At last! Finally, his mother seemed open to at least the possibility of dumping her lover and getting their life back to normal without that civil servant creep joining them for dinner every night. Tyler had never realized just how deep his vein of snobbism truly was until Peter Van Husen moved in with the Schuyler family. The man didn't even know that wearing socks with sandals simply wasn't done. It was embarrassing to be seen with him at the Schuyler Square Country Club.
"Well, Tyler?" his mother prompted, "what's your idea? How can we get Peter to move out?"
"I have two thoughts," Tyler replied. "Both involve a little bit of subterfuge."
"Go on," Mavis urged. She got up, disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a bottle of vodka. After adding a healthy slug to her tomato juice, she looked at Tyler expectantly. "I'm waiting."
"My first idea would involve getting Peter in some kind of compromising position. What if you happened to stumble on him in a clinch with Tiffany?"
Mavis laughed. "Tiffany? Please. She's practically jail bait and besides, Peter has better taste than Tiffany. She's too pudgy for him."
"Mom, he isn't going to really fool around with Tiffany, this is all just to set him up," Tyler patiently explained.
"I don't like it. I'd look foolish if my boyfriend was fooling around with someone like Tiffany," Mavis announced.
Tyler sighed and tried to remember that with his mother, appearances were almost everything. "You don't think you look foolish now, fooling around with Peter?"
Mavis ignored his question. "What's your second thought?"
"Well, it's a little more far fetched. Suppose we got Peter fired from his job?"
"How would we do that?"
"We could tell his boss that he stole something from us--maybe a piece of jewelry or an oil painting."
"Tyler, that's plain stupid. Why would he steal anything from us? In the first place, I give him everything he needs and in the second place, Peter doesn't know squat about art. He thinks posters of Ferraris are high art form if they come in nice frames--and his idea of a nice frame is chrome. Forget it."
"You're shooting down all my ideas," Tyler said with the faintest hint of a whine in his voice. "I don't hear you coming up with anything better."
"I do have one idea," Mavis said after a long draw on her tomato juice/vodka concoction. "Suppose we poison him?"
"Mom! We want to get rid of him, not send ourselves up the river! We'd get caught for sure."
"Not if it was food poisoning. Think about it, Tyler: it's summer and there's always a break out of salmonella somewhere during the summer months. We could get our hands on some tainted produce and give it to Peter. Voila, no more live in boyfriend troubles!"
"How do you know he'd die? He looks pretty healthy to me."
Mavis frowned. "You have a point. Peter has a very strong constitution. I should know. He's wearing me out." Wearily, she rubbed her eyes. "I wish I'd never met him. I wish I could go back in time and somehow do things differently so that Peter Van Husen had never walked into my life."
Tyler looked at his mother with more than a little disgust. "Maybe the next time you want to find a playmate, you'll pick someone more appropriate."
"Oh, I will," Mavis promised. "Next time I'm going to find someone with at least an MBA from a good school."
Good Lord. If Tyler ever needed proof that he might have been adopted, his mother had just handed it to him. "I'll think of something."
Mavis drank some more vodka laced tomato juice. "You do that for your mommy," she instructed.
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