Treading Lightly

Add the two blaring, competing televisions in the gym that hovered to Janine’s upper right and left sides, the mind-numbing Muzak being piped over the loudspeakers placed strategically around the large room, assorted nubile and robust young forms running around half-naked, and the huffing, panting man beside her—who could not be ignored no matter how much she tried—and she was on system overload.

Any minute now she was going to blow. Or trip. Both were possible; neither favorable.

She looked over at the man, hoping and praying he wouldn’t keel over, based on the sounds he was making. Having a man die on the treadmill next to her would definitely put her over the edge.

She looked at Mr. Locomotion again, wondering how he could go out in public to make such guttural, almost animalistic sounds. By animalistic, she was thinking swine, possibly boar.

She was obviously oblivious to her own auditory articulations.

“You okay?” the man asked.

Elise Lanier

Elise Lanier is a pen name for Elise Leonard, who also writes children’s books under her real name. Elise earned her undergraduate degree from LIU-C.W. Post, and her master’s at SUNY Albany. After teaching for almost twenty years, she now writes full-time in the home she shares with her husband of twenty-five years and her two cool, smart, attitude-packed teenage sons.

Treading Lightly

Elise Lanier

MILLS & BOON

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Acknowledgments:

My heartfelt gratitude to the world’s greatest agent,

Jay Poynor, for his hard work, his perseverance, his

constant attention and his wonderful friendship.

He gives far more than anyone would expect

from a man in his position.

Special thanks to the agency’s V.P.,

Erica Orloff, for everything.

I’m sincerely grateful to my editor, Tara Gavin.

Your insight is pure genius, and I’m thrilled and honored

to have you as my editor. Thank you. (And just so you

know, I really wanted to put exclamation points after each

of these three sentences, but I restrained myself.)

To my husband, John: How does one thank another

for giving them unconditional love and unwavering

support for twenty-five years? “Thank you”

seems inadequate, but…thank you.

Michael and John. You are my sons, you are my

inspiration, you are my life. You totally amaze me.

Keep tackling life head-on. And never forget…

I’ve got your backs!

To my mom: You really lived. Thanks for showing me how

to do it. I miss you and think of you often.

To my dad: I’m so glad I got to share your best years,

however few. I really miss you.

A special shout-out to Lieutenant Colonel

M. Noyes, my first writing contact and now my friend.

Had I never been published, I still would have won.

I stayed the course, and yes, you told me so.

Finally, a word of thanks to my readers…

Honoring the light in you,

Knowing the light in me,

We are one.

This book is dedicated to all women over forty.

We’ve earned our wings, ladies. It’s time to fly.

Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

EPILOGUE

LETTER TO READER

CHAPTER 1

“Jesus, Mom! What the hell happened in here? It looks like a testing sight for curling devices.”

“Don’t say ‘Jesus,’ Craig.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’re religious,” she said distractedly, while plucking at an errant wisp of hair, making it stand up straight.

“No we’re not.”

“Oh. Right. Well, it’s blasphemous.”

“No it’s not.”

“Well, don’t say it anyhow. And before you ask your next question, it’s because I said so!”

“So, what the hell’s going on?” he persisted.

“Now that I cut my hair, I don’t know if I need the three-eighth-inch curling iron, the half-inch curling iron, or the five-eighth-inch curling iron to fit my curls. My old hot rollers won’t stay in. It’s too short. Oh, and don’t say ‘hell’ either.”

“How come? You say it all the time!”

“It’s not attractive coming from the mouth of a twelve-year-old.”

“I’m almost thirteen,” he claimed, throwing her a sideways glance that would have weakened a lesser opponent. “And it’s enchanting coming from your mouth?”

“Hell, yeah!”

Her attempt at irony didn’t escape him. “Okay, Mom, I get it. Let’s not overdramatize things.”

She burned her finger on the hot curling iron, grimaced and cursed. “Why stop now?”

“Yeah,” he said, snorting a laugh and stubbing his huge, adult-sized, boot-covered foot into the bathroom rug. “Good point. So what’s for dinner?”

She could handle his mood swings—they mirrored her own. Perimenopause and the teenage years were a lot alike. Well, except for the drooping, the sagging and the bloating. On the bright side, her pimples weren’t as bad as his. On the not-so-bright side, he applied his makeup far more artistically than she applied hers. But both only wore it for large-scale social occasions; another thing mother and son had in common. “Spaghetti.”

“Again?” he whined.

“Well, did you remember to take something out of the freezer?”

“I didn’t know it was my job.”

“It’s both our jobs,” she said, trying the five-eighth-incher out for size.

“Why don’t you just take it all out of the freezer so we’ve got it on hand?”

“Tried that once. It all went bad.”

“Oh,” he said, eyeing her newly made curls. “Those are too big. They look loopy. Yours are tighter. Like those springs you find in a pen.”

Janine grabbed the half-inch curling iron to try out the smaller size.

“Mom, the small one! Try the small one,” he said with abundant annoyance. “You’re just wasting your time with the other two.”

She put down the half-inch and grabbed the three-eighth-inch iron, watching him from the corner of her eye. “Since when are you so concerned with how I spend my time?”

“Since I’m starving to death!”

“Ah,” she said, a slow smile spreading across her face. “I should have guessed. You’re so good to me, my son.”

“It’s all about you, Mom.” He grinned.

“Yeah, right.” She tried the three-eighth-inch barrel and had to admit he was right. It worked the best. “Hey, do me a favor and go put a big pot of water on the stove, would ya?”

“Yeah, okay. Whatever. Anything to get some food around here,” he muttered on his way out.

“And throw some salt into it,” she continued. She knew he was rolling his eyes. “And don’t forget to put a lid on it, or it will take forever to come to a boil.” That was one of the few culinary tips she knew.

Twenty-five minutes later they were headed for their usual positions at the kitchen table.

“So why the big interest all of a sudden, Mom?” Craig said as he simultaneously pulled out and hopped onto his chair from behind. It was a slick move she’d often wondered how he came up with. It also prompted frequent prayers to the gods of the family jewel keepers that he wouldn’t hurt himself. One false move and she’d never have grandchildren. Time and again she’d told him not to do that, but he always ignored her, laughing at her concern and insisting it was his signature move.

Each time he did it, she’d cringe, but with a teenage son, one had to choose one’s fights cautiously. After all, motherhood was a long haul. A very long haul. It wasn’t just that wonderful and all-too-swift period of cute, gurgling baby noises and patty-cake. Sure, it was that too. In the very beginning. But that only lasted a short while. Then you’re given a few years to prepare yourself, ready yourself—at least as best you can—for…this: your child’s unswerving, non-stop, express train ticket headed straight to puberty. Some called it adolescence. To others it was known as the “front lines.” A chosen few simply referred to it as “hell.”

She’d learned a long time ago, that if you fought every battle that came up, a mother—particularly an overprotective one—would be dead in no time. That clearly in mind, she decided not to comment on the hopping-over-the-back-of-the-testicle-crushing-chair move. She figured if he ever did miss, he’d be humbled, humiliated and racked with pain—which was far more of a deterrent by example than any “I told you so” ever was.

“What do you mean? Why, all of a sudden, my big interest in what?” She sat down with a heavy sigh. “Please pass the Parmesan.”

He handed her the tall, green bottle. “All the hair-curling stuff. You’ve always had the equipment and never used it before.”

Out of the mouths of babes. Her mind couldn’t help pondering the depressing thought that she had lots of equipment that hadn’t seen any use for a while. “I don’t know, it just feels funny.” Her hand flew to her head, and patted.

“You did a good thing, Mom,” he said, while slurping up a stray strand of spaghetti.

She watched her son lick sauce off his mouth with a quick flick of his tongue. “Yeah, I know. Thanks.”

“I wonder who’ll get it,” he said, before shoveling in another huge mouthful.

She had the urge to tell him to take human bites, but didn’t. “I don’t know. They handle it like an adoption.”

He nodded. “Have any regrets?”

She swallowed and then added more Parmesan cheese to her mound of spaghetti before answering. “Yeah, marrying your father.”

He rolled his eyes. “I meant about cutting off your long hair.”

Maybe a little. “Nah. It’s only hair.”

“Not to the girl who’ll get it,” he said, hitting her reason for doing it to begin with square on the head.

“Yes,” she said wistfully, imagining the joy of the sick and horrified hairless teen who would receive it. “I suppose.”

They ate in relative silence, a habit they’d gotten into over the past couple of years. “So how was school?” she asked before the meal wound down. She knew he’d lock himself in his room for the rest of the night, and they’d shared such a nice moment before, she wanted to extend it.

Wanting and getting were two different things when one had a teenage child.

“What is this? Twenty questions?” he asked, his wall of attitude now firmly placed around him.

“It was one question.”

“One too many,” he said snidely.

Yes, their Hallmark moment was over. “What’s the matter, Craig, did I hit a nerve?”

He rolled his eyes. “Everything you do hits a nerve, Mom.”

A smarter woman would have quit while she was ahead. She went on. “Oh yeah, I forgot. But help me out here, a little. You’re not failing anything, are you?”

“No,” he said sullenly.

“Anything I should know about?”

“No.”

“Any teachers want to see me?”

“No.”

“Doing drugs?”

“Jeez, Mom!”

“Answer the question and it’ll be the last one I ask.”

“For tonight.”

“So, sue me for caring about my kid!”

He rolled his eyes again.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Drugs?”

“No!”

“Good. And can I trust you?”

“You said that would be the last question.”

She shoved a huge forkful of spaghetti into her mouth. “I did, didn’t I. Okay, you don’t have to answer that last one.”

Like her, he shoveled a large forkful of spaghetti into his mouth.

“Just nod.”

“Mo-om,” he cried, spitting bits of spaghetti and sauce on his side of the table.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

He finished chewing and swallowed hard, eyeing her mischievously. “You’ll have to forgive me, my mother never taught me manners.”

“Don’t try to change the subject, Craig.” She wasn’t going to let up until she had her answer, and he must’ve known that, since he’d lived with her for his entire lifetime.

Capitulation was inevitable. She’d wear him down eventually. It was easier to answer and move on with life. “Yes, Mom. You can trust me. I don’t do drugs.”

“Okay, just checking,” she said with a smile.

“Anything else you want to drill me about?” He took a swig of his soda from the can.

“No. I’m good for now. Eat your spaghetti, dear. And didn’t your mother ever teach you to use a glass?”

“We don’t have any clean ones.”

“Oh. Okay. I’ll have to buy some more.”

“You could break down and wash some, Mom.”

She opened her own can of soda and took a swig. “What? I’m the only one that lives here? Your hands are damaged?”

“It’s easier to give in than argue,” he said with a smirk as he pushed over the ever-present pad of paper that sat on their table, and handed her the pen that stayed permanently on top of it.

She wrote: Buy More Glasses!

As she pushed the pad away, the phone rang and Craig reached to get it. Janine didn’t bother answering it anymore after three o’clock. It was always for him, and never for her, so why bother.

“Hey, Dad,” she heard her son say after a brief pause. He listened for a while then looked at her cautiously.

Here it comes. It was another one of those conversations that was going to make her out to be the bad guy. She could see it in her offspring’s eyes. She could feel it in her stomach. Either it was that, or the half pound of pasta and tomato sauce sitting like a brick down there.

She ate too fast. Always did. It was a trait her ex-husband had pointed out frequently. Of course it didn’t help that after a long while of hearing him constantly assert that she ate too fast, she responded with a concise remark of what she thought he did too fast! True, it’s not the most high-minded or confidence-building thing to criticize about a man, but any man should know not to criticize a woman about her eating habits. Both were hitting below the belt, if you’d ask her. So she’d always considered it a fair comeback. He didn’t.

But he was never a match for her. She’d overpowered him from the moment they’d met. When they were first together and newlyweds, he’d told her he thought her assertiveness and aggressiveness was sexy and exciting, but after a while, he’d changed his mind.

For her, when they’d first met, she’d thought his shyness and passive-aggressive, soft-spoken ways were endearing. Plus, it was easy to always get her way. But after a while, there was no way around it for her. She’d only perceived him as “wimpy.”

Wimpy, but very manipulative. It was that passive-aggressiveness that threw her off every time.

She wasn’t used to that because she’d always called ’em like she saw ’em—saying what was on her mind. She was always up-front. There was never a hidden agenda when Janine was involved. She let everything show. Whether the other person wanted to see it or not.

Her ex-husband, on the other hand, played so many head games she never knew what his intentions were, or what he was getting at. All through their entire marriage—and their divorce—she had never known what he was trying to accomplish. He’d always had an order of business—of that she was certain—but she was never privy to it. And obviously, by the one-sided conversation she was hearing from her son, her ex was up to his usual scheming, underhanded tricks again. Which only goes to show, she thought to herself, a leopard never changes his spots.

It reminded her of a story.

One day a man found a frozen snake in the forest. Feeling sorry for it, he took it home and nursed it back to life. He defrosted it—or whatever the hell it is you do to a frozen snake to nurse it back to life—and gave it water and food.

As soon as the thing unfroze, the man was hand-feeding it with love and care when it suddenly bit him.

The man said, “How can you bite me? I nursed you back to health! I gave you water by dropperfuls and even hand-fed you!”

The snake looked him in the eye and said, “Thanks, buddy, but you’re forgetting one thing.”

The man said, “What’s that?”

The snake said, “I’m a snake.”

She wondered what Martin was up to now.

CHAPTER 2

“Oh come on, Mom! Why not?”

“Because it’s too dangerous, Craig. I said no, and I mean it.”

“I can’t believe I have an opportunity like this, and you won’t let me go!” He stomped his heavy, boot-clad foot. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to go white-water rafting with Dad! You’re, like, the Wicked Witch of the East, not letting me go!”

She shrugged, not budging at all in her decision.

“You’re so unfair! I hate you!” screamed her usually passive son before storming out of the kitchen, slamming the door behind him. He was basically easy-going, that is, until his father put some stupid idea in his mind causing him to rebel and rear his defiant head in a blaze of hateful challenge.

He slammed his bedroom door, too, for good measure. Or maybe because she’d followed him, hoping to work things out before they got too ugly.

“Don’t you want dessert?” she called in after him.

He didn’t bother answering her. She could hear him muttering to himself in his room. Being her only child, she knew he did this often—probably because he was an only child and didn’t have anyone besides her to talk with—so she tried to allow him some leeway and privacy. “If I never saw her again, it would be fine by me! Lord knows I can barely stand living with her! She’s so unfair! She’s closedminded, overprotective and unfair!”

Okay, he had the right to get angry and she understood his frustration, so she let his comments go, realizing where they were coming from. He hadn’t really said them to her face, anyhow, so she had no right addressing them, arguing about them, or even agreeing with them.

“And Dad’s right. She’s a bitch!”

Okay, now he was starting to get her hackles up. She quickly became so angry she could feel the heat of her blood as it pumped through her, but again, she tried to be understanding and realize where that had come from. Breathing deeply to regain her composure, and silently cursing her ex-husband for making her out to be the bad guy for the millionth time, she could only hope and pray his hair continued to recede at its blistering pace, and his premature ejaculation problem continued in its customary fashion.

Lost in her silent prayer, she hadn’t noticed that Craig had opened his bedroom door again until he’d slammed it with enough force to make the windows rattle and the pictures bang against the walls. She might have tried opening his bedroom door and entering, hoping to calm both of them down and possibly calling a truce, but she’d heard him throw himself on his bed, the squeal of the bed frame’s feet scratching along the wooden floor as his weight was hefted upon it. That was her first clue as to what was going on in there. The second clue that he wanted nothing to do with her came when he flicked on his stereo—the Linkin Park CD blaring through his speakers.

He knew she hated Linkin Park, so when he’d turned it up, way up, she got the not-so-subtle hint that he was a bit miffed and wasn’t in the mood for talking. She could feel the music reverberating in her bones. And that was with the door closed. “Yeah, good. That’ll teach me!” she muttered to herself. “Make yourself deaf.” She could have screamed it to her son, but no one, including herself, would have heard her over the shattering volume. Obviously he didn’t care if he blew his eardrums out. She had pissed him off, and now it was time for a little payback—teenage style.

She shook her head and headed to her own room, knowing they were done communicating for the night. His stereo was so loud she almost missed the incoming call, but a few months back he’d talked her into buying phones with LEDs that lit up when they rang, so although she didn’t hear it, she could see it was ringing.

He must have, too, because he had lowered the volume significantly and swiped up his phone at the exact moment she lifted her extension. He was probably assuming it was one of his friends, because she heard him say, “Yeah, talk to me.”

“Hello, dear.”

“Oh. Hi, Grandma.”

Janine knew so much about him that she could read his thoughts almost to the letter. Right now he was thinking, Oh, great, it’s the woman that spawned my current adversary. The female that gave life to the bane of my existence. Yeah, like I really feel like speaking with you at the moment!

“Hello, dear. How is everything?”

Again, she knew exactly what he was thinking. Most likely because they had a conversation about this at least once a week which always started with him whining, “Mom, what kind of lame question is that? How is everything? Like I’m supposed to know how everything is doing. And Grandma asks it every time she calls! What is it with older people? Does everything they do have to be so freaking annoying?” She wondered why he thought she knew the answer to that question. Especially because—ironically—she constantly asked herself the exact same thing after each and every conversation with her mother.

“Everything’s fine, Grandma. How’s everything with you?” she heard him say, and smiled, knowing that if Craig was anything, it was predictable.

“Well, dear, I have a nasty sinus infection at the moment, but you know me and how susceptible I am to sinus infections. Every time I get a cold, it goes right into my nasal passages and I get a sinus infection. This one’s a doozy! Today my discharge is green. Yesterday it was yellow, but today it’s green. That’s bad. A sign of infection. I can’t wait until it’s clear again.”

Way too much information there, Grandma! Janine thought to herself, wondering if she should let Craig off the hook by interrupting here, or let him suffer a little longer. “Sorry to hear that, Grandma. I hope you’re feeling better soon. If clear nasal discharge is what you wish for, I hope your wish comes true.” The sarcastic little brat. She had to admire him, and would have rescued him, but his harsh words were still fresh in her head, so she let him have a few more minutes of torture.

“Me too, dear. Me too. So, how’s school going?”

Janine smiled with the knowledge of what her son was thinking. Another lame question. She knew his insides were crying out to say, “How do you think it’s going, Granny? It sucks! It’s school!” but instead, he said, “School’s fine, Grandma.”

“Are you getting good grades?”

And there was worst question number three. He constantly whined to Janine, “Does Grandma have to have the exact same conversation every time she calls? She’s lived, like, forever! Can’t she come up with any other questions? Since she feels the need to come up with any questions at all, that is. Why does she always think that asking me the same exact lame questions will give her any different answers? Have they ever changed, yet? Does she even hear my responses? Does she even care?”