Accidents of Marriage (6 page)

“Thanks, cupcake. Tell Emma to give you breakfast.” He ran his fingers through his hair and caught the foul stench of the bar.

•  •  •

The steaming shower beat against his headache. He dumped an extra-large glob of shampoo into his hand and lathered up his head, chest, arms, and legs in one fell swoop to save time. The scent of Maddy’s flowery shampoo rose with the heat and brought back his nausea. Ben flexed his shoulders, feeling the muscles complain.

Christ, what a day he faced. Senior counsel meant being senior class monitor at these case-crunching meetings. More like nut-crunching, these statewide clusterfucks. Every lawyer in the room wanted one of two things: to show they were smarter than Ben, or to show how smart they’d make him look if he brought them into the Boston office.

“
Dad!
” Emma screeched through the door.

Ben shut off the water. “
What?
”

“When are we leaving?”

Ben wrapped a large towel around his middle. He dripped over to the bathroom door and cracked it open. “Mom didn’t say I was driving you. Just the kids.”

“I’m not your kid?”

“You know what I mean. Watch your mouth.”

Emma’s eyes worked out her resentment before she spoke. “There’s a camp trip this morning. Mom knew. My campers can’t go on the trip without me. There won’t be enough counselors.” Emma crossed her arms.

Anger at Emma’s attitude, pride at her responsibility, and resentment at Maddy for putting him in the position of feeling mad at Emma fought for primacy. Not that it mattered—he knew when he was beat. No way he’d be allowed in this house again if he left crippled campers swinging in the wind.

“Fine,” Ben said. “Make sure everyone is ready to leave in ten minutes.”

When he got downstairs, Caleb and Gracie sat on the hall bench, clutching their lunch bags. Emma stood like the family duenna, arms crossed against her chest, as Caleb swung his feet back and forth and Gracie gripped her backpack.

“Emma wouldn’t let us move, Dad,” Caleb complained.

“Because that’s what he told me.” Emma poked Caleb’s foot with her sneaker.

“Here.” Gracie reached for the chrome Thermos cup on the table. “Your coffee.”

“Just a second. I need something.” Ben dropped his briefcase on the floor.

“What happened to ‘
not one minute more
’?” Emma imitated Ben’s clipped tone. “We have to go, Dad.”

“
One minute more,
” Caleb repeated.

“Quit it, all of you.” Ben went into the small bathroom off the hall. He rummaged through the medicine cabinet for a few minutes and then slammed it shut. “Jesus Christ. Is anything in this house in the right place?”

He ran up the stairs two at a time. After checking the bathrooms upstairs and the linen cabinet, he yelled out, “Where’s the aspirin? Does anyone know where your mother keeps it?”

“We have to go. The trip bus will leave.” Emma sounded hysterical.

“Then find the damned aspirin,” he shouted as he pounded down the stairs.

Emma found and practically threw the pills at him—what the hell were they doing in the kitchen cabinet?

The moment they were buckled in, he sped out and onto Myrtle Street, getting only one short block before having to slam on the brakes and stop short at backed-up traffic.

“Damn, damn, damn.” Ben hit the dashboard with the side of his hand. “I’m sunk if I don’t get to the meeting.”

“What will happen, Daddy?” Gracie asked. “Aren’t you the boss?”

“Yes, sweet. I’m the boss. They can’t start without me, but I can’t have them think I screwed up.”

CHAPTER 5

Maddy

Would Maddy get credit for arriving at work scarcely ten minutes late? Sure, she’d promised to be here by seven, but the hour marker had barely passed. Would Olivia appreciate the improvement from her usual half-hour-or-more tardiness?

Probably not.

The difference between Olivia, best friend at work, and Kath, best friend since college, was that Kath saw Maddy’s flaws and pasted over them, while Olivia rendered them in Technicolor, asked or not, so Maddy could work on them.

Maddy’s red briefcase and matching sandals provided the single bright spots in her hospital-issue, social-worker-grade office. She had time to read maybe five emails before she and Olivia left for group.

“Hey! Good of you to come in!” Olivia put down a pile of pink telephone messages, leaned back, and grabbed her hospital mug emblazoned with a blue caduceus. Oh, the perks of their job.

Maddy smiled as though Olivia was offering nothing but true gratitude. Screw her sarcasm. It was too early. “You’re very welcome.” She held out a small greasy bag. “Coffee cake muffin.”

Olivia took the bag and then patted the roll sitting on top of her waistband. “Come on home and join your sisters.”

Maddy unwrapped her bagel. “I hate when you do that.”

Olivia lowered her glasses a bit and looked over them at her. “Do ya now? Well, I hate that folks in this town worship the Red Sox more than they treasure black kids. Everyone hates something.”

Olivia rushed to make fun of her body before anyone else could, and she didn’t give a damn if Maddy thought her Sicilian and Jamaican genes blended into Amazonian beauty. She treated herself hard—but no worse than she treated the rest of the world. If you had masochistic tendencies, then Olivia was your girl.

“Gotcha.” Maddy bit into the cream-cheese-covered doughy bagel. “I hate men.”

“Marriage not so good this week?”

Marriage not so good this year.

“Patience gets wearying—you know what I mean?” Maddy asked.

“Nope.” Marriage had eluded Olivia. She peeled the paper cover away from her muffin. “What happened?”

“Nothing. I don’t want to get into it.”

Olivia must have been massively sick of hearing her complain about Ben, the kids, her life. God knows Maddy had tired of hearing her own voice.

“Later.” Maddy took a notebook from her briefcase. “We’ll talk about it later. I have to prepare for Sabine’s hearing.” Sabine and her against the DCF, the Department of Children and Families—those weren’t good odds.

Sabine belonged to the Wednesday Blues Club. Some members still wore their black-and-blues; some only carried the memories of being beaten. Many had their pain doubled and tripled by having their mothering put on trial by DCF. Sabine was one of those—she was trying to regain custody of her kids.

Three children similar in age to Maddy’s children—a circumstance she didn’t want to imagine.

Despite the painful situations of the women of the Wednesday Blues, Maddy and Olivia loved the group. Compared to most of their
hospital clients—the grieving parents, the end-stage cancer victims, the depleted spouses of Alzheimer’s patients—the Blues members might be battered, but they still had juice.

Olivia and Maddy rode to Dorchester in separate cars. Usually they drove in Olivia’s—she believed herself the superior driver—but Olivia would be going back to the hospital after group, and Maddy would be taking Sabine to the courthouse for the hearing.

The warm stuffy church basement where they held group smelled of long-gone parish suppers. Moira, the quietest and oldest, arrived first. Married for more than thirty years, her husband had knocked her up with a regularity that ended only at menopause. Never had hot flashes been so welcome.

Homemade oatmeal cookies sat on the pitted wood table every week; Moira’s husband thought she spent Wednesdays helping at the rectory and that she made the cookies for the priest. Grateful for the sugar, desperate for any bit of comfort in their lives that they didn’t have to pay or beg for, the women inhaled the treats.

“Hey, Mama,” Kendra greeted Moira. The young woman bounced into the room, movement and light to Moira’s stillness, with her flying braids wrapped in brightly colored clothes she’d designed and sewn, small and tight to Moira’s shapelessness.

As usual, the others seemed to come in as one. Pia, the youngest, was nineteen. Beautiful as a dream, raising three children, with an assault record from when she’d stabbed a girl who’d mouthed off at her daughter, she was shy, usually silent, and always sat next to Maddy.

Olivia cleared her throat at the five women in chairs. In a group with ten on the roster, they considered that excellent attendance. “Okay, who’s on first?”

“Me.” Amber’s stories exploded out each week. “So he’s back.”

“How do you feel about that?” Moira had picked up their jargon during her long tenure.

“How do I feel? That motherfucker thinks he can just walk in and start over like it never even happened? No effin’ way.” Amber touched her left wrist, which until last week had been in a cast. “But I gotta let him see Dion, right? A baby need his daddy.”

“Didn’t I hear you say you’d never, ever, till hell fucking freezes over, ever take him back?” Kendra asked. “Wasn’t that you yapping last week?”

Olivia held up her hand. “Hold off. Let Amber tell her story.”

Amber cut her eyes at Kendra and flipped her limp blond hair over her shoulder. “Tito was straight when he came over. And he’d bought all kinds of shit. Sneakers for Dion. A little tiny Patriots jacket and a football.”

“Dion’s only six months,” Moira said. “Does he need a football? Or sneakers?”

“Listen, Tito’s only done me up once,” said Amber.

“Who are you bullshitting?” Kendra asked.

“Whoa—” Olivia warned again.

Kendra sat up straight. “Well, it’s true. She’s lying. Tito did her a thousand times. Unless you’re only counting broken bones. Is that what you’re doing, girl?”

Now Maddy held up a traffic-cop hand. “Nobody ends up here because they want to. I know I’m repeating myself, but too bad. Obviously you aren’t all hearing it. You don’t fall in love with a man because he’s cruel; you end up in here when someone turns out to have a whole other side than you saw when you fell in love.”

Like Ben. So hotly in love with her, so determined to be her hero in the beginning. Maddy shut off the thoughts with an iron fist. It was normal. Every woman who worked with victims saw bits of herself. Look at Olivia, avoiding any relationship for fear she’d end up like her parents.

“Face it, they hide it in the beginning.” Olivia swallowed a bite of her cookie before her next word. “You fall in love because he’s your dream. When he turns into your nightmare, you don’t know what to do because it feels too late and—”

“Because he already has you hooked.”

Everyone turned toward the bitter voice. Sabine spat out words as though she paid for each one. It wasn’t unusual for her to intimidate the group, between her sinew-skinny body, hard as a ten-year-old
boy’s, arms scarred from years of drugs, and fight-scarred fists. After speaking, she ran a hand over her brown burr cut. Sabine’s mother called her an ugly fish-belly half-breed and said Sabine was just like her rapist father. Maddy wondered if Sabine glanced at every white man, looking for one with her corn-green eyes and a dirty soul she believed would match her own.

“Tito’s like heroin,” Sabine said. “How’d you get off that?”

“I was never hooked,” Amber said. “I just chipped.”

Kendra snorted. Amber looked around for the right answer.

“We’re all just swinging with the tides sometimes, looking to catch an anchor,” Maddy said. “Waiting to find the right answer, the best path. The trick is, the problem is, you really can’t just wait—”

“I just want to feel good,” Amber said.

“I know.” Maddy nodded and tipped her head toward Olivia. They’d worked together enough years to know exactly when it was time to pass the ball.

“The problem is this,” Olivia said, looking at Amber but then directing her gaze around the entire room. “We can’t be waiting for someone to hand us respect, for a man to make us feel good, as though we’re puppies waiting to have our bellies patted. Happiness comes from a whole lotta different places. A man’s love is just one piece of that huge cake. And even harder? You gotta bake that damn cake yourself.”

•  •  •

Sabine’s mercifully short custody hearing could have been worse—some hope for the future seemed possible. At least they gave lip service to the role domestic violence had played in Sabine’s case. Still, pulling away from the Dorchester courthouse, Maddy felt as though she’d already worked an entire day. She’d offered to drive Sabine home, but was grateful she said no.

She pulled up to a stoplight and waited to make a right turn. There was heavy traffic, but she didn’t care. Even worn out, she felt good—lightened. A morning without driving the kids was a gift from the gods. Leaving while Ben slept had been strange, but she assured herself
everybody would be just fine. Emma would get the kids dressed and give them breakfast. She’d already packed lunches. She’d even made fresh juice. Ben simply had to shower and get himself dressed. She should be so lucky.

A siren sounded. She looked in all the mirrors, wondering from which direction the ambulance was approaching. Flashing red lights sparked close behind her. A cop car. No surprise in this neighborhood—every corner offered drug deals.

Maddy pulled over to the curb, next to an empty lot littered with garbage. Across the street were a grate-shuttered bar, a rat hole of a liquor store, a Chinese restaurant offering only a boxed window in which one could shout orders through a small hole in a plate of clouded plastic, and a series of forbidding triple-deckers.

Three young men watched her with arms crossed, cigarettes hanging from their mouths. She hit the button to lock all the windows, waiting for the cop car to pass, a shiver passing over her as she imagined what horror awaited the arrival of the police.

The men’s eyes burned. The siren screeched. She was eager to be away from the unfamiliar streets, the wasteland of warehouses and empty lots.

She wanted to get closer to security. The safety of strangers was never a sure thing.

CHAPTER 6

Ben

Halfway to dropping Emma off in South Boston, Ben remembered the meeting papers sitting right where he’d left them. On the bed. He’d have to go back home, and just to make it as bad as possible, it was starting to rain.