The Vineyard (4 page)

When the phone continued to ring, she snatched it up. “Hello?”

“Hi,” said Ted. “Just checking in. It's been a hell of a day here—one meeting after another—like this is a plan to change the whole
world for eternity when all it is is a five-year plan for one puny little company that'll probably go under before the first year's done anyway. Why are you late getting home?”

“Things backed up,” Olivia said, rolling her eyes to make Tess laugh, “but listen, I can't talk now.”

“I know how
that
is—haven't had time to do anything for
me
since first thing this morning—I swear I've been talking that whole time—I'm probably not good for much more myself—I'll call you back in ten minutes.”

“No. Tess and I have stuff to do. I'll call you later.”

“Well—okay—I'll be here for another hour, then at the gym for an hour—but that is
assuming
the machines I need are free, which is a
big
assumption—meatheads monopolize the free weights for hours—I mean, I'm no ninety-eight-pound weakling but they sneer at me and I run—so just in case it takes me longer than an hour, why don't you try me at home at eight?”

“I'll try. Gotta go.” She hung up the phone, exhausted. Ted had that effect.

Tess's chin quivered. “Mrs. Wright sent a note.”

“Oh, dear.” Ted was quickly forgotten. Olivia took a deep breath. She could only hope that the note had been in a sealed envelope.

“I tore it up.”

“You didn't.”

“Tore it up and threw it away.”

“Oh, Tess. I need to see it.”

“You don't. She's just one teacher. She doesn't know everything.”

So. Sealed envelope or not, her daughter knew something of what the teacher had written. “Where is the note?”

Tess looked away, defiant.

Olivia caught Tess's chin and gently turned her back. “Where is the note?”

She looked at the ceiling. Her jaw remained set.

Sighing, Olivia released her daughter's chin and stood back. That was when she saw the torn corner of something protruding from the front pocket of Tess's jeans. She pulled out one portion of the note, then a second and third. On the small square of counter beside the stove, she put the pieces together.

“Dear Ms. Jones,”
the note read.
“We truly do need to talk
about what to do about Tess for next year. I know that the thought of having her repeat the year is unpleasant, but ignoring my notes doesn't help the situation.”

Ignoring what notes? Olivia thought with a sense of dread.

“You and I need to meet. The final decision on next year's class assignments is being made on Monday. If I don't hear from you before then, I'll go ahead with my recommendation that Tess stay in fourth grade a second year. Yours truly, Nancy Wright.”

Olivia's mind was spinning. Tess had been tested and diagnosed. She had tutoring at school three times a week. As of Olivia's last meeting with both teacher and tutor, the child was showing a slight improvement in spelling. But she continued to fail tests either because she misread the directions or because she miswrote her answers. She couldn't read. It was a terrifying problem.
She couldn't read.

The tutor claimed it would get better in time. Olivia wanted to know how much time. Tess seemed to be falling further and further behind the others in her class. She liked learning and retained what she learned. When Olivia read to her, she was responsive and smart. One on one, she was capable of understanding complex concepts. On her own, though, she lacked the tools to access those concepts.

Three half-hour sessions a week with a tutor wasn't enough; Tess easily could use twice that number. What she really needed was a whole special school, but that was a pipe dream. So Olivia did what she could, helping with homework. She also tried to get the teacher to be more kind, although Tess wasn't aiding her own cause when she failed to deliver letters that the woman sent home.

“Don't yell at me,” Tess begged. “I didn't bring the other notes home because I know what she wants to do. I can see it in her face whenever she looks at my papers. I was thinking that if I tried harder it'd get better and she wouldn't look at me that way, only she still does.”

Olivia pulled Tess close and held her with a sudden fierceness. She understood. In fact, she
agreed
. She hadn't wanted Tess in Nancy Wright's class in the
first
place. The woman was a stickler about directions, and following directions was one of the hardest things for Tess to do. She panicked. She rushed. She lost her place. She guessed. The other fourth-grade teacher was far better with learning-disabled children, but as the principal had dryly informed Olivia, she couldn't take
all
of them in her class.

For the life of her, Olivia didn't understand why Nancy Wright hadn't called when her notes weren't answered. A phone call would have been far more appropriate in the first place. Putting a child's failings on paper and then sending that paper home with the child seemed cruel.

Olivia couldn't begin to estimate the damage that had been done to her daughter's self-esteem in the last year. Granted, it might have happened with any teacher. Tess was at that age. Much more of the same, though, and she wouldn't only need a tutor—she would also need a therapist.

What to do? Olivia had the name of a tutor who would work with Tess through the summer, but tutors cost money, and the electronic transfer of funds that had continued for several months after Jared's death had ceased abruptly with his parents' verdict that Tess wasn't Jared's child.

That Tess wasn't Jared's.
The charge still stung.

“But she
is,”
Olivia told the lawyer who had sent the letter informing her of the family decision.

“Can you prove it?”

Of course, she could. Tess was there in the flesh!

But Olivia had watched
The Practice
. She knew how lawyers thought. Lawyers wanted DNA tests.

“My client was cremated,” this one said. “His ashes were scattered over the Great Smokies. Unless DNA tests were done before, you'll have a hard time proving it. His family won't hand anything over for testing. You'll have to take them to court.”

Olivia vowed to do just that—for all of two minutes. Then she came to her senses. She couldn't put Tess through a paternity battle. Besides, it took money to win money.

So the Stark connection was severed. It was another sad twist to an already sad saga, because it wasn't about money at all. It was about love. Olivia had loved Jared. He was a brilliant man, a scientist who was forever writing up treatises on seemingly obscure things, like the correlation between eating carrot greens and the ability to identify birdcalls at night. He claimed that what he did was crucial to mankind, and Olivia remained a believer even when he lost interest in her. She hadn't planned on getting pregnant. When it happened, she saw it as God's way of telling Jared to stay put. He didn't. The man was long gone by the time Tess was born, but paying
child support for nine-plus years had been his own free choice. He had taken it on without complaint.

Olivia had hoped that his family would give that fact some weight. She had hoped that they would want even some small part of the son they had lost. Apparently they did not.

So here was Tess, badly in need of help. Olivia would take out a loan to pay for more tutoring if she felt the child would go for it, but that wasn't what Tess wanted. She wanted tennis camp, had her heart set on tennis camp,
had
to go to tennis camp because two of the popular girls in her class were going, and she saw it as her one chance to excel. She had never played tennis before, but she was a good little athlete, and if she really tried, then anything was possible.

Not that Olivia had the money for tennis camp. Not that she would have the money for
food,
if she didn't find another job. She had sent résumés to dozens of museums in the hope that one would want an in-house restorer. To date, she had received six rejections. She supposed she could always go back to selling cameras, but she had hated doing that. She loved taking pictures and did it almost on instinct. Teaching others how to do it was something else. Olivia had neither the patience nor the vision. Her mind worked differently from most people's. Tess hadn't come upon dyslexia by chance.

What to do?

She had an idea. Tipping up her daughter's head, looking into that beautiful little freckled face framed by long brown curls—a legacy of the father who hadn't wanted to know her—Olivia fell in love for the gazillionth time. “Want Chinese for dinner?”

Tess's eyes lit up. “General Gao's?”

Olivia nodded. “But only after homework.”

“I'm starving
now.”

Olivia opened the refrigerator and poured a big glass of milk. “This'll tide you over. The sooner you start on your homework, the sooner we can go.”

Tess took the glass. “I have to read twenty pages.”

“Twenty?”
Twenty pages was daunting for a ten-year-old dyslexic. “Of what book?”

Tess held it up—a geography text.

“O-kay,” Olivia said, trying not to sound discouraged. “Why don't you start while I change? We'll do what's left together.” She picked up the mail and sifted idly through it on her way to the closet.
Halfway there, she turned and sank into the sofa. In her hand she held a letter that had no return address, only a Chicago postmark. It was enough.

Her heart started to pound. Okay. The handwriting looked different. But it had been four years since her mother had written. All sorts of things might have happened to explain the change. The woman might have broken her wrist and be wearing a cast. She might have lost one arm in an accident. She might have had a stroke. She might … just might be so nervous about writing to Olivia that her hand was shaky.

Olivia ripped up the flap and immediately swallowed down a sharp disappointment. Her last letter was inside the envelope, unopened. She unfolded the note with it and read,
“To whoever's writing these letters—you keep sending them to this house, but there's no Carol Jones here. Don't write again. She isn't here.”

Olivia bent forward and hugged her knees. This address was the most recent she had, so either her mother had moved right after mailing the last letter or had mistakenly put down the wrong return address—“mistakenly” being the important word. Olivia refused to believe it was deliberate. She refused to believe that her mother didn't want any contact at all. Granted, her last letter had been short and noncommittal, but she hadn't told Olivia to get lost. She had never done that. She simply had gone off on her own a week after Olivia's high school graduation. As she saw it, at that point her obligation was fulfilled. Other mothers felt that way. It wasn't so bad.

The bottom line, though, was that if Carol hadn't received her recent letters, then she didn't know where to reach Olivia now, either. So maybe she was trying. Maybe she, too, was mailing letters and getting them back. Olivia had had the post office forward mail from her old apartment to this one longer than they usually allowed, but that time had long expired. What to do now?

The phone rang. Tess started to rise, quick to do something other than read, but Olivia snapped upright, pointed her back to the chair, and went for the phone herself.

“Hello?”

“Just me again—I'm getting ready to leave here and head for the gym—I probably won't be home until eight, and then there's the news on CNN, and by the time I've had something to eat it'll be late—but I need to know if tomorrow night's a go.”

Olivia pushed a hand into her short hair and held on. “Tomorrow night?”

“The North End Bistro.” It was a new Italian restaurant, open barely a month. He had heard good things about it and was rushing to get there, as if it would close if he didn't go soon.

Olivia figured that if the restaurant closed so soon, it wasn't worth eating at. “I can't, Ted. Weeknights are hard. I've told you that.” Tess needed homework supervision. Besides, Olivia came home from dates with Ted feeling competitive and tense. Nothing about him was laid-back. Nothing.

“They don't have a reservation open on a Saturday night for three weeks—that's how popular this place is—I'm telling you, Olivia, now's the time to go.”

Suddenly irritated, Olivia said, “If it's that popular, it'll be here in a month. Make reservations then, Ted. Tomorrow night's bad.”

“Okay—okay—I'll hold the reservation just in case you change your mind—so call me later, will you?”

“Let's talk in a day or two.”

“But what about the North End Bistro?”

She fought for patience. “I said no.”

“You said you might change your mind.”

“You
said that.
I
said I couldn't make it.”

“Sounds like you're in a lousy mood—Otis must've been in a snit again—what an ornery son-of-a-B he is—good thing he's retiring—a few more years with him and you'd be a basket case—so listen, I'll call you later.”

She took a breath.
“No,
Ted. Good Lord, give me a
break!”

“Hey—don't get upset—jeez, look at the time—I have to go—much later and the meatheads will have taken over the gym—they spend their evenings there—lifting is their idea of culture—I'll call you tomorrow.” He hung up before she could argue.

Olivia stood for a moment wondering how she could get through to the man, when Tess said, “Maybe he's dyslexic. He doesn't hear, either.”

“You hear,” she scolded. Heading off to change clothes, she was struck with a sudden attack of self-pity. Between a school crisis, a maternal rejection, and Ted it had been one hell of an hour. She deserved a prize for valor.