A Woman's Place: A Novel (9 page)

I went through the list and gave arguments against each. Finishing, I asked, "How can a judge make a decision after hearing only one side?"

"They do it all the time," Carmen said. "My job is to make sure he hears the other side." She flipped her pad back to an earlier page. "What about the allergy medication?"

I had been racking my brain about that one since Dennis had thrown it at me. "We don't go anywhere without that medication. It's a ritual that goes with having a child with a severe allergy problem --like reading package ingredients, shopping in health food stores, buying baked goods only in certain bakeries. She even wears a small medic-alert bracelet, not always willingly, but I insist. She can't eat shellfish, nuts, or celery. Nuts are the biggest problem. If they're ground up, you can't tell they're there. So we always pack the medicine kit. There's an Epi-pen for injecting epinephrine, and an oral antihistamine. I put them in a carry-on, just in case she eats something on the plane. She always brings her own food with her, but I don't take chances. When she gets sick, it happens quickly. Her throat can be swollen and closing in twenty minutes.

"I spent a whole long time telling the flight attendant what to do. I told her where the medicine was. I'm positive I packed it, Carmen. There's no way I wouldn't have. And, anyway, if I hadn't, my sister, Rona, would have found it. It was in her refrigerator. That was a week Page 43

Barbara Delinsky - A Woman's Place

and a half ago. I stayed at my mother's apartment on the return trip, but I saw Rona every day, and she didn't mention the medicine. She wouldn't have thrown it out. She knows about Kikit's allergies. She's seen Kikit have an attack. She adores Kikit. Besides, I remember packing it in Kikit's bag. I remember packing it."

"Who would have done the unpacking?"

"Dennis." But that would mean he had knowingly risked Kikit's life. I couldn't even consider it. "Maybe Kikit unpacked. Maybe she inadvertently tossed it somewhere. I keep spares, but Dennis is a where-do-you-keep-the-milk kind of guy. Then there's the whole issue of what she ate. It wasn't anything in the casserole, that's for sure. But, okay. She got sick. So why didn't he call me when she had the attack? I wasn't incommunicado. He could have reached me. Everyone else who wanted to did."

"Which brings us to Brody," Carmen said. "How often did you talk with him while you were away?"

"Every day. Just like I talked with the children-or tried to, but at the end I couldn't get through. I kept getting the machine."

"Didn't you start to worry?"

I had asked myself the same question and others, had tried to look at different angles during the hours I had spent lying awake in Joy's bed. Had I worried? "Honestly, no. Kikit and Johnny were with their father. I trusted that he would call if there was a problem. It wasn't like a week went by with no word. It was only two days. Besides, once before when I was traveling and couldn't reach them, I called Dennis's parents, and he was livid. Said I'd embarrassed him. Said I'd insulted him. Said he was perfectly capable of taking care of his own children. So I've trained myself not to worry."

"But you did talk with Brody."

"Brody is business. Besides, I don't have to work through a machine. He answers the phone himself."

"And you talked business." Her insistence might have been accusatory, if it hadn't been for the apology in her voice. "If your husband has phone records, he'll know how long you talked."

"We talked a long time," I said, because it seemed foolish to be evasive, "and it wasn't all business. My mother is getting worse by the day, and it's upsetting. Dennis hates it when I'm upset, hates it when he doesn't have answers. He thinks I deliberately ask him questions that put him on the spot, but I don't. Hell, there isn't any answer to death. There's just airing the fear and the sadness. I need to talk. Brody lets me."

"Do you love him?"

"Brody? Don't we all?"

"But you've never been sexually involved?"

"Never."

"Any close calls?"

"We've never even kissed on the lips. We touch like friends touch. Page 44

Barbara Delinsky - A Woman's Place

There's never been anything inappropriate. Dennis is jumping to conclusions. He doesn't have a shred of concrete evidence to prove an affair. The problem," my voice rose with the frustration of it, "is that I can't prove he's wrong. All I can do is say he's wrong. We've had opportunity, Brody and I. Plenty of it." I had to laugh at the irony of it. "If we had wanted to do it, we could have, and Dennis couldn't have proven that, either. Brody and I are business partners. We travel together a lot. We take separate rooms, sometimes two-bedroom suites--so easy, if we'd wanted to sleep together-but we never did and there never seemed anything wrong with those kinds of accommodations, because Brody is a family friend. Hell, he was Dennis's friend before he was mine."

"So you denied the charges, that one and all the others. What did Dennis say then?"

"He thinks he's right. He thinks the court order proves it."

"And at the time when each thing happened? How did he react, for instance, when you first realized you missed that parent-teacher conference?"

Thinking back, I remembered feeling terrible. What had Dennis said at the time? "He wasn't overly upset. I'd have remembered if he was. He was comfortable with the idea of my setting up another meeting, which I did, which he then didn't even ask about because he was away at the time--fly-fishing in Vermont, I think it was. I can check that out." He kept his calendar on the computer, easily accessible. Two could play the game.

Carmen asked, "Did he ever, then or at any other time before yesterday, accuse you of being a negligent mother?"

"No."

"Did he ever, before yesterday," she flipped back several pages,

"suggest that you were in 'a state of personal crisis'?"

"No, and I have to tell you, he didn't think up that term himself. Dennis doesn't go in for pop psychology. Business buzzwords, yes. Psychoanalysis, no. Someone else fed him that. His lawyer is Arthur Heuber. Would he have done it?"

Carmen frowned. "He could have, I guess." I pointed at the court order that lay on the near edge of Carmen's desk.

"Could he be behind this whole thing? It's such a sudden step. Such an extreme step. Dennis claims he mentioned separating three times, but he never went beyond the mentioning stage. He does that a lot--says things to upset me, tells me to sell the business or something --but he doesn't mean it, and if he did in this case, he could have pressed the issue, or suggested we see a therapist, or actually moved out. He could have told me he was seeing an attorney. Boy, did I miss that one. They put together a whole case against me without my knowing a thing." A new thought came. I pushed it away, but it slid back with dawning force. "If I wanted to be cynical, I could say he set me up." I expected her to tell me I was paranoid. Instead, she said, "You could."

"My God."

"What makes you suggest it?" she asked.

"Little things," suddenly making sense. Oh, yes, the evidence was Page 45

Barbara Delinsky - A Woman's Place

circumstantial. But if circumstantial evidence had been good enough for a judge, it was good enough for me. "Like the smell in the kitchen the morning I left for Cleveland. He made a big deal about it, then produced a rotting half-onion from the wrong cabinet, like he knew where to look. And the mix-up with my ride to Logan. I arranged for it. Someone canceled it," something else struck me then, "and he conveniently couldn't take us to the airport, knowing that Brody would, so he could hold that against us, too. And as for the mess-up with Johnny and Kikit's return from Cleveland"--I was on a roll-"Dennis says I gave him the wrong information. Maybe I gave it to him right and he got it wrong. And then there's the fact that he wasn't as bad as he usually is when I'm getting ready to leave. Usually he picks fights--about the kids, the house, whatever, and he pushes and pushes until he knows I'm upset. Only he didn't this time. Like maybe he was looking forward to my being away. Like maybe he knew what he had planned and was looking forward to that. Like maybe there was no business meeting in the Berkshires, just a weekend away with some buddy or other. Like maybe he could have come with us to see my mother after all and just didn't want to." I ran out of breath and venom at much the same time. I hated Dennis just then, not because he might have done any of what I was thinking, but because he was making me think it. I had been agreeable for fifteen years. Suddenly he was reducing me to a shrew.

All that, even before I analyzed Kikit's allergy attack. Carmen's pen scratched across the paper for several more minutes. Then it, too, stopped.

I was close to tears. "I want my kids back. This is a total, total nightmare. My life was fine. Our lives were fine. Dennis was never a full-time father. He never wanted to be one. So why is he doing this now?"

"Probably for money," Carmen said.

I gawked. "He has plenty of money."

"He does, or you do?"

"We do. Our savings are in joint accounts. He has access to it all."

"Who earns the most?"

"Me."

"By how much?"

I was about to say twice as much. Then I thought about the figures we had reported to the IRS the April before. I hadn't paid much heed to them then, rarely did when it came to comparisons. Dennis was thin-skinned. If I looked at him the wrong way at tax time, he bristled. Thinking about those figures now, though, I realized that saying I earned twice what he did was an understatement. "I earned four times what he did last year."

"Will it be the same this year?" "No. The discrepancy will be greater. He's working less."

"By choice?"

"Partly. He doesn't have to work. Wicker Wise brings in more than enough Page 46

Barbara Delinsky - A Woman's Place

for us to live well on."

"What's the other part?"

I hesitated. Dennis was my husband. Badmouthing him to a stranger seemed wrong.

Then I realized the absurdity of that, given what he was doing to me.

"He isn't very good at what he does," I stated. "He had a few breaks early in his career, but those breaks stopped coming when the economy soured. He tries, now that the market is improving, but he can't make things work the way he used to. The more desperate he gets, the worse his judgment becomes."

"And ego?"

I blew out a breath that said it all.

"So," Carmen said, "I repeat. It could be that he wants money. That's what often happens in cases like this. The father uses custody of the kids as a bargaining chip. He agrees to give his wife custody, if she agrees to lower alimony. In your case, the situation is reversed. Dennis will trade custody for higher alimony."

"He can have it," I cried, because if that was all he wanted, the solution was a snap. I wasn't greedy. Having come from nothing, I prized basics over extras. I didn't give a hoot about things like diamonds and sports cars and the four-hundred-dollar boots that Dennis loved. The joy I took in the success of Wicker Wise had less to do with money than with personal satisfaction. "He can have all the money he wants, I don't care. Call his lawyer. If this is about money and a phone call will do it, ca."

"It isn't as simple as that, Claire. Yes, I'll call Art, but if you're thinking something will happen before Monday, it won't. When the judge issued this court order, things were taken out of even Dennis's hands. The issue in court wasn't money. It was your ability to parent."

"I can parent just fine."

"That's what we have to argue. But there are procedures to follow. For us, that means filing counter affidavits answering Dennis's charges against you. We have to convince the judge to reverse both the temporary custody order and the Order to Vacate."

"But if Dennis drops his objections--"

"He won't. Not before Monday. Not after having gone to court. Art won't let him. It's a matter of his credibility as a lawyer."

"I thought it was a matter of what's best for the children."

"It is, but in time."

"Call him. Tell him Dennis can have however much he wants."

"Whoa. You need something to live on."

"I have plenty."

"What if he asks for a lump sum of ten million?" My laugh was a reedy sound. "I don't do that well." Page 47

Barbara Delinsky - A Woman's Place

"He may argue there's that and more in Wicker Wise

"Whatever is or is not in Wicker Wise isn't fluid."

"That won't matter, if you give him carte blanche. He'll suggest you borrow against the business, or against the house, or against the investments you've made for the kids' education. Okay, maybe he won't ask for a lump sum. Maybe he'll ask for a monthly check of twenty thousand."

I swallowed. "We don't live on anything near that."

"Maybe not in cash. But when you tally the value of the house, the cars, the clothes, when you figure in other living expenses, and entertainment and travel expenses necessary to keep him in the style to which he is accustomed, when you figure out what percentage of your business he's entitled to because he was the one who stood by your side and helped you to build it--"

"He didn't help me build anything," I cried. Wicker Wise was always a quiet little aside, something I did while Dennis was doing other things. He never helped me with it. He wasn't even aware of it being anything more than a hobby until the profits started to mount, and even then, I kept it in the background. I never made business demands on him, never insisted that he wine and dine or buy Christmas gifts for my people. I did those things for his business, but he never did them for mine. Wicker Wise was my baby from the start, my time, my hard work. It isn't his. He has no claim on it."

"Give him carte blanche and that's what he'll take." I was quiet then. The unfairness of it was too much. Carmen touched my hand. "I'm sorry for being so blunt, but it's important you know that this won't be simple. Few divorces are."

"Divorce." I swallowed.

"That's where this is headed unless something gives fast. You've suggested marital counseling, and he's refused."