Chapter 6: The Unexpected Agreement

We didn’t want to have a heavy discussion in the car about Brian’s relationship with the two girls from Kokomo. He had obviously been communicating with them far more frequently than I was aware. Thankfully, they were a hundred miles away and none of them had a driver’s license.

Of course, if Brian wanted to visit, I could probably be persuaded to drive. The memory of Anna’s soft bosom pressed against mine when we hugged made me rub my legs together in the passenger seat of the car.

There was no chance of a confrontation with Brian over his weekend at the ranch, since our return home was synchronous with Betts’ return from her summer on the horse show circuit. At that very minute, the countdown began. We had two weeks to get her packed and shipped off to Purdue. It sounds like a long time, but time has a way of collapsing in the presence of Hurricane Betts.

I had no time to worry about who my son was dating and no time to fantasize about her mother. Oh, damn! Did I even think that? I needed to focus on getting my daughter out of the house.

As matters happen, my mother fell sick that week and I had to take the week off work just to take care of things. It looked like I would have two weeks of vacation time used up just tending to my mother, my daughter, and running my son back and forth to the fair. Brian’s introduction to cooking with Hannah had led to a real attachment to the kitchen. With my son cooking nearly every day, I was worried that Hayden and I would pack on pounds over the summer—especially when Brian started baking bread two or three times a week. But he was learning about balanced diets as well and both his parents dropped a few pounds. We were both feeling quite healthy.

I was getting a little tired of tomatoes at every meal as Brian narrowed down his selection for his 4-H Foods demonstration. Bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwiches on fresh bread. Sliced tomatoes with olive oil, mozzarella, and basil. Cold tomato soup. Tomatoes stuffed with chicken salad. Fried green tomatoes. Sesame tomato and cucumber salad. And my favorite, a bloody Mary with Brian’s own fresh seasoned tomato juice. Still, I was looking forward to his demonstration at the fair on Tuesday as the end of tomato season.

When Betts found out about Brian meeting Jennifer and Courtney at the dude ranch for the weekend, she nearly went ballistic. Until she stood up to Brian and discovered that she was now shorter than her little brother. There were some threatening interludes as the two faced off with each other, but things calmed down enough that Betts agreed to take Brian and his date to the fair on Sunday—along with the fresh loaf of bread.

In the contest of wills, Brian declared to Betts that he didn’t have a girlfriend and he could date a different girl every week if he wanted. A bold statement for a kid who couldn’t drive. But it was also a relief. He spent an awful lot of time with Hannah Gordon last year and was heartbroken when they broke up. It was healthier, in my opinion, for him not to form such firm attachments. If I saw such attachments begin to form, I might even suggest that we take a day to go to Kokomo. To get him focused on the girls there. Not for my own benefit, of course.

I couldn’t believe I was thinking this way. Eight years ago, Hayden had an affair that nearly tore us apart. When his mistress called and asked me to agree to sharing my husband, I boldly told her that the path to sharing Hayden lay between my legs and not to call back unless she was ready to put her face there. It had been a key element in saving our marriage and before long, a prime ingredient in our fantasies. I’d teased Hayden with the idea that I was bringing my friend Joyce home to eat. He’d never met Joyce, of course, and when he finally saw her at Cary’s wedding he cocked and eyebrow at me and shrugged. She did have a pretty voice and apparently, Cary found her newly trim body to his liking.

But was I really contemplating what it would be like to have another woman share my marriage bed? Or was I simply allowing a fantasy to take on too much shape? I shook it off as I watched Brian make his cold tomato soup at the fair demonstration. He did well, but there was a redhead who was more a performer than a cook, in my opinion, and edged him out of the first place slot. I was agape when Miss Polly invited both kids to be on The Homemaker’s Hour the next day. It seemed there was a glint of mischief in the eyes of the two. She was baiting him and he was rising to it.

Well, there was another day off work to run Brian around getting ingredients and then arriving the next morning at eight to get his demo set up.

And the mischief began.

Candace fired the first salvo at Brian by accusing him of stealing her lines but confessed that the tomato salad he recommended kept her brother’s fingers out of the struts of her Eiffel Tower cake. Brian returned fire by suggesting that coring the garlic would leave his breath sweet enough for Candace to kiss. There was a chemistry between the two that let them play off each other all the way through the demo and interview.

I wasn’t surprised when Brian suggested that he’d like to spend the rest of the day at the fair. With Candace. Well, what kind of trouble could they get into at the fair?

There was a flurry of phone calls that afternoon and evening as concerned girls lit up the lines to see if it was true that Candace was Brian’s new girlfriend. Betts was no help. Even the girls from Kokomo called. I called Anna late that evening. We. I was sitting in Hayden’s lap in the recliner and we held the phone between us as we talked to Anna.

“You don’t mind my giving the girls permission to call Brian, do you?” she asked. “They pestered me all afternoon until I finally gave in.”

“I don’t think that’s a problem. It was a good reminder to Brian that he’s sworn not to have a girlfriend this year,” I laughed.

“Hmm. Jen and Court are now declaring that he is their famous TV star boyfriend but they are just part-time girlfriends to him.”

“Part-time? How does that work?”

“Marilyn, I have to tell you that Jen and Court are ... Well, I don’t think they are actually sexually involved with each other ... yet. But they have been closer than sisters for a long time. I see them holding hands and see a peck on the cheek now and then. I have never seen them interested in a boy until Brian. For some reason, they seem to think he is someone they could share. Which I suppose makes each of them part-time. But I couldn’t help but overhear their phone conversation tonight. I think they believe they could share him with someone else as well,” Anna said.

I was flushed by the time she finished this little description. Her two girls sharing my son? If she is okay with that...

“How does that sit with you, Anna?” Hayden asked, covering my discomfiture.

“I’ve had some time to adjust to the idea that my daughter and her friend could feasibly be lesbians,” Anna sighed. “There were times I almost wished they were. Dealing with another girl is so much less messy than with a boy. And I don’t have to worry about either of them getting pregnant. Though, Courtney’s parents and I agreed to get the girls on birth control anyway. You can’t be too safe in this world. What I was saying was that thinking of the two girls together makes it a little easier to imagine them sharing a boy. I’m not sure how it would work, but it does fuel the imagination.”

“We’ve been thinking about that for some time,” I said. “Perhaps it’s not as strange as we were raised to believe.”

“Why don’t we keep in touch on a regular basis, Anna,” Hayden suggested. “We might even get together occasionally ... Just to compare our perceptions of how things are developing.”

“If Brian takes after his parents, I’m not too worried,” Anna laughed. “Um ... I like the idea of keeping in touch. I’ll give you a call in a couple of weeks. Can I call after ten? I’d rather the girls not listen in.”

“That would be lovely.”

Brian’s announcement on television Thursday that he had five girlfriends still blindsided me.

Brian and Hannah had said they were boyfriend and girlfriend a year ago, but they were children. Their ‘dates’ were playdates in the purest sense of the word. Neither the Gordons nor we ever worried that Hannah and Brian might misbehave. It simply wasn’t in the cards. And we’d had plenty of opportunity to play cards together and with Dennis and Abby Hopkins. Our children were a major topic of conversation.

But as I looked out at all the kids in Crystal Lake on Labor Day, I was filled with the sudden awareness and ... dread ... that we were no longer dealing with children. We were dealing with young, beautiful, hormone-driven teens. When I saw Hannah get off Brian’s shoulders and give him a kiss on the cheek, it was sweet. But when I saw that incredibly beautiful and buxom blonde he’d taken to the fair get on his back, all my senses went on high alert. I could see little blonde babies in their future. I clutched Hayden’s hand and his eyes followed mine. I heard him groan.

“Do you want to ride around on my shoulders out in the lake for a while?” he whispered.

“Don’t tempt me.”

We knew Rex and Maria Davis casually. They were expected to join the picnic later in the afternoon. We had known our children were friends but we didn’t really frequent the same circles. We’d met Rex, a young real estate lawyer at the time, when we subdivided and sold the acre to Ford Barnes next door. His older daughter was about the same age as Jessica. But I don’t think any of us had anticipated that our kids would one day date. I certainly didn’t anticipate the kiss Rose gave Brian when she dismounted his shoulders to make room for Brenda Lenox. I shuffled myself over to the pavilion where we needed to get food on the table for the twenty-some teens we’d gathered at the lake. I lost sight of my son but figured he couldn’t get into much more trouble than what I’d already seen. They didn’t call this Crystal Lake for nothing.