Mood Swing

“Then why are you—”

“Dad’s getting married.”

For several seconds, Susan just stood there, not moving. Don was getting married? She hadn’t had so much as a date in the past year and a half, and Don was getting married?

“When did he tell you that?”

“Last night when I had dinner with him and Marla.”

Marla. That woman made Susan absolutely crazy. Don had a lot of nerve dating a woman who was too nice to hate.

“Why didn’t you tell me last night?” And why didn’t Don tell me before he told our daughter?

Lani just shrugged.

“Well,” Susan said gently, “I guess we knew this could happen, huh?”

Another shrug.

“We really should be happy for him, you know,” Susan said in her best Mother of the Year voice, even though it was all she could do not to choke on the words. “Marla’s very…nice.”

Lani looked up, her eyes shimmering with tears. “But this means you and Dad really aren’t getting back together.”

Susan would have thought by now that her incompatibility with Don would have been clear to everyone on planet Earth, in distant galaxies and into the far reaches of the universe. How, after all this time, had it gotten past the one person closest to both of them?

Actually, it hadn’t. Lani knew. But, in the end, all she wanted was for Mom and Dad to occupy the same household again so everyone could at least pretend things were normal. What she didn’t know was that the longer two people pretended their relationship was normal when it was anything but, the worse it became for all concerned.

A few minutes later, Susan hustled Lani into the car, and on the way to the grocery store she explained again that reconciliation was never going to happen, which made Lani even more miserable. When they arrived at school, she’d dried her tears, but chances were that her classes that day were going to be a total bust. Lemon pound cake in hand, she started to scoot out of the car, only to turn back with a quizzical look.

“And who’s that guy who keeps calling in the middle of the night, anyway?”

That’s it, Susan thought. I have to do something about Dennis.

But once she got to the hospital, she’d lost track of that directive, with room in her mind for only one thought: Don’s getting married. And I’m not.

I don’t care, she told herself later that morning as she was extracting a peanut from a toddler’s nose. After all, it wasn’t as if she wasn’t prepared for it—Don and Marla had been seeing each other for over a year. And she really did like Marla, enough that Susan had considered warning her that if she was going to marry Don, she’d better like her men to be mindlessly inconsiderate and grossly insensitive. But love was blind. There was someone for everyone and maybe true love had won out. She wished both of them well.

Deep breath. Ah. There.

Susan felt so rational and adultlike that she could almost chalk up the sickening twinge in her stomach to indigestion rather than envy. It was Don’s life, after all, and she couldn’t expect him to be a monk for the rest of it. She had just hoped he’d continue to be a monk until she found a way to stop being a nun.

Around noon, Susan couldn’t face another of the vending-machine lunches she’d had for the past few days, so she ventured into the cafeteria. She waited until nearly one o’clock, but Dennis still showed up to make her bad day worse. Now she knew for sure that he had to be getting intelligence on her day-to-day movements from a source in the hospital. And she was pretty sure that source’s name was Evie.

As Dennis started talking, Susan knew she should call a halt to all of this, but she’d dealt with enough crap that day already and the last thing she wanted was to deal with any more. So once again she tried to tune him out, turning her attention instead to the piece of gravy-covered cardboard on her plate. But as she was choking down the last bite, as impossible as it seemed, his loony rhetoric took a quantum leap.

“So I was thinking that maybe on Saturday night you could come over to Mom’s house for dinner. How does that sound? She’s a pretty good cook, you know.”

Susan stopped short. “What did you say?”

“Mom told me to invite you to dinner.”

She looked at him incredulously. “I don’t even know your mother.”

“That’s the point. She always wants to meet the girls I date.”

Susan gripped her fork until her fingers turned white. “Dennis. We’re not dating.”

“Sure we are. We have lunch together all the time. Evie says a relationship is all about togetherness.”

Evie. Change one letter and she became Evil. Why had Susan never noticed that before?

“I’m busy on Saturday,” she said.

“Then Friday.”

“I’m busy then, too.”

“Then pick a day. As long as it’s not Sunday. That’s Mom’s bingo night.”

Susan couldn’t take this anymore. “I have to go.”

She rose and headed for the conveyor belt to dump her tray. Sure enough, Dennis got up to follow her, still yammering away, and all she could think about was how her ex-husband was getting married to a decent woman when the best Susan could do was the quintessential geek with bad hair, bad posture and bad breath, a man she was going to have to break up with even though they’d never dated in the first place.

Suddenly, all kinds of emotions swirled around inside her. Irritation. Apprehension. Resentment. Desperation. Regret over the past. Hopelessness for the future. A plan was forming in her mind to break into a Hershey’s chocolate factory at two in the morning and eat herself senseless, after which she would crawl into a corner, curl up in a fetal position and cry. At that moment, she was a psychologist’s Rolodex all crammed into one person, and that one person was ready to blow.

“So how about seven o’clock on Thursday?” Dennis said. “Any later and Mom’s arthritis starts to—”

“Don’t talk to me anymore.”

“But—”

“I said shut up.”

“But I need to be able to tell her—”

Susan slammed her tray down on the conveyor belt and spun around, skewering him with a furious glare. “Listen to me! I don’t want to go anywhere with you!”

When his eyes got all wide with surprise, Susan was sure she’d scored a direct hit. Then his face morphed into a goofy grin. “Yeah, Evie told me you always play hard to get. She said you like men who won’t take no for an answer.”

Evie was a dead woman.

He inched closer. “She also said you like a man who talks dirty.”

Susan had barely registered shock over that statement when Dennis, in the most graphic language imaginable, proceeded to tell her his fantasy about the nurse in the black hip boots and the naughty barista.

In a flurry of astonishment and disgust, Susan shoved him against a nearby wall, her hand at his throat. His eyes bugged open with surprise.

“Listen to me,” she growled. “I’m not your girlfriend. I don’t even like you. I’ve had it with you calling me at four in the morning. And the last thing I want to hear about are your sick fantasies!”