Proper Care and Maintenance of Friendship (9781609417291) Page 22

  Kate’s lips curled into a smile. “You’ve become a mother.”

  Jo nearly spewed a mouthful of coffee all over her nicely tailored suit. Seizing the steering wheel and her coffee with one hand, she groped for a tissue with the other. “Well, Lordy sakes, Kate. You can’t just up and say things like that to me. Messes with my self-image.”

  “I watched you with her last night.” When Kate had arrived at Jo’s place, she’d had to resist the urge to gather Grace into her lap and smother the poor child with hugs and kisses. That urge had been more for her than for Grace, whom Kate pegged right away as a prickly-pear type. “Her gaze followed you all over the room. And you noticed the moment she got tired. With one word from you, she marched up into her bedtime routine like she’d been doing it in your apartment all her life. Shoot me for thinking it, but I didn’t expect it out of the Mistress of the Universe.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, this mothering thing has got me thinking.” Jo patted her chest and lap blindly with the tissue, searching for splatter. “It got me thinking of that associate we lost last year, Laura Henley—sharp as a tack, imaginative, came up with the idea of the cliffhanger commercials for that clothing line. She left because my boss wouldn’t let her telecommute two days a week so she could spend some time with her newborn. It reminded me of Ginger Schein—a brilliant graphic designer—sidelined after she had to cut her hours to take care of her aging mother. It’s got me thinking there’s a lot of talent going out the door.”

  “I smell a business plan.”

  “I might be needing an exit strategy after we lose this account,” Jo said, “but it’s more than that. With Grace in my house these past few weeks, it’s been a real challenge to do my job and take care of her in the way that she needs. There doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day.”

  “Proud of you, Jo.”

  “Hush you up. I’m still going to St. Lucia in February.”

  “Good for you. I’ll be spending my February at basketball games in middle-school gyms that smell like old sneakers.”

  “You’re not going to really do that, are you, sugar?”

  “Yes, I am.” She curled deeper into Jo’s sweater, wishing she could curl around Anna, Tess, and Michael, wishing she could just see them right now. She raised her knees and contracted into a ball, trying not to let panic seize her again. “Right now, I’m looking forward to sausage-and-pepper heroes and seeing that fat basketball referee with the limp—”

  “No, I don’t mean basketball—I mean, you’re not going to completely cave in to Paul, are you?”

  Kate tucked her hot chocolate back in its holder. She avoided Jo’s eye by perusing the Joss Stone songs on the iPod. Kate knew that Paul—no matter how furious he was right now—would allow her back in the house. He needed her to pick up his suits from the dry cleaner and make the kids’ lunches every night and to settle the kids back into their routine. If there was one thing she’d learned from this whole disaster, it was that she’d mastered something over fifteen years: running a household and raising kids.

  And there loomed the dangerous eye of the vortex. For the kids, she would make any sacrifice. She’d submit to her old life—give up skydiving, anything—just to be able to care for them again. For the sake of Tess, Michael, and Anna, she’d even continue in a marriage to a man who might not be so sure he loved her anymore.

  “Kate!” Jo nudged Kate’s shoulder. “You’re not just going to cave, are you?”

  She cocked her head. “Define ‘cave.’ ”

  “Sugar, you know he’s not the only one wronged here—”

  “Paul’s going to see it that way.”

  “Then it’s your job to make Paul see sense.” Jo reached over blindly, yanking the sleeve of the sweater Kate was wearing. With one manicured fingernail, Jo tapped the fading remnants of the henna design on Kate’s hand. “This is a sign of the old Kate,” she said, “and I love that girl. I loved that you hurled yourself out of an airplane. I loved that you rode an elephant through the Indian jungle. I’m thrilled that you spent some time with a Nigerian gunrunner—”

  “English, actually. Schooled at Oxford. But it’s hard to think about that,” Kate said, as she tugged the sleeve down over her knuckles again. “Especially when the bill for my forbidden pleasure is about to come due.”

  “Honey, it wasn’t exactly a sex tour you took in Bangalore. No. No more, Kate.” Jo seized the iPod out of Kate’s lap and ran a thumb over the menu. “No more Nina, no more Joss, no more Amy Winehouse. No more wailing, whining women. You’re depressing me.”

  “Hey, it’s your iPod.”

  “Hon, you just can’t cave. You can’t do that to yourself. Or to me.” Jo ran her thumb around and around, searching the menu as she steered one-handed. “If you give in to him without fighting for your relationship, you’ll be no better off than before you jumped out of an airplane.”

  “Life before skydiving was pretty damn good,” Kate muttered. “I had a nice house. Great kids. Insurance policies. Sex on Tuesdays and Saturdays—”

  “I’m not listening to this. Don’t you dare tell me you can’t have it all. I’ve got a kid of my own now, Kate. I’m counting on you to show me I can still have a full life.”

  Kate reached for her hot chocolate again. She didn’t know what to say. She’d thought she had a full life until Rachel had sent her skydiving. Maybe Rachel had realized, long before Kate did, that her relationship with Paul was dying.

  No.

  “Here, let’s listen to this.” Jo pressed the play button and tossed the iPod back on Kate’s lap. “And, girl, I want to hear you sing.”

  “Why? You like bad singing?”

  Jo’s grin spread. “Remember that karaoke bar we used to go to when you were working downtown? You always got the most applause.”

  “I was blonde.” She stretched out a strand of hair. “Naturally blonde.”

  “And you sounded like a wounded hound. Come on, don’t worry, this BMW’s soundproof. Sing at the top of your lungs, honey. I want you to feel it.”

  Kate glanced at the iPod as the music started. Gloria Gaynor. “I Will Survive.” She rolled her eyes. “Hold on, let me blow the dust off this one.”

  “Go ahead, sugar, mock it. But George Michael’s next. And you know every word.”

  Kate suddenly remembered a time years ago, when the kids were small, and she and Paul had driven to Ohio to visit her mother, and they were so punch-drunk from listening to Disney tunes that they started making up their own raunchy words, until Paul could barely breathe he was laughing so much.

  Kate’s singing stalled on a sob.

  “Hell, Kate.” Jo took the exit ramp off the highway. “That was supposed to cheer you up.”

  “Memory’s a bitch.” She peered out the tinted glass at the sign that welcomed her to her hometown. “Let’s get this over with, huh?”

  The house came into view. Kate’s gaze skimmed across the peeling paint and the streak of greenish moss on the roof shingles by the gutter. Anna’s bike sprawled in the driveway next to Michael’s skateboard and an overturned bucket of bubbles. The front yard sported an elaborate maze made of lawn chairs, towels, and a pup tent, bound together with jump ropes and anchored with border stones pulled from around the rhododendrons.

  Jo pulled the car close to the curb. With a sore, fluttering heart, Kate unfolded her aching body from the front seat, seized by the sudden urge to freeze this moment in time. She wanted to capture the sight of her home, just as it looked right now—standing solid amid the buffeting winds—in all its weathered, vibrantly flawed, and gloriously chaotic beauty.

  “Hey! Mom’s home!”

  The front door flew open. Tess raced down the walkway. She dropped to her knees to crawl through one of the towel tents and then flung herself out the other end so hard that Kate tumbled back against Jo’s car.

  “Finally! Mom! I’m so glad you’re home. Finally!”

  Kate squeezed her—she couldn’t help her
self, she held on tight, because she knew in a minute Tess would pull away, embarrassed—but Tess only jumped more, vibrating in her excitement.

  “I’m so glad you’re back! You wouldn’t believe the trouble we’ve had! Grandma was such a pill! And I nearly got kicked off the team! But I didn’t, because Daddy had a long talk with the coach and told him all about you going off to India and all, and then he let me stay. And we won Saturday’s game—”

  Kate drew away long enough to smooth the bangs off Tess’s brow and gaze with love at the flash of her braced teeth.

  “—that means we’re going to the semifinals next week! Can you believe it? Helena says we’re never going to beat Caldwell East, that they’ve got players head and shoulders taller than us, but I—”

  “Mama’s home!”

  Anna sprung out of a pup tent wearing a tutu of purple tulle. Squeezing herself under a draped towel, Anna ran toward them and shoved every ounce of her fifty-two pounds between her sister and Kate’s knees. With one arm around Tess’s back, Kate crouched down and pulled Anna against her, crushing the tulle. Anna gifted her with a small, wet kiss.

  “Look, Mom!” Anna opened a fist to reveal a pile of candy corns, white and orange like the ring around her mouth. “I’ve got Halloween candy!”

  “Yum,” Kate said, drowning in those enormous brown eyes. “How did you convince Grandma to let you have that?”

  “Grandma doesn’t know.” Anna leaned in with a secretive little grin. “Daddy said I could have them.”

  “Mom, Mom,” Tess said, “can we have sausage and peppers tonight? Or real lasagna? Grandma’s been feeding us stuff you wouldn’t believe, and Daddy said…”

  Through the barrage of Tess’s narrative, and above Anna’s head, Kate glimpsed Michael, who’d come around the far side of the family minivan and now fretted with his skateboard in the driveway. Catching his eye through the flop of his bangs, she raised her hand. With an uncertain smile, he returned her breezy wave. Then, abruptly, he slapped the board onto its wheels, shoved off down the street, and thrust his hands deep in his pockets.

  “Are you listening, Mom? Because Helena really wants to sleep over tomorrow night to study math but also she needs a ride to soccer the next day….”

  But Kate wasn’t listening, because the front door had swung open, and Paul stood framed in the doorway.

  She tightened her grip on the girls as she straightened up. He wore a Caltech T-shirt, the black logo faded and cracked, and the fabric so softened by washings that it clung to his chest. A dishcloth lay across his shoulder, as if he’d just come from the kitchen.

  Jo came up beside her. “I’ll hang out for a while.” She reached over to mess Anna’s hair in greeting, muttering for Kate’s ears only, “Just to make sure there are no serious incidents of domestic abuse.”

  Paul loped down the stairs and strode across the flagstones, pausing just on the other side of the pup tent that crossed the walkway. “Girls,” he said, pulling the dishcloth off his shoulder. “Find something to do in the house.”

  Paul’s voice forced Kate’s heart rate up into aerobic territory. Tess and Anna sensed the tension—after an exchanged glance, they skittered off.

  Kate watched them go, not just to drink in the sight of two ponytails swinging, but because her pulse was pounding dangerously and she wasn’t ready to look Paul straight in the face. It was as if her whole body were wired, and someone had just flicked the switch. Though he stood a good five feet away, with a stretch of nylon tent waist-high between them, he was so here. It was the intensity of his concentration. She hadn’t experienced this kind of laser-beam awareness from him in a very, very long while.

  She tightened her grip on the strap of her carry-on bag to maintain balance. “I appreciate,” she said, in a voice too hoarse to be her own, “that you kept the kids home from school today.”

  “Half-day.” He wiped his hands in the dishcloth like he was pulling off skin. “Teacher conferences.”

  She winced. “Well, at least you didn’t send them all on play dates.”

  “You can bet I thought about it.”

  Her gaze flew to his. She felt the shock of his bright-blue eyes. She felt the shock of the sight of him, too—how tightly his skin stretched across his cheeks, how rigidly he held his shoulders, how thick the scruff had grown on the line of his jaw. She’d seen him like this once before—when he’d been under job-threatening pressure to deliver a beta version of a computer game, and she’d found him asleep twice in his office chair, his cheek on the keyboard. It was fury that kept him upright now, but Kate could see that Paul was approaching the point of utter exhaustion.

  Guilt came in waves.

  “Hey, Paul.” Jo slapped a protective hand on Kate’s shoulder. “Can’t say I haven’t seen you looking better.”

  “Jo.”

  “Don’t you think that it might be wise to bring this show inside?”

  “Nope.” He flung the dishcloth over his shoulder. “I don’t give a damn about the neighbors. If I did, I wouldn’t have left this mess here up for three days to kill my lawn. If my wife has anything to say, she can do it while I take care of this house and this family.”

  His words cut deep. She stood wincing as Jo’s hand slipped off her shoulder, and her friend backed away. With shaking fingers, Kate shoved her hair out of her eyes. She’d had twenty hours on an airplane to think about this first conversation. Yet now, with Paul reaching across the tent to work the knotted rope that held it to a chair, the explanations she’d practiced over and over caught behind her teeth.

  Well, at least she knew how to begin.

  “Paul… I’m so very, very sorry.”

  Paul’s expression flickered. The tiny contraction of small muscles was barely discernible—except to her, the one who loved him best.

  “I know that sounds really lame,” she said, “but I really mean it. I never should have left you, or the kids, so abruptly.”

  “That is the first damn thing you’ve got right in weeks.” He yanked the rope free and let it drop. “But ‘sorry’ isn’t going to cut it.”

  “I know.”

  “You left us—”

  Left us.

  “—and I keep waiting to hear a reason why.”

  “I’ve been trying to tell you—”

  “Over satellite connections,” he retorted, working on the knot on the other side of the tent. “From the back of a damn elephant, while riding motor scooters through Bangalore—”

  “—and if you’ll just stop and listen for a moment, I’ll try to do it better.”

  He gave her a smoldering look as he freed the pup tent and moved stiffly to the next section of the maze. Tentatively, Kate shuffled parallel to him. She fingered the knot of a jump rope tied on the edge of a lawn chair. The rope was damp, and the knot pulled tight. It’d be just as hard to unravel as the truth about their marriage.

  “That T-shirt, you wore it on our honeymoon,” she said, glancing briefly at a pale spot upon Paul’s shirt, where she’d dripped bleach in one of the early years of their marriage.

  He shrugged one shoulder impatiently.

  “Do you remember our honeymoon, Paul? Do you remember when we took that walk to the lava fields of Volcano National Park?”

  She knew he remembered. She saw the memory playing across the angry lines of his brow. That night, they’d walked carefully with flashlights along the marked route after dark, getting closer and closer to the heat, the smell of sulfur, and the dangerous red glow of the lava. They’d watched how the molten rock sprayed sparks, how it hissed every time a rivulet touched the sea, where new land was born.

  “I remember everything,” she murmured. “I remember standing next to you in the darkness. I remember holding your hand. I remember thinking about the years to come, and the new life we would someday make together. The baby we’d call Tess—”

  “Kate.” Words dammed behind his lips; she saw the angry red swell of them in his throat. “Get to the point.”
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  “This is the point. It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all along.” Kate felt a moment of dizziness. It was the same sensation she’d felt approaching the open door of an airplane, just before stepping into the void. “I think the problem with our marriage might have begun just after Tess was born.”

  His head shot up. His fingers stilled on a knot. His pupils widened, and he swayed back on his heels.

  “A good part of it was my fault.” She let the words tumble, while he was still processing, knowing she might not have a chance to say anything more if she didn’t say it now. “Having that baby scared the hell out of me. I was so afraid of screwing up. Send me into a company that’s kept handwritten records for thirty years, and I’ll get the whole thing straightened up in a few weeks—but this? Ten pounds of mewling infant? There were no guidelines for that, there were no semi-annual reviews, there was no ladder to climb, and I was lost—”

  “Since Tess?” His cocked his head. “Since Tess?”

  “—and so I overcompensated, like I always do. I read every freakin’ book and played Mozart while she napped and bought every educational shape-sorting toy. And I just couldn’t stop when Michael and Anna came along. It just intensified, it built upon itself, and before I knew it I was running the PTA and shuttling them to soccer—”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere, because that’s what this is about.” He yanked a freed rope and sent it whirling across the yard. “You doing too much with the kids.”

  “I know.”

  “Michael in two sports, Tess on a travel team.” He hurled a damp towel to the ground behind him. “Anna in gymnastics—”

  “I never meant for it to get so—”

  “—and you,” he continued, kicking a bucket of pebble soup out of his way, “you treating sex like it’s something to cross off your list.”

  From somewhere far away, Kate heard Jo make a strangled little sound, but only in passing, because now it was her turn to reel with the impact of his words. The truth pinched hard. She remembered writing it down once. “Have sex with Paul,” she’d scribbled. Right after “Tess’s soccer practice” but just before “Anna’s bath.”