“We go downstairs,” he repeated, a little louder the second time, “have dinner with our friends, and take turns checking on the girls every half hour. How’s that?”
Caroline’s head was spinning. She was horrified at his casual comparison to her mother, having spent her entire life determined to be anything but like her mother. And she didn’t want to disappoint him, especially when he’d gone out of his way to plan something special. The restaurant was literally right under their noses. They wouldn’t be gone long. “I don’t know…”
“You do know. We’ll be right downstairs, we’ll check on the kids every thirty minutes, they won’t even know we’re not here.”
“You promise everything will be all right?”
Hunter took her face between his hands and kissed her tenderly on the lips. “I promise,” he said.
“Mom? Mom, are you home?”
Caroline heard the front door open and the words race through the downstairs hall and up the ivory-carpeted stairs toward her bedroom, as if actively searching for her.
“Mom?”
Caroline opened her mouth to speak, but thought better of it and said nothing. If she didn’t answer, maybe Michelle would assume she wasn’t home and go away. Although she knew even before she heard the footsteps on the stairs that Michelle was unlikely to give up so easily. Her daughter was as relentless as she’d always been.
“Mom?”
Caroline could feel Michelle standing in the doorway, peering into the darkness of the bedroom, her eyes burning into her back.
“Mom?” Michelle said again, flipping on the overhead light. “What’s going on? Didn’t you hear me?”
“I heard you,” Caroline said.
“You heard me but decided not to answer?”
“I…,” Caroline began, then stopped when she could think of nothing significant to add.
“What’s the matter? Are you sick?” There was something vaguely accusatory in Michelle’s tone.
Caroline shook her head. It was a tone she was used to.
“Then what are you doing? Why didn’t you answer me? Why were you just sitting here in the dark?”
Caroline shrugged. She hadn’t noticed the darkness. When had that happened? “What time is it?”
“Almost seven o’clock.”
“What are you doing here?” Caroline asked.
“What do you mean, what am I doing here? You invited me to dinner, remember?”
“You said you were busy.” Caroline swiveled around on the bed to face her daughter, surprised as she always was by how thin Michelle was, and biting down on her lower lip to keep from voicing this thought out loud.
“I was,” Michelle said. “Then I thought you might…Never mind what I thought. What’s going on? Bad day at school?”
“I didn’t go to school.”
“Why not?”
“Just didn’t feel like it.”
“You didn’t feel like it?” Michelle repeated, taking a few tentative steps into the room. “That doesn’t make sense. You always feel like it.”
“I didn’t feel like it today.”
“Why not?” she asked again.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
Caroline shrugged. Was Michelle going to repeat everything she said? “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I want you to tell me what’s going on. You’re acting very weird. Did you have a fight with Dad or something?”
“No.”
“Is this about Mackenzie?”
“Mackenzie?”
“Dad’s new baby,” Michelle said with more than a hint of annoyance, as if they’d been over this many times—and perhaps they had.
“No.”
Michelle stood at the foot of the bed, shifting from one foot to the other and looking everywhere but at her mother. “So, what happened? You sounded normal this morning on the phone when you were lecturing me about my responsibilities. And you’re dressed for work, so you were obviously intending to go.” Her eyes drifted to the newspapers strewn across the unmade bed. “Was it the article? The pictures? I mean, you can’t be too surprised. This happens every year. You’ve kind of learned to go with the flow…”
“It’s not the article or the pictures.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve been sitting here all day and you have no idea why? I don’t believe you.”
“Michelle…”
“Mother…”
“Please, Michelle. I don’t want to argue with you.”
“I don’t want to argue with you either.”
“Then let’s just drop it, shall we?” Caroline pushed herself off the bed and took Michelle in her arms, hoping to silence her. Instantly she felt her daughter stiffen. Caroline took a deep breath, forced a smile onto her face. “So, where do you want to go for dinner?”
“How about that new raw place over on Bayshore?”
“Raw? As in not cooked?”
“It’s all organic. Very healthy.”
“I’m sure it is. Just doesn’t sound all that…”
“Forget it,” Michelle said.
“No. I’ll give it a try.”