Treading Lightly. Elise Lanier
“It’s easier to give in than argue,” he said with a smirk as he pushed over the ever-present pad of paper that sat on their table, and handed her the pen that stayed permanently on top of it.
She wrote: Buy More Glasses!
As she pushed the pad away, the phone rang and Craig reached to get it. Janine didn’t bother answering it anymore after three o’clock. It was always for him, and never for her, so why bother.
“Hey, Dad,” she heard her son say after a brief pause. He listened for a while then looked at her cautiously.
Here it comes. It was another one of those conversations that was going to make her out to be the bad guy. She could see it in her offspring’s eyes. She could feel it in her stomach. Either it was that, or the half pound of pasta and tomato sauce sitting like a brick down there.
She ate too fast. Always did. It was a trait her ex-husband had pointed out frequently. Of course it didn’t help that after a long while of hearing him constantly assert that she ate too fast, she responded with a concise remark of what she thought he did too fast! True, it’s not the most high-minded or confidence-building thing to criticize about a man, but any man should know not to criticize a woman about her eating habits. Both were hitting below the belt, if you’d ask her. So she’d always considered it a fair comeback. He didn’t.
But he was never a match for her. She’d overpowered him from the moment they’d met. When they were first together and newlyweds, he’d told her he thought her assertiveness and aggressiveness was sexy and exciting, but after a while, he’d changed his mind.
For her, when they’d first met, she’d thought his shyness and passive-aggressive, soft-spoken ways were endearing. Plus, it was easy to always get her way. But after a while, there was no way around it for her. She’d only perceived him as “wimpy.”
Wimpy, but very manipulative. It was that passive-aggressiveness that threw her off every time.
She wasn’t used to that because she’d always called ’em like she saw ’em—saying what was on her mind. She was always up-front. There was never a hidden agenda when Janine was involved. She let everything show. Whether the other person wanted to see it or not.
Her ex-husband, on the other hand, played so many head games she never knew what his intentions were, or what he was getting at. All through their entire marriage—and their divorce—she had never known what he was trying to accomplish. He’d always had an order of business—of that she was certain—but she was never privy to it. And obviously, by the one-sided conversation she was hearing from her son, her ex was up to his usual scheming, underhanded tricks again. Which only goes to show, she thought to herself, a leopard never changes his spots.
It reminded her of a story.
One day a man found a frozen snake in the forest. Feeling sorry for it, he took it home and nursed it back to life. He defrosted it—or whatever the hell it is you do to a frozen snake to nurse it back to life—and gave it water and food.
As soon as the thing unfroze, the man was hand-feeding it with love and care when it suddenly bit him.
The man said, “How can you bite me? I nursed you back to health! I gave you water by dropperfuls and even hand-fed you!”
The snake looked him in the eye and said, “Thanks, buddy, but you’re forgetting one thing.”
The man said, “What’s that?”
The snake said, “I’m a snake.”
She wondered what Martin was up to now.
CHAPTER 2
“Oh come on, Mom! Why not?”
“Because it’s too dangerous, Craig. I said no, and I mean it.”
“I can’t believe I have an opportunity like this, and you won’t let me go!” He stomped his heavy, boot-clad foot. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to go white-water rafting with Dad! You’re, like, the Wicked Witch of the East, not letting me go!”
She shrugged, not budging at all in her decision.
“You’re so unfair! I hate you!” screamed her usually passive son before storming out of the kitchen, slamming the door behind him. He was basically easy-going, that is, until his father put some stupid idea in his mind causing him to rebel and rear his defiant head in a blaze of hateful challenge.
He slammed his bedroom door, too, for good measure. Or maybe because she’d followed him, hoping to work things out before they got too ugly.
“Don’t you want dessert?” she called in after him.
He didn’t bother answering her. She could hear him muttering to himself in his room. Being her only child, she knew he did this often—probably because he was an only child and didn’t have anyone besides her to talk with—so she tried to allow him some leeway and privacy. “If I never saw her again, it would be fine by me! Lord knows I can barely stand living with her! She’s so unfair! She’s closedminded, overprotective and unfair!”
Okay, he had the right to get angry and she understood his frustration, so she let his comments go, realizing where they were coming from. He hadn’t really said them to her face, anyhow, so she had no right addressing them, arguing about them, or even agreeing with them.
“And Dad’s right. She’s a bitch!”
Okay, now he was starting to get her hackles up. She quickly became so angry she could feel the heat of her blood as it pumped through her, but again, she tried to be understanding and realize where that had come from. Breathing deeply to regain her composure, and silently cursing her ex-husband for making her out to be the bad guy for the millionth time, she could only hope and pray his hair continued to recede at its blistering pace, and his premature ejaculation problem continued in its customary fashion.
Lost in her silent prayer, she hadn’t noticed that Craig had opened his bedroom door again until he’d slammed it with enough force to make the windows rattle and the pictures bang against the walls. She might have tried opening his bedroom door and entering, hoping to calm both of them down and possibly calling a truce, but she’d heard him throw himself on his bed, the squeal of the bed frame’s feet scratching along the wooden floor as his weight was hefted upon it. That was her first clue as to what was going on in there. The second clue that he wanted nothing to do with her came when he flicked on his stereo—the Linkin Park CD blaring through his speakers.
He knew she hated Linkin Park, so when he’d turned it up, way up, she got the not-so-subtle hint that he was a bit miffed and wasn’t in the mood for talking. She could feel the music reverberating in her bones. And that was with the door closed. “Yeah, good. That’ll teach me!” she muttered to herself. “Make yourself deaf.” She could have screamed it to her son, but no one, including herself, would have heard her over the shattering volume. Obviously he didn’t care if he blew his eardrums out. She had pissed him off, and now it was time for a little payback—teenage style.
She shook her head and headed to her own room, knowing they were done communicating for the night. His stereo was so loud she almost missed the incoming call, but a few months back he’d talked her into buying phones with LEDs that lit up when they rang, so although she didn’t hear it, she could see it was ringing.
He must have, too, because he had lowered the volume significantly and swiped up his phone at the exact moment she lifted her extension. He was probably assuming it was one of his friends, because she heard him say, “Yeah, talk to me.”
“Hello, dear.”
“Oh. Hi, Grandma.”
Janine knew so much about him that she could read his thoughts almost to the letter. Right now he was thinking, Oh, great, it’s the woman that spawned my current adversary. The female that gave life to the bane of my existence. Yeah, like I really feel like speaking with you at the moment!
“Hello, dear. How