Other Plans by Constance C. Greene Read Free Book Online Page A

room.
    â€œI made cookies,” she said. “I’ve been working my buns off all day cleaning and cooking.” She laughed and ran her hands through her already tousled dark hair. Her face was nice, he thought, pale but pleasant. She was very thin, and wore blue jeans and a sweater with a cigarette bum smack in the middle of it. She smoked a lot, lighting one cigarette from the butt of the one she still had. She listened hard to everything they said, listened with great intensity, nodding her head in agreement or shaking it slowly from side to side. He couldn’t imagine her passed out on the couch when Keith got home from school. Maybe Keith was putting him on, trying to make his mother seem more unusual than other people’s mothers. He didn’t really think Keith would do that, but he couldn’t be absolutely sure.
    Then, out of the blue, she’d said, “John, why don’t you stay for supper? I have to go to an AA meeting, and I don’t like to leave Keith alone. I’m an alcoholic. Maybe Keith’s told you.” Her fingers were very long, very thin, like the rest of her. Very nervous. “I’m sure he’d like the company if you could stay. Why don’t you call your mother and ask her if it’s all right? We’re having cube steaks. I’m a whiz at cooking cube steaks.” She smiled at him, her lips stretched wide in her lean face, her lipstick smudged in the corners of her mouth. “And all the cookies you can eat.”
    He hesitated. His mother didn’t like him to stay at other people’s houses on school nights.
    â€œMom,” Keith sounded weary. “John’s got to get going. His mother runs a very tight ship. She wants to know where he is when he’s not home.” Keith’s eyes glittered in that way they had. “Isn’t that right, John? Doesn’t your mother want to know where you are all the time? She’s very strict.” Keith’s voice lent the word new meaning.
    â€œNot exactly.” He defended his mother, although many times he railed against her strictness. But he didn’t like the tone in Keith’s voice, the way he made her sound like a prison warden. She wasn’t like that. “She likes me to check in once in a while,” he apologized for his mother.
    â€œDon’t let him kid you, Mom. John’s mother is a tiger. And he’s her cub,” Keith had laughed. He hadn’t stayed for supper.
    Twice Keith had been threatened with expulsion from school because his school fees hadn’t been paid. “My mother doesn’t get the money from her trust fund until January,” he’d explained nonchalantly. “They’ll have to wait until then. Gleason knows what’s what. He knows she can’t pay until then. He’ll have to cool it. She pays when she gets the bread. That’s what rich people do. They don’t pay their bills every month. Only squares do that.”
    With shame, he thought of the neat pile of bills his father laid on the hall table the first of every month, stamped and tidy, waiting for the mailman. The first of the month was bill-paying day in his family. Once, when his father had been sick with flu, he remembered his mother doing the bills. Nothing but death would stop their inexorable bill paying, he was sure. Another fact to be buried, hidden from Keith’s voracious gaze. God, how middle-class his parents were.
    â€œIs your mother rich?” he’d asked.
    â€œHer family has money. That’s how she latched onto a trust fund. Her grandfather was loaded. He owned a railroad. He left her and her sisters a bundle. But she can’t get her hands on it,” Keith had said, grinning. “The way the money was left, the lawyer doles it out, inch by inch. Boy, does my mother hate that lawyer. She claims he’s stealing her blind. If she could figure out a way, she’d scrag him good. Sometimes, when things