She? And Max didn't sound serious anymore. He sounded... Like a guy talking to another guy about sex. And they didn't even have the decency to have their conversation in the locker room. They were practically punching each other's biceps right there in front of her.

"Well, move along, son."

"I will."

Gwen heard the window roll up and threw back the quilt. She saw the light fading as the policeman's flashlight moved away. "Local talent? Yes, sir, she is?"

Max leaned between the seats, gave her a smacking kiss. "If this is a fight, can we have make-up sex?"

Back to U...

If she never had another Halloween weekend, she'd die happy. Prematurely, if she didn't see another October 31st, but dead at forty would be better than Hannah Montana's karaoke fall, Hayden's broken nose, her daughter hating her, and now Max suddenly being reliable. She didn't want to feel anything for him and certainly not entertain any whisper that she could be with him after all these years apart. It was all too confusing.

She'd woken up with her head in his lap, and he'd just been there, steady as anyone could be. He'd even smiled at her as if he hadn't just had a terrible night's sleep. She couldn't imagine how uncomfortable he'd been through the night. It had been better for her, but even her hand was asleep and tingling. She didn't want to think about how inappropriate her tingly hand had been. His toga was mighty thin. Thank god he'd had underwear on. At least she was pretty sure he had underwear on.

At dawn she'd finally wrestled one of Max's T-Shirts on her mother. She'd better cut the pain pills in half or nobody would be able to keep clothes on the woman. Well, Max needed to cut the pain pills in half. She'd felt horribly guilty leaving him, but she had morning classes, and he was free until late morning when Missy would take over. He'd already moved the TV into Ellen's bedroom and seemed to know his way around the kitchen. Ellen would soon break the die out of her handbag and then he'd be Bunco sorry, but until then things seemed surprisingly stable.

It bothered her that she needed to rethink Max. Maybe it was unfair to assume he'd stayed the same. They'd not only grown up, they'd aged. He was at Belmar, teaching, living in a comfortable house, volunteering to take care of her mother. What if he could be counted on? And why did that feel both promising and terrifying? Thank god she could forget everything for a couple of hours and just cook.

She'd made her way into the university kitchen, felt a little giddy at her escape. Monday could be nothing but up from Halloween. School was salvation, even though they were taking their lamb final, whipping up one of every dish they'd determined were the best of the recipes Chef Gaspard had given them. At least there wasn't tension in the kitchen. She felt comfortable there, in her element with the elements she supposed. It was unlike the feeling of disorientation she felt about everything else in her life, maybe especially her own child. Missy had been asleep when she'd come home in the morning. They'd crossed paths briefly in the bathroom when she was leaving and Missy was heading to shower and then take care of Grandma.

But after throwing herself into five hours of lamb preparation, she was over the giddy and ready for the nap. The dishes were beautifully plated, though. There were mini lamb burgers that were just three bites each and topped with a variety of creamy cheeses and roasted sweet peppers. Her own variation of the Greek kabobs glistened with a fine web of cumin-infused honey. There was lamb sliced and fanned out among sauteed chive blossoms that smelled wonderfully buttery, and a pastry wrapped rack of lamb that would have impressed an architect with its structure of sharp bones arching up.

With Deb's help, she and Ty had weeded out a dozen less-than-stellar recipes and modified a few to be consistently excellent, beautiful, fragrant and tasty, even though she was never, ever eating lamb again. The rest of the class could dig in. That's what usually came of their masterpieces and even their failures. Some college students never got to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Who could work on an algebra problem and walk away with a full belly? But the cooking students were always well fed. Sometimes they even consumed the evidence of their failures to avoid culinary prosecution.

She saw the kitchen doors open and couldn't have been more surprised to see Max come in. Missy would have called if there'd been a problem with grandma. Her heart speeded up. He must have looked up her schedule and tracked her down.

He spotted her and froze, camera clutched in his hands, and she reached up and ran her hand over her nose. Surely she'd gotten all the paprika off after the dry rub earlier, but he was staring like there was something wrong with her, like there was something wrong with her being there.

The other students, oblivious to Max standing there, chatted and slowly gathered up their things to leave the kitchen, but Deb walked up to Max like she knew him. "We're done." She pointed to the table. "They're all yours. Why she wants them is beyond me."

Max didn't answer but walked over to the food, rearranged a plate or two, only stopping when Gwen stood beside him. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm, uh, photographing the food." He clicked a couple of photos of the kabobs.

"I can see that. Why?"

He crouched down to be camera level with the rack of lamb. "Why are you here?"

"What?"

"I thought you were taking psych. for your degree." He slid the plate of mini burgers closer and fired off half a dozen shots. "I didn't know you were taking a cooking class."

She felt disoriented. She'd woken up on his lap, for crying out loud, and now he wouldn't make eye contact with her? He hadn't met her eyes since that first minute he'd frozen in the doorway. Maybe he was surprised that he didn't know what she was studying. He was interested in her life, housing her mother and all, and he should be let in on her academic aspirations, however slim her chance of success. "I'm in the program. Just. I was taking classes, but Deb moved me up to second year, and Chef Gaspard said I had to commit to the program or leave. So I did."

He clicked so many photos, it seemed like he talked to her almost as an afterthought. "I can see that."

He didn't sound like he could see her there. She wasn't used to defending herself against anyone but herself. "I'm really good at this."

"I don't doubt that."

"Then what is your--"

Chef Gaspard stepped into the kitchen and paused, Gwen thought, for effect. She needed to stop thinking about the woman like that. Chef Gaspard was a French master chef, beautiful and groomed within an inch of her life. Damn she was doing it again. She smiled and tried not to step aside too much and join the rest of the class, standing now with their backs against the cooking range since Chef Gaspard blocked the escape to the hallway.

But Chef Gaspard ignored them all, not even greeting Deb as she passed her, shoulder to shoulder on Deb's way out.

Gwen held her breath, as her fellow classmates did, when Chef Gaspard walked up to the table and critically eyed the dishes. Ty's rack of lamb stood above any others. That was a given. But Gwen hoped her modest kabobs would hold their own.

Chef Gaspard moved a couple of sprigs of lemon thyme around at the edge of the lamb burger plate, stood back, and nodded her approval. Then she turned to Max and smiled with what Gwen thought was a mystery of sensuality no American woman could possess. And then like the slow motion fall her mother had taken before her eyes, she watched Chef Gaspard take Max's face between her fine-boned hands and kiss him on the mouth for seconds, entire whole seconds during which he did not pull back. She broke the kiss, smoothed her hands down his cheeks and patted his chest. "Merci, amour."

Thank you, love. Thank you, love ran through Gwen's head as she watched the woman leave and the students scramble out of their chef's tops, take off their hats, and grab their bags before she could come back. They hustled out the door and left Gwen and Max alone in the kitchen.

He raised his camera as if he could just resume his photo shoot but then turned around slowly to face her. She'd been played again and had a second to decide if she wanted to kick him in the ass or wait until his crotch came into range. She wanted to kick both.

He lowered the camera, body already curving a little in anticipation of a hit, but his voice was calm and steady. "You probably have some questions."

Why was she so fucking stupid? was the biggest question she had, and she was pretty sure he couldn't answer that one for her. She definitely wanted to kick him in both the ass and the crotch. The ass, the crotch, and his calm, rational face if her foot could go that high. Oh, that's what a fist was for.

"I can see by your expression that you are not wondering so much as angry?" He waited a second. "Okay, very, very angry. Maybe if you understood the situation..." He cringed. "Actually, I think that would make you even madder, so maybe the thing to do..."

She looked around for something, anything, she could smack him with. She grabbed a large pair of tongs off the range top. They were still covered in caramelized lamb juice, and she liked that they looked like they'd already been used as a murder weapon. She snapped them in the general direction of his pants' zipper.

"...is to tell you everything. Which I have tried to do several times..."

Snap.

"Could have tried harder."

Snap.

"Here goes. A couple of years ago when Nicola and I met and started living together in Paris...

She dropped the tongs.

"That's part of what I was going to tell you."

"You lived with Chef Gaspard?" While she'd been knee-deep in mortgage payments with an insurance agent, he'd been jetting across Europe with a silk bloused, uber-thin French chef who was the princess of a restaurant dynasty?

She realized Max hadn't answered, and she was horrified at her own blind stupidity. She'd indulged in flirting and togas and the beginning edge of trust and maybe even more than she wanted to admit she'd hoped for.

She whispered, "You're still with Chef Gaspard." She'd thought she'd already looked as foolish as a middle-aged tossed aside woman could look, but that had all been foreplay to this grand humiliation. "You were just... what? Feeling me up for old time's sake?"

He tilted his head, shrugged in an apology so lame her body shot from embarrassed shock to rage. Somebody needed to pay besides her. "Goddamn the whole fucking world!"

His mouth opened but nothing came out, and she pointed at him. "Good choice. Don't say anything, you... you..." She didn't even know what he was. She didn't even know what she'd done, what the fuck she'd ever done to end up so... "What did I ever do wrong? Really wrong? Not a little wrong, like be an imperfect mom, date you, marry Steve, spend time with you again after you'd proven yourself to be unreliable."

She jabbed her finger in his chest, liked the solid thunk of the motion, and hoped he bruised easily, as easily as she did. "Unreliable. Take that because I can't think of anything worse to say about another human being than unreliable. You're the guy in the fox hole who runs like a fox, like a dog, and leaves all the other dogs to die of something horrible like mustard gas or grenades."

Picking up the tongs, she gestured at him. "That's you. The running dog. And I would like to know what is broken in me that I am even here having this conversation with you. You, who runs. And this time you added lying. You are a lying man. Oh, sorry, is that redundant? And, okay, I get why Steve lied to me because he didn't want to give up the younger woman he left me for because, I don't know, she's cute or thinks he's a super cool grownup with his own car. I don't know, but I get the lying there, duh. But you? You didn't have to run me over trying to escape because you weren't even available to be in the fox hole with anyone were you?"

She looked up at the ceiling, a blinding white with one splotch of dirty tan where a lid-less blender had shot up a squash soup. She could feel the force of it, could remember that class when the motor kicked on and an explosion blanketed the kitchen. She felt like she was standing right under it again and again. "What exactly did I do to the universe that has caused so much shit to rain down on my head? It is a shit storm."

She felt so frustrated she wanted to scream, to knock somebody out, to be knocked out. She waved her arms and bits of lamb flew off the tongs. "My life is a shit storm of men leaving, except you, who are apparently still attached. To a goddamn French chef. It's like I might forget that I am just a housewife and apparently a loser at that, but god forbid should I think I could move forward, be something else, because here's a funny reminder... I'm actually just the generic version of a goddamn French gourmet woman. And, even better news, I'm cheaper and hardly any maintenance at all. Really, I'll just be waiting, thank you, for anything you can manage while the name brand version - Merci, Amour - is busy. And is she ever busy? She doesn't seem to do a goddamn thing around here, but that's okay because I'm just a student. I'm at least five years older than she is, but I'm just a student because I don't know anything. I've just spent my life making sure third grade math homework got done and Steve had clean underwear and that's all. Nothing to be rewarded for, certainly, but who in the Hell knew it was something you got punished for?"

She stood breathing as heavily as if she'd run up a mountain, her lungs aching from the effort of it. Then, the worst, she felt the quicksilver shift of her mood and knew tears were coming. Nothing was going to make her shed even one in front of him. She darted for the door but heard his steps behind her. He cut her off and stood between her and the exit, his face so familiar, the good and the bad, she wanted to have never, ever met him. He took one good look at her face and stepped aside.

Running down the hallway, she kept her head down across campus, and made it into the dorm elevator. She pressed the button, but by the time she reached her floor, the tears had come, and she could barely see her own door. She'd left her bag and key in the kitchen and hoped Missy had left the door unlocked. She groped for the knob, felt relieved when it turned. She aimed for her bed, lay face down, and cried until she fell asleep.

"Mom? Mom."

Gwen felt the sway of her body, back and forth. It felt good and comforting, like being rocked.

"Mom!"

She tried to open her eyes, but they were gritty and swollen. In a crush of memory, the afternoon and the first forty years of her life came back to her, and she closed them again. She just wanted to go back to where she'd been, unconscious.

"Mom!"

The one word that could bring her back even from the dead. She made a genuine effort, and lifted her lids, adding, for Missy's benefit, a smile she didn't feel. "Hi, sweetheart." She heard the hoarseness in her voice and cleared her throat.

Missy scooted her over and sat on the edge of the bed. Gwen felt Missy's hand rest hard on her shoulder. "What happened, Mom? Are you alright? I just saw Grandma. Should I get her?"

Yeah, in a crisis, Ellen would help. She scrunched her face in the pillow, a soft, cotton escape, but Missy rolled her back over. Some things, like your life, you couldn't escape with a pillow. She considered that for a second. You couldn't escape with a pillow unless someone held it real tight over your face. "Grandma's immobilized. Your father's gone. You're grown. Max cheated with me. I'm fine."

It took her breath away, her stupidity. She'd once been young and stupid, but so were lots of people. That's why it was such a popular expression. And while young and stupid had broken her heart, it hadn't held the colossal embarrassment being an old fool did.

"I'm grown?" Missy smiled in surprise then frowned. "Max cheated with you?" She shook her head. "Wow, I did not see that coming."

"That's two of us. He's been with Chef Gaspard for years apparently."

"No shit?"

"No shit."

"Did you, you know, sleep with him?"

She cringed. She'd kept everything neat and tidy for Missy and there was her daughter, witness to her personal disaster of a non-existent sex life. "No, I did not." There may have been a little foreplay and some actual sleeping, but no. She had that going for her.

"You've got that going for you."

Gwen felt her lower lip tremble. "That's the nicest thing you've said to me in a really long time." She began to cry again, even though she felt so dried up she didn't know how her eyes possessed any moisture.

"Oh, Mom. I know." Missy reached for the box of tissues and dug the last one out.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, Missy. Your parents are divorcing and your mom lives in a..." she looked around the room and tried not to remember Steve's disgust when he'd caught her in it. "In a dorm room. And now you know how stupid your mother is. God, save yourself."

"Mom." Missy gave her the my-mother-is-crazy look, which had been meant to harm all those teen years, and now felt encouraging.

"I don't know what I'm doing." She sniffed and felt her body shake. "I want to lie to you and say I've got it, it's okay. But I don't know what I'm doing. And most of what I'm doing is wrong. I mean, it seems right, well at least it seems interesting and not some horrible mistake and then he's with somebody else, and I just feel old and stupid."

Missy rolled her eyes, tapped her finger on her chest. "Okay, I didn't go to college so I could follow a guy, and no matter what the deal is with Max, it's not like he's not way better than Austin."

"That's true."

"Mom!" Missy laughed and Gwen wanted to join her, but only tears came. "But it wasn't just Austin. It was the music. Well, not the music, you know, that we were singing, but the singing. And mom? Don't take this the wrong way or anything, but it's just hard, you know. You do everything. And I needed to go so I could, you know, have a life."

She'd left her own mother once for the same reason, but it didn't hurt any less to hear it. It didn't hurt any less that it was true and healthy and right. "I know, hon."

"But I was really bad at it. I mean, I came back here, to you, because I suck out there."

Gwen sat up. "There is no out there, Missy. It's just your life. Sometimes it's that hard, especially when you're new at it. Girl, you're new at it." She reached for the tissue and wiped her eyes. "At your age it's about practice and mistakes. You get lots of both. You've done everything right. You're going to do lots more great stuff and some screwed up stuff too, and it's all good. It's what you're supposed to do when you're young." She brushed Missy's hair from her cheek.

"Now you tell me."

Gwen laughed, and it made her cry more. "Now I tell you."

Missy hugged her, and for the first time she felt that Missy was holding her. She relaxed into it, breathed in the sweet scent that was her daughter. She'd apologize to the universe later. Clearly something she'd been part of had been wonderful.

Chapter Fourteen.

Celery salt and love make Mom's Potato Salad.

"When I said I'd take you out for dinner, I didn't mean the cafeteria." Gwen slid her plastic tray along the metal counter tracks.

"You already have the meal ticket. It makes sense."

When had her daughter become fiscally conservative? Oh. It felt so new to think Missy worried about her, sweet and troubling. She'd wanted to protect her child from the world of adults, even after her child had become one. "I've got money, hon."

"Dad's giving you money?"

She couldn't blame Steve for that. Missy thought he'd been the only one working for the past twenty years because she'd kind of thought it too. "Half of what Dad and I have is mine. We just need to figure things out. I might be ready to sell the house."

She'd said it out loud, hadn't she? When she'd found temporary shelter in the cooking program, it had rolled around in her head as a possibility, so maybe cheating with another kitchen had made it easier to let hers go. That was a good one. She'd be sure to share that with Steve.

"Things will work out, Mom. They will."