Significant Others Read online

  “Are you flying all the way down here to check up on me, Honey?”

  “Not to check up,” I assured, sighing. My client was going to have to wait. My mother wasn’t finished talking.

  “I want to see you, and I’m going to help you pack and move you back to Atlanta,” I said. Where you belong.

  Every time I brought up the subject, she was ready with a handy excuse. “Aunt Helene and I have tickets to the Miami opera.” “We want to catch that new gallery opening in South Beach.” “There’s a great show coming to the clubhouse.” “We’re going to hear a Japanese choir that sings in Hebrew.” “Aunt Helene is still getting over Harold’s death. She needs me.”

  But I knew the truth. My mother needed Aunt Helene more.

  “Donny is going to pick me up from the airport,” I said. And yes, I wanted to see this big-deal tree for myself and try to make some sense of a situation that made no sense at all.

  “Have you told anyone else about this—apparition?” I ventured.

  “Just Max,” she replied. “Max says someone is trying to send me a message.”

  “Max?” I choked. My father hadn’t even been in the ground for a year and she was already quoting another man to me? I stomped down my indignation and managed to sound calm.

  “Max who?”

  Someone else was beeping in, trying to reach me. I checked the number. It was my assistant, probably with some emergency only I could solve. But my mother was still talking.

  “Max Fisher, the widower who lives down the hall in 411,” my mother explained. “I told you about him. He was with his significant other, Jean, for six years. But she developed Alzheimer’s. He’s already booked a seniors’ Christmas cruise to the Caribbean, but Jean’s in a nursing home now, so she can’t go. He was so upset when I talked to him on the phone. He’s already paid for the cruise and he’s thinking of canceling. I told him not to be so hasty. He won’t go alone, and it would be a shame to waste the tickets. He asked me to go with him, and I’m considering it.”

  My mother paused for emphasis, and then started stuffing words into the gaping silence.

  “And why not?” she challenged. “Do you think nobody but your father could be interested in me? You think I haven’t had admirers before? Remember my old choir director?”

  “Arnold Macovsky? The one with the six kids?” The one who was too busy making babies with his wife to have time to even look at another woman? That Arnold Macovsky?

  “Exactly. You’ll like Max. I want you to meet him.”

  Wonderful. I can kill two birds with one stone—see Jesus and meet Max.

  The BlackBerry was still buzzing, so I knew it had to be important. The office would just have to wait. My mother was still too fragile to be rudely interrupted. Slow down, Honey Palladino, this is your mother on the phone.

  Taking a deep breath, I tried to focus on the conversation at hand and began the role-reversing task of grilling my mother.

  “How well do you know this Max person? Are you two dating?”

  “Of course I’m not dating, not this soon after your father,” she said defensively. “We’ve been out to dinner a few times. Sometimes we spend the evening sitting and watching TV. He keeps me company so I don’t have to think about your father. When I slip and call him Stanley, he doesn’t seem to mind too much. I don’t think he hears very well.”

  “Are you crazy? You can’t go on a cruise with another man. I know you aren’t going to share a room.”

  “Private balcony staterooms are very expensive,” my mother answered, “especially at Christmas. And the ship is going to some wonderful places—Barbados, St. Lucia, St. Johns, Antigua, St. Maarten and St. Thomas.”

  “That sounds like a lovely itinerary,” I said, stalling for time, drumming my fingers on the end table. “But if you want to go on a cruise, I can take you.”

  My mother laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You never have time,” she insisted. “A relaxing cruise is just what I need. I can picture myself in perfect peace on my private balcony overlooking the ocean. You can lose yourself in an ocean.”

  “Private balcony staterooms are one thing,” I countered. “But what about privacy?”

  “I can always dress in the bathroom. It will be fine.”

  “But are you going to m-make out with M-Max?” I stammered.

  “Make out?”

  “Are you going to have sex?” I clarified. Is that plain enough for you, Mom?

  “Honey, how can you talk to your mother like that?”

  “Because I’m concerned about you.”

  “I’ll let you know when I get back.”

  “Mom, don’t you think you’re too—I mean, is this appropriate behavior?”

  “For a woman my age, you mean?” she shot back. Now I’d insulted her.

  “I didn’t say that. It’s just that I don’t know anything about this Max person. For instance, where did you meet him?”

  “At my bereavement group.”

  “Your bereavement group?” I echoed, feeling faint. I dropped a pair of flip-flops into my suitcase and slumped onto the bed.

  “Yes, Aunt Helene told me about it. It’s really sort of a social group. That’s where everyone at Millennium Gardens meets their significant others.”

  Significant others? I wondered if I had time to catch an earlier flight. I knew I was being childish, but my father was the only significant other I wanted in my mother’s life, even though he was no longer capable of being a significant other, except in the spiritual sense.

  But I was hardly qualified to give my mother relationship advice when my own marriage was unraveling. I’d just found out that my significant other was cheating on me with a woman who was young enough to be his daughter.

  My husband Marc doesn’t think I know he’s sleeping with his twenty-seven-year-old temp, Trisha. But he isn’t exactly subtle. Maybe I am on the wrong side of forty, but I still can’t believe he’s betraying me. Still, how can I ignore the proof right here in my purse? Pictures don’t lie. Husbands do.

  When I arrived at the drugstore to pick up photos from our family Thanksgiving dinner, I was blindsided when, along with snaps of the turkey, I found pictures of Trisha that bordered on the pornographic. The only difference between Trisha and the bird was the turkey was dressed and Trisha wasn’t.

  And that wasn’t his only betrayal. I had a feeling he was behind the deal to sell Palladino Properties. As a mergers-and-acquisitions attorney, he was in business to make acquisitions, and somehow he had influenced my mother and was working behind my back to sell our family business. I just didn’t know why. So I’ll admit I didn’t want my mother to give up Palladino Properties, because, right now, the job was all I had. Well, I have Hannah, and my husband Marc, but I don’t have him for much longer.

  I considered myself a fairly rational person. But right now what I needed (besides a divorce attorney and a stiff drink) was a priest to help me unravel the mystery of what my mother saw or didn’t see in the Jesus tree, and why. Where am I going to get one of those? I could call my rabbi, but she was going through her own divorce. My mother went to high school with a priest in Pittsburgh. Before he became a priest. And they were still in touch. Maybe I should call Father Dominick DeFazio.

  “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” my mother asked quietly.

  “I’m reserving judgment,” I muttered, silently ticking off the dozens of tasks that had to be accomplished before my flight—the closings in progress, walkthroughs, appointments with inspectors, and a meeting with my assistant to make sure he monitored my listings, which currently ranged from a $260,000 condo in Decatur to a $3 million mansion on Tuxedo Road. Just an average day on the roller coaster that had become my life since my dad died and my mom dropped out of the picture.

  Time was running out for my mother in Boca. Time was also running out for my marriage. I hadn’t had the opportunity to confront Marc about his lies because I didn’t have the time, b
ut I was determined to have a showdown. I’d even marked it on my calendar. Christmas Day. There are no closings on Christmas Day. That was going to be our D-Day. “D” as in divorce.

  I was planning to talk to Donny’s wife about it at dinner tomorrow night. Marc was a lawyer, so he thought he had the advantage, but he hadn’t counted on my secret weapon—Barbara the Barracuda, and right now a barracuda was exactly what I needed.

  Or maybe what I really needed was a vision of my own, a vision of hope, of a new beginning, rather than the bleak prospect of an unhappy ending. Maybe my mother wasn’t so crazy after all. I wondered what I’d see when I finally came face-to-face with the Jesus tree.

  Chapter Two: The Shrine

  Boca Raton, Florida

  Leaving the Ft. Lauderdale airport, Donny drove me to his condo and used his key to unlock the front door. He moved my luggage into the guest room.

  “I set up the scanner in your bedroom so it wouldn’t disturb Mom,” Donny said. “She, um, sleeps a lot.” He looked deflated.

  “Thanks, Donny,” I replied.

  “Honey? I thought I heard voices. I’m so glad you’re here.” Dee Dee smiled as she came out of her bedroom to greet us.

  I folded the Bat Mitzvah Mom into my arms. Had she shrunk since the last time I’d seen her? Were those new lines under her eyes? Age spots on her hands that hadn’t been there before?

  Getting old bites, as Hannah liked to say. I never seriously thought it would happen to me. But it was happening, and without my permission. Even my hands with their ropy veins were beginning to resemble my mother’s. My best friend Vicky and I had already found a few age spots of our own. We called them our Chef’s Special Brown Spots, like the signature Chef’s Special Brown Sauce they served in our favorite Chinese restaurant. Maybe Marc was trying to hang on to his youth by hanging on to his youthful temp. That actually made sense in a bizarre kind of way. I just wished he’d realize I’m not thrilled about growing old, either, and maybe we could help each other negotiate the minefield of aging.

  I should never have let my mother out of my sight. The memory of her swaying over my father’s grave still haunts me. If Donny hadn’t caught her, I think she would have fallen—no, she was definitely about to jump—into the hole of freshly turned dirt to join her husband.

  I took her small, shapely hands into mine and rubbed my fingers against her wedding ring. She still wasn’t ready to let my dad go, to break the bond between them. Even though it breaks my heart, I had to admit it made me feel secure that she hadn’t forgotten my father. It was also another reminder that my mother had a better relationship with her dear departed husband than I did with my live, lying one, and that her marriage—even beyond the grave—was in better shape than mine.

  My mother had been heavily involved in the negotiations with Hammond Reddekker, but lately her focus hadn’t been on business and her heart hadn’t been in the acquisition talks. Her recent pronouncement that she was going to pull out of the company completely was not entirely unexpected. The final decision was hers, but right now Palladino Properties was my life and I didn’t know what I’d do without it. Maybe that was selfish, but that was how I felt.

  While my mother walked into the kitchen to fix us lunch, Donny approached me about the buyout.

  “Not now,” I cautioned. “We just got here. We can talk about that later.”

  Donny grumbled.

  As I surveyed the living room in disbelief, he announced proudly, “So, sis, how do you like the changes I’ve made to the place?”

  “You’ve redecorated,” I noted, rubbing my fingers against my jaw and across my mouth, trying not to register my shock. “It’s very...retro,” I said charitably.

  Taking my remark as a compliment, Donny smiled one of those big goofy smiles that lit up his green eyes and his entire face, while I continued to look around the darkness in confusion.

  Walking into the living room of my mother’s condo was like walking back in time. The blinds were closed and the lights were dimmed, except for strategically placed spotlights designed to enhance the vintage photos on the wall. It was obvious my mother didn’t really “live” here. She just existed. The atmosphere was as sterile as a museum. I wondered if I needed a ticket for admission.

  “Is this supposed to be some kind of a shrine?” I asked in the hushed tones that the room demanded, thinking that maybe it was something like the Elvis shrine Mrs. Shelby down the hall had in her spare bedroom. “Did you do all this for your dad?”

  Okay, now it was official. Both my mother and my brother were skating on the edge of sanity. And it was my job to pull them back from the brink. Work was the perfect prescription. It was the only way to help them get over the pain of losing a husband and a father. It was the way I planned to cope with a marriage that had turned to mush. If I could convince my mother not to sign my father’s company away.

  “Yeah, and I already know what you’re going to say,” Donny blustered. “Stanley Palladino was my dad.”

  “I wasn’t going to say that.” I frowned; however, I was thinking it. It was still spooky how well my brother could read me.

  Donny had obviously set the place up as a memorial to honor his real father, a World War II flyer who was shot down in a bombing mission over Europe. Donny never knew his real dad. The only remnant of him was an out-of-focus and now faded picture—the only picture Mom had of him. Donny had set it up on the sideboard on a lace runner, in a place of honor, next to his team picture of the Kingfishers, his wedding picture, a photo of Barbara and the children, and a high school graduation shot of Hannah that Marc had taken. That was the only trace of my husband in this condo. Which was appropriate, because I was trying to erase all traces of him from my life. But I’d been in love with my husband for twenty years, so it was hard to break the habit, even for a serious indiscretion.

  I circled the room. It was a throwback to the ’40s. Donny was obsessed with World War II, and it showed in the way the place was decorated.

  “Is this what you’ve been doing down here the last few months?” I asked in disbelief, thinking of all the time he had wasted.

  “These are great books, huh?” Donny said, hefting a particularly bulky volume from the coffee table and placing it gingerly into my hands. He indicated several other books with World War II themes displayed around the room, as well as a wealth of wartime memorabilia hanging on the walls.

  “Look here,” he said eagerly, picking up each book in turn. “The World at War 1939-45; Bombers: the Aircrew Experience; and Bomber Missions: Aviation Art of World War II. You wouldn’t believe what I had to go through to get these. Go ahead, don’t be afraid to handle them.”

  Flipping through some of the pages of the book in my hand, in an effort to humor my brother, I glanced at color photos of Superfortresses, pin-ups painted on the planes, and personalized jacket art worn by fearless young men dressed in leather flying jackets with fur collars to ward off the cold in the cockpit. My eyes skimmed the words—“dangerous missions,” “strategic targets,” “intrepid bomber pilots.” I tried to muster up some excitement because these books meant something to my brother, but they were echoes of a past I wasn’t part of and couldn’t relate to.

  I returned the book to Donny, who pressed the button on a wall panel that sent soft background music from the 1940s spilling into the living room.

  “I’ve piped the music into every room in the house,” Donny announced proudly. Apparently you couldn’t even go to the bathroom unaccompanied by the big band sound.

  My mother and Donny’s father met at a USO dance at a women’s club in Pittsburgh during the war, and Donny was obviously trying to recreate those happy memories.

  “Your father was very handsome in his uniform,” my mother used to say, when Donny asked about his dad, which was often. “He was an exceptional dancer. He had the most gorgeous green eyes. You have his eyes.” But Mom didn’t have much else to tell about their compatibility off the dance floor. They danced to all the great
s—Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey. The romance lasted for several months. They fell hopelessly in love. He went off to war and got himself killed. End of story.

  When Donny asked to see their love letters, so he’d have a tangible record of his parents’ history and get a better mental picture of his father, she told him they must have gotten lost after all those years.

  Looking around the condo gave me the creeps, because I didn’t think now was the time for my mother to be dwelling on painful memories of her first dead love while she was still recovering from her grief over her second one.

  But how could I be critical when I had a lifetime of memories with my dad, and Donny didn’t even have one real memory to cling to. So he’d created his own memories in a cramped condo in Millennium Gardens.

  “Stanley Palladino was a good dad,” I said, feeling the need to defend my father, especially now that he was gone. Why hadn’t he been enough for my brother?

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Donny said, “but he wasn’t my real dad.” Donny lowered his voice so our mother wouldn’t overhear. He had heard the story; we both had, more times than we can count.

  My dad adopted Donny and gave him his name when he married my mother. She and her baby boy were making a new life for themselves when they moved from Pittsburgh with my grandmother and Mom’s younger sister—my Aunt Helene—to Atlanta, where she took a job as a typist at my dad’s real estate agency. She worked herself up to agent, and after a couple of years of courting, she agreed to marry him. The rest, as my dad used to say, was history. My birth was part of their history.

  “Your mother was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen,” Stanley Palladino was fond of saying when he told the story of their romance. “She was prettier than any model on the pages of a fashion magazine. She refused to marry me so many times I stopped counting, but I never stopped asking. Then one day when I arrived at her apartment for dinner, little Donny greeted me at the door and said his first words, ‘Da Da.’ Your mother burst into tears. I’ll never forget that night. I caught her at her weakest point and closed the sale,” Stanley grinned. “She finally said yes. Of course, I’d been carrying the ring around in my pocket for more than a year. Let that be a lesson to you, Honey,” he used to say, tapping a long finger to my nose. “Persistence pays.”