We Need To Talk, Mother
HUMMING Someday My Prince Will Come while smooshing her apricot-gloss-coated lips together, she bounced down the stairs on the balls of her feet, unfettered breasts jiggling beneath a short yellow sun dress, legs cased in thigh-highs despite the late July heat, and 2" heels—short enough for early afternoon yet high enough to enhance her toned calves and thighs, of which she was inordinately proud. Half-way across the kitchen her older daughter Meg spoke up. "We need to talk, Mother."
Lil (please call me Lil, Lilith is so Biblical) replied without breaking stride. "Not now, Margaret, I'm going out for a while. It can wait until I get back." She knew Meg didn't like to be called Margaret, she complained it was too geeky, but Lil had been christened Margaret Ann McGillicuddy—thank God she'd changed it to Lilith Diamonte—so her namesake daughter could damn well put up with it.
Meg's snarky response wasn't inspired by dislike for her given name. "No, your boss can wait for you, Mother." She dragged out Mother so it sounded more like an epithet than a term of endearment. "It's not like you'd forget how to suck his dick if you were a few minutes late."
Lilith, briefly struck dumb, spoke without turning around. "That's preposterous ...what a ... terrible thing to say ...and a lie! Not to mention unacceptably foul language."
She continued walking toward the door, but Meg's ominous threat stopped her. "Oh, you'll have more to worry about than 'unacceptably foul language' when you hear what Lizzie and I have seen and heard when Dad's been out of town."
Their father Jedediah Stewart (just call me Jeb) was head football coach at David Crockett High School. To satisfy the budget hawks on the school board, he also taught boys' PE and Introductory Gender Studies. Because their conference was pretty far-flung, he had to make occasional overnight trips for away games during football season.
"I don't know what you two thought you saw, but you were mistaken."
Meg laughed. "Oh, come on, Mother. We've both taken Sex Ed. We know what we saw."
"That doesn't teach anything about life, it's all made up to satisfy trendy ideas by educators who can't get real jobs."
"Uh, here's some real life for you, Mother. The guys at school ask me for a blow job two or three times a week."
Lil seized the opportunity to deflect. "That's sexual harassment! You and I will speak to the administration about this! Is Lizzie is being harassed, too?"
"No, Mother, I'm just a little kid in the 4th grade. My guys just want hand jobs."
Lilith shook her head in mock shock, then narrowed her eyes. "I suppose you're recording this."
"That would be illegal and immoral, so no, Mother, despite your example, we're not recording. Would you please read the appropriate statute, Lizzie?"
Because Meg was older she got to be the prosecutor; Lizzie was just a little kid, so she had to be the paralegal. Lizzie lifted the top two pages of a yellow legal tablet and started reading. "A person who, intentionally and without the consent of all parties to a confidential communication, uses an electronic amplifying or recording device to eavesdrop upon or record the confidential communication, whether the communication is carried on among the parties in the presence of one another or by means of—"
"I know the damn law, I'm a trial lawyer, remember? Now listen you two juvies, here's what's going to happen. You forget all about what you think you saw or heard or I'll make you wish you were in foster care. No phones, no internet, no hanging out, just homework and housework—"
Lilith's phone interrupted her rant. She tried to ignore it, but it quickly dinged to announce a text message. Jeb's message startled her.
—Answer your damn phone, Nancy.
She called him. "Whaddya want, Jeb? And what's with Nancy? You know my name's Lil."
"Game over, bitch. I'm filing for adultery. Your boss better watch his backside." He hung up.
Lilith turned fiery eyes to Meg. "You lied to me!"
"No, mother, I wasn't recording, I was live streaming. Dad was recording, to the cloud. And I wasn't lying, either, simply presenting some truth to the benefit of my clien...err, father. After all, if I'm going to follow in my mother's footsteps as a trial lawyer, I need all the practice I can get. Right, Lizzie?"
Their smirks were gratuitous, but felt great.
Epilogue
THAT'S ONLY 750 words. Here's the rest of the story to save all y'all the effort of typing "Drink bleach, asshole!" or "ending sucks!" or "FTDS!"
McGill/Lil (hereafter known as Nancy) was divorced by Jeb, who successfully petitioned for primary custody of Meg and Lizzie on the grounds that Nancy created an unwholesome environment by occasionally bringing extramarital sexual partners into the family home. In exchange for her not fighting it, he changed the grounds to the omnibus Irreconcilable Differences. Nancy was dismayed to find that despite her carefully groomed façade of cynicism, she actually mourned the dissolution. She continued to practice law halfheartedly for a few years, but was urged to resign when her billable hours fell below the minimum required of partners. On her 45th birthday she entered the novitiate of the Sisters of Perpetual Regret, made her final vows at 49, then spent the rest of her active life teaching Situational Ethics at L'Université de Notre Dame du Lac. She retired at 93 to the mother house in Intercourse PA, and died of mostly natural causes three years later.
Jeb avoided entangling relationships with women until five years after his divorce from Nancy, when he met and—after an intensely carnal courtship—married the divorced mother of one of his quarterbacks. He continued coaching at David Crockett High School for another 15 years. After guiding them to the state championship for three years running, he was named offensive coordinator for the Denver Broncos. He and his wife relocated with the team when they moved to the Philippines, where they were renamed the Manila Folders. Jeb died unexpectedly of dengue hemorrhagic fever at 64, joined shortly thereafter by his widow, Pauline Stewart, née French, who succumbed to Takotsubo cardiomyopathy.
Meg earned a BA in rhetoric at Swarthmore and won a scholarship to Georgetown Law, finishing at the top of her class. Continuing her string of outstanding achievements, she clerked for Supreme Court Associate Justice Michele Obama. After completing that resumé-enhancing stint, Meg joined Steele, Gold & Silver LLC, a mid-sized Washington law firm, where she was named junior partner after only three years. Shortly thereafter, she was recruited by Pepperdine University's Rick J. Caruso School of Law as a tenured full professor whose seminars in Mergers and Acquisitions were always SRO. Meg had several multi-year relationships, but never married and retired at 70 with a handsome pension but no cats. She traveled the world for several years before dying of chronic ennui at 77.
Lizzie, the eternal little sister, had to settle for a BA in English from Penn State, but parlayed her study skills into scholarships that yielded an education MA from Brown and a PhD in medieval French literature from UC Berkeley. She taught creative writing at Berkeley for 9 years, but her semi-autobiographical novel We Need To Talk, Mother garnered nothing more than 154 boilerplate rejections. In a fit of self-destruction, she left her tenured post at Berkeley to teach Remedial Composition at Diablo Valley Community College, where she met her once and future husband. They married after a whirlwind courtship—not until the class ended and he was no longer her student, of course—and she became Mrs. Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor. Archie's parents had divorced when he was 3, but remarried less than a year later just before the birth of his sister Mehetabel. The splendid ceremony uniting Lizzie and Archie was celebrated in the chapel of the Queen Mary berthed in Long Beach before more than 500 guests, all of whom were accommodated in the QM because Archie's great-grandmother rented the entire hotel for five days. Archie was so taken with shipboard life that he took online learning courses in seamanship and started as an ordinary seaman. Lizzie faithfully supported him for the next 12 years, though alone and lonely most of the time, as he worked his way up to Master, Any Gross Tons, Oceans. She took the opportunity to write four more semi-autobiographical novels, none of which was deemed publishable. Lizzie was finally able to accompany Archie at sea when he achieved his lifelong ambition to be captain of a cruise ship, but she died just two years later when she refused to leave him as he went down with RMS Novum Oriana after it collided with a container ship returning empty containers to China. Thanks to Archie's insistence on rigid adherence to safety training and equipment, theirs were the only two lives lost of 1,685 passengers and 1,130 crew."
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