Chapter 16

Sarah was all smiles when she walked into my house without knocking. She found Liz and me in the kitchen cutting up some fruit.

I wore my usual casual clothing ... a pair of cutoff sweatpants and a ratty old T-shirt. Liz was stuck with what was in her travel bag so she was a lot more stylish. Her white shorts were form-fitting without being obscene and she wore a scooped-neck pullover with blue and white horizontal stripes. The heels she would have worn to complete the outfit were at least five inches high.

“Mutt and Jeff,” Sarah remarked.

I gave her a glance out of the corner of my eye and nudged Liz with my elbow.

“I think she just called you a dog,” I said.

“I heard,” Liz replied as she fought a smile.

“That’s not what I meant!” Sarah said.

“Well, ‘ruff, ruff, ‘ I guess,” Liz said. Her voice sounded sad but only I could see that she was struggling to keep up the façade.

“No!” Sarah said.

“I could see if she called you a bitch but, I mean, a mutt? That’s just harsh,” I said.

“Travis!” Sarah said in a harsh growl. As with most things, I’d seen her do the same thing to her children. She spoke without parting her teeth.

“Hey, you’re the one that came in and starting calling names,” I said. “You know, Liz has a knife in her hand. She could probably kill you and get away with it.”

“Totally,” Liz said, unable to contain her laughter any longer. She turned and laughed harder at the look of indignation on Sarah’s features.

“You asshole,” Sarah said – to me, not to Liz.

“He said you’d just walk in like you owned the place and make a wisecrack about how we were dressed,” Liz said, wiping a tear from her eye.

Sarah had crossed her arms and was glaring at me.

“You love me and you know it,” I said with a laugh.

“You might want to bring a food taster to dinner tonight,” Sarah said, her anger dissipating rapidly (as it always did).

“Dinner?” Liz asked, looking over at me.

“He didn’t tell you?” Sarah asked with evident glee. “He invited himself to dinner at our house tonight.”

“So you can meet the boys and Marcie – Matt’s mom,” I said. “She’s a fan.”

“Oh, so I go from a dog to a show pony that you trot out to impress all your friends,” Liz said with a raised eyebrow.

“What?” I asked. “Oh, no, Marcie’s a fan of me. She doesn’t give a shit about you. I just have to take any woman I spend time with over to meet her so she can offer a critique. What did she call Yvette? A skanky whore?”

The last two questions were directed at Sarah and she laughed.

“She totally did,” she dished.

“She’s like the world’s coolest grandma,” I said, smiling. “She’s what, 53 or so?”

“Wait until I tell her you said that!” Sarah replied, happy to turn the tables on me. “She’s 51. She was 18 when Matt was born. I swear, if she had met Travis 10 years ago, she’d have been all over him.”

“If she had met me 10 years ago, people probably would have thought I was the one robbing the cradle,” I said. “I swear, most of the time she looks like she’s 40 and acts like she’s 20!”

Sarah shifted her gaze to my guest.

“Matt is the middle child,” she told Liz. “Aaron was born when she was 16. She had three kids before she turned 21 and then her husband just wandered away one day. She didn’t get to have much fun until the last one was out of the house. But Travis is right. She’s very fond of him. If she wasn’t friends with his mom, she said she’d totally go cougar on him.”

Liz tilted her head downward to peer at me through her lashes as I blushed bright red.

“Now she’s hoping he’ll still be single when her daughter retires and moves back here so she can hook them up,” Sarah continued, unabated by my embarrassment. “Carrie is 31. She’s been in the navy since she turned 18. She’s stationed over in Norfolk. She really is great. It sort of sucks for me, though. My mother hated her mother-in-law; my grandmother hated her mother-in-law; I get stuck with St. Marcie the Great. Aaron lives in Oregon and she doesn’t see his kids more than two or three times a year. Carrie isn’t married and doesn’t have kids yet. So Marcie loves my boys like nothing else. That’s for sure. She took a day off work today so we could go to the concert last night. Travis would be lucky if he hooked up with her – even if it would be creepy to have him be my father-in-law!”

Liz was still looking at me through her lashes.

“Well, Travis didn’t tell me he was so ... popular ... with the ladies,” Liz noted with a smirk directed toward me.

“If you think Marcie is bad, wait until Saturday!” Sarah continued. “There is a mother and daughter that live right behind him. If they see him out on the deck, they will both race to put on their bikinis so he can have some visual entertainment. The mother is probably in her late 30s and the daughter might be 16 or 17. I know that’s why Matt likes to come over to visit on the weekends.”

“Huh?” Liz said as the smirk on her face grew slightly.

“It gets him out of my hair so I don’t mind,” Sarah continued. “Last summer, I bought a bikini just like one of theirs. It took him until the end of our vacation to figure out where he’d seen it before.”

“So,” Liz said, “apparently I’m not the only one with cross-generational appeal. Daughters, mothers, grandmothers ... huh.”

“I...” I began to protest before I saw the look of humor in Liz’s face. “What can I say? I figure I might give the daughter a couple of more ice cream seasons then invite them over with Marcie to see if we can make our own porno movie. I’m sure it would sell as well as the 69ers against the Fudge Packers.”

“Travis!” Sarah said through gritted teeth again.

“I know a good videographer you can use,” Liz said, as she elbowed me in the ribs. “But you might want to keep your plans a secret from Matt – and probably his mom.”

“Matt, yeah,” Sarah said, shaking her head at the thought of having a conversation of this nature in my kitchen with Liz Larimer. “Marcie would probably try to recruit the others just because she would think it would be wild. She’s been skydiving; she drove a Formula 1 car at 130 miles an hour. She wants to take private pilot lessons. She comes along with us anytime we go to an amusement park. If there is something a 50-year-old shouldn’t do, she does it. You’ll really like her, I think.”

“I’m sure I will,” Liz said.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” I said. “It sort of slipped my mind with everything else.”

“Everything else?” Sarah asked, looking between Liz and me.

I was about to tell Sarah it was none of her business when Liz slipped her arm around my waist. Just as she had done the night before, she turned my lips until she kissed me.

Even if the kiss didn’t feel wonderful, the look on Sarah’s face would have made it worthwhile. Her mouth had dropped and her eyes were wide. Her head jerked from Liz to me almost like a cartoon.

“I’m not the type to sleep with a guy and then just toss him aside,” Liz said with a wink at my stunned friend.

“You guys...” Sarah stammered. “You and him...”

“Yep,” Liz said with a giggle.

“No,” I said at the same time.

“I seem to recall waking up in the same bed as you about an hour ago,” Liz said, returning to the smirk. “Do I have that wrong?”

“Well, yeah,” I said. It was my turn to shift my attention from one to the other. “But...”

“But nothing,” Liz said.

“Wait!” Sarah said. “I mean, I guess it’s not my business but...”

“It’s not,” I said pointedly.

“We’re discussing the prospect of seeing where things go,” Liz told her anyway. “There are parts of my life that I’m not sure Travis will enjoy. That said, I’m really glad that you dragged him to see me the other day.”

“And that you don’t have to have Sarah killed,” I added, trying to deflect the attention in another direction.

“I thought you might have grabbed him up already,” Liz said. “You told me that you wanted an autograph for you and your husband. I thought you meant...”

“Travis,” Sarah concluded. “Yeah, I knew that. I just ... this seems ... quick.”

“It comes back to it not being your business,” I said.

“She looks out for you,” Liz told me. “She worries about you and, well, she’s familiar, I think, with my dating patterns.”

“Yeah,” Sarah said. “I’m not ... look, I like you, Liz. I really do. But ... well, I do love Travis. We all love him.”

“I know,” Liz said without rancor. “And I expected this reaction. I’ll just give you my word that I will never intentionally hurt him.”

“It’s more the unintentional hurt I’m worried about,” Sarah said.

“She’s been honest with me from the first,” I cut in, unhappy about being excluded from a conversation that pertained to me. “And we’re just ... thinking about it. Right now, we’re getting back in touch, you know. Don’t worry about me.”

“Yeah,” Sarah said, focusing her attention on me. “I worried about you when you first started going out with Belinda Myers. I worried about you when that new doctor started sniffing around last year. You don’t think I’m going to worry when you’re dating someone that might put a song about you on the radio? Dream on, Pal.”

“He already has a song about him on the radio,” Liz noted. “And another on one of my other discs. You heard both of them last night, in fact.”

Sarah’s laser-like gaze shifted to the room’s other occupant.

“‘Invisible, ‘“ Liz said. “Golden Boy, too.”

“I wondered about that when you sang it last night,” Sarah said. “I ... didn’t know about the other one. You said last year that you’d only twice written songs about a specific person. It was those two.”

“No,” Liz admitted. “Yes, I was talking about ‘Invisible’ but Travis was more of ... an inspiration ... for ‘Golden Boy’ than the subject. I wrote ‘Game of Chance’ about ... someone else.”

Sarah nodded. I suspected she knew the person in question even if I had no clue.

“When I sit down to write, I take a lot of experiences and combine them,” Liz clarified. “The reason I say ‘Golden Boy’ isn’t about anyone in particular is because I drew on my feelings. I started to think about how fleeting fame can be when I learned about Travis’s baseball career ending but the song is about what I would say to him if I could – and what I hoped other people had told him or would tell me if my dream came to an end one day. If things don’t work, I’ll never put my feelings out there for public consumption.”

The two women seemed content to look at one another. Personally, I’d had enough intervention into my personal life.

“We need to get to the rental place if we’re going to be back in time to get the boys from school,” I said.

Sarah closed her eyes and nodded.

“I do like you, Liz,” she said.

“I know and I’m not upset that you’re looking out for Travis,” Liz replied amiably. “I promise: I’ll look out for him, too.”

The drive into the city started out in silence. Finally Sarah spoke as we turned onto the highway.

“I’m not trying to be a bitch,” she said. She left me an opening to mention that she came by it naturally – but I passed it up.

“It’s my decision to make,” I said.

“I know it is,” Sarah said quickly.

“Then you don’t think I’m capable of making it?” I asked in a harsh tone.

“Damn it!” Sarah said, responding to my inflection in kind. “That’s not it either. I just don’t think you know what you’re letting yourself in for.”