The Summer of Good Intentions (42 page)

Rob, however, was an architect who worked in the laws of right angles and degrees, in the language of square footage and arcs, levels and foyers, concrete and marble. It was not a job that required much of an emotional investment, as far as she could tell. Her husband left his work on the drawing table at the office, and when he was home with her and Benjamin, they got all of him, one hundred percent. For this, she loved him dearly, but she also envied him. He had chosen a profession that built the right-angled spaces people lived and worked in; she had chosen a career that plunged her into the messy lives inside them.

She slipped into her skirt and a sheer white blouse. She'd leave the blazer off till she dropped Benjamin at day care. The baby stirred again as Rob got up to shower. His eyes opened briefly, then closed.

“Good morning, sweet boy,” she whispered across the room. Her baby, now ten months, seemed to take up so much space. Once just a tiny infant whose feet she could barely find inside his sleeper, he had grown nearly into a toddler. Precious baby fat still coddled him in all the right places, but he was longer now, his head larger. Her little boy growing up. She felt a slight twinge in her chest at the thought. He was growing up every minute, while she spent the majority of his days working with other families. The irony did not escape her. She tried not to dwell on it.

Now he stretched his arms above his head like an old man. It was a move he'd practiced ever since they'd brought him home from the hospital. The first time Rob called her into the room, laughing and pointing to Benjamin, who reached his fingertips to the sky, his yawning mouth stretched into a perfect O. It had been miraculous as so many of those baby firsts were. Now he looked around, rolled over, and pushed himself to sit up. He gave her a big gummy smile.

“Well, hello there, sleepy boy. Did you have a good sleep in Mama and Dada's bed?”

She leaned over to sweep him up and give him a kiss, his body still warm with sleep.

He looked at her, then pointed to the bedroom door. “Bah,” he said, his new favorite word. It was funny to her how he could go from zero to sixty in a heartbeat, ready to start the day almost as soon as he woke.

“We'll go get your bottle in a sec,” she said. “First, we have to change your diaper and get you dressed.”

She gave him another kiss, smoothed his hair, and carried him into the nursery. She loved the cool colors of his room. She'd decorated it with a nautical theme, at odds with their Midwestern corner, but she couldn't resist the happy blue whales that swam on the borders of a crib bumper they'd found when she was pregnant. From there an entire sea had been born. Bright tropical fish hanging from Benjamin's mobile, a table lamp covered in starfish with smiley faces, stuffed whales for snuggling, and even a diaper holder embroidered with conch shells.

The baby fussed as she changed him, something he never liked, but was happy again the moment she sat him on the floor, his fat belly sticking out over his diaper. She pulled out warm fleece pants, as tiny as a doll's clothing, and a red sweatshirt to cover his pint-sized turtleneck. She managed to get it all on him without too much fuss. She could hear Rob singing in the shower down the hall, some Bruce Springsteen tune, and was surprised to find herself smiling. Benjamin bounced up and down on his knees, waving his arms, his signature dance.

She hoisted him onto her hip and carried him down the stairs, twenty-three hardwood steps to be exact. She and Rob had counted them when they first moved in, after they'd made love at the top, christening the old windy farmhouse as their own.

“Brr, baby,” she said and drew Benjamin closer now. The chill of the night had settled into the lofty spaces of the high-ceilinged first floor. She turned the thermostat to eighty to get the heat cranking.

“Why don't we live in California again?” she asked.

The truth, she reminded herself, was that while both she and Rob had lived in California for a spell, each had returned to Wisconsin, as if a rubber band had pulled them back with a snap. Lanie had always thought that a certain sense of superiority lurked in the humbleness of Midwesterners, that they were a people who weathered the blistering cold, temperatures unimaginable to most, and so were able to endure more of life's challenges than most.

It was a mentality she'd tried to shake again and again, traveling first to Berkeley, then to a clerkship in Seattle, then to Boston, yet all roads had led back to Madison. She and Rob laughed about this peculiar fact on their first date over brats and beers on State Street: A Midwesterner spent his life trying to escape the cold winters but always ended up back home.

Though she would never admit it, she'd loved coming home. She returned in late July, fresh from a tour of the Eastern seaboard, places like Portland, Maine; Gloucester, Massachusetts; a last hurrah in New York City. She and her housemate at the time, Julia, had packed their bags, sold the rest of their belongings in a yard sale, and set out for three weeks of carefree abandon. It was a fitting farewell to a coast that had served her well. She'd been working in tax law in Boston, a job that helped pay off her loans, but she jumped at the chance to join one of Madison's top firms.

While Lanie was expected to bill a certain number of hours at Brandt & Smith, she was in the fortunate position of being able to balance lucrative divorces with, to her mind, the more pressing family dispute and social restitution cases. When Ellen asked what compelled her to work with people whose lives were so depressing—beaten women and children, abandoned children in foster care—Lanie answered easily and with certainty: It was her calling. It was the reason she had gone to law school in the first place, to help those less fortunate. That she was able to return home to do so was only icing on the cake.

When she arrived in midsummer, three suitcases and her briefcase sitting at her feet, Ellen greeted her at the terminal, her sleeveless shirt collared with perspiration, her brown hair frizzing in the humidity. Lanie had always envied her sister her heart-shaped face, her kind eyes, and over the years Ellen had come to embody the maternal role she'd always played in Lanie's life. Her once slim figure had morphed into that of a woman who was comfortable with a few extra pounds, her formerly slender arms now round.

When their own mom passed and Lanie was just six, Ellen had become like a second mother to her. Their father, on the edge of his own despair, was helpless to guide her. So Ellen, just sixteen, moved from her own room back into her sister's. Ten years later it was Ellen who rode in the jolting car up and down the school parking lot when Lanie got her learner's permit; Ellen who pressed their mother's letter into her hands on the night of Lanie's high school graduation, saying, “Mom wanted me to hold on to this until you graduated. I've done my best to preserve it. It's a little battered around the edges, but it still has her scent.”

And, indeed, when she held the envelope to her face, Lanie could detect the sweet aroma of lilacs, her mother's perfume. Later, after a celebration under a sweeping white tent in their backyard, she opened the letter in the privacy of her bedroom and cried to see the faint pink of her mom's lipstick on the edges of the inside seal. It was as if her mother were sitting there on her bed, rubbing her back again, and Lanie, still six.

She had ridden home with Ellen from the airport that July day nearly six years ago. A thunderstorm had recently passed through, and she rolled down the window to open herself to the sweet scent of sugar corn and wild grass hovering over the fields in fat droplets of humidity.

“Hmmm,” she said. “That smells nice.” She stretched her arm out the window, as if she could reach the dewy drops, bottle them up like the lemonade they'd sold in Mason jars when they were little girls. The stretches of country road brought her back to days of eating cherry popsicles on the front porch, so cold they'd stuck to her tongue, and of catching fireflies late into the night till the stars popped out and their mother called them in, once, twice, three times, her voice more insistent on her third trip to the door. Then she'd strip Lanie's body of her sweaty clothes and throw her into the bathtub, right after Ellen, the dirt from her sister still ringing the tub.

“There's no sense in wasting water,” their mother always explained when they inquired why they shared the same water. Their mom, a farmer's daughter, possessed a farm girl's practicality when it came to husbanding resources.

Lanie smiled at her memories while they drove along, the telephone poles ticking by, Queen Anne's Lace and wild blue chicory dotting the roadside. She remembered many things about Harriet McClarety. Like the way she would bite into a tomato, whole, like an apple, or the way she'd make lemonade with fresh lemons, never concentrate, but would add so much sugar that all they could taste was the sweetness, not the tart. Lanie remembered, too, the hot summer nights they'd sit on the front porch swing, her mom patiently combing through her wet tangles while they swung back and forth, Ellen acting out tales of great kingdoms on the porch's grainy floor. Her mom would work out all the knots, one by one, as if it was the easiest thing in the world to do, and laugh her sweet laugh at her sister's antics.

On that hot summer day, her sister driving her back to her childhood town, Lanie knew she'd come home at last. It felt right. She wondered if she'd ever have her own child's tangled hair to smooth out, her own little girl or boy to whisper to, “Now just sit still; this won't hurt a lick.”

• • • •

Now she went to fix Benjamin's bottle. They had switched to formula once she went back to work, three short months after he was born. The whole breast-pumping thing was beyond her. She couldn't imagine toting a pump back and forth to work, having to pump behind closed doors, or even worse, in the bathroom stall at the courthouse every few hours. She knew that studies claimed breast-feeding up to a year was best for babies, but she tried to convince herself that Benjamin had gotten a full dose of antibodies in those first few months. Her pediatrician reassured her that it was okay, that the most important thing to remember was that “a happy mom meant a happy baby.”

She threw the afghan around him now and watched as his lips fastened hungrily onto the bottle's nipple. She rocked him gently and clicked on the news with the remote. Up to a foot of snow, maybe more, they were predicting. Rob came down the stairs whistling, dressed in a navy jacket, khaki pants, and the yellow tie that Lanie had laid out for him the night before. He seemed happy, as if all the snow was cause for celebration. She, on the other hand, fretted over the practicalities—getting Benjamin to day care safely, making it to court on time, her clients' making it to court on time.

“I'll get the car warmed up and ready,” Rob said as he slipped into his coat. “You guys will be toasty.”

“Thanks,” she offered.

“Benjamin, baby, when's this snow going to stop?”

He looked into her eyes, wide-eyed and knowing, but didn't offer a word. His lips puckered around the nipple, sucking away.

When Rob came back in, he seemed surprised by the strength of the storm.

“Be careful out there. It's pretty slick. I've sanded the driveway, but it looks like the plows came through a while ago.”

“Okay.” She nodded, half-hearing. “Thanks, honey.”

She could feel him hesitating by the front door. Benjamin sat up to look.

“Do you think day care will even be open today?”

“No cancellations yet.” Lanie had been watching the closings scroll across the bottom of the screen. Still just a few. There was a local joke that the schools in Wisconsin didn't close unless the snow was piled so high that you couldn't open your front door.

“Do you want me to drive you guys this morning?” She could tell from the timbre of his voice that her husband was being kind.

“No, you go. I know you've got a big day ahead of you, too. We'll be fine.”

He came to give her a kiss and picked up Benjamin. “Bye, buddy. Have fun at school today. Maybe you'll go sledding, huh?”

Benjamin kicked his feet, waved bye-bye. He'd come to know that these early-morning rituals, including a kiss on the forehead, meant daddy was going to work. “It's a caffeine kind of day,” Rob said on his way out the door. “See you tonight.”

“See you tonight,” Lanie said, but she'd already turned back to the news and was propping the baby up for a burp, wondering how on earth she was going to make it to court in time for her nine o'clock hearing.

• • • •

Rob couldn't help it. As he negotiated the slippery roads on the way into the office, all he felt was relief. Relief to be going to work; relief to be leaving Benjamin's tired cries of the night behind; relief to be free of Lanie's guilt-inspiring looks. So what if he didn't get up last night to help with the baby? He certainly had done his fair share during those first few months. And both he and Lanie knew that the only thing Benjamin wanted at two in the morning was his momma. As much as Rob tried to be supportive—offering to get up in the middle of the night to fetch a bottle, rubbing Lanie's back when she fell back into bed, playing with Benjamin as soon as he got home from work—sometimes it just didn't seem like enough.

He was glad that Lanie had gone back to her firm after maternity leave. He supposed that made him a little unusual since most of his colleagues seemed to prefer that their wives stay home and raise the kids. But that was such an old-fashioned attitude, almost cavemanesque. He knew Lanie well enough to understand that she needed some kind of activity to get the wheels in her brain spinning again. She had read and reread all the baby books during the first few weeks of her maternity leave, highlighting sections, to the point where he'd taken to slipping them into the back of bookcases, hoping she'd put all that advice aside and just enjoy the mommy thing. But it was typical Lanie: wanting to get her arms around every detail she could about a case (or in this instance, their son), analyze them, and then come up with a game plan.