Veronica had known since she began dating Carsten was more along the lines of Eddie’s description. She was a curmudgeonly woman, who was constantly complaining, and morbidly pessimistic. The only time she seemed happy was when she was around Eddie and Carsten. And in turn, they would do anything for her. Veronica suspected her downward cycle this past year was connected to Carsten’s death, even if the doctors were convinced it was part of her natural decline.
“I’m giving a presentation on her life today, but everyone seems to be too busy to attend. So I guess you’ll never get to find out,” Maggie said.
The words might have been directed at Eddie, but Veronica knew the attitude was meant for her. “Mags, I’m going to try to make it. As soon as I get done with Jamie’s principal,” she said.
“Whatever.”
Chapter 5
The final battle of the morning would be to get Maggie to change her outfit. Politically based shirts were banned in school, and one trip to the principal’s office a week was Veronica’s limit. After a brief but spirited fight, Maggie relented, and returned in a simple head-to-toe black ensemble of sweater and jeans, perhaps mourning life in general.
Veronica threw a professional suit jacket over her concert shirt that she wore with stylish jeans and heeled boots. She had maintained enough Manhattan style to pull it off, but she still hadn’t got used to her new, short, blonde-bob hairstyle—a sharp departure from shoulder length style she’d worn since college. She figured if Jon Bon Jovi could cut off his hair, then so could Veronica Peterson.
But that change didn’t compare to moving back to Pleasantville. And while it was culture shock for everyone, Veronica was convinced that she’d made the right decision. It gave the kids a bigger yard to play in and the schools were quality. And of course, finances played a big role. Like a lot of thirty-something couples, she and Carsten hadn’t prepared for death. Carsten made good money as an executive at Sterling Publishing, but it was ‘own a Saab and take an exotic vacation once a year’ money, not ‘manage a hedge fund and own a villa in Italy’ type. So she quickly found out that raising two kids on the Upper East Side of Manhattan without a steady income caused their savings to hemorrhage.
And if those weren’t reasons enough, there was no shortage of built-in babysitting. Which reminded Veronica—her Uncle Phil had been feverishly campaigning to fill-in for Career Day, but Jamie ruled his pharmaceutical sales career as “too boring.” So they needed to get out of here before he realized that he’d been bumped by Eddie.
Veronica rounded up Maggie and Jamie, and headed off for school in their oversized Chevy Tahoe. Eddie had loose ends to tie-up concerning his dead drug dealer, and would meet Jamie at school. Mr. Charisma campaigned to ride in the “cool cop car,” but was turned down. While Eddie was the infantile jokester around Veronica and the kids, he was obsessively professional when it came to his police work. It was always interesting for Veronica to see that side of him.
She drove through their secluded neighborhood, known as Usonia. It was named for the modernist, open-style homes made famous by Frank Lloyd Wright—typically small, single story dwellings made of environmentally sustainable materials. They were green before it became trendy.
Veronica’s family had bought up many of the hillside homes off Bear Ridge Road back when they were built in 1948. This included the L-shaped Usonian that Veronica and the children now lived in, which was wrapped around a garden terrace at the rear of her mother’s house. Uncle Phil and Aunt Val lived two houses down from them.
They maneuvered through winding hills until they arrived at the busy Bedford Drive, which was the “main drag” in town. Veronica flipped on her play-list of 1980s power ballads.
Maggie was not a fan—probably not angry enough. “Mom, can we put the news on about tomorrow’s election?”
Maggie had carried on her father’s passion for politics, and sounded eerily like him when she debated complex topics that should be beyond kids her age.
The election was contentious, to say the least. And at the heart of it was a potential conflict brewing in the Middle East. If war broke out, many experts predicted that it would last for over a decade, which caused Veronica to have horrible nightmares about her children coming in contact with roadside bombs ten years from now. So she was voting for Theodore