Wreathed Page 2

  “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.

  Having exhausted the possibilities of electronic correspondence, I switched over to Candy Crush Saga and settled into my boot
h. I finished two levels before I realized that it had, now, indeed been a long time since Mother had gone into the bathroom.

  Shortly after that I realized that I needed to not drink any more coffee if I didn’t want to make the gutsy call about whether or not to duck into the men’s room.

  It was not much longer after that when I realized that I was a thirty-year-old single woman sitting alone in a chain restaurant, sipping coffee and playing Candy Crush Saga.

  I don’t enjoy eating alone in restaurants. I would rather eat microwave lasagna over the sink than eat at a restaurant by myself, and I have. I like restaurants. I like eating better food than I could ever hope to cook for myself, and I like leaving large tips for the nice people who bring me my food and clean up after me and wash the dishes after I leave. But I detest eating by myself, especially in happy, noisy restaurants full of dating couples and families with toddlers and waiters wishing people a happy birthday.

  I considered my options.

  I could go and pull Mother out of the bathroom and apologize and give in to her unreasonable demand to drive her down to Cape May for her mysterious appointment.

  I could sit and wait for her to pull herself together so we could talk about this, the way that reasonable people do.

  I could leave and ask the bartender to call her a cab, maybe slip him a twenty and ask him to pay the cabdriver. Then I could drive home and prepare to spend the rest of my life listening to my mother complain about that time I left her alone in a restaurant.

  It wouldn’t be so bad to indulge her, just this once, I told myself. Just go in the bathroom and apologize. Take her to Cape May. Maybe you can get a nice meal and a spa treatment out of it. It can’t possibly be as bad as you think it will.

  That’s what my inner voice was saying, but I didn’t listen because sometimes your inner voice is an idiot. I finished my coffee and paid the check and sat back in the booth and made a couple of moves in Words With Friends. Mother came out of the bathroom just as I was playing VICTOR on a triple-word score to take the lead.

  “Are you ready to go?” she asked. “You didn’t pay for dinner, did you?”

  “I did indeed,” I said.

  “How much was it?”

  “If I tell you, you’ll try to give me cash for it, which I’m absolutely not going to take, and then we’re going to just go round and round all over again. I am tired and I would like us to stop arguing and go home.”

  She slipped into the booth across from me. “I just want to say one thing before we go.”

  “I’m not in a hurry,” I said. “Would you like some coffee or something?” I had won this round, but I didn’t see the point in pressing my advantage further than that.

  “It is getting late, and coffee is the last thing I need right now. I’ve had a little time to think about how I’ve behaved tonight, and I wanted to tell you that I’m not proud of myself.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I should have leveled with you right from the start. I’ve had a very distressing day, and I thought I could count on your sister to take me down for the funeral, and when she backed out on me, I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “The what?”

  “The funeral. Friday morning, in Cape May.”

  My back stiffened against the booth. “What are you talking about? What funeral? Who died?”

  “Nobody you know, of course, or I would have told you about it already. But that’s why I need to go down there, is to go to the funeral.”

  “Um,” I said. “Er. Um.” I was frustrated by my sudden inability to master the basics of the English language. I knew it, I thought. Every time she calls me, it means somebody’s in the hospital, or somebody’s dead.

  “Are you all right, sweetheart?” Mother asked.

  “You could have told me that,” I said.

  “I should have,” she said. “And I apologize. It’s just that I remembered that you aren’t really much of a funeral-goer. I thought it would be best not to bring the subject up over dinner.”

  “I do fine at funerals,” I said. It came out sounding a little more tense than I wanted it to.

  “I just thought you might not be comfortable with the idea right away.”

  “That happened one time. I was twelve.”

  “I know, dear,” she said. “I remember it very clearly.”

  “Mother, is it so much to ask to be treated like an adult? Just one time?”

  “Of course not, Wendy. I would be happy to oblige you.”

  “That would be nice,” I said. I drank the last couple of drops of coffee in my cup.

  “Well, here goes. I have a funeral to go to in Cape May on Friday morning, and it would help me if you could drive me down there Thursday night. Would you be available?”

  It took a moment for me to realize what she was doing. This was manipulation under another name. This was giving me the illusion of a victory without the substance. And the worst part of it all was that it was working. I’d been waiting for my mother to treat me like an adult all my life, and now she was doing it, and now it was working against me. The problem with being treated like an adult, it turns out, is that then you have to act like an adult.

  “Yes,” I said. “I will drive you down there. I will go with you to this funeral, for whoever it is, because it seems to be important to you. I can take a day off without too much trouble, and I wouldn’t mind taking a nice drive down the Shore.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate it. I know this is difficult for you.”

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “I know this won’t be fun for you,” she said. “But when you get to be my age, half your social life revolves around going to funerals.”

  “Something to look forward to,” I said. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  We gathered our purses and jackets and made our way out to my car.

  Chapter 4

  The next morning was brutal. I got up at the time I always tell myself I am going to start getting up, but instead of exercising and eating a healthy breakfast, I grabbed a stale cinnamon roll and a bottle of water and headed to the office. I plowed through the two wills I needed to review and managed to gulp down two cups of coffee before my clients arrived.

  My clients were perfectly nice people and it wasn’t their fault that they had both inherited generation-skipping trusts with significant estate-tax implications. Three generations of lawyers had worked to conserve the capital tied up in those trusts, and the wills I had drafted were designed to pass that capital down to the next as-yet-unborn generation with minimal loss. Of course, when my clients did manage to add members of that next generation, the wills would have to be redrafted to address their existence, which would result in more billable hours for my firm. (Being an estate lawyer gives you a slightly skewed view of marriage and family relationships.)

  The husband was one of the vacant, uninteresting old-money drones I had spent my dating life trying to avoid. His new wife was petite and graceful, with flawless tanned skin and raven hair—in other words, everything I am not. I inherited my mother’s pale-blond hair and delicate bone structure, which would have been fine if I hadn’t also inherited my father’s imposing height. If I were a little thinner, I could get away with being willowy and elegant, but I’m not and I haven’t been willing to do the exercise and starvation needed to make that happen. Additionally, some rogue gene gave me D-cup breasts, which are more of a hindrance than anything else. Women make nasty comments behind my back about plastic surgery, and they strain my back, and they attract the wrong kind of men on top of that.

  Setting aside their obvious flaws, though, these particular clients were very nice people, and they were perfectly happy with the will, and they even managed to listen closely and nod in the right places when I explained the various clauses and their tax implications. It was a pleasant enough meeting, and it ended just in time for me to grab a quick sandwich at my desk.
I was in the middle of rearranging my schedule so that I could take Friday off when my sister called.

  “I just had to say thank you,” Pacey said.

  “You are just so incredibly welcome, dear sister,” I said.

  “Already with the sarcasm, I see. You must have had a fun evening talking to Mother.”

  “A fun evening, and a busy morning.” I would have complained to Pacey about the press of my work responsibilities, but I knew she would respond by telling me about everything that she had to do every day in corralling two active toddlers.

  “I know you wouldn’t have wanted to take Mother to this funeral. I would have done it, you understand, but it is just simply impossible.”

  “It’s not easy for me, either,” I said. I had plans to spend my evening researching safe conversational topics for the drive down.

  “I know, but I appreciate it like you would not believe. Benjy and Simon have been looking forward to this party for weeks. They ask me about it every ten minutes. I ought to drop them off at the U.N. sometime and let them do some negotiating.” Pacey had a graduate degree in foreign policy and used to have a good job with the German consulate in New York. She married a Swiss diplomat named Henri, and they bought a home in rural New Jersey. When Pacey found out she was pregnant with twins, Henri left the diplomatic corps and got a job with one of the big Swiss banks. It was supposed to be a more stable job for him, but he ended up spending almost all his time shuttling back and forth to Geneva. That left Pacey alone at home, tending to two three-year-old boys, who were capable of bouncing off the walls even in good moods. I thought of them as Biter and Smiter, although I would never say that out loud where Pacey could hear me. Of course, I bribed the twins with Hershey’s Miniatures every time I visited, so it was possible I was not seeing them at their best.