Getting Some Of Her Own (27 page)

She changed into street clothes, packed her personal things. “I want to be gone when Enid gets home. I don't have time for a personal visit.”

Fred's chuckles amused her. “I gather that dame ain't to your taste. I'm ready to go.”

She arrived home after nine, exhausted but happy with what she'd done with Enid's house. She had no doubt that the woman would be pleased, and especially because she finished a thousand dollars under budget. The red light flashed on her downstairs phone, and she saw Cassie's number in the caller ID window.

“I'm sorry, old girl, but I'm starved, so you'll have to wait till I heat a can of soup and make myself a sandwich.”

She prepared the meal and sat down to eat, but the doorbell rang before she could bite the ham sandwich. She went to the window, saw Cassie standing at the door and rushed to open it.

“Hi, Cassie. Come on in.” She saw the woman's mottled and tear-stained face and her eyes red from weeping and pulled Cassie into her arms. “What is it? What's the matter?”

Through the sobbing and tears, she couldn't understand anything that Cassie said. Finally, she took her by the hand, led her to the kitchen and gave her a glass of water.

“Now. Slowly. What happened?”

“K . . . Kix. He's left me. He packed up and left while I was on a trip for the office. My first trip since I was promoted to dean of our school.”

“Wait a minute, Cassie. I didn't know you got the promotion. When was this?”

“About three weeks ago. I meant to tell you, but I never saw you.”

“I don't care about that,” Susan said. “Didn't you promise Kix that you'd start a family as soon as your boss decided who would be dean of that institute?” Cassie nodded.

“Sit down, Cassie. You don't have the right to be unhappy. I'm in love with a man, and I can't give him a family, so I try not to let him get too close. If he falls in love with me, he risks giving up his birthright, and I won't be responsible for that. You willingly deny Kix that right, and yet you claim that you love him. I don't feel for you, Cassie. Give him a divorce, and let him marry a woman who loves him enough to give him a family.”

“I know I sound awful, but I can't do that. I love him.”

“You can't prove it by me, or by Kix either, I suspect. Do you have a health problem?” Cassie shook her head. “Well, if you want that man, girl, you have to change your act, because he means business. And if you don't keep your word this time, he's gone for good.”

“I know. He left me a note that he intends to file for a divorce, but I'm not giving him one, you hear?”

“If he states his grievance to a judge, you won't have a choice.”

Lucas's insistence in knowing why she invited him to her apartment and seduced him into making love with her came to mind, and she thought... “Cassie, are you scared to have a baby? Scared of being pregnant and having those pains?”

“It's something like that, but not exactly.”

“Why can't you share your fears with Kix? He'll help you deal with them.”

“I . . . uh . . . I don't want him to know that . . . I mean, to see me ugly and sick. Oh, Susan, he's so handsome . . . and he can have the most beautiful woman—”

Susan's hands went to her hips. “I can't believe you said that. Girl, get off your behind and straighten things out with your husband. That man loves you. Go home and call him. Do you know where he is?”

“He said he's staying in his office at the restaurant.” She hugged Susan. “You think I'm a bad person?”

“No, but I think you're not very wise. Give Kix a chance to show you what you mean to him. Nothing is certain in this life but death and taxes, so you have to have faith.”

“Maybe you're right,” Cassie said in a softer than normal voice, mostly to herself. “If it doesn't work out, at least I'll have a child.”

“Atta girl. Now get busy. I'm starved, and my soup's getting cold.”

 

 

Cassie jogged home deep in thought
. Had she been so wrong all this time? Would Kix really love her more if she had a child? She hardly remembered her father, and she grew up thinking that men wanted children because kids gave them bragging rights. Well, anything was better than that empty house that had creaked and rattled ever since Kix moved out.

She walked into her house, locked the door and dialed Kix's cell phone number. “Kix, this is Cassie. I want you to come home. Please. I can't stand it here without you.”

He was silent long enough to unnerve her. “All right, Cassie. I'll be there in an hour, but not to stay. I'm through begging you for a family. I'm going there in order to hear what you have to say. Don't bother to try getting me into bed, because sex is the last thing you'll get out of me.” He hung up.

He could get home in half an hour if he wanted to, so he was letting her know that he was in no hurry to see her. She had intended to look as elegant and sexy as possible, but his words brought her up short. He didn't want veneer or polish, but the real thing, warts and all, and wasn't that the problem anyway? He'd never seen the real Cassie, except maybe when he had her strung out in bed. She was always perfect from her toes to her hair; perfection was her crutch and her assurance that she was superior. “My Lord, have I always been so shallow? It's been years since Kix told me I looked nice,” she said aloud, “and I hadn't even noticed.” She walked from the kitchen to the living room and back, then retraced her steps. What would she do if he didn't want to hear all that she had to say?

She heard his key in the front door lock and tremors raced through her as she stood rooted in the spot. Kix walked into the house, went straight to the living room and sat in a chair that had never been his favorite. At a loss as to what to do or say, she looked around, feeling helpless.

“I'm in here,” he said, as if she knew the exact location of “here.” She walked into the living room and stood before him, much as the accused stand before a judge, awaiting sentencing. That she had wronged him was paramount in her thoughts, for she couldn't deny that she had not lived up to her promises, promises that she made before their marriage and many times thereafter.

“I'm waiting for what you have to say.” He didn't sweeten his harsh manner with a smile or a gentle voice, and she had a feeling that she was about to drown.

“I'm . . . I'm scared, Kix.”

He spread his arms out on the back of the big chair and narrowed his eyes, but said nothing.

“I'm . . . I can't . . . I don't know where to start.”

“Start with why you've been content to welsh on your bargain.” She twisted her hands over and over, and she hated seeing anyone do that. “Sit down, Cassie, and calm yourself, because this is your last chance to tell me anything.”

“If I'm . . .” She dropped on the sofa and buried her face in her hands. “If I was big, fat, out of shape, my feet and legs swollen and nauseous all the time, would . . . would you be able to stand being around me?”

“What? What in God's name are you talking about? Have you gone out of your mind?”

She wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “I'll be ugly, because maybe I won't feel like fixing up. I always try to look nice so you'll love me and be proud of me.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“Kix, please don't joke. This is hard enough for me. I walk down the street with you and almost every female we pass, even teenagers, ogle you. I know you can have any woman you want, so why should you be satisfied with a miserable-looking—”

He interrupted her. “I can't believe you're serious. You want me to believe you have an inferiority complex, when you look down your nose at half the people you know?”

“I don't. There's so much about me that you don't know and wouldn't believe.” The tears met beneath her chin, and she stopped wiping them. “All those years when I pretended to have orgasms, although I really didn't because I wouldn't let you teach me. I was scared you'd think I was inadequate, that I wasn't much of a woman, but I pretended just the opposite. I told myself all kinds of lies about why I couldn't afford to get pregnant. I want a family, Kix, but I'm scared you'll . . . that if I'm huge and ugly and unfeminine-looking you won't feel the same way about me, and . . . and maybe you'll get interested in somebody who—?”

“Don't say it. If all these years, I didn't know you, you don't know me, either.”

She didn't know when he left his chair, for her hands covered her face, and the feel of his arms around her had to be a hallucination. She trembled from the loneliness she felt.

His words startled her. “You will always be beautiful to me, Cassie. In spite of all your foolishness, I love you. If you're telling me that you need my assurance that I'll love you no matter what, you have it. I've loved you, sweetheart, from the day I met you. You've made it difficult at times, but I've never wavered. I . . . Woman, I'd worship you on my knees if you were big with my child. “

He moved away from her. “Are you willing to make love with me without a condom?” he asked, his voice unsteady and his eyes squeezed tight.

“Yes.”

He opened his eyes and looked hard at her, as if to confirm with his eyes what his ears heard. “Are you taking the pill?”

“I've never taken it.”

He gazed at her until her breathing accelerated, but she could do nothing but wait for his response. “Tell you what,” he said. “Let's run upstairs, pack a few things, and go to Winston-Salem and spend the night in a luxury hotel.”

“But you said—”

“I don't give a damn what I said. Go ahead and get your things. I'll make a reservation. We're going to do this thing right.”

Susan looked at the caller ID on her ringing telephone and couldn't decide whether or not to answer it. She wanted to know what Enid Jackson thought of her work, but she dreaded an encounter with the woman, whether by phone or in person. Loose-tongued people were to be avoided, and Enid's tongue was looser than most.

She lifted the receiver. “Hello. This is Susan.”

“I'm ecstatic. I never dreamed my house could look like this. It's just fabulous, and cheaper than you said it would be. I'm going to give a reception and invite about twenty-five or thirty people. You have to come, so I can show everybody my decorator. Girl, this place makes me look rich. I'm hiring a landscaper tomorrow; I want the outside to look as elegant as the inside. I'm putting your check in the mail today. Jessica Burton thinks she's such hot stuff, but her place doesn't look any better than mine. I'll send you an invitation to the reception.”

Susan thanked her, marveling that she hadn't had to say a word. Enid was happy listening to her own voice. She hung up and gave herself a gentle pinch. Life was good.

With the tutoring session at an end, Susan welcomed the chance to spend a few minutes with Rudy and Nathan when she went to Ann Price's home to collect Ann's laundry and get her shopping list. Maybe an iron deficiency accounted for Ann's lethargy, but the woman seemed also to have lost weight. From what Susan could discern, the three older grandchildren did little to relieve Ann of the housekeeping chores.

“Your grandmother is not well,” she said to Yolanie, Ann's fourteen-year-old granddaughter. “You should at least keep the kitchen clean for her. A lot of grandmothers would have let the city put you children in a foster home, and you'd have had a much different life. Ask Rudy what a foster home is like. Come on. Let's clean this kitchen.”

To her surprise, the girl worked along with her and didn't seem to mind. “If you clean after every meal and if you don't allow the other children to make a mess, you can keep this straight, and your grandmother won't have to do it. If she has to go back to the hospital, you may have to go into foster care, so help her all you can.”

Yolanie looked at Susan. “Okay, but you tell them they have to obey me. Rudy will want to go live with you, and Nathan wants to be with Rudy. He stayed to himself until Rudy came. His mother was my aunt.”

Susan's antenna shot up. “Did you say was?”

“Yes, ma'am. She was living in Philadelphia with some guy who was selling hash, and she got killed in a drug bust. He's doing time.”

“Is he Nathan's father?”

“No, ma'am. Nathan's father was killed in Iraq. He was a marine. He sent Grandma money every month.” Susan detected pride in Yolanie's voice when she spoke of Nathan's father, as if he, and not Nathan's mother, had been her relative.

“I'll speak to the children and ask them to help you relieve your grandmother while she's not feeling well.”

Susan put the laundry in the trunk of the BMW, went back inside to Ann's room. “Did you make out your grocery list?”

“I made it out, but I don't feel right. Last week, you didn't take the money, and if you won't let me pay, I can't let you shop for me. How's it coming with the adoption papers?”

“I've been waiting three weeks for that case worker to tell me whether my volunteer work for the school board can be considered as a job. Since I'm self-employed, I need a job reference.”

“Those people are geniuses at creating obstacles. I'll keep on praying for you.”

“Thanks, Ann. I'm praying, too.”

Already an hour behind her daily schedule, she went to her shop where she found a message to call Willis. Her heart stuck in her throat as she dialed the number.

“Hello, Mr. Carter. This is Susan. What's up?”

“Call me Willis. This is a ten-story building, and I just wanted to remind you that on each higher floor, an apartment may have a few inches less space in certain important places. Which floor are you using for a sample?”

She blew out a long breath and let herself relax. Willis Carter hadn't previously called her, and her first thought was that something had happened to Lucas. “I measured on the second floor, but I haven't ordered furniture, although I've selected it.”

“If you can come over, I'll show you where you may have a problem. It won't complicate things too much, but you need to anticipate it.”

“Thank you, Willis. I want this to be my best job ever, and I appreciate your help.”

“I want the same. The three of us ought to make a great team.”

She hung up, closed the shop and headed for Hamilton Village. “Yes, we would make a wonderful team, but it would never happen. Lucas thinks I'm something that I'm not, and if he casts his lot with me, he'll come to hate me.”

As she drove along Parkway Street, past Lucas's house and alongside Pine Tree Park, she recalled the evening she sat on a bench with Lucas eating ice cream under a star-filled sky. Why couldn't life be like that? If she was lucky, Lucas would be in Danville, and she wouldn't have to deal with his presence or with the fact that when she was last with him, she told him over and over in a moment of ecstasy that she loved him. They had talked since, but he hadn't mentioned it, and she had tried to forget it. But it was her moment of truth, and he had to know it.

 

 

Lucas was about to have a moment of truth of his own. He left his Monday morning staff meeting and stopped by his father's house for a short visit with him as had become his weekly custom.

“Good morning, Marcie,” he said to Calvin's wife when she opened the door. “Where's Dad this morning?”

“Calvin's in the den,” she said, as if she denied his right to call Calvin Jackson Dad.

He walked into the den and, for the first time, his father greeted him with a hug. Startled, he didn't return the gesture, and when his father stepped back and looked him in the eye with an expression of sorrow, he opened his arms to the man against whom he'd held a gripe for so many years and enveloped him in an embrace. He parted his lips to tell his father that they should bury the hatchet for all time, but when he saw the tears that rolled unchecked down Calvin Jackson's cheeks, the words wouldn't leave his tongue. He simply held his father in an embrace.

“Is it . . . all right between you and me now?” Calvin asked him.

Lucas fought to rid himself of the lump in his throat. Finally, he was able to say, “I've buried the hatchet, Dad, and I don't waste time thinking about what used to be.”

“Calvin, I want to see you a minute, but if you can't tear yourself away, I can say it right here.”

Lucas glanced toward the door, looked steadily at Marcie's pursed lips and furor-mottled face, then at his father's troubled visage.

“Excuse me, Son,” Calvin said.

Lucas jerked his shoulder as if to say he had no interest in Marcie, and indeed, he didn't, except to give her the time of day when he entered her home, a courtesy that she didn't bother to reciprocate.

“Listen,” Lucas heard Marcie say from an adjoining room. “You have to wash my face with your philandering by bringing that man into my house whenever it suits you. Wasn't it enough that you slept around with his mother for years, and now you throw the evidence in my face and in my children's face. What's worse, you fix it so that I have to get my allowance in a check with his signature on it. If our friends knew—”

“Would you please lower your voice? You didn't have to tolerate my affair with Noreen. You didn't once mention a divorce. Many is the time when I would have gone out of my mind if I hadn't had her, but you didn't even know I was suffering. I had eighty dollars in the bank, and you wanted me to replace your mink with a sable because that was what everybody was wearing. I knew damned well that
everybody
couldn't afford a sable coat.

“Let me tell you something, Marcie, and I want this to be the last time we have this conversation or one like it. When I married you, I was besotted with you, crazy about you. I'd leave home to go to work, and I could hardly think about anything all day except getting back home to you, and maybe that would be the day you would welcome me with love. You knew how I felt about you, and Lord knows you took advantage of it. If I tried to kiss you, you presented your cheek. If I kissed you on the mouth, I'd ruin your lipstick. Sex? Once in a while, you opened your legs and allowed me to relieve myself. Then, you went to sleep. I can't remember a single time in all these years when you initiated a kiss, not to speak of sex.

“Oh, you were a master at dribbling out your affection. When I needed you—to talk with you, to have a little assurance that you'd be with me no matter what—where were you? Off someplace building your social kingdom. I hit rock bottom. My business was thirty days from changing hands. I completely lost my self-confidence. If you knew it, you didn't let on. You sent our children to me with foolish requests for in-line skates, video games. Hell, Enid asked me for a shearling coat with a fox trim when I could hardly afford to pay the electric bill. Why should a seven-year-old have that kind of coat when, a year later, it will be too small? The day I might have given up and declared bankruptcy was the day I met Noreen Hamilton. I told you I didn't feel like going out, that I was out of sorts and having trouble with the business, but you nonetheless dragged me to a fundraiser at somebody's house and then ignored me as usual.

“I was standing alone in the hallway away from the noise and the smell of liquor, Marcie, trying to figure out what I'd do after I watched ten years of my hard work slide down the drain in a bankruptcy court. What would I do with my life? I'd never been so miserable, so far down.

“This woman walked up to me and asked me, ‘What's wrong? What's the matter?' I looked down into the face of the first person, other than my mother, who had showed any concern for me in years, and I heard myself pouring my soul out to her. That stranger opened her arms, and said, ‘I'm so sorry. I wish I could help.' I went into those arms, held her and soaked up the compassion she offered. I fell in love with her. I've been in those arms ever since, and I will always be in them.

“To her credit, because she knew from the start that I was married, she avoided me as long as she could, but I pursued her. I didn't help her raise Lucas, because out of vengeance—because I was hell bent on getting rich and staying atop the social set, and marrying her would have interfered with that—she denied me any parental privileges. She moved to another town to be sure I never saw him or her, but I always knew where they were, how they were getting on and how his life was shaping up. I would give him the heart out of my body if he needed it. And that's that. You say one more word to me about him, and I'll give him the key to this house.”

“Where does that leave me?”

“That's up to you. You got what you wanted out of this marriage—financial security and social status. It's foolish to hope for anything else.”

Lucas dropped himself into a chair, leaned back and closed his eyes. He had been conceived in love, and his parents had then suffered an unfulfilled love ever since. He'd rather face a question about the foundation of a skyscraper building than decide what to do about his parents, and he knew the ball was in his court.

“I'm sorry,” Calvin said when he returned to the den. “Things aren't so good between Marcie and me these days. Where were we? Oh, yes, I meant to tell you that my mother told me she was enchanted with your friend, Willis. Later, she called to say he sent her a box of live crabs and two pounds of shrimp from someplace on the Chesapeake Bay. Did she tell him how she loves those things?”

“If she did, I didn't hear her. Willis had an unpleasant childhood. My mother spoils him, and Nana sure did her bit.”

“You're never going to tell me how Noreen is? I'm so hungry for any news of her, but I don't question your integrity in this.”

He sat forward, facing his father, spread his knees and rested his forearms on his thighs. “I . . . over the years, I've judged you both, sometimes harshly, but for different reasons. I suppose I've been harder on her because she kept me from you.”

Lucas leaned back, draped his right ankle over his left knee and looked at his father. “I heard every word you said to Marcie, and I realized that my parents have suffered from an unfulfilled love all of my life.” Calvin jerked forward. “What makes me happy right now,” Lucas continued, “is knowing that I was conceived in love. My mother loves you still, and she wanted so badly to visit you before you had the operation and after, but I prevented it, and I wouldn't let Willis take her. I told her that you were still married and that contacting you would be improper. I'm sorry I did that, and I'm going to tell her so.”

When Calvin could control the trembling of his lips, he said, “I know that she never married, and I always felt guilty about that. I . . . I don't know how to thank you for telling me this. Will you tell her I love her, and that I'm sorry I wasted so much of her life and mine, years we should've lived together? Will you tell her?”

It's not for me to judge. I'll leave them to heaven
. “Yes, sir. I'll tell her.”

He watched as his father's countenance shone with the happiness he felt. “After all these years. How does she spend her days?”

“For years, she worked as a clerk in the superintendent's office at the post office. She doesn't need to work now. She volunteers at the library, goes to church on Sunday mornings, and—”

“Did she encounter any social problems because she wasn't married when she had you?” Fear of the answer clouded his eyes.