Better Off Without Him (Romantic Comedy) Read online

  Better Off Without Him

  Dee Ernst

  Copyright 2010 Dee Ernst

  Chapter One

  April, in general, is not a good month for me. Here in northern New Jersey, April can either be awash with daffodils or buried under a foot of snow, and waiting to see which way it will go kills me. I hate the April version of winter –some days, that nip of spring teases the air and gets you thinking about warm sunshine, but mostly it’s just cold enough to be miserable. The snow turns black and ugly in about six minutes, and the salt used on the roads gets in between the pads of my dog’s feet. Ever try washing the feet of a 60-pound lump of wet fur? Whimpering, quivering wet fur? No fun at all.

  On the flip side, what if it does get warm and sunny right away? That whole process of morphing out of winter woolies and sweaters and scarves that successfully hid my entire body for four months and getting into clothes that not only show skin, but also rolls, pouches, wrinkled knees – it’s excruciating.

  Then, of course, there’s the whole tax thing.

  Let’s not even discuss my allergies.

  So it stands to reason that any given April day will not be a particularly good one. But the day my husband Brian told me that he was leaving me for somebody 15 years younger and 30 pounds lighter was the worst.

  That morning, Daughter the First, the 16-year-old, bitchy, bossy one, screamed from her upstairs bedroom that she had no clean clothes to wear, so she was not going to school. Since she, like her two younger sisters, is responsible for her own laundry, I screamed back that it was not my problem and she could go to school in her pajamas for all I cared, but she’d better be out of the house in fifteen minutes. She then came down stairs in full make-up and her pajamas.

  “Miranda. Go upstairs. Put on real clothes.”

  “These are real clothes.” She was wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a camisole.

  “No. Those are pajamas.”

  “You just told me I could wear them.”

  The space right behind my eyeballs started to heat up. “What?”

  “Just ten minutes ago, you said I could go to school in my pajamas for all you cared, as long as I got out of the house on time. You just said it, Mom.” Her face was full of sudden concern. “You’re not starting to forget things, are you?”

  “No. Of course not. I remember what I said. I just didn’t mean it. I was being facetious.”

  She walked over to the cupboard, pulled out a bowl, walked to another cupboard and found the cereal. The look on her face was one of fierce concentration. “What does that word mean again?”

  “You know damn well what it means. It means I won’t let you out of the house in pajamas.”

  “Just the bottoms,” she pointed out.

  “That still counts.”

  “All the girls wear them. Not just to school, either.” She went to the refrigerator and pulled out the milk. “Remember the girls we saw in Kings?”

  Yes, I remember. I remember thinking, at the time, that I’d die of embarrassment if my daughter walked around in public looking like she had just rolled out of bed. I also remember telling my daughters that I would lock them in a closet before I would let them walk around looking like that. Did Miranda remember that?

  “Don’t you remember what I said about that? About locking you in a closet?”

  She shrugged. “You didn’t mean it.”

  “Yes. I did.”

  She defiantly poured Cocoa Puffs into a bowl. “I thought you were being facetious. Besides, I have nothing else that’s clean.” She poured some milk as I counted to ten.

  “What about that outfit we just bought last weekend? The one with the camouflage skirt?”

  Daughter the First, also known as Miranda Claire Berman, shrugged expressively. “I won’t wear that. It’s ugly.”

  “Then why did I spend all that money buying it for you?” I asked, although I should have known better.

  “Well, I liked it in the store. But when I tried it on at home, it was really awful.”

  “And what,” I continued, simply because I had to hear her answer, “is the difference between here and the store?”

  She chewed, then swallowed. I could see that she was actually giving this some thought. “Maybe the light?” she suggested at last. “Yeah, I think the lights that they have in dressing rooms are trick lights so that everything you try on looks really cool, but when you put the same clothes on in, like, real daylight, it looks crappy. So I can’t wear it.”

  And this is the girl who has problems in school, they keep telling me, because she’s not working up to her potential. Any human being who can come up with an idea like that should be working in a brain trust.

  “Real clothes, Miranda,” I said in my best I’m-only-saying-this-once-then-I’m-killing-you voice. “Jeans. Or a skirt. Or Dockers. Not jammy pants. Then bring down the ugly outfit so I can take it back to Macy’s for credit. Now.”

  Miranda knows when she can push and when she has to back down, so she actually dropped her cereal bowl and spoon into the sink before she flounced out of the kitchen in a subtle display of teen-age compromise. I stirred lots of sugar into my coffee and waited for the second wave.

  Daughter the Second and Daughter the Third are only separated by eight minutes, but that counts for a lot when you’re fourteen. Daughter the Second is very sweet. Daughter the Third chews nails for breakfast then spits them out at people all day long. When they were little, they were kept in separate classrooms in school because they were impossible to tell apart. But sometime around the age of ten, distinct personalities began to develop. Now, to the casual observer, they could be two completely separate species.

  Lauren, the older and infinitely wiser, combs her shining, soft brown hair into neat little braids or pony tails, applies some mascara and clear lip gloss, then descends into the kitchen smiling, her books in a neat pile by the door, her jeans freshly washed and actually ironed – which, I must admit, bothers me just a little- and her T-shirt always clean. That bothers me a little too, but she actually kisses me on the cheek every morning as part of her morning routine. I tend to overlook a lot of her little foibles.

  That particular morning, I could see a happy kitten face beneath her grey hoodie, and her hair was in a long braid. She carefully measured oatmeal and water into a bowl and set it in the microwave, then smiled as she poured her orange juice and said, in her very sweet, little-girl voice, “I put our DNA in Johnson already. Is that okay?”

  I smiled. Of course it was okay. For those who need a translation, Johnson is our mini-van. I call it Johnson after the actor, Van Johnson. I am a huge movie fan, and I watched a lot of old movies on television when I was a kid. The DNA she was referring to was the science project she and her sister had been working on for the past six weeks. The science teacher put a number of acceptable projects into a hat, and Lauren and her sister Jessica, who are both very smart in science and are lab partners, pulled out the DNA model as their project. Jessica, with her warped sense of humor and her innate ability to take any mundane activity and turn it into something that will drive everyone crazy, insisted on a very large-scale model. The finished project was over five feet long and about as graceful to maneuver as a herd of water buffalo. So I was driving them both to school that morning.

  On cue - that is, late - my youngest, my baby, my last chance of attaining perfection, clumped down the stairs. Jessica can’t help clumping. She really can’t. Her feet are encased in Doc Marten boots that are designed to protect SWAT team members from having their feet shot off by bazookas. But they are black, so they match the rest of her outfit, which is, of course, the important thing. Her pants, cut raggedly below
the knee, are black. Her long-sleeved button-down shirt is black. The heavy eyeliner and clumpy mascara is black – are we all getting the picture? And her hair is black, the kind of dead, dull, artificial black that can only be bought. Very cheaply. Speaking of hair, her haircut is very one-of-a-kind, but for anyone who would care to duplicate it, here’s how it’s done.

  1) Bend over, brushing your long, silky, beautiful hair straight down.

  2) Gather all your hair together and fasten with a rubber band, as close to the scalp as possible.

  3) Still bending over, grasp the hank of hair about three inches from the rubber band with one hand, and with the other hand, using very dull scissors, cut as close to the rubber band as possible.

  4) Remove rubber band, stand upright, and shake your head.

  5) Leave all the cut hair on the bathroom floor.

  6) Mix one application of GothGirl Hair Color #666, Your-Mother-Will-Scream Black, in the bathroom sink, making sure to get a few flecks on the walls.

  7) Apply half the bottle to your newly shorn head, leaving the rest to drip over the hair on the floor.

  8) After rinsing, let hair dry without benefit of conditioner, gel, mousse or blow dryer.

  Ta-dah! The Jessica!

  Jessica growled. She’s not a morning person. She poured herself a cup of coffee, which she drank, of course, black, and started taking apart a bagel with her blackened fingertips, putting very small bits into her mouth a little at a time.

  “I need a favor,” she said. “It’s really important.” She was slouched against the counter, squinting at the sunlight like a vampire.

  I sighed. “No,” I told her, “you cannot get a tattoo.”

  “That’s not it.”

  “And you can’t get your nose pierced either.”

  “Wrong again, Mom.” She sighed and munched more bagel, then and asked, very casually, “Could I sleep at Billy’s Friday night?”

  Billy is her so-called boyfriend. He’s a year older and lives six blocks away. He walks over to see her on the weekends and they go out for walks, sometimes into town, where there are places to eat and have coffee. He’s a very quiet kid, with long hair that hides most of his face most of the time.

  I put my coffee cup down very carefully. “Did you just ask me to spend the night at Billy’s?”

  She shrugged. “Yeah. He’s having a sleepover party.”

  “A sleepover party?” I looked over at Lauren for some sort of verification. Lauren was actually nodding.

  “Yes, Mom,” Lauren said. “A lot of kids are having boy-girl sleepovers. It’s kind of the new thing.”

  I was trying not to hyperventilate. “Who else is invited?”

  Jessica shrugged again. “I don’t know. Kids. Jill, I think, and Avery. Maybe Matt.”

  “And his parents are going to be home?” This was sounding more interesting all the time.

  “Don’t know. Maybe.”

  “What are all of you going to do?”

  “Don’t know. Listen to music, watch a few movies, I guess.” She shook her hair away from her eyes so she could actually look at me. “We’ll stay up all night, Mom. It’s no big deal. It’s not like we’re all going to be having sex or anything.”

  “Well, of course not,” I said heartily.

  “So, can I go?”

  “As soon as I speak to Billy’s mom, and Jill’s mom, and of course, your father, whom I’m sure will be thrilled with the idea.”

  “Mom.” Jessica started to whine. “You can’t tell Daddy. He’ll flip out. Can’t you tell him I’m at Jill’s or someplace?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry honey, but what if I get struck by a bus on Friday night and am in the hospital dying? You father would want to be able to bring you to my bedside so you can say a last good-bye. He needs to know where you are, Jessica. I don’t lie to him about stuff like that.”

  She slammed down her coffee mug, then threw her bagel across the room where it landed, surprisingly, in the trashcan. She stormed out, muttering under her breath. I looked at Lauren.

  “So, parents are actually letting their kids sleep over with members of the opposite sex?” I asked.

  Lauren put her bowl and spoon in the sink. “Yes. It’s okay, I guess, because everybody is in a big room together, and if anything was going on, everybody would know about it, and that would be really embarrassing, you know?”

  I smiled, but was not convinced. I didn’t think that a teenage boy, faced with the prospect of getting some, would consider embarrassment a major obstacle. Lauren went upstairs and I sighed into my coffee cup.

  I love my children. I really do. And I still have some control over their actions. But I can’t help feeling that one day they’ll figure out that there are three of them and only one of me, and it will be all over, like when the great lioness is taken down by a pack of lowly hyenas by force of their sheer number.

  I drained my cup of coffee and began to put the girl’s dishes in the dishwasher. I turned the kitchen tap slowly, then breathed a sigh of relief as clear water gushed out. Some days, that’s a real cause for celebration in our house.

  Earlier that morning we had a plumbing event. The claw foot tub in the girl’s bathroom made a noise and coughed up something that looked like rusty water. That happens a lot. We live in a very old house, which is what I’ve always wanted to live in, but there’s a downside to high ceilings and beautiful hardwood floors, and that downside usually involves problems that can only be solved by highly paid professionals.

  We’ve lived in this great, big old house for about eighteen years, and it’s almost finished. Brian and I originally thought that it would be fun to get an old fixer-upper and do all the work together. You know, bonding. However, older houses have things like plaster walls, so just trying to hang a picture requires expensive tools and titanium screws. We soon found it easier just to pick up the phone and ask for estimates. All our common living areas are beautiful, as are most of the upstairs bedrooms. The master bath has one lone toilet and lots of exposed beams, not to mention various lengths of copper pipe. And the walk-up attic, which is supposed to be my sanctuary, has plywood covering all the windows, because the windows haven’t been actually ordered yet. It’s not money that’s the issue, but time, energy and the red-hot blood-lust that’s needed to actually find the antique window store located down some dark alley in a strange little town and make the decision between four-over-four or six-over-six.

  Why do I need a sanctuary? Because I’m a writer, and all writers need someplace quiet, peaceful and totally theirs where they can go to relax and be inspired. Actually, I’m an award-winning, New York Times bestselling author. Now, before you rack your brain, trying to think of that beautifully written family saga that got short-listed for the Booker, or the thriller that Robert Redford optioned as his Next Big Thing, let me explain to you that the New York Times has several bestselling lists. There’s the hardcover fiction and non-fiction list, the Holy Grail of lists. Then there’s the trade paper, fiction and nonfiction lists. Trade paperbacks are those books that you think are hardcover because they’re the same size as a hardcover, but they’re really soft cover, and infinitely cheaper to publish. Then there’s the mass market list. Mass markets are your basic small-enough-to-stash-in-your-purse sized paperbacks. That’s the list I made. I hung on to the number one spot on the mass market original paperback list for almost four months with one of my favorite titles, Passion At Dusk.

  Yes, I’m a romance writer. When I started almost twenty years ago, romance novels were pretty much delegated to the back corners of bookstores. Since then, it’s grown to be quite a respected, not to mention lucrative, genre. I write under the name of Maura Van Whalen, because my real name, Mona Quincy Berman, doesn’t have a very romantic ring to it. Because I was a history major in college and am a sucker for old, moldy ruins and rusty swords, I write historical romance. Maura’s heroines are usually raven-or-auburn haired women with fair skin, clear green eyes and warm trembly lips. They
are usually named Clarissa, Isabella, or Honoria, have amazing breasts, and are strong-willed and daring. Their brooding, handsome counterparts are usually Drake, Trane or Lord Aubrey Sinclair.

  Being a history major, I’m big on historical accuracy, which is tough when you’re writing not only about history, but about sex. Way back in the day, women were having all kinds of sex all over the place, pretty much the same as today, but the only ones who admitted it were the prostitutes, and, of course, royalty. I like to have to get my characters married off in the first chapter or two, often unwillingly, so they can then be separated and/or put through some trying ordeal together during which they realize how much they really do love each other. I write about a lot of arranged marriages, which were, in fact, very common among the gentry. I also like to throw in the occasional Duke who must hand over his gorgeous and willful daughter as payment of a gambling debt to an unscrupulous but amazingly hunky blackguard.

  Lately, though, I’d been wanting to write for the twenty-first century, which would allow my characters to sleep with each other without even knowing each other’s names. Their names would eventually be something like Chloe, Zoey, Colton or Paco, and they would have exciting jobs like magazine editors or undercover drug enforcement agents. I even had a new nom de plume picked out, Monique B.

  As for my awards, well, let’s say that there are roughly a gazillion groups out there related to the romance business, and they all love to have conferences and conventions, and prizes are awarded for everything from best plot, pluckiest heroine, or most frequent and imaginative use of the word “cock”. I have a number of these awards. Considering what these awards represent, you’d think they’d be shaped like a giant, erect penises, or maybe upright and breathtakingly full breasts. Instead, they are very abstract in nature, and tend to look like falling stars, soaring comets, or something a dog may have thrown up.

  Speaking of dogs, and throwing up, that morning as the girls were heading out the back door, I heard Miranda mutter, then, moments later, Jessica growl. Lauren called over her shoulder about something gross on the floor. I wasn’t paying a lot of attention because I had my head down, trying to dig the keys out of the bottom of my purse. Then I stepped in something. It was soft and made a squishy kind of sound. I closed my eyes and sighed. Fred had left me another treasure.