Mommy Tracked (20 page)

“Oh, I sorted it out.” Noah’s voice was bitter again. “I found out that Jessie had been seeing her ex-boyfriend. They got married six months after we broke up. On the same day, and in the same place where we were supposed to get married. I guess after all of her hard work planning the wedding of her dreams, she figured it was pointless to start over from scratch. She just substituted a new groom.” Another humorless chuckle. Anna had liked it better when Noah was smiling with his eyes, although the
cheat-er
siren had faded away. “I heard they served salmon and beef Wellington.”

“That’s awful,” Anna said. She reached out and touched his hand. “You must have been devastated.”

“It wasn’t a fun time,” Noah admitted. “I was angry for a long time, and then I was bitter for a while. I worked a lot. And then, after a while, I just got over it.”

“I think that would be a hard thing to get over. It would be hard to trust anyone again,” Anna said, doubting very much that Noah
had
gotten over Jessie or the way that she’d gone about leaving him. He still seemed stuck on bitter. Then again, it was a phase she knew only too well, so who was she to judge?

“It took a while. But eventually, I did. And I haven’t been engaged since.” He flashed her a wry smile. This time, it reached his eyes.

The waitress appeared again, carrying their entrées on a round tray. She put the plates down with a flourish, again attended to their wineglasses, and said,
“Bon appétit!”
before flitting away. Anna picked up her fork and knife and cut into her steak. It was perfectly cooked, and there was a pat of herbed butter melting on top.

And yet, for once, the conversation was holding Anna’s interest more than the food.

“Anyway. There you go, that’s my—what did you call it?—dark, sordid past. Crazy, huh? Four engagements, no marriages, no kids, no pets. Although I have been thinking of getting a dog,” Noah said.

“I’ll let you take Potato out for a day, if you want to work up to it,” Anna joked.

“I just may take you up on that. So, did I succeed in scaring you off?”

“Is that what you were trying to do?” Anna asked lightly, flashing him a smile.

“No,” he said, and his voice was serious. “Just the opposite, actually.”

Anna looked at Noah, who gazed steadily back at her. In the movies, a moment like this would be accompanied by a swell of music and some meaningful dialogue about how they completed each other.

But all Anna could think was,
Oh, my God, do I have lettuce in my teeth? Is he segueing into a meaningful conversation while I have bits of green gunk wedged into my gums?

She tried to subtly run her tongue over her front teeth to check for the lettuce but stopped when she realized how odd this would look.

“How are your dinners?” their waitress asked, pausing by their table and smiling down at them expectantly.

“They’re fine, thank you,” Noah said, and Anna used the distraction to lift her napkin to her mouth as a shield. She performed a quick finger-check on her teeth—and discovered that, yes, indeed, there had been a bit of lettuce trapped there.

Great
, Anna thought darkly.
First poison ivy, now lettuce teeth
.
What next? Will I come out of the ladies’ room with toilet paper stuck to my shoe?

“Can I get you anything else?” the waitress continued.

“No. I think we’re all set,” Noah said.

Anna tried to set aside the lettuce trauma and think back to what Noah had just said and how he’d looked at her as he said it.

Did I succeed in scaring you off?

Anna hadn’t given him her answer. The truth was, she wasn’t yet sure.

Anna and Noah had driven separately to the restaurant. As they waited out front for the valet to bring their cars around, they didn’t speak at first. But Noah took Anna’s hand in his, and as their fingers curled together, she shivered.

“Are you cold?” Noah asked. His lips were so close to her ear, his warm breath tickled her skin.

“No,” Anna said truthfully.

Noah drew her to him, so that the length of her body molded against the hard planes of his. His hand tightened over hers, and Anna swallowed. She suddenly felt like she was sixteen again, overdosing on teenage hormones and the close proximity of a cute guy. It was like every nerve ending in her body was poised, waiting for his touch.

A party of four, two couples in their mid-to-late fifties, came out behind them, laughing and talking, and another valet approached to take their ticket. Anna nodded at the approaching station wagon the first valet was pulling up in.

“That’s my car,” she said.

“Right,” Noah said.

She stepped forward, away from him, although he didn’t let go of her hand. The valet opened the door and hopped out. Noah slipped him a tip.

“Thank you, sir. Have a good night,” the valet said, touching a finger to his forehead.

Anna turned to look at Noah. “Thank you for dinner,” she said. “I had a great time.”

“You’re welcome,” Noah said. He leaned forward.

He’s going to kiss me
, Anna thought. She inhaled sharply, and her pulse felt like it was skittering out of control.

Another valet pulled up in Noah’s Lexus sedan, and, at the same time, the door of the restaurant opened again. Another group of diners, this one rowdier and louder than the last, spilled out onto the carport. They’d obviously had a few too many cocktails, and they roared with drunken laughter.

Noah stepped back and smiled ruefully.

“It’s a bit crowded here,” he said. The valet flashed the lights and looked around to see where the driver was. Noah raised his hand and said, “That’s mine. I’ll be right there.”

He turned back to Anna.

“I don’t suppose…” Noah began.

The third valet arrived with a giant Lincoln Navigator. The SUV was so big, he couldn’t wedge it up under the carport. The valet waited patiently for Anna and Noah to move their cars.

“I think we’re blocking the way,” Anna said.

“Are you going to stand there all night?” one of the men—presumably the driver of the Lincoln—asked irritably. His face was a ruddy red, although Anna couldn’t tell if that was due to sun or liquor. Probably both, she thought.

“Shhh,” his wife shushed him. “Can’t you see he’s trying to kiss her good night?” She turned back to watch Anna and Noah, not bothering to hide her interest.

Anna and Noah looked at each other, and they both laughed.

“I should go,” Anna said apologetically.

“Home?” Noah asked. “Because I rented
Dirty Harry
. Just in case you really wanted to see it.”

It sounded innocent enough, but Anna knew what he was really asking:
Come home and
s
leep with me. Come on. You know you want to. You practically had a spontaneous orgasm when I almost just kissed you.

Her answer, also unspoken, echoed back:
Four fiancées. Four! Not a normal number, like one. Or maybe two, tops. But four! That’s a freakishly large number of ex-fiancées for one person to have, no matter how you look at it.

“No, I can’t. Not tonight,” Anna said, and tried not to feel too flattered when she saw the obvious disappointment on his face. She stretched up and kissed Noah chastely on the cheek. Then she leaned back and looked at him, her brow furrowed. “Did any of them give you the engagement ring back?”

“Not a one,” Noah said, smiling wryly. He let go of her hand, and Anna’s fingers, freed from his, felt suddenly cold.

“I’m home,” Anna called out, as she walked in her front door.

Her mother was in the small, cozy family room, just off the front hall, curled up on the couch and watching
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
on television. “How was your date?” she asked.

“It was fine,” Anna said. She kicked off her heels and sank down on the couch next to her mother with a sigh. “How’s Charlie?”

“Sweet as a bug. He had a grilled cheese sandwich and an orange for dinner, and then I took him out for an ice cream cone, which he immediately dropped on the ground.”

“Oh, no! Was he upset?”

“No, I gave him mine. I didn’t need the calories, anyway,” Margo said, patting her flat stomach. “And after that, we came back home, and I gave Charlie a bath and tucked him into bed. He went down without a peep.”

“Good.” Anna leaned back against the couch. “Thank you again for watching him.”

“I’m always happy to babysit my sweet boy, you know that. Now. Tell me about your date. I want all the juicy details.”

“There aren’t any juicy details. But it was”—she searched for the right adjective—“nice.”

“Good! So you like him?” Margo asked eagerly.

Anna could tell her mother was already mentally writing the wedding invitations:
Mrs. Margaret Swann requests the honor of your presence at the marriage of her daughter, Anna Elise, to Noah Springer.
She’d probably even tack an
MBA
on after his name.

“Yes, I do like him. He’s sweet. And smart, and funny.” She nodded, and smiled a bit wistfully. “Actually, I really like him.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“I didn’t say there was a problem.”

“I know you better than that. I can always tell when you’re fretting about something. Your forehead furrows up, and you look just like your father.”

Anna knew her mother well enough to know that this was not a compliment.

“Well, we both have a lot of baggage.”

“You don’t have any baggage,” Margo said.

“I’m a single mother, Mom. I pretty much define the word
baggage
.”

Margo shook her head impatiently. “You kids make this more difficult than it has to be, what with your online dating and your AIDS tests.”

“My what?”

“Dating is supposed to be fun. You have a few drinks, eat a couple of steaks, play a few records. Have a good time. Your generation makes it more difficult than it has to be,” Margo said.

“We’re not making it anything. It just is what it is. The world is a difficult place these days,” Anna said.

“When I was your age, I was a single mother, and I went out all the time. I had a date lined up every weekend.”

“I remember,” Anna said, raising her eyebrows.

“And don’t give me any more of that nonsense about how your dating will somehow hurt Charlie. You turned out just fine.”

“When I was fifteen, one of your dates grabbed my ass when I was leaning over to get a can of soda out of the fridge. Another one was driving drunk when the two of you picked me up from a friend’s house and kept swerving out of his lane the entire way home,” Anna said flatly.

“Oh, that,” Margo said, waving her hand dismissively. “He wasn’t drunk. Just a tiny bit…tipply.”

“That’s not even a word, Mom.”

Anna knew Margo would never have purposely exposed her to jerks. And, to give her mother credit, she had reamed out both men for their bad behavior, then refused to see either one again (two of the few times she didn’t give her dates second, third, and fourth chances). Yet her mother had never exactly had a surplus of common sense, especially when it came to men.

“Then there was the guy who used to pee with the door open,” Anna continued.

“Well, yes, that was odd. But he was ex-military.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“Oh, you know. When soldiers are living in the barracks, they lose a lot of their inhibitions,” Margo said vaguely.

Anna rolled her eyes. The man—his name was Ed Armstrong, Anna remembered—had been discharged from the army some twenty years before he even met her mom. He was just a weirdo. Who goes into someone else’s home as a guest and fails to close the door while peeing? It was appallingly gross. Even worse, her mother had continued to date him even after the first time he’d left the bathroom door open.

“Oh! And do you remember that one guy who told me all about how he didn’t believe in wearing deodorant, that he preferred his own natural fragrance?” Anna asked, grinning at this memory.

Margo shuddered. “Yes, I remember him. But give me some credit—I went out with him only once,
and
it was a blind date. I couldn’t possibly have known that he was going to show up smelling like a pair of dirty sweat socks.”

Anna laughed and bent her knees up in front of her, propping the heels of her feet on the edge of the sofa cushion. This reminded her of being little, when her mom had been the one to go out and she’d lie in bed, pretending to be asleep while she waited for Margo to come home. As soon as the babysitter left, Anna would scamper out of bed to see her mother, and the two would curl up on the couch together, talking and giggling late into the night.

“Mom, why don’t you ever go out anymore?”

“I do go out.”

“You know what I mean: go out with men, out on dates.”

“Oh, I’m too old for that.”

“You’re only sixty.”

Margo shrugged and sighed. “Well, I guess it used to make me feel young to date. Now it makes me feel old. Besides, the only available men my age are all widowers, and they’re just looking for someone to take care of them.”

“That’s men of any age,” Anna said.

“You sound so bitter.” Margo’s forehead crinkled into a concerned frown.

“I know. But I’ve earned my right to be bitter.”

“I just hope you’re not punishing Noah for Brad’s crimes,” Margo said reprovingly.

Anna didn’t reply, because she didn’t know what to say. She liked Noah, and she was certainly attracted to him. But she didn’t trust him. It wasn’t personal—although the four fiancées didn’t exactly help his case. It was just that she doubted she’d trust any man automatically at this point, at least not before she got to know him. And even then? She had no idea.

“Didn’t it make you bitter when Daddy left?” Anna asked.

Her parents had divorced before Anna’s fourth birthday. Her father relocated to Miami, remarried within a year, and had three more children. For a while, Margo had driven Anna down to her father’s house every few months to visit, but as she got older—and as his new family expanded—the visits had grown infrequent and then stopped altogether. Anna still saw him on occasion—her father had a passing, sentimental interest in Charlie—but it had been a long time since he’d had any sort of presence in her life.