Mommies Behaving Badly. Roz Bailey
there were tears in her eyes and told me I was refreshing.
Although he was the father of her kids, who were in junior high when their dad left, Morgan had never talked about Jocko much. She still didn’t mention him much, aside from the occasional shorthand barbs in e-mail, things like “What do I know, he always hated redheads.” and “Maybe there’s some Brokeback lawyer thing going on.” Along with the appropriate joke: “What do cowboy hats and hemorrhoids have in common? They’re both worn by assholes!”
Since Jacob’s desertion I’d seen Morgan through two minor surgeries. She’d eaten her way up to a size 14 then dieted down to a ten, given up smoking and thrown herself into her career, which had meant a boost for mine. She’d become a great agent and a better friend. She helped me maintain my sanity when the kids and husband tore it to shreds, I helped restrain her from hiring a hit man to go after Jocko.
So in light of our relationship, I knew it would kill us both to have that jumbo, megacontract snatched away.
“We both need the income,” I said, thinking aloud. “Not to be a downer, but even if Chocolate sells, I’ve got to keep writing romances.”
“Of course, of course, and why wouldn’t you? You’re so good at it, and it earns you a nice chunk of change. Don’t you worry about Oscar. We’ll get you a contract for more romances. Trust me, honey, trust me. This will work out over the next few months. If Oscar wants you that much, another publisher will want you more.”
“It would feel strange not to be writing for Hearts and Flowers, not to be working with Lindsay.”
“I know, I know. But in the meantime, you still owe them one romance, and you’ve got Chocolate to write.” We had already decided that Chocolate would be a stronger sell if Morgan could dangle the complete manuscript before the noses of a few editors, and so my work was cut out for me. “If I put my mind to it, I’ll bet I can get you a fat offer to ease your worries. Once Chocolate is a hit, Oscar will come crawling back to us, whimpering like a suckling pig.”
Christmas…ouch. Without a new contract, I’d have to think twice about getting Jack that new set of golf clubs he’d been dropping hints about. Of course, there’d be no cutting back on toys for the kids, or holiday trimmings, but I’d learned that the things that mattered most to the girls, like decorating cookies or reading Christmas stories under the tree, cost very little. In fact, without a new contract I’d have plenty of time to be the perfect Christmas mom. I’d delay delivery of my last book in the contract and spend my time decking the halls, organizing caroling parties, decorating cookies, building the gingerbread house the girls had been pining over…
“Of course, this is all the more reason to get Chocolate written, quick as the wind,” Morgan said, rattling my vision of an idyllic Christmas. “How fast can you get it finished? That would help me sell it, to have a complete manuscript.”
I tried to do a mental calculation of my calendar as I vacillated between turning right onto Northern Boulevard to pick up the girls from after school or heading straight home to the relative quiet of the house with just the sitter and Dylan. It was only four thirty and I could probably squeeze in another hour or so of work, but the December days were getting shorter and the sudden invasion of night in the afternoon always filled me with a haunting desperation to retrieve my children and see them safely tucked away at home. Funny, on a July night I could work until seven without guilt, but encroaching winter somehow tugged on my maternal instincts. I turned right, toward after-school care.
“Are you there?” Morgan asked. “Can you hear me?”
“Just dodging traffic.”
“So finish Chocolate ASAP. Put Oscar’s last book on the back burner, okay? We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“Got it. Bye!” As I hung up I realized that someone would have to tell my editor, Lindsay, our side of the story, and I wasn’t sure about sharing any of this with Jack until things got settled. We’d connected briefly after the big lunch. I’d stood ducking the wind in a storefront above the tracks of Penn Station to get cell phone service. But I’d downplayed the meeting with Oscar, and Jack seemed to forget all about it, caught up in the office politics at Corstar Headquarters, in Dallas where CJ and Hank and Desiree were bemoaning the fact that they’d been passed over for promotion and the big bosses had seen fit to recruit a division manager from outside the company, hiring a woman named Terry Anne, aka Tiger.
“What do you think about Tiger?” Jack had asked. “Sound like trouble to you?”
“Be glad you’re not part of the Dallas office,” I’d told him. “Where there’s a Tiger, there’s bound to be prey.”
Of course, I hadn’t met any of these people, though I enjoyed following their trials and victories vicariously through Jack, similar to reading a soap opera summary at the end of the week—all plot, no emotion. And for now, the Dallas drama would keep Jack distracted from my lack of a new contract. Despite my rising contribution to our household income, my husband had always worried that one day the bottom would drop out of my chosen career, and I didn’t want to give him any inkling that his worries might be coming true. Besides, things were tense at Corstar Corporation, where Jack had recently been given a promotion to management at the New York affiliate TV station, along with stock options that might, one day, knock us into the upper class if all went well. But getting kicked upstairs had given Jack an eyeful of the inner workings of Corstar, and firsthand knowledge of the sordid underbelly had been keeping him awake at night ever since. Promotion—good; underbelly—bad. I figured my news could wait until it turned into good news. That was me, the Can Do! Girl, Little Miss Silver Lining all the way.
“Hi, Ms. Nancy,” I said as the petite woman opened the door of her home.
“Becca doesn’t drink her milk,” she said glumly. “I don’t like to waste it. You tell her, next time, she drink it.”
How’s that for an end-of-day greeting? I thought as my smile froze on my face. “I don’t force her to drink it at home,” I said. “Maybe her tastes will change, but until then…”
“She need milk for strong bones and teeth,” Ms. Nancy said wisely. I wondered if her parents had forced her to drink milk when she was a kid. Wait, milk in China? No, but rice—she’d told me about that, how her parents had warned her that each grain of rice left in her dish would be a pockmark on the face of her future husband. Amazing the twisted way we raise our young.
“I didn’t ask for milk,” Becca said, looking up from the table as we swept into the kids’ playroom—a converted sunporch. Ms. Nancy ran a tight ship, the toys taken from their bins one at a time and all homework completed before play could commence. I loved her for that, for instituting the discipline that I never could seem to enforce in my own home. “Mom, you said I don’t have to eat something if it’s going to make me sick, and I said I didn’t want it.” That was my eldest daughter, eight going on eighteen.
I rubbed Becca’s shoulder. “You know I’m okay with that.”
But Ms. Nancy was shaking her head in disapproval. “All my children drink their milk.”
Not wanting to take on Ms. Nancy, who, I admit, sometimes frightened me, I asked about homework, and Becca assured me it was all done, except for her reading, which she insisted on doing with me every night. A child of ritual, Becca valued our reading time, and sometimes, as I dozed off to the sound of her mellifluous voice, I worried that she didn’t know how to read in her own head. Then again, Jack said I worried too much about Becca.
When she was born, Jack had been so smitten with her that he’d immediately wanted to get going on creating a second child so that Becca would never have to be alone. I worried that Becca subconsciously longed for those days when she was the only one—the object of all our affections. A first child leaves an indelible blueprint on a family, the entire pregnancy experience, when a mother is so hyperaware of movement inside her, careful and vigilant about diet, weight, exercise. I’d been taking prenatal vitamins before I even conceived Rebecca, though with the other two I remembered vitamins every other day or so. Jack