Envious Shadows

by R.P. Burnham

  The Last To Know

  Becky Paine woke feeling tired, perceived that it was daytime, then fought the impulse to close her eyes again. Before that happened her instincts kicked in, and she listened to the baby monitor to find out how Trevor was doing. Hearing soft cooing and lip-smacking noises, she relaxed and remembered why she felt so tired. He was suffering from a bad diaper rash and had woken twice in the night to cry out his discomfort. She had changed his diaper and applied the soothing salve, but still she had to hold him for over two and a half hours all told. She remembered the feel of him, tiny and human and in pain that her soft cooing words could not heal. At least now he was sleeping peacefully.

  Something, though, was not right. She had to think for a moment before the thought hit her with a shock. She was alone in bed. She listened for sounds downstairs of Bill moving around. Five, ten, fifteen seconds, and yes, there it was, the sound of a chair scraping against the floor and then the faucet turned on. Bill must have gotten up before the alarm and turned it off. He must have showered and dressed without her hearing a thing. Stifling a yawn, she looked at the clock and again almost panicked. It was half past seven, a full hour after the time she usually got up. She swung her legs out of bed and reached for her robe. But where was Johnny? He always wanted to have breakfast with his dad, and yet she could not hear him, the world’s loudest boy, downstairs. She looked into his room on her way downstairs, becoming even more perplexed when she saw he was already up.

  In the kitchen Bill was standing at the counter going over some papers from his briefcase. He looked up and smiled. “Did you sleep okay? I mean after the two interruptions.”

  She nodded while anxiously searching for Johnny. “Where’s—”

  “—Johnny?” Bill interrupted, smiling even more broadly. “The little man is maturing. I told him he had to be quiet because Mommy needed her sleep. He and I had our cereal and talked in whispers. Only once did he forget himself and yell, ‘Hey, Daddy!’ but it didn’t wake you.” He looked towards the living room. “Johnny, come say good morning to your mother.” To Becky he explained, “The little angel has been looking at one of his picture books of animals for the last twenty minutes as quiet as a church mouse.”

  “Perhaps it’s a miracle,” Becky said facetiously, though actually her heart was swelling with pride.

  “I even changed his diaper,” Bill said with a touch of a different kind of pride. Johnny was just beginning his toilet training, but the process hadn’t included any night training yet, so he still wore a diaper to bed. He came into the kitchen with his pajama top on and a pair of fresh underwear for his lower parts. He too was smiling proudly as he came up for a hug.

  “Hey, Mommy! I was quiet for you this morning.”

  “I know you were, honey. I think you were wonderful, and Mommy loves you.” She leaned down and hugged him, feeling the usual thrill of pleasure when his little arms reached around her back not quite touching together.

  She looked up at Bill watching them with a strange look on his face as if he were stricken with a dread thought. Lately she’d seen this strange expression several times and was at a loss to understand it.

  An awkward moment passed when he saw that she perceived the expression on his face, and then he offered to keep an eye on the kids for fifteen minutes so that she could take a quick shower. “One question, though. What should I do if Trevor starts fussing?”

  “You could try to soothe him, but don’t get him up. He’ll need a bath and a change first thing, and I need to apply the zinc oxide for his diaper rash.”

  By the time she got out of the shower twenty minutes had passed and Bill was showing signs of impatience. After they exchanged a perfunctory kiss, he informed her that he might be late tonight—“no more than an hour, though, so if we eat at six I should be home by then.”

  He started out the door when she remembered something. “Oh, by the way, I talked to the secretary at the Congregational Church yesterday. Eleanor Smallwood, she seems like a nice person. She told me four is a good age to start Sunday school, though a lot of parents wait until the child is five and in school. She talked a lot about day care and starting now if we were church members, but I let that slide. Anyways, what do you think?”

  “You mean if Johnny should start at four? I don’t know. Why don’t we wait until he’s five.”

  She frowned. Bill was not against Johnny having Bible lessons and going to Sunday school, but he clearly suspected he would be roped into going to church. That’s why, she was sure, he wanted to delay. She’d already told him she would go to church alone if necessary. Like him she was not a churchgoer, but she was willing to make the sacrifice to expose Johnny to Christianity. She frowned because Bill wasn’t willing to make the same sacrifice. “Okay,” she said, “we’ll talk about it later.”

  Watching him drive away, she felt doubly dissatisfied—with him and with herself. With her awake almost every night with Trevor, they were not lovers now and had not been for a few months. She felt the distance between them and knew they were going through a dry period in their marriage, and here when he had made an effort this morning and been so kind, she opened up the lesion again by choosing a bad time to mention the Sunday school business.

  But she didn’t have time to dwell on it. Delaying her own breakfast, she went upstairs to draw the bath water for Johnny. While they waited for the tub to fill she had another session of toilet training. He only had to pee right now, so she had him lift the lid and told him to aim. She watched him being fascinated by this interesting tool he had and smiled. Unfortunately he saw the smile and turned towards her, peeing on the floor, With toilet paper she cleaned it up. Once he was in the tub happily splashing and playing with his toy boats, she went in to wake Trevor. He was fussing and irritated at first, but he refrained from crying. She brought him into the bathroom to sponge bathe him in a small plastic tub she placed on the counter. Johnny wanted her attention and for a moment she tested the water before telling him to play with his boats. The pediatrician had told her to avoid soap on Trevor’s butt since it irritated the sensitive tissue. She sponge bathed his body and then used warm water to cleanse his bottom. Her care was having results, she was glad to see. The ugly red rash was subsiding. With a soft towel she dried him, gently patting his bottom, and then applied the zinc oxide before putting a diaper on him, followed by a full-body jumper. Putting him in his bassinet, she turned her attention to Johnny. She washed his back and neck, then dried him with vigorous rubbing of the towel because he always liked that. He squealed with delight. She wrapped the towel around him to keep him warm while she went to his bedroom to choose his clothes. Although she preferred heather colors for her own clothes, she dressed him in bright colors. His long-sleeve jersey was bright yellow, his trousers purple.

  Holding Johnny’s hand and carrying Trevor with her other, they made their way downstairs carefully. She had one more chore to do before her own breakfast. She had to feed Trevor. She had breast-fed Johnny for fifteen months, but after eight months with Trevor she had trouble with her milk and had switched to formula. After warming the bottle and giving it to him, she sat at the kitchen table and hurriedly ate a bowl of cereal. She burped Trevor, then put him in the baby seat and wound it up. The swinging always soothed and delighted him. With the baby quiet and Johnny in the living room watching a children’s show on PBS, now was a good time to do the monthly bills. Still at the kitchen table, she wrote checks for the electricity, gas, phone, cable and mortgage payments. Occasionally Johnny would yell for her to come see something, so her tasks were interrupted three or four times. Next she rinsed out the breakfast dishes and ran the dishwasher. While that was running she entered all the bills into her home accounting software on their computer, which was on a small desk in the dining room. She kept meticulous records and could give the yearly and monthly household expenses down to the last penny. While at the computer she was interrupted again by Johnny asking her why there were no giraffes in Waska, Maine.
She explained that Africa was a long way away and that Africa was their home.

  She checked Trevor, and after finding him still quiet she prepared a marinade for the chicken breasts she was serving for dinner. Johnny, hearing the clatter of dishes and utensils, came into the kitchen wanting to help. His children’s show was over. She placed him on the high stool in front of the counter and let him shake the soy sauce into the marinade. With nothing else to do he quickly grew bored, but before he returned to the living room to play she told him tonight’s supper was going to taste extra good because of his help. That pleased him, and he walked into the living room looking quite proud of himself.

  She went over to Trevor and cooed at him for a bit. When the milk agreed with him, which was most of the time, and when his rash was quieted down by the ointment as now, he often spent up to an hour awake yet quiet. His little face became very happy when she leaned down in front of him. She kissed him and said over and over in a soft, cooing voice, “Mommy loves you” until he was gurgling with delight.

  The dishwasher buzzer rang. Kissing Trevor once more, she emptied it, carefully placing the dishes and bowls on the bottom of the stack so that everything got used. It was a habit she had learned from her mother, as was also the careful examination of the silverware to make sure each utensil was dry and would not tarnish.

  She remembered that her friend Lynn MacArthur and her son Phil were coming for lunch today and that she was serving egg salad sandwiches. She put some eggs on to boil and debated doing a load of laundry before deciding to wait until the afternoon. She had to go to the drugstore to get some more zinc oxide ointment; this would be a good time to get the medication for Johnny’s inner ear infection that he had suffered the last two winters whenever he got a cold. If he were to get an early fall cold, she did not want to be caught without the medicine. The prescription was on file at the drugstore, but to make sure there would be no mistake she returned to the computer to look up the medications. Benzocaine for the pain and a combination of antibiotics, Erythromycin and sulfisoxazole, were the names she’d entered into Johnny’s file two years ago. There was a note that the medical term for the disease was otitis media and another note saying that if the disease reoccurred this year the pediatrician recommended an operation on the tympantomy tubes should be performed. That note scared her, but she knew she would give her okay if it was necessary. She trusted her doctors. The rest of the material in the medical section contained her records on Johnny’s inoculations. She looked that over to see if anything was upcoming, and then brought up Trevor’s file for the same information when she saw nothing was. Trevor was also fine for several months, which she was glad to see—he had cried for a long time when he got his first shots and one of them had left behind a hard purplish bruise that was sore for two weeks.

  The eggs had boiled now for up to ten minutes; they had overboiled, in fact, as the shells were cracked in several places. She removed them from the heat and left them to cool on another burner. She went over to Trevor and was glad to see that his eyes were growing heavy. He was a very deep sleeper, so with any luck he would sleep through the entire excursion to the drugstore. She hated it when he cried in public and some people, mostly men, frowned their displeasure.

  Egg salad required mayonnaise. She went to the refrigerator to check, but before she opened the door Johnny yelled at her. “Hey, Mommy! Look at me! I’m playing ball.”

  “Just a minute, honey.” She opened the refrigerator and peered in. There it was, a jar over two-thirds full.

  In the living room she saw that Johnny had gotten hold of Bill’s softball glove. At first sight it seemed innocent enough, but looking closely she saw that he had squeezed the pocket to fit his little hand. She did not know much about softball equipment, but she did know Bill was very particular about his glove. He always stored it with a softball in the pocket. In winter he went one step further and tied a piece of rope around the glove so that the softball couldn’t move. Once years ago when she had removed the ball while moving the glove he had become very angry. Last night for some reason he had sat on the couch and pounded the ball into the pocket for a long time as he watched a TV show. She’d asked him if he was going to play this weekend, and he’d given her a strange look, as if he’d been startled out of a daydream, and said rather sadly but in a tone that didn’t invite any further inquiries, “No, it doesn’t look like we’ll be playing softball anymore this year.”

  He had left the glove on the table beside the couch, which was where Johnny found it.

  “No, no, Johnny. Don’t play with your father’s glove.” She spoke sharply.

  He looked crestfallen. His lip quivered. “Why can’t I?”

  “Daddy is very particular about his glove. He doesn’t like others messing with it.” She took it from him and replaced the ball in the pocket. Sitting down and patting the couch beside her, she said, “Sit down. Let me tell you something. You’ve got to learn to respect other people’s property. Your hand, you see, is too small for this glove. Now, what if someone took your truck without your permission and broke it? Would you like that?”

  Johnny studied her intently. His face was so serious that she had to stifle the impulse to laugh. He shook his head. “No, I like my truck.”

  “Well, Daddy likes his glove. Haven’t you seen him spending a lot of time getting it just right?”

  When he looked doubtful, she said, “You know, when he sits and pounds a ball into the pocket.”

  He brightened. “Yeah, I’ve seen that. Is he getting it just right?”

  “Yes, that’s what he calls it. Now you know your hand is much smaller than his, so when you put your hand in it as you just did, it ruins the pocket. That would make Daddy feel bad, just as you’d feel bad if Phil or Teddy took your truck and broke it. Do you understand?”

  Very solemnly he shook his head up and down. “I do.”

  Smiling, she reached down and hugged him. “Good. Now I’ve got to get you and Trevor dressed. We have to go to the drugstore.”

  She returned the books to the shelf, then went out to the breezeway to get the child halter for carrying Trevor when they got to the store. She brought it to the car, using this first exposure to the day to assess the weather conditions. It was in the sixties but a stiff breeze was blowing. She dressed Trevor for warmth and made Johnny put on his jacket before setting him on the kitchen table and putting on his sneakers, which were getting tight. She hoped they would last another month, at which time she would buy his winter boots. It took the usual five minutes to fasten the boys in their safety seats before she could back out of the yard and drive the five blocks to the in-town mall. She parked near the drugstore, unhooked the boys, got the still-sleeping Trevor into the halter without waking him, and took Johnny by the hand.

  Inside the store they passed a premature display of Halloween material and had to stop because Johnny was intrigued by a wolfman mask. He wanted to get it, but she told him it was too early. With the pharmacy at the back of the store, they had to pass many other things designed to catch the busy eye of a little boy—a soccer ball, a coloring book of dinosaurs, a wrench, and a selection of crayons, which last item, together with a new pad of paper, she got for him to keep him quiet. Trevor, sleeping through all of Johnny’s squeals, was not a problem.

  She got the ointment and ordered the medications for Johnny’s ear infection, then waited while trying to keep Johnny from darting off to look at whatever caught his eye. Many people walked by and admired her two blue-eyed and tow-headed charges; one old lady walking awkwardly with a cane took a rest beside them and said, “You have two beautiful children, my dear.”

  Her heart swelled with a foolish pride at the remark, but she maintained her decorum and said with a smile, “Thank you. They’re a handful, I must say.”

  “But worth the effort,” the old lady said as she hobbled away.

  Johnny was starting to get fidgety at the long wait. She had to constantly yank him back from his attempts to wand
er. She was telling him that it would only be a few more minutes when she looked behind her and saw Denny Genier. She got the distinct impression that he was in the process of quickly turning away before he was seen. He pretended to have turned to look at some item on the shelf and then to have looked up to see her. But she had already seen his eyes recognize her.

  “Hi, Denny,” she said and was immediately echoed by Johnny. He had been fascinated last winter when Denny and Pat Williams made a finished room for their house in the basement.

  “Oh, hi, Becky. Hi there, Johnny.”

  Her initial suspicions seemed confirmed by the way he was acting. He appeared embarrassed and ill at ease. He couldn’t keep still, and he was afraid to look her in the eye. Confused, she tried to understand his behavior. The only thing she could think of was that he was supposed to be at work and was afraid she would tell his partner Pat she had seen him. It was either something like that or embarrassment about the lack of a permit for the work they had done on the basement.

  He asked, rather awkwardly, how she had been, and then was relieved to be rescued from his discomfort by the pharmacist calling her name. He said good-bye and quickly disappeared down the next aisle. She would have to ask Bill if he knew what was wrong with his friend later tonight; with two children, one rambunctious and the other starting to wake up, demanding her attention now, she let the matter drop.

  When they got home she put Trevor, who had fallen back asleep after waking briefly in the drugstore, in the bassinet and Johnny before the television. She tidied up a bit, which mostly meant putting Johnny’s toys and picture books back on the shelves in the small hallway between the dining room and living room and returning Bill’s glove with the ball snugly resting in its pocket back to the breezeway where it was kept. The rest of the house was clean and orderly already. Once again she debated doing the daily laundry now but decided to defer it until afternoon since it wouldn’t be completed by the time her friend Lynn MacArthur and her son Phil came for lunch, and she hated to leave clothes in the dryer. When Johnny grew restless in front of the television, she decided to read to him from one of his books. They sat together on the couch to do this. She was beginning to introduce Johnny to the mysteries of the written word. Already he could recite the alphabet through the letter “L.” She pointed to a picture of a cat and then to the word C-A-T. He traced the letters with his finger and wanted to write them, so she got the new pad of paper and the crayons, and he made a few efforts, not too successfully, at writing the word. They continued reading, looking at pictures and occasionally trying to write them—he did the word “tree” quite nicely, though she suspected it was still a little too early to expect much comprehension—for another half hour; then Trevor started fussing.

  She had just finished cleaning him up, applying ointment and putting a new diaper on him when Lynn and Phil arrived. Johnny announced their arrival. “Phil’s here! Phil’s here!” he yelled in his loudest voice. He was so excited that he had to run around the kitchen table once just to expel the excess energy.

  Lynn was thirty years old. She had never lost the weight she put on when pregnant and as a result her large thighs, lower abdomen and behind contrasted rather incongruously with her tiny head, a condition that was even more obvious because she wore her reddish-brown hair brushed back into a ponytail and flat on the sides. Becky had often thought that with a different hairstyle, with fuller hair on the sides, she would look much better, but she had never dared suggest this to her friend. She was aware of her own blond good looks and didn’t want to appear catty or condescending. Nevertheless Lynn’s face was still pretty. Her freckled complexion was classically Scottish; her nose was small and delicate, her lips full and sexy, and her dark eyes flashed vivaciously when she became animated. She was a schoolteacher, but like her was taking off five years to be a mother.

  They were good friends, though they had very different personalities. Where she was serious and efficient, Lynn was facetious and laid-back. These differences led to much teasing on Lynn’s part. Becky, in fact, never saw Lynn but that she expected to be the target of some good-natured ribbing. She had long ago resigned herself to being the kind of person others found impossible not to tease. She knew that she was orderly and efficient to an almost compulsive degree and that others who weren’t found her approach to life inscrutable. Even Bill would tease her sometimes about the way she ran the household. Referring to such things as how she knew where everything was all the time, how she could account for every last cent that was spent, how she planned meals two weeks in advance so that if the grocery store didn’t have an item one week they would likely have it the next, how she kept phone lists for every utility and every repairman, he would say, “Hey, Becky, you’re not running Charlie Davenport’s agency anymore.” The Davenport Insurance Agency was where she worked when they were first married right after graduating from Bates College. Bill had landed a good job with an accounting firm in Portland, and they had decided to live in Waska. A business major like Bill, she had interviewed at the largest insurance agency in the Waska-Bedford area once they had settled into their first apartment. She started as a junior executive, but very quickly her organizational skills and efficiency were recognized and she was promoted. Within two years she was virtually running the place, and Charlie was able to do what he had longed to do for years, become semiretired and live the life of a gentleman of leisure. Her leaving to become a full-time mother created a vacuum in the agency that necessitated Charlie’s return, and that is why every time he saw her he would beg her to come back. She would put him off, saying she needed a few more years before the children were older, but his offer did keep strong that part of her ego that wanted worldly success and recognition. It was because of her boss’s respect that she could accept Lynn’s frequent and Bill’s occasional ribbing about her efficiency with equanimity and good humor. She knew her own worth.

  Efficiency was not, however, the only or even the chief target of Lynn’s bantering. Her husband was a lawyer who had political ambitions in the Democratic Party. Becky was a Republican. In itself this would not be sufficient grounds for satiric sallies, but two things invariably amused Lynn. First, Bill generally voted Democratic so that their votes canceled each other’s. For some reason Lynn seemed to find this hilarious. Her more usual target was what she regarded as Becky’s inconsistencies. As a responsible citizen and mother, Becky was very concerned about the environment. She had talked Bill out of buying a sports utility vehicle just last year because they were notorious gas-guzzlers. She was also a fanatical recycler; she approved every scheme to set aside wilderness areas; she opposed drilling both offshore and in Alaska. In her own house she conserved as much as possible. Every bulb was an energy-saver; their furnace was a high-tech efficient unit; all their windows were likewise energy efficient. Lynn, while approving of all these measures and following many of them herself, would ask, “How can you vote Republican and be green? The two don’t mix.” Becky would answer that the Republican Party stood for individual rights and responsibilities but that many of the party’s leaders took this belief in freedom too far on such issues as ecology. It was possible to be fiscally conservative and concerned about the earth at the same time. Teddy Roosevelt was the first great conservation president, and he was a Republican. She was not the only socially progressive and fiscally conservative person in the world; her whole family were the same. “Yeah, maybe,” Lynn would say, “but still it must be lonely thinking that way and belonging to a party where the only green that is appreciated is on a dollar bill.”

  Where they came together and shared beliefs that were the basis of their friendship was in the conception of a mother. Both knew that politics was at best one percent of life; the rest was simply being human. The best politics was to produce decent, thoughtful and tolerant human beings. Their whole life now was focused on raising their sons to be that kind of human being. Both of them felt that being a mother was the most important job in the world. Becky’s best
friend in high school had bad parents who took little direct interest in her welfare so that she did not feel loved or appreciated, and her insecurity ruined her life. She got into drugs and promiscuous sex with the result that she was pregnant at age twenty. She dropped out of college, got married to another man, divorced him after birthing another child, and lived hand-to-mouth as a single parent of two children. She still did drugs so that the last Becky had heard the state was close to taking her children away from her. Her oldest child, a boy of ten, was constantly in trouble at school, disruptive and violent. There it was: bad parenting ruining a child and that child in turn ruining her children’s life. Lynn could tell similar stories. Whatever else they did in life, avoiding these destructive ways was paramount. Their serious discussions were almost always on this subject.

  Usually they did not arrive at this seriousness until a great deal of bantering occurred; today, however, Lynn came in the door with a serious, almost grim expression on her face that signaled even before she spoke that teasing facetiousness was not going to happen. The boys hurried into the living room to see the lettering Johnny had done earlier. Before long they began making a racket, and Lynn, wincing as if she had a headache and speaking very sharply, said, “Okay, tiger, quiet down in there.” When Becky asked if something was the matter, she appeared embarrassed. She dropped her eyes and explained that Phil had been fussing all morning. She did not know if it was his breakfast not agreeing with him or something else—maybe just nerves because he was excited to be seeing his best friend.

  “He had a temper tantrum,” she went on. “When I told him he couldn’t play a video game his father had got for him because it was too violent, he actually had a tantrum. He’s never done that before.”

  “Boys can be willful,” Becky offered as an explanation. She was glad Johnny had never had a tantrum where he screamed at her. “I had a small problem with Johnny today. He was playing with Bill’s softball glove—you know how particular Bill is about that piece of leather. Luckily he listened to me when I explained why he must not touch it. He was very quiet. I worry about the day when he does have a tantrum, though. What did you do?”

  Lynn laughed nervously. “I’m afraid Phil spent a lot of time-out time staring at the corner. He was calmer after I let him come forth.”

  “Trevor has slept through most of the morning. I almost wish he wouldn’t. It probably means he’ll be awake again like he was last night.”

  After a moment of silence, Lynn asked, “Were you up again?”

  She nodded. “Two and a half hours this time. If he doesn’t wake by lunch I’ll have to get him up. It’ll be time for him to eat.”

  “Any solid food yet?”

  “Just starting.” Becky watched Lynn. Mostly she was looking towards the living room, which was around the corner, aurally monitoring the boys. But something wasn’t right. As they talked a strange feeling began growing on her. It wasn’t merely that Lynn was not her usual bantering, facetious self; it was that she wasn’t herself period. She exhibited many of the same symptoms she had seen earlier in the morning with Denny Genier. Like him, she was distracted and ill at ease. She did not seem comfortable looking her in the eyes. Becky found this similarity vaguely disturbing. Their conversation, usually spontaneous and nonstop, was labored.

  At lunchtime Lynn’s behavior passed beyond distracted to something very odd. When she started telling Lynn about feeling bothered at not seeing Lowell and Fiona Sparrow for the past month, Lynn at first became palpably uncomfortable and tried to change the subject. Nervously looking around the kitchen, her eyes seized upon the picture mounted on the wall above the table of Bill with Johnny in his lap and her holding Trevor. “Is that a new picture?” she asked.

  Becky put her sandwich down and stared at her. “No, of course not. Don’t you remember helping me mount it last spring?”

  For a moment Lynn looked close to panic before a mishap with Phil’s sandwich allowed her an escape. He had picked it up with his hands holding the top with the result that much of the egg salad fell out onto the table, his lap and the floor. By the time the mess was cleaned up and Phil had been given a lesson on how to hold his newly made sandwich in the middle, she had recovered her equanimity.

  The rest of lunch and the cleanup after lunch passed without anything odd happening. They went out to the backyard so that the boys could play on the swing and slide set. With Trevor in his bassinet beside her lawn chair and both of them sipping a cup of herbal tea as they kept an eye on the boys, Becky starting talking about her row of rosebushes. She had planted them from dried sticks she got from a mail-order gardening center, and after a slow start two years ago they had bloomed into healthy plants that were about waist high and had been flowering constantly throughout the summer.

  Lynn listened to her not particularly attentively. For a moment she stared into vacancy; then she appeared to come to a decision. “Becky,” she said in a confidential tone, “let me ask you something. Have you noticed anything different with Bill lately?”

  Becky turned and regarded her for a long moment. She looked both concerned and mysterious, as if she had a secret. “What do you mean?”

  Only now did she realize she was staring so intently at her that Lynn was feeling self-conscious. She dropped her eyes. “You know, has he been distant or sullen or anything like that?”

  She shook her head and looked towards Johnny on the swing. She thought for a moment and then remembered something. “I can say one thing. I’ve been at Bill for several weeks to fix the swing. Some of the bolts have become loose so that it wobbles. When something needs fixing around the house—for you know Bill is not very handy—he usually asks his brother Lowell to fix it. But as I started to say at lunch, lately for some reason we haven’t been seeing Lowell. That’s rather strange because he was over here all the time before.”

  Lynn pursed her full lips and frowned. Becky could see her mind making connections. Her apprehension grew.

  “Why do you think Lowell is keeping away—if that’s what he’s doing?”

  “I do think that’s what he’s doing. At first I thought it was because Lowell was newly in love with his girlfriend Fiona Sparrow, but I’ve heard from my mother-in-law that they visit regularly. But, Lynn, you’re asking me this because you know something.”

  Just then they were interrupted. “Hey, Mommy! Look at me! I’m swinging standing up!”

  “No, no, Johnny. Don’t do that. It’s dangerous.”

  She watched Johnny obediently sit down and continue swinging, then turned expectantly to Lynn.

  “It may be nothing, but it disturbed me. My sister-in-law—you’ve met her, right? Joan Fournier?” When Becky nodded, she continued. “She said on more than one occasion Bill has been seen with a woman in Portland—”

  Instantly she understood all the mysterious airs and nervous distraction Lynn had been showing. Feeling as if her trust had been violated, she hurriedly interrupted. “Yes, yes. He’s told me that he’s eaten out with a female colleague or secretary when they worked late.”

  Lynn regarded her with a look of pity that caused a wave of resentment to rise up and burn across her cheek, but before she could retort, Lynn stated the fact that changed everything.

  “But this was in a bar, a rock ‘n’ roll club.”

  She felt too numb to speak. The burning feeling in her cheeks grew more intense. She fought the need to cry.

  “He was seen twice. I thought you should know, though I’m sorry, real sorry.”

  Becky stood and clenched and unclenched her fists. She had a sudden need to hug her children. She needed to feel love, not this terrible desolation that had seized her body and soul. Then she was angry. “I know what you’re thinking, but why should I believe the idle gossip of some woman I hardly know. Her poison tongue can say anything and you’ll believe it.”

  Patiently, Lynn listened to her. Now that she had told her secret all signs of distraction, of being ill at ease and nervous, had disappeared. H
er face expressed sorrow, and she spoke calmly and with deep concern. “I had a lot of trouble believing it too because I know Bill. But Joan had no reason to lie. Maybe there can still be an explanation for drinking beer and dancing in a club, but I do think it looks bad. I thought I wouldn’t be a good friend if I heard this and didn’t tell you. I get the impression a lot of people know about this.”

  “Did you say dancing? He was seen dancing as well?”

  “That’s what Joan said.”

  “And that a lot of people know about it?”

  “Again, that’s what Joan said.”

  Both lapsed into silence, though this time there was nothing awkward about it and Becky could feel Lynn’s concern and sympathy. She still felt the need to hug Johnny and Trevor, and the stinging in her eyes told her she wanted to cry, but before she gave in to tears she came to a decision. “I don’t know what to say, Lynn. I don’t even know what to think. But before I believe these stories I have to talk to Bill.”

  Lynn reached across the table and put her hand on Becky’s arm. “That makes sense to me.”

  Trevor stirred and made a little cry. It was enough to justify picking him up and feeling his total need for her. When she did she felt better. She smoothed his thin blond hair and wiped the sleep from his eyes while she carefully kept him out of the direct rays of the sun. Lynn, understanding her need, went over to the boys. Alone, she started cooing to her baby. “Mommy loves you,” she cooed. “Mommy thinks you’re wonderful.” Then the tears flowed, though she kept herself under enough control not to sob.

  Lynn maintained a discreet distance and busied herself pushing the boys on their swing seats so that they squealed with delight. When Johnny yelled, “Hey, Mommy! Look at me!” she had cried herself out and was able to join them.

  They played with the boys for a while, and then it was time for Lynn and Phil to go. Johnny did not make too much of a fuss; it was time for his nap and he was exhibiting signs of sleepiness. Lynn’s parting words were indirect and vague, but still spoke volumes. “Call me if you need to talk later,” she said.

  She was all right at first because she had things to do, things that could occupy her mind. She put Johnny to bed for his nap and settled Trevor into his swing. He was awake now, but like a cat he slept more hours than he was awake. Soon he too would drift off again and then she would bring him upstairs to his crib. She cleaned up the lunch things, putting the remainder of the egg salad into a plastic container and rinsing the dishes and putting them into the dishwasher. She went into the living room and tidied up the mess the boys had made. Johnny’s attempts at writing she saved in a folder which later would go into a scrapbook she was keeping of his childhood milestones. Back in the kitchen, she saw that Trevor was already close to being asleep. She picked him up, which caused him to start fussing, and brought him upstairs. She looked into Johnny’s room and saw that he was already asleep. She put the baby in his crib and stayed with him until sleep closed his heavy lids.

  She gathered up the dirty laundry in the upstairs basket and brought it down to the basement. Putting the load into the washing machine, she saw on the shelf above a vase she used to put flowers in. It was an ordinary translucent vase of glass tinted blueish, teardrop shaped and about eight inches high. Looking at it, tears suddenly welled in her eyes. It had been a long time since Bill had given her roses.

  She started thinking of the first time he had given this token of love. They were under-graduates at Bates College and becoming serious though not yet in “love” when one Saturday night he broke a date. He was supposed to pick her up in her dorm room at 7:00 and never showed. He and two friends had driven to Fryeburg, Maine to help another student move his parents after a fire which had damaged but not destroyed their house. Bill hadn’t been able to get in touch with her before they left, and the fire, like all fires, had happened suddenly and demanded speedy action. They went, spent four hours helping rescue items damaged more from water than fire and then left at four P.M. to get back to Bates for the evening. A breakdown on a secondary road in the middle of nowhere marooned them for hours, and they didn’t get back to the campus until midnight. The next day Bill found a florist open on Sunday and ordered a dozen long-stem roses to be delivered to her room. She had been angry after a fitful night of broken sleep, thinking he had gone somewhere on a lark and deciding that if he could be that casual he must not love her. The roses showed her doubts to be groundless, and when he shyly knocked on her door an hour later they had declared their love. Ever after roses had been their special flower. Bill would buy them for every occasion or to apologize for sharp words that had been unwisely spoken or when the boys were born or sometimes for no reason at all except to say that he loved her.

  The thought, the wish, that tonight he would come home with roses…

  Yes, they were going through a dry period, all her time taken with the two boys, his boys as much as hers. But what if what Lynn said was true? A chill of horror, of despair, crept up her spine. Momentarily her knees felt watery, and instinctively she reached for the top of the washing machine to steady herself. She stood leaning against the machine with both hands, perfectly still and staring at the empty vase, while she thought about Bill. She saw him waving at her with his face bisected by a happy smile and mouthing the words—for he was across campus too far away to hear—“I’ve got to get to class.” She saw him as they exchanged their wedding vows looking handsome and manly in his tuxedo. She remembered the tears of joy he shed after Johnny was born. She thought of all the times they kissed long and deep simply because they were going to work and would not see each other for nine long hours.

  She couldn’t imagine life without him at her side.

  Just then she heard Johnny calling from upstairs. “Hey, Mommy!” the voice said, so insistent, so sure of love and response. No, she would not believe it. It was impossible. Even Lynn didn’t quite believe it, did she? And, besides, wasn’t there an explanation? Didn’t he say he was working late and might have to grab a bite to eat with his secretary on those nights the rumors spoke about? Gossips are always malicious and ready to exaggerate, always changing details to put the darkest possible shade on innocent actions.

  Passing the phone in the kitchen on her way up to Johnny, she saw the phone list tacked onto the bulletin board on the wall above. She stopped and looked at it while uninvited her mind played her a succession of images, the strange stricken look on Bill’s face she had seen lately, Denny Genier’s awkward discomfort, Lynn’s face while she spoke of events in Portland. Among the numbers for doctors and tradesmen and friends, her eye went to Charlie Davenport’s name, and she realized what she was thinking before she actually thought it. If Bill and she separated, she would probably have to go back to work. To have this thought, to need to have it, was too much for her, and she had to fight a mighty battle so that when she got to Johnny’s room he would not see his mother crying.