Shop and Let Die (3 page)

“
I couldn’t manage without
Mom.” There’s a faraway look in her eyes. I could almost picture
her in charge in a neat office full of tax code books and forms.
She was wearing a suit instead of the shapeless I’m-too-big-to-care
dress she has on now. Her hair is brushed in the back, not just in
the front like it is now. “We built her a nice apartment over the
garage—with twins, you know, that’s so much easier.”

“
I can imagine.” Yes. I
can. No getting up at 5 a.m. to get everyone ready for the day,
trying to make the daycare by 7 a.m. so that I could be on time for
work at 8. Maybe I could have managed to keep my full time job, if
only my mother didn’t live so far away. Or liked
children.

“
She’s gone to visit my
sister before the new baby comes.” Lawyer Mom flashed me a smile.
“And probably to remind me not to take her for granted.”

“
Smart mom.” I wish I knew
the magic wand to wave away being taken for granted. Maybe by the
time I was a grandmother, I’d have it figured out.

She wiggled her toes some
more and sighed. “I know. I can’t wait for her to get back, and
this whole giving-birth-thing to be over and done with. Soon. Six
weeks and three days.” She looked at me as she confided. “I’m being
induced, it’s so much more efficient. My doctor says I think like a
lawyer.” She grinned. And she looked at me with that polite look
that acknowledged she’d just spent a lot of time talking about
herself. I felt it coming, but was helpless to ward it off. “What
do you do?”

I opened my mouth, but
nothing came out. Housewife makes me shudder to even think, never
mind say. Stay-at-home mom is long and guaranteed to stupefy her in
her already vulnerable state of exhaustion. And explaining mystery
shopping…takes a little time. “I shop for a living,” I said, with
the hope she’d take it as a joke.

She turned her sharp
lawyer’s eyes on my outfit and I could see her frank disbelief. In
her world, people who shop for a living do not wear K-Mart jeans or
neutral gray hoodies with artful coffee stains.

I think she may have been
about to bombard me with some sharp questions, but fortunately for
me, one of the twins made a break for the dinosaur and was captured
by the docent. The unsmiling woman deposited him, screaming and
crying, on his mother’s bulging belly.

Lawyer Mom smiled
apologetically at me and then heaved herself off the bench to
wrangle her crankier toddler into the back of the stroller. For a
minute it was a tossup who would win—the ready-to-pop-out-a-baby
mom, or the toddler-who-could-twist-like-a-frenzied-pretzel. Mom by
a hair. But it had been close.

The other little
boy—playing good twin I imagine—climbed into the front and arranged
himself placidly, as if his brother wasn’t turning red with fury
behind him. He didn’t even blink in dismay when his mother slipped
her feet back into her shoes and wheeled away.

Instead of goodbye, she
said, “Nap time!” with the same vigor as she’d said Ferber and
Whatchamacallit earlier.

I watched her waddle
away—glad my children were past the toddler stage. And glad I
hadn’t had to answer her follow up questions to the question I hate
most in the world: “And what do you do?”

CHAPTER THREE

Life in the
House on Landers Lane

The truth is, nobody knows what mothers do. Sure,
the museum mom had a job. She was a tax lawyer. So she had
something for people to nod at when they asked the inevitable
question. But really, all that did was hide what else she
did.

Maybe her mom, the saint,
did take care of the kids during the day. And maybe she even got up
with them half the time at night. But what about the other half of
the time?

Not to mention bath time,
and bed time and mommy-I-just-need-a-hug time? That was there,
hiding behind the tax lawyer job and the suit, and the completely
brushed hair. It only peeked out at her most vulnerable—when the
world had to stop for a while so she could welcome child number
three into the world.

She couldn’t pass that job
on to her mother. Or her husband. Nope. That was only a job a mom
could do.

“
Want some frozen yogurt
before we drop Sarah off?” I asked the girls when they’d had their
fill of dinosaurs.

“
Yes!” They both said at
the same time, loud enough for the docent to look over at us
sourly.

I shushed them and helped
them into jackets and shoes. I’m on a low carb regimen this month.
Giving up sugar may be the hardest thing I’ve ever done—including a
five-hour labor that culminated with my son’s birth and the
doctor’s exclamation, “That baby has a big head!” Tell me about it,
doc.

As we walked toward the
car, Anna slowed down. She hung back as I opened the car
doors.

“
What’s wrong?” I asked,
hoping it was a small anxiety, easily fixed.

“
Not the mall yogurt shop.
Okay, Mom.”

My heart ached, and the
missing mom’s face flashed through my mind as I pretended I didn’t
know why she was asking that we not go to the mall. “Sure thing,
honey. We have plenty of time.”

I watched her carefully as
she and Sarah ordered yogurt and then sat and teased each other
about who could eat more neatly, more quickly, and without brain
freeze. Anna won. Anna almost always won, because Sarah loved to
talk even more than she loved to win contests.

It was times like these,
when I got to observe my daughter in her natural habitat, that gave
me a peek into the secret corners of my little girl’s heart and
soul. What would I miss learning about her if I didn’t have these
unhurried moments?

The cell phone rang when
the car turned onto Beech Street, Sarah’s home. I don’t know how
Deb does it, but she seems to know exactly when to call to check on
Sarah’s safe arrival home. Mom ESP, I guess. Or she sets the alarm
on her phone. Something I should learn to do now that I’ve entered
the age of the smart phone.

Anna dug the phone out of
my purse and answered it on the third ring, just as I pulled into a
neatly edged driveway that led to the three-car-garage Seth envies,
and that he knows he can’t have until I’m back in the workforce
full time.

Deb’s triple garage comes
thanks to the insurance settlement she got after her husband, also
a cop, got killed on the job. Somehow, Seth forgets that tiny fact
when he thinks about adding one more garage bay to our
house.

I squashed my desire to
grab the phone and warn Deb not to talk about serial killers around
Sarah. Anna would have heard me, and my objective would be
immediately lost.

A quick mindsweep dredges
up a question I do need answered. “Ask her if she’s bringing
chocolate cupcakes or vanilla to the PTA bake sale on Friday,” I
managed to blurt out before Anna says, “Mo-om, your battery is
almost dead.”

She looks at me with
accusatory eyes, and echoes her father. “You have a car charger.
What if you have an accident and the phone is dead?”

She didn’t wait for me to
reply. “Hi, Mrs. K.” Anna raised her voice and pressed one finger
to her free ear. For some reason, this neighborhood has terrible
cell reception. “We just got here.”

She turned to Sarah, who
knows the drill and dangled her key for Anna to see. “Yes, she has
her key.” Sarah thanked me and smiled that happy little girl smile
that goes underground when kids hit their teens, climbed out of the
car, and walked up her front steps.

“
She’s opening the door.
It’s open. She’s inside.” Anna narrated, her gaze glued to Sarah’s
progress. “Yes, she closed the door.”

Sarah appeared at the
window, her phone pressed to her ear as she waved. Anna said,
“Bye.”

“
Wait.” I said, just as
the phone gives an annoyed beep and goes dead. “You forgot to ask
about the cupcakes.”

“
She’s bringing chocolate.
I didn’t have to ask. She told me ‘cause she knows I like
chocolate.” Anna looked through the snarl of receipts and wires and
located the charger and plugged my phone in before she snapped
herself back into her seatbelt. “I think you had a voicemail from
Dad.”

“
Are you sure? I didn’t
hear it ring.” My phone was new, a present to myself to help make
the mystery shopping go a little more smoothly, because it times,
records voice and video, has a calendar, a camera, and lets me run
a few time-saving apps to streamline the paperwork. Apps that also
made the battery last about as long as a firefly’s glow.

I don’t know if I should
admit to Anna that this phone is so different from my old phone
that I still can’t tell how to see if I’ve missed a call. She’ll
worry.

“
I pulled down the status
bar and it said you had two voicemails.”

Status bar. Right. I
wondered where that was. “Thanks, I’ll check it when we get home.”
If the phone had enough charge by then.

I backed out of the
driveway, glad to be heading home at last. I could see Sarah’s lips
moving as she chattered to her mother about her day. What we
mothers won’t do to make sure our little girls are safe.

Ryan was waiting on the doorstep when we got
home, leaned up against his backpack, jiving to some music or other
coming through the headphones that seemed eternally glued to his
ears lately.

“
When did Stephen’s mother
drop you off?” As if the kid had any sense of time at
all.

He shrugged. “Not long.
Brittany had a doctor’s appointment.”

“
Oh.” What was there to
say to that? I had asked her not to drop Ryan off if I wasn’t home,
but doctors don’t wait, they only make
you
wait.

No doubt she assumed Ryan
had his own key, like her kids, 11-year-old Stephen and the 15 and
pregnant Brittany.

As if he read my mind,
Ryan said, “You should let me have a key. I feel like such a dork.
Everyone in my class has a key to their house.”

This was a lie, told
without regard for the fact that I swapped notes with his
classmate’s parents every PTA meeting and sometimes in the school
parking lot. “Maybe you
should
have a key.”

He pulled the left earbud
out, a smile forming as he asked, “Do you mean it?”

“
I suppose.” Of course,
since he routinely lost everything from pencils to homework, I’d
have to Superglue it to his index finger. Maybe I’d make ten keys
and stash one under the flowerpot by the mailbox. Seth would have a
cow at the security hole that would create at home.

I reached to tap his
cheek—he’s going to be taller than I am soon—and pulled out the
other earbud. “You should have done your homework while you
waited.” We’ve talked about the fact that his dyslexia means he
needs to spend more time on homework, not less. But I try not to
bring up the D word too often. His reading tutor says to focus on
the positive strategies rather than the reason he needs
them.

The half formed smile
disappears. “I don’t have any.”

Right. It’s moments like
this that made focusing on positive strategies difficult. “I have
to get dinner going, but we’ll go through your backpack when I’m
done.”

He was already halfway
down the hall to the kitchen by the time I finished my sentence,
but his plaintive, “Moooooommmm,” echoed back mournfully, followed
by the snap of the refrigerator door opening.

Neither of us wanted to
have to look at the crumpled papers hiding at the bottom of his
backpack. But it had to be done.

The answering machine
blinked madly from across the living room, but I ignored it. If I
could get the laundry and dinner started, I would have just enough
time to get one short report sent in before Seth was due home and
the evening dinner/homework/bath/bedtime ritual began.

Listening to the answering
machine would throw off the delicate balancing act. Anyone who
really needed me would have called my cell phone.

I stopped and sighed. The
cell phone I’d left plugged into the car when I turned the engine
off. I’d have to go get it.

I examined the metal and
glass half circle of hallway table. It had been an impulse
purchase, meant to class up the entry way. But any class had long
been buried under the precarious pile of research papers, discarded
Happy Meal toys, a baseball glove and a dusty vase I’d once
envisioned full of fresh flowers. Silly me.

My purse would fit on top
of the baseball glove, but it could shift. So I went for balancing
it on the square vase top. Yes! Point for Mom.

Before Anna could even ask
what was for dinner, I cut her off, “Go get your dirty laundry and
bring it down to the basement.”

“
Mom—”

“
Do you want to watch TV?”
My voice sounded like the tax lawyer’s at the museum when she said
the name of her law firm. That pleased me.

Even more pleasing was the
way Anna stopped arguing and turned sharply, her ponytail whipping
around as she spun. She’d already missed Jelly Rangers, no way was
she going to miss SpongeBob.