Scott was not letting go of the sleeve, not as long as Tommy was standing. "Help me," Tommy said. "Pry him off."
Jody looked for a place on the turtle to grab — reached out and pulled back several times. "I don't want to touch him."
The phone rang.
"I'll get it," Jody said, running out of the bathroom.
Tommy dragged Scott to the doorway, keeping his feet safely away from Zelda's jaws. "I forgot to tell you…"
"Hello," Jody said into the phone. "Oh, hi, Mom."
Chapter 23
Mom and Terrapin Pie
"She's in town," Jody said. "She's coming over in a few minutes." Jody lowered the phone to its cradle.
Tommy appeared in the bedroom doorway, Scott still dangling from his sleeve. "You're kidding."
"You're missing a cufflink," Jody said.
"I don't think he's going to let go. Do we have any scissors?"
Jody took Tommy by the sleeve a few inches above where Scott was clamped. "You ready?"
Tommy nodded and she ripped his sleeve off at the shoulder. Scott skulked into the bedroom, the sleeve still clamped in his jaws.
"That was my best shirt," Tommy said, looking at his bare arm.
"Sorry, but we've got to clean this place up and get a story together."
"Where did she call from?"
"She was at the Fairmont Hotel. We've got maybe ten minutes."
"So she won't be staying with us."
"Are you kidding? My mother under the same roof where people are living in sin? Not in this lifetime, turtleboy."
Tommy took the turtleboy shot in stride. This was an emergency and there was no time for hurt feelings. "Does you mother use phrases like 'living in sin'?"
"I think she has it embroidered on a sampler over the telephone so she won't forget to use it every month when I call."
Tommy shook his head. "We're doomed. Why didn't you call her this month? She said you always call her."
Jody was pacing now, trying to think. "Because I didn't get my reminder."
"What reminder?"
"My period. I always call her when I get my period each month — just to get all the unpleasantness out of the way at one time."
"When was the last time you had a period?"
Jody thought for a minute. It was before she had turned. "I don't know, eight, nine weeks. I'm sorry, I can't believe I forgot."
Tommy went to the futon, sat down, and cradled his head in his hands. "What do we do now?"
Jody sat next to him. "I don't suppose we have time to redecorate."
In the next ten minutes, while they cleaned up the loft, Jody tried to prepare Tommy for what he was about to experience. "She doesn't like men. My father left her for a younger woman when I was twelve, and Mother thinks all men are snakes. And she doesn't really like women either, since she was betrayed by one. She was one of the first women to graduate from Stanford, so she's a bit of a snob about that. She says that I broke her heart when I didn't go to Stanford. It's been downhill since then. She doesn't like that I live in the City and she has never approved of any of my jobs, my boyfriends, or the way I dress."
Tommy stopped in the middle of scrubbing the kitchen sink. "So what should I talk about?"
"It would probably be best if you just sat quietly and looked repentant."
"That's how I always look."
Jody heard the stairwell door open. "She's here. Go change your shirt."
Tommy ran to the bedroom, stripping off his one-sleever as he went. I'm not ready for this, he thought. I have more work to do on myself before I'm ready for a presentation.
Jody opened the door catching her mother poised to knock.
"Mom!" Jody said, with as much enthusiasm as she could muster. "You look great."
Frances Evelyn Stroud stood on the landing looking at her youngest daughter with restrained disapproval. She was a short, stout woman dressed in layers of wool and silk under an eggshell cashmere coat. Her hair was a woven gray-blond, flared and lacquered to expose a pair of pearl earrings roughly the size of Ping-Pong balls. Her eyebrows had been plucked away and painted back, her cheekbones were high and highlighted, her lips lined, filled, and clamped tight. She had the same striking green eyes as her daughter, flecked now with sparks of judgment. She had been pretty once but was now passing into the limbo-land of the menopausal woman known as handsome.
"May I come in," she said.
Jody, caught in the half-gesture of offering a hug, dropped her arms. "Of course," she said, stepping aside. "It's good to see you," she said, closing the door behind her mother.
Tommy bounded from the bedroom into the kitchen and slid to a stop on stocking feet. "Hi," he said.
Jody put her hand on her mother's back. Frances flinched, ever so slightly, at the touch. "Mother, this is Thomas Flood. He's a writer. Tommy, this is my mother, Frances Stroud."
Tommy approached Frances and offered his hand. "Pleased to meet you…"
She clutched her Gucci bag tightly, then forced herself to take his hand. "Mrs. Stroud," she said, trying to head off the unpleasantness of hearing her Christian name come out of Tommy's mouth.
Jody broke the moment of discomfort so they could pass into the next one. "So, Mom, can I take your coat? Would you like to sit down?"
Frances Stroud surrendered her coat to her daughter as if she were surrendering her credit cards to a mugger, as if she didn't want to know where it was going because she would never see it again. "Is this your couch?" she asked, nodding toward the futon.
"Have a seat, Mother; we'll get you something to drink. We have…" Jody realized that she had no idea what they had. "Tommy, what do we have?"
Tommy wasn't expecting the questions to start so soon. "I'll look," he said, running to the kitchen and throwing open a cabinet. "We have coffee, regular and decaf." He dug behind the coffee, the sugar, the powdered creamer. "We have Ovaltine, and…" He threw open the refrigerator. "Beer, milk, cranberry juice, and beer — a lot of beer — I mean, not a lot, but plenty, and…" He opened the chest freezer. Peary stared up at him through a gap between frozen dinners. Tommy slammed the lid."… that's it. Nothing in there."
"Decaf, please," said Mother Stroud. She turned to Jody, who was returning from balling up her mother's cashmere coat and throwing it in the corner of the closet. "So, you've left your job at Transamerica. Are you working, dear?"
Jody sat in a wicker chair across the wicker coffee table from her mother. (Tommy had decided to decorate the loft in a Pier 1 Imports cheap-shit motif. As a result it was only a ceiling fan and a cockatoo away from looking like a Thai cathouse.)
Jody said, "I've taken a job in marketing." It sounded respectable. It sounded professional. It sounded like a lie.
"You might have told me and saved me the embarrassment of calling Transamerica only to find out that you had been let go."
"I quit, Mother. I wasn't let go."
Tommy, trying to will himself invisible, bowed his way between them to deliver the decaf, which he had arranged on a wicker tray with cream and sugar. "And you, Mr. Flood, you're a writer? What do you write?"
Tommy brightened. "I'm working on a short story about a little girl growing up in the South. Her father is on a chain gang."
"You're from the South, then?"
"No, Indiana."
"Oh," she said, as if he had just confessed to being raised by rats. "And where did you go to university?"
"I, um, I'm sort of self-educated. I think experience is the best teacher." Tommy realized that he was sweating.
"I see," she said. "And where might I read your work?"
"I'm not published yet." He squirmed. "I'm working on it, though," he added quickly.