Playing By The Rules

He took his eyes off the road again to glare at me. “What’s wrong with you tonight?”

“I’m fine.” Grace was wrong with me, I thought, her and her absurd opinions about me and Sam.

“You’re not fine,” Sam said. “You’re being caustic.”

“At least I don’t tell people I love them on the first date. Or did you do it on the second?” We’d reached the parking lot that I used and he drove my car into a space. The Mitsubishi rocked on its shock absorbers when he hit the breaks too hard. I tried not to wince.

“I did not tell her that I loved her,” he said.

“Well, you must have done something to put the idea in her head.” I got out and slammed the door. “In the throes of passion, maybe?”

“I never even got around to passion with her!”

My heart shifted a little. Damned if I cared. I grabbed my keys from his hand and started up the street toward our apartment building.

“So what about that scampi?” Sam asked, following me. “Since we’re both home now and we’ve semi-resolved the Woodsen thing, we might as well eat together.”

“Bribe me and I’ll consider it.”

“You want me to pucker up like a fish?”

I turned and walked backward to face him. “For the record, Frank kissed like a…like a…”

“Words fail you?” he said when I couldn’t quite continue.

“I’m trying to reach for the perfect superlative.”

“I hope you come up with it before my hearing starts to go.”

“There are just so many to choose from.”

He reached around me and opened the outside door of our building. I pivoted back to face forward and we crossed the black-and-white marble vestibule to step into a fern-filled hallway. My apartment was on the first floor, his was one floor above mine.

“Come on, Mandy. Feed me,” he said. “I’ve got some wine I could contribute. I bought it because I was going to try to lure Tammy back here tonight.”

“Ah, leftovers. Sam, I am so flattered.”

“I’d rather share it with you.”

Everything inside me rolled over. Slowly, sweetly. It was purely Grace’s doing, of course. I had been absolutely fine when I’d been hating Sam in Judge Larson’s courtroom two hours ago.

“Go get the wine, Sam,” I said, a little tired of fighting off images of how he would claw. But I watched him move up the stairs with that slow, prowling way he had of moving, and I found myself thinking that on so many levels he seemed absurdly unaware of his own appeal. Either that or he took it for granted. I had never quite figured out which it was.

I went into my own apartment and closed the door behind me. The telephone was ringing. I jogged across the living room into the kitchen and grabbed it. It was Sylvie Casamento.

“It’s after six o’clock,” she said immediately. “You said you’d be home by six o’clock.”

I looked at the clock on the wall in the kitchen. It was two minutes past the hour. “I had a wonderful time,” I said. “Thanks for asking.”

“Did that man find you?”

“Which one? The blue shirt, or the one with the fishy mouth?” What difference did it make? They’d both nailed me, but I wanted to know which one of them had come here looking for me first.

“He was wearing blue,” Mrs. Casamento said.

“Then, yes. Thank you so much for your help. You can send Chloe down now.”

Mrs. Casamento lived in my building on the second floor across from Sam. I went back to my apartment door and into the hall, and I collected my daughter.

I sent Chloe off to take a bath. Back in the kitchen I stared at my purse, at the papers stuffed into the side flap.

Over the years, from conversations at preschool, playgrounds, and PTA, I have come to the conclusion that single mothers share a near-psychotic obsession with being a good parent. Maybe this is because statistically we are expected to fail, to produce serial killers and assorted other prison inmates. Our children cannot possibly thrive in a broken home. To prove those statistics wrong, we obsess. And obsession can be exhausting. This is why, when your seven-year-old stares at you with guileless eyes and swears up-and-down on the life of her Barbie that she did her homework at the babysitter’s, sometimes you believe her. You do it because you want the hard part of your day to be over and done with. You’ve earned your wage, you’ve paid the gas bill. If there’s not food on the table, then at the very least it’s in the refrigerator waiting to be warmed up, or it’s in a takeout bag on the counter. So you take your child’s word at face value until you begin to shoo her out the door the next morning and you realize that she fibbed…just a little. The homework is half-done. You’re late for court and she’s late for school and there’s no way to backtrack and fix this. Now her teacher is going to know the truth. You are actually a bad parent in sheep’s clothing. Your child is doomed for the penitentiary.

This is why I ended up opening the papers right then, after all, instead of waiting for morning. Part of it was that I might be considered a bad parent for not reading them right away. The other part was that I really wanted the hard part of my day to be over, and I knew that wouldn’t happen unless and until I knew exactly what Mill was up to.

Chloe was in the tub with the door open so I could hear if the splashing stopped—that way I’d know if she was drowning. I scanned the papers and they were pretty much what I had expected. Mill had decided that he wanted Chloe to live with him.

My heart did a dive. I read the papers again before I went to the phone and dialed Mill’s number. This is another thing about single parenthood—if a man fathers your child, it doesn’t matter if you haven’t laid eyes on him since the moment of conception. You will never forget his phone number.

“Have you lost your mind?” I demanded as soon as Mill answered. “You don’t want this.”

“Amanda.” Other than Sam, he was the only person in my life who ever dared to call me by my given name. I wondered briefly what the implications of that might be. One was the father of my child, and the other was my…well, my platonic friend.

“This wasn’t our deal,” I grated finally, staring at the papers in my hand.

“No,” he agreed. “But a father can’t actually sign away his parental rights, can he?”

He was right. A parent is a parent is a parent. Though I had a consent order with his signature on it wherein he solemnly swore never to intrude in Chloe’s life if I promised never to ask him for a dime of child support, I’d always known that if he chose to get involved, that piece of paper wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans.

The fact that he knew that, too, told me that he had been boning up on his family law—Mill specializes in corporate and tax law. Either that, or the attorney he was using for this had informed him of the fact.

I was starting to feel sick.

“I want my daughter,” Mill said. “I want a relationship with her.”

“Oh, the hell you do.” It was knee-jerk, out before I could stop it.

There was silence. I took that as a good thing. Maybe he was thinking that I wasn’t snowed. Or scared. Though, actually, I was a little—a lot—of both.

“Mandy, it just doesn’t look good,” he said finally.

I realized that he would probably be taping our conversation by now—it’s a neat lawyer trick. As long as words are spoken on a telephone line—which is technically a public medium—they’re legally up for grabs. So I took a new tack. “It’s the election thing, right?” I asked. “Mill, I understand. Okay, then. I’ll marry you.”

I was gratified by a gargling sound. “I beg your pardon?”

“You asked me once, then you withdrew the offer. And I was so young and foolish at the time. Now I’ve realized the error of my ways. Marry me, Mill. Please.”

Chloe chose that moment to wander into the kitchen wrapped in her favorite, too-pink Barbie bathrobe. I tried to shoo her away but she wouldn’t go. I had him, I knew I had him, but I couldn’t push my advantage with her listening on.