Queen of Broken Hearts (33 page)

Haley lets out a long, weary sigh, then glances at me. “Austin's right, you know. I'm a terrible wife.” She lowers her eyes and picks at a fingernail, a childhood habit that reappears whenever she's upset.

I throw my hands up in the air. “See? That's what verbal abuse does. Of course you're not a bad wife. You're a wonderful, loving person. Granted, I'd like to see you make more of an effort in some areas of your marriage, which we've talked about. Martha Stewart you ain't, and having an orderly, well-organized household is more important to Austin than to you. But marriage is made up of compromises.”

“Oh, that's an original, Dr. Ballenger.”

“I know you've heard it all before. But that doesn't make it any less true. If you know Austin likes to come home to a hot meal, the two of you work out something both of you can live with, like taking turns cooking, or whatever. Big surprise: Life goes much more smoothly when things are well planned and orderly.”

“I threw away that damn tablecloth,” she blurts out.

“Haley, you didn't!”

“I did, too. I scorched it so bad, I knew Austin would go apeshit if he saw it. I feel terrible about throwing it away, but I panicked. His poor grandmother would die, if she weren't already dead.”

“Oh, dear. Not good.”

“Don't I know it. I felt so bad I got my friend Beth, you know, who sews, to teach me how to embroider so I could make another one. But I was such a klutz, I quit. Beth said she'd do it, but it'd take months. So I said forget it. If I had another one, I'd have to iron it, too.”

“If Austin's dead set on using a tablecloth for entertaining, take my advice and buy perma-press.”

“Oh, don't worry, I'm heading to Target this weekend. But Mom, I hate the way Austin tries to play the big shot at work, throwing fancy dinner parties and stuff like that. Other folks at the college don't do it. Sometimes I think he's just trying to impress John and Wanda Webb.”

“What
is
it with Austin and those two?”

She shrugs. “You've got me. I've gotten so I can't stand Wanda, but I can't say anything because Austin says I'm jealous of her. Puh-leeze! Austin thinks both she and John are perfect, and they act like he's Jesus Christ reincarnated. It's funny to me that Austin has so little time for his family now, but he always finds time for them. I used to think Wanda had the hots for Austin, but now I think John is gay and
he's
the one who does. Not that I blame him—marrying Wanda would turn any man gay. I'm sick of both of them.”

“Okay, that does it,” I say briskly. “I've heard enough. Here's what you're going to do, young lady, and what I'll do in return. Leave here, fix a nice dinner, get the kids down, then have a talk with Austin. Tell him that the two of you
must
see a marriage counselor, and right away. That's your part. Meantime, here's what I'll do. I'll get on the phone and start calling until I locate the best person for the two of you to see. Can't be someone who knows me well, or Austin will think—”

“He won't do it,” Haley interrupts. “He'll say we can't afford it, wait and see. You know what a tightwad he is.”

“Let's cross that bridge when we get there. I'll work out a barter or a professional discount or something. Promise me you'll do this. Promise?”

She nods glumly, and I go soft inside, just looking at her. With a sigh, she leans in to me, and I put my arm around her shoulder. “Oh, sweetheart, this seems bad right now, I know. But we'll get through it together, like we have everything else. Okay? Just like it's always been, me and you together.”

Although Haley wasn't a child of my body, she became a child of my heart in a most unexpected way. My decision to adopt her became a landmark case in the state of Alabama: Stepfathers often adopted stepchildren, but it was unprecedented for a stepmother to do so. My lawyers tried to talk me out of it, saying it was unnecessary. In fact, it was the most necessary decision I'd ever made, in many ways more crucial than deciding to marry Mack or starting a career as a therapist.

Five years after we married and moved to Fairhope, Mack and I sat in my doctor's office and received the devastating news: There would be no more babies for us. Our first child, a son we named Daniel, was born prematurely while I was working on my therapy license, driving back and forth to work at a family practice in Mobile. As tiny and fragile-looking as a bird emerging from the eggshell, Daniel lived six weeks, hooked to so many tubes and wires it was hard to tell a baby was underneath. Although Mack and I could caress and talk to our perfectly formed son in his incubator, neither of us ever held him. On the night we lost him, the staff sent us home from our endless vigil because he'd seemed so much stronger that we should be able to hold him soon, and they insisted we rest up for the big event. We collapsed into an exhausted sleep until I sat straight up with my heart pounding, awakened by the sound of a baby's cry. A dream, I knew, but I made Mack get up and drive me to the hospital. Arriving at the neonatal unit, we tried to push past the team of doctors and nurses who rushed forward to stop us. By their stricken faces, we knew Daniel was gone, even before seeing the tubes and wires hanging uselessly over the sides of the horribly silent incubator.

Because Mack and I were young and inexperienced in the ways that life can break even the strongest of us, our grief seemed inconsolable. We had yet to learn that consolation can be found in a seemingly small gesture of love. Dory kept our house filled with flowers, and Zoe Catherine, the most gregarious and outspoken of women, came and went without a word to anyone. We didn't even see her, just the evidence that she'd been by: food prepared, laundry folded, the house cleaned. She was as unable to accept my gratitude to her as I was to adequately express it. I prayed that if nothing else, her ministrations might be the catalyst to bring Mack and his mother together, but it didn't happen. Mack had grown up feeling like an abandoned child, a pain that never left him.

When I got pregnant a year later, we celebrated too soon and too readily; I miscarried the day after. I carried the next baby a month longer, making the miscarriage more of a blow. After a battery of tests and a painful correctional procedure, I was soon pregnant again. That baby, too, I lost during the first trimester. After more extensive tests, a gut-wrenching verdict. Along with the news that it was useless for us to keep trying, Mack and I were given a list of adoption agencies, both domestic and foreign. “Some lucky child is out there waiting for parents like you two,” the doctor told us, seeing us to the door.

For a long time afterward, both Mack and I dealt with the blow in unhealthy ways. I went back to school for a doctorate in addition to working full-time, and I stayed away for days at a time. I picked divorce recovery for my dissertation topic because the research was scanty and challenging; I had no way of knowing that decision would start my career in a whole new direction. Mack had quit his hated banking job and started to work restoring old houses, and I convinced myself that his work filled the void for him in the same way mine did for me. I even told myself it was a good thing, and we were lucky not to need a family to make our lives complete. I didn't know that, alone and aimless, Mack had found another way to deal with his pain. Although I was trained to spot the signs of alcohol abuse, I failed to notice them in my own husband.

Then came the day that turned our lives upside down. Mack received a registered letter from a law firm in Orange County, Florida, demanding he contact them regarding an urgent matter. When he blew it off, a sheriff's deputy served him papers a few weeks later, just as we were sitting down to one of our rare dinners together. Mack collapsed onto the sofa, white-faced and trembling, and I grabbed the papers from him. A paternity suit had been filed against Macomber Hayden Ballenger III, of Fairhope, Alabama, by the surviving kin of Shirley Marie Scott, of Naples, Florida. When I was able to speak, I asked the question any wife would: “Mack? Who is Shirley Marie Scott?”

I thought Mack wasn't going to answer me, and when he did, his response told me the letter wasn't a mistake, as I'd hoped. “This means that … she's dead?” Mack said blankly. “Shirley's
dead?
”

When I replied that normally you didn't have surviving kin otherwise, he blinked in bewilderment.

“Paternity,” he said. “She had the child, then.”

My legs no longer held me up, and I sank down beside him. Finally I was able to say, “You'd better tell me about it.”

It turned out to have been a deliberate omission, Mack never telling me, or even Dory and Son, about Shirley Scott. Dropping his head, he admitted that he'd been ashamed of her, and even more ashamed of his treatment of her. He'd picked her up in Gulf Shores while they were both still in high school, a tough girl from the wrong side of the tracks who'd dropped out of school to move there with a girlfriend. Shirley initiated him into another world, fast and furiously. Mack confessed that he was as enamored of her as he was of the pot they smoked during sex, and the thrilling way it heightened the experience for both of them. Only because of his training as an athlete did he give it up, albeit reluctantly. And not altogether, either; each time he went home to Fairhope from Bama, he found himself going to Gulf Shores, toward Shirley's inviting bed. The last time he'd been with her was the weekend before he met and fell in love with me. After the team had played a game in Mobile, he'd gone to Gulf Shores to see Shirley, then sneaked back into the hotel where the team was sleeping, without the coach ever knowing he'd been gone.

That summer, however, Shirley presented him with the news: She was pregnant. He was in despair, knowing that his father would disown him, and he'd lose me as well. Desperate, he got rid of her in a way that was easy for him at the time: He paid her off. With money for an abortion and a new start, nineteen-year-old Shirley returned to her hometown of Naples. “That was ten, eleven years ago,” he said in despair. “There's no way the child could be mine.”

I met his look, unflinching, and said tightly, “It's a paternity suit, Mack. I guess you'll find out in court, won't you?”

With Rye representing him, Mack ended up settling the case out of court for a staggering sum in back child support, paid out to Shirley's relatives, since he had no proof of the large amount of money he'd given her previously. After she'd blown the money Mack gave her to start over, her life spiraled out of control. With a baby and no education, no way of supporting herself, Shirley got by the way she always had, by latching on to any man she could. After being involved in several abusive relationships, she ended up doing hard drugs, and her child was passed from relative to relative. A week before her thirtieth birthday, Shirley overdosed on cocaine, leaving behind an eleven-year-old girl and a piece of paper with Mack's name and address on it.

I wasn't home when Mack and Rye returned from Naples after settling the paternity case. Instead, I was in Baton Rouge, completing the final edits of my dissertation. By the time I returned to Fairhope, Mack had gone back to work on the houses he was restoring. This time it was with a different purpose: He'd gone heavily into debt to settle the case, paying off past years of child support and court costs, and he worked such long hours that I rarely saw him. Not only was he working off his debt, he was also avoiding me, going to bars after work rather than face me. It was the worst time of our marriage. He adamantly refused to discuss the case, or what he'd found in Naples, and would walk out of the room when I questioned him. At last, I could stand it no more, and I went to Rye.

“Of course we saw the little girl, Clare,” Rye said, sitting behind the big mahogany desk in his office and looking at me with pity. “Poor thing's not a very appealing child. Scrawny and in bad need of braces, not very healthy-looking. The kid's had a rough life, I'm sure.” As I was leaving, however, he said with a wistfulness I hadn't yet heard from the carefree, fun-loving Rye, “But you know? Beneath that mess of hair, I got a glimpse of Mack's gray eyes.”

To this day, I'm not sure what made me head straight to the Landing after I left Rye's office. All I knew was, for some reason I wanted desperately to be with Zoe Catherine. I found her at the bird sanctuary, working on a cage for a red-tailed hawk whose legs were taped up. Seeing me, her face lit up. “C'mon,” she said. “I need to show you something.”

Zoe led me to the dock, jumped into a battered old canoe, and motioned for me to pick up an oar. Seemingly without a care in the world, she chattered about the injured hawk as we paddled down the creek, me following her lead and dipping my oar in synchronicity with hers. My gloom lifted, and I found myself reveling in the smooth glide of the canoe over the mottled green waters of the creek, the salt-sweet air on my face, the soft splash of the oars. For the first time in weeks, I heard my laughter as Zoe brandished her oar to scare away a couple of ducks that followed us, their webbed feet moving under them like little eggbeaters. Shaking her head, she told me, “See that big-billed one paying me no mind a'tall? That's Jimmy Carter. Rosalynn will set him straight, wait and see.” Sure enough, after much quacking and flapping of wings, the two ducks gave up their pursuit and returned home, twitching their tails and leaving a gentle wake behind them.

At a bend in the creek, an inlet of land formed a natural beach, white-sanded and reedy. Zoe motioned for me to hold my oar still. “Shhh,” she warned, a finger held high. “They're making so much racket they won't hear us, but I don't want our movement to scare them.”