The Best Laid Plans (26 page)

“What, don’t tell me you have nothing to say for yourself, young lady,” I say, channeling every bad sitcom parent I’ve
ever seen on TV Land. How is it that I’ve found my fourteen-year-old daughter with her blouse half off making out with a boy on the couch—a boy her sister is dating—and I’m the one who’s groping for the right words?

“I’m sorry,” Molly mumbles with her back to me. Then she turns around and her voice becomes bolder. “Don’t you get it? For once a boy likes me. He said he was breaking up with Paige to be with
me
. And he’s not just any boy, he’s popular, he’s Brandon Marsh,” she says as if somehow that explains everything.

This is my comeuppance, I think guiltily. All those weeks ago when this whole thing started, I was secretly rooting for Molly—and now look what’s happened: I got my wish. Of course Molly wants to be popular; who doesn’t? Life is just like high school, a constant struggle to belong. For goodness’ sake, in the TV business, viewers rated Sienna’s likeability every single night. But somewhere along the way, if we’re smart, if we’re lucky, we populate our lives with the people who love us just the way we are. Not for what we could be or what we do for them—such as making out in a darkened den or pumping up their egos by competing for their attention. I have to make Molly understand that by being with Brandon she’s not only betraying her sister, she’s betraying herself.

I pat the cushion on the couch beside me. Warily, Molly folds her arms in front of her chest and sits down.

“So,” I say softly. “It must feel good to have Brandon like you.”

Whatever Molly was expecting me to say, this isn’t it. “It does,” she says tentatively.

“I remember the first time I kissed Daddy.…”

“Oh, Mom, please, you’re not going to make me listen to that story again? About how you’d go out to coffee with him after your study group and you got to know him and trust
him before you two really got together? That was like centuries ago. Things are different today.”

“How so?”

Molly shifts uncomfortably on the sofa where just five, ten minutes ago she was sprawled out with Brandon. “Well, for one thing, kids today don’t wait so long. I mean if you want to have a boyfriend you have to show him that you like him.”

I suspect that Adam tried to get Eve to give it up by trying that one on her, but I hold my tongue.

“Did you want to make out with Brandon?” I ask carefully.

“Well, of course I wanted to make out with Brandon. What girl wouldn’t?”

The girl I knew just a few days ago who said she only wanted to be with a boy who wanted to be exclusively with her, I think, and for the second time in as many minutes I censor my thoughts. Instead I ask, “Did you like kissing Brandon?”

Molly crosses her right leg over her left, then recrosses them in the other direction. “Well, yeah, of course,” she says unconvincingly. “I mean I don’t have anything to compare it to.”

“Molly …”

“Okay, yeah, you’re going to say that I was just kissing Brandon to make him like me.”

“And?”

“Maybe a little. But I was curious, too.”

“You know you can say no, right? I mean, even once you’ve started kissing a boy, you don’t have to—”

“
Ohmygod
, Mom, next you’re going to be quoting that retard list they gave us in the sixth grade. ‘No, I’m not ready.’ ‘No, I don’t want carpet burn.’ And oh yeah, my all-time favorite, ‘No, I’m allergic!’ What, the guy’s going to be afraid that you’ll end up in anaphylactic shock?”

“It could happen,” I say unconvincingly, because rationally I know that you’re more likely to die from allergies to peanut
butter than sex, although I’d do anything to get Molly to switch her affections from Brandon to Skippy.

Molly shakes her head and stands up to end the discussion. “I could also get hit by a bus,” she says, quoting her father, who seems to believe that the dangers of crossing the street will make me less worried about whatever it is that I’m focused on, when in truth it just gives me something else to be anxious about. “Stop turning this into the End of the World. Why does everything in this family have to be such a big deal?”

“Because I love you! Because I want to protect you! Because you’re too young! Because it is!” I say, in frustration, abandoning my politically-correct-be-understanding-and-open-minded-with-your-kids tact. “And by the way,” I say, as Molly picks up her iPod from the floor and storms noisily out of the room, “you’re grounded. For about a hundred and fifty years.”

“M
OLLY, IT WAS MOLLY
, not Paige,” I groan, unable to make sense out of yesterday afternoon’s events.

“Maybe that’s the problem. Molly’s always been so low-maintenance. If it’d been Paige you’d be sore but not surprised, probably not fair to either one of them. Here,” Sienna says, breaking off a piece of chocolate and handing me a square. “The guy at Whole Foods told me that each batch of this stuff is exposed for five days to the electromagnetically recorded brain waves of meditating monks.”

I roll the chocolate around in my mouth. “Did he tell you they were praying for world peace and zero calories?”

“Actually he said they were praying to raise enough money to buy an air conditioner for the monastery.”

I smile and reach for the rest of the bar. “Maybe I’ll stop and buy some on the way home. As fellow small-business owners it’s practically our moral obligation to eat as much of this as we can. And Molly always likes to support a good cause. Maybe I can get her interested in something besides Brandon.”

Sienna raises an eyebrow but refrains from saying the obvious. No matter how many endorphins are crammed into a bar of chocolate it can never compete with the thrill of being with a boy. Especially a boy who I’ve now declared off-limits. I’m furious with Brandon. And myself. And with Peter. I’m so mad at Peter I might have to rip the shoulder pads out of his sports jacket. What the fuck is he doing in Hawaii at a time like this? He’s supposed to have been here to threaten that moron Marsh boy that he’ll chop him up into a million pieces with a meat cleaver if he ever so much as comes within a hundred feet of either of the girls ever again. And then Peter was supposed to have climbed into bed and made me believe that everything’s going to be all right.

I crumple up the candy wrapper and toss it into the wire wastepaper basket. Sienna and I are sitting behind a two-way mirror, waiting for a focus group that Bill’s organized with Veronica Agency clients to begin. The room where the meeting is taking place has a pale green carpet, soft lights, and comfortable-looking armchairs. On the other side of the wall, Sienna and I are perched on metal folding chairs. A fluorescent fixture makes me feel as if we’re the ones under investigation.

“I can’t even get hold of Peter,” I say sullenly. “He sent one email yesterday from Miami. Something about how when he got fired the company took away his BlackBerry and when he replaced it, he hadn’t wanted to spend the extra money for the world plan. ‘Didn’t think I’d need it, never expected to leave the house again.’ The damn thing doesn’t work outside the continental U.S.”

“Did he leave a hotel phone number?”

“Yup, but the phone lines are down. I tried calling all night.”

“I’m sure you’ll talk tonight. And you’re going to see him Saturday, right?”

“Maybe,” I say, rummaging around my purse for my phone. Still no messages from Peter. And nothing from Molly, either. “I’m not flying off to Hawaii until things are settled at home.”

Sienna leans forward on her chair and runs her hand comfortingly across my back. “I shouldn’t be giving advice. I’m not the mother of a teenager, or anybody’s mother, for that matter. And I’m not even very good with plants. Everybody says you can’t kill a cactus, but somehow I managed to.”

“You’re a great friend. And it seems like you’re becoming a pretty good girlfriend,” I say, looking through the two-way mirror at Bill, who’s just entered the room. He smiles up toward where he knows we’re sitting.

“We’ll see,” Sienna says, issuing a small wave back to her beau. “But the one thing I know is that you’re a terrific mother. Molly’s not screwing up her life.…”

“She’s just screwing around?” I say, distressed by Sienna’s choice of words.

“No. Molly’s just breaking away. She’s doing exactly what teenagers are supposed to do.”

“I thought you just said you didn’t know anything about being a parent?”

“I interviewed the star of
Nanny 911
once. And I seem to remember a certain incident with the captain of the football team.…”

“Shit! Frank Fucking Nelson.” I shake my head. “He told me that if I could make out better than Serena Levine he’d take me to the junior prom instead of her.”

“And?” Sienna nudges.

“I could and he didn’t. What an asshole.”

“Right. Every girl needs to date at least one asshole so that when she meets a good guy, she’s smart enough to know it.”

Thank goodness for Sienna. I can always count on her for a
rational perspective. It’s invaluable to have a friend who doesn’t freak out over every little thing that happens—not to mention one who remembers the day we sneaked off together to get our ears pierced, and my entire romantic history. “Frank Fucking Nelson, whatever happened to him, anyway?”

“Divorced, alcoholic out-of-work auto mechanic,” Sienna says, without missing a beat. “Actually, I hear he’s the CEO of a hedge fund.”

“Well, at least the out-of-work part is probably true.”

“And his knees. The man’s a forty-something ex–football player, he probably can’t go through an airport security line without setting off an alarm.”

I squeeze Sienna’s hand. I’d give anything for an alarm to go off in Molly’s head right now about Brandon. Or to hear a simple cellphone beep signaling that any of my loved ones is trying to reach me.

I set my phone on vibrate and clutch it in my hand. Sienna points to the room on the other side of the mirror, where the Veronica Agency’s clients—aka the Friends of Bill—are helping themselves to cups of coffee and settling into seats around a polished black conference table. Several of the guys are well-toned and others have slightly inflated waistlines, which when worn with an expensive enough business suit tell the world that a man’s well-fed and well-heeled. (Ironic that the same waistline on a guy in a sweatshirt with an exposed butt crack casts him into an entirely different social class.) Our clients are mostly average-looking, some above or below, but all of them, every last guy in the room, has one thing in common: Like Bill, our business partner and Sienna’s boyfriend, they’re all young. Which doesn’t go unnoticed by Sienna, either.

“Just look at those guys in there. Do you realize that when they were teething, we were getting braces? And the year we went off to college, they were entering kindergarten,” Sienna
grumbles. She takes out her mirror and runs a comb through her luxurious hair, which she’s wearing an attractive shade darker than she did when she was on camera.

“You do realize Bill not only adores you, he helped us build a whole business around the idea of older women and younger men?”

“Sure, but I always figured I be with somebody thirteen years older, not the other way around. That way I wouldn’t have to worry when my looks started to go—the old coot would be too blind to notice.”

“You’ll always be gorgeous. You’re not really worried about your age difference, are you?”

“No, of course not. But I sometimes wish I was with a guy who remembers Watergate. Or water beds. Or when the Water Pik was invented,” Sienna says glibly.

Bill calls the meeting to order and I turn up the volume on the control panel of the two-way mirror so we can hear what everybody’s saying. For his first order of business, Bill holds up a large silver platter and asks if anyone wants a pastry. Unlike our escorts, who mostly passed on the donuts, every guy takes him up on the offer—except one, whom I recognize as Georgy’s date, Gabe.

“My new woman’s got me on Atkins,” he says with a broad smile, sounding proud that there’s a woman in his life who’s taking an interest in his health, even if she is on the payroll. Of course, Gabe’s the client who brought a French maid’s uniform and handcuffs along on the date—he
likes
taking orders.

“Oh c’mon,” says a ruddy-faced fellow, reaching for a cannoli. “For what Bill here is charging us you’d better get some free food thrown in with the deal.”

“Larry, you’re not complaining about the rates already, are you? Quality, gentlemen, comes at a price.”

Larry takes a generous bite of the cream-filled treat and, in
the bargain, gets a thin dusting of powdered sugar around the edge of his mouth. “Nah, just giving you a hard time,” he says with a laugh.

“Speaking of which,” says a guy Bill introduced as his graduate school friend, Mike, “it was a hard time. A hard, hard time, if you get my drift. And me
likey
!”

“And me want-to-throw-up-y.” I giggle, rolling my eyes.

“You were right, dude, older women are more self-assured,” says the cannoli-eater, Larry, who’s now moved on to a Danish. Either these guys are going to have to work out their oral fixations in the bedroom or we’re going to have to put the lot of them on Atkins.