A Woman's Place: A Novel (23 page)

"Call Morgan," I told Carmen. "See what he can find." I would do most anything in a heartbeat, when it came to the children. That was a prophetic thought, if ever there was one. I had barely bathed and settled into bed that night, worn down by alternating calls to Rona and Connie, who were bickering with each other, when the phone rang. It was Dennis saying that Johnny was sick, that he didn't want to disturb Elizabeth so late but that he didn't know what to do. I knew what to do. I slipped into a sweatsuit and drove right over. ten. My key still worked. I let myself in, dropped my coat on the stairs over scattered tiers of school books, sneakers, and laundry, and ran right up. Dennis was coming out of Johnny's room when I reached it.

"He threw up after dinner. Can't seem to keep anything down." I could smell that the minute I entered the room. Johnny was huddled under a blanket on the bare mattress. Mattress pad, sheets, and comforter were wadded up on the floor.

"Hi, sweetie," I said. My throat knotted as I sat down on the bed by his side. He had been my firstborn, as easy a baby as could be, my one and only for two years. Ours had been a mutual admiration society, a Page 120

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symbiotic craving. Time and circumstance had muted the craving--Dennis's wants, Kikit's arrival, Johnny's own need for independence and growth--but it flooded back now.

Praying that he wouldn't turn away from me as he had done the last time I was at the house, I stroked his face. His cheeks were flushed, fever-hot. "Not feeling so good?" He shook his head and scrunched up tighter. "I couldn't get to the bathroom in time."

"It's okay, it's okay, sweetie." I fished one of his hands from under the blanket. He was wearing undershorts and nothing more. I assumed his pajamas were in the pile on the floor. "Does anything hurt?"

"I didn't know I was gonna do it," he cried, "just woke up and felt awful and then it just came up. I tried to hold it in." His hair was damp. I stroked it back. "Shhh, I'm not angry."

"But you had to come all the way over here." There was nothing of the would-be man in his voice. He was little-boy sick, little-boy frightened.

I was sick and frightened just then, too, thinking that my nine-year-old son imagined I begrudged taking care of him, because I knew what it was to feel like a burden. Year after year during my childhood, my mother had come home from work wanting solitude and silence. I remembered having things to ask her but not daring, having things to show her but not daring, the fear of rejection was so great. I had sworn my children would never experience that, had gone out of my way to let them know they came first. And they did. Still. Always.

I held Johnny's hand tighter, pressed his mouth closed with my thumb. "I didn't have to come over here. I wanted to. Didn't have to, Johnny, wanted to. I came the minute Daddy called." I moved my thumb to let him speak. "Tell me what hurts."

"Everything."

"Nothing special, just aches all over?"

"Mm."

"Flu going around school?"

"Mm."

"Still nauseated?" "Mm."

Dennis stood at the door. His hair was mussed and his shirt untucked in a way that might have suggested concern for his child, had it not been for the hands on his hips and the peeved look on his face. I wasn't sure what annoyed him more, Johnny's flu or my being there, but I wasn't brooding on it. It was the least of my worries just then.

"Did you give him anything--aspirin, water?" I asked.

"No. I got out the aspirin, but he wouldn't take it."

"Is there anything left in his stomach?"

"There can't be. Not with all that came up."

"I didn't mean to," Johnny protested.

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I rubbed the back of his neck. "Daddy knows that. He's not angry, just upset that you're sick. Maybe even scared. He's new at this. We have to be patient with him. Know what I think would be good? A nice bath. While you're in it, I can put on fresh sheets. How does that sound?"

"Okay."

While Dennis ran the bath, I sat with Johnny, wiping his face with a damp cloth, humming a soothing song. When the tub was ready I helped him into the bathroom, then left Dennis with him so that I could see to the rest.

First, though, because I couldn't wait a second longer, I looked in on Kikit. The sight of her sleeping with her babies, the crowd of them profiled by the pale glow of her Pocahontas night light brought a swift tightening to my chest. The picture was definitely a pearl in my life's strand, taken for granted for so long, but no more. It was all I could do not to go in and touch her, but I didn't want to wake her, lest she be upset.

Lest I be upset. More than I already was. Because it was odd, moving around the house, so like I had never been gone that I could almost forget the circumstances. Things were just the same, organized the way I had left them, fresh sheets piled neatly in the linen closet and laundry detergent at the ready beside the washer in the basement. Granted, the washer held clothes I hadn't washed, the dryer held others waiting to be folded, and the detergent bottle was covered with blue drips. Granted, coming back through the kitchen, I found the refrigerator filled with food I hadn't bought, mostly cartons of orange juice and milk, loaves of bread, wedges of cheese, more of each than I expected the children would eat or drink in a month. Still, the bulletin board held the very notes I had left there, the wide cranberry candles still stood on the table on either side of the apple bowl, and the answering machine was blinking red to indicate a message waiting to be heard.

Dennis never erased his messages, just left them for me to erase. I pressed the play button.

"Hi," came a clipped female voice. "Selwey gave them a hearing on a Motion to Recuse. It's for show. He'll never grant it. But we have to be there for the hearing, Thursday at ten. Be at my office early, and we'll get breakfast. For the settlement meeting that afternoon, I revised our demands. There's no reason we can't shoot for more, since we're in the driver's seat. I'll give my list to Art. He'll do the talking. Anything else? No. Ciao."

I stabbed at the erase button, then further vented my fury by chipping ice into small pieces in a bowl. Returning to the bedroom, I closed the window I'd opened. By the time I had the bed freshly made, Johnny was walking bleary-eyed from the bathroom wearing the clean pajamas I had passed in to Dennis.

I helped him into bed and gave him the ice chips to suck. He was still ghostly pale, but cooler. I rubbed his back and sang softly. He loved

"Let It Be," so I started with it and moved on to others that I knew he liked. He started to doze, caught himself, started to doze again, caught himself again.

He was so obviously fighting it, that I coaxed, "You can sleep."

"What if I get sick again?"

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"Do you feel like you will?"

"No, but what if I do?"

"There's a pail right here." I pointed to it. "And me. I'll help."

"Are you staying?" he asked so directly that it hit me, with a gnawing twist inside, that that was why he was fighting sleep. He didn't want to sleep and find me gone when he awoke.

"I'll stay for a while. I like watching you." He seemed pleased enough by that to let himself go. Only when he was sleeping deeply did I slip away.

I was in the laundry room, shifting sheets from washer to dryer, when Dennis came to the door arid said, "That was messy." My first impulse, sheer habit, was to offer sympathy --poor Dennis, swamped in vomit during his watch, I'm so sorry--but it was followed by a swift anger. "It wasn't deliberate."

"I know. But I couldn't ask my mother to come. She's seventy-five." My hands went still for the space of several stunned breaths, before tugging another sheet from the washer. "You could have done it yourself. It doesn't take an advanced degree to clean up after a sick child." I stuffed the sheet into the dryer.

"Well, this worked out fine."

I didn't say anything to that, couldn't think of a comeback that wouldn't be snide. Sad, but not so long ago, snideness wouldn't have arisen. I would have given Dennis the easier chore without a second thought, would have done the harder simply because it was there to be done and I knew how. I was a mother. Dirty work was part of the job. The job belonged to Dennis now. So why was I doing the laundry?

I consciously set down the box of fabric softener sheets. "What would you have done if I hadn't been home?"

"Called Brody's house," he said.

I didn't dignify the remark with a denial. "And if I wasn't there?"

"I'd have done this myself. I'm not helpless. You may find it hard to believe, but we're doing okay without you."

I slid a pointed look at the laundry that I had personally folded and piled high.

Dennis said, "No one asked you to do that. No one asked you to do any of this. You made such a big deal when I didn't call you about Kikit's attack that I figured I'd be a good guy and call you about Johnny." My jaw dropped. "You figured you'd be a good guy? Come off it, Dennis. You didn't know what to do! You panicked."

"You'd have a hard time proving that. What's more, if you try, people will think you resented being bothered tonight, which wouldn't reflect well on you as a mother. You can't win."

"I'll win," I said, but I felt suddenly worn. Leaning back against the Page 123

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washer, I braced my fingers on the edge and studied Dennis. He was the same man I married--same looks, same quick tongue, same ego--but different. A stranger. I had thought it before. Now I wondered when it had happened. For the life of me, I didn't know. "Where did we lose it, Dennis?"

"Lose what?" "Whatever it was we had. Whatever it was that made our marriage work."

"Our marriage never really worked."

"It did. At the beginning, at least."

"It was a novelty. We were young."

"We were twenty-five and twenty-eight," I argued. "That's not terribly young, and we dated exclusively for three years before to make sure. You were happy. Unless you put on such a good show that I never suspected," which, come to think of it, he would have been capable of doing. "But if you weren't happy back then, why did you want to get married? Were those romantic gestures just big fat lies?"

"No."

"So what did you see in me then that you don't see now?" I was still slim and attractive. Judging from Brody's response, I was sexually appealing.

"Humility," Dennis said. "You were approachable back then."

"I'm approachable now."

"You're up on a high horse now. You weren't back then." Arrogant? I wasn't arrogant. "I have more confidence now, but that's different from arrogance. What else did you see in me then?"

"You were there for me. You were willing to do what had to be done. Things changed when the kids were born and later on when you started the business. You were there for other people more than you were there for me. Your loyalties changed."

"They didn't change. They broadened. I just had more people to be loyal to."

"They changed."

"You're the one whose loyalties changed," I argued. I was tired, so tired of being unjustly accused. "You turned on me, Dennis. You went to a lawyer, then a judge, with stories that weren't true. Good God, the story I could have told about you. If character is the issue, messing around with your boss's wife says something, don't you think? But I do value loyalty. I have never told anyone about that."

"Brody knows."

"Because you told him. For what it's worth, he's been as close-mouthed as I have."

"Two peas in a pod," Dennis said with just enough flippancy to set me off.

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"Damn right, two peas in a pod. We never even discussed it. If he thought there was more to the story than you let on, he never said a thing. Maybe he didn't want to know. Maybe I didn't want to know. So who's loyal? Think about it, Dennis." Disgusted, I slammed the dryer door and stabbed at the start button.

"Have you told your lawyer?"

"About Adrienne? No." I headed out. "I chose to think you'd changed, in which case it was irrelevant." I stopped. "Unless there is more to the story. Is there?"

"I can't believe you're asking that, after all we've been through together."

Incredulous, I stared at him. With a bark of exasperation, I started up the basement stairs, then, in a moment's boldness, turned back and said,

"Is it Phoebe?"

He stared up at me from the laundry room door. "Is what Phoebe?"

"What went wrong with us."

"What are you talking about?"

"She's young and attractive."

"Beautiful. She's beautiful."

Talk about arrogant. There was more than a touch of it in his tone. It dug into me just where he wanted it to. So I was hurting already. What was a little more? "Are you in love with her?"

"She's my lawyer."

"Anyone walking into this house would know that. Do me a favor? Erase messages once you've listened. And tell her to watch what she says. The kids listen to those messages."

"Her messages are harmless."

"They're telling. It sounds like she's running the show. Does she tell you what to do and how to do it?"

"For Christ's sake, give me credit for something. I don't have to be told what to do. I've been running my own business for years." I could have pointed out the sad state of that business. But I had suddenly had enough of the argument, had enough of vituperative spit. So I turned and went on up the stairs.

"What about the rest of this stuff?" he called.

"Since you're so capable of doing things yourself," I called back, "I'll let you do it."

"Where are you going?"

"To check on my son."

"He's fine now. You can leave."

I wasn't leaving until I knew for sure that Johnny was all right. Let Page 125

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Dennis call the cops. Let Jack Mulroy smell the lingering sickness in Johnny's room and make me go. Let Phoebe Lowe or Art Heuber or whoever the hell was his real lawyer explain to the judge why Dennis had asked me to come in the first place.