Lex and Lu (18 page)

“So, what did he say,” Lu asked, bracing herself. She couldn’t even come up with a thought on how he would want to handle this.

“He wants you and Nina to move to England.”

Lu drew a deep breath. “You can’t be serious!”

“Oh, I’m completely serious. He said he would give you six months to work it out. His lawyers will help with the visa issue. He’d find a place for the two of you to live. In the meantime, he wanted joint custody. He seemed to know that joint custody would mean school holidays only. But once you moved there, you would be splitting weekends, weeknights, holidays.” Willa stopped, allowing all of this to sink in. “He wants the custody agreement worked out before you move there so that there is no ambiguity.” She put air quotes around
ambiguity.
“He had it all worked out in his head.”

Lu looked stricken again. “Shit,” she muttered. Grabbing her wine glass, she got up and walked to the window. Taking a sip of her wine, she thought about his request. Of course, after everything that had happened, it was more of a demand. Could they really move to England? Why would he want her close to him? Before she could even think about that, she realized that he didn’t want her close to him. He wanted Nina close to him and he would tolerate her to accomplish his goal. Moving didn’t really worry her. She needed time to complete her dissertation. But when she was done, she worried about finding a team to be able to continue her work.

“Lu,” Willa said, dragging her back to the conversation, “are you OK?”

Lu walked back and sat down on the floor.

“What are you thinking?” Sky asked.

“I’m thinking it could be worse.”

“Seriously?” Willa and Sky asked at the same time.

Lu looked at both of them. “Seriously.”

Incredulity reflected back at her from both sets of eyes. “Look, how else is he going to have access to Nina? It’s not ideal, but for the next year, I’ll be writing my dissertation anyway. I can do that from anywhere. My research is mostly complete. Besides, there are worse places to go. Dr. Ziegler was a Rhodes Scholar and I know he still has contacts there. If I need to come back to do some work, I can work that out.” She paused, looking at both of them. “Nina will adapt. She’s far more adaptable than we are.”

Willa wanted to be delicate in the way she said this, but she just didn’t have it in her. “He’s never going to want you.”

If her bluntness hurt Lu, she didn’t show it. She grabbed Willa’s hand. “I know that. I’m letting it go. Can’t you see that?”

“You’re moving on?” Willa asked, doubtful.

“Yes, I’m moving on. I’ll even date. I’ll make you both proud.”

Sky and Willa exchanged doubtful glances.

Lu acknowledged the looks. “Seriously,” she said, trying to convince them. She turned away, not wanting to face their skepticism. “I know we all came home to bury Mr. P. But my childhood fantasies died right along with him.”

Neither Sky nor Willa had any response to that.

As the last of the guests left the Pellitteris’, Amber, with Stacy and Natalie’s help, wiped down the counters and cleaned the rest of the kitchen. Jo and Chris holed up in the library, discussing the terms of Mike’s will. Lu, through Pete, had encouraged Lex to come over and read to Nina before she went to bed. Amber couldn’t be sure about Willa. She’d left a while before in a huff but had refused to tell Amber anything. When everything was clean, they grabbed a bottle of wine and set out for the porch.

Pouring a glass for the three of them, Amber sat back, exhausted. Closing her eyes, she let her head fall back on the chair. “I still can’t believe he’s gone,” she said to no one in particular.

And no one responded. What was there to say? Their twenty-year friendship had seen it all—all except death. How did they recover from it? What would it be like without Mike? Would Jo still come around? Once, long ago, they’d talked about death. But it was a subject that one avoided in the throes of life. Amber distinctly remembered Jo saying that she wouldn’t want to be around all the people who were constant reminders of her life with her husband if he were gone.

“Do you remember—” Natalie began.

Both Amber and Stacy responded “Yes!” quickly, effectively halting the conversation. They all knew that the cornerstone of their relationship had begun to crumble.

Lu walked up to the morose group right then. In hindsight, Amber would think that if she had caught her at a different point, she might have reacted differently, things might not have gone the way they did. But she didn’t.

“Ladies,” Lu said as she made her way around the table kissing them all. “I know this glass is waiting for Dr. J., but since she and Dad seem to be in deep discussion, can I hijack it?”

Natalie lifted the bottle, filled the glass, and pushed it toward Lu.

“How ya doing?” Stacy asked. They all knew the story, had in fact been intimately acquainted with most of the details of the “tragic teenage pregnancy,” so their inquiries seemed natural.

“OK,” Lu said. Leaning back and capturing her mother’s eyes, she continued, “In fact, I received a rather interesting proposition.”

Amber looked at her, waiting to hear about all the undercurrents that had been bouncing through the house that day.

Lex and Lu had always strategically told their parents information. The pregnancy, for instance—they told them about that following Supper Club one night. By the time they were teenagers, they’d figured out that Supper Club meant their parents were probably pleasantly buzzed and generally in a good mood. So they’d waited at Lu’s house for their parents to get home. As their parents pulled the golf cart into the driveway, Lex had run across and asked them to come over. The only one of the four of them who knew at that point was Mike. Mike’s buzz dissipated right then and there. It had softened the reaction, but not the blow. The problem, they all said later, was that Lu was too smart and Lex was too worldly.

Perhaps they’d been wrong in their assessment. Either that or Lu had learned from the master.

“Lex wants Nina and me to move to England,” she said matter-of-factly.

Amber stilled. “What? Why?”

Stacy and Natalie exchanged glances and started to get up from the table.

“You can stay,” Lu said. “It will save her from having to recount the story later.”

Amber looked at them and nodded her assent. “How do you feel about that?”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense. He has a career that isn’t mobile right now. I don’t. He wants an opportunity to get to know his daughter. He can’t do that from over there. And quite frankly, it wouldn’t be fair to Nina to have to constantly fly back and forth across the ocean.”

Frustration lanced through Amber like a sword in the back. “So once again you put your life on hold to accommodate the dreams of Lex Pellitteri? How did I raise you to be at the mercy of a man?”

Lu flinched. Suddenly embarrassed to have an audience for this conversation, she glanced to Natalie and Stacy, who had already begun to remove themselves from the area.

“I am not at his mercy,” she hissed furiously. “How can you say that?”

Amber’s anger made her rigid, almost robotic in her movements and speech. “For the last nine years I have watched everyone bend over backwards to make Lex’s life easier. At first, I thought we were too much of a force for you. Imposing our will on you. Now, I see that you’re weak. And we made you that way.”

Lu stood up out of her chair so forcefully that it flipped over behind her. “
Weak?
” she yelled. “I’m weak. The fact that you can even say that to me just illustrates how little you know of me. If you had been stronger, strong enough to stand up to Dr. J., I wouldn’t be in this situation. But you weren’t. You fed me and your unborn grandchild to the fucking wolves. So don’t sit there and call me weak. I’ve managed to accomplish a lot while raising a pretty amazing daughter. Your precious prodigy has surpassed expectations, even after having a child at seventeen.” She paused to take a deep breath and to calm down. “What I’m choosing to do now is what’s best for my child. A concept you know nothing about.”

With that, Lu turned and walked back through the house. Amber sat, anger mounting, as she thought back over those fateful couple of weeks when they’d made the decisions that continued to shape the lives of her daughter and Lex. So focused was she that she didn’t hear the scrape of the chair. When his hand reached out to grab a glass of wine, she noticed Lex watching her.

Amber blinked. She found herself looking into a pair of green eyes, flashing with anger.

“That was pretty magnificent,” Lex said, in an eerily calm voice.

“What did you hear?” Amber asked, not really caring.

“Just that last part. About doing what was right for her child.” He slowly swirled the wine in his glass. “Let me be very clear on this, Dr. A. No one is to interfere with my family anymore.”

“Family?” she spat. “What do you know about family? You haven’t been here in almost ten years. You don’t know anything about the mother of your child, nor your child. Don’t you dare talk about your ‘family’ when you’ve known about the birth of your child for less than twenty-four hours!”

“And whose fault is that?” He stood up, looking down on her through a haze of contempt. Then, leaning down, so that his face was directly in front of her he said, “I’m going to say this again, so that you don’t misunderstand my meaning. You. Are.
Not.
To. Interfere.”

As Lex walked away, Amber watched, angry at the world. She knew that she had had a hand in everything that had happened. She knew she hadn’t protected her daughter as she should have. She knew that she’d given in because she had been so angry with Lu for throwing away her future. She knew all of that and even accepted that part of this was her fault. But she couldn’t help it. She blamed Jo. They’d all bent to her indomitable will. She’d just been more stubborn and determined than the rest of them. Much like her son. That apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree. Seething with anger, she stood up and headed to the library.

Chris and Jo looked up at the same time as she entered. Chris smiled, but quickly registered concern as he noted the look on her face.

Without preamble she said, “He’s making her move to England.”

If Jo and Chris were surprised, it didn’t show. They both digested the information. Nodding slowly, Chris said, “That actually makes a lot of sense.” Had he been able to properly gauge her anger, he would have kept that comment to himself.

Jo noticed and kept her mouth shut.

“Makes sense? Are you fucking kidding me?” Amber said, anger rolling off of her. “Once again, her life has to change to accommodate the great Lex Pellitteri. What is the matter with everyone?”

Chris, suddenly realizing his mistake and finally noting the magnitude of her anger, walked toward her, hoping to stop her from saying anything that would irreparably harm their decades-old friendship. “Amber, this isn’t the time,” he said as he stepped in front of her and grabbed her hands. “Not now,” he whispered, hoping Jo didn’t hear him.

But Jo, bracing herself for what came next, waited. As much as she liked to kid herself that Amber had forgiven her, she knew that underneath the foundation of their friendship existed a sinkhole of bitterness that threatened to pull it all under.

Amber stepped around Chris. “This is your fault. All of it. The outcome would have been different if we hadn’t all agreed to sacrifice my daughter for the benefit of your son. Once again, he’s dictating her life. He got that from you. That sense that the whole world is at his command.” Amber took a breath, not even trying to control the anger that threatened to destroy everything between them. “You need to do something. You need to fix this.” Pointing her finger in Jo’s direction, she wisely didn’t move any closer to her. “If he hurts her again, like he did today. If I ever see that look on her face again, I’ll find a way to hurt you just as bad.”

Chris grabbed her around her upper arms and whispered to her, “That’s enough!” as he pulled her from the room. He glanced up at Jo and mouthed, “Sorry,” even though he knew that wasn’t enough to fix what had just happened.

When they had cleared the room, the door sliding shut behind them, Jo sank into Mike’s chair. Resting her head in her hands, she let go. Finally, seventy-two hours after the death of her husband, she gave in and cried. She cried for her loss and her children, she cried for the death of her friendship, and she cried for the collision course that she had set for Lex and Lu all those years ago. She wanted to fix it. She wanted to make it right for them. She owed it to them and to Mike. But she didn’t have a clue as to how to do it. For the first time in her life, she felt powerless.

Six months later

Lu bent over to pull the turkey out of the oven. She may have moved to England without putting up a fight, but she was determined that Nina would take part in the American traditions. Taking a sip of her wine, she tried to fight the nerves flaring up in her stomach. Walking a tightrope, she worked to find the balance between matchmaking and interfering. She owed Willa and Pete, though, and this represented her chance to help them find their way back to each other.

Lex’s demand that Lu move to England had dealt the deathblow to Willa and Pete’s fledgling relationship. Willa wanted Pete to get involved. His refusal pushed her away. Like Lex, Willa went hard. All or nothing. Pete taking Lex’s side—or not trying to talk some sense into him—had felt like Pete wanted nothing. It didn’t matter that she essentially asked him to choose. She couldn’t see beyond his support of Lex. Lu knew it wasn’t right for Willa to hold Pete to that standard, but that was Will. And for her relentless support of Lu over the years, Lu wanted to give her what she needed. The problem being that Pete wasn’t what Will wanted right now. Which meant Lu’s impromptu Thanksgiving meal could be over very quickly.

It had been easy to get them over there. Both Willa and Pete had time. Pete had a short break from school and Willa got the weekend off from the practice. Nina and she had been in England for a little over three months because Lu hadn’t wanted Nina to start a new school year at home. Lu had taken the summer to get everything together, and they were in London for the start of school. Nina’s aunt and uncle hadn’t seen her since they left. A visit was due.