Playing By The Rules

This is why I ended up opening the papers right then, after all, instead of waiting for morning. Part of it was that I might be considered a bad parent for not reading them right away. The other part was that I really wanted the hard part of my day to be over, and I knew that wouldn’t happen unless and until I knew exactly what Mill was up to.

Chloe was in the tub with the door open so I could hear if the splashing stopped—that way I’d know if she was drowning. I scanned the papers and they were pretty much what I had expected. Mill had decided that he wanted Chloe to live with him.

My heart did a dive. I read the papers again before I went to the phone and dialed Mill’s number. This is another thing about single parenthood—if a man fathers your child, it doesn’t matter if you haven’t laid eyes on him since the moment of conception. You will never forget his phone number.

“Have you lost your mind?” I demanded as soon as Mill answered. “You don’t want this.”

“Amanda.” Other than Sam, he was the only person in my life who ever dared to call me by my given name. I wondered briefly what the implications of that might be. One was the father of my child, and the other was my…well, my platonic friend.

“This wasn’t our deal,” I grated finally, staring at the papers in my hand.

“No,” he agreed. “But a father can’t actually sign away his parental rights, can he?”

He was right. A parent is a parent is a parent. Though I had a consent order with his signature on it wherein he solemnly swore never to intrude in Chloe’s life if I promised never to ask him for a dime of child support, I’d always known that if he chose to get involved, that piece of paper wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans.

The fact that he knew that, too, told me that he had been boning up on his family law—Mill specializes in corporate and tax law. Either that, or the attorney he was using for this had informed him of the fact.

I was starting to feel sick.

“I want my daughter,” Mill said. “I want a relationship with her.”

“Oh, the hell you do.” It was knee-jerk, out before I could stop it.

There was silence. I took that as a good thing. Maybe he was thinking that I wasn’t snowed. Or scared. Though, actually, I was a little—a lot—of both.

“Mandy, it just doesn’t look good,” he said finally.

I realized that he would probably be taping our conversation by now—it’s a neat lawyer trick. As long as words are spoken on a telephone line—which is technically a public medium—they’re legally up for grabs. So I took a new tack. “It’s the election thing, right?” I asked. “Mill, I understand. Okay, then. I’ll marry you.”

I was gratified by a gargling sound. “I beg your pardon?”

“You asked me once, then you withdrew the offer. And I was so young and foolish at the time. Now I’ve realized the error of my ways. Marry me, Mill. Please.”

Chloe chose that moment to wander into the kitchen wrapped in her favorite, too-pink Barbie bathrobe. I tried to shoo her away but she wouldn’t go. I had him, I knew I had him, but I couldn’t push my advantage with her listening on.

“I heard you were seeing someone,” he said suddenly.

“You did?” I couldn’t fathom how that rumor might have gotten started. Then, with his next words, I got it.

“That lawyer who lives in your building,” he clarified.

My heart stalled a little. Things always managed to come back around to Sam lately, didn’t they? “I’m not seeing him,” I said. “We’re just friends.” This was starting to sound like a mantra, I thought.

“That might have changed the whole complexion of this issue.”

I almost laughed aloud. Mill would always be…well, Mill, I thought. No, he didn’t want Chloe. He was just trying to find an easy way out of our seven-year-plus mess. If Chloe had another father figure in her life, then maybe he wouldn’t have to do the job. He couldn’t be publically chastised as much for not remaining a part of our lives.

In an odd way that made me sad.

I was about to say so when Sam came banging at the door. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t want him to hear me talking to Mill about this. Maybe because I didn’t want him to know there was suddenly a major crusade afoot to push us together and the entire city of Philadelphia seemed to be in on it.

“I’ll get it, Mom!” Chloe shouted. Then, a heartbeat later, “It’s Sam!”

“I’ve got to go,” I said quickly.

Mill overheard. Chloe’s voice can be like a siren when she’s happy. “Sam?” he asked.

“The pizza guy.” I hung up the phone fast.

“I have two bottles,” Sam said, stepping into the kitchen. He held them both in one hand. In the other was his Glenlivet. That told me I could have the wine to myself—he wouldn’t be sharing it.

“Was it going to take you that much to get Tammy into—” Then I broke off. Chloe was leaning against his right thigh, looking at me expectantly.

“Get Tammy into what?” she asked. Then she looked up at Sam. “Who’s Tammy?”

“Never mind, rug rat.” But Sam knew where I’d been headed with my comment. “One was for before,” he told me, “and the other was for after. I’m good. I don’t need much help.”

Funny thing about a woman’s body. It has a mind of its own. You can react even when your brain is utterly sane with the understanding that reacting is stupid. It happens viscerally. I imagined “good” with Sam and when something rolled over inside me this time, it wasn’t in my gut. It was a lot lower than that. And after it rolled, it tightened up.

Damn Grace. I rubbed my forehead again.

“Neck rub?” he asked, noticing.

“Just uncork the wine, Sam. And hurry.”

Chapter Three

I blame Sam’s wine as much as I blame anything else for what happened next. By nine o’clock, when Chloe was tucked into bed, my eyes were closed and my head was tilted back against the sofa cushions. My feet were propped on the coffee table. So were Sam’s. He was on the other end of the sofa.

“You know what the problem is?” he asked me suddenly.

I made the kind of noise in my throat that said I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about, but that he should go on, anyway.

“With dating,” he clarified.

I opened one eye. “Ah, that problem. Your way or mine? Excessively or rarely?”

“I don’t date excessively.” He sat up straight, indignantly. “Saturday night comes every week. I just like to use it accordingly.”

“Sam, you date on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, too.”

“My point is that too much or too little of this dating business is equally frustrating.”

He was staring down into his scotch glass now. His expression was serious. After a day filled with Grace’s observations and Mill’s custody petition, Sam’s suddenly pensive mood worried me.

“You go out with a woman for the first time and she expects all these subtle little things to immediately click right into place,” he continued. “Talk about pressure.”

“As opposed to men,” I asked, “who don’t give a damn about things clicking one way or the other?”

He looked over at me and his face took on that offended look again. “That’s not true. We give a damn.”

“Before or after you catch sight of the finish line?”

“Both.”

I rolled my eyes to show my opinion of that. “Continue. What little things?”

“Mental stimulation. Good conversation. Mental stability. Sexual attraction. Everything is supposed to happen all at once, and men are looking for that, too. I mean, some of us want it and some of us run like hell when it’s there, but it’s still an issue.”

Suddenly, I was sure that Grace had repeated to him everything I’d told her earlier about my own over-thirty-five theory, my three-Cs rule of thumb—companionship, comfort and conversation. This was a little spooky.

“Have you been talking to Grace?” I demanded.

Sam looked around my living room as though expecting to find her there. “Not since McGlinchey’s. Why?”

“What did she say to you?”

He looked at me oddly. “You were there. You heard the whole conversation. You were part of it.”

“You didn’t talk to her privately?”

“When would I have done that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re really acting strange tonight,” he said.

I grabbed the wine bottle from the coffee table and topped off my glass. “Having your daughter’s father sue you for custody can do that to a woman.” I’d filled him in on the problem after dinner when Chloe had gone to her room to watch television.

Sam waved a hand negligently. “I told you I’d handle that.”

“And I told you no thanks.”

“You’re too close to it to represent yourself.”

And he was closer to it than he knew. I could only imagine Mill’s reaction if Sam—the man I was reputedly seeing—appeared with me in court. “Get back to your point,” I prodded him. “You were philosophizing.”

Sam slanted another look my way. “Okay. The thing is, somebody is always waiting, wanting, hoping for all those little things to click into place and coincide.”

“The mental stimulation, the conversation and the animal attraction,” I said to clarify.

“I didn’t say animal. Who said anything about animal?”

I realized I had claws on my mind again. “Well, that’s what we’re all looking for, right?”

His brows climbed his forehead. “Are you?”

I definitely wasn’t going to get into that discussion again. “We were talking about you, Sam.”

“All right. Fine. We’ll call it animal attraction. But it never happens, you know. Either you get the mental stimulation going, but then the animal business is missing—or it’s there, but the woman turns out to be a Looney-Toon, emotionally unstable. Or she thinks you’re great and you think she’s about as interesting as a can of vegetables.”

I got stuck on the emotionally unstable part. “Like Tammy?”

He didn’t argue it. He just shrugged. “Then you’re left trying to wriggle free without hurting anyone’s feelings or wearing some pink drink,” he said.

He was like that, I knew. He worried as much about hurting women as I did about bad parenthood. “You looked ridiculous, by the way.”

He didn’t rise to the bait. He lifted his glass and swallowed the last of his scotch. “I just get tired of it, Mandy. But it’s like some kind of…of addiction. We keep scrambling after it because we need that male-female thing going on in our lives. And the need makes us keep going out there, bashing our heads against walls, smashing ourselves all up, getting drinks tossed in our faces, just because we had the audacity to look for a partner who’s on the same wavelength.”

“Wavelengths are shifty little things,” I agreed.

He stood and went to the kitchen to retrieve his bottle of scotch. When he came back, he bent and picked up his shoes from my living room floor. Then he stood at the door, armed with all of it. “On that note, I’m going home,” he said. “Thanks for dinner.”

Suddenly I felt an overriding need to set everything back to the way we had been in the courtroom that afternoon. I wanted to banish Grace’s insane observations and Mill’s innuendoes from the air. Maybe I just figured that by reminding us of what we were supposed to be, we would be able keep it so.

“You know, it’s really great to have a male-type friend,” I said. “It’s nice to talk like this, to get a masculine perspective.”

“That’s me,” Sam said shortly. “Male-type.” Then he left. Quickly.

I frowned after him. I knew him well enough to understand that somehow or other, I had just hurt him. But how? Then my heart hit the wall of my chest. Did he not want to be just a male-type friend anymore?

I shook my head. This was Grace’s doing. Such a thought would never even have occurred to me five hours ago.

Or maybe it was the wine, I thought. I’d had too much of it. I narrowed my eyes to focus them on the door he had just passed through. There was only one door there, so I was not drunk. Nope, I was fine.

Either way, now that I was alone, a million little demon thoughts came spewing out of the recesses of my mind to hoot and holler. Most of them wore little T-shirts labeled Sex and Sam. It came to me then that I probably wasn’t going to be able to sleep until I knew why he’d been insulted by what I’d said. I got to my feet, still looking at the door. I put my wine down on the coffee table. The Sex and Sam goblins were jumping gleefully up and down by now, clapping their hands. A tiny, sane part of me told me to go to bed right now. So, of course, I listened to the demon-goblins.

I peeked into Chloe’s room. She was sound asleep. I tiptoed in, kissed her forehead, then I closed her door quietly behind me. I left my apartment and stood in the hall, looking at the stairs to the second floor.

If I came right out and asked him if he wanted to be more than just my male-type pal, I knew I was going to get my pride kicked hard. For one thing I wasn’t his type physically—not a blond hair in sight. For another, if he’d had any romantic designs on me whatsoever, I figured he would have acted on them a long time ago. We’d known each other for nearly six months, and Sam is definitely not the reticent sort.

That realization made me sane again. I started to turn back into my own apartment, but then I saw his legs appear on the landing. The top part of him was chopped off by the next level of stairs.

“Sam?” I said, to be sure.

“What are you doing down there?” he demanded.

“I was coming to your apartment.”

“No need. I’m right here. So you can just stay where you are.”

Talk about one of us acting odd. “Okay.”

“Why were you coming to my apartment?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” I shrugged, though he couldn’t see it. “I was just…thinking.”

“That’s a very dangerous thing to do at this hour.”

I looked at my watch. “It’s only ten o’clock.”

“Yeah, but that makes it something like three in the morning in parts of Europe.”

“Okay. So what are you doing on the stairs at three in the morning in parts of Europe?”

“I’m not sure yet.” Then there was a very long, very quiet pause. “I guess I was thinking, too.”

Somehow, in that very moment, I knew I’d been right. He’d definitely been offended by what I’d said, unhappy about being classified as a male-type friend. “About time zones?” I asked, in case I was wrong.

“About us.”

I’d been expecting it, but I think my heart actually vaulted over its next beat anyway. “Are you drunk?” I asked. I’d ruled myself out—now I needed to make sure he was sober, too.

He took some time to think about it, and I imagined he was probably squinting at doors, too, just to be sure. “No,” he decided finally.

I inched toward the stairs, leaving my door open so I would hear Chloe if she woke up and called me. He headed down. We reached the bottom tread at the same time and I dropped to sit there, but he kept standing beside me.

“I was thinking that maybe we could give each other a kind of break for a while,” he said finally. “From dating. You know, we could do things together.”

“What kinds of things?” I asked.

He scowled down at me. “I don’t know. Just…uncomplicated things. Things that don’t involve pink drinks or timing devices like Frank Ethan’s watch. We could swear off chasing the opposite sex for a while if we keep each other company in the interim. We could assuage all those male-female urges without the issue getting too complicated.”

It wasn’t me who needed the break, I thought. Grace had been right. I’d pretty much been on a dating hiatus since I’d met him. But I decided that it might be prudent not to mention that, because there was a lot in this for me. I could put up a good front for Mill, I realized. If he thought I really was happily involved, maybe he would back down on this whole custody issue. I can rationalize anything, even the irrational.

“Let me make sure I’ve got this straight,” I said. “We’ll do things together for a while—uncomplicated things—while we swear off dating until such time as one or both of us feels up to plunging back into the pool?”

He looked relieved. “Yeah. That’s it exactly. So…what do you think?”

“Define uncomplicated first.”

“I don’t know. Dining, drinks, companionship. Sex.”

He shoved that last part in quickly, and my air stopped somewhere midway in my chest. Well, I thought, this would certainly put Grace’s opinions to rest once and for all. I could claw my heart out with him for a while and get it out of my system.

“That’s the whole point of this!” he said when I didn’t answer immediately. I thought he sounded stressed. “Without the sex, we’re right back out there bashing our heads against the wall looking for the whole enchilada! Damn it, male-type friends can have sex, too!”

Ah, I thought. Bingo. Am I perceptive or what? “Of course they can,” I said quickly.

“This would be a mutually gratifying situation,” he said. “Not a relationship.”

“We already have a relationship.”

“But we don’t have a relationship.”

I thought about it. “True.” I got to my feet. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“It sounds reasonable to me.” I was breathing again, but just barely.

“So when are we going to start this?” he asked.

“Tomorrow? It makes sense to begin with a brand-new day, doesn’t it? And we could each have tonight to change our minds.”

“Are you going to change your mind?”

“Probably not.”

“Neither will I.” He laughed. He sounded self-conscious. Then he started to turn up the stairs again and he paused. “I’m still good for that hot dog tomorrow if you want to get to the courthouse early. Maybe we should each bring a couple of…I don’t know…ground rules for this…this…” He trailed off completely this time, sounding lost.

“Nonrelationship?” I suggested.

“Arrangement.”

I nodded. It was as good a word as any I could think of. “You want bylaws?”

“They could be our arrangement bill-of-rights-and-wrongs,” he said.

“Should we write them down and affix our signatures?”

He laughed again, but his voice still didn’t sound quite right. “Sure, if you want.” Then he went upstairs.

I watched him go. When his legs disappeared around the landing, I came to the amazing discovery that I no longer possessed legs of my own. They’d gone hollow.

After a while, I wobbled back to my apartment. I checked on Chloe, still snoozing, barely moved. This is another parent thing, but I think it’s the same whether you’re single or with a mate. You check your young repeatedly while they sleep. I don’t know what exactly it is that we expect to have happen to them while we’re not actually looking at them. It’s just a compulsion, and maybe it’s a selfish one at that. Because in the back of your mind, you know that the only way you can really settle down and get some rest yourself—or write lists, as the case might be—is if your child is genuinely zonked for the duration of the night.

Since Chloe appeared to be sincerely zonked, I went to my briefcase, found a legal pad and a pen, and carried them back to my own bed with me. Impulsively I took the last of the wine and the shrimp, too. Two hours later I was surprised by how hard it was for me to come up with the ground rules Sam wanted.

Who needed guidelines? I thought. I figured we’d just pretty much stay the way we were, except we’d…do the sex thing. I’d get to touch him with impunity. I’d finally get to drive my fingers into that great, dark hair of his, touch it when it fell down over his forehead the way it did. I’d get him—and Grace’s theories—out of my system.

Still, I figured I needed to come up with my own bill of rights if only to keep in the spirit of things, so I spent much of the rest of the night on my list. I still wasn’t satisfied with it when I tucked my car into the municipal parking lot at twelve-thirty the following afternoon.

Sam was already standing on the corner beside the hotdog vendor. The spider monkey—or chimpanzee, or whatever it was—was perched on his shoulder. Sam should have looked ridiculous. Instead, something airy filled my legs at the sight of him.

I got out of my car and rooted in my trunk for my briefcase, wondering if this wobbly-leg business was going to be a new phenomenon while our arrangement was in place. I could only hope that it would go away as things wore on.

His back was to me and he didn’t see me approach. I was able to step up behind him before I spoke. “Boo.”

He turned. The monkey began chattering. It swiped an eerily human hand in my direction and I jumped back. I did not like the beast. However, like so many females, she was crazy about Sam.

“She has a crush on you,” I said.

It was an opinion I’d shared before, but this time Sam wiggled his brows at me. “Jealous?”

“I am beside myself with anguish. Where’s my hot dog?”

“Anguish obviously doesn’t affect your appetite.”

“Not a bit.” The vendor held a hot dog in my direction, gooey with melted cheese and fried onions, just the way I like it. The monkey made a grab for it. “Back off,” I warned. “Mine.”

“See?” Sam said to Julio, the vendor. “She’s jealous.”

I took a bite. “I was referring to my meal. He’s paying this time,” I said to Julio. The poor guy’s gaze was whipping back and forth between us now. He seemed confused and wary.

“We have an arrangement,” Sam told him, then he looked at me again. “By the way, it’s started now, right?”

Things danced inside me. I managed to nod. “But if you call me something like doll, I’ll clock you.” It was one of the few rules I’d been able to come up with last night. No saccharine endearments. I’d included this mostly because I’d overheard a good many of Sam’s over the last six months, and they all tended to be nauseating.

He shook his head seriously. “Doll? I don’t think that particular term has ever passed my lips.” He bit down into his own hot dog. The monkey did not try to take his.

“Yes, it did,” I said. “With that redhead.”

“What redhead?”

“A couple of months ago. The one in the rust-colored spandex. We arrived home at the same time—me and Frank and you and her. And when you opened the door for her, I distinctly remember hearing you call her doll.”

“Oh, that redhead. Of course I did. That was her name.”

I laughed. “Doll?”

“Eee. Doll-y.” He grinned that crooked grin. “So do we have a marriage or what?”

The last bite of my hot dog jammed in my throat. I swallowed hard to push it down. Last night he’d been calling this thing an arrangement, and now he was talking about marriage? I felt like I’d fallen asleep in the theater and woken up at the end of the movie. “Come again?”

“The Woodsens,” Sam explained. Then he lifted the little monkey from his shoulder. “There now, darling,” he cooed to her, giving her back to the vendor. “I’ll be back before you know it.” He picked up his briefcase from the sidewalk and headed toward the courthouse steps.

The Woodsens, I thought. He was talking about the Woodsens. Of course he was. I paid the vendor without even thinking about it—because Sam hadn’t—and I went after him.

“Did you talk to Lisa?” he asked when I caught up.

“Yes. She’s says she’ll attempt a reconciliation rather than lose her kids.” We were back in lawyer mode. There was a great deal of comfort to be found there. Not that I didn’t want to proceed with our arrangement. I did. But I was finding that it was a little like walking a tightrope, and every once in a while it just seemed best to step down and plant my feet on solid ground again.

“It’s never going to work if that’s her attitude,” Sam said.

“He dumped her and filed for divorce over a simple medical problem!” I protested.

“Simple medical problem?” Sam laughed as we trotted up the steps. “Is that politically correct for running around the house naked?”

“Only when your partner perceives it as an invasion from Pluto.”

We stopped in front of the big oak doors. “Lyle’s going to need more of an enthusiastic response than that,” Sam insisted. “That’s all I’m saying.”