Death of a PTA Goddess Read Online Free

very unwillingly handed her a mantle that symbolized her entrance into adult relationships. She’d gone to boy-girl group functions and outings, but we’d said she had to be sixteen before we’d let her go on actual dates. She’d had her sixteenth birthday last week. What the hell had we been thinking? She was way too young. Or maybe I was. Or too old. In any case,
I
wasn’t ready!
    She said, “Hello?” listened, and then grinned. As she was leaving the room and trotting up the stairs to her room, I distinctly heard her say, “I’m sorry, too.”
    Oh, crap! Was that apology undoing the “wise decision” that Patty had complimented her for?
    Meantime, Jim was oblivious and still reading the sports section. “Jim! Get your nose out of the newspaper! Our little girl is passing before our eyes!”
    “What?” he asked, deserting the paper and sitting bolt upright. “What happened?”
    “I think Karen is being asked on a date with some upperclassman named Adam Embrick who says ‘yo, babe’ instead of ‘hello.’ ”
    Jim looked baffled and blinked a couple of times before speaking. “How did that happen? You were on the phone with some PTA person. How did that wind up with Karen’s dating someone?”
    “He’s the secretary-slash-treasurer’s son.”
    “But she’s too young to . . .” Jim’s eyes widened as, no doubt, the significance of her last birthday dawned on him. He got up and started pacing, pulling on his mustache, a habit whenever he was upset. “Our daughter can’t go out with some guy who refers to people as babes. Did his family used to live in L.A. or something?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    Nathan, who has that special antenna that allows children to sense when a sibling is perhaps about to get yelled at, came bounding up the stairs from the basement. He’d been playing a computer game in my office. He took one look at our faces and asked, “What’s going on?”
    “Nothing,” Jim replied harshly, but added under his breath, “just that my only daughter is about to go out with some dolt who thinks he’s Joe Cool.” He shifted his attention to me, his brow furrowed. “What do you know about this guy?”
    “I think his mom said he’s president of the junior class. Either that or the glee club. He’s president of something, though. Or maybe that’s a sibling of his in junior high. It’s so hard to keep everyone’s kids straight when the PTA has to deal with all thirteen grade levels at Carlton Central.”
    We spent the next few minutes in shared, speechless anxiety, unwilling to discuss things further in front of Nathan, who was, in turn, unwilling to leave us alone and miss out on anything. The beacon that had kept me going during occasional dips and dulls of my twenty-year relationship with Jim was the realization that marriage meant my never having to date again. Yet another miscalculation on my part. I’d neglected to factor into the equation the vicarious element of motherhood: the fact that worrying about my daughter felt even worse than actually experiencing her travails myself.
    Karen came skipping down the stairs and hung up the phone. “Adam and I have a date tonight. Before you ask, he’s president of the junior class, and I’ve known him from pottery class last year and choir this year. He’d been going out with someone, but broke up with her a couple months ago because she wanted to spend every minute with him, and he’s in all these honors classes and has to study a lot. And, Mom, he . . .” She’d started laughing so hard that she had to stop and get her breath, but finally managed to say, “He said to tell you he was sorry for saying ‘yo, babe’ when he picked up the phone. He thought you were a guy friend of his, and he was goofing around.”
    Jim’s and my eyes met. Apparently the boy had much more going for himself than I’d assumed, but in some ways that only posed a bigger threat. “So what was Patty Birch saying to you about him and