Second Chance. Elizabeth Wrenn

doing here?’ Her smile was both intrigued and horrified, as though I’d just lifted my shirt and said, Oh, hi, honey, want to see my third nipple I’ve never shown you?

      Suddenly indignant, I shot back: ‘What do you mean, what am I doing here? I come here a lot. Sometimes. I come here, I shop here, from time to time.’ God! Complete role reversal. I was behaving like an adolescent male caught with a Playboy. What was wrong with me? I’m a forty-nine-year-old woman and I can damn well shop at Victoria’s Secret! I’m looking at terry-cloth robes, for God’s sake! I pushed a piece of my overgrown bangs back behind my burning ear and returned my attention to the robes.

      ‘Are you getting one of these?’ Lainey’s tone was soft and genuine now, as she rubbed the sleeve of the pink robe against her cheek in an endearing way. ‘They’re really soft.’ She smiled and picked up the sleeve of the purple one, touching it to Nan’s cheek.’ Feel.’

      ‘Yeah,’ said Nan, relief flooding her face that the mother-daughter standoff was over as quickly as it had begun. I perpetually wanted to put my arm around Nan. When her father had run off with a younger woman last year, Nan, Sara, and their mother, Amy, had had their lives blown up into puzzle pieces. Melba’s too, now that I thought about it.

      ‘They’re so soft, Mommy,’ Lainey said, temporarily losing her armor and gazing at me with loving, childlike eyes.

      I smiled. Little Lainey. My love.

      ‘I know,’ I said, nodding conspiratorially to both girls. ‘I’m thinking about it. Which color do you like for me?’ I lifted the pink one off the rack and held it under my chin, then grabbed the purple one with my other hand and switched. As I did so, my purse strap fell off my shoulder and onto my elbow, its weight yanking my arm down, both robes spilling off their hangers and onto the floor.

      ‘Mah-ahmm!’ Lainey hissed. An eerie ‘she’s baaa-ack’ sounded in my head.

      ‘Oops, sorry. Here, help me get them.’ We reassembled the robes on their hangers, and I put my purse on the floor between my feet and held each one up again. I was going to buy myself one of these damn robes.

      ‘Which do you think is best for me? I’m kind of leaning toward the pink. I’m thinking the purple’s kind of dark – too plummy and … frumpy.’

      ‘Well, they’re both nice,’ she said, again sweetly. A person could get whiplash from teenage tone-of-voice changes. ‘The pink might be a little young for you, though. I think the plummy suits you.’

      Bam! A brick upside my head. I looked up, seeing myself in her eyes. Not the adored mommy of her girlhood, not the cool mom of her preadolescent years, but the alternate-reality mom who was best neither heard nor seen. Certainly not in pink anyway. She was voting for the cloak of invisibility.

      I looked at my watch. Twelve fifteen. I sent the girls to go meet Matt and took the purple one up to the counter, not because I thought plummy ‘suited me,’ but because I was afraid I’d look like a very large wad of bubble gum in the pink. I handed the girl my Discover card, trying to think only of the savings and 1 percent cash back we’d get, not the 100 percent bill we’d get.

      Neil used to proudly say I could pinch a penny till it screamed, and it was true. I knew women who spent forty to a hundred dollars on their hair every couple of months. I waited for a coupon for my local Quickie Clips and went about twice a year. My lack of extravagance in all things personal was why my staying at home as a full-time mom was financially lucrative for us. Where another woman would need nice outfits for work, or treat herself to a necklace, or makeup, my old sweats had lasted decades and I treated myself by only very occasionally buying the house something new, and then only on deep discount. A table runner. A colored glass vase. I bought virtually nothing outside of meeting our basic needs for nearly a year so we could buy a new dining table. Our minimalist kitchen remodel meant years of extra saving, since we prioritized college and retirement, living much closer to the bone than Neil’s income might indicate. But it would have cost us money for me to work whatever odd job my un-degreed self could have landed. Just under two years at the University of Wisconsin – one year as a Humanities major (why not just stand on the roof of the chancellor’s office and shout, ‘I have no idea what I want to do with my life!’?) and part of another taking a few art classes – didn’t get a person far. Call it housewife, homemaker, or domestic engineer, there’s still no paycheck, so I always felt like I was spending someone else’s money. My value to my family was my time, like beach sand: warm, inviting, fun to grab big handfuls, squeeze it and let it slip through their fingers before they ran off over it.

      Phantom Girl handed me the credit slip. I signed my name and handed it back to her. She stared at the credit card and then at the slip. ‘Ma’am?’ she said, sliding both back toward me again.

      I stared at my signature. I had a feeling of shrinking downward and backward through a tunnel, a roaring in my ears. I hurriedly scratched out Deena Hathaway and signed my married name of twenty-three years, Deena Munger.

      ‘Sorry. Spaced out there for a minute.’ I could feel the damn blood rising in my cheeks again. Lately, if I wasn’t flushed for one thing I was flushed for another. Or welling up in tears. It was a nearly perpetual emotional bath of one sort or another.

      ‘Can I see an ID, please?’ she asked, her voice tinged with suspicion.

      I handed her my driver’s license, the worst picture of me ever taken, just last month when I’d had it renewed on my birthday. I stared at my license after she handed it back, wondering if she would call security. I didn’t even recognize myself in this photo. But she smiled, completely satisfied that the haggard woman with the dazed expression in the photo was me. She handed me my plummy robe in the pink striped bag and with a practiced smile said, ‘Have a nice day.’

      At the food court, Matt’s friend Josh offered to bring everyone home later. Prior to my arrival, they’d all decided that after lunch they’d go to a movie, then after that head over to Josh’s for Ping-Pong and pizza. Having suffered the boys’ blatant confused, then amused, stares at my pink striped bag, I escaped without further questioning, or joining them for lunch.

      At home, I hung the robe in the back of my closet and stuffed the bag into the trash in the garage. That way Neil would not find it and start asking questions, either about the cost or why buy that at Victoria’s Secret.

      I was heading up to the bedrooms with an armful of the kids’ textbooks and papers, which had been strewn about the living room, when I noticed the bouquet on the dining room table. An unusual bouquet, to say the least. Smiling, I set the schoolwork on one of the stairs, a little ray of warmth shining deep within me as I headed back down. There were four colorful new dish towels rolled up and stuck into one of my glass vases, tied up in a bow with one of Lainey’s hair ribbons. Neil must have taken a nearly unheard-of hour off – even on a Saturday – to bring them home to me. A piece of junk mail, pulled from the recycling basket, no doubt, a note scrawled on the back, was taped to the vase.

      Sorry about the dish towel, D. I got these at the dollar store, two for a dollar, a good deal, I think.

      Thought maybe we could have lunch but you weren’t home, and nothing was prepared, so I left. Meet me for dinner – we’ll splurge, go get some pasta at Guiseppe’s. It’ll have to be late, I’m meeting a guy from the Washington Square Health Foundation at 6:00 for drinks. I’ll meet you at 7:30 at G’s. xo N.

      I suddenly had a cacophonous orchestra of emotions playing in me. A trumpet of delight to be asked out on a date by my husband; a sweet flute trill that he’d shown and expressed remorse, especially in such a creative way. But there was also an entire off-tune strings section that he’d called attention to the price, and didn’t ask so much as inform me of dinner plans tonight. A certainty that I’d have no plans. I shrugged off the strings. I didn’t have plans, and Neil hadn’t made a gesture like this in a long time. I smiled again, picturing him picking out the dish towels, debating whether to spend the extra dollar on ribbons or bows and deciding