Love, Suburban Style

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  In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Dedicated in loving memory of our cousin,

  Laurie Steinberg (June 1954–March 2006),

  and her mom, Aunt Shirley Staub

  (February 1926–May 2006).

  And in celebration of the family they left behind:

  Don, Michael, Mitchell, and Beth; Tom, Felicia,

  Scott, and Suzanne.

  And, as always, for my own:

  Brody, Morgan, and Mark.

  Acknowledgments

  With gratitude to my editor, Karen Kosztolnyik, and the staff at Warner Books; my agents, Laura Blake Peterson, Holly Frederick, and the staff at Curtis Brown, Ltd; my publicists, Nancy Berland, Elizabeth Middaugh, Kim Miller, and the staff at Nancy Berland Public Relations; Pam Nelson and the staff at Levy Home Entertainment; and to Kyle Cadley, never a Fancy Mom, always a friend.

  Prologue

  I brought supplies.” Geoffrey Lange thrusts a plastic shopping bag into Astor Hudson’s hands the moment she opens the apartment door.

  “What kind of supplies?”

  “Let me get past this obstacle course, and I’ll show you.” He steps first over the threshold, then over her sleeping cat, Chita Rivera, and finally over the heaping plastic basket of unfolded clean clothes Astor carried up from the basement laundry room an hour earlier.

  She dropped it just inside the door and rushed to answer the ringing telephone.

  Now she really wishes she hadn’t.

  She was having such a great day so far—especially for a Monday—before the call came.

  The June sun has finally broken out after three straight days of cold rain, pleasantly warm, but not yet hot, on her shoulders during her early-morning run in Central Park. Cosette, her fifteen-year-old daughter, actually smiled and didn’t protest too vigorously when Astor insisted on kissing her good-bye before school. She then ran into her friend Melinda from 3C in the laundry room, and they grabbed a quick, gossipy latte together at the Starbucks on the corner while their washers were sudsing and spinning.

  Then came the call…

  Which she relayed tearfully, word for word, in a subsequent IM to her best friend Geoffrey, who fortuitously happened to be online when she signed on to Google Deeanna Drennan. Once again, an upcoming young actress has usurped Astor for a lead role. This time, it was for an upcoming Broadway revival of Brigadoon.

  Face it. You’re over the hill.

  She has to remind herself of that, because Geoffrey isn’t going to be the one to say it. Being a loyal, loving sort, he rushed right up Broadway from his apartment eight blocks away to lend an ear, a shoulder—and supplies, no less.

  This is getting to be a regular ritual.

  Geoffrey hugs her hard against his brick wall of a chest and shoulders—he’s been hitting the gym religiously.

  I should have been, too. Maybe then I’d still be getting cast.

  Aloud, she says, “I’ll live.”

  “But you so deserved it. You totally look the part.”

  “I don’t know… Fiona is supposed to be in her early twenties.”

  “So? You could be in your teens.”

  She snorts at that. Though with Astor’s petite build, long auburn ringlets, and big green eyes, her agent often assures her that she looks at least a decade younger than her age—which is thirty-four.

  “And anyway, no twenty-year-old’s voice has the maturity and color yours does,” Geoffrey goes on. “You were robbed.”

  “I knew you’d say that.”

  “Deeanna Drennan—whoever she is—won’t hold a candle to you, honey.”

  “I knew you’d say that, too.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “You’re right. You’re a good friend, Geoff.”

  “I am a good friend. Which reminds me… I promised my friend Andrew in L.A. that I’d try and find him a place to live.”

  “In L.A.?”

  “No! Here in New York, of course. He’s sick of getting typecast as a plus-sized, effeminate gay man—which he just so happens to be—so he’s going to try auditioning here for a change. Know of anyone who wants to sublet their apartment?”

  “I’ll ask around.” Shifting gears, she asks, “What ‘supplies’ did you bring?”

  “Whatever I could buy at the Duane Reade on Columbus Avenue on such short notice, to help you get over this,” he replies, and strides across the living room. “It’s positively funereal in here. For God’s sake, let there be light.”

  He raises the shades on the two windows to usher in the morning sun. Thanks to the apartment’s southeastern exposure, the place brightens instantly.

  “There, that’s better, isn’t it? I mean, you’re not a vampire… though your daughter is starting to look like one if you don’t mind my saying.”

  “I told her the same thing just yesterday. I’m sure it’s just a phase.”

  Cosette, who until recently shared her mother’s all-American wholesome beauty, dyed her brown hair jet-black—without permission—and has taken to wearing thick, dark eye makeup and a somber wardrobe utterly devoid of color.

  “No offense, but she looks like she’s channeling Morticia Addams,” Geoffrey says.

  “Which is particularly interesting because my real name was Addams. Two D’s and everything.”

  Geoffrey’s eyes widen at that news. “You’re kidding. What was your first name?”

  “Margaret. But I went by Meg.”

  “Why did I never know that after all these years?”

  “You never asked.”

  She and Geoffrey have been friends ever since they were both in Les Miserables together. Astor played Cosette; Geoffrey was the understudy for Marius.

  “I never thought to ask. Does that mean I’m completely self-centered?”

  She grins. “Not completely.”

  “So Meg Addams?” Geoffrey says thoughtfully, looking her over. “That’s your name?”

  “Was.” She created the stage name “Astor Hudson” the moment she graduated from high school, and never looked back.

  “Meg Addams sounds so… small-town.”

  “She was small-town.”

  “I thought you grew up in the New York suburbs.”

  “I did. But Glenhaven Park is way up there in Westchester County. It might be less than fifty miles north of Manhattan, but it’s more small-town than suburbia.”

  “What, no strip malls? No minimarts? No eight-lane, five-way intersections?” asks Geoffrey, who grew up in Jersey.

  “None at all. Big old Victorian houses, tons of tall shade trees, dirt roads, shops on Main Street where everybody knows your name…” Astor sighs.

  “You suddenly look homesick.”

  “I suddenly am.”

  Though, perhaps not so suddenly.

  Lately, she’s found herself thinking a lot about her hometown. Glenhaven Park is less than an hour’s ride on the Metro-North commuter line, but it might as well be in the Midwest for as often as she’s been back there in the past decade. She’s an only child, and her aging parents, who had her late in life, retired to a golf community on the South Carolina coast the minute she left home.

  “I should take a ride up there some weekend,” she tells Geoffrey a bi
t wistfully. “Want to come?”

  “Honey, you know I’m allergic to suburbia. Charming small towns included.” He gestures at the shopping bag. “Go ahead, unload the provisions.”

  Smiling, Astor begins removing the contents one by one and setting them on the coffee table.

  The table’s surface was already cluttered with three days’ worth of mail and newspapers, a bag containing the toilet paper she bought on Friday, and Cosette’s forgotten—or more likely hastily discarded—bag lunch: all heaped in the shadow of Astor’s proudly displayed Tony Award with its comedy and tragedy masks etched on the mounted circular medallion.

  “Entenmann’s chocolate doughnuts, Kleenex, a DVD of… Sunset Boulevard?” she reads from the label.

  “The movie with Gloria Swanson, not the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. But I thought it was still appropriate. All About Eve would have been more fitting, but they didn’t have it.”

  “It’s a drugstore. I can’t believe they had Sunset Boulevard.”

  “Bargain DVD bin.” He shrugs.

  Meg isn’t sure she wants to immerse herself in the tragic tale of a faded star desperate to make a comeback, but Geoffrey means well. And anyway, it is somewhat fitting.

  “Let’s see what else you brought,” she says, going back to the goodies. “A bag of Lays barbecue chips, yum… and a package of… stool softener?”

  “Oops, that’s for me,” Geoffrey interjects, plucking the box from the pile and stashing it in the pocket of his vintage bowling shirt.

  “And a bottle of Grey Goose vodka—you didn’t get this at Duane Reade… and it’s only half-full.”

  “That came from my liquor cabinet. I thought you’d need to drown your sorrows.”

  “It’s only”—she checks her watch—“ten-forty in the morning.”

  “We’ll make bloody Marys.”

  “I don’t have tomato juice or horseradish or—what else goes in a bloody Mary? Celery?”

  “Never mind, we’ll drink it straight. Let’s get a couple of glasses. You’ve got ice, right?”

  “That’s all right… I’m waiting for Laura to call me back about another audition, and I need to keep a clear head.”

  “Then I’ll drink for both of us,” Geoffrey decides, poised in the kitchen doorway. “Is the bag empty?”

  Astor peers inside. “Just this—it’s yours, too.” She proffers a package of condoms.

  “Oh, no, those are for you, honey.”

  “For what?”

  “That you even have to ask that makes me sad.” Geoffrey shakes his head. “How long has it been since you—”

  “Not that long.” She pauses. “Unless you think six months qualifies as—”

  “You poor thing.” Geoffrey shakes his head. “We’ve got to find you a man.”

  “Geoffrey! Not finding a man is the whole point, remember? You were there when I made my New Year’s resolution.”

  They were at a rooftop party together in Hell’s Kitchen, sharing a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and their respective sorrows. Just blocks from the Times Square melee, they could hear the chaos from their perch, close but not in view. They chose not to go downstairs to the host’s apartment to watch the ball drop on television with everyone else at midnight.

  That was mainly because neither of them had anyone but each other to kiss.

  Geoffrey’s new—and destined to be short-lived—flame, Elliot, was performing in a Rodgers and Hart review on a cruise ship somewhere in the Caribbean. Astor’s most recent flame, Ken, was at the party with his current flame, a walking cliché in a short skirt, plunging neckline, and stilettos.

  Astor shouldn’t have been surprised when Ken broke her heart after a seven-month, too-good-to-be-true relationship.

  She’s always been a passionate, impulsive soul. That comes in handy in her business; not so much in matters of the heart. Every time she’s ever met someone new and promising—despite her best intention not to get involved—she eventually lets down her guard, falls hard—and gets hurt.

  She’s been there, done that, more times than she cares to count, in a pattern that began with her ex-husband and ended—hopefully for good—with Ken.

  That’s why it’s crucial to avoid the kinds of men to whom she might find herself attracted. She’s getting too old and too emotionally exhausted to go through another heartbreak.

  “Give it up already, Astor,” Geoffrey is saying. “I mean, come on. Who keeps their New Year’s resolution?”

  “Not you.”

  Geoffrey’s was to cut up all his credit cards and live within his means. It lasted almost forty-eight hours. Then he stumbled across a January White Sale, and it was all over.

  “At least my resolution was reasonable in the first place,” Geoffrey tells her.

  “So was mine.”

  “Giving up men?”

  “Not forever. And not all men. Just the ones I might fall in love with. I can still date.”

  “Isn’t falling in love the point of dating?”

  “No! At least, not for me. Not anymore.”

  “Then why don’t you place an ad in the personals? Single white female seeks swarthy, neurotic, unemployed—”

  The ringing telephone mercifully interrupts him.

  “That’s Laura.”

  “Good luck!” Geoffrey calls after her as she goes to answer it in the bedroom.

  She’s going to need more than luck, because for the second time today, Astor Hudson finds herself on the receiving end of a dreaded phone call.

  When she emerges from the bedroom, Geoffrey looks up from the vodka he’s pouring.

  Seeing the look on her face, he lowers the bottle. “What is it, honey?”

  She just shakes her head, still speechless.

  “Oh my God, you’re scaring me. Is someone dead?”

  “Not yet,” she says when she finds her voice. “But I swear, when I get my hands on my daughter…”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “That was the headmistress of Cosette’s school. She was just expelled for having a gun in her backpack.”

  Chapter

  1

  Station stop: Glenhaven Park,” a robotic voice announces as the words flash in red on the electronic scroll overhead.

  Glancing out the window at the vaguely familiar wooded countryside, Meg tucks today’s New York Post into her black leather tote bag and nudges her daughter in the seat beside her. “Come on, Cosette, put that away, we’re almost there.”

  Cosette’s pencil-darkened brows furrow and her liner-blackened eyes refuse to budge from the open copy of Rolling Stone in her hands.

  Oh. She’s plugged into her iPod.

  Meg reaches out and plucks a tiny earphone from Cosette’s right ear.

  “Hey!”

  “We’re almost there.”

  Cosette shrugs. “You go. I’ll just ride to the end of the line and meet you on the way back down to the city.”

  “You’re not doing that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Look, you can make this as difficult for me as you possibly can, or you can cooperate. Either way, we’re getting off this train in two minutes, and if I have to drag you by your hair, believe me, I will.”

  Of course, she won’t. She’s never laid a hand on Cosette in her life; she won’t start now.

  Anyway, Cosette could—if she dared—shake her off like a pesky bug. Her daughter is a good three inches taller than Meg’s five-four, and probably weighs more, too. Not that Cosette has an ounce of fat on her black-garbed frame. But Meg, normally slender, is now verging on skinny.

  She hasn’t eaten much of anything—including the chips and doughnuts Geoffrey brought—all week, since Monday.

  The day she lost the part to Deeanna Drennan.

  The day Cosette got kicked out of school.

  The day Astor Hudson died, and Meg Addams was reborn.

  Now it’s a gorgeous Saturday morning on the cusp of summer, and the train is chugging to a stop in Glenhaven Park at
last.

  At last. Yes…

  The ride up from Grand Central was only an hour; but Meg realizes now, as she glimpses the soaring white steeple of the First Presbyterian Church on the green, that she’s been waiting much, much longer than that to come home.

  Home?

  The word catches her off guard.

  Glenhaven Park hasn’t been home since her parents sold the family’s two-story brick Tudor on North Street.

  But suddenly, this self-contained village in the northern reaches of Westchester County feels more like home than Meg’s two-bedroom, rent-controlled Upper West Side apartment has in the dozen years since she moved in.

  Over at 31 Boxwood Street, a ladder is propped against a three-story home with a mansard roof, wraparound porch, and forty-six windows.

  Sam Rooney knows all too well that there are forty-six of them. Not because he grew up in this house but because he counted the windows before he started scraping them back in the beginning of April.

  He expected to have had that part done and the painting started by mid-May at the latest, but he was only able to work on them in sporadic weekend moments when the weather was dry and sunny. Weekdays were out entirely; even on his high school science teacher’s schedule. Long gone are the days of blowing out of school on the heels of his students, arriving home shortly after the last bell.

  Back then, he was teaching in Pelham, where they lived at the time. Sheryl was around to shuttle Ben and Katie from play dates to Brownies and Cub Scouts.

  Those activities, which the kids retained after the move to Glenhaven Park, have long since given way to various engagements that are even more time-consuming: lessons, sports practices, tutoring, appointments with doctors, ortho- dontists—and, of course, child psychiatrists for both.

  That’s a must when you lose your mother suddenly and tragically… even now that it’s been over four years.

  Four years.

  Sometimes, it feels like just yesterday that Sam was waking up next to Sheryl.

  Other times, it feels as though it happened—as though she happened—in another lifetime, to somebody else.

  But on this sun-drenched June Saturday, his thoughts aren’t on his late wife or the life they used to have—they’re on forty-six windows that need to be painstakingly primed before they can be painted.