9
Liv
I glance at my phone. It’s eleven ten. Hazel’s late. And driving my car. This is her second day of unrestricted driving privileges, as mandated by the Pine Tree State and she’s already broken curfew.
I sigh and glance at Oscar, asleep on the couch, a book on his chest. He’s snoring. Loudly. I think he needs a CPAP machine. He says he just needs to lose twenty pounds.
I’m sitting across from him in an old leather chair we inherited from my parents, inherited meaning we stole it from their basement. It used to be in my dad’s office back when he still had a medical practice. It’s got to be forty years old. Soft, black, creased leather. I love the smell of it. The way it seems to surround me, reminding me of the days when he would take me to his office on a Saturday while he caught up on his charts. I’d sit in this chair for hours and read while he worked at his desk.
I’ve been running some numbers on the Anselin house project. Like ours, their early-nineteenth-century home is a farmhouse built in a style referred to as “continuous architecture.” While our home just has a large barn attached, the Anselins have a kitchen, a shed, a carriage house, and a large barn, all attached to their farmhouse. The additions would have been built as the family became more prosperous, and the tradition of attaching the outbuildings was for convenience’s sake. Less snow shoveling during our hard winters. Farmers could get to their stored firewood, their sleigh or carriage, and their animals without having to go outside.
I shift in my father’s leather chair. I use the downstairs bedroom just off our family room as an office. I could be working in there at my desk, but I settled here earlier in the evening so I could be with Oscar. I was hoping we could talk about Hazel. Start coming up with a plan. How she’s going to finish out the school year. What she’s going to do with the baby while she’s in class. How Baby Daddy is going to support his progeny and what that will look like financially. Didn’t happen. After dinner, Oscar turned on the TV to watch Boston play the Orioles and read. Both at the same time. I tried several times to start a discussion, but he wasn’t having it. I got one-syllable answers and eventually gave up.
I glance at my legal-sized notepad on my lap. The Anselins have already set a budget, but then they keep adding upgrades. I can’t seem to get them to understand that details like granite countertops and radiant heating in the floors can add considerably to the final cost.
Oscar gasps. Snorts.
I glance at him over the top of my reading glasses. His. I couldn’t find mine. His strength is stronger than mine anyway. Sadly, I see better in them. And he must have half a dozen pairs here and there in the house. “Oscar?” I pause. Wait. He doesn’t move. “Hon?”
He groans.
“Hon,” I say a little louder. “You should go to sleep.”
“I was asleep,” he mutters, his eyes still closed.
“Asleep upstairs in bed.”
He rolls over on the couch, taking his book with him, presenting his back to me. His T-shirt rides up as he moves and those few extra pounds around his waist spill out of the back of his shorts.
My cell vibrates, and I pick it up, thinking Hazel is texting me that she’s on her way.
Still up? It’s my bestie, Amelia.
I turn my phone so that it’s horizontal the way Sean showed me. Easier to text with the larger keyboard. Waiting for Hazel. She’s late. In my car. Prob wrapped around a tree
Prob not Amelia responds.
I smile despite the fact that I truly am concerned about Hazel. Amelia has a way about her. She’s the kind of friend that can talk me off a ledge. Any ledge.
How was your date? I ask.
Good. Nice.
The bubbles appear. I wait.
Ok, she adds.
He look like his pic or was it another one taken ten years ago? I ask.
In bed?
Working, I text. Watching Oscar sleep on the couch. O’s beat the Sox in ten innings.
My phone starts vibrating steadily. Amelia is calling.
“Hey,” I say, getting up out of the chair, setting the notepad on the end table. “What’s up?” I pad barefoot out of the living room, turning off the lights as I go.
“We need better pitching,” Amelia says, referring to the Red Sox.
“Our pitching was better than theirs. Lucky double in the top of the ninth.” I push the readers up on my head so I don’t trip.
“He did look like his photo.” Amelia sounds morose. “Even better in person. He’s an attorney—”
“I thought you said no attorneys.”
“He’s an attorney,” she repeats. “And I liked him. He was nice and smart. We had a good time. . . .”
“But?” I ask when I hear her hesitation.
“I don’t know. I thought we were hitting it off, but then . . .” She sighs. “I don’t think he was that into me.”
The disappointment in her voice makes me sad. I don’t know what to say.
I struggled to support her during her divorce. I think she gave up on Sam too soon. On their twenty-three-year marriage too soon. Too easily. I think they could have revived their marriage with some counseling, with some effort. Neither was willing to put in the effort. Now Sam’s dating a CPA ten years younger than Amelia. His and Amelia’s daughter, a sophomore at Providence College in Rhode Island, is having a fit, according to Amelia. Lizzie says her dad is doing things with the girlfriend’s children he never did with her. The whole thing is an ugly, sad mess. The way divorce usually is.
“Did you make plans to meet again?” I ask into the phone. “Dinner or something?” Amelia’s formula for online dating is to exchange a few texts in the app and then meet for coffee or a drink, depending on how optimistic she’s feeling. Then additional dates to follow if she and bachelor #18 connect. So far, she hasn’t met the new love of her life, but she’s hopeful and I’m trying to be encouraging.
I lean against the sink with my hips, peering out the double windows into the darkness, waiting for the headlights of my car. I hope she hasn’t wrecked it. For the obvious reasons, but then also because I think I’ve decided to trade it in on a pickup. It makes more sense for the job. I’ll be hauling samples of tile and hardwood and assorted supplies back and forth to the Anselins’ house. And once the remodel is done, I’ve got a budget for decorating. I’m hoping to pick up some nice odds and ends like tables and chairs and armoires at estate sales to fill the space.
Amelia sighs and I hear her take a drink. I wonder if it’s chardonnay or vodka. I decide not to ask. In the early days, after Sam left, I was worried about her. She was drinking too much, too much to the point of going into work late. Missing work. Not cool for a public school principal. Not cool for anyone. Or healthy. Luckily, by the time I brought up the subject, she already knew she was skating on thin ice and was able to back it off to a safe place before she fell through. That doesn’t mean I don’t worry about her starting the whole cycle over again. Especially now that she’s out in the world of online dating and it’s not going as well as she had hoped.
Amelia takes another drink of the unidentified beverage. “He asked for my number.”
“That’s good, right?” I try to sound enthusiastic, but not too enthusiastic. Supportively enthusiastic, without blowing smoke up her skirt. “He wouldn’t ask for your number if he wasn’t planning on calling you. Asking you out.”
“I don’t know.” Amelia groans. “I asked him for his, and he brushed over it. I wonder if he thought I had stalker potential.” She takes on a desperate tone. “Do I come off as having stalker tendencies?”
I laugh. She sounds so serious. Which also makes me sad. “No, you do not seem like the stalker type.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re my friend and you have to.”
“If I thought you had stalking propensities, I’d be the first one to tell you and you know it.”
“True,” she agrees. “Hang on. I have to take my top off. Going to put you on speaker. This underwire bra is killing me.”
I smile at her comment and glance out the window again as I see headlights coming up our road from the direction of Hazel’s friend Katy’s house. It passes. I check the time. She’s now seventeen minutes late. I wonder how long I should let it go before I call her.
“Can you hear me, Liv?”
“I hear you. Lost you for a second.”
“God, that feels better,” Amelia says. “I think maybe I need to make a new rule for first dates. I’m getting quite a list of them. New rule: No underwire bra unless it’s something more than a cup of coffee or a glass of wine. I want at least three courses in exchange for a lacy torture device that cost me sixty-two dollars.”
I laugh.
“Who came up with the idea of an underwire bra, anyway?” she demands.
I hear sounds that suggests she’s still undressing. Dressing.
“Had to be a man,” she tells me.
“I’m sorry your date didn’t go better.” I’m genuinely disappointed for her. “But who knows, maybe he’ll text or call.”
“Right. And maybe hell will freeze over. Enough of my pathetic life. Tell me what’s going on in your house in crisis.”
“Now I’m putting you on speaker so I can text my wayward daughter.”
I text Hazel, On your way home?
“No change,” I tell Amelia. “I’d say it’s like a battlefield around here, but it’s worse than that. Instead of lobbing grenades, we’re all tiptoeing around each other, trying not to lose our shit. Hazel can’t speak to me without a mean voice.”
“Eh. Try not to take it personally. It’s probably the easiest way for Hazel to react right now. To be angry with you.”
“It’s not even Hazel. I mean, yes, she’s angry just on general principle, but Oscar, he’s . . .” I turn and lean against the kitchen sink, propping one elbow on the edge behind me and lifting the phone to speak directly into it again. “He’s really angry with me, Meels. Angrier than . . .” Emotion tightens my throat. “Angrier than I can ever remember him being. And not pissed off, shouting anger. That would be fine. That I could handle.”
“When has Oscar ever hollered at you?” she scoffs.
“I know. But you know what I mean.” I exhale, trying to find the right words to explain without bursting into tears. “This is like a quiet . . . stewing anger.”
“He’s not talking to you?” she asks.
“He’s talking to me. About making Sean’s tuition payment. About not wanting to stop for zucchini on the way home from work. But he’s not talking to me.”
“Hmmm,” she intones. “Is he in denial that his teenage daughter had sex with a cretin and is now going to give birth to a baby cretin?”
She makes me smile even when I don’t want to. “No. He’s not in denial. He just doesn’t want to talk about it with me. He doesn’t want to talk about anything with me.” I try not to sound sullen, but I don’t pull it off well.
“Are you having sex?”
I laugh though it’s not funny. “I wish. At this point, I’d take a little angry sex.”
Amelia laughs with me, but it’s the kind of laughter you share with someone you love when you’re feeling her pain.
I glance at the clock on the back of the stove. “Hazel hasn’t called, and she hasn’t texted. Think I should go looking for her?”
“You call her?”
“Don’t want her answering the phone while she’s driving. I texted her.”
“So you do want her texting you while she’s driving?” Amelia asks.
“She’s probably dead. All this upset about a baby and it’s not going to matter because they’re both dead.”
“They’re not dead. She’s running late. Teenagers do that.” Amelia sounds as if she really means it and she’s not saying it just to try to comfort me.
“She didn’t call or text to tell me she was going to be late. She always tells me when she’s going to be late. Used to. She didn’t last night, either,” I add. “Am I supposed to start grounding her now? At this point? I mean, I thought we were beyond that.”
“You never grounded your kids,” Amelia points out.
“No. I never needed to.” I turn to watch out the window again, if not for Hazel, then for the police cars and the paramedics with their flashing red lights. “Apparently I needed to. Apparently I need to lock her up in her room and swallow the key,” I add tartly. “I can’t believe she didn’t use protection, Meels. I can’t believe I didn’t make sure she was having safe sex.” My voice catches in my throat. “I can’t believe I didn’t protect her.”
“We can’t guard them from everything,” Amelia murmurs. Then, “You hear from Sean?” A not-so-subtle redirection of the conversation. “How’s the new roommate and their visit to Portland? I thought it was great that they decided to meet before school started.”
“He texted me to say he arrived yesterday. Got a pic of a mountain of fries today. Guess he’s good.”
“Our little Sean, all grown up.”
I sigh. “Growing up.”
Light comes through the window, casting shadows in the dark kitchen. Headlights. I turn around to look out the kitchen window. I don’t think I’ve ever in my life been so thankful to see my Toyota. “Gotta go. She’s home.”
“Go easy on her,” Amelia says softly.
“Going upstairs,” Oscar calls from the living room as I hang up. “Can you let Willie Nelson out before you come to bed?”
“Yes,” I call back. “Hazel’s just getting home. I’ll be up soon.”
He doesn’t answer me.
I hear the garage door open and I try to come up with a plan as to how to handle the curfew issue. I debate whether to be nonchalant or give her hell when she comes in the door.