Wreathed Read online

  WREATHED

  Curtis Edmonds

  Scary Hippopotamus Books

  Trenton, NJ

  http://www.scaryhippopotamus.com

  Copyright © 2014 by Curtis Edmonds.

  All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN: 978-0-9889163-6-4

  Cover art by Dangerdust.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Kindle Direct Publishing edition November 2014.

  O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?

  1 Corinthians 1:55 (KJV)

  Chapter 1

  It was seven o’clock on a Tuesday evening, and I was stuck at the office. I had been working ten hours a day since my last vacation, four months ago. This was just as pathetic as it sounds. I could have been having a nice dinner with friends, or using my long-neglected gym membership, or even sitting on my couch in my pajamas watching real estate shows. But I wasn’t. I was at my desk, staring at a computer screen, engaged in the necessary but mind-draining and butt-numbing chore of proofreading legal documents. Just another fun-filled day in the life of Wendy Jarrett, Attorney at Law.

  The advantage of working this late was that it minimized distractions. But after three straight hours reading page after page of legal boilerplate, I found myself glancing at my phone, hoping that it might generate a distraction or two. Maybe an old friend from college was in town for the evening and wanted to hang out. Maybe a cute guy had seen me walking across the courthouse square this afternoon and was about to text me and to take me out for drinks and conversation and maybe a little romance. Maybe the anonymous creeper I had been dominating in Words With Friends over the last month was secretly a gorgeous billionaire who was waiting downstairs to whisk me away to a life of luxury and ease. None of these potential distractions were, shall we say, realistic, but at that particular moment anything had to be better than sitting all by myself in an empty law office in Morristown, New Jersey, and comparing two separate sixty-page wills for typos and inconsistencies.

  I did get a distraction in the form of a phone call from my mother. That could only mean that something horrible had happened.

  I do my best to keep in touch with my mother, but that means that I’m the one who has to call her nearly every single time. This is partly because she has a misplaced sense of old-money frugality about long-distance phone calls, but mostly it is her passive-aggressive way of getting me to communicate with her more frequently. So I call her on alternate Sunday afternoons, unless I’m on vacation, or unless I’m snowed under with work, or unless I drank so much chardonnay the night before that I lose the ability to claw my way out of bed. We have a nice little conversation, which occasionally touches on topics of parental concern such as why I drink so much chardonnay. Then I hang up, and she hangs up, and that’s it for parent-child communication for another fortnight.

  The only reason my mother ever breaks this pattern and calls me is if something horrible has happened. I couldn’t imagine another reason why she would call me at work at seven in the evening on a random weekday. It meant that someone was in the hospital, or someone was dead, or aliens from Alpha Centauri had landed in central New Jersey looking for Orson Welles. And the only way to find out the nature of this particular disaster was to pick up the phone.

  I looked at the phone. I looked at my computer screen. Whatever it was that had gone so badly off the rails that it had prompted Mother to call me couldn’t be that much worse than having to read another line of boring legalese. I picked up the phone.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said, not without some trepidation.

  “Hi yourself,” she said. “Are you at work? I tried calling you at home, but the call went to voicemail.”

  “Yes, I’m still at work. I have clients coming in tomorrow for an estate-planning meeting and I’m just proofreading the new version of their wills to make sure everything matches up.”

  “So you haven’t eaten,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  “I have a hot date with a frozen dinner.”

  “I know you’re busy, dear daughter, but could I impose on you to take me out to dinner? Nothing on today’s menu is looking good to me.”

  My mother lived in an exclusive senior community in central New Jersey, about twenty miles south of Morristown. “Senior community,” for most people, means a place where you warehouse old people and make them play shuffleboard and serve them gray institutional meals. This place was more upscale, with organized bus tours and nature walks and what I guess you could call a political action committee. And the food, at least to hear my mother talk about it, was impressive. They served healthy, nutritionally balanced meals that were accompanied by gooey cheesecakes and crispy apple strudels and large, soft mounds of ice cream. I had never, not once, heard my mother issue even the smallest complaint about the food, which was so unlike her that I suspected that the kitchen staff had developed an amazing magical cooking prowess unknown to the rest of humanity. I wished I knew their secret—not so much because I wanted to learn how to cook, but because I wanted to know how to insulate myself from maternal criticism.

  “Are you feeling all right?” I asked.

  “Of course, dear. Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just that this seems kind of an unusual time for you to call me, that’s all. I thought something might be wrong.”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” she said. “I just can’t bear the sight of my fellow residents here for another minute, and I don’t feel like imposing on your sister right at the moment.” When Mother retired, she’d moved to the same town where my older sister, Pacey, and her husband and twin sons lived. Pacey has many fine qualities, but she’s not much of a cook, and I could understand why Mother would rather have me take her out to a restaurant instead.

  “As much as I would like to join you for dinner, I’m right in the middle of something,” I said. “If I stop now, I am going to obsess over it all night and then have to start all over in the morning from the beginning.”

  “Wendy, please listen to your mother for once. Whatever these people are paying you, they are not paying you enough to sit around and proofread paperwork at seven in the evening.”

  I thought about explaining, once again, the economics of law firm billing, but I kept my mouth shut. One of my mother’s less endearing qualities is the ability to filter out explanations for things that she does not want explained to her. That encompasses any excuses I might have for not going out to dinner with her when she wanted to go out to dinner with me.

  “All right,” I said. “You caught me at a weak moment. Let me close up everything here and I’ll be there in half an hour or so. Think about where you want to go eat.”

  “That would be lovely.”

  This all sounds too easy, I thought. Something else must be going on, or there is some ulterior motive she’s not telling me about. I had no idea what it could be but at least I wouldn’t have to eat that rubbery microwave lasagna that had been hanging in the back of my freezer for months.

  “OK,” I said. “See you in a few.”

  Five minutes later, I pulled my Audi out of the parking garage, made my way through Morristown, and headed south on the highway. Traffic was sparse, so I shifted gears and merged into the fast lane, passing the slow-moving trucks like so many barges in the wake of a speedboat. Not that I had a speedboat. I had
a ten-year-old German convertible and a studio apartment and a giant heaving mound of debt from law school.

  The Audi was not my first choice. My first choice had been a MetroCard, and a small apartment in a good neighborhood in Manhattan. After graduation, I’d spent four months looking for a job with a Wall Street law firm. My plan was to work my way up to the kind of job and the kind of office that Michael Douglas had in Wall Street. I’d been in two great summer associates’ programs in 2007 and 2008, and I imagined I was well on my way up the glittering path to a rewarding career, easy money, and a cute boyfriend who looked like a young Charlie Sheen but who didn’t do drugs or sell out small regional airlines in insider trading scams. But the economy cratered during my last year in law school, and all of the smart, engaging, helpful people I’d met in Manhattan during my summer programs were too busy trying to keep themselves afloat to help me get a job. Then I made the stupid mistake of taking the New York and New Jersey bar exams at the same time—and when I passed New Jersey but failed New York, I ended up stuck looking for work on the wrong side of the Hudson.

  The best job I could find was with a boutique firm in Morristown, doing wills and estate planning. I was lucky to get the job in the first place, and I was lucky to still have it five years later. I gave up on Manhattan and the small apartment in the good neighborhood and the MetroCard. I found an apartment five minutes from my office, and a used convertible with a hairline crack in the windshield and a big chip of paint missing on the trunk lid.

  I didn’t need the car and I didn’t need the additional debt that went along with it. But if I couldn’t live in Manhattan, I at least wanted to be able to cruise down Seventh Avenue or the Jersey Shore or a narrow country road in the Poconos. I wanted the freedom to drive away as far and as fast as I could go anytime the mood struck. For the first couple of years, it worked out all right. But lately, I spent more and more of my weekends stretched out on my couch, catching up on sleep or work or whatever else was more important than getting in my car and driving somewhere and having fun. Worse, even if I did find the energy to drive somewhere and have fun, I didn’t have anyone to have fun with.

  I kept the Audi in high gear until it was time to decide whether to exit off the highway and keep driving somewhere else. I wanted to keep dodging traffic until I had outrun all my problems. But I knew it wouldn’t work, and anyway, I was hungry. I pulled off the highway and made my way south.

  Chapter 2

  When I picked up my mother, she was wearing a long, plaid skirt and a cable-knit sweater, just as though she were golfing in Scotland. Most of the women at her retirement complex wore tacky, sequined sweatshirts and stretch pants, which is what I aspire to wear if I ever get that old. Either Mother hadn’t been there long enough to downgrade her wardrobe, or she’d refused to change the way she dressed just because the rest of the world had gotten sloppy. I decided I would buy her a “World’s Greatest Grandma” sweatshirt for Christmas, just to check.

  I offered to drive us to a nice steakhouse in the next town over. I didn’t want a steak, necessarily, but I figured there might be a chance that she’d spring for a nice bottle of chardonnay and I knew this place had a good cellar. She decided it would be easier to go to the closest chain restaurant. I didn’t argue with her, on the grounds that I would likely end up arguing with her over something else and I wanted to save my energy for the more important battle yet to come.

  The restaurant was half deserted on a Tuesday night, but the multiple television screens showing basketball and hockey games made the atmosphere noisy and distracting. We ordered our drinks—a raspberry mojito for me, iced tea for her—and our dinner, and didn’t say much. If Mother had an ulterior motive, she was taking her time letting me know about it.

  “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.”