Friday Mornings at Nine (15 page)

Bridget took in all the information and readily agreed to do whatever she could to help—talk with Evan, her other children, her husband. She zombied her way through Keaton’s conference (thank goodness she’d had Cassandra’s the night before) and rushed to her car, calling Graham on his cell phone while still in the school’s parking lot.

“Okay, okay, Bridget. Calm down. We’ll figure out what’s going on with Evan,” her husband said, sighing. “You get too emotional. He’s just a growing boy. Moody like the other two. It’ll sort itself out, so just relax, would’ya?”

Relaxing wasn’t in the cards for Bridget. Easy for Graham to tell her to calm down! A problem like that didn’t just “sort itself out”—a parent had to help. She fumbled in her purse for a licorice twist and a pack of gum. Then she chomped agitatedly until she thought she could drive safely. It took ten minutes, one Cherry Twizzler and two pieces of Trident Cool Mint before that happened.

Tamara, meanwhile, was nowhere near any of the Glendale Grove schools. In an odd (for her) tea choice, she was working her way through a rather large pot of Berryblossom White and losing herself to the sentimentality of
not
getting to go to parent/teacher conferences this year.

For the first time since Benji had been five, she was home on this day with not a single teacher expecting her. A whole day with no one to tell her what a smart, amiable, creative son she had. And it just sucked.

She’d heard some nonsense once about women who cried when menopause hit and they stopped getting their periods. Sobbed like infants, for chrissake, right in the middle of the Tampax aisle. Even now she rolled her eyes thinking about it. She planned to drink a pitcher or two of raspberry-lemon-drop martinis when
that
blessed day occurred.

But nobody had told her to prepare for
this
day. Nobody had ever said, “You’re gonna be a wreck while every other mother in town is listening to some fifth-grade dragon lady criticizing their child’s spelling or a leather-skinned industrial arts teacher praising their kid’s birdhouse. Make yourself some soothing tea, buy yourself a box of tissues and don’t talk to anyone. It’ll be embarrassing.”

And, of course, Jon was away again. Indianapolis this time. Not that he’d be nearly as affected by missing out on conferences as she was. He’d barely made it to one in four when Benji was a kid, and he hadn’t gone to a single one when their son was in high school.

She blew her nose and poured another cup of tea, envying Jon the distraction of his job. Perhaps the time had come for her to really consider getting out there again. She had an MBA after all. She was marketable. Mostly. Not that she’d used any of her business skills in years—at least not to further her own career—but they were still there. Just waiting until she was ready to pull out her portfolio and unleash them. With the economy the way it was, a lot of people who’d been out of the workforce for a while were going back if they could get a position somewhere. She’d be proud to be one of them.

She pulled out a sheet of lined paper and began listing anything that could legitimately fit on her résumé:

• BS degree in marketing from University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign, 3.86 GPA.
  
• MBA from Northwestern University, 3.73 GPA.
  
• Three-month summer marketing internship at Lewis, Darvis & Webstock in Chicago.
  
• Two years experience in the marketing-promotion department at Tower Graphics, Evanston (part time, while in grad school).
  
• Nineteen years of working a room for her husband at incredibly boring law firm cocktail parties and supporting his career.
  
• Excellent PTA negotiating skills as evidenced by a new playground, a revamped hot lunch program and the best Teacher Appreciation Brunch in a decade (when Benji was nine).
  
• Top-notch Boy Scouts fund-raiser—sold LOTS of popcorn tins and holiday wreaths (when Benji was twelve).
  
• Can type…pretty fast.
  
• Has no problem—morally or physiologically—with two-martini lunches.
  
• Likes dress clothes.
  

Okay, well, maybe she’d have to reword everything after her time at Tower Graphics, but at least this was a start.

What other skills did she have?

She could coordinate outfits pretty well, grow vegetables and a handful of robust flowers, use Microsoft Word and Excel, e-mail attachments, fax documents, collate, copy, talk on the phone—

The knock on the door startled her. She hadn’t been making any noise and there were no house lights on (well, it was ten-thirty in the morning). Maybe, if she sat really still, whoever was there would leave.

Or not.

Three more knocks followed, louder this time, followed by a ring of the doorbell.

With a sigh, she forced herself out of the kitchen and to the door, where she spotted Aaron through the side window.

Oh, boy.

“Hey,” she said, swinging the door open and noticing the brown bag he had clasped to his chest. “What’cha got in there?”

“Just some my-produce-is-better-than-yours proof.” He grinned. “The bag’s kinda heavy. Can I set it down for you somewhere?”

She squinted at him. It didn’t look
that
heavy, but she said, “Sure, thanks. There’s an open spot on the kitchen counter.” And she stepped back so he could come in.

Once he’d set down the bag, he opened it, rummaged through half of it and pulled out his first offering.

“Just take a look at this.” He held up a perfect, soccer-ball-sized pumpkin. “Happy October, neighbor.”

“Wow,” she said, genuinely impressed. “Suitable for painting, carving or reenacting
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
”

“Damn right.” He sifted through the bag some more, this time unearthing two smallish cantaloupes. “What d’ya say to this?”

“Braggart.” But then she thought about what she was seeing. “Those
grow
in the Midwest?”

He looked triumphant. “Yep. I’ve got five more of ’em in my kitchen. They’re small, but pretty tasty, if you let them ripen.” His hand dipped into the bag yet again.

“Lettuce?” she guessed, staring at his latest retrieval.

“Cabbage,” he corrected, setting it down on her counter before pulling out two beautiful zucchinis, several bunches of broccoli, a smattering of Roma tomatoes and a small spray of wildflowers, which he handed right to her. “I lied. I do have poppies and a few wood violets. No buttercups, though. But I keep them hidden in the backyard. It was an experiment. I used one of those floral seed packets from the grocery store,” he explained. “Didn’t turn out too badly, though.”

She stared at him.

“You’re not allergic or anything, are you?”

She shook her head, swallowed and then instinctively brought the bouquet to her face. She inhaled. It was odorless, but still—she nearly hugged the blossoms. It’d been so long since anyone had brought her flowers. Even for an occasion as innocuous as this one. “Thanks, Aaron,” she murmured.

He grinned, crossed his arms and struck a confident pose. “Well, there you go, Ms. Smarty Pants. How’re you gonna beat that?”

“Well, I don’t know yet, Mr. Green Giant, but I
will.
” She wrinkled her nose at him, then turned to fill a tall glass with water for the wildflowers. “A marginally impressive little show you just put on.”

“Marginally impressive?”
he cried with mock indignation. “That was a slam dunk, and you know it.”

She relented and laughed, which was not how the game was played, of course. If she were totally
en pointe,
she would have teased him for far longer. Made him work for any hint of defeat and her ultimate admission. Been nonchalant. Feigned obvious boredom. Dragged out the charade so it’d be more fun for him. But she couldn’t hack the simplest of tasks that day. Not even elementary level flirting. “You caught me at an off hour,” she confessed. “I’m truly at a loss for words.”

He took a step back, dropped the alpha male pose and raised a dark blond eyebrow. “Everything okay?”

Her gaze shot to the piece of paper/pseudo résumé on the other end of the counter. “More or less.”

His gaze followed hers, squinting to read her heavily slanted scribbles. “Job search?”

“Maybe.” She snatched up the sheet before he could get to the embarrassing stuff farther down the page. “So, working at home. Pros? Cons?”

His expression turned thoughtful. “Kinda depends. On you. On your relationship.” He exhaled for somewhat longer than she thought necessary before continuing. “Not to be sexist about it, but some of the disagreements Isabelle and I had over it might not affect you because you’re a woman and Jon is already accustomed to your being at home during the day. For men, it has its challenges, though more guys are doing it now, so it isn’t seen as quite so strange. Still, I worked for a company for a couple of years before I launched the magazine. Isabelle had a hard time adjusting to my suddenly being home when she wasn’t. She resented having to be the one to go out on cold mornings, start the car, deal with the commute, put up with the social dynamics of the people at her law firm and—”

“Jesus, she was a lawyer?”

“Yep. Was and still is.” He rolled his eyes and couldn’t hide a painful grimace.

They shared a moment of mutual, though nonverbal, commiseration. It was hard being a lawyer’s spouse. At least with certain lawyers. Draining to always have to put on a show for the other people in the firm, who—let’s face it—often looked down on a stay-at-home mom as being a dependent slacker. She had spent her entire marriage struggling to prove to most of Jon’s colleagues that she wasn’t “a brainless housewife” (one of Jon’s partner’s favorite terms), and even then they would usually dismiss her as soon as someone more interesting showed up.

Heaven only knew how many little digs guys like that would have given Aaron at those tedious cocktail parties. How, in major ways and minute ones, they would have shown how little they respected someone who wasn’t wearing a tailored suit and clocking billable hours at a “real” office somewhere, no matter how successful he was at home.

“For you, it might be win-win. Though it’s still a
career,
” he said cryptically. “There can be other issues you won’t be immune to.”

“Like?”

“Like knowing when your workday is really over. It’s tempting to check your e-mail ‘just one more time’ or fix ‘one last document’ or make ‘only one super-quick phone call.’ And, before you know it, it’s eleven o’clock and you haven’t had a conversation with your spouse about anything other than the mundane operations of the house.”

“I can see how that could happen,” she said.

“Also, there are other people who don’t understand how much you actually do need to work. They don’t realize you have to call clients or freelancers during regular business hours. That you might be less rigid as far as timing, but not all the people you work with have the same flexibility.”

She agreed. And, though she didn’t tell Aaron this, she’d heard Jon make such assumptions about his few nontraveling, corporate-lawyer buddies who worked from home as consultants. Jon still considered this to be a cushy job for “old” men. Something done for fun in between golf games.

“Pros, though, are many,” Aaron said. “You do set your own hours. You base your work on what’s most significant to you. You can more easily screen out phone or e-mail distractions—or at least postpone them to more convenient times. You can work on your garden for an hour before lunch and mull over project ideas or take your dog for a walk when he needs to run around. If you need to schedule a root canal in the middle of the week, you don’t have any hoops to jump as far as taking time off or filling out paperwork. But, unless you work for an established company, you also don’t get any built-in health or dental insurance, paid vacation time or other special perks. I’m sure you know that.”

She bobbed her head. She loved the way he logically ran through the details and was willing to explore all the options with her, but he didn’t do it condescendingly. He accepted without question her intelligence as being sound, and he treated her immediately as an equal. The law spouted off about equal opportunities and mandatory women’s rights and blah, blah, blah, but that didn’t mean this was her day-to-day experience. Not by a long shot.

“There are financial issues to remember, also. Start-up costs and such that you’ll want to explore with your husband, because they can be seriously high at first.”

She’d run into Aaron the week before and, when she told him about her aunt’s death, he expressed his condolences and asked her about the funeral services. She told him about Al and about her few days in Vermont. She did not, however, tell him about Aunt Eliza’s will, and the inheritance bequeathed to her. As the details had yet to be divulged to the other recipients, Tamara hadn’t mentioned the sum to anyone. Jon hadn’t asked, but even
he
didn’t know the full projected amount once estate taxes and other fees had been deducted. Tamara, however, knew her start-up costs wouldn’t be an issue, even if Jon didn’t agree to spend a cent.

“The deal is,” Aaron said, “if you can learn to maintain some kind of balance that works for you, working at home is a beautiful thing. The flexibility, the control, the environment, the opportunity to mesh your real life with your work life and tailor your unique skills to a career you largely create…it’s phenomenal. For me, it helps me stay passionate about what I do. Since I’m accountable for everything, if I’m finding I hate some aspect of my job, I can’t blame that dissatisfaction on the boss in the other office. I have to work to either creatively fix the problem or to eliminate it.”

“How long did it take you to achieve a balance like that?”

He paused, his gray blue eyes scanning the ceiling unseeingly as he considered. “A little over three years.” He shrugged. “Most of my marriage.”

“Ah,” she said.

After Aaron left, she read through her résumé, such that it was, again. She wasn’t without skills, no matter how little experience she’d had in the corporate world. But much of what Aaron said appealed to her, especially since she could fashion numerous aspects of a new career to the abilities she did possess, slowly building up her experience and, eventually, taking on work opportunities she might not be privy to now. She’d always wanted to be a marketing consultant. To help small businesses look their best. To get their products recognized and purchased by the right buyers.