Love, Suburban Style

by Wendy Markham

Genres: Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Fed up with her moody teenage daughter, Meg Addams decides what they both need is a good dose of suburban wholesomeness. But when they leave Manhattan behind for Meg's humble blue-collar hometown, they find it crowded with wealthy strangers and upscale boutiques. Settling into a creaky fixer-upper, Meg finally spots a familiar face right next door--and it belongs to none other than Sam Rooney. The would-be love of Meg's high school life is now a single dad, her daughter's new soccer coach--and a neighborly ghost-buster whenever things go bump in the night. With three kids and an undeniable attraction between them, Meg and Sam are in for some heart-racing, wee-hour encounters that have nothing to do with spirits...but everything to do with hearts.

Release date: July 1, 2007

Publisher: Forever Yours

Print pages: 385

Sample

Prologue

I brought supplies.” Geoffrey Lange thrusts a plastic shopping bag into Astor Hudson’s hands the moment she opens the apartment door.

“What kind of supplies?”

“Let me get past this obstacle course, and I’ll show you.” He steps first over the threshold, then over her sleeping cat, Chita Rivera, and finally over the heaping plastic basket of unfolded clean clothes Astor carried up from the basement laundry room an hour earlier.

She dropped it just inside the door and rushed to answer the ringing telephone.

Now she really wishes she hadn’t.

She was having such a great day so far—especially for a Monday—before the call came.

The June sun has finally broken out after three straight days of cold rain, pleasantly warm, but not yet hot, on her shoulders during her early-morning run in Central Park. Cosette, her fifteen-year-old daughter, actually smiled and didn’t protest too vigorously when Astor insisted on kissing her good-bye before school. She then ran into her friend Melinda from 3C in the laundry room, and they grabbed a quick, gossipy latte together at the Starbucks on the corner while their washers were sudsing and spinning.

Then came the call…

Which she relayed tearfully, word for word, in a subsequent IM to her best friend Geoffrey, who fortuitously happened to be online when she signed on to Google Deeanna Drennan. Once again, an upcoming young actress has usurped Astor for a lead role. This time, it was for an upcoming Broadway revival of Brigadoon.

Face it. You’re over the hill.

She has to remind herself of that, because Geoffrey isn’t going to be the one to say it. Being a loyal, loving sort, he rushed right up Broadway from his apartment eight blocks away to lend an ear, a shoulder—and supplies, no less.

This is getting to be a regular ritual.

Geoffrey hugs her hard against his brick wall of a chest and shoulders—he’s been hitting the gym religiously.

I should have been, too. Maybe then I’d still be getting cast.

Aloud, she says, “I’ll live.”

“But you so deserved it. You totally look the part.”

“I don’t know… Fiona is supposed to be in her early twenties.”

“So? You could be in your teens.”

She snorts at that. Though with Astor’s petite build, long auburn ringlets, and big green eyes, her agent often assures her that she looks at least a decade younger than her age—which is thirty-four.

“And anyway, no twenty-year-old’s voice has the maturity and color yours does,” Geoffrey goes on. “You were robbed.”

“I knew you’d say that.”

“Deeanna Drennan—whoever she is—won’t hold a candle to you, honey.”

“I knew you’d say that, too.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“You’re right. You’re a good friend, Geoff.”

“I am a good friend. Which reminds me… I promised my friend Andrew in L.A. that I’d try and find him a place to live.”

“In L.A.?”

“No! Here in New York, of course. He’s sick of getting typecast as a plus-sized, effeminate gay man—which he just so happens to be—so he’s going to try auditioning here for a change. Know of anyone who wants to sublet their apartment?”

“I’ll ask around.” Shifting gears, she asks, “What ‘supplies’ did you bring?”

“Whatever I could buy at the Duane Reade on Columbus Avenue on such short notice, to help you get over this,” he replies, and strides across the living room. “It’s positively funereal in here. For God’s sake, let there be light.”

He raises the shades on the two windows to usher in the morning sun. Thanks to the apartment’s southeastern exposure, the place brightens instantly.

“There, that’s better, isn’t it? I mean, you’re not a vampire… though your daughter is starting to look like one if you don’t mind my saying.”

“I told her the same thing just yesterday. I’m sure it’s just a phase.”

Cosette, who until recently shared her mother’s all-American wholesome beauty, dyed her brown hair jet-black—without permission—and has taken to wearing thick, dark eye makeup and a somber wardrobe utterly devoid of color.

“No offense, but she looks like she’s channeling Morticia Addams,” Geoffrey says.

“Which is particularly interesting because my real name was Addams. Two D’s and everything.”

Geoffrey’s eyes widen at that news. “You’re kidding. What was your first name?”

“Margaret. But I went by Meg.”

“Why did I never know that after all these years?”

“You never asked.”

She and Geoffrey have been friends ever since they were both in Les Miserables together. Astor played Cosette; Geoffrey was the understudy for Marius.

“I never thought to ask. Does that mean I’m completely self-centered?”

She grins. “Not completely.”

“So Meg Addams?” Geoffrey says thoughtfully, looking her over. “That’s your name?”

“Was.” She created the stage name “Astor Hudson” the moment she graduated from high school, and never looked back.

“Meg Addams sounds so… small-town.”

“She was small-town.”

“I thought you grew up in the New York suburbs.”

“I did. But Glenhaven Park is way up there in Westchester County. It might be less than fifty miles north of Manhattan, but it’s more small-town than suburbia.”

“What, no strip malls? No minimarts? No eight-lane, five-way intersections?” asks Geoffrey, who grew up in Jersey.

“None at all. Big old Victorian houses, tons of tall shade trees, dirt roads, shops on Main Street where everybody knows your name…” Astor sighs.

“You suddenly look homesick.”

“I suddenly am.”

Though, perhaps not so suddenly.

Lately, she’s found herself thinking a lot about her hometown. Glenhaven Park is less than an hour’s ride on the Metro-North commuter line, but it might as well be in the Midwest for as often as she’s been back there in the past decade. She’s an only child, and her aging parents, who had her late in life, retired to a golf community on the South Carolina coast the minute she left home.

“I should take a ride up there some weekend,” she tells Geoffrey a bit wistfully. “Want to come?”

“Honey, you know I’m allergic to suburbia. Charming small towns included.” He gestures at the shopping bag. “Go ahead, unload the provisions.”

Smiling, Astor begins removing the contents one by one and setting them on the coffee table.

The table’s surface was already cluttered with three days’ worth of mail and newspapers, a bag containing the toilet paper she bought on Friday, and Cosette’s forgotten—or more likely hastily discarded—bag lunch: all heaped in the shadow of Astor’s proudly displayed Tony Award with its comedy and tragedy masks etched on the mounted circular medallion.

“Entenmann’s chocolate doughnuts, Kleenex, a DVD of… Sunset Boulevard?” she reads from the label.

“The movie with Gloria Swanson, not the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. But I thought it was still appropriate. All About Eve would have been more fitting, but they didn’t have it.”

“It’s a drugstore. I can’t believe they had Sunset Boulevard.”

“Bargain DVD bin.” He shrugs.

Meg isn’t sure she wants to immerse herself in the tragic tale of a faded star desperate to make a comeback, but Geoffrey means well. And anyway, it is somewhat fitting.

“Let’s see what else you brought,” she says, going back to the goodies. “A bag of Lays barbecue chips, yum… and a package of… stool softener?”

“Oops, that’s for me,” Geoffrey interjects, plucking the box from the pile and stashing it in the pocket of his vintage bowling shirt.

“And a bottle of Grey Goose vodka—you didn’t get this at Duane Reade… and it’s only half-full.”

“That came from my liquor cabinet. I thought you’d need to drown your sorrows.”

“It’s only”—she checks her watch—“ten-forty in the morning.”

“We’ll make bloody Marys.”

“I don’t have tomato juice or horseradish or—what else goes in a bloody Mary? Celery?”

“Never mind, we’ll drink it straight. Let’s get a couple of glasses. You’ve got ice, right?”

“That’s all right… I’m waiting for Laura to call me back about another audition, and I need to keep a clear head.”

“Then I’ll drink for both of us,” Geoffrey decides, poised in the kitchen doorway. “Is the bag empty?”

Astor peers inside. “Just this—it’s yours, too.” She proffers a package of condoms.

“Oh, no, those are for you, honey.”

“For what?”

“That you even have to ask that makes me sad.” Geoffrey shakes his head. “How long has it been since you—”

“Not that long.” She pauses. “Unless you think six months qualifies as—”

“You poor thing.” Geoffrey shakes his head. “We’ve got to find you a man.”

“Geoffrey! Not finding a man is the whole point, remember? You were there when I made my New Year’s resolution.”

They were at a rooftop party together in Hell’s Kitchen, sharing a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and their respective sorrows. Just blocks from the Times Square melee, they could hear the chaos from their perch, close but not in view. They chose not to go downstairs to the host’s apartment to watch the ball drop on television with everyone else at midnight.

That was mainly because neither of them had anyone but each other to kiss.

Geoffrey’s new—and destined to be short-lived—flame, Elliot, was performing in a Rodgers and Hart review on a cruise ship somewhere in the Caribbean. Astor’s most recent flame, Ken, was at the party with his current flame, a walking cliché in a short skirt, plunging neckline, and stilettos.

Astor shouldn’t have been surprised when Ken broke her heart after a seven-month, too-good-to-be-true relationship.

She’s always been a passionate, impulsive soul. That comes in handy in her business; not so much in matters of the heart. Every time she’s ever met someone new and promising—despite her best intention not to get involved—she eventually lets down her guard, falls hard—and gets hurt.

She’s been there, done that, more times than she cares to count, in a pattern that began with her ex-husband and ended—hopefully for good—with Ken.

That’s why it’s crucial to avoid the kinds of men to whom she might find herself attracted. She’s getting too old and too emotionally exhausted to go through another heartbreak.

“Give it up already, Astor,” Geoffrey is saying. “I mean, come on. Who keeps their New Year’s resolution?”

“Not you.”

Geoffrey’s was to cut up all his credit cards and live within his means. It lasted almost forty-eight hours. Then he stumbled across a January White Sale, and it was all over.

“At least my resolution was reasonable in the first place,” Geoffrey tells her.

“So was mine.”

“Giving up men?”

“Not forever. And not all men. Just the ones I might fall in love with. I can still date.”

“Isn’t falling in love the point of dating?”

“No! At least, not for me. Not anymore.”

“Then why don’t you place an ad in the personals? Single white female seeks swarthy, neurotic, unemployed—”

The ringing telephone mercifully interrupts him.

“That’s Laura.”

“Good luck!” Geoffrey calls after her as she goes to answer it in the bedroom.

She’s going to need more than luck, because for the second time today, Astor Hudson finds herself on the receiving end of a dreaded phone call.

When she emerges from the bedroom, Geoffrey looks up from the vodka he’s pouring.

Seeing the look on her face, he lowers the bottle. “What is it, honey?”

She just shakes her head, still speechless.

“Oh my God, you’re scaring me. Is someone dead?”

“Not yet,” she says when she finds her voice. “But I swear, when I get my hands on my daughter…”

“What’s wrong?”

“That was the headmistress of Cosette’s school. She was just expelled for having a gun in her backpack.”

Chapter 1

Station stop: Glenhaven Park,” a robotic voice announces as the words flash in red on the electronic scroll overhead.

Glancing out the window at the vaguely familiar wooded countryside, Meg tucks today’s New York Post into her black leather tote bag and nudges her daughter in the seat beside her. “Come on, Cosette, put that away, we’re almost there.”

Cosette’s pencil-darkened brows furrow and her liner-blackened eyes refuse to budge from the open copy of Rolling Stone in her hands.

Oh. She’s plugged into her iPod.

Meg reaches out and plucks a tiny earphone from Cosette’s right ear.

“Hey!”

“We’re almost there.”

Cosette shrugs. “You go. I’ll just ride to the end of the line and meet you on the way back down to the city.”

“You’re not doing that.”

“Why not?”

“Look, you can make this as difficult for me as you possibly can, or you can cooperate. Either way, we’re getting off this train in two minutes, and if I have to drag you by your hair, believe me, I will.”

Of course, she won’t. She’s never laid a hand on Cosette in her life; she won’t start now.

Anyway, Cosette could—if she dared—shake her off like a pesky bug. Her daughter is a good three inches taller than Meg’s five-four, and probably weighs more, too. Not that Cosette has an ounce of fat on her black-garbed frame. But Meg, normally slender, is now verging on skinny.

She hasn’t eaten much of anything—including the chips and doughnuts Geoffrey brought—all week, since Monday.

The day she lost the part to Deeanna Drennan.

The day Cosette got kicked out of school.

The day Astor Hudson died, and Meg Addams was reborn.

Now it’s a gorgeous Saturday morning on the cusp of summer, and the train is chugging to a stop in Glenhaven Park at last.

At last. Yes…

The ride up from Grand Central was only an hour; but Meg realizes now, as she glimpses the soaring white steeple of the First Presbyterian Church on the green, that she’s been waiting much, much longer than that to come home.

Home?

The word catches her off guard.

Glenhaven Park hasn’t been home since her parents sold the family’s two-story brick Tudor on North Street.

But suddenly, this self-contained village in the northern reaches of Westchester County feels more like home than Meg’s two-bedroom, rent-controlled Upper West Side apartment has in the dozen years since she moved in.

Over at 31 Boxwood Street, a ladder is propped against a three-story home with a mansard roof, wraparound porch, and forty-six windows.

Sam Rooney knows all too well that there are forty-six of them. Not because he grew up in this house but because he counted the windows before he started scraping them back in the beginning of April.

He expected to have had that part done and the painting started by mid-May at the latest, but he was only able to work on them in sporadic weekend moments when the weather was dry and sunny. Weekdays were out entirely; even on his high school science teacher’s schedule. Long gone are the days of blowing out of school on the heels of his students, arriving home shortly after the last bell.

Back then, he was teaching in Pelham, where they lived at the time. Sheryl was around to shuttle Ben and Katie from play dates to Brownies and Cub Scouts.

Those activities, which the kids retained after the move to Glenhaven Park, have long since given way to various engagements that are even more time-consuming: lessons, sports practices, tutoring, appointments with doctors, ortho- dontists—and, of course, child psychiatrists for both.

That’s a must when you lose your mother suddenly and tragically… even now that it’s been over four years.

Four years.

Sometimes, it feels like just yesterday that Sam was waking up next to Sheryl.

Other times, it feels as though it happened—as though she happened—in another lifetime, to somebody else.

But on this sun-drenched June Saturday, his thoughts aren’t on his late wife or the life they used to have—they’re on forty-six windows that need to be painstakingly primed before they can be painted.

The trim will be cranberry, to contrast with the varying shades of yellow on the clapboard, shingles, and gingerbread embellishment.

Last year, when Sam added to his home improvement agenda the insane task of painting the exterior of his recently inherited Queen Anne fixer-upper, he was actually amused that the color palettes read like a supermarket shopping list: from butter to lemon to mustard.

Now there’s nothing amusing about anything remotely involving paint.

But today is dry and sunny and breezy, and he needs to get moving on this trim so that it’s all finished before summer’s humidity and afternoon thunderstorms descend.

He’s halfway up the ladder with a full bucket of white primer when a bloodcurdling scream nearly causes him to topple backward.

Whoa!

It didn’t come from either of his kids—he dropped twelve-year-old Katie at piano lessons ten minutes ago, and fifteen-year-old Ben couldn’t emit a high-pitched scream if he tried; his voice is decidedly baritone these days.

No, it came—not surprisingly—from the house next door.

Sam maneuvers his lanky frame down the ladder, sets the bucket on the grass, and takes off running around this side of the house to the backyard.

Here we go again, he thinks as he sprints across the side yard and crashes through the overgrown hedge on the property line—just in time to hear another screech and a loud bang.

The sound a door would make if, say, someone bolted through it, scared out of their mind, and slammed it shut behind them.

Terrific. The newest residents of the old Duckworth place—a nice young family from Brooklyn—haven’t even moved in yet, and already it’s starting.

“Station Stop… Glenhaven Park.”

Snatching the magazine from Cosette’s hands and ignoring her protest, Meg grabs her daughter’s arm and escorts her off the train with a smattering of other riders.

The long, concrete platform looks exactly the same as it did the last time Meg was here. Only then, she was headed to New York… for good.

Or so she thought.

“This way.” She leads the glowering Cosette along the platform, toward the stairs that rise to the enclosed station one story above the tracks.

From there, opposite flights of stairs descend back to ground level: the commuter parking lot and taxi stand on one side of the tracks, the main drag of the business district on the other.

“I can’t believe I’ve never brought you here,” Meg tells her daughter, as they descend to the street.

“I can’t believe you’re bringing me here at all—especially today, of all days,” Cosette mutters.

Meg ignores her, just as for the past forty-eight hours, she ignored Cosette’s pleas to let her keep her standing Saturday afternoon movie date with Jon, her boyfriend of the past four months. Jon, who—as Meg just discovered—is not a high school student at Fordham Prep in the Bronx, as Cosette implied. No, he’s a college sophomore at Fordham University in the Bronx—and part of the reason Cosette was expelled—just before finals, no less.

“You were this close to finishing the school year!” Meg shoved her hand in her daughter’s face, her thumb and forefinger pressed together. “This close! Couldn’t you have hung in there for another two weeks without getting yourself into trouble?”

“It wasn’t even a real gun,” was Cosette’s maddening reply.

“You didn’t bother to tell that to the kids you threatened with it, did you?”

“What would have been the point of that?”

“What was the point of any of this?”

“It wasn’t my fault. I’m not the one who goes around harassing people because of how they look. They should have been kicked out of school, not me.”

Privately, Meg happens to agree with her daughter on that count—at least, that the school should also have a zero tolerance policy against bullying.

If only she had known that a group of kids have been tormenting Cosette at school lately. Kids who used to be Cosette’s friends, back when they were all on the soccer team together. Meg knows their parents; in fact, knowing their parents, she isn’t particularly surprised by the kids’ behavior.

She herself was frequently cold-shouldered by the cookie-cutter women she dubbed the “Fancy Moms” from her first encounter with them. With their moneyed husbands, spectacular Central Park West apartments, and tasteful designer wardrobes, they did little to conceal their contempt for a single working mom. Even if she was an accomplished Broadway actress. Meg knew they regarded her Tony Award with as much esteem as they would a “World’s Best Mom” coffee mug—not that it ever mattered to her.

Well, not much.

And she certainly never let on to Cosette that she felt ostracized by the Fancy Moms.

Just as Cosette never told Meg what their mean-spirited little brats were doing to her.

Still, there was no excuse for how her daughter chose to handle the daily abuse when it threatened to go from verbal to physical.

After a couple of girls got their boyfriends to gang up on her after school last Friday, a shaken Cosette turned to Jon.

Not to her mother, or a teacher, or the principal.

No, she turned to her much-older boyfriend, who gave her the fake gun and told her to brandish it the next time anyone dared to bother her.

Bad advice.

“What do you think I should have done, then?” Cosette demanded. “Dyed my hair into a perfect blond pageboy, gone shopping at Talbots, and run for student council?”

How was Meg supposed to answer that?

Yes, life would be easier for Cosette if she were a conformist.

But you weren’t, Meg reminded herself then—and again now, as she lands on Main Street, where she spent her formative years.

She can’t help but remember how, bitten by the acting bug her freshman year, she quickly gave up trying to fit in with the preppy crowd at school.

But I never threatened anyone with a gun.

Her daughter’s offense is so heinous that Meg wasn’t even sure where to begin punishing her. Being grounded for a month is a good start. And Cosette seems to think this Saturday afternoon jaunt to suburbia is a fate worse than that.

But maybe she’ll come around.

After all, Glenhaven Park is the quintessential all-American small town, and it looks particularly appealing on this beautiful summer day. Everywhere you look, flags are flapping in the slight breeze. The grass and shrubs and trees are verdant and lush. Brilliant blooms spill from window boxes and hanging pots.

“Well?” Meg asks her daughter as they pause on the sidewalk. “What do you think?”

Cosette glances around glumly.

Meg follows her gaze, taking in the broad, leafy green that stretches for three blocks. A brick path meanders the length of the park, past clusters of wrought-iron benches and tall lampposts. In the center, surrounded by a bed of pink and purple annuals, is the bronze statue dedicated to the eleven local soldiers who died on D-day.

The road on either side of the green is lined with tree-shaded sidewalks, diagonal parking spaces, and nineteenth-century architecture.

On this, the northern end: a row of mom-and-pop shops and businesses that have been there for years. The quaint pastel storefronts appear to be in surprisingly good repair for their age—better repair, in fact, than they were back when Meg lived here.

At the southern end of the green, the street becomes more residential, lined with stately nineteenth-century relics Meg recognizes from her childhood.

There’s her friend Andrea’s old home, a classic Victorian with multiple turrets and a wraparound gingerbread porch. It used to be white with black shutters; now it’s a bona fide painted lady, clapboard and trim enhanced by complementary vintage shades of green and gold.

Next door to that is the looming stone mansion where Miss Oster, the high school Latin teacher, lived alone with a half dozen cats…

And across the green, the three-story monstrosity once home to the Callahans, who had sixteen redheaded freckle-faced kids and assorted pets. There’s no one hanging out any of the windows or dangling from tree branches out front, and the lawn is no longer covered with bikes, scooters, and wagons. It’s probably safe to assume that the Callahans have all grown up and moved on.

“I wonder if anyone I know still lives around here,” Meg muses.

In the split second after she poses that mostly rhetorical question, mostly to herself since Cosette doesn’t appear the least bit engaged, Meg spies a familiar figure strolling toward them along the sidewalk.

“I don’t believe it!” she exclaims, clutching Cosette’s sleeve—long, and black, despite the midday heat.

“I don’t, either. There’s not even a Starbucks around here,” Cosette grumbles.

“No, that’s Krissy… Krissy!” Meg calls and waves at the woman.

Hmm. Maybe it isn’t Krissy after all; she doesn’t wave back, nor does she even look up from the cell phone or BlackBerry or whatever it is that’s poised in her hand.

Is it Krissy? Krissy Rosenkrantz was Meg’s first kindergarten friend, and her partner-in-crime right up thro. . .