“Relax, Dev,” Britt said. “Here. I found a shirt for you.” Heck is for people who don’t believe in gosh. Devin yanked the shirt off the hanger and threw it across the men’s department.
“All right, that’s enough!” said Lu. “What’s gotten into you guys?”
Devin didn’t bother to respond, retreating into his usual fog of people-be-gone. Ollie continued to beg for the This is my clone T-shirt, making Lu’s gums ache with irritation. Britt merely smiled and held up one last shirt, one with a line she recognized instantly from the movie Jaws: I think you’re going to need a bigger boat.
Lu led her boyfriends from Carson’s and out into the mall, moving swiftly toward the bookstore. Surely there was something there that the boys could get Ward. A Dilbert calendar, the latest business book that Ward would never open, a crossword puzzle collection. A sign at the entrance of the store screamed author signing today! but no names were mentioned. Lu thought it was pretty funny.
“Look,” she said. “Anonymous author signings!”
“So?” said Ollie.
“What the hell are we doing here?” Britt said.
“Loopy! Britt said ‘hell’!” Ollie blared.
“And so did you,” Britt said.
Lu sighed. “Can we stay focused, please?” she said. “Think: Gifts for Dad, gifts for Dad, gifts for Dad. It’s your purpose, your mantra. It is the central idea around which your life revolves.”
This attempt at humor got another “Huh?” from Ollie and a blank stare from Devin. Britt, however, laughed. Britt the Fork-Tongued, Britt the Berserker, the “problem” child—the one who had gotten himself suspended from school as well as every sports team he joined—had recently become her favorite. And it wasn’t because she recognized herself in him, because she didn’t. As a girl, she had been more like Devin, hard and numb and unforgiving, dragging around her resentment like a club foot. Compared with that, Britt was sort of a macho drama queen: histrionic yet brash, a teen Tarzan. You had to admire him for it.
She watched as Britt scanned the stacks of best sellers, declaring them lame, more lame, and totally lame (not necessarily in that order). If she had been more like him as a child, a fighter, she thought, what kind of person would she be now? If she’d told her own stepmother, hand on hips, “You’re not the boss of me!” If she’d thrown a fit every time her mother tried to paint a wall or rearrange the furniture. If she had demanded from her father extravagant gifts and even more extravagant vacations but kept insisting that no one loved her enough. Perhaps if she had done all her fighting when she was young, she would have a better handle on things now.
Then again, maybe not. Maybe Britt wasn’t any more prepared for his future than she’d been for hers, for this strange job she had. Stepmother. She’d looked it up and found that the word came from some term meaning “to step in,” back in the days when regular old mothers dropped off every two minutes from consumption or exhaustion and other women had to step up to replace them, but Lu thought that it really meant something else. A step down. A step removed. A place where the children looked at you and you looked at them and all of you could see way too much.
Speaking about seeing too much, the pink and orange and black words screamed all around her—How to F&*% Like a Porn Star, How to Stay Fit Forever, Investing for Idiots—and she had to wonder if the bookstore people put this stuff out just to make all the customers look stupid. And what was with all the management books? The Three-Minute Manager, Managing for the New Millennium. Who was doing all this managing, and so very badly? She remembered that Mr. Pink Shirt told her that he’d been accepted to a management program after college. She kept asking, “But what will you be managing?” mostly because he didn’t know the answer and it made him furious.
Lu felt the vibration of her cell phone in her purse and dug around to find it. Here was another problem: these stupid phones making everyone so available to the universe, so beholden to it. She hated that the world could find her, wherever, whenever, that they knew she was like all the rest of them, filled with random thoughts about lunch meats and logistics. There were no secrets anymore. No privacy. No dignity. Every moment was a “funny” T-shirt.
“Hello?” she said, sure it was the Lowickis, clients who disliked every single one of a dozen homes she’d shown them but who still called her every fourteen seconds for an update.
“Hello, Lu. This is Beatrix. Is Devin with you?”
Lu flinched, trying to understand why Ward’s ex was calling on her cell phone when Devin’s was perfectly functional. She wondered if this was going to become a habit.
“Lu?”
“Yes,” Lu said. She felt a familiar churning in her gut, the one she got whenever she had to talk to Beatrix. She once met a woman, a second wife, who hadn’t been acknowledged by her husband’s ex in a decade. Lu knew which of the two situations was supposed to be preferable, but . . .
“Lu, can I talk to Devin, please? It’s urgent.”
“Oh! Yeah!” Lu said. “Just a second.” Urgent? What was urgent? Was someone dead? Maimed? Psychologically unglued?
She found Devin leafing through an issue of Maxim. “Devin? Your mom’s on the phone.”
Devin rolled his eyes and took the phone. “Yeah?” There was some chatter from Beatrix on the other end, and Devin replied, “No, I can’t.” More chatter, louder, pleading. “I just can’t.” Chatter, sharp and angry. “Because I can’t.” Finally, he pushed the END button on the phone and handed it back to Lu.
“What’s up?” Lu asked.
“Nothing,” Devin said. “She wanted me to come for dinner. She’s making burgers. She knows I don’t eat red meat.”
That was urgent? Lu wanted to say. Burgers? Instead she said, “Oh well. You guys can go to dinner if you want. She’ll make you something else.”
“We’re shopping for Dad.”
Peeved, Lu dropped the phone back into her purse. “I know. I mean, I was the one who talked you into coming. But you could have explained that to her instead of just saying, ‘I can’t.’ I’m sure she would have appreciated a reason.”
“I didn’t want to explain. And I don’t care what she’d appreciate.” His face hardened. “Why do you always defend her?”
Lu had the urge to burble an Ollie-like “Huh?” “I’m not defending anyone.”
“You’re doing it right now.”
“I’m just saying—”
“Right,” Devin said, rolling the Maxim into a tube and smacking one palm with it. “Are we done with this store yet?”
She felt her body stiffen involuntarily. “In a few minutes. Keep looking.”
Lu left Devin at the magazine rack and pretended to browse among the business books. She told herself that, to him, it must feel as if every adult in the world had gone mad, divorcing, changing jobs, moving, marrying strangers with weird extended families with whom Devin would be expected to make nice. Because of such things, some kids got middle-aged and exasperated before their time, bitching about their parents like soccer moms about their children. Others, like Devin, held on to their resentments, nursing them like orphaned kittens until the resentments seemed to take on their own lives, walked around on needle-sharp claws. Her own experience taught her all this, but it hadn’t taught how horrible it would feel to be on the other side. To be caring for someone else’s kid and have that kid turn around and lump you in with all the other people who have pissed him off or let him down.
She idly picked up a copy of Who Moved My Cheese? from the top of an enormous stack. The book, a parable about cheese and mice, was supposed to teach readers how to “manage change” in work and in life. Manage change! How in the hell do you do that? Lu looked around wildly for someone to share her disgust, someone other than a disgruntled teenager. Some grown-up person. A frosty-haired woman in stretch jeans stood next to her, flipping through a picture book written by someone famous, Billy Crystal or Tom Brokaw or Boris Yeltsin. “How is a book about cheese supposed to help a person man
age change?” Lu said to her.
The woman took a baby step backward. “I heard that book was good.”
“Good for what?”
She was rattled by Lu’s questions; the woman’s head shook like Katharine Hepburn’s. “My brother read it. He liked it.”
Lu scoffed. “Marry a divorced guy with kids, then talk to me about managing change.” She added a smile, hoping to show the woman she was kidding, but the woman sidled away, slipping into the travel section. Great, thought Lu, I can’t manage my cheese, and I’m scaring all the nice people.
She put the book back on the stack. She might not be much of a fighter, but she wasn’t as fatalistic as she used to be, not really. Hadn’t she traded in all those bad boyfriends for a new set, for Ward and his sons? Before she was aggressively passive, now she was passively aggressive. There was, she told herself, a huge difference between the two.
“Loopy,” Britt said, “I’m not finding anything.”
“I found these,” Ollie said hopefully, holding up some comics.
Lu looked over the comics. “And I guess those are for Dad?”
“Well . . . ,” Ollie said. “He could read them first.”
“Nice try,” Lu told him. “Let’s take a look in the back of the store. If nobody sees anything, we’ll go somewhere else.”
Lu and the boys poked through the histories and the biographies with little luck and no consensus. She was just about to suggest that they move on to Bath & Body Works for rosemary-honeysuckle shaving gel when they stumbled onto the author signing, tucked into a dark corner. A girl, no more than twenty-two or -three, sat at a table piled high with books and not one customer. Over a blue bra, the girl wore a tank top that read, Hot Young Writer, something that might have been cute if she hadn’t been so hot and so young and if her eyes didn’t have the guarded, slightly contemptuous look of the terrified. Lu felt a jolt of sympathy for the girl. Maybe she had majored in bad boyfriends, too. Maybe someone had moved her cheese.
No such compassion from the boys. A sneer buckled Devin’s lips. “She’s not hot.”
“Who’s not hot?” Ollie said.
“Shhh!” said Lu. “She’ll hear you.”
“She isn’t so young, either,” Devin added.
“What do you mean?” said Lu. “Of course she’s young!”
Britt patted her arm in the way he did when he thought she needed to have the world explained to her yet again. “Look, Loop. Mad as a box of frogs is one thing. But you can’t just go around wearing a shirt like that, okay?”
“But—”
Now Britt’s voice was gentle, pitying. “Even if you wanted her book, you couldn’t buy it. You just couldn’t.”
Out in the mall, the recycled air smelled like Pine-Sol and cloves and feet. They hadn’t bought a single gift; all they had to show for their trip were a few smiley-faced God cards and an issue of Maxim. Lu had no idea where to go next, what to try.
“Puppies!” Ollie said, shouting.
“Huh?” said Britt, just to annoy her.
In the midst of the Christmas chaos, the local Humane Society had set up some sort of pet fair. There were stacks of cages with dogs and cats and rabbits up for adoption, volunteers in matching shirts. Ollie begged to go look at the “doggies,” and Lu relented; they could all use a bit of puppy love.
Britt marched up toward the cages. “Who’s the bitch?” he said loudly. When people turned to stare, he pointed at a Welsh corgi mix. “What? I meant the dog.”
Ollie tugged on her sleeve. “Loopy, Britt said—”
“I know what he said, Ollie. Let’s pretend we don’t know Britt and look at all the doggies and kitties, ’k?”
“Doggies,” said Devin. “Geez.”
Lu couldn’t bear to see the cats—she had a thing for cats, she would have taken every single one of them, including the rabid and the feral. They focused on the dogs instead; she was sure she could resist the dogs. They petted an old black Lab, an overweight beagle, and a mutt with three legs. “He gets around just great!” a volunteer said as the three-legged dog skipped around the floor.
“What about the Welsh corgi?” Lu said, peering into the cage. “She’s cute.”
“Let’s get it!” said Ollie. “Let’s call it Corgi!”
“‘I’m with Stupid,’” Britt said.
“You’re just mad because Corgi likes me better.”
Lu looked at the dog, and the dog stared back solemnly. Probably not a purebred, but corgi enough. Corgi-ish. And not jumping around or panting or licking, which Lu liked. She herself wasn’t neat, but she appreciated neatness.
“Lu?”
Lu turned to the dark-haired woman who stood next to her, recognizing her as the mother of one of Ollie’s schoolmates. But what was her name? Something with a G. Something good-witchy, like Glinda. Oh, yeah. “Hey, Glynn.”
Glynn—who must have introduced herself to Lu on half a dozen occasions while they waited for their respective kids in the school yard and had to endure Lu’s willful amnesia every time—seemed shocked to find Lu had finally remembered her name.
“Yes!” she said as if praising a troubled student. “Glynn!”
She sounded so enthusiastic that Lu said, “Yes! Hi!”
“I thought that was you. I recognized you from the school yard. And,” she added, “from the parent-teacher conferences.”
“Right,” said Lu, face burning. At one particularly memorable parent-teacher conference, Ward and Beatrix’s husband, Alan, had had a shouting match that nearly led to blows. Lu had stood there, unable to move, almost breaking out in hysterical laughter as she noticed the hand-drawn poster that framed the men’s battle: “My Words to Live By,” the poster said. “Verbs, because they DO something!”
But Lu had heard in the school yard that Glynn was divorced and remarried herself, so maybe she had suffered her own soap opera moments. Maybe her new husband and her old husband brawled regularly at parent-teacher conferences; maybe, these days, interspousal brawling was all the rage.
“These are my stepsons, Ollie, Britt, and that’s Devin.”
Glynn smiled at Ollie. “Are you getting a dog for Christmas?”
The enthusiasm was catching. “Yes!” said Ollie.
“No,” Lu said. “We’re just taking a break from shopping right now. What are you looking for?”
Glynn pointed to a boy who jumped up and down in front of the dog cages, outpuppying the puppies. “I promised my son, Joey, a pet.”
“Why don’t you take that one?” Lu said, pointing to the corgi.
“I’m really not a dog person,” Glynn said. “We were looking for something smaller.”
“Oh,” Lu said, strangely disappointed. “How about a cat?”
“Um, smaller. I was hoping that they’d have a guinea pig. Or maybe a hamster.”
“What good is a hamster?” said Devin, oblivious to Lu’s warning glare.
“Well,” Glynn said lamely. “They’re cute. And they run around in those little plastic balls.”
“And that’s supposed to be fun?” Devin said, practically shouting. “What do you do, kick it around?”
“Devin!” said Lu. “What’s the matter with you?”
Devin turned away and turned up the volume on his Walkman, his whole body saying: Whatever.
“Sorry,” Lu said to Glynn. “I don’t know what his problem is. Normally, you can’t even get him to speak.”
“It’s all right, I understand. The boys always want dogs. I don’t know why. An unconditional love thing?”
“Yeah, maybe.” Lu scrutinized Devin for signs of implosion or explosion, but the moment seemed to be over; he was busy mumbling to the music and tapping the bars of the corgi’s cage. The volunteer unlocked the cage, and the dog stepped out gingerly. It didn’t look like the sort of dog that offered unconditional love. It looked as if it were gauging the belly rub, table food, and master bed potential of each passerby. It was scanning the crowd for just the right sucker. Come
here, sucker!
Devin murmured softly, secretly, to the corgi, ruffling the dog’s ears in a gentle way at odds with his stiff back and his permanent hostility. Behind him, Glynn observed them with a weird expression on her face, as if they were pitiful and a little depressing, but vaguely so, like news reports from distant countries. Lu didn’t think that was quite fair. Periodic brawls aside, they weren’t doing so badly, were they? Other families, regular families, didn’t look so stable, either.
Flashing Glynn an overbright, positive grin, Lu stuck her finger out and the corgi gave it a brief, velvet sniff.
“Loopy?” said a plaintive voice. “Can we go see Santa now?”
Lu estimated that the Santa line was about forty miles long, give or take a dozen.
“Why the hell did you promise to let him do this?” Britt said as they inched up another few steps. “Are you trying to kill us all?”
“That’s how I bribed him to come shopping,” Lu explained impatiently. “Just like I promised you a video game and Devin a CD.”
“Can’t me and Dev go get some ice cream or something?”
“I want you to see me with Santa!” Ollie yelled.
“This is gonna take forever,” Britt said. “Times like these, I wish I had a gun.”
A gray-haired man standing in front of them gave Britt a look, but Britt stared back boldly. “Yes? Can I do something for you? Do you need assistance? Shall I fetch an elf?”
“Shut up, Britt,” Lu said. “Sorry,” she added in the man’s general direction, but she didn’t really mean it, and the man could tell.
“You should teach your children better manners,” the man said gruffly.
“Yeah, okay,” Lu said. “I’ll get right on that.”
“We’re not her children,” Ollie added helpfully.
“She’s our wicked stepmother,” Britt said.
“That’s wicked Nazi stepmother to you,” Lu told him, enjoying the incredulous look on the gray-haired man’s face as she said it.