Carpool Confidential by Jessica Benson Page A

you’ve done to get your life back on track.”
    â€œNot so much other than mope.” I didn’t see any reason to fill her in on my conversations with Charlotte just yet.
    â€œYou’re in denial.” I might have detected a trace of concern in her voice. “You think you’re going right back to that nice, little world of cozy financial security and PTA meetings and quasi-suburban dinner parties where everything is nice and fake and no one mentions anything of substance, don’t you?”
    God, I hoped so.
    â€œAccept it, Cassie, he’s moved on. He’s left you, he’s not thinking about you, he’s thinking about him, and now you need to get your head out of the sand and figure out your life, not wait for him to give it back.”
    â€œIt’s not denial, it’s optimism,” I explained, although really no sane person would have used the words PTA meetings and optimism in a related context. And I loved those dinner parties where the houses were always beautiful and fabulous food was prepared by unseen hands in unseen kitchens. Even if they could occasionally be, um, slightly dull, they were so shimmeringly different from the bean-pot-tofu-banjo-strumming singalongs that had been the mainstay of my mother’s post-divorce social life, I couldn’t help but love them. “A concept I don’t think you get.”
    â€œOh, I get optimism all right,” she said. “It’s the tool of stupid people everywhere, Like Marx said on religion—”
    â€œHe’s been gone less than two days,” I said. “Why don’t we revisit this conversation if necessary in a few weeks?”
    â€œI’m worried about this willfully blind stupidity, Cassie.”
    â€œMom”—I thought with a clever segue I could maybe move the spotlight off of me and my failings—“have you been lonely being on your own all these years?”
    She made a noise suspiciously like a snort. “I assume that by ‘alone’ you really mean without a man?”
    â€œI guess so.” Now I was kind of embarrassed. Was my definition really that narrow? “I didn’t mean to—”
    â€œDon’t worry,” she said. “I’m used to societal attitudes towards single women. I’d rather be by myself for eternity than spend a weekend in your father’s company, if that’s what you’re asking.”
    â€œOh,” I said. “OK.” What other answer was there to that?
    â€œUnlike my Stepford days, I know myself. I have my practice, politics, my friends, and my Rabbit,” she went on.
    Argh. I so did not need to know that. Also, I was apparently the only woman on the planet without one. Maybe tomorrow I’d ask Sue Moriarty about hers.
    â€œI find Saddam’s all I need.”
    I gulped. Double argh. And I’d thought Grey was weird. “Saddam?” I said.
    â€œHas it ever occurred to you, Cassie, how much Western propaganda we’re spoon fed? Who’s to say Saddam was really what he was made out to be by the bigoted oppressors in charge of our own country? I, for one, happened to find him a vibrant and interesting man. And by the way, I’d suggest you get yourself one.”
    â€œA Rabbit or a dead dictator?”
    â€œDon’t be ridiculous,” she said. Why was it that she had such a severe sense of humor failure? “Of course I meant a Rabbit. It’s no joke to be a woman without a sex life. Studies have shown—”
    Time to end this conversation in a hurry. While I did not agree with her on a number of points (Rabbits or dictators), I had to admit there might be something to what she’d said about optimism and denial. Over the next week, every time I picked up the phone to find Rick on the other end, it was a stretch to hold onto either of those. Today, I told myself each time, he’s going to apologize for having been out of his mind and say