Plan C Read Online Free

dash to his side, clinging like flies to a screen.
    “Daddy, she’s being mean,” says Jean-Baptiste.
    “Okay, you know what?” I say. “
You
take them. I was supposed to hit the send button on my computer ten minutes ago.”
    I escort them all out of my office door, easier said then done, dodging the hundred and fifty action figurines strewn across my floor - enough to entertain a village in Bosnia; enough to support an
entire
cancer wing full of children; enough to fund our nation’s financial bailout- and still send every hard working American on vacation.
    Ben is out the door with both boys but looks back, “I’m going to take them out for lunch, to a movie, to the park, and then…”
    I close the door before he can finish his thought. Then I fall back against it as my eyes tear up, my hand planted on the inside of the handle separating my world from theirs, as though I’m looking through the wrong end of a telescope and they’re fifty miles away.
    And through the telescope I can see Ben’s pre-married life. The ski slopes in Aspen, the August trips to Italy – apparently eating gelato - the five star hotels and the Michelin starred restaurants. And never once having to pull a plug on the monitor of a dying Grandmother. Never once spreading his mother’s ashes on the shore - twisting the tin container’s top as you flung them into the wind and then trying to remain solemn; caught between the bittersweet tears and the granular crunch as they blew back in your tear-stained face.
    This was not the life I had signed up for. I was finding out the hard way – like running your fingers along the blade grass at the beach – that life with Ben was going to be full of surprise paper cuts. I could use one of my Grandma’s ethnic remedies about now. “If you want to make a bad burn or poison ivy go away, squat down, pee on a cloth, add a little witch hazel and dab with it until…”
    Rising up from the floor, my desk clock reminds me I now have seven minutes until my deadline. Life always seemed to be a ticking clock of deadlines. I move to my daughters’ high school and college graduation photos lining my fireplace. We had survived the test of time, we three women, but I had to have a Teflon heart to do it. Their days of little girl tea parties and frilly ankle socks were a lifetime away, though I clearly remember a specific night - a birthday sleepover with classmates, when I watched them evolve into teenagers. Such bizarre creatures at the age of fourteen - their brains exploding with ideas, so much of it devoted to the pursuit of silliness. They’re like fizzing electric wires, spurting energy but not hooked up to anything.
    But now my girls were grown and had moved into respectable lives. They were concerned with the environment, creating universal peace, saving all the whales from extinction, and most of all, fighting for the legalization of marijuana.
    I twist the lever on the blind and find that my window washer has left his bucket on the ledge. Staring down into its contents - the water blacker than Donna Karan’s autumn line - I can almost see a reflection of the person I once knew; a person who was supposed to be enjoying her empty-nest time. And then I look up. The window washer is back, staring in at me.
    I mouth the words, “Why am I being tarred and feathered by stepkids?”
    The washer shrugs. “I no speak-o English.”
    “And I don’t speak Spanish,” I mouth back, plopping back down in my chair at my wet desk.
    My window washer returns to his job and I return to my keyboard, which is now sticking from the tea spilled between the “R” and “U” keys. Damn it. Finally, after a lot of furious pushing, the keys begin to soften and finally move again. I breathe a sigh of relief and resume….
    “As a stepparent do you often feel unappreciated, alone, and resentful? There’s little fulfillment in being a stepmother, but maybe there’s a farmer’s market nearby that sells poison