Flirting with Forty

by Jane Porter

Genres: Women's Fiction; Romance; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

He got the second home and the Porsche. She got the kids and a broken heart. Now Jackie, post-divorce and heading toward the big four-oh, is on vacation in sunny and staring down her upcoming birthday-alone. But not for long. She's soon falling for Kai, her gorgeous, much younger surf instructor, and the wild passionate fling they have becomes the biggest surprise of Jackie's life. Back home in Seattle, Jackie has to struggle with single parenthood...and memories of Kai. He hasn't forgotten her. Yet thousands of miles of ocean-not to mention an age difference that feels even wider-separate them. And, of course, her friends disapprove. When a choice must be made, can she, will she risk everything for her chance at happiness?

Release date: May 7, 2008

Publisher: 5 Spot

Print pages: 369

Sample

One

Ah, Christmas. The most wonderful time of the year. Not. Not if you’re a newly single mom. People say crowds at the malls or lines at the post office ruin Christmas. I say it’s the damn Christmas tree.

The whole Christmas tree thing is miserable, wasn’t designed for women, and certainly not for women with young children.

Christmas trees require a man, or a gaggle of women friends, but when you’re my age and Time magazine calls your generation “soccer moms,” you know your friends will go to lunch with you, have a girls’ night out (which means expensive cocktails at a swanky place), or indulge in a manicure/pedicure spa date, but they don’t go Christmas tree shopping with you, and they won’t do the lifting, hauling, tying, untying, hauling, and lifting that’s required to get the tree from lot onto car, home, and then into stand.

I’m no weakling—I work out—but I’ve yet to meet a full, fresh noble fir that’s, well… light.

Which reminds me. Last year—the first year Daniel and I were living apart before we actually filed for divorce—the nice man at the Christmas tree lot near the Arboretum sold me a tree with—I love this—a double trunk.

A double trunk.

That tree had to have weighed ninety pounds at least. Maybe a hundred. Getting it home and into a stand was unreal. (Horrible.) I’ve learned my lesson. I will feel every tree up and down before I let the guy with the chainsaw buzz inches off the bottom, making a tree officially mine.

Now it’s a year later, and here I am again with my children shopping for a tree, albeit at a different tree lot. And my mood’s low, I admit. December’s the hardest month in the year for me being single—not because I need a man, but because all family traditions I worked so hard to create now bite me. But today is going to be fun. I swear. We’re going to have fun right now.

Right now, I insist silently, jamming my hands deeper into my trench coat pockets, shoulders hunched to ward off the December Seattle rain.

I’m trying hard not to let the rain get to me. Contrary to popular opinion, it doesn’t rain every day in Seattle, and I seriously doubt we have the highest suicide rate in the country. That’s absurd. Sleepless in Seattle was set here. This isn’t a depressing place. In fact, we here in the Pacific Northwest blithely refer to our wet weather patterns as drizzle, mist, droplets, light showers, scattered clouds, scattered rain, afternoon clearing, and reported sunspots.

How is that depressing?

But I will tell you I’m less than thrilled to be shopping for a tree right now. The rain isn’t exactly pelting us, but it’s got a nice clipped tempo, and it’s cold out, and the lot is muddy and the trees are wet and the kids are now wet and I just want to go home.

But I promised them (Mom, a promise is a promise), and they came home from school excited, so here we are.

“How about this one, Mom?” William shouts from a thicket of green that easily tops ten or eleven feet.

“That’s a beautiful tree,” the guy from the lot says, baseball cap pulled low on his forehead, hiding his face and sparse ponytail.

“It’s got to be ten feet,” I say, trying to keep the exasperation from my voice. How does he think I’m going to pack and carry a ten-foot tree on my midsize SUV?

“It’s twelve, ma’am. And a really nice tree. You won’t see many that pretty.”

I shoot him a long look. I’m an interior designer. Ceiling heights are my thing. “My ceilings are barely eight feet.”

“We can always take something off at the bottom.”

Like what? Four and a half feet? And they charge you by the foot when you buy a tree? Sure. That’s fiscally wise.

I turn away, push wet bangs off my forehead, as the hood on my coat doesn’t quite cover my face. I’m cold, tired, wet, and grouchy and would give almost anything right now for a tall, nonfat, sugar-free vanilla latte. Or just a plain old cup of coffee would do.

“William. Jessica,” I call, trying to inject some enthusiasm into my voice. “Come and help me find a six-foot tree.”

Jessica comes skipping out of the drippy pine tree forest, her lavender sweatshirt soaked, her long blond hair matted.

“Where’s your coat, Jessica?”

She stops, gazes back, around, blue eyes wide. “I don’t know.”

“Honey, go get it.”

“I’m hot.”

“Jess, it’s raining.”

“I’m hot.”

I will say this for children born in the Pacific Northwest: They’re not wimps. Fog and rain don’t slow them down any. “It’s forty degrees, Jess. Get your coat on or we go.” I warm to the threat. I like this threat. I’d love to go home right now. “If you can’t cooperate, then we’re heading home.”

William, my nine-year-old, has heard this last part, and he comes stumbling out of the trees in protest. “But you said, Mom, you said—”

“I know what I said, but I’m not going to fight with you or your sister, not today. Getting the Christmas tree is supposed to be special. I want this to be fun, not a hassle.” Right.

And there are times (like now) when I wonder where I got all this parent-speak from. Is it something inherited? Something transmitted in the XY chromosome? Because sometimes (like now) my mouth moves and words come out and I hear my voice, and the tone, and I am a nag. A mother.

William turns to his sister, who is conveniently three and a half years younger and continues to live up to her status as the baby in the family. “Knock it off, Jess,” he hisses. “Get your coat and do what Mom says or we’ll go home and we won’t have a Christmas tree and there won’t be any presents and Santa won’t come and it’ll be all your fault.”

Jessica gets her coat.

I look at William, my handsome firstborn who is thicker around the middle than he used to be, putting on size where I didn’t know size would go, and silently congratulate him on getting the job done. These days I’ll take all the help I can get.

Reaching up to wipe my face dry again, I think of the two umbrellas in my car that have been there for two years and never been used. Odd to live in a place that rains so much and yet never use an umbrella. It’s just that most of us who live here don’t pull out umbrellas for something as insignificant as showers. We’re, well… tough… tougher.

Or maybe just stupid. Stupider.

I feel stupider right now, walking through wet, mushy soil to stare at staked trees. We’re the only ones at the lot. Yes, it is a Monday at four in the afternoon, but surely there must be other parents who promised their kids they’d buy a tree today if they were good.

If they were good. Glancing at my two, I see Jessica take a swing at William. Jessica with her blond hair and blue eyes and great dimples may look like an angel but is the devil incarnate. She’s hell on wheels, and I wish I could blame it all on Daniel, but word has it I was difficult at five, too.

And six. Seven. Eight. But who’s counting?

Certainly not me, because I just want to go home.

“How about this one?” I say, pointing to a relatively attractive fir that’s in the five-to-six-foot-tall range.

Both Jessica and William shake their heads. “It’s short,” Jessica says.

“It’s ugly,” William adds, moving his hand in one of the tree’s huge holey pockets. “There’s nothing here. How will you hang ornaments if there’s nothing to hang them on?”

He has a good point, but I’ve seen the price tag. The tree is sixty-five dollars, twenty less than the better-groomed brothers in the seven-foot row. “We can put something special there,” I say.

“Like what? A piñata?”

He’s getting funny in his old age. I can only imagine the excitement of adolescence. “It’s not perfect, but it’s a nice tree.”

He harrumphs at me, much the way his father used to do, and then finds the tree we end up buying. While Jessica splashes in puddles in her best shoes (why didn’t I see she was wearing her best shoes earlier?) and then cries the whole way home that she’s cold.

The good news is that we have a tree tied to our roof and we’re in our car heading home.

The bad news is that it’s only step one. Swiftly I review the other steps—

Step one: Buy tree & tie on car.

Step two: Drive home without losing tree.

Step three: Get tree off car.

Step four: Get tree in house and in stand.

We’re home soon—I like step two, I feel really good about step two, and congratulate myself for a job well done. Now it’s time for three.

I send William into the kitchen for my utility scissors while I open the various car doors, positioning for my climb toward the roof. William hands me the scissors, and I cut the twine on this side and then the other and the other until the tree’s freed. The kids cheer me on in the dark, as twilight has given way to night at only four-thirty in the afternoon. The rain is still coming down in a nice, steady splat, splat, splat, and bless my kids, they never once mention the rain, don’t think to complain, and I know it’s because they think all children live like this.

It doesn’t even cross their minds that right now, this very minute, it’s sunny somewhere else in the United States.

That places like Phoenix, Orlando, Los Angeles, and Denver all have sun. That Palm Springs is perfect this time of year. Hawaii sublime. Miami a total hot spot.

No, they’re innocent. They don’t realize if we just moved south, we’d move to blue skies and sun year-round.

Which is why we try not to take them out of state too often. It just makes them wish for drier pastures (notice, I did not say “greener,” as the only place possibly greener then Seattle is Ireland), and they’re not getting drier pastures until they go away to college.

“Okay, William, Jessica, stand back.” I hang on to the SUV’s roof rack. “I’m going to drag the tree to the edge and then drop it down.”

I scoot the tree across the roof, cringing as the branches squeak and scratch. Lifting the base of the tree, I feel the sticky ooze of sap. I make a mental note to be careful of sap. I have sap stains from last year’s mammoth double trunk on one of my favorite sweatshirts still.

Even though this isn’t a double-trunk tree this year, it’s still heavier than expected, and suddenly it’s caught on one of the rack rails. I tug, the tree doesn’t budge; I check the twine, it’s cut; I check the tree, the branches aren’t caught. The tree is just too heavy to knock off the roof.

“William, I’m going to need a hand. Be careful.”

He’s eager to help. He jumps up on the driver’s seat, reaches for the top part of the tree.

“Why can’t I help?” Jessica protests. “Why does William get to do everything?”

“You’re helping, Jess.” I grunt as fresh noble fir branches slap my face. Another good hard yank and I should have the tree off. “Stand back. William—yank it your way and then try to catch it before it falls.”

Yes, I know. Not the smartest thing to say or expect him to do. Looking back, I should have just let the tree fall. To hell with the car. To hell with the asphalt. To hell with protecting the tree.

I should have protected the son.

Fortunately, there’s no blood. And he’s not crying. But in the house he lifts his T-shirt, and he’s got a huge red welt running from his shoulder past his sternum to his lower ribs.

“I’m sorry, baby,” I say, giving him a huge, guilty hug. But at least step three’s accomplished.

On to step four.

I get a bottle of water from the fridge, twist off the top, and take a long, fortifying drink as I mentally review my strategy for getting tree into stand.

Even with Daniel, getting the tree into the stand is a series of four-letter expletives strung together.

Now, without Daniel here, I’m determined we’re going to do this and keep it fun. I’m an adult. I’ve had two babies—one of them nine pounds—I’ve carried six grocery bags at one time. I can do this.

And the kids, bless them. They’re looking at me with all the confidence in the world.

I put on a CD of Nat King Cole’s Christmas carols, do a little stretching—okay, feeling vaguely like Owen Wilson in Shanghai Noon, but that’s fine. Anything to keep this fun.

Jess, William, and I fling open all the doors, grab a piece of tree, and drag-carry our increasingly less noble noble fir into the living room.

We get it there, and it lies in the middle of the floor, hogging space. I know the man at the lot said it was only seven feet, but I didn’t really think about girth. It’s a big wide tree. Wow. It’s sure going to look good when it’s decorated.

I stand back, rub sap off my hands. William plucks at his shirt. Sap. Jessica’s lavender sweatshirt. Sap. Good. It’s a healthy big wide tree.

Still rubbing my hands, I share the plan: “We’re going to slide the tree into the stand while it’s still on the ground. And then together we’ll lift it. Then while you guys hold it steady, I’ll tighten the screws and we can start decorating.”

It’s a good plan. It should work.

It doesn’t.

And of course it doesn’t. Nothing about Christmas is easy. It’s the most wonderful—cut, edit, paste—stressful time of year.

The tree’s lower branches won’t let us get the tree stand ring high enough around the trunk to hold the tree upright in the stand. And as nice as the tree looks horizontal on my carpet, I worry about twenty-some days of sap leekage.

We lower the tree, and screws are loosened with great difficulty (I shouldn’t have been so zealous with the pliers until I knew the tree would fit).

We’re going to have to cut branches. And of course, I don’t have any tools for cutting branches.

In the divorce Daniel got the second house, the Porsche, the new young girlfriend, and the old saw we used for things like this.

I should have bought a saw. I bought a toolbox when Daniel and I separated—a nice red-painted box packed with tools—but a saw wasn’t in it. And in case you’re wondering, I’m the kind of designer who has good ideas, not the kind who’s crafty herself. A pity, I think now, because maybe if I were more crafty and better with my hands, my tree would be standing up properly right now.

“How about scissors?” Jessica suggests.

“Scissors will break,” I answer, sitting on my heels. I hear Nat croon, but it’s not helping. I’m not happy. I’m really not happy. We left for the tree lot at four. It’s now past six. The kids haven’t had dinner, done homework. And the tree is still prone, a massive green whale on my cream thick pile carpet.

“How about a knife?” William offers.

“Sure.” I’m battling here for warmth and charm. It’s December, Christmas, fun, family fun, make it fun, make it special for the kids. “Get the bread knife, though. That’s the long one with the serrated edge—” I see his blank look, break off. “Never mind. I’ll get it.”

One bread knife later, I’m sawing at the slim lower branches that seem to have sprung up all over the tree base. It takes minutes to cut just one. There are at least ten more. My God. This could go on all night.

The tree is rapidly getting on my bad side. It’s not a helpful tree. It’s not cooperating.

Good trees should practically leap into their stands, nice and straight, and wait while one tightens the base. This tree doesn’t even care if my kids get fed.

I’m still sawing away, swearing under my breath. I take a rest.

“Mom, let me do it. I can do it. I’m strong.”

I look at William, my William, who at nine has become the new man in the family, and I see how big he has become. My nine-pound baby on his way to adulthood. “I don’t want you hurt.”

“I won’t get hurt.”

“You got hurt outside.”

“That’s because you dropped the tree on me.”

Mmmm. Good point. But still. Knives are different. “I’d hate for you to get cut—”

“I won’t.” He takes the knife from me. “Stand back.”

Stand back. I almost cry. Little boys shouldn’t have to ever take care of their mothers. “You can try, just for a minute,” I say, crouching close by in case he slices off a few fingers and I have to run fast to get them on ice.

Nothing will go wrong, I tell myself. Why would anything go wrong? This whole tree thing has been a roaring success.

William saws and hacks away at the tree. Carpenters and contractors on home improvement shows would be appalled at our crafts skills, but we’re a family, and we hack and saw like a family. “How’s it going?” I ask him.

“Good, Mom.”

Jessica’s crouching close now, too. “My turn.”

“No, Jessica. You’re not going to use the knife.”

“Why not? William is.”

“William’s almost four years older.”

“So?”

“Knives are dangerous—”

“You let him do everything and you don’t let me do anything.”

“You’re right.” I sit back, hands on thighs. “I should have let you get crushed by the tree instead of William. He’s ninety pounds and you’re what? Forty? You can handle it.”

She rolls her eyes at me. “I wouldn’t get crushed. That’s an exaggeration. Daddy says you always exaggerate.”

Oh, I love Daniel. I love him sooooo much.

“William, that’s good,” I say, beginning to get uneasy the longer he saws at the tree. I’m just waiting for the knife to slip, fingers to fly, blood spurting. And I’m seriously not good with blood. Even when I was a kid, the TV show Emergency made me queasy.

“But, Mom, I’ve almost got it.”

“No.”

“Mom—”

“No! Give me the knife.”

He looks like a dog that’s just been kicked. But he hands me the knife.

Jessica, however, eyes me with five-year-old contempt. “You didn’t have to yell at him, Mom. He was just trying to help.”

“Jessica…”

“Why are you always so mean?” She glares at me. “Melinda’s not mean.”

Melinda being her daddy’s legal eagle girlfriend in Silicon Valley. She’s smart, Jacqueline. Ambitious. Princeton grad, MBA from Brown, we’ve got so much in common. Hooray, Daniel. I’m so glad for you.

He and sexy, sleek Melinda practically live together, while I can’t even think about dating.

It’s not that I hate men, I just don’t want anything to do with them. I’ve been divorced a year now, and I’m still dead inside. I’ve nothing left to give anyone, and the men I do meet are looking for wife number two to replace wife number one, which means (like me) they come complete with houses, children, and ex-spouses. And I’m not ready for that. I can barely deal with my own kids; how can I possibly deal with anyone else’s?

No. After eleven years of being a good corporate wife and (part-time) interior designer, all I want are my kids, my friends, and my business to thrive.

The friends are easy, the work is challenging, and taking in Jessica’s mulish expression, I think at least one of the kids is impossible.

“Because Melinda’s not your mother,” I answer. “She’s your daddy’s girlfriend.”

“So?”

Thank God I had William first, because if Jessica had been the firstborn, there would have been no other children. “So Melinda isn’t responsible for you. I am. And it’s my job to make sure you grow up healthy, safe, and polite.”

Twenty minutes later, we’re ready to try to stand the tree again. William and I are holding the tree and trying to shake it all the way down to the bottom of the stand, but we can’t get it down no matter how hard we try.

I stand back to see what it looks like, while William is buried in the tree, holding it steady. “Maybe it’s okay like this,” he mumbles around a mouthful of pine.

I’m thinking he’s right. It looks straight. Enough.

“Keep holding the tree, and I’ll tighten the screws the rest of the way.” I’ve located a second pair of pliers, and with pliers in hand I wiggle on my stomach beneath the tree, heading in face-first, as if I’m auditioning for the staged version of Desert Storm. Jessica’s crawling in from the other side with her pliers, and together we bang and clank on the screws while William shouts encouragements.

“You’ve got it,” he says. “Looks great. I think it’s going to work.”

“Mom, I’ve got this side,” Jessica says.

And finally, sappy and red faced, I crawl back out. The tree looks okay.

“Are we going to decorate now?” Jess asks, putting the pliers to bookends and drawer knobs and anything that protrudes.

“You guys need dinner.”

“No, we don’t.” William already has the strings of lights coming out of the boxes.

I rub the back of my neck and try not to see how William is getting the light strings in knots. “You do. You’ll be starving and won’t sleep.”

Jessica kneels to clamp a light with the pliers. “Jess,” I warn.

She looks up at me, all wide-eyed innocence. “What?”

“Those bulbs are glass.”

“Uh-huh.”

“They’ll break.” And snap. She shatters one. Bright bits of red glass shards in the carpet.

Jess drops the pliers. “It broke.”

William shakes his head. “You did that deliberately.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did.”

“I didn’t!”

“Guys.” I stand between them, a restraining hand on each. “Come on. We’ve got lots to do.” I send Jessica for the vacuum, William for the phone to call Domino’s, and I pop two Advil. This is going to be a really long night.

Three hours later, the kids are finally in bed and I’m sitting with a Santa mug of mulled wine in the darkened living room, staring at the tree, the red and green and blue and gold lights glowing and my favorite old Neil Diamond Christmas album playing. Daniel hated my Neil Diamond Christmas album, as well as the Barry Manilow, Carpenters, and Barbra Streisand albums, but he’s not here anymore and I can damn well play what I want.

And Neil Diamond is such a guilty pleasure.

“Song Sung Blue.”

“Cherry, Cherry.”

“I am… I said.” Or something like that.

I sip the spiced mulled wine, a recipe I’ve made every year for the past thirteen years. It was one of Daniel’s and my first traditions. Pizza, mulled wine, and tree.

Daniel probably doesn’t even remember why I started making mulled wine. The mulled wine was to coax him into helping put up the tree after work. He’d be tired, and not festive, but I’d make the wine and put on some carols, and after a few cups he’d be in the spirit. It always worked. By cup three he was singing . . .