Not This Time
17
As Time Goes By
WE GOT THROUGH the summer. I kept selling, but I started consciously trying to make more time for my family. It was just so hard to do it all. I considered dropping out of school in the fall, but chose to change my hours instead. I started working only three days a week and added Friday to my days off. That didn’t mean that I didn’t work Tuesday through Friday. It meant that I didn’t go to the office. I was still likely to get called to show a unit or to close a sale. But I was trying to make sure that Emily had a mommy who was home for her and that it was me. I’d successfully battled two grandmothers who wanted to take her from me in my first life. Now I was battling myself.
“Slacking off?” Jim asked when I came in on Saturday morning in November.
“See any signs that sales are slowing down other than the usual move into winter?” I responded caustically.
“Not so much. Just watching for signs of burnout. You’ve been at it for almost two years. I don’t think you’re Superwoman.”
“Is my cape wrinkled?”
“No. Perfectly starched and pressed, just like your skirt, your blouse, your jacket, and probably your panties,” Jim said. “Ease up and let’s talk.”
“About what?”
“I’m worried about you. Wait. I know I don’t have the right to be concerned about your personal life or whether you take vacations. You perform on the job. You sell condos. Sales are higher than expected for this time. I’m wealthier than I have a right to be and am looking for places to put my money. You’ve been good for me. I’m just concerned that I’m not good for you,” he said. “Something has been eating at you for a couple of months. It’s almost Christmas and we should be planning a party, not stressing out over whatever it is that has you stressed.”
I sighed. Jim was right. He’d been more than an employer and source of product to sell. He’d even given me a place to stay when I first got to town. I supposed I owed him an explanation.
“How do you do it, Jim?” I asked. “How do you balance managing a couple thousand units, construction crews, rental office, and maintenance? How do you do that and have a life?”
“That’s where I can be more of a bad example than a good example,” he said. He opened the door to his office and I went in with him. Jim didn’t have a desk and credenza or a lot of decorations on the walls. Hell, he still wore a blue mechanic’s shirt with his name embroidered on a patch over the pocket. He had some comfy leather furniture that just screamed MALE! at you. There was a table if the meeting required one. A big TV was in one corner and I noticed that it silently displayed the Financial Network with a stock ticker crawling across the bottom of the screen. In one corner was a small dorm-size refrigerator with a coffee pot on it. He poured two cups and set one on the side table next to the chair he gestured me to. Then he plopped down across from me and sighed as he took a sip.
“I feel like I’ve been invited into the spider’s web,” I said, looking around.
“I don’t have a kitchen here and I don’t eat young women unless I’ve cooked them first,” he laughed. “Look. I don’t even have a couch. No place in my office that a woman could be assaulted. I learned that lesson long ago.”
“Really?”
“When my accountant told me I’d made my first million, I got pretty full of myself. I figured I could have anything I wanted and that would include the young women who seemed to fawn over rich older men. When I lost my first million, my accountant pointed out to me that my wealth was on paper and if I continued to split my liquid assets with random young women in order to keep them from suing me, I wouldn’t have enough left to rent one of my own apartments.”
“What did your wife think of that?”
“She agreed to a promissory note for half the valuation of the business at the time of our divorce.”
“So, you paid her off and she left you, too,” I sighed. “I could end up in the same position.”
“You could,” he said. “I finished paying my wife off fifteen years ago. But I never stopped paying her. She thinks the monthly payments are still paying the initial settlement. Maybe that’s my guilt talking.”
“You’ve made fifteen years of monthly payments above and beyond your divorce settlement and she doesn’t realize it? I find that hard to believe,” I scoffed. What kind of an airhead did he marry in the first place?
“There are special circumstances. Her second husband left her after their Down syndrome child was born. He abandoned her. I didn’t have the heart to. I think she knows on some level. We talk occasionally. But money is all I had to give her. My business had my soul.”
“God, Jim, that sounds so bleak. Is that what I’m headed toward?”
“I guess that depends on you,” he laughed. “What I know is that I’d do it differently if I had to do it over.” That hit me like a slap in the face. Isn’t that what I swore to do? Do it differently.
“I hope you don’t get that opportunity,” I said. “I don’t believe that hindsight is 20/20.”
“I think the important thing is not to try to second guess it,” he said. “Just look at your life and tell me what is important to you. Go ahead. Try it. What is important to you?”
“My daughter,” I said immediately. “And Bruce and Lily. My job. Getting through school. I guess being comfortable in my life.”
“Great,” he said. He grabbed a tablet and wrote down what I’d just said and handed it to me with the pencil. “That’s the list you just gave me. I believe the order you put things in when you think of them is the order of true significance. Now put a number next to each of those from one to five that shows how much you invest in each of them. Think of your investment in terms of time, money, emotion. What do you invest the most in?”
I wanted to just write 1 2 3 4 5, but I knew that was a lie and I knew he’d recognize that as well. I invested a lot more in my job than in anything else. I almost put Emily number two, but realized that the reason I invested so much in my job was because I wanted a comfortable life. Then Emily and Bruce and Lily. Finally, school. I started crying.
Damn it! Even when I was pregnant and alone and Jim gave me a place to live, I’d never cried in front of him. But there was the truth. My precious daughter ranked number three and my lovers number four.
“I think you need to reprioritize where you invest yourself.”
I couldn’t just abandon the business and I knew Jim didn’t want me to. He was making a huge amount of money from my work. And I would be letting Gordon down, as well. And my family needed the money. The comfortable life was for them. That’s what I told myself.
But I had to admit that the motivating factor for that was that in my former life, I’d felt powerless and having my own business and money was a way to take the power back.
I went back to the list that Jim had written down for me and decided to reconstruct it. I needed to define what each of these things meant. And I was going to start with my daughter. What did I want?
I wanted the dear sweet relationship that I’d had with my little girl in my former life. We’d been playmates. I rescued her from the evil grandmas and played games with her. In some ways, I suppose, she was my little dolly. I dressed her up. We had tea parties. We went to the playground. And as she grew up, we became co-conspirators as we talked about her friends and school and even the boys she dated.
She was sixteen when she asked to borrow the car so she could go bird-watching with a friend. I’d probed and she’d admitted the friend was a boy, but he was really a bird-watcher and wanted to show her what was in the park.
“Honey, did he ask you to go to the park and watch birds with him?” I asked softly. She nodded. “And you are going to go and meet this boy in a park to spend the afternoon with him?” She nodded again. “Doesn’t that count as a date? Like your first date? Ever?”
“Um… I guess so,” Willa mumbled.
“I’m so happy for you!” I said. She looked up at me startled. “You have your own transportation, so you can come home whenever you want to. You know that you never have to do anything or go anyplace with him that you don’t want to. You’ve made this grown up choice to go on a date with a boy you like. Be grown up about any other choices you have to make.” Willa threw herself into my arms and hugged me.
“I love you, Mom!”
“Of course you do! Give me a call if you are going to be later than seven tonight. Tomorrow’s a school day. Besides, I’ll be worried about you the whole time you are gone!”
“Don’t worry, Mom!” Willa assured me. “I’ll be home by seven.”
That was the kind of relationship I wanted with my little Emily. But I didn’t have to steal her away from evil grandmas. Bruce and Lily loved her as much as I did and were good with her. I didn’t want to cut them out. Which meant that we all four had to conspire together to give Emily the kind of life we wanted.
Number two on my list was harder. I knew what I could have in a relationship with my daughter because I’d had it before. I didn’t know anything about good relationships with other people. In all my former life, I hadn’t even fantasized about a relationship. I didn’t read romance novels because there was no romance in my life and I didn’t believe any of the stories.
Even now, I was skeptical of romance, in spite of all the evidence I had to the contrary. I’d let myself be romanced by Bruce and by Lily. But I hadn’t really done anything except in response to them. That almost fit a model of being passive aggressive. The only time I’d asserted myself with them was when I was hurt because they were making love to each other without me. I needed to fix that. I needed to show them that I loved them more than everything in the world.
I had no idea how to do that.
It would start at dinner. For the family.
Emily and I played tag, hide-and-seek, and peek-a-boo until the toddler dropped from exhaustion. I made sure she was dry and comfortable and put her in her crib. Then I started in the kitchen. It wasn’t going to be a fancy meal, but I could make spaghetti and meatballs with the best of them. I reached for the phone to call the office and then snatched my hand back. They had my number. If anything was wrong at the office, Renata would call me. I looked through the cabinets and found that we had a bottle of Chianti. I uncorked it and let it sit. I made the meatballs and got the sauce going. The smell of garlic filled the kitchen. Now that Emily wasn’t drinking from my breasts, I went a little wild on the garlic. I lowered the temperature to simmer and cook off the extra liquid.
She woke up about half an hour before Lily was usually home. I changed her and quickly bundled her up to run to the IGA. There I bought a baguette and salad makings and rushed home again. I stirred the sauce while Emily was still in the carrier, thankful that I caught it before it stuck to the bottom. I smeared butter, garlic, and parmesan on the split baguette and got it ready for the oven. Lily got home just as I finished.
Emily and I rushed to kiss her as she came through the front door. I could tell she was tired.
“Tough day, sweetheart?” I asked.
“Oh, you know how it goes,” she responded. “You try to help everyone. Unwed pregnant girls with no money. Have to do what you can for them.”
“You didn’t!” I laughed.
“No. This one was male. He was flagged by the new computer system because he is failing all his classes. I called him in for an interview. The poor kid was a wreck. I mean he was crying when he came into my office. Said he knew he was failing and he was sorry. Like he was apologizing for personally letting me down.”
“He sounds miserable. Has he been partying all semester?”
“No. He moved up here from Illinois to start school just at the time his father was diagnosed with cancer. He’s been driving to Illinois every other weekend and working his butt off at a job here to pay for the trips and to help his mother. He just couldn’t do everything and his schoolwork took last priority.”
“Poor kid. Are you able to do anything?”
“We’re working on it. The first is to enter a family emergency withdrawal for him so his classes don’t affect his admission or acceptance. That has to have the agreement of all his professors, so my work for the next few days is cut out,” Lily said. I led her to the sofa and brought her a glass of wine. “What’s this for?”
“It’s because the second most important person in my life is having a bad day and I want her to have something special,” I said.
“Still behind Bruce, aren’t I?” she sighed.
“No, silly.” I put Emily in her arms. “You are behind our baby. But only just barely.”
“But… Bruce?”
“He’s also my second most important person. I hope you don’t mind.”
“You’re too much,” Lily giggled as Emily slobbered on her. “I love you.”
“Please don’t ever forget that I love you, too,” I said as I kissed her. Emily almost got squished.
“Oh wow! I think I’m going to have to clean the sofa again,” she sighed.
“I’m sure when Bruce gets here, he’ll happily help clean some things up for you,” I said. “I’ll help, too,” I whispered.
Bruce arrived before Lily had finished her first glass of wine and got the same treatment. I ran out to put the bread in the oven and the pasta in the boiling water. Then I called my family to the table.
“You’re being so domestic today,” Bruce said. “This is delicious! I love spaghetti and meatballs!”
“Not exactly a four-star restaurant, but I wanted you both to know how much I love you. How was your day at the shop, Bruce?”
“My TAs finally have a handle on managing the crews, so I don’t think I’ll have to be there every second next term. If I can just get them to label things and read what is on the label,” he laughed.
“What happened?” Lily asked.
“We used flex glue to coat the Styrofoam blocks for the stone walls so we could paint them,” he said. “Flex glue comes in five-gallon containers, so I had them pour some out in empty gallon cans to make it easier to handle. Someone capped a gallon can without labeling it. So last night, Carol came in and followed exactly my instructions to have her evening crew put a clear coat on the newly painted parquet floor design that took me most of the weekend to paint.”
“Uh-oh,” I said.
“You guessed it. The flex glue was in a can labeled Kleer. They painted the entire floor with glue.”
“Oh, no! Do you have to do it all over?”
“Fortunately not. The flex glue dries clear, it’s just dull as dishwater. We did a sample on a portion today and putting Kleer over the top of it brought the painting back to life. We had a couple class discussions about labeling cans properly,” Bruce laughed. “David has the crew tonight and believe me he knows which can has the right stuff in it.”
After we had cleaned up the dishes and everyone got a chance to play with the sleepy baby, I took my lovers to bed and tried very hard to show them how much they were loved.
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