Whatever Happened to Baby Jane

Eventually, I manage to drag my daughter from the percieved safety of the car through the maelstrom of death that is the hedge with a bee.

She is filthy and smells like bug spray. All is right with the world.

I ask her if she'd like to attend camp Hari Kari next summer for a week or maybe two. She said she loved it but she'd miss me. (As if.) I joke with her. "Go on the week you are supposed to be with Daddy!" Not so funny. She'd miss him too.

And this is where I am again wracked with guilt. The last thing I want for my vibrant little toe-head is to begin to decline invitations and forfeit opportunities because of my whacky custody arrangement. It is no way to live.

Within minutes my girl has moved to other more cheery thoughts though and is interested to get to Lars's house to see the dog. She would have been at Lars's house this weekend if not for camping, and she's a little off kilter. Not even a grilled cheese and lemonade with a DoubleStuff Cakester can make it right.

I inspect the hedge for lingering predators and she runs on her spindly mosquito-bitten legs to the car. And we are off - our mother-daughter adventure having come to an end all too soon.

I return to find Scott looking handsome and rugged in my front yard. He's already planting the bushes and is quite a sight for my sore sleepless eyes. I pull up in front of the house to say hello before going around the block to park. I tell him I'll return shortly with a kiss and a cold beer for him.

Spoke too soon.

As I come around the corner, I am forced to slam on my brakes because something resembling a Rose Bowl float has ambled out infront of my car, waving its arms in every direction.

I stop and squint. It squints back.

OK, I know I am not the picture of beauty and elegance at the moment. I have just spent the last 3 days in the woods with a dozen prepubescent girls and all the bugs and wild life a girl can stand. And limited ability to perform routine acts of hygiene.

I squint a little harder. It is not a Rose Bowl float. It is not a Mummer. It is not even a peacock.

It is Jane Bosworth, one of Scott's more assertive Facebook stalking "friends!"

Since I have slammed on my brakes to avoid creaming her in the street, I am stuck idling there while she lifts her bedazzled sunglasses from the bridge of her nose and recognition settles in every synaptic junction of her atrophied brain.

Big gasp, and few expletives, and an OMG later she is at my driver's side window.

She is not even remotely curious about me...she has observed a nice car with out of state plates in front of my house (I knew she'd be stalking!) and wants to know if it is Scott's.

No, it is the Publishers Clearing House people.

She rambles on and on almost unintelligibly about Scott for a minute and a sleazy looking guy in a truck pulls up to the curb right behind me. It's her new boyfriend. Her mother needs to go to the emergency room and he is there to help...because Mom is in the tub, dontchaknow.

Whew! There is a God. Too bad you can't stay, Jane...

But no.

She sends the boyfriend in to extract the mother from the tub, and she is going to trot on down to my house to give Scott a piece of her mind for not calling when he knew he'd be in town.

She runs off in the direction of my house in her Daisy Dukes and overly fitted T-shirt with some snarky motto on it while I frantically try to dial Scott's cell to warn him to hop the fence and take cover.