CHAPTER SEVEN

One Temptation Leads to Another

 

I’d spent a week thinking about the brochures in my bag. Not reading them, just thinking about them. And maybe there’d been a few thoughts about the green-eyed Fed, too. But who could blame me for that?

Every day, Seth asked if I’d applied to any of the jobs yet.

Every day I said, “not yet.”

Finally, at breakfast, before I’d had coffee, when I was at my most vulnerable, he asked to see the brochures.

I dug them out of my purse. “Here.”

He shuffled through them. “The FBI?”

“Why not? Mystery shopping could count as experience, couldn’t it?”

He laughed. “Be serious, Molly.” He held up a brochure from the University Admissions department. “You would be great at this.”

Oh the mysteries of SAT scores and extra-curricular activities. I try to discourage him. “It isn’t academic year. I’d get two weeks vacation and holidays.”

He shrugged. “We’d deal with it.”

“No complaining that we couldn’t take off for three weeks to visit your mom and dad at their camp? You promise?”

“A job is a job,” he said.

For a second, I believed him. Until he added, “And there’s probably some way you could work extra hours for a few weeks and take comp time if we wanted to go to camp.”

“I’ll think about it.” I took the brochure away from him, hoping to bury it deep in a pile of other papers, where it would never see the light of day.

For some reason, he wasn’t willing to let it go. “I can help you with your resume, if you want.”

“Okay.” The idea of writing a resume made my stomach ache. How to describe the last few years of motherhood and volunteer activities? Never mind the mystery shopping.

He smiled, happy that I was seeing things his way at last. “We can do it tonight.”

“I have PTA tonight.” I had told him this, and written it on the calendar, and yet he still looked surprised.

Fortunately, he needed to leave for his early morning class, and I needed to get the kids to school, so the conversation ended without any concrete decisions.

I put the FBI brochure on the kitchen counter, where I could see it. And I put on mascara, which made me feel more powerful for no logical reason whatsoever.

Maybe I’d be a regular working mom soon, but today I was still a Supermom so flexible I could leap sudden bouts of flu and teacher in-service days with aplomb.

Some days I feel closer to the Supermom badge than others. Today I was smoking. Organization could have been my middle name. I vacuumed, ran to the grocery store for milk and bread, did two quick fast food shops, and was home again in time to start a load of laundry.

Because the PTA meeting would be held at 7, I got dinner prepped and in the oven before I left to pick up the kids.

A true supermom would no doubt have had it in a slow cooker since morning (and have planned the menu itself at the beginning of the month). But I was proud of my own efforts—just a meatloaf, carrots (with a half-a-cup to remain raw, because Anna liked her vegetables uncooked), and a green salad.

I even managed to be first-mom-in-line to pick up the kids. Smoking, Molly, I told myself, because no one else was going to give me credit.

Knowing dinner was already in the oven, and my jobs reports were already written, I didn’t hesitate to ask both of them what homework they had. No matter what it was, we’d get it done before I left for PTA, I vowed. Supermom was on the job.

“Nothing.” Ryan always tried that line on me, despite the fact I never, ever, believed him.

“Reading.” Anna’s school did not believe in homework for second graders, but many parents did, so her teacher, a wise veteran of the parent-teacher wars, assigned her class reading as homework every night.

She had the class write down the titles and authors of the books they read and kept a thermometer of books read by her class. She did not break it down by students, so the parents of the future Ivy Leaguers grumbled that it was a shame some kids held back the average.

“What book did you bring home to read tonight?”

“When Dinosaurs Die.” She hauled out the book to show me, and I did my best not to let her see my distress.

Anna, a budding brown-noser, did her part every night. Half of me cringed at her compliance with the—essentially—busywork and part of me was proud that she was willing to meet her responsibilities. And all of me worried at the titles she chose. Death. Dying. Non-fiction on gruesome topics.

Don’t get me wrong—I wanted her to read, but I wanted her to want to read, not read for nebulous brownie points and a higher redline on the reading thermometer.

And I want her to read uplifting books that help ease her worries, not add to them. But I can’t say that to her, because she wants to read these books.

“Want me to read it to you while you make dinner, Mom?”

“Perfect!” Nothing like listening to a good dinosaur death book while you’re squirting barbecue sauce on top of a mostly-cooked meatloaf.

Not that I would say that to her. The world spends a lot of time sending mixed messages: don’t worry about what anyone else thinks vs do what other people tell you is worthwhile. There has to be a happy medium. Somewhere. I’m determined to find it.

Part of me saw Anna as a natural Supermom when she grew up. The kind of Supermom who keeps up with all the latest expectations for Supermom, rather than trusting her own judgment on the matter. Of course, I wanted Supermom status for myself, and somehow I’ve always fallen short of it because I’m aspirationally organized, not actually organized.

There are days, like today, when I’m so close I feel the shining star within reach. But those days are usually followed by the days when I forget my day planner and have to call the dentist to see what time an appointment is scheduled for.

Always humiliating when said appointment time has just passed and I have to reschedule with the exasperated receptionist. Ten points off Supermom status there. Even a balanced dinner doesn’t offset those days.

But, for today, I was able to do it all, and do it well. To keep my record for the day gold-plated, I even remembered to retrieve my cell phone from the car charger and bring it into the house with me.

I was on such a roll there was even time, after listening to Anna read about dying dinosaurs, for me to go through Ryan’s backpack with him. Lo and behold, as I questioned him on the crumpled papers, we created a huge toss pile and a small-but-significant pile of homework papers that should be returned. Two of them were overdue. Math. Word problems.

Organized as I was, I forbade TV until the papers were finished. Ryan spent twenty minutes with loud sighs and two requests for new erasers before he declared himself done.

I was free to demand the papers to check while he protested that he knew how to do his homework. Not wanting to tarnish my Supermom status today, I did not point out that the consistent “F” grades do not support that conclusion. Positive reinforcement was better than negative reinforcement. Or so his reading tutor told me.

Reading Ryan’s math homework always made me want to cry. His dyslexia means that word problems are sheer torture for him. As a result, he pulled the numbers from the problem and guessed whether to add, subtract, multiply, or divide. Needless to say, he guessed wrong about eighty percent of the time.

“Ryan, come here.”

He came over with an annoyed look on his face, as if I were wasting his time. Self defense. He’d decided if he treated me as if I couldn’t possibly know how he is supposed to do his homework, I might one day stop checking.

“If John had x apples and gives Sally y, how many apples does John have left?”

He sighed, and answered as if he was indulging a madwoman. So like his father there. “x - y.”

“Then why do you have “x + y” written down?”

He scowled, determined not to admit that his dyslexia was responsible. He and I both know that his IEP calls for him to have word problems read to him, but he’d rather face water torture or the rack than ask the classroom aide to read simple problems to him in full view of the rest of his class. He’d rather get an “F” than ask me. He’d rather die than ask Seth.

Without further word, I read each problem to him and he easily answered correctly and made the appropriate corrections on his paper, although each time his erasures got more and more violent.

At last, Supermom status buoying me, I hugged him. “You can do this honey, you just need a little help. Ask for it, why don’t you?”

He nodded, but only to escape.

I continued, “There’s no shame in dyslexia, and your tutoring will get you up to speed soon, so you won’t need to ask for help very much any more.”

He was making good progress in his reading tutoring, and had brought his reading level up from second grade to fourth grade level. But since he was in seventh grade, that didn’t help him handle the massive amounts of reading material he had to process. His coping mechanism was to avoid reading altogether if there were more than three sentences on a page.

He brought home more papers with “F” on them than any child’s heart could stand. Always in bright red and branded large on the paper. Every teacher professed profound surprise that Ryan’s dyslexia was causing the problem when I brought the issue to their attention.

It seemed impossible to me that they missed the obvious. But then again, I only looked at Ryan’s homework. I didn’t have to look at the homework of thirty other kids.

School is tough on some kids. Ryan’s friend Elliot is a very smart kid without the self-preservation skills to keep his intelligence hidden. The teachers visibly winced when he raised his hand because they knew he was going to make a thoughtful, well read comment pointing out how shallow the teacher’s own knowledge of a particular subject was. They kept trying to put him in the gifted and talented program, but his mother had had the good sense to refuse after his first two weeks in it.

Elliot, a normally reasonable child, came home ready to do battle with the world because the school interpreted gifted and talented to mean the child should have to do more and harder worksheets than the ungifted and untalented kids, like mine. Discussion was frowned upon, and competition was brutal.

Elliot made an eloquent and articulate statement to his mother, the gist of which was that he would become either a juvenile delinquent or mad as a hatter if he were forced to spend even one more day in such a class.

She, a true Supermom if ever there was one, decided to keep him in school (but not in G&T) part time for his socialization skills, and homeschool him herself in the afternoons and on the weekends. I envy them the afternoons they spend at museums, traipsing through the woods identifying plants and animals, and photographing nature.

Ryan envies him the electronics and chemistry labs set up in their basement—although he participates in Elliot’s experiments and projects often enough that we have no doubt he’s a smart boy. We hope when he learns to read at grade level he’ll begin to show the teachers. I try not to give in to the fear that teachers pigeonhole a kid early on and the label is almost impossible to shake.

Take me. Smart and quiet, the teachers called me. Stuck up and Miss Know it All, my fellow students said. Shy and paranoid, I labeled myself. Even today, I can feel myself test out each label for truth whenever I make a misstep in parenting, wiving, shopping, or life itself.

On my better days I reject all the labels, like a true Supermom. Which, I suppose, is just another label.

Of course, if I’m going to brush up my resume, I’m going to have to embrace the labels. At least the ones that would make me sound like a good hire.

 

With both kids focused on homework, and Seth not due home for thirty minutes, I picked up my latest library book—a tale of a young woman who must decide whether to choose between her dream of trekking in the Andes or to marry the man she was fairly sure she loved enough to spend a lifetime with.

So far I had barely gotten to the part where her dilemma began… asking her potential husband if he’d mind if she wanted to trek the Andes. Since it was already a week overdue, and the irate reminder from the library was due any day, I had to finish it, or I’d never know if he let her go to the Andes—or from his life completely.

A shrill voice inside me screamed at her to head for the Andes without looking back. But she was young and in love and she was still undecided.

The house phone rang and I hurried to pick it up before the answering machine. Even talking to a salesman or a pollster would be better than witnessing the train wreck about to happen to this nice girl. Sometimes I wondered if writers were undercover sadists—torturing their readers, along with their characters, for the sheer satisfaction of seeing us squirm.

“Molly, sorry to call you on the home phone, but you didn’t answer your cell.” Sue again.

I mentally deducted a Supermom point. I’d brought in my phone, but left it somewhere in the kitchen, with the ringer turned off. The dying dinosaurs must have rattled me. “Sorry.”

“I need you.”

I had a momentary hope that the job was something great. “Got my massage already?”

“No. Another dating thing.” She sounded a bit hesitant.

“Sue, I’m married. And I’d like to stay that way.” Most of the time, anyway.

“I know. I know. You and everybody else. I wouldn’t ask you if I wasn’t desperate. Job pays a hundred.”

A hundred? I got a headache imagining what kind of work the merchant would want from me for a fee that big. Was it a twenty page detailed report? “Does that mean I need to marry the guy and rate his husband-ability?”

“No. It’s not like that.” Sue didn’t sound all that convincing. “In fact, it’s a real step up. Two hours work, max. An hour to go through the interview process, then some time on line to pick a man to contact—one email and then one follow up. And you have to reply to three men who contact you.”

I knew enough about mystery shopping to automatically double the time she said I’d need. Four hours. A hundred dollars. Still…. “I think my husband might be a little unhappy.”

“Tell him you’re getting a hundred dollars and a really wild date night—then let him have a little fun on your dating jag, too.”

“He’s not a kinky man.” I wasn’t a kinky woman, either, but between us, I think Seth would win the unkinky award hands down. But then I remembered the Secret Shopper Sisters boards. Other shoppers had had used the shops to add a little spice. Why shouldn’t I?

Sue pressed, “You won’t really be dating these guys, just going through the motions.”

I protested, “Isn’t that what prostitutes do? Go through the motions for money?”

Without missing a beat, she informed me, “Absolutely no cyber sex allowed on this site—in fact, that’s one of the things they want to screen for—perverts.”

Great. I’d be trolling for perverts. “I’d have to lie. Unless you think that these guys will want to date a married 37 year old whose greatest goal in life is to be a supermom?”

Sue laughed. “Don’t worry. The vendor has a persona for you—this is the closest thing to safe dating ever invented. You’ll be someone else—the Mata Hari of the online dating world.”

“Why don’t you get a single woman?”

For the first time, she sounded evasive, “That’s a bit complicated. They’re actually quite exclusive and they don’t want to take a risk getting an unqualified woman hooked up with their men.”

“Exclusive?”

Reluctantly, she admitted, “No one in this service makes less than 10 mil a year.”

Ten million dollars a year? Whoa. “What do they need a dating service for? The money must be better than an overdose of pheromones.”

She sounded more confident now. “Exactly—unfortunately it attracts the wrong sort.”

How did anyone know I wasn’t the wrong sort? “I don’t know…”

“I’ll toss in another hundred as a bonus.” Sue pleaded.

Two hundred dollars. She must really be desperate. I’d have to shop ten little shops to earn that. Driving to and from. Working around the kids’ schedule. Avoiding a serial killer.

I threw out my last big obstacle. “I have a PTA meeting tonight.”

She didn’t say anything. Neither did I. My silence brought out the big guns. “I’ll schedule you the next massage shop.”

“Promise?”

“Cross my heart and hope to have hard drive failure if I don’t.” I heard a rustle from her end of the line, as if she had literally crossed her heart as she spoke.

“Okay.” I’d tell Seth, convince him to play along, and then it wouldn’t quite be like cheating. Maybe it would even revitalize our admittedly tired romantic life.

I tried to picture the two of us pretending to be a new person—a sexy single woman making over 10 mil a year. Maybe it wouldn’t be kinky so much as necessary—after all it would take every scrap of imagination I had to be that person.

Maybe Seth would have some ideas. He certainly made closer to a mil than I ever would. Especially if I went to work for the Admissions office.

I returned to the hapless heroine of my novel, but it was a lost cause. No longer did I care whether Natasha came to her senses and headed to the Andes. Now I wondered what to do with the two hundred dollars I was about to earn.

Ryan wanted guitar lessons, but I didn’t see how he could fit them into his already busy schedule. Anna had just had her birthday and was all set for shoes and clothes, including the new purple jacket she’d been asking for.

So, really, it would come down to getting the new front door I’d been wanting for a while, or the bookshelves. Both were problematic.

While the money would pay for the door, or the wood for the bookshelves, it wouldn’t cover manpower. Neither Seth nor I were handy, but only I admitted it. Seth had installed our back door so well that it required two hip thumps and steady knee pressure to lock and unlock it. I did not want to see what he’d do with the front door.

I could always save the money, of course. But I’m not that good at saving. That’s more Seth’s department.

 

When Seth came home, he seemed a little surprised to see that dinner was on the table. Or maybe he was surprised that I had mascara on. Either one was unusual.

He slung down his backpack and gave me a hug. “What’s the celebration?”

I hugged him back. “Big job.”

A flash of hope shone in his eyes. “A job?”

I realized my mistake and pushed him away. “Don’t get your hopes up. Mystery shop.”

“Oh.” The light in his eyes died. “So are you sneaking around a fast food bathroom, or trying on glasses that you have no intention of buying?”

“Someone has to do it.” It was always a tactical error to sound defensive, but sometimes with Seth I can’t help myself. “Besides, it’s none of those—and I’m getting paid two hundred dollars.”

He sat down and gave me a sharp look. “What do you have to do? Walk the Great Wall of China?”

“I have to go online as Serena Smalley and be a good date.”

“Date?” He laughed.

Not quite the reaction I’d expected. “Well, not actually, of course. I am married.” Where was the jealousy? The momentary mental question about whether I was in the market for a new husband?

“Good.” He relaxed and grabbed a breadstick. “I thought maybe you’d forgotten.”

So much for putting a spark back into our relationship. “How could I when I’m getting dinner on the table for you?”

He stopped munching, looked at me, and then sighed. “Sorry. I had ten students in my office today, crying about their grades on the mid-term. This dating job idea is coming from left field.”

“I know. Nearly outside the ball park. But it won’t take much time, and it’s more money than I’ve earned on a job yet.”

“So, if you don’t date them what do you do? Lead them on and dump them?”

Technically, I guess, the answer was yes. Not that I would admit it out loud. “Exchange an email.”

“Awful high pay for what sounds like little work. What’s the catch?”

“The online site is very exclusive and they don’t want to chance a single woman ringer getting hold of one of their rich clients. Like with like, you know.”

“Sounds strange.”

“Very strange. I almost didn’t take it, but the money is good and Sue suggested I should invite you to join the fun if you want.”

“Join you?”

I tried to sound sexy. “You know, do it together, add a little spice to our marriage.”

He cocked his head and contemplated me for a full three seconds. “Are you worried you might find someone better and be tempted?”

“Of course not. Just feels a bit weird. Dating upstairs in my office while you’re downstairs watching sitcoms.”

He thought about it for a moment, but then shook his head. “No thanks. I’d rather have the sitcom. Online dating is pathetic.” He grinned at me, his eyes lighting up with a mischievous look. “Why don’t you tell them to do it the right way — meet in a bar — like us?”

“Pathetic’s a bit harsh. Not everyone likes the bar scene. We didn’t. We just got lucky.” Memory is a tricky thing. Standing there in the kitchen, I had a flash of the feeling that had swamped me when he’d walked up to me the very first time — right before he offered to buy me a drink and handed me his cheesy pickup line.

He’d had the softest, sexiest lips I’d ever seen. Nice eyes, too. I hadn’t gone barhopping ever again. As far as I know, neither had he.

He smiled again, and the hazy unfocused look in his eyes told me he was remembering, too. “Lucky happens easier in bars, though.”

“If they were offering me two hundred dollars to go barhopping, would you rather I did that?”

“If you could take a guest.” He laughed. “You check out the guys, I check out the women. Besides, there isn’t a barhopping serial killer out there, only a mall serial killer.”

My temper was heating up to a steady simmer. Why wasn’t he even a little bit jealous? But I had work to do, so I turned off the heat. “Okay, you watch your sitcoms, I’ll face the pathetic online dating millionaires alone.”

“Millionaires?”

“I told you, it is an exclusive site.”

“Hmmm.” Money is his weakness—not that he makes a ton of it himself, but he’d like to dream of it. “Okay. I wouldn’t want to leave you alone against the millionaires.”

At last, the green-eyed monster reared its head. All it took was the idea of me playing in a pool of guys with lots of dollar signs in their bank account.

Somehow, it made me feel just a little sexier than usual. Who knew? Sue and MysteryK79 were right. “Great. You help Ryan with his math and make sure Anna takes a bath while I’m at the PTA meeting, and we can launch the beginning of our profitably kinky lifestyle when I get back, at nine-thirty sharp.”