Acts of Contrition (3 page)

While we wait, I pull a brush from my pocket and run it through Sally’s hair amid her cries that I’m killing her. “Brushing your own hair is always an option,” I remind her. She’s reading her myth book, a tattered hardback she’s read a million times. One time I overheard Sally telling Emily, “Mom is like a Greek tragedy, the way she fusses and worries over us, very Persephone and Demeter.”

Emily shrugged. “I think it’s cool that she loves us so much.”

Sally harrumphed. “I’m not complaining about being loved. Sometimes I just wish she would chill out.”

When the bus comes, I pull Emily over near Sally and kiss each of them, covering their faces. I touch my palm to their
cheeks, place my mouth on the crowns of their heads, and kiss them again.

“Enough, Mom,” Sally says.

I step back, not wanting to be so Greek tragic. “Safety first,” I say.

“Never last,” they chime.

“Love you, girls.”

“Love you, too,” they sing.

“Stick together,” I say.

“We will.”

“Make good choices!” I holler after them, but they’ve had their fill of my bus-stop affirmations. I’m the affirmation queen. I dose them out each morning with their vitamins, scratch them on notes in their lunch boxes, pack them in the kisses I cover them with each night. My promises manifest in words, notes, and flesh.
If no one else, you always have me.
I open my mouth and then stop. It’s time to let them go, to trust that they won’t be swallowed into a chasm in the earth.

The boys and I wave furiously at them as the bus pulls away. Like that, 50 percent of my kids are on their way to school. I kick the lock off the stroller, holler, “See ya, ladies!” to my friends, and head home at breakneck speed. I’m in the final stretch.

CHAPTER TWO

Transgressions

TOM

I’M NOT EVEN INSIDE THE
beltway and I’m already stuck in traffic. It’ll free up after I get beyond the merge. DC traffic is the worst. Maybe not LA bad, but bad enough. A twenty-mile drive could easily take an hour. Longer, on any given day.

I was thinking of taping it,
plays over and over in my head—not just Mary’s words, but the tone of her voice and the dopey look on her face, like
I
was being paranoid. Like she would be completely okay if the tables were turned, if my ex-girlfriend were on every television.

Sometimes I think about my ex, Cassandra. She’s a nice daydream when I need a break from the Mary-and-Landon nonsense ricocheting in my mind. Cassandra was a knockout by all standards: a dancer with stick-straight posture, a tight little ass, and perky breasts. She and I met at an office party. She came with another guy but left with me. I don’t deny I felt like a
million bucks that night, her arms wrapped around my waist. We went back to my place, and I learned that everything guys said about going to bed with dancers wasn’t just wishful thinking. She was still there in the morning, her willowy limbs crisscrossed over mine.

We went on to date for almost three years and I have to admit she wasn’t a bad girlfriend. She used to say she was the “nesting” type. She’d cook me dinner, we’d watch movies, she even knitted me a chunky Irish sweater for Christmas one year. She was loyal, too, leaving me notes written on scraps of paper. Lots of
x
’s and
o
’s and a smack of her red lips. As hot as she was, she sometimes worried I would leave.

She might have been needy, but she didn’t care for anyone else who was. She never volunteered to do a damn thing; in fact, she’d make up excuses to get out of anything that didn’t benefit her directly. I’d catch her in little white lies. One day I overheard her telling our neighbor she
wished
she could help him out with jumper cables, but she didn’t have any. She had them, all right. I had packed them in her car just the month before, after her battery died. When I asked her about it, she said it seemed like a hassle and she was on her way out the door for a pedicure.

One night we were in DC, on Pennsylvania Avenue, walking back from dinner out. We passed a homeless guy sprawled across a grate, warming himself against the winter cold. “God, that sucks,” I said to Cassandra after we walked by. “It sucks that he has to be there.” I was speaking philosophically, politically, from a humanity standpoint. Without knowing this man who was on the ropes, I wanted more for him, wanted his existence to be something other than seeking refuge on a warm grate.

“No kidding,” Cassandra said, wrinkling her tiny nose. “Go to a shelter and take a shower.”

It bothered the hell out of me that she wasn’t compassionate. I’m far from a bleeding heart and am the first to say that a man needs to fend for himself in this world and not ask for handouts, but at least I could sympathize. I guess I could thank my brother and father for that, each of whom could have easily ended up sprawled across a grate, homeless, following one too many rendezvous with whiskey.

Mary and Cassandra couldn’t be more different. One time Cassandra and I were watching television and our show finished and a paid program for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital came on. A toddler named Cailey was being profiled, a cutie with giant blue eyes, a can-do attitude, and a perfectly shiny scalp. Cassandra grabbed the remote, said something like, “Add that to my list of eighty reasons why I don’t want kids,” and turned the channel. I remember watching her walk away: her giraffe legs and sashaying hips, her blond hair fanning down her back. That was when I realized it would never work with her. I wanted a family. I wanted to be a dad. And I wanted a woman who cared whether Cailey lived to see her next birthday.

Then came Mary. The first time I met her was at a softball game. I was filling in for a guy on her law firm’s team. My buddy Joe was an associate at the same firm and had called and asked me to come. Mare says we met on the field, which is true, but I actually saw her about a half hour before the game started. She was walking down Connecticut Avenue. I was walking behind her, though at the time I didn’t have a clue we were going to the same game. I remember watching her, thinking she was cute. Short as hell, like five foot four, if she was lucky. A curtain of shiny brown hair, swinging side to side. And she was wearing athletic shorts and an oversize T-shirt. She looked like she was barely twenty years old, but God, she was cute. I remember
thinking how Cassandra wouldn’t be caught dead in a T-shirt and how her athletic clothes were always clingy spandex that framed her perfect curves.

There was an old lady who was struggling to hold her grocery bags. Why she thought she could carry so many bags was beyond me, but she had them lined all the way up her spindly arms. Mary went right up to her and asked if she could carry her bags. I trailed behind as she walked two blocks down D Street and into the lady’s building. I waited for about five minutes to see if she came out. Finally she did, holding a stack of cookies the old lady must have given her. Mary proceeded to chomp her way through the entire stack as she walked briskly in the same direction as me.
A girl who eats,
I thought, as if it were the most interesting observation. I was so used to Cassandra and her cardboard protein bars and six-packs of cottage cheese—Cassandra who would cook for me but never eat anything herself. Hell, Cassandra wouldn’t even eat fruit. Too many carbs. All I could think was that I wanted to take this short girl eating cookies out to dinner. Carmine’s, maybe, to share a gigantic bowl of pasta and a basket of bread.

When she and I walked to the same softball field, my heart flipped. The older guys greeted her like she was their daughter and the women welcomed her with hugs. She was loved. People wanted to be around her.
I want to marry that girl,
I thought at that moment. I found my buddy Joe, and asked him about her. He said she was great. He thought maybe she was just newly single.

What I saw that day in Mary is truly who she is: open, loving, giving, accessible. She made our house a home. She taught us to be a family who loves deeply, who puts each other first. She loves our kids with excess and abundance, like Santa’s bag, with
all of the gifts magically multiplying. Scrapbooks, photo albums, artwork covering our shelves, paintings plastered on the refrigerator, a hallway covered in school pictures. She’s the mom who serves herself last because she wants each of us to have the best of everything.
Take mine,
she says, sliding her helping of dinner onto Sally’s plate, leaving herself with bread heels and overcooked ends of the roast.
I like it this way,
she says, and the thing is, she does like it that way: her family having the best.

Mary and I were only together for a month when that same St. Jude commercial came on. Mary was dressed in a suit for work. She was a new associate at the time and putting in a sixty-hour workweek was typical. She was running late, her arms clutching a stack of files, trying to find two matching shoes—following a screwup a few days earlier when she went through her day wearing one blue pump and one black one—when she saw the commercial. She sat down, rested the files on her lap, and leaned forward. She sat there for maybe a half an hour and blubbered as she watched the sick kids fighting for their lives. Afterward her face looked like it had been stung, so swollen and red. I helped her gather her mountain of Kleenex, and when she hugged me tight she just kept saying, “We’ve got to help. We’ve got to help.” That was eleven years ago and we’re still making monthly contributions to St. Jude. Mare says our children are healthy and we’ll support St. Jude for the rest of our lives just to thank God for our blessings.

So why am I daydreaming about careless Cassandra instead of Mary? Why does Mary, the sweetest, most compassionate person I know, sometimes leave me unsettled, as though I’ve witnessed a crime I’d never be able to report? Because Mare dated that dickhead for six years before she and I met, and at times it’s like the bastard never left. Mary doesn’t lie. Ever. But she lied
about Landon. He called and she didn’t tell me. I found out later. Mary and I are as close as a married couple can be, but whenever Landon James is involved, somehow I end up feeling like someone has moved the goalposts. I dated Cassandra, a real knockout, and she never once made me feel as insecure as Mary has.

CHAPTER THREE

Moral Inventory

“OKAY, BOYS, LET’S DO THIS!”
I clap my hands together and set the twins up at the counter. I never meant to raise my kids according to gender stereotypes, but it just happened. I find myself all of the time calling the boys “sports fan” and “buddy” and “champ.” We are always hitting the ball out of the park or scoring goals or touchdowns.

I place bowls of apple oatmeal in front of them with small glasses of milk. I lean over the counter to get their attention.

“Boys, do you know what today is?” I ask. My voice is as enthusiastic as an infomercial.

They look at me blandly.

“It’s the first day of preschool!” I gasp, my hands flying in the air. “Can you believe it? You’re going to school! Just like Sally and Emily! You’re big! Are you excited?”

“I don’t want to go to school,” Dom says.

“I want to stay with you,” Danny says.

“That’s great, guys!” I say, finding the Vince Lombardi in me. “But you’re going to school, and you’re going to love it! It’s going
to be the best! Come on, now. Eat up your oatmeal so we can go check it out.”

Each swirls his spoon through the gruel. Danny, my child who barely eats, looks at me with worried eyes.

“Four bites,” I say. “Because you’re four years old, right?” I hold up their lunch boxes. “Look! You’re all packed. Dom, remember, you picked out Spider-Man, and Danny, you picked out the one with all the dinosaurs! Look, T. rex! I even packed you two Oreos!” I slap my hand over my mouth like it is truly scandalous to give them two whole Oreos apiece.

The boys shrug and begin to discuss dinosaurs.

“T. rexes are the best,” Danny says, anchoring his elbows along his sides, waving his menacing little T. rex arms.

“Yeah, but brachiosaurs have really long necks,” Dom says, sticking out his neck so far his mouth stretches and he looks like a skeleton.

It still amuses me to hear my four-year-olds say pterodactyl and triceratops. I’m a girl who has been surrounded by girls her entire life: first sisters, then daughters. The boy stuff still has a way of shocking me. Dinosaurs, trucks and tractors, peeing contests.

By eight fifteen the boys have eaten a respectable amount of oatmeal and drunk their milk in exchange for mini-marshmallows, and we are upstairs preparing to get dressed.

“Let’s go potty!” I yell, and start in the direction of the bathroom. Instinctively, the boys start to waddle, splaying their feet, their hands out to the side, quacking. When we began potty training, I had pretended I was the mommy duck and they fell in line behind me. Once something sticks with kids, there’s no getting rid of it.

My oldest sister, Martina, once told me, “Don’t think that what you’re doing with them now won’t be the same exact thing
you’re doing with them ten years from now.” She was talking about bad habits, like letting the kids sleep in our bed or leave the table without cleaning their plates. But I know the stickiness rule applies to other things, too, like the way Tom and I profess our love to our children each day with a ferocity that leaves no question as to how we feel about our treasured gifts. If something sticks, I hope it’s that, a film that covers each of them like a security blanket, an assurance that leaves them with a resounding echo in their ears, “I’m loved.”

Danny goes right away, quacking all the while.

“Good job, baby duck!” I cheer. “Mommy duck is so proud!”

Dom’s hovering in the doorway.

“Come on, Dom. Your turn. Quack.”

“I don’t have to go,” he says, holding his hands across his pants, as clear as a
NO TRESPASSING
sign.

Dom is
just
barely potty trained, and the preschool had made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that the children must be! No Pull-Ups. If they kick him out of preschool on his first day, I will seriously need to check myself into a mental hospital.