Treading Lightly. Elise Lanier

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      “Yeah, right. Like I’m going to tell you. If I did, you’d beg me to tell her you were in the shower again. And there’s no way in hell I’m going to do that! A favor? Yeah, right. I don’t think so,” he mumbled to himself—yet was loud enough for an ear plastered to the door to hear—before she heard him clomp back to his room, slamming his door behind him for good measure.

      She picked up her extension, clicking the button and pretending she didn’t know who was on the line. “Hello?”

      “Oh, hello dear.”

      “Hello, Mother,” she said with a definite lack of enthusiasm. Her son didn’t know how good he had it. He had no idea what it was like having a mother who was a pain in your ass. He may think she was a pain, but she was a poodle as compared to the old attack dog that was her mother.

      “You must be working on one of your little books, because I called you three times this week, and you never returned my calls.” This was great. Just what she needed. Fighting with Craig, and now her mother was sticking it to her. But, you had to hand it to Mom. In one fell swoop she had insulted her profession, her writing, her manners, and her capacity as a daughter. All with that one short sentence. Her ex could learn a lot from her mother. At least her mother ragged her quickly and efficiently. Not like Martin. He was much more slow and laborious. Quite amateurish, actually. But after a lifetime with her mother, a seasoned insult comic would appear incompetent and amateurish.

      “Sorry, Mother. I’m doing an edit. It’s hard for me to get interrupted. I need to keep focused so mistakes don’t happen.”

      “What, like your little books are as important as brain surgery that you shouldn’t get interrupted? Or are you trying to imply that speaking to me is a mistake?” Damn, she was good. Either way, Janine looked like an idiot. In so many words—or rather, so few words—her mother had once again reinforced that her books were unimportant, her career was insignificant, and she sucked as a daughter. If it weren’t so exhausting—and directed at her—she’d probably find it impressive.

      “No, Mother. I didn’t say that.”

      “I don’t know how you make your living as a writer, when you can’t clearly explain yourself in a simple conversation.”

      “Whoa, Granny. Pull in the reins! Even I think that one was a little rough, and currently I’m on the warpath with her almighty highness.”

      Janine rubbed her temples and sighed. “Craig, get off the line, would you please?” She hadn’t realized he was listening, but as the saying went, what was good for the goose was good for the gander, so she couldn’t rightly say anything, could she? Plus, she really didn’t mind. She had nothing to hide. Particularly from her son.

      When she heard the click of the phone, she assumed he had hung up. “Mother, I’ve had enough fighting for one day. Between Martin and Craig, I was at my limit before you called, and to be quite honest, I don’t have the energy or desire to contend with you right now. If you’d care to, you can try calling in a few days and hopefully by then I’ll be better equipped to handle your hostility.”

      Her mother gasped.

      “No offense, Mother,” she said as an afterthought.

      After harrumphing better than a short, round Englishman wearing a monocle, she said, “How can I not be offended, Janine?”

      With a heavy sigh, Janine said what she knew she’d have to say to get the older woman off her back. “I’m sorry, Mother. I’m under a lot of stress lately. Please forgive me.” She rolled her eyes as she said it, thankful she was on the phone and not having this conversation in person while having to keep a straight face. She couldn’t have pulled it off if she had to do it face-to-face. As it were, she was smiling wickedly and the sparkle in her eye was a dead giveaway that she was not the least bit sorry.

      CHAPTER 3

      Her mother’s phone call was long forgotten. The woman was a pain in the butt, but that wasn’t anything new. The minute she’d hung up, it was off her mind. This edit was important and she needed to finish it, so she’d worked all night. When Janine finally looked at her clock, she was surprised to see it was 2:23 a.m.

      “Guess it’s time to call it a night,” she said to herself as she shut down her computer. The eerie light it had cast no longer illuminated the surrounding space, throwing her into total darkness. Taking a deep breath, she walked out of her room, not needing any light down the short hall toward Craig’s room. She’d done this a million times before.

      A faint yellow band glowed from underneath his door, and she surmised that he’d fallen asleep with his light on again.

      Opening the door slowly so it wouldn’t creak, she gazed at her son sprawled fully dressed across his bed. She crossed the room silently, thinking he looked like an angel in repose, and knelt beside the bed so she wouldn’t wake him. Carefully she untied the laces of his government-regulation black boots and gently tugged them off. God, his feet were huge. And they stank, too! Keeping those mammoth puppies penned up in those hot, festering, black leather encasements didn’t help matters. The boy’s feet needed air circulating around them.

      With that thought in mind, she removed his wet, sweaty socks and threw a blanket over his prone body, kissing the top of his head and smoothing back his bangs as she did every night after he fell asleep.

      “Mommy loves you,” she whispered. It was her ritualistic mantra that she uttered to the sleeping boy nightly.

      She stood for a few minutes, watching him sleep, letting the sight calm her. When she felt her body relax and lose some of the strain that seemed to be ever present in her upper back, she reached over and turned the light switch off with a click.

      Closing the door silently behind her, she left his room to do the other thing she did nightly. Raid the kitchen.

      Heading straight for the junk-food cabinet to check out what was left, she grabbed a fistful of strawberry Twizzlers, and popped a stray purple jelly bean she’d found on the bottom of the shelf into her mouth before realizing what she’d just done. She spent a couple minutes trying to calculate when that uncovered jelly bean could’ve possibly been purchased, not remembering the last time she’d bought a bag of jelly beans, then quickly drowned out any possible contamination worries by scarfing down approximately thirteen licorice sticks, hoping that would obscure or perhaps overwhelm any bad pollutants the one measly grape-flavored jelly bean might’ve caused. She closed the cabinet door before padding back to her room to attempt sleep. It was hard for her to unwind when she was in edit mode. She held an entire novel in her head, and needed to make sure every thread, every action, every sentence fit perfectly. It took her almost two hours, but by approximately four in the morning she finally fell asleep.

      As she’d tossed and turned, she had again been struck by the relative ease at which she could make things work out perfectly on paper, but in her real life, her existence was a mess. Try as she might, she couldn’t control things as she could in her books. And anyone who knew her would agree that she always tried. It wasn’t that she was a control freak. Well, maybe it was. But things just never seemed to work out for her the way they did for her characters.

      For example when she woke up the next morning, she’d trodden into the kitchen, eyes crusted over with sleep, hair sticking out haphazardly on the right side and plastered against her head on the left, heading for the coffee machine. He was her only true love now—Mr. Coffee. At least at that hour. Ben СКАЧАТЬ