Treading Lightly

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 is everything?”

Again, she knew exactly what he was thinking. Most likely because they had a conversation about this at least once a week which always started with him whining, “Mom, what kind of lame question is that? How is everything? Like I’m supposed to know how everything is doing. And Grandma asks it every time she calls! What is it with older people? Does everything they do have to be so freaking annoying?” She wondered why he thought she knew the answer to that question. Especially because—ironically—she constantly asked herself the exact same thing after each and every conversation with her mother.

“Everything’s fine, Grandma. How’s everything with you?” she heard him say, and smiled, knowing that if Craig was anything, it was predictable.

“Well, dear, I have a nasty sinus infection at the moment, but you know me and how susceptible I am to sinus infections. Every time I get a cold, it goes right into my nasal passages and I get a sinus infection. This one’s a doozy! Today my discharge is green. Yesterday it was yellow, but today it’s green. That’s bad. A sign of infection. I can’t wait until it’s clear again.”

Way too much information there, Grandma! Janine thought to herself, wondering if she should let Craig off the hook by interrupting here, or let him suffer a little longer. “Sorry to hear that, Grandma. I hope you’re feeling better soon. If clear nasal discharge is what you wish for, I hope your wish comes true.” The sarcastic little brat. She had to admire him, and would have rescued him, but his harsh words were still fresh in her head, so she let him have a few more minutes of torture.

“Me too, dear. Me too. So, how’s school going?”

Janine smiled with the knowledge of what her son was thinking. Another lame question. She knew his insides were crying out to say, “How do you think it’s going, Granny? It sucks! It’s school!” but instead, he said, “School’s fine, Grandma.”

“Are you getting good grades?”

And there was worst question number three. He constantly whined to Janine, “Does Grandma have to have the exact same conversation every time she calls? She’s lived, like, forever! Can’t she come up with any other questions? Since she feels the need to come up with any questions at all, that is. Why does she always think that asking me the same exact lame questions will give her any different answers? Have they ever changed, yet? Does she even hear my responses? Does she even care?”

“Yes, Grandma. Mostly A’s.”

Janine heard her mother cough up a disgusting wad of what she could now only picture as a big glob of “snot”—in Craig’s native tongue—on the other end of the phone. She wondered if Craig was picturing it too, and figured he most likely was. How appealing, she thought, as her mother went off on a hacking spree. She could have sworn she heard Craig mumble “Nice,” but it was hard to tell over the amplified expectoration being spewed through the phone line. It made one glad Ma Bell had perfected the resonance of their fiber-optic lines. As the huge conglomerate promised, they made your phone connection so real, it was like you were right next to each other. There’s a lot to be said for not being able to hear a pin drop. “You’re so smart, Craig. Just like your mother used to be.”

And there it was. She had to remind him of his antagonist. Had to bring her up. Janine knew he’d been trying so hard to forget about and ignore her—hence the blaring music to drown out her existence—and now she was right up there on his mind. Her mother was right, he was a smart boy, so Janine knew he’d make both of them pay with the one punishment he could inflict on both of them simultaneously. “I’ll go get her for you, Grandma,” he said before Janine heard him throw the phone down on his bed.

“Yeah, that’s it. Let ’em at each other. They deserve each other! I sure as hell don’t deserve either one of them, but they sure as hell deserve each other,” he muttered to himself as he stomped down the short hallway to her room. Her bedroom door was shut, so he didn’t see her leaning against it, her ear against the hollow door. “She’s working—all the more reason to disturb her—she hates to be interrupted when she’s working,” he said to himself with the pleasure of a nefarious villain who had a deliciously reprehensible plan. With what she could only imagine was an evil smile, he pounded on her door. “PHONE!” he shouted to it.

Head rattling, she called out, “Who is it?” while covering the mouthpiece of the phone tightly with one hand and her mouth with the other so she’d sound distant. Yes, she knew it was a juvenile move, but she did it anyhow.

“Yeah, right. Like I’m going to tell you. If I did, you’d beg me to tell her you were in the shower again. And there’s no way in hell I’m going to do that! A favor? Yeah, right. I don’t think so,” he mumbled to himself—yet was loud enough for an ear plastered to the door to hear—before she heard him clomp back to his room, slamming his door behind him for good measure.

She picked up her extension, clicking the button and pretending she didn’t know who was on the line. “Hello?”

“Oh, hello dear.”

“Hello, Mother,” she said with a definite lack of enthusiasm. Her son didn’t know how good he had it. He had no idea what it was like having a mother who was a pain in your ass. He may think she was a pain, but she was a poodle as compared to the old attack dog that was her mother.

“You must be working on one of your little books, because I called you three times this week, and you never returned my calls.” This was great. Just what she needed. Fighting with Craig, and now her mother was sticking it to her. But, you had to hand it to Mom. In one fell swoop she had insulted her profession, her writing, her manners, and her capacity as a daughter. All with that one short sentence. Her ex could learn a lot from her mother. At least her mother ragged her quickly and efficiently. Not like Martin. He was much more slow and laborious. Quite amateurish, actually. But after a lifetime with her mother, a seasoned insult comic would appear incompetent and amateurish.

“Sorry, Mother. I’m doing an edit. It’s hard for me to get interrupted. I need to keep focused so mistakes don’t happen.”

“What, like your little books are as important as brain surgery that you shouldn’t get interrupted? Or are you trying to imply that speaking to me is a mistake?” Damn, she was good. Either way, Janine looked like an idiot. In so many words—or rather, so few words—her mother had once again reinforced that her books were unimportant, her career was insignificant, and she sucked as a daughter. If it weren’t so exhausting—and directed at her—she’d probably find it impressive.

“No, Mother. I didn’t say that.”

“I don’t know how you make your living as a writer, when you can’t clearly explain yourself in a simple conversation.”

“Whoa, Granny. Pull in the reins! Even I think that one was a little rough, and currently I’m on the warpath with her almighty highness.”

Janine rubbed her temples and sighed. “Craig, get off the line, would you please?” She hadn’t realized he was listening, but as the saying went, what was good for the goose was good for the gander, so she couldn’t rightly say anything, could she? Plus, she really didn’t mind. She had nothing to hide. Particularly from her son.

When she heard the click of the phone, she assumed he had hung up. “Mother, I’ve had enough fighting for one day. Between Martin and Craig, I was at my limit before you called, and to be quite honest, I don’t have the energy or desire to contend with you right now. If you’d care to, you can try calling in a few days and hopefully by then I’ll be better equipped to handle your hostility.”

Her mother gasped.

“No offense, Mother,” she said as an afterthought.

After harrumphing better than a short, round Englishman wearing a monocle, she said, “How can I not be offended, Janine?”

With a heavy sigh, Janine said what she knew she’d have to say to get the older woman off her back. “I’m sorry, Mother. I’m under a lot of stress lately. Please forgive me.” She rolled her eyes as she said it, thankful she was on the phone and not having this conversation in person while having to keep a straight face. She couldn’t have pulled it off if she had to do it face-to-face. As it were, she was smiling wickedly and the sparkle in her eye was a dead giveaway that she was not the least bit sorry.

CHAPTER 3

Her mother’s phone call was long forgotten. The woman was a pain in the butt, but that wasn’t anything new. The minute she’d hung up, it was off her mind. This edit was important and she needed to finish it, so she’d worked all night. When Janine finally looked at her clock, she was surprised to see it was 2:23 a.m.

“Guess it’s time to call it a night,” she said to herself as she shut down her computer. The eerie light it had cast no longer illuminated the surrounding space, throwing her into total darkness. Taking a deep breath, she walked out of her room, not needing any light down the short hall toward Craig’s room. She’d done this a million times before.

A faint yellow band glowed from underneath his door, and she surmised that he’d fallen asleep with his light on again.

Opening the door slowly so it wouldn’t creak, she gazed at her son sprawled fully dressed across his bed. She crossed the room silently, thinking he looked like an angel in repose, and knelt beside the bed so she wouldn’t wake him. Carefully she untied the laces of his government-regulation black boots and gently tugged them off. God, his feet were huge. And they stank, too! Keeping those mammoth puppies penned up in those hot, festering, black leather encasements didn’t help matters. The boy’s feet needed air circulating around them.

With that thought in mind, she removed his wet, sweaty socks and threw a blanket over his prone body, kissing the top of his head and smoothing back his bangs as she did every night after he fell asleep.

“Mommy loves you,” she whispered. It was her ritualistic mantra that she uttered to the sleeping boy nightly.

She stood for a few minutes, watching him sleep, letting the sight calm her. When she felt her body relax and lose some of the strain that seemed to be ever present in her upper back, she reached over and turned the light switch off with a click.

Closing the door silently behind her, she left his room to do the other thing she did nightly. Raid the kitchen.

Heading straight for the junk-food cabinet to check out what was left, she grabbed a fistful of strawberry Twizzlers, and popped a stray purple jelly bean she’d found on the bottom of the shelf into her mouth before realizing what she’d just done. She spent a couple minutes trying to calculate when that uncovered jelly bean could’ve possibly been purchased, not remembering the last time she’d bought a bag of jelly beans, then quickly drowned out any possible contamination worries by scarfing down approximately thirteen licorice sticks, hoping that would obscure or perhaps overwhelm any bad pollutants the one measly grape-flavored jelly bean might’ve caused. She closed the cabinet door before padding back to her room to attempt sleep. It was hard for her to unwind when she was in edit mode. She held an entire novel in her head, and needed to make sure every thread, every action, every sentence fit perfectly. It took her almost two hours, but by approximately four in the morning she finally fell asleep.

As she’d tossed and turned, she had again been struck by the relative ease at which she could make things work out perfectly on paper, but in her real life, her existence was a mess. Try as she might, she couldn’t control things as she could in her books. And anyone who knew her would agree that she always tried. It wasn’t that she was a control freak. Well, maybe it was. But things just never seemed to work out for her the way they did for her characters.

For example when she woke up the next morning, she’d trodden into the kitchen, eyes crusted over with sleep, hair sticking out haphazardly on the right side and plastered against her head on the left, heading for the coffee machine. He was her only true love now—Mr. Coffee. At least at that hour. Ben & Jerry’s came in at a close second, but not first thing in the morning. Perhaps second thing. But not first.

On her way to her beloved Señor Café—she saw him as the Latino type, deep, dark, rich, fiery, and with a kick that woke her up quickly—she passed the kitchen table with the pad. Her heart soared every morning when she read the short note from her son, which had become a tradition they’d started when he was old enough to go to the bus stop each morning without her guidance.

That decision had been more of a negotiation than an outright decision. She’d felt he was too young to go to the bus stop alone, and he’d insisted he was “big” enough. After a few dozen extremely mature instances of “are not,” “am too,” “are not,” “am too,” she’d finally confessed in her most pathetic whine that she’d miss him. That’s when he came up with the note idea. “That way you’ll be able to keep me with you all day, Mom,” he’d said.

She’d almost cried when he’d said that because she was so proud of him. “Who’s the grown-up and who’s the kid?” she’d said to him that morning so long ago as she ushered him out the door before closing it. She remembered watching him through the peephole until she couldn’t see him anymore. When he was gone, she’d turned, leaned against the door, and cried because her baby was growing up.

Now her baby was well on his way to manhood. In some religions and cultures, he would be considered a man in a few short weeks.