Lucky Stars (28 page)

“You’re very welcome, Mrs. Reiser,” said Maura.

“You certainly are,” said Jack. “Now, when the police are through questioning you, we’ll get you to a doctor so you can have that shoulder examined.”

“Nonsense,” said my mother. “I’ll put a little Ben-Gay on it and it’ll be fine. I once wrote them a complaint letter and they sent me a whole case of tubes.”

He squelched a laugh. “Then we’ll just drive back to the hotel and get your things, and then we’ll take you down to L.A. You must be exhausted.”

“A decent night’s sleep would be nice,” Mom conceded.

“You probably don’t want to be alone tonight, so feel free to stay with me at my apartment,” I offered as Jack
and Maura left us to talk to the police officer in charge. “You can have the bedroom and I’ll take the sofa. I know you have most of your clothes at Victor’s, but we can pick them up once he’s in custody.”

“That’s so thoughtful of you, dear. Especially about letting me stay with you.”

“You’re my mother. You’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”

“What a generous, considerate daughter I have. Your bed is one of those mattresses that’s practically on the floor, isn’t it?”

“It’s a platform bed, right. But it’s comfortable, you’ll see.”

“I have seen, and it doesn’t look comfortable to me.”

“It may not look comfortable, but it is.”

“Without a good, solid box spring? How could it be comfortable?”

“Well, because it’s great support for your back.”

“Yes, but what does it do for the rest of you? There are reasons that people in underdeveloped nations have health problems, dear, and one of them is that they sleep on the floor.”

“It’s not
on
the floor,” I said, feeling myself tense in reaction to her critical assessment of my damn bed. Why did she have to start in? Why couldn’t she just accept my invitation and leave it at that? Had she and I slipped back into our roles as the Domineering Mother and the Defensive Daughter so soon after our brush with death?

Well, I hadn’t slipped back, no sir. I’d been changed by the Victor crisis. I viewed my mother differently now. I valued her and appreciated her and was grateful for her, having come so close to losing her.
I want a relationship with her even if it means putting up with her harangues.
That’s what I’d told Karen Sweetzer.
I love
her more than I want her to change,
I’d said.
If
I
want her to accept me for who I am, I have to accept her for who she is.
Besides, I’d made that bargain with God, remember? In exchange for Mom’s safety, I had agreed to keep my mouth shut when she got on my nerves (except when she
really
got on my nerves). So now it was time to hold up my end of the deal by continuing to provide innocuous responses to her exasperating remarks and refrain from telling her to shove it.

“I just wish you’d buy better quality furniture for that apartment of yours,” she went on. “A person could get sick sleeping on the floor, Stacey, so listen to your mother and—”

She stopped midsentence and emitted an actual gasp, as if she’d caught herself badgering me, as if she’d recognized that she had reverted to type, as if she’d actually heard her own words and, for the first time in her life, rejected them.

“Listen to your mother and what?” I said, spotting the twinkle in her eye now.

“And remember that she could be wrong.”

Well, what do you know? I thought, putting my arm around her shoulders and walking her toward Jack and Maura. I guess she’s changed, too. Not completely, but a little. Maybe more than a little.

e
pilogue

“
A
nd finally, a spokesperson for Rest E-zy recliners confi
rm
ed that the company is recalling a hundred thousand of its new Football Guy lounge chairs, due to a defect that just might land
your
football guy on his rear end. For more information, go to Rest E-zy’s website at
www.restezy.com

. Reporting live, this is News Four’s Helen Reiser, the eyes and ears of southern California consumers.”

I hit the power button on the television and turned to Jack. “Is this the job she was bo
rn
for or what,” I said.

“It’s another example of how it can take some people years to figure out what they really want to be when they grow up,” he said.

I nodded. We were lying next to. each other in bed, our legs intertwined. We’d been watching the eleven
o’clock news, the half-hour nightly program on which my mother has been the consumer reporter for three months. As we’d feared, she’d been dumped by Fin’s Premium Tuna once her adventures with Victor had become tabloid fodder. Her agent and manager and all the other hangers-on had defected, too. There’d been no more acting jobs, no more commercial endorsements, no more power lunches. The sad fact was, her phone had stopped ringing, but, oddly enough, she hadn’t seemed to mind. Not even when my phone had started ringing off the hook.

She’d been right about my career getting a boost from the avalanche of media stories about my portrayal of Karen and my ability to convince my own mother that I was Victor’s ex-wife. Producers and directors had bombarded Mickey with calls about me, and it was dizzying how fast I’d gone from nobody to somebody. Right now, for example, I’m starring in a new hour-long drama series for CBS. I play a medical examiner who spends a lot of time sifting through blood and guts to solve crimes. I enjoy the work, am thrilled to be making good money at my chosen profession instead of slaving away at Cornucopia!, and get a big kick out of being considered hot, knowing all too well how quickly I could go back to being cold.

When I’d first been offered the television series, I was reluctant to tell my mother about it, given how our fortunes had reversed themselves yet again. This time I was the one who was up and she was the one who was down, and I wasn’t sure how she’d react. But, as I said, she’d handled the situation much better than I would have.

“You’re the actress in the family,” she’d reassured me. “You always have been. I was a fluke.”

And so, with her blessing, I’d become a medical examiner on TV. I’d also become engaged to Jack—more or less with her blessing. He’d popped the question shortly after Victor was taken into custody along with Vincent, the chauffeur, who, it turned out, had not driven Vic and Mom to Montecito so he could stay behind in Beverly Hills and off Rosa and Carlos. He was thwarted when they got wind of his plan and fled the house and the country. Jack heard a rumor that they’re Mexican movie stars now—as Carmen and Ramon!

Anyhow, we had decided to have the wedding ceremony and reception at the Bel Air Hotel. Maura was going to be my maid of honor and Tim was going to be his brother’s best man, and we were going to say our “I do’s” with only our family and close friends in attendance. We wanted to avoid the circus atmosphere that accompanies many celebrity weddings and to simply pledge our love to each other, not broadcast it to all the world.

There had just been the matter of Mom, who, as I said, had more or less given us our blessing: “more” in the sense that she could finally brag to everybody that her spinster daughter was getting married; “less” in the sense that she disagreed with virtually every choice Jack and I made regarding the wedding. Why weren’t we having it at her house? Why were we inviting so few people? What about Aunt Minny and Uncle Seymour, never mind poor Cousin Iris, who’d undergone triple bypass surgery and was recently widowed and was depressed enough without having to be excluded from a family function? And how was she supposed to explain to her friends back in Cleveland that they, too, were being deliberately left out of the festivities? How could Jack and I be so insensitive to
her
needs?

There’d come a point during the conversations about
the wedding that the guilt she’d inflicted on me nearly forced me to call the whole thing off. Yes, she had changed, but not on the subject of my nuptials.

“It’s not worth the aggravation,” I’d said to Jack one night. “She’s driving me insane.”

“She’s not even my mother and she’s driving
me
insane,” he’d said.

We’d been beaten down by Mom’s meddling and were on the verge of running off and eloping when Mickey called me one morning to say that he’d been contacted by the news director at our local NBC affiliate about my mother.

“Why did he call you about her?” I’d said.

“I guess he figured I’d know where to find her, since I represent her daughter.”

“Logical. What did he want?”

“He read a piece in the paper about how Helen bashed Chellus in the head with her Bruno Magli shoe and how the heel broke off and how she wrote to the company and demanded a new pair. And, of course, he remembered how outrageous she was in those Fin’s commercials. He put two and two together and decided she was the perfect person to fill his slot for a consumer reporter, despite the fact that she’s not twenty with the tits and ass to match.”

“That’s fantastic,” I’d said. “Do you want me to call her and set up a meeting for you two, since you’ve never met?”

“Yeah, do that, would you, kid?”

“Would I ever,” I’d said, and dialed my mother’s number the second I hung up.

I’d told her about the opening at KNBC and she’d relished the prospect of reporting on consumer issues. Within the week, she’d landed the job and begun to
channel all the energy she’d been expending on our wedding into badgering companies about the quality of their products. No more nagging us about her friends in Cleveland. No more bitching about Aunt Minny and Uncle Seymour. No more guilt trips about poor Cousin Iris. She’d stumbled into another career—a life that didn’t revolve exclusively around me.

“We’re so lucky,” I said after thinking back on the events of the past few months and leaning over in bed to kiss Jack. “We’re in love. We’re getting married. My career is going well. Your career is going better than ever. And my mother is too busy to tell us what kind of flowers we should order for the centerpieces.”

“Or what kind of food we should serve at the reception.”

“Amen. We can plan our wedding without her interference.”

“And without her dragging us into some melodrama involving a man.”

“Amen to that, too,” I said, so grateful that the Victor saga was behind us.

Jack stroked my cheek, and his caress prompted another kiss from me, and before I knew it, we were in each other’s arms, as lusty and adoring as an engaged couple should be.

We were interrupted at an especially intimate moment by the ringing of the telephone.

“It’s late. Let the machine get it,” said Jack.

We let the machine get it and refocused on each other, only to have the phone ring again.

“I know, I know. Let the machine get it,” I said.

We let the machine get it and resumed our lovemaking, only to have the phone ring a third time.

“I’d better get it,” I said. “Whoever it is will only keep trying.”

Whoever it is.
Please. There was only one person who called and called and called, whether it was late or not. The question was: What was she calling about?

I rolled over and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“Stacey, it’s your mother.”

“Everything okay, Mom? We saw your segment tonight. Good work on that Rest E-zy thing.”

“Yes, yes, but I’m calling to talk to you about romance.”

I sat up in bed, my blood pressure skyrocketing. “Look, Mom. If this is about my wedding, I just want to say that while Jack and I value your opinion, we’re adamant about setting boundaries, about making our own decisions, and we hope you’ll respect that.” And I’d thought her new job had solved this particular problem.

“This isn’t about you
and Jack,” she said, sounding—
what?—sort of breathless. “It’s about Mickey and me.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Mickey Offerman. Our agent.”

“What about him, Mom?” I was impatient. Impatient and eager to jump my
fiancé's
bones.

“We’re having an affair.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Mickey and I are seeing each other.”

“That’s crazy. Mickey’s a complete womanizer.”

“Used to be. He says
I’m
the only woman he wants from now on.”

“But when did you two even—”

Before I could finish the sentence, Jack had snatched the phone out of my hand.

“It’s almost midnight, Helen,” he said to my mother.
“Stacey will call you tomorrow. Sleep tight.” And then he hung up.

I stared at him. “She claims she and Mickey are a couple.”

“Good for them,” he said as he nuzzled my neck.

“I’ve never known him to date women her age,” I said.

“I love the way your skin feels right here,” he said, sucking on my right earlobe.

“I’m telling you, he’s totally wrong for her,” I said.

“But most of all, I love the way your skin feels right
here,
”
said Jack, who pressed his lips against mine and put an end to the discussion.