Commencement (6 page)

I exhaled. I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath.

“If that’s alright with you?” he asked.

“Oh, she’s a grown woman,” my mother said, laughing. “You don’t need my permission or my blessing. You two do what you like.”

“Then what is this all about?” I demanded. “Seriously!”

“Just exercising my maternal rights to interrogate and intimidate your suitors for my amusement,” she said as she rose from the chair, “Nice meeting you, Dr. Grayson.” She waved and glided past me to the bedroom door. I followed.

“Nice meeting you as well. I feel suitably interrogated and intimidated,” he called.

“Glad to hear it,” she responded over her shoulder. “I’ll let you say goodbye, and we’ll talk further over breakfast,” she said, tucking my hair behind my ear.

“Jeez,” I scoffed, and untucked the hair. “Fine, I’ll be there in a sec.”

I shut the door behind her and returned to the desk, sitting down in the chair my mother had just vacated.

“Well that went well,” the Professor said.

“God, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what got into her.”

“No, it’s fine. She loves you, she’s looking out for you.”

“I guess,” I said. “Still, that was a pretty brutal scene.”

“I’ve been through far worse.”

“Yikes. I hate to imagine that.” I laughed. “Hey, thanks for not lying to her. I wouldn’t have liked it if you had, and it wouldn’t have worked anyway, because the woman is a human lie detector.”

“I’m a lot of things,” he said, straightening the cuff of his shirt and rubbing at his wrist idly, then sighing, “but I like to think I’m not a liar.”

“Whoa, don’t get heavy on me now.”

“Sorry.” He sighed again. “Never mind.” His lips curled in a halfhearted smile. “Go on, have breakfast with your mum. We’ll talk later.”

“Okay, later.” I nodded, blew him a kiss and ended the call. I threw on a pair of leggings, an oversize cable knit sweater and stalked to the kitchen to have words with my mother.

Charlotte had gotten to her, I was certain of that. She’d called her, and had poked all of Mom’s Goddess of Protection buttons to instigate the bizarre interrogation that had just taken place in my bedroom.

As I rounded the corner into the kitchen, my brain kicked back a few of the Professor’s words to me. Call it delayed processing, subconscious suspicion, or maybe Mom and Charlie were getting into my head despite my efforts to the contrary.

“I like to think I’m not a liar,” he’d said.
What the fuck does that mean?

“
C
harlotte called you
,” I said as I walked into the kitchen and made a beeline for the coffee pot to refill my mug.

“She did.” My mother nodded. “She didn’t say much. Just that you had a guy in your life and she’s worried about it, about you.”

“She needs to mind her own fucking business.”

“Language, and yes she does. She’s got some issues of her own that are not being addressed,” she said, pulling a pink pastry box from a bag on the kitchen table. “Which is why she’s distracting herself from them, by obsessing over yours.”

“Good,” I said, sitting down at the table. “I’m glad you see it my way.”

“I see it all ways.” She sighed and sat across from me. “I trust you to know what you’re doing. And I trust my family to take care of each other if, and when, we need extra support.”

“Right, what’s that mean?” I said, reaching for a pastry.

“I do believe he respects you, so that’s points in his favor. He could’ve lied to me, or ended the call, but he didn’t. I read him as a man who respects people in general.”

“But?”

“But, while that’s lovely, that doesn’t mean that you won’t get hurt.”

“Mom, that’s life. People get hurt.”

“Yes. But a relationship such as this one has a higher probability of ending badly.”

“First, there is no relationship. We have plans to fuck, that’s all. You and Charlotte are getting way ahead of yourselves here.”

“Language.”

“Second, why on earth does something between me and the Professor have a higher probability of ending badly than any other relationship?”

“That right there,” she said, pausing on her way to snag a pastry to point her finger at me instead. “You call him ‘the Professor’. There is a disproportional balance of power in this pairing from the very beginning.”

“Because he’s a teacher and I’m a student?”

She nodded.

“Negatory, Doctor Mom.”

“Convince me.”

“We power play, I’ll grant you that, but it’s been flip flopping back and forth and I know that’s a big part of the attraction. Besides, he asked me to call him by his first name, I just don’t.”

“Age?” she asked as she picked idly at a flaky croissant.

“Early thirties.”

“Relationship with family?”

“Daddy issues,” I said and quickly added, “Just like me,” when she raised an eyebrow. “I have no idea about his mom.”

“Siblings? Other family?”

“I have no idea.”

“Ever been married?”

“No idea.”

“How long will he be staying here in the States? When does he go back? What does that mean for the two of you?”

“Again, no idea. Look, I haven’t been interrogating him like you just did. Everything has been organic. We met, and it was immediate combustive sexual chemistry.”

“And yet you haven’t consummated that.”

“Not yet—his rule, not mine.”

“So what did you do last night?”

“Watched
Downton Abbey
, got drunk and played strip Scrabble. He won by playing an archaic and arguably illegal word invented by Shakespeare. The man loves Shakespeare.”

“Well that’s another point in his favor.”

“He also loves Jane Austen, by the way.”

“I’ll give him ten points for that one.”

“Oh, and he speaks French. There, that’s something I know about him.”

“I dated a French guy once, you know,” she said, her eyes twinkling over her cup of coffee. “He was marvelous at cunnilingus.”

“Yes, Mr. Bouchard. He was our mechanic and he was French-Canadian, not French.”

“Same difference.”

“No, it’s not. Also ew, I didn’t need to know that.”

“Listen, you have not orgasmed from oral stimulation until you’ve been brought to that state by a man whispering French poetry against your clitoris.”

“Oh my God.” I nearly choked on my cruller.

“Of course, I don’t speak French, so he could have been reciting from the back half of the Volvo’s owner’s manual for all I know. God, I miss that car.”

“Once again, ew.”

“Well, sweetheart,” she said, sighing as she set her coffee cup on the kitchen table, “you do as you will, as you must, and I’ll be here to support you, regardless.”

“Thanks. Will you run interference with Charlie?”

“I will gently remind her that she needs to attend to her own household before she starts trying to manage yours.”

“Great, thanks. Everyone just needs to take a deep breath and stay completely out of my business.”

“Now
that
I can’t promise, because we are a family. We share in triumphs and tragedies, we support each other, unconditionally,” she said and I could see tears glistening at the edges of her eyes.

“Mom,” I began, eager to steer the conversation into safer territory.

“The people who love you have every right to worry and look out for you,” she said, raising a hand to stop me from talking. “We do, because we are the ones who have to help put the pieces back together if everything falls apart again.”

“Mom, that’s in the past,” I said and reached across the table to hold her hand.

“Not so far in the past.” She shook her head.

“For me it is. I’ve moved on. Really,” I said softly. “You and Charlie did help me, tremendously. I would have been completely lost without you guys. But ultimately I healed myself, Mom.” She squeezed my hand and I smiled at her. “For better and for worse, it’s my life and I’m responsible for it. Please stop worrying.”

“Never gonna happen, baby girl.” She sniffed and patted my hand. Then smiled back, a thin veneer that did little to dissipate the tension. “Just be sure to get him to speak French to your kitty. You will not regret it.”

“Good Lord, woman.” I rolled my eyes and laughing, reached for another pastry. This was going to be a long couple of days.

“Seriously,” she said, rising from the table to refill her coffee mug. “I think it has to do with how they pronounce the words, the way they move their tongues. And the accent, there’s something melodious, a vibration perhaps. Really, it’s marvelous.”

“Oh my God, Mom.” I stood, and took my pastry and coffee mug to the kitchen door. “I’m off to the showers. I gotta wash my mother’s dirty mouth out of my ears.”

“Okay, sweetheart.” She smiled and lifted her mug. “I put a new massaging shower head in the guest bath; enjoy it.”

“Jesus Christ, Mom!” I shouted as I escaped down the hall.

“Language!”

F
uck
.

I hadn’t heard from the Professor in days. Not a call, not a text—nothing. He was MIA and I wasn’t sure what to think of it. Of course, I could have reached out to him. But I didn’t. Since my mother and my sister were convinced I was falling too hard, too fast for the wrong guy, the last thing I was going to do was prove it by acting like a teenager. So I didn’t call him and I didn’t text.

I couldn’t say it was the very worst Thanksgiving I’d ever had, but it definitely hit the top five. The food was good, Mom and I made a killer spread complete with oyster stuffing, corn pudding, and a heritage breed turkey large enough to feed a calendar full of firemen. We’d even made three kinds of pie for dessert: pumpkin, apple and bourbon pecan.

After several days with my mother, constantly dodging her not-so-subtle attempts to psychoanalyze me, my not-boyfriend, and my not-relationship I was definitely NOT in the mood for any more familial meddling. So maybe it was good that Charlie never did make it up to see us, although she’d managed a ten minute obligatory phone call before her shit-bag boyfriend, Mason, had pulled her away. Our dining guests consisted of a few cousins and friends, my mother’s boyfriend, Jeffrey, and his son and daughter-in-law. Unfortunately we also had the dubious pleasure of hosting my Great Aunt Pearl, her own family having decided to fly out of town for the holiday. I suspect they only did so to escape her.

Aunt Pearl, eighty-six, is a crackling bundle of dry twigs collected from the floor of a haunted forest. Charlie and I had called her Black Pearl growing up, as she had a knack for drawing dark clouds of doom wherever she went. This Thanksgiving was no exception. Aunt Pearl had managed to judge my family, my mother, my profession, and my future in one magnificently engineered remark that she squawked across the dining table at me in a steady voice that belied her tiny frame.

“What did she say?” Sasha asked me when I relayed the tale to her the next day on my drive back to Maryville.

“Something to the effect of if my mother had raised me better, I’d have married Brian and now would have a husband and a home and I wouldn’t have to sully the family name with my whore-job.”

“Whore-job? You have a whore-job? As your employer, what does that make me?”

“I don’t know. A flesh peddler? A pimp? Head whore in charge?”

“I like that last one.” Sasha laughed. “So Auntie Pearl is a charmer, then.”

“Oh she is, and it got better,” I said. “After she called me a whore, she went on a rant about babies. She droned on and on about how many babies I’d have by now if I had only stayed with poor Brian Forrestor.”

“My God, Jane,” Sasha said with a gasp. “That’s evil. How could she say that? Does she not know…what happened?”

“Oh, she knows alright. The whole damn town knows. Hell, that’s why I left, just to get away from all of it, all of the memories and the pain and the pity.”

“Well there’s certainly no pity coming from Auntie.”

“No, she’s just a nasty piece of work,” I agreed. “But in her defense, I suspect she stays alive by feeding on the pain of others.”

“I’m astonished you can joke about it,” Sasha said.

“It’s how I cope, Sash,” I said. “I joke so I don’t cry. I can’t live in the past. I’m graduating. I’ve got to move forward with my life. I’ve got to figure out where to go from here, what to do next.”

“Yes, I’ve got some ideas for you.”

“I know.” I laughed. “You keep hinting about that. When are you going to just spill it?”

“Soon, I’m still working out the details. But listen, the reason I called… I need you to work tonight.”

“Really? I thought we were closed?”

“I received an unexpected call from an old friend. He’s got a group of business associates in town for some sort of convention and he needs to entertain them this weekend.”

“Who has a convention Thanksgiving weekend?”

“Canadians.”

“Oh right. Yeah, sure. I’ll be in, then.”

“And double—no—triple up on that grocery list I gave you on your way back if you would. These gentlemen have expensive tastes. I’ll reimburse you when you arrive.”

“Got it, boss.”

“Jane?” she said.

“Yes?”

“You’re fabulous, you know. I adore you.”

“I love you too, boss.”

“And you’re very good at your whore-job.”

“Hanging up now,” I said, laughing.

I
texted
the Professor when I got home. He didn’t respond. I texted him again after my shower, and let him know I’d been called into the club. I figured it was too much to hope he’d stop by, but at least if he did text me back, he’d know I was at work.

“Holy crap, Sasha, are they having the entire convention here?” I asked when I saw her in the dressing rooms. The club was packed with men in suits, clinking glasses and loosening their ties, trading business cards and scooping handfuls of nuts into their mouths.

“Looks that way, doesn’t it?”

“I dropped off the cooler with Malcolm,” I told her. “He said to tell you he’ll have everything out in a flash. You’re serving all that food to these guys?”

“Yes, tonight’s event is in honor of our fancy Canadian friends. We are calling it a VIP Tasting Party.”

“Tasting party?” I rolled my eyes. “No double entendre meant, of course?”

“Certainly not.” Her eyes widened in mock horror.

“What are you charging for this tasting party?”

“Sixty-five dollars a head, darling. And that’s a bargain. I dove into my own wine cellar to accommodate these well-dressed meat-heads and I expect to make back twice its value in up-sells tonight.”

“Wow.”

“Which brings me to some bad news. We’ve got just four girls tonight. You’re all going to have to work more than your fair share. All the other girls are out of town.”

“Crap.”

“Yes, so no private room dances except those negotiated by me for well past our usual rate. I need everyone on the floor all the time. Try to keep all up-sells to the floor, so everyone can enjoy the show.”

“While one poor schmuck pays for it.”

“Absolutely.” She smiled.

“Okay, got it.” I exhaled and started combing out my hair.

“Jane,” Sasha said from the doorway. “Let your creativity flow tonight. I know you’ve been working on new routines, new costumes and ideas. I want to see them all. This is the perfect audience for it. Just do whatever you like. Every fourth dance is yours, and in between your sets I expect you on the floor. Try to keep breaks to a minimum.”

“No problem.” I grinned at her. “I can really do whatever I want?”

“Yes, I’m counting on it.”

K
andy
, Krystal and Kaia where three of Sasha’s best dancers and heroes in my mind for delaying their weekend plans to help out this evening at the club. They often danced together, parties and private gigs under the name The Special K’s. Tonight they showed up with a trunk full of costumes and a bottle of Schnapps. I brought my unpacked suitcase in from my car and we dumped the contents of both cases onto the floor of the dressing room. We had about twenty minutes to plan a long night of impromptu routines.

“You’ve got a turkey costume?” I asked, staring bemused at the large fabric poultry corpse that lay at my feet.

“We had a gig at a club in Boston last night,” Kandy answered. “One of those ‘dinner and a show’ things, so we did a Burlesque Turkey dinner.”

“You guys are geniuses,” I said, picking up the turkey costume and marveling at the expert placement of Velcro that resulted in a costume that could be removed a piece at a time, and put back together again later. “Oh my God, let’s use these tonight! It’s perfect for Sasha’s Tasting Party theme.”