The Book Club Hotel(20)

Meg stared at him as if he needed humoring. “Er—okay, Dad. If you say so.”

I’m the same age as Erica, Anna thought. Would people guess she was almost forty? Yes, probably. She wasn’t thin, and she didn’t stride around exuding confidence the way Erica did. She was suddenly aware of the fact that her jeans were biting into her tummy. Maybe the kids leaving home would be the nudge she needed to take better care of herself. Get fit.

“Erica stays in hotels a lot, so she always uses the gym and the pool.” She ignored the little voice in her head that reminded her that exercise was a choice, that you didn’t need a five-star hotel or a gym membership to stay in shape. Claudia was proof of that. She ran most mornings, and worked out several times a week. There was no doubt that of the three of them, Anna was the sloth.

“Exactly,” Meg said. “Erica puts herself first and doesn’t apologize for it. That feature about her last week—what was the headline?” Meg tapped her finger on the table and then smiled. “‘What Glass Ceiling?’ That’s it. About how she’d let nothing get in the way of her ambition. I showed everyone at school. I said That’s my godmother and they were all like, Whoa, you’re kidding. And then the teacher asked if I could invite her in to talk to the school. I said I would, but she’d probably be in Tokyo, or London or somewhere glamorous. She’s an incredible role model for women.”

Anna put her fork down.

She’d spent the past eighteen years trying to be the best mother possible, and now she was discovering that if she’d gone back to work and focused on climbing the career ladder, she might have earned more respect.

And if she’d done that, she’d have something in the future that wasn’t about to change.

“I used to work in the same company as Erica. In fact, I was promoted before she was.” The moment the words left her mouth she felt embarrassed. What was she doing? Trying to prove that she was worthy of the cool title, too? Was she really that insecure about herself and her place in the world? Since when was your worth measured in terms of job title and salary?

“You were promoted before she was?” Daniel’s eyes widened, as if he couldn’t even picture his mother occupying the same space as Erica. “Why did you give up?”

“You know why.” Meg rolled her eyes at her brother. “She had us.”

Daniel looked troubled. “But you could have carried on working.”

It intrigued her how simple the world seemed to her children. They saw everything in black-and-white, no shades of gray. Maybe that was one of the advantages of hitting forty. You saw things in a more nuanced way.

“I could have carried on working.” She smiled. “But I enjoyed being a mother. Our family has always been my priority, and I have no regrets about that.” No regrets, but lately she’d wondered how her life might look if she’d made different decisions. “You’ll be making these decisions yourself one day.”

“I’m not sure I’m going to have children with the state the planet is in,” Meg said. “Your generation has broken it. Thanks a lot, Mom.”

Anna blinked. Now she was being held personally responsible for global warming.

“Anyway, you can still go back to work. It’s not too late. As Dad says, forty isn’t that ancient.” Meg helped herself to another piece of garlic bread. “Priya’s mom has just gone back to work in a doctor’s office.”

Anna tried to imagine herself working in a doctor’s office.

That wouldn’t happen. She’d been out of the workforce for too long. She had no skills. She’d have to retrain and she wouldn’t even know what to retrain as. She couldn’t think of anything she wanted to do. Her life stretched ahead, empty and without purpose. She imagined herself walking from room to room, tidying things that were already tidy.

She’d always known this moment would come, so why wasn’t she better prepared?

After the kids had cleared the table and helped load the dishwasher—she might be a stay-at-home mother, but she wasn’t a walkover—she glanced at Pete.

“It seems you and I are getting the tree by ourselves on Saturday.”

“Mmm. I can pick one up on my way home from work on Friday if you like. I pass a store that sells them.”

His answer unlocked the misery she’d kept inside. “Sure. Why not just add it to our weekly shopping? Maybe we should buy one already decorated so we don’t have to bother with that part, either.” She saw him raise his eyebrows and sighed. “Sorry. Ignore me.”

“I was trying to be helpful,” he said mildly, “but clearly it wasn’t a good suggestion. What’s wrong? What am I missing?”

“Evidently nothing!” She felt frustrated that he didn’t understand without her needing to explain. “Am I the only person in this family who appreciates tradition? Don’t you care at all that the kids don’t want us at their concert, and that they don’t want to join us to get the Christmas tree? A Christmas tree isn’t a chore. It isn’t something to be ticked off the to-do list like laundry.”

He paused. “Anna—”

“Don’t Anna me.”

He rubbed his fingers across the bridge of his nose, the way he always did when he was trying to figure out exactly what to say. “It’s not that they don’t want to come with us to get a tree. It’s that they had other plans. We could do it at a different time.”