Home Song (15 page)

“Yeah, well, nothing happened between us, okay?” he declared somewhat belligerently.

“Of course not,” she said, her eyes falling to the green apple.

He could see she was relieved to hear it, though he'd never given her reason to believe he'd been promiscuous with girls. He hadn't.

“So how long has he known about me?” Kent asked.

“Since the day I registered you at school. I had no idea he was the principal there till he walked out of his office.”

“So he never knew I existed?”

“No.”

Kent doubled forward, dropping his head to his hands, the telephone pushing his hair against his skull above one ear. The room grew terribly silent. Monica set the apple on the coffee table as if both pieces were made of spun glass. She sat almost primly, hands crossed and both wrists turned upward while she gazed at a rectangle of sunlight falling across the living room carpeting. There were tears in her eyes, too.

After more than a minute of misery Kent raised his head.

“So what made you tell him?”

“He recognized you and asked.”

“
Recognized
me?”

“You look a lot like him.”

“Oh, do I?” The idea took hold and rattled Kent.

She nodded at the carpet.

The surfeit of emotion erupted in a sudden watershed of anger that Kent did not understand. “I spend my whole life being told nothing, now all at once you not only tell me who he is, you tell me he's this man I like, and that I even look like him!” He paused a beat, then shouted, “Well, talk to me, Mom! Tell me how it happened! Don't make me ask sixty-four thousand questions!”

“You aren't going to like it.”

“Do you think I care by now? I want to know!”

She took some time to collect herself before beginning. “He was a boy I used to see around the college campus sometimes. We had one class together—I don't even remember which one anymore. I always thought he was handsome, but we never dated. I didn't really even know him. In
my senior year I worked as a delivery girl for Mama Fiori's Pizza, and one June night we got a call for a half dozen pizzas to be delivered to a bachelor party. I delivered them, and he was the one who answered the door. He . . .” She inverted her linked fingers and shrugged. “I don't know . . . he grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the apartment. There was a lot of noise, and they'd been drinking, of course. There were beer kegs, and some rather scantily clad girls there. He remembered me and rounded up a big tip from all the guys and said why didn't I come back after I got off work and have a beer. I'd never . . . well, I'd never done anything like that before. I was what you'd probably call a tight-ass. A scholar. Very straight and disciplined. Very goal-oriented. I can't say why I did it, but I went back after work and had a couple of beers, and one thing led to another and I ended up in bed with him. Two months later I discovered I was pregnant.”

Kent let it sink in a minute, staring at her balefully. “A bachelor party,” he said in a rusty voice. “I was conceived at a bachelor party.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “But that's not the worst of it.”

He only waited.

“It was his bachelor party.” She had colored some.

“His?”

“He was getting married the next week.”

It took only a split second for everything to add up. “Oh, don't tell me . . .” Their eyes met, his distraught, hers embarrassed. “Aw, come on . . . to Mrs. Gardner, my
English teacher
?”

Monica nodded and dropped her gaze, rubbing the cuticle of one thumb with the pad of the other. Kent tossed the telephone onto the sofa, where it bounced once while he fell back against the cushions with a forearm flung over his eyes.

“A one-night stand,” he said.

His mother watched his Adam's apple bob and replied, “Yes,” offering no self-defense.

“Does she know?”

“None of them know. He's telling them now.”

He went on hiding behind his arm while his mother's eyes took in his long body, dressed in blue jeans; the mouth that was held firm as if to keep from crying, the chin and jaws with the patchy beard that now needed shaving every day, the throat that pulsed each time he swallowed his tears.

She reached over and rubbed the coarse blue denim covering his knee. “Kent, I'm sorry,” she whispered.

His mouth moved. “Yes, ma'am, I know.”

She kept rubbing his knee; she didn't know what else to do.

He jolted to his feet as if to escape her touch, sniffing, running the back of a hand under his nose. “Listen, Mom.” He pelted toward the door. “I just gotta get out of here for a while. I gotta . . . I don't know . . . my mind's a mess. I gotta go, okay? Don't worry. I just gotta go.”

“Kent!” She rushed to the railing overlooking the entry, but he'd descended the steps in three giant strides and the door was already closing behind him. “Kent!” She ran down the stairs and jerked the door open. “Kent, wait! Please, honey, don't take the car! We can talk some more . . . we can—”

“Go on back in, Mom!”

“But, Kent—”

“You took eighteen years getting used to the idea! At least give me a few hours!”

The car door slammed, the engine revved, and he backed down the driveway too fast, bumping and turning off the curb, leaving a pair of rubber marks on the pavement as he squealed away.

F
OR
Tom, the ride home from Ciatti's parking lot was a journey through purgatory. How would he tell Claire? How would she react? How would he tell the kids? Would they think him an immoral weakling? A phony? A liar who had wronged their mother on the eve of their marriage and hid it all these years?

He would tell Claire first—she deserved that much—before he broke the news to the kids and the four of them got into the heavy scene that was sure to follow. Claire deserved to be told in private, to hit him, blame him, shout, cry, call him names, whatever she felt like doing, without her children watching or listening.

When he got home she had them busy cleaning their rooms, the vacuum cleaner wheezing upstairs. He found Claire on her hands and knees in the living room, dusting the lower shelf of an end table. How unsuspecting she was, how vulnerable, working away, thinking they'd straightened things out the other night by forgiving each other and making love. Little did she know.

He squatted down on one heel behind her, regretting how he had to hurt her.

“Claire?”

She reared up and bumped her head.

“Ooo, damn,” she said, rubbing it through her baseball cap, wincing as she turned and let her weight sink against the carpet.

“Sorry, I thought you heard me come in.”

“No-o-o, I didn't. Jeez, that smarts.”

She looked twenty-five years old in her HHH cap, jeans, and wrinkled shirt. He felt his heart swell with incontrovertible love, and suffered a fresh stab of guilt.

He squeezed her arm. “You okay?”

“I'll live.”

“Claire, something's come up that I need to talk to you about . . . away from the kids. Would you take a ride with me?”

Her hand dropped slowly from her head. “What is it, Tom? You look terrible.” She rolled to her knees, facing him. “What's wrong?”

He took her hands and drew her to her feet. “Let's take a ride. C'mon.”

He called the children. “Robby? Chelsea? Come here a minute.” When they came, he said, “Mom and I will be gone for an hour or so. When we get back I want you to be here, okay?”

“Sure, Dad. Where you going?” Chelsea asked.

“I'll tell you all about it when we get back. Get your rooms finished and make sure you're here, understand? It's important.”

“Sure, Dad . . .”

“Sure, Dad . . .”

Their voices reflected puzzled obedience.

In the car, Claire said, “Tom, you're scaring me to death. Will you tell me what's wrong?”

“I will in a minute. Let's drive over to Valley Elementary first. The schoolyard should be empty. We can talk there.”

She sat as if wearing armor whose only movable part was the headpiece, studying his profile while he drove to the nearby building and pulled around the back, where the blacktop abutted the playground. Here their kids had gone to elementary school, had drawn hopscotches, hung on jungle gyms, and competed on Field Day. The sight of the building and playground swathed in late afternoon sunlight brought a wave of nostalgia.

Tom turned off the engine and said, “Come on, let's take a walk.”

She followed reluctantly, sensing calamity ahead. Tom took her hand. They trod across a stretch of grass and a corner of a softball diamond, their footsteps raising blossoms of dust on the infield. Beyond the ball field, a sturdy gathering of playground equipment created a geometric pattern against a violet sky, while at their backs, the sunset hour approached. They went to the equipment and sat side by side on swings shaped like horseshoes. The seats were low to the ground, the earth beneath them covered with wood chips through which paths had been worn down to hard-scraped earth.

Claire's hands clung to the cold steel chains; Tom tipped forward like a basketball player on the bench.

Neither of them swung. They sat for a while, smelling the forest-musty smell of the wood chips, feeling the swings cinch their hips and the earth anchor their feet.

Finally, Tom cleared his throat. “Claire, I love you. That's
the first thing I want to say, and the easiest. The rest is a lot harder.”

“Whatever it is, just say it, Tom, because, damn it, this is horrible!”

“All right, I will, straight out.” He drew a deep breath first. “Six days before school started a woman walked into my office and registered a boy who, it turns out, is my son. I never knew he existed till that day. She never told me, so I had no reason to suspect. His name is Kent Arens.”

Their eyes were locked as he finished. He supposed he would never forget the shock in hers, the drained look, the disbelief. Not one muscle moved while her wide-eyed gaze remained fixed on him and her hands clung to the chains.

“Kent Arens . . .” she whispered, “. . . is your son?”

“Yes, Claire, he is.” He said it as gently as possible.

“But . . . but that would mean . . .” She struggled with dates.

“I'll make it easy for you. He's seventeen years old, the same age as Robby. He was conceived in June of 1975.”

This time she didn't have to struggle. “The month we got married?”

“The week we got married.”

The tiniest, pained word came out of her. “Oh . . .” and again while her eyes widened and got glossy, “Oh . . .”

“I'm going to tell you exactly what happened, because she never meant anything to me, nothing. Above all, you've got to believe that.”

“Oh, Tom,” she managed, covering her lips with three fingers.

He hardened his resolve and continued, determined to tell this straightaway, for only in absolute truth could he see a modicum of dignity. “The weeks before our wedding are pretty hard to remember now, the actual events that were
going on at that time. But one thing stands out crystal clear in my mind: I wasn't ready to get married yet, and I felt—I'm sorry to have to say this, Claire—but I felt trapped. Maybe even a little desperate. Sometimes it was almost like . . . like I was being railroaded. I'd just spent four years in college and I had plans for the next couple of years. I wanted to take the summer off, and get a teaching job in the fall, live with the guys, be free for a while after all the years of keeping schedules and studying. I wanted to buy a new car and some nice clothes, and vacation in Mexico and maybe do a weekend in Las Vegas now and then.

“Instead, you got pregnant and I ended up at premarriage courses, picking out rings and china patterns and renting tuxedos. Everything just seemed to . . . well, it escalated so fast! The truth is, for a while I got just plain scared. Then after the first shock wore off, I got angry.

“That's probably the mood I was in the night of my bachelor party, when this girl I hardly knew at all delivered a bunch of pizzas. I talked her into bed with me, and it was simple rebellion, nothing more. She went off to live her life, and I went off to live mine, and we never met again . . . until she walked into my office with her son last week.”

Claire's brimming, disillusioned eyes rested on him, then veered away while the shock waves rattled through her. She began to rise from the swing.

“No, stay.” Tom held her arm. “I'm not done. That's the trouble with telling something like this. I don't want to leave anything out, but I have to work through all the bad stuff to get to the most important thing, and that's the fact that I changed. After I married you, I changed.” Softly, he added, “I came to love you very, very much, Claire.”

“Don't!” She pulled her arm free and twisted the swing till she faced west, her back to him, her front to the
brightening orange sky. “Don't offer me platitudes. After what you've just told me, don't you
dare
offer me platitudes!”

“They're not platitudes. I started realizing what I had in you the day Robby was born, and ev—”

“And that's supposed to make me feel good?”

“You didn't let me finish. And every year got better. I found out I love being a father, I love being a husband, I love you.”

He could tell from the quivering of her shoulders, she was crying.

“You did that . . . with another woman . . . the same week that we got married?”

He'd known that fact would weigh heavier than any other and that he'd have to be patient with her while she dealt with it.

“Claire . . . Claire, I'm so sorry.”

“How could you do that?” Her voice had grown pinched and high from contained emotion. “How could you do that and walk down an aisle with me a week later?”

He dropped his elbows to his knees and let his head hang low, feet spraddled while he stared at the dirt and wood chips between them. Since learning about Kent he had held his own emotions in check, but tears stung as he realized how he'd hurt Claire. He let them gather, pinching them away only to find his eyes refilling immediately. He was a man without excuses, so he offered none as the afternoon aged and they sat on their separate swings, facing separate directions, she west and he north.

She was still crying when she said, “I never knew that before . . . how you . . . how you r . . . resented marrying me.”

“Past tense, Claire, honest, it's all past tense. I told you I came to realize how lucky I was.”

She hurt too badly to be soothed. “Wouldn't you think a woman would sense a thing like that on her wedding day? I guess I was just so glad to have the f . . . father of my baby marrying me that I . . . that I . . .” She began crying audibly, muffling the sound with her hand.

He reached out and squeezed her shoulder from behind. Her body shook with her weeping; it tore at his heart. “Claire, don't,” he pleaded, aching as much as she. “Jesus, Claire, I didn't want to hurt you this way.”

She shrugged his hand away. “Well, you did. I hurt and it's b . . . because of you and I hate you at this m . . . moment for doing this to us.” She was using the sides of her hands to wipe her nose. He passed his handkerchief over her shoulder.

She used it, then said, “You've been acting so strange lately. I knew something was wrong, but I couldn't figure out what.”

“I tried to tell you in Duluth, but I just . . .” His words trailed away and he ended softly, “Aw, hell.”

Silence pressed down, thick, oppressive, stilling all but their burrowing thoughts. Sorrow sealed them to their swing seats and held them prisoners of each other and this cruel foible sprung upon them at midlife, when they'd been so serene and smug. The autumn evening progressed, the edge of the world closing the sun's lower eyelid, turning the sky the hues of fruit. A faint chill drifted across the playground.

After many minutes Claire finally asked, “Does he know?”

“She's telling him today.”

He could tell she was adding things up and drawing the wrong conclusion. All this time she'd been turned away from him with the swing chain crossed above her head. She let it uncross and throw her into line with him so she could see
his face. Though her expression seemed dulled by sorrow, her gaze seemed to penetrate clear to his viscera.

“You saw her, didn't you? That's where you were when you said you were going to buy the battery.”

“Yes, but Claire—”

“Have you seen her other times?”

“Listen to me. He's grown up not knowing who his father was. I couldn't tell you about him without her permission, and that's what we talked about today, the decision to tell the truth to everyone at the same time so nobody would find out from anyone else.”

“You didn't answer my question.
Have you seen her other times?
”

Some muscles tensed, altering his jawline, reflecting movement at his temple. “Yes. Once. The day I found out he was my son.”

“Where?”

“At her house. But all we did was talk, Claire, honest.”

Claire said nothing for the longest time, staring at him with puffy, red, mistrusting eyes. Finally she dropped her gaze to her knees. “She must live around here someplace.”

“In Haviland Hills Addition. She moved here from Texas just before school started. When she walked in to register Kent, she had no idea I was the principal. Claire, I'm answering all these questions because I have nothing more to hide. That one night back in 1975, that was it. I swear to God, there has never been anyone but you since the day I took my vows.”

She let her shoulders slump and dropped her hands between her legs, where they hung loosely. Her eyes closed and her head lolled backward, pointing the bill of her baseball cap at the sky. She sighed once—a great, noisy shudder of a sigh, then sat, motionless, the picture of one who simply
wishes to escape. She gave herself a tiny jog and set the swing in motion—a few degrees only—as if somewhere in the depths of her mind she pretended she was beyond all this. Her chambray shirttail hung behind her, and her crossed shins laid the outsides of her tennis shoes against the dirt.

He waited, sick at heart for having caused her despair.

“Well,” she said finally, pulling her head up as if marshaling fortitude, “we've got some children to consider, don't we?” The swing continued in waggling figure
S
's. Then abruptly it stopped as she clapped a hand to her mouth and turned away while the tears built once again. “Oh, God, what a mess.” Her voice had gone squeaky.

What should he say? Do? Give? Offer? His misery was as complete as hers.

“I never meant to hurt any of you, not you or the children, not in any way, Claire. It happened so long ago. It was just an incident out of my past that I'd forgotten about.”

“It was long ago for you, but it's now for us. We've got to deal with it
now
, and it's so unfair to foist this on the children.”

“Don't you think I've been thinking about that?”

“I don't know. Have you?”

“Of course I have. Claire, you act as if I've suddenly gotten heartless because of this thing. Can't you see that I hurt, too? That I'm sorry, and I wish I could undo it? But I can't. All I can do is be honest about everything and hope that's the way to cause the least amount of pain to everyone involved. As for the children, I intend to tell them today. I can do that by myself or you can be with me, whatever you want.”