the expected one.
'Because you've got other things on your mind at the moment. Things are bad enough. I didn't want to complicate your life.'
She embraced her daughter and kissed her on the cheek.
'What the hell are mothers for?'
'I just didn't want to go to camp - that's all. Frankly, I'm afraid to leave you two alone in the house.'
Barbara laughed at herself, at her old image as dependent woman, fearful and unassertive.
'No man pushes your old mom around, baby.' She did a mock Humphrey Bogart.
'He's Daddy.'
'I know, precious. He's your daddy. Not mine.' She laughed again.
'It's no tragedy. Just a plain old ugly divorce action. I think I'm right. He thinks he's right. The judge will decide. So it'll be a little ugly. So what? Why be afraid?' She waved her finger in front of Eve's nose. 'It's a new world out there, honey. And don't you be a dummy when it comes to men. Equal strokes for equal folks. Don't give up what you want for them. That's the lesson for your life. You have a living example before you.' She raised her arms and stood on tiptoe. 'I feel a hundred feet tall,' she said. 'High as a kite. High on life.'
'I've never seen you like this, Mom. So damned content.'
'So, you see? Nothing to worry about. Go to camp. Enjoy.'
In her heart, she forgave Ann. Forgave everything. Show the bastards no mercy, she told herself, thinking of Oliver and all the rest of those cock heads.
As if to celebrate her newly perceived freedom, she bought herself a vibrator. It had a penis shape and wide ridges like corduroy along its shaft. The idea of it was almost as delicious as its effect on her private parts, which proved a revelation of pleasure as waves of orgasmic crescendos invaded her senses. Sometime in the middle of the day, she would announce to herself, Time for happy hour, and would go up to her room and proceed to use her cock toy, as she called it. It was better than Oliver had ever been.
'You beautiful little technological miracle,' she would whisper to it when it had done particularly yeoman service. Who needs them?
The high was accelerated by the deepening of spring. The trees along the circle were in full blossom and the view of the park and the Calvert Street Bridge in their spring wardrobe was magnificent. As for Oliver, he was hardly a bother. More like a rodent who was never seen although the evidence of him could not be missed. Sometimes at night she heard him puttering in his workroom, and if she awakened early, she heard him leave the house. As far as she was concerned, he was no longer part of her life.
But she could not shake the idea that somehow his presence had intruded itself in her room. She had learned recently to trust her instincts, to act according to a deep, unrealized, and unarticulated intelligence. It wasn't anything she could pin down with surety. She had carefully inspected the room and her closets, looked under the beds, even into her shoes. At night, when she could not sleep, she reviewed in her mind this feeling, even tried to dismiss it. But it lingered, pervasive and intuitive.
During the day, dutifully, in addition to running her business, she went about the chores of preparing the children for camp. Eve was to be a counselor in training, which mollified her somewhat, in that it represented a euphemism for privileged camper. This meant greater freedom.
'Just be careful, Eve. We don't need any problems with you. Not now.'
'I'm cool,' Eve replied. Mother and daughter understood each other. Josh gave her little trouble. His life revolved around basketball and school. She wondered how she could be so negative toward males and still love her son.
But success bred its own problems and Barbara discovered the meaning of cash flow. She had agreed in the separation agreement not to use any household money for her business. It hadn't made much sense, but she did get her suppliers, the various food markets and wholesalers, to bill her with separate invoices, as Thurmont had instructed.
She wasn't the best bookkeeper in the world, but she reassured herself that all she had to do was add up the invoices for the purchases, then add up the bills to her customers, and the difference would be, she hoped, profit. She made simultaneous shocking discoveries. Her customers paid her very slowly and since she was so anxious for the business, she did not press them. But her suppliers demanded payment at shorter intervals. To keep herself afloat, she had borrowed from the household money.
'Nobody taught me anything about business, Thurmont,' she protested when he rebuked her.
'Tell that to the man you buy your meat from.'
'I did.'
'And?'
'He cut me off.' The memory fueled her indignation. 'If I hadn't been a woman, things would have been different. He had no confidence. I showed him my bills to customers. He sneered at me. 'That's your problem, lady,' he said. It was the 'lady' that galled me and I threw a handful of chopped meat at him.'
'That was good business.'
'It gets worse.' She felt the anger solidify into a hard ball in her stomach. 'He told me that women shouldn't be in business. They're too emotional. Then he nearly struck me with his cleaver.' She hesitated. 'I don't quite mean that. He swung his cleaver hard into the wooden counter. But I knew what he meant. He wished it were me. The bastard.'
'You went too fast,' Thurmont told her. 'Your business isn't really relevant to the case. In fact, your success hurts the case.'
'I'm sorry.' She was sarcastic.
'What about the other household bills?' he asked.
