The Not So Perfect Life of Mo Lawrence

  For Angel, Malcolm and Ron,

  who are much funnier in real life.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1

  The first cracks opened when the phone rang at five forty-three on Wednesday evening. Michelle was in the kitchen, crouched before her eight-month-old daughter, Rosie, spooning into her willing mouth an organic mixed-vegetable mush that Michelle knew would emerge from Rosie’s other end pretty much unchanged in colour and consistency, if not in aroma. The vegetable mush currently smelled not unlike the first pumpkin pie Michelle had ever made. That smell (compost peelings with a top note of cough syrup) had been the major reason contributing to it being also the last pumpkin pie Michelle had ever made. That and the fact it hadn’t set properly, and fell on the plate in viscous globs much like those you’d find in the handkerchief of someone with an acute sinus infection.

  Fortunately, that Thanksgiving it had only been her and Chad. It was their first, eight months after their wedding, before babies, and mercifully free of in-laws. Chad’s father had accepted a junket to Rome courtesy of some European mega-bank and taken his wife with him, a joyous event not to be repeated for any of the subsequent Lawrence family Thanksgivings.

  Chad had stared at the globs and asked, ‘Don’t you make pumpkin pie in New Zealand?’

  ‘No, we bloody well don’t!’ Michelle had huffed. ‘And we don’t make any of that other freak food like baby marshmallows with sweet potato, or salads encased in — gag me — moulded gelatine. We have roast lamb and pavlova, like normal people!’

  Chad had looked up at her, his expression wistful. ‘I like baby marshmallows and sweet potato.’

  Michelle had shaken her head. ‘Not on my watch, buckaroo. As long as I have breath in my body, in this house the freakish twain of confectionery and tubers will never, ever meet.’

  Of course, every subsequent Thanksgiving at her mother-in-law’s house, Michelle had to watch, powerless, as both her husband and her son, Harry, scarfed down turkey stuffed with sausage, mashed potato oozing with extra cheese, and the sweet potato casserole made with marshmallow crème custard that continued to be served because ‘it’s always been Chad’s favourite’. Michelle noted that Chad studiously avoided her eye as the serving spoon emerged from the casserole dish with a sucking sound, bearing a mound of pinkish goo. Michelle was only grateful that Chad’s mother considered the customary addition of jello cubes to anything, sweet or savoury, as ‘tacky’. And that she didn’t stint on the wine.

  No, Virginia Lawrence could not be said to be a stingy hostess, Lord love her. Michelle had never seen her mother-in-law in a state even close to tipsy, but she was convinced there were deeper reasons for her insisting that Harry called her ‘Gin-Gin’.

  Michelle glanced over at her son, sitting up at the table, working his way steadily through a plate of beans and rice and carrot sticks. Harry, at three, did everything steadily. He refused to abandon any task before he was finished and, equally, he refused to be hurried. In that respect, as well as physically, Harry was just like his father. The two were blond, measured and solid. In fact, Harry added a whole new dimension to the word solid. Friends would bend down to pick him up off the floor and exclaim ‘Christ!’ (or ‘My goodness!’, depending on whether they were an actual friend or just a friend of the Lawrence family). Even Lowell, Chad’s father, who until recently had been as hale and robust as a Wagnerian god, had struggled to get baby Harry off the ground.

  Michelle smiled fondly at her son. Her daughter, who was as measured as a rogue firework, did not appreciate even a second’s pause while being fed. With a squeal of irritation, Rosie lunged forward and grabbed the plate.

  ‘Shit!’ Michelle jerked, and the plate shot out of Rosie’s grasp and flipped upwards, hurling a brown arc of mush into the air. Most of it landed on Rosie, who began to scream at a pitch and volume to rival Maria Sharapova on centre court. A big gob splattered right in Michelle’s eye. ‘Shit!’ she yelled again, wiping at it frantically. ‘Shit, bugger, bugger, that stings!’

  ‘Mom-ee!’ Harry hated yelling of any kind but especially the swearing kind. He also hated the thought of anything bad happening to his mother. He’d become inconsolably distraught when Michelle had effed, blinded and hobbled after her bare foot had landed heavily on a piece of Lego. Now, Michelle made sure she always wore slippers.

  ‘Mom-ee-ee!’

  ‘I’m OK, sweet pea!’ Michelle called. ‘It’s just Rosie’s food! Effing stinging bollocksy crap,’ she added under her breath, fumbling for the baby wipes. ‘Organic, my bum.’

  Rosie writhed under the wipe, red-faced with rage. Her screams had that shuddering tremolo of pure fury, and were now potentially audible to not only the neighbours, but also citizens of the next state.

  ‘MOM-EE-EE!’

  ‘Harry!’ Michelle snapped. ‘Chill!’

  The phone rang, and Michelle snapped at it too. ‘Go away!’

  The ringing seemed to get louder, as if the phone knew it was being deliberately ignored. Michelle gave up wiping a furious Rosie and stomped to the refrigerator, where she stabbed a plastic straw into a box of juice, stomped back and shoved it at her daughter, who stopped crying instantly and started sucking. Michelle then went to Harry, picked him up out of his chair and hugged him to her.

  ‘There you go, sweet pea.’ She stroked his back as he buried his hot little face in her shoulder. ‘Everyone’s all better now. We’re all cool little Fonzies.’

  Harry lifted his head. ‘Rosie’s not s’posed to have those,’ he told his mother. ‘They’re bad for her teeth and she could choke on the straw and die.’

  ‘Sounds word for word out of the mouth of your grandmother. Did Gin-Gin tell you that?’

  Harry nodded solemnly, and added, ‘The phone’s still ringing.’

  ‘I know,’ said Michelle. ‘But the only people who call at this time are telemarketing freaks who want to take our money. They’ll go away soon.’

  Immediately, the ringing stopped.

  ‘See?’ Michelle smiled at her son. ‘We’ve just saved twenty bucks of Daddy’s hard-earned moolah!’

  The phone started up again.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Michelle tried not to yell. ‘You cannot be serious!’

  ‘Might be Daddy,’ said Harry.

  ‘Daddy knows better than to call at your dinner time …’ But Michelle plumped Harry back down in his chair and walked a little faster than normal towards the phone.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Is he there?’

  Forty years of living in the South had taken most of the clip out of Virginia Lawrence’s Boston vowels, and while she would never go so far as to adopt the languid formality of a Blanche Dubois, she always spo
ke with a scrupulously measured courtesy. She would never, ever, under normal circumstances begin a conversation without a reciprocal hello.

  ‘Virginia?’ Michelle frowned. ‘What’s up?’

  Normally, too, her mother-in-law would protest at the use of the expression ‘What’s up?’, classifying it with others she deemed irretrievably vulgar, such as ‘How’s it hanging?’, ‘Where y’at?’ and ‘Gimme five!’ When Harry was first learning to talk, Michelle had considered teaching him to greet his grandmother, just once, with ‘Yo, bitch!’ but had reluctantly decided against it.

  But Virginia seemed not even to have heard her. ‘Is he there?’ she said again, with a breathless urgency. ‘Is he home?’

  ‘Who? Chad?’ Michelle glanced at the clock on the wall. ‘It’s only quarter to six.’

  ‘He left here ten minutes ago.’

  Michelle felt a small, unpleasant prickle of dread. The soles of her feet began to tingle, as if the ground she was standing on was no longer stable. ‘He left your place? What was he doing there? He always comes straight home—’

  She heard the click of the front door opening. It was a sound that she subconsciously waited for every week night. Usually it released a small but vital bubble of happiness, which flitted upwards from her gut to her heart. Usually that click meant Michelle could be sure all was right with her world.

  ‘Daddy!’

  Seems she wasn’t the only one who listened for it. Harry scrambled down off his chair, ruddy face alight with joy, and stood bouncing up and down on his tiptoes, ready to race forward at the first sight of his father.

  ‘Virginia!’ Michelle hissed urgently. ‘What was Chad doing at your place?’

  ‘It will kill him. Really, you must talk to him!’

  ‘Kill who? Jesus!’

  ‘Dad-eeee!’

  Harry had spied his father in the kitchen doorway and was racing towards him. Michelle watched as her tall, blond husband bent to scoop up his small son into his arms. She heard Rosie in her highchair grunt and gurgle with excitement, knowing that Daddy would soon stride over and chuck her cheek with his finger and kiss the top of her dark, downy head. That was Chad’s routine — a bear hug and a ‘Hey, big guy!’ for Harry, a quick kiss and a ‘Hey, gorgeous!’ for Rosie, then a fuller kiss on the mouth for Michelle and a brief, silent exchange of amusement mixed with disbelief, as if neither of them was entirely sure how all this had come about but it seemed only right to count their blessings.

  This Wednesday evening, however, at ten to six, there was no ‘Hey, big guy!’ when Chad scooped up Harry into his arms and hugged him. His eyes were on Michelle. The small prickle of dread crept up her spine and insinuated itself everywhere. She felt suspended, in that nauseating instant when you realise you’ve stepped out onto nothing and are about to fall.

  A muted squawking reminded Michelle that her mother-in-law was still on the line. She held out the receiver to her husband.

  ‘It’s your mother.’ Chad nodded. ‘Shall I put her on speaker?’

  Her husband reached out for the phone. ‘Mom, I’ll call you back.’

  The answering squawk was abruptly terminated.

  Rosie, outraged at being deprived of her kiss, began to yell. Michelle saw Harry’s face crumple and knew he, too, was about to cry. Her dread was swept away by an emotion Michelle was more familiar with: the rapid boil of anger.

  ‘You will get these children into their bath,’ she informed her husband. ‘You will get them both into bed and you will read Harry a story. You will then find me in the living room, drinking a large glass of wine, and you will tell me, without the slightest prevarication, what the hell is going on!’

  2

  ‘I blame you,’ Michelle told her best friend, Darrell.

  ‘How can it possibly be my fault? I’ve never even met Chad! I live in London. In a whole other country. A whole other continent!’

  The little figure of Michelle on the Skype screen put its hands over its ears. ‘No, no! Not listening! Too busy blaming!’

  ‘All right,’ said Darrell. She settled back against the propped-up pillows and shifted her laptop on her knees. ‘I give in. How is it my fault?’

  ‘It was that bloody Euro road trip you took with lover boy. I caught Chad looking at the photos on my computer one weekend. You and the studly Gypsy rover, in some amazing French “valley shady”. He looked like he was whistling, too!’

  ‘Anselo doesn’t whistle,’ Darrell remarked. ‘He’s more of a hummer. Except with Patti Smith’s version of Gloria. That he’ll sing to.’

  ‘And in the next photos, you’re on some spectacular alpine pass, and then on the shores of Lake effing Como! Did you see George, by the way—?’

  ‘Little old village men dashed hopes. Signor Giorgio Clooney was in France with his latest bella ragazza. I’m not sure what that means.’

  ‘It’s Italian for Lucky Bitchio … Wait. Lost track. Back to blaming. You have to understand that Chad has been to only two places in his whole life. Home one: here in Charlotte, North Carolina, and home two: the Lawrence family holiday mansion in Ogunquit, Maine. They call it The Cottage, you know, as if at one time it was inhabited by salt-of-the-earth pastoral people. Unlikely, seeing it was built in the 1920s, and that no Lawrence family matron would let a micron of either salt or earth near the place.’

  ‘Is there a point coming?’ Darrell said. ‘Skype is free but broadband is not. And you made me call you, remember?’

  Michelle threw up her hands. ‘Point is that Chad hasn’t even been to his parents’ Boston birthplace. He is about as well travelled as a public monument. I think your photos were like a first hit of crack to him. And now he’s buying Lonely Planet guides and forcing us to up stumps and shift the length of this whole freaking country. To San Freak-Cisco!’

  ‘Well, that is where his new job is—’

  ‘He doesn’t need a new job. He has a perfectly good old job!’

  ‘Is it a step up? Career- and money-wise?’

  ‘He doesn’t need a step up. We’re more than comfortable here!’

  Darrell knew this to be true. She and Michelle had been best friends since secondary school and, despite having had miles of globe between them for years, messaged or called each other pretty much every week. Michelle spared Darrell no details of her life, so Darrell had not only seen photos of Michelle’s house, she probably knew more about it than Michelle’s immediate neighbours. Michelle and Chad lived in an affluent part of uptown Charlotte called Elizabeth. Although it was no more than ten minutes’ drive from the central city, the streets were leafy and, thanks to the streetcars that had once run down them, broad. The houses, including Michelle’s, were large and mainly Victorian. Michelle’s house had a blue and white painted outside and lots of wood panelling inside. Out front, it had a huge wrap-around porch where, on the many fine weekends, the whole family hung out and shouted cheery hellos to other families passing by on their way to the park. Darrell and Michelle had grown up in Wellington, New Zealand, in a conservative suburb where porch-sitting was, in good English-derived tradition, frowned upon as slummy. You could sit in the back garden under the pergola, but the only socially acceptable reason for spending any time out the front of your house was trimming the hedge. This task had to be performed with eyes averted from the neighbours in case anyone thought you were spying (which, of course, you were but there was no call to be obvious about it).

  Darrell knew Michelle loved where she lived. She was part of a neighbourhood mothers’ group, who shared babysitting and play dates. She loved the park, one of Charlotte’s oldest, where they watched Fourth of July fireworks in summer and Chad pulled Harry on a sled in the small amount of snow that fell in winter. Over the tops of the trees you could see the shiny peaks of the city skyscrapers.

  Despite a population of less than two million, Charlotte was, after New York, America’s second largest financial centre. Many banks and large corporations were headquartered in Charlotte. Chad worked for a b
ank. Darrell wasn’t entirely sure what he did, but whatever it was his father, Lowell, had done the same thing before him and made a pile. When you added this to the pile he had inherited from his Boston Brahmin family and the Maine property his wife had brought as dowry, it was clear that Lowell Lawrence was really quite wealthy indeed. Darrell knew that while Chad earned a good income, the only reason he and Michelle were living in their large Victorian uptown house was that Lowell had paid for half of it. He’d called it a loan, but everyone knew that was a lie. It was a gift to his only child — his only son — and, in a way, to his wife, because it ensured the Lawrence grandchildren would be only a few minutes’ drive from Lowell and Virginia’s even larger grand old home in Myers Park, and not in some ranch house at the farthest reaches of Mecklenburg County or, God forbid, in one of Charlotte’s more artistic and ethnically diverse communities.

  Michelle had got it off her chest in a series of communications (some in full ranting caps lock mode), so Darrell felt her friend had accepted that her house came at a price. But Michelle was determined that familial obligation would only extend so far. She had recounted to Darrell her refusal of Virginia’s offer to pay for a nanny, during which she told her mother-in-law that she did not want to reach fifty and realise she’d missed her one real chance to be actively involved in her children’s lives.

  ‘But I’m still actively involved in Chad’s life,’ Virginia had protested.

  ‘My aim is to do it while they still want me to,’ Michelle had replied, which had prompted two weeks of frosty silence.

  Darrell remembered when her best friend had arrived in Charlotte six years earlier, from London, to work as a corporate lawyer. Michelle had stayed in New Zealand long enough to gain a top-class law degree and a stellar reference from her first employer, and at age twenty-six had landed in London to take the kind of high-powered job Darrell had no doubts Michelle had always considered her due. After three years, though, Michelle made it very clear that she’d had enough of grey days that hung about her like an old man’s cardigan and asked for — nay, demanded — a transfer to anywhere that did not require her to take daily vitamin D supplements. The firm she worked for was headquartered in New York, but had rapidly and aggressively expanded into strategic locations around the world. They had a branch in Charlotte because wherever there is high finance there are substantial legal fees. The Charlotte branch made so much money its New York owners referred to it as ‘Cha-ching!’