This Christmas (8 page)

“You seem…happy.” Eddie realizes, with a pang, that it’s true. Sarah does seem happy, and it never occurred to him that she could be this happy with him gone. Nor does it occur to him that she may be this happy because he’s back.

But it occurs to Sarah. For the first time in years it occurs to Sarah.

“I am happy.” Sarah nods. “This job has been incredibly fulfilling. I feel as if I’ve found myself again. Do you know what I mean?”

Eddie looks quietly at her. “I do. I’m not going to lie to you and tell you I’m happy, but I’ve found respect for myself again. I’ve got more energy than I’ve had in years and I feel like a young man again. Before…I felt middle-aged. I felt like my life was over, and now I feel that it’s beginning again.”

Oh, God. Sarah feels a jolt. Maybe he’s met someone new. Maybe he has a girlfriend. The thought had never occurred to her before now, but then again the Eddie she remembered wouldn’t have had the energy to go out and find himself a girlfriend, much less have the ability to attract one.

But this Eddie? This is the Eddie that chatted her up at that Halloween party all those years ago. This Eddie would have no problem attracting women. And, hell, even Sarah knows how big the singles scene is in Chicago. She’s just never thought that anyone would be interested in Eddie.

“Have you…?” She has to ask. She swallows hard. “Have you met anyone?”

Eddie widens his eyes in disbelief. Is she kidding? He spends every night missing Sarah, figuring out how to get her back. But maybe she’s asking because she has? It’s the one scenario he hadn’t pictured, hadn’t prepared to deal with.

He shakes his head and Sarah feels relief flood over her. “You?” he says, trying to sound as casual as possible.

Sarah thinks about her brief flirtation with Joe the contractor and smiles. “No.”

And now it’s Eddie’s turn to feel relieved. There’s a long silence as both of their eyes meet until Sarah smiles and looks away, her heart pounding. This is the last thing she expected to happen. This is a date. It feels just like a date. She feels excited, and nervous, and scared. She’s sitting opposite her husband of eight years, ever so slightly drunk, and she’s wondering whether he might be thinking of kissing her.

And as she imagines him bending down to kiss her she feels a shiver of excitement and she flushes.

“Are you okay?” Eddie asks.

“Fine,” she whispers, attempting a seductive smile, which comes out rather crookedly, thanks to the alcohol.

Eddie stands up. Here it comes, she thinks. Here he comes. Back home where he belongs. And her heart stops.

Eddie stretches, then checks his watch. “I’d better go,” he says. “I’ve got to be at the Inn.”

Sarah takes a deep breath. “Do you want to stay the night?”

There’s a long silence. Too long. Eddie’s trying to figure out what she means, trying to figure out whether his heart should be leaping with joy or whether he’s misinterpreting what she’s asking, and Sarah feels sick.

“I didn’t mean
that
,” she says suddenly, blushing, even though that’s exactly what she meant. “I meant in the spare room. Just so you could be with the kids in the morning. It just seems silly for you to go to the inn now. It’s so late…this makes more sense.”

“Oh, sure,” Eddie says, disappointed. “Okay. Great. I’ll just go and get my stuff. Oh, and Sarah?”

“Yes?”

“Thank you for such a special evening. For letting me be with the kids. For being so great about everything.”

“Oh. You’re welcome.” Sarah forces a smile. Damn. This isn’t the way she wanted it to go. “I’ll go and make up the bed in the spare room. Sleep well.”

“Sarah?” Eddie’s voice is soft as Sarah turns expectantly from the doorway. “Merry Christmas,” he whispers, and she smiles at him uncertainly and wobbles upstairs on unsteady feet to make up the bed in the guest room.

Walker and Maggie sleep in, given that it’s Christmas Day. At 5:45
A.M
. they get up and scramble downstairs to the Christmas tree. Maggie knows instantly that the huge box contains her Barbie jeep, and Walker is delighted that Santa heard him and gave him the robot
and
the light saber. They are both even more delighted that Santa clearly enjoyed his cookies and milk.

“Mommy! Look! Santa got me web shooters!” Walker bursts into Sarah’s room, already in full Spiderman costume, Maggie following closely at his heels as Walker climbs on the bed.

Eddie rolls over with a smile. “Shhh!” he says, getting out of bed and leading the children into the hallway as he gestures to Sarah, sleeping soundly on the other side of the bed. “Mommy and Daddy had a very late night. Let’s go and make breakfast for Mommy, okay?”

“Okay, Daddy.” Walker and Maggie each take a hand as Eddie leads them out of the master bedroom and downstairs, and lying in bed Sarah smiles. She may not have known what she wanted for Christmas, but Santa certainly did.

Please turn the page for an exciting sneak peek of

Jane Green’s

THE OTHER WOMAN

now available in hardcover from Viking and
coming in trade paperback from Plume in
June 2006!

Pulling a sickie is not something I’m prone to do. And, while I’d like to say I feel sick, I don’t. Not unless prewedding nerves, last-minute jitters, and horrific amounts of stress count.

But nevertheless this morning I decided I deserved a day off—hell, possibly even two—so I phoned in first thing, knowing that as bad a liar as I am, it would be far easier to lie to Penny, the receptionist, than to my boss.

“Oh, poor you.” Penny’s voice was full of sympathy. “But it’s not surprising, given the wedding. Must be all the stress. You should just go to bed in a darkened room.”

“I will,” I said huskily, swiftly catching myself in the lie—migraine symptoms not including sore throats or fake sneezes—and getting off the phone as quickly as possible.

I did think vaguely about doing something delicious for myself today, something I’d never normally do. Manicures, pedicures, facials, things like that. But of course guilt has managed to prevail, and even though I live nowhere near my office in trendy Soho, I still know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that should I venture outside on the one day I’m pretending to be sick, someone from work will just happen to be at the end of my street.

So here I am. Watching dreadful daytime television on a cold January morning (although I did just manage to catch an item on “updos for weddings,” which may turn out to be incredibly useful), eating my way through a packet of custard creams (my last chance before the wedding diet goes into full acceleration), and wondering whether there would be any chance of finding a masseuse—a proper one—to come to the house at the last minute to soothe the knots of tension away.

I manage to waste forty-five minutes flicking through the small ads in the local magazines, but somehow I don’t think any of those masseuses are what I’m looking for: “guaranteed discretion,” “sensual and intimate.” And then I reach the personal ads at the back.

I smile to myself reading through. Of course I’m reading through. I may be about to get married but I’m still interested in seeing what’s out there, not that, I have to admit, I’ve ever actually gone down the personal-ad route. But I know a friend who has. Honestly.

And a wave of warmth, and yes, I’ll admit it, smugness, comes over me. I don’t ever have to tell anyone that I have a good sense of humor or that I look a bit like Renée Zellweger—but only if I pout and squint my eyes up very, very small—or that I love the requisite walks in the country and curling up by a log fire.

Not that any of that’s not true, but how lovely, how lucky am I, that I don’t have to explain myself, or describe myself, or pretend to be someone other than myself ever again.

Thank God for Dan. Thank you, God, for Dan. I slide my feet into huge fluffy slippers, scrape my hair back into a ponytail, and wrap Dan’s huge, voluminous toweling robe around me as I skate my way down the hallway to the kitchen.

Dan and Ellie. Ellie and Dan. Mrs. Dan Cooper. Mrs. Ellie Cooper. Ellie Cooper
. I trill the words out, thrilling at how unfamiliar they sound, how they will be true in just over a month, how I got to have a fairytale ending after all.

And, despite the cloudy sky, the drizzle that seems to be omnipresent throughout this winter, I feel myself light up, as if the sun suddenly appeared at the living-room window specifically to shine its warmth upon me.

The problem with feeling guilty about pulling sickies, as I now discover, is that you end up too terrified to leave the house, and therefore waste the entire day. And of course the less you do, the less you want to do, so by two o’clock I’m bored, listless, and sleepy. Rather than taking the easy option and going back to bed, I decide to wake myself up with strong coffee, have a shower, and finally get dressed.

The cappuccino machine—an early wedding present from my chief executive—shouts a shiny hello from its corner on the kitchen worktop, by far the most glamorous and high-tech object in the kitchen, if not the entire flat. Were it not for Dan, I’d never use the bloody thing, and that’s despite a passion for strong, milky cappuccinos. Technology and I have never got on particularly well. The only technological area in which I excel is computers, but even then, now that all my junior colleagues are messing around with iPods and MPEGs and God knows what else, I’m beginning to be left behind there too.

My basic problem is not so much technology as paper: instruction manuals, to be specific. I just haven’t got the patience to read through them, and almost everything in my flat works eventually if I push a few buttons and hope for the best. Admittedly, my video recorder has never actually recorded anything, but I only ever bought the machine to play rented videos on, not to record, so as far as I’m concerned it has fulfilled its purpose admirably.

Actually, come to think of it, not quite everything has worked that perfectly: The freezer has spent the last year filled with ice and icicles, although I think that somewhere behind the ice may be a year-old carton of Ben & Jerry’s. And my Hoover still has the same dust bag it’s had since I bought it three years ago because I haven’t quite figured out how to change it—I cut a hole in it when it was full one time and hand-pulled all the dust out, then sealed it back up with tape and that seems to do the job wonderfully. If anything, just think how much money I’ve saved myself on Hoover bags.

Ah yes, there is also the superswish and super-expensive CD player that can take four hundred discs at a time, but has in fact only ever held one at a time.

So things may not work the way they’re supposed to, or in the way the manufacturers intended, but they work for me, and now I have Dan, Dan who will not lay a finger on any new purchase until he has read the instruction manual cover to cover, until he has ingested even the smallest of the small print, until he can recite the manual from memory alone.

And so Dan—bless him—now reads the manuals, and gives me demonstrations on how things like Hoovers, tumble dryers, and cappuccino machines work. The only saving grace to this, other than now being able to work the cappuccino machine, is that Dan has learned to fine-tune his demonstrations so they last no longer than one minute, by which time I’ll have completely tuned out and will be thinking either about new presentations at work, or possibly dreaming about floating on a desert island during our honeymoon.

But the cappuccino machine, I have to say, is brilliant, and God, am I happy I actually paid attention when Dan was showing me how it worked. It arrived three days ago, and thus far I’ve used it nine times. Two cups in the morning before leaving for work, one cup when I get home, and one, or two, in the evening after dinner, although after 8:00
P.M
. we both switch to decaf.

And as I’m tapping the coffee grains into the spoon to start making the coffee, I find myself thinking about spending the rest of my life with only one person.

I should feel scared. Apprehensive at the very least. But all I feel is pure, unadulterated joy.

Any doubts I may have about this wedding, about getting married, about spending the rest of my life with Dan have nothing whatsoever to do with Dan.

And everything to do with his mother.

J
ENNIFER
C
OBURN

Maybe it was the holiday spirit. Maybe it was pity. All right, if I’m being entirely honest, my motives were driven primarily by self-interest. But if my plan worked, everyone would get a happy ending. Reilly and me. Prudence and whomever.

It’s not as if I was plotting the downfall of my new husband’s ex-wife. I didn’t want her dead—or even injured. I simply wanted her remarried and off the market. More specifically, I hoped that if she had a new man in her life, it would eliminate any crazy ideas she might have about reconciling with Reilly.

My friend Gwen proposed the idea as a joke when we spoke earlier in the evening. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Finding a new husband for Prudence seemed like a perfect way to get her out of my life.

To be fair, it wasn’t as though Prudence was stalking Reilly. In fact, I hadn’t even seen her since my wedding to Reilly six months ago. She came to the ceremony with her friend Jennifer, a six-foot tall African American woman with a penchant for dressing in costumes from Broadway shows. Thankfully, Jennifer stuck to a simple cobalt blue slip dress at my parents’ beach house reception. Just last year at her own wedding, she wore the Kristin Chenoweth’s cast-off from her role as Glinda the Good Witch of the North in
Wicked
.

Anyway, back to Prudence. It was my idea to invite her to the wedding so we could establish some sort of neutrality. We weren’t going to be best friends and form the Wives of Reilly Lunch Club, but I did want to make a gesture to let her know I didn’t consider her the enemy either. After all, it was she who was indirectly responsible for Reilly and I meeting.

Last winter I took a class called Cooking without Recipes at the 92nd Street Y, and Prudence was there with some friends. She seemed nice enough, and I felt sorry for her because the teacher kept shouting at her to release her plan. No one knew what the woman was talking about, least of all Prudence, who later got a pretty serious cut while chopping vegetables blindfolded. (Don’t ask, it was a very weird class.) A few weeks later, I was dining out with my mother when I saw my cooking classmate at another table with an attractive man. The kind who could fasten his necktie while carrying on a phone conversation. The kind of guy I’d go for. Prudence stopped at our table and we all chatted for a few minutes—just long enough for me to discover that her handsome dinner companion was so much more than just another clean-shaven face. Reilly O’Shaugnessay was one of New York’s most highly regarded, ragingly successful international businessmen. And, thanks to Prudence’s indiscretions, Reilly was brand spanking new to the singles market. The two were out discussing the terms of their divorce. I’ve heard of the Casserole Circuit, where ninety-year-old women in Miami show up at mourning widowers’ homes claiming they were friendly with the deceased wife when in reality they’d actually just read the obituary section of the paper. So in comparison, flirting with the soon-to-be divorced Reilly seemed appropriate. Plus, Prudence seemed to be almost cheering us on, as though she had a personal stake in Reilly and me getting together. Little did I know how right I was.

Get this: Reilly’s nut job of an ex-wife went off for a college reunion in Ann Arbor, Michigan, had a weekend fling with an old boyfriend; and accepted his marriage proposal—while she was still married to Reilly! Instead of coming home and letting Reilly down easily, Prudence got the harebrained idea that she would secretly find him a new wife. I know, I know, I’m planning a gender-swapped version of the same scheme, but Prudence took it too far. She hosted a singles party and gave away free mugs with Reilly’s picture on them. He told me she had his face printed on white chocolates with cards beside them inviting women to “Have a Reilly—he’s delicious!” That’s simply not normal behavior. When I set out to find Prudence a new husband, it’ll be done more tastefully. There will be no mugs. No chocolates. No wild parties. Just a simple, professional regional search for the ideal new husband for Reilly’s ex-wife. Then, I can relax and we can all peacefully coexist as happily married, completely unavailable couples.

I never thought I’d find myself so wound up with thoughts of Prudence coming back to haunt my marriage. It’s so incongruous with who I am, who I’ve always been. My parents proudly dubbed me a “cool customer” on my first day of kindergarten. My classmates shrieked with horror and wailed tears of deep mourning as their parents left them in the classroom. After my mother knelt to kiss and hug me at the door of Mrs. Ellenson’s classroom, I gave a modest smile, crisply turned my maroon leather Buster Browns, and told her, “That will be all.” It was a phrase I always thought sounded terribly sophisticated when my mother used it on waitstaff or our cleaning women. I’d maintained this contained demeanor throughout my life, and it’s served me well. It matched my solid color sweater sets and sensible shoes. Hand wringing wasn’t my style, but these days I found myself neurotically obsessing about Prudence, imagining she was plotting a hostile takeover of my marriage.

If I had to pinpoint the exact moment I started thinking about Prudence lurking in the shadows, it was Thanksgiving Day when Reilly and I were at my parents’ home. As we drove through the neighborhood, there were three homes listed for sale. The yard signs were all from the same real estate brokerage—Prudential.

At Thanksgiving dinner, Reilly advised my father that investing in securities right now wouldn’t be prudent.

The next day, my editor at
The Wall Street Journal
assigned a three-part series on the new direction of the Prudential Life Insurance Company.

When the kids returned to school, Hunter’s first-grade teacher, Mrs. Polly Friedman, went on maternity leave and was replaced by Miss Prudence Cantor. I felt like Jan Brady in
The Brady Bunch
episode where the middle child was lamenting that she was constantly compared to her older sister. At her wits end, Jan shrieked, “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!” That’s how I felt. But the Bradys’ first daughter’s name was replaced by Reilly’s first wife’s—Prudence, Prudence, Prudence!

When Reilly and I were dating, I was the picture of poise, listening to the horror story of Prudence’s affair and subsequent wife hunt without the bat of an eye. I never bad-mouthed Prudence or her actions. I simply encouraged Reilly to explore his own feelings and watched him untangle himself from the rage he justifiably felt toward her. I was so proud of how emotionally disengaged I was from the whole thing. As I mentioned, it was even my idea to invite Prudence to our wedding. My dear, often brutally honest, friend Gwen suggested that my invitation was not, in fact, an act of generous composure but, rather, unseemly gloating. “Inviting Reilly’s ex-wife to your wedding is ludicrous!” she snapped when I told her. “You may think it makes you look like the Patron Saint of Second Wives, but it’s transparently rubbing the woman’s nose in your happiness.”

Honest to God, this was not the case. Gwen was usually spot on with her observations, which was one of the things I simultaneously loved and hated most about her. This time I thought she was wrong, though. Having Prudence at the wedding was not intended to make me appear gracious. Okay, maybe a little. Far more important, it was a symbolic gesture that would mark a new era in Reilly’s life, one where he was so emotionally disentangled from his first marriage that having his ex-wife attend his second wedding wouldn’t have the slightest effect on him.

A colleague of mine—one of those unfortunate thirtysomethings living a protracted adolescence—said something that summed up this sense of detachment quite well. As her chandelier earring bobbed about, she said of her failed relationship, “I’m
so
over it.” Looking like somewhat of a wedding cake in her three-tiered lace miniskirt, Serena said she would never give her ex-boyfriend a second thought. Having Prudence at Reilly and my wedding was a way of saying to the world,
We’re so over Reilly’s first marriage
.

Gwen said that if I were truly over it, I wouldn’t have ever even contemplated what her presence would or wouldn’t mean to others. “If you’re so ‘over it’ why are you even thinking about her?” she asked. At the time, I dismissed Gwen’s comments. I figured we didn’t see eye to eye on this one. We’d been friends since she moved to New York in our freshman year of high school. In the twenty years we’ve known each other, we’ve respectfully disagreed on many issues without it ever getting ugly. I nodded as she gave me her opinion and went about my merry way, knowing Gwen was utterly mistaken about my wedding invitation list.

After I’d battled the snow and arrived home that evening, I knew I’d have about an hour to myself because Reilly had taken Hunter, my six-year-old, to Rockefeller Center to ice-skate. In less than a year, Reilly had become the ultimate hockey dad, sans the screaming fights with hairy, beer-drinking fathers. Frankly, I would have preferred that Hunter take up tennis, or even soccer, but after his and Reilly’s first Rangers game, Hunter insisted we find him a peewee team. Of course, tonight my boys wouldn’t chase each other around with sticks, but join a hundred or so New Yorkers and visitors as they enjoyed skating against the familiar backdrop of the enormous Christmas tree and golden statue of Prometheus.

I plugged in the light cord behind our family Christmas tree, filling our home with the perfect holiday ambiance. Through the oversized living room window of our brownstone, I watched the streetlights illuminate the snow falling through the periwinkle sky. In this quiet moment, I thought about what Gwen had said last summer and realized she may have had a point. Six months after Reilly and my wedding, I was feeling anything but “over” Prudence Malone.

Everything about our home suggested the season had changed. Our tree sparkled with tasteful white lights buried deep in the branches of our tall evergreen. I was thrilled when Reilly hung my familial hand-carved, painted, and blown glass ornaments a good four inches into the tree, instead of plunking them onto the branch ends, as my first husband did. I begged Rudy not to do this because it made the greenery look depressed. I told him repeatedly that hanging ornaments at the very tip of the branches made them sag—and showed the hook. As was the case in most of our marriage, Rudy didn’t really care all that much how I felt and proceeded to do it exactly as it served him. My insistence on inset placement of tree ornaments sounds highly anal, I know, but everyone deserves a few areas in life where things are done properly. And properly means
her
way. But I digress. Not only did everything inside our home indicate that six months had passed since our summer wedding but also outside: women wore wool coats with muffs to match the fur trim. Kids wrapped raspberry-colored wool hats around their heads and ears. On every corner, Santa Claus rang a bell and shouted, “You’re his wife now, Sarah!” Obviously, I stretch the truth for emphasis, but you get the point. Seasons had changed for everyone else but me. All of the Christmas decorations were just that—decoration. I wasn’t filled with my usual holiday spirit.

Typically I loaded ten holiday CDs in the player and kept it going as our seasonal soundtrack. This year, I dragged myself to our music selection to find something tolerable. I dreaded going to Saks, one of my all-time favorite holiday spots. And the only party I planned to attend this season was the one I’d just been to at Hunter’s school.

Though I’ve thought about her nearly every day this past month, I was especially preoccupied with Prudence because I just found out that one of her close friends is a mother at Hunter’s school. As luck would have it, this woman’s twins are in Hunter’s class. Miss Cantor was leading the children in a song about the happy little snowflake, and Reilly rushed in and parked himself in the small wooden chair beside me. He pecked my cheek, then did a double take when he saw the J. Lo-sexy mother standing near the window. She seemed to recognize him as well and gave him a friendly, but not overly enthusiastic, wave. After the happy little snowflake melted, the woman approached us. Reilly immediately greeted her as Sophie.

“You must be Sarah!” Sophie said warmly. She wore a form-fitting cream cashmere top, a herringbone skirt with buttery leather boots, and a funky purse. Reaching a soft manicured hand toward me, she said she’s heard so many nice things about me. I smiled as we shook hands. “From Prudence,” Sophie finished.

“Sophie and Prudence are friends,” Reilly filled me in. “She was a cohort in the whole, well you know,” he said.

Sophie smiled her obnoxiously white teeth at us and said she hoped Reilly didn’t hold a grudge. “It all worked out for the best, didn’t it?” She smiled. “You know how Prudence is. Heart in the right place, head in the clouds.” Reilly smiled as if to say there were no hard feelings and placed his hand on my shoulder. A normal person would have taken some comfort in this gesture. The real me would have seen how clear it was that Reilly was with me 100 percent. I silently reminded myself that Prudence had never so much as phoned our home to ask Reilly about the heating system in their loft. Instead of finding peace in this and Reilly’s measured interaction with a woman who’d helped plan a find-a-new-wife theme party, I was unsettled by the way Prudence was creeping her way into my life. Now every blessed morning when I saw Sophie for school drop-off, I’d be reminded of Prudence.

Something had to be done. At home that evening, I lit the fireplace, sank into the chaise, and called Gwen. She always knew what to do. And when she didn’t, she acted as if she did, which for me was deeply comforting, as it reminded me of my mother. “You need Paxil,” Gwen immediately shot when I told her about seeing Sophie at Hunter’s class holiday party.

Rolling my eyes with my voice, I said, “You’re simply hilarious, Gwen.”

“I’m quite serious. You’re creating undue anxiety for yourself, Sarah. Every day, you call me and ask if I think Reilly’s having an affair with his ex-wife, despite the fact that there’s not a shred of evidence to suggest he is.”

“It’s a hunch,” I snapped. “Doesn’t women’s intuition count for anything anymore?”