Another Piece of My Heart by Jane Green Page B

mom’s, and we thought this was the best thing.”
    “It was. Thank you,” Andi says, squeezing his hand. “I just…”
    “What?”
    “I just needed one weekend to ourselves.” She turns her head and drops her voice to a whisper, ensuring Emily doesn’t hear. Tears fill her eyes as she shoots a look at the black-haired figure frowning in the backseat. “I needed a weekend without the filthy looks and the sarcastic comments and the rudeness. I just needed a break.”
    “We’re here with you,” Drew says quietly. “We’ll look after you. Topher already told her she has to behave.”
    “He did?”
    “You know my husband. He’s pretty damn tough when he needs to be.”
    “She didn’t throw a fit?”
    “No. I think the kid is desperate for some boundaries.”
    “Tell that to her father,” Andi says.
    *   *   *
    “Boundaries.” That loaded word is bandied about by people who think they know everything about parenting. It is the word that Andi uses more than any other when she and Ethan are talking, or arguing about what is wrong with Emily.
    As a child, Andi was never aware of the word “boundary.” It wasn’t talked about; her parents did not sit with other parents and discuss how every child needed to know where the limits were in order to feel safe. Andi did not plead and whine and beg for something she wanted, long after her parents had said no, in the knowledge that if she created enough of a scene, in all likelihood she would get what she wanted.
    She was the only child of older parents who had given up on the desire to have children. At forty-four, entirely unexpectedly, Judith and Oliver Fieldstone found themselves pregnant.
    Andi was adored and revered from the beginning, but she knew her place. Her parents had her eat dinner with them every night, with a beautifully set table in the dining room, joining in the adult conversation. They talked about their days, and about museums they had gone to, books they had read, plays they had seen.
    When they had finished eating, Andi would clear the table and dry the dishes her mother washed. If she misbehaved, or got “fresh,” a stern look would usually be all it took for remorse to flood her small body as she apologized.
    “No” meant no. If ever Andi didn’t listen, her mother would start counting, the threat of “three” being so terrible, Andi always did whatever she was supposed to have been doing by “two.”
    The boundaries were invisible, never talked about, but were absolutely there: lines she would never dare cross, too frightened of the consequences.
    Despite this, Andi knew she was loved. At night, before bed, she would sit in her mother’s lap, their fingers intertwined as her mother read her a story. When Andi would look up and catch her mother gazing at her, there was infinite adoration in her eyes.
    The family home, with all its invisible boundaries, was her mother’s haven, a place filled with quiet and calm. Andi knew she was loved, and in turn loved her parents, but she wished—oh how she wished—they were younger, like all the other parents.
    She wanted them to be young, and hip, to be interested in pop music and parties, not opera and the ballet. She wanted brothers and sisters. She wanted her parents to be invited to the neighborhood barbecues that seemed to be a constant occurrence during the summer—a roving party at someone else’s house every night of the weekend.
    She wanted to eat dinner at a stool at the counter, at five o’clock. She wanted PB & J for dinner, and macaroni and cheese, and green bean casserole made with Campbell’s Mushroom Soup, not the fresh, grilled steaks and salad, the Sôles Veroniques the coq au vins that they sat down to on a regular basis.
    Andi wanted friends to come over and tear through the house as their mothers sat with her mother at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and smoking, and barely raising an eyebrow at the children.
    Her parents were only in their forties when they