, and leftover pizza—and finding himself face-to-face with the buzzing old light bulb. He looks sheepishly over his shoulder, hoping he is alone, but finds Tiffany standing behind him looking skeptical.

  “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” Buck quickly decides. “We’re going to go out for breakfast, go to your house and get your stuff, and then you’re going to spend the night here. Tomorrow morning, we’re going to drive down to L.A. and Lizzie is going to be thrilled to see you.” Buck says each step with such conviction that he even has himself believing in this plan.

  “Where are we gonna go for breakfast?” Tiffany asks, and Buck breathes a sigh of relief that she is on board with the plan or at least not putting up a fight.

  He quickly thinks about her question. His father always goes to Sunday breakfast at Denny’s in the next town over with his mother after church. “Mug’s,” Buck answers definitively.

  Tiffany nods her head and walks out of the kitchen saying, “I’ll get my shoes,” as Buck breathes a sigh of relief that a plan is now in action.

  8

  Sitting in the cracked brown vinyl booth at Mug’s, Tiffany can’t help but think about how her stepfather, Chuck, loves (loved) the crummy coffee shop. Normally, whenever he suggested it, Tiffany put up a fight to go to Denny’s instead. Denny’s benefited from the power of the parent company and undoubtedly has better food. Mug’s, so named because of the owners’, sisters Mildred and Wilma Appleby, mismatched collection of mugs in which they serve everything from coffee to clam chowder, is substandard on a good day. Today, though, Tiffany didn’t have the strength or the will to argue. She doubted she’d be able to eat anything anyway—which she was proving true as she shoved the runny scrambled eggs around her plate and took tiny sips of watery hot chocolate from a Shepherd and Moore Insurance Agency mug with a smiling yellow sunshine on it.

  Buck had laid out a plan: breakfast, going home to collect her belongings, and then, in the morning, going to L.A. to deliver her to her aunt Lizzie. She could tell that Buck had tried hard to sound convincing when he told her about her aunt Lizzie’s concern for her and about how happy she would be to see them when they arrived. She had quelled her normal teenage defiance and let him believe that she believed it.

  “Eggs okay?” Buck asks with a look of true concern.

  “They’re a little runny,” Tiffany admits, taking a bite of overly buttered wheat toast midway through her answer. “Toast’s good, though.”

  “Yep, they make good toast here,” Buck agrees, taking a bite of his underbuttered raisin toast and thinking that his eggs seem runny enough to be a salmonella risk.

  They finish what they can manage to stomach of the putrid breakfast before Buck puts a single twenty-dollar bill on the table and doesn’t wait for change.

  “Ready?” he asks politely, signaling to Tiffany that it’s time to get up and go.

  As she stands up, her flannel pants stick to the sweat the vinyl booth created on the backs of her legs. She looks down as she peels them loose and realizes for the first time—or maybe just caring for the first time—how stupid she looks out in public in the same pajama pants she has had on since she went to bed two nights before. Tiffany stares at the green-and-navy plaid as she makes her way out of Mug’s. She also notices that as she passes by the booths and tables and walks toward the door that people are whispering. Victory is a small town, and in small towns word travels fast.

  “They all know about my mother,” she thinks as she pushes the restaurant door open and hears Wilma Appleby mutter “Poor thing” from behind the old register.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Buck nod at the beehived restaurateur as he holds the door and follows Tiffany out. In silence, they climb into his truck and the engine starts with a roar. Chuck’s truck is (was) an older (much older) version of the same Ford. Tiffany takes notice of all the improvements the manufacturer has made—most noticeably the difference in the starting sound. Buck gives his key a slight turn and the truck eagerly turns over. Chuck would have to hold his key for seconds while the old engine begged for mercy before accepting defeat and grumbling to attention. The blue oval with Ford in script in the middle of the steering wheel is identical, though. Tiffany finds herself wishing that Buck’s truck was a piece of shit like her own family’s simply so that she could find some comfort in something familiar. For as long as she could remember, Tiffany had complained about her boring life. Now, her life had suddenly become much more exciting, and she wished with all her might that it was back to the mundane existence she had formerly despised.

  A few seconds go by before Tiffany realizes that they are still sitting in the parking space in Mug’s cracked-asphalt parking lot. She looks over at Buck, who is watching her, looking afraid to speak—like she is counting something important and one
word could cause her to completely lose her place. When they make eye contact he uncomfortably asks, “Where is your house?”

  “Oh,” says Tiffany, feeling stupid for not realizing that of course he doesn’t know where she lives (lived). She gives him simple directions to her house, which is only a few miles away, and then settles back in the passenger seat, her wish for familiarity coming true as they travel the well-known route.

  In a few minutes, Buck’s truck is in her driveway, perfectly centered over the oil stain Chuck’s truck had left behind. He puts the car in park and then turns the engine off, but he doesn’t make a move to get out.

  “Do you want me to come in with you?” he asks, clearly unsure of what he should do.

  “No, that’s okay,” Tiffany says, trying to sound nonchalant…the way she would have this time last week. Of course, this time last week, Buck Platner wouldn’t have been driving her home from breakfast, and if he had, her mother would have been running outside, bursting with excitement, to greet him and invite him in for a cold Coke.

  Buck nods, giving the key a half turn in order to lower the power windows. He then leans his head against the back of the seat and instructs Tiffany to take her time.

  She hops out of the truck and makes the same walk up the driveway that she has made thousands of times. When she gets to the front porch and stoops to retrieve the emergency key—which is actually the only one they ever use—from under the doormat, she realizes that her legs are shaking.

  With uneasy hands, Tiffany puts the key in the lock, turns it, and then puts it back beneath the mat. She opens the door and steps inside, and can hear her mother hollering, “Tiffany Debbie Dearbourne, I pray to God you’ve wiped your feet!” That was how her mother always greeted her. Charla wasn’t a religious woman; in fact, the only thing she ever prayed for was for Tiffany to wipe her feet. Nine times out of ten, Tiffany lied about having used the key-hiding mat to clean her feet.