by Carla Damron
“Then nobody would notice if you left. I’ll cover for you.” Tonya couldn’t complain; Marion had done the same for her more times than she could count.
Marion ground her cigarette into the kitty litter filling the urn. Tonya eyed the door, knowing she had a pile of work waiting, as Marion lit another Salem.
“I’d better get inside,” Tonya said.
Marion ignored her. “Guess what I found out? Janet is getting a raise.”
“Who told you that?”
“I was sorting Mr. Jamison’s outgoing mail and there was a memo to her. I sort of read it.”
“You sort of read it?” Reading correspondence that wasn’t addressed to you was forbidden. An unpardonable sin. Ruthless would fire her for less.
“The envelope wasn’t sealed. Anyway, Jamison’s giving Ms. Cleavage a nice fat paycheck.” Marion frowned at the lit end of her Salem.
“Damn.” Tonya had never liked Janet Willowsky. She dressed like people on TV: toned legs under her short skirts, boobs bulging out of low cut tops. Mr. Jamison couldn’t help but stare whenever Janet was in the room. Her breasts were impressive, and probably expensive, but not worth a raise.
“She’s been going to school,” Marion said. “Just got her CLA, whatever the hell that is.”
“It means Certified Legal Assistant. She must have been going to Tech.”
“Janet doesn’t do one damn thing that we don’t do. It isn’t fair. She’ll be making over eight hundred dollars a week!”
“No way.” Tonya couldn’t imagine that sort of salary. She made less than five hundred and hadn’t had a raise since she started at the firm three years ago. Janet was in her second year.
“I think Jamison’s using the CLA thingie to give her more money. He’s awarding the raise to her bosoms,” Marion said.
Tonya laughed. It felt good, after her morose morning, but then a tinge of guilt tightened her stomach. The Hastings family wouldn’t be laughing any time soon, would they?
“She is not better than you or me. I swear, I’m gonna buy me a push-up bra and wave my girls at Old Man Jamison. See what kind of promotion I get.” Marion cupped her breasts the size of honeydews and shook them. Tonya glanced around to make sure they were alone so Marion didn’t get herself fired.
Would Janet’s job change? She might get assignments to do legal research and client interviews, something Tonya always wanted to do. Just last spring, Ruth got to interview four witnesses to an industrial accident, and had discovered that management had fudged some inspection reports about safety violations. The settlement had been a hundred thousand per plaintiff, thanks to Ruth. Her job had meaning that Tonya envied. You’d think Ruth would be in a better mood.
“If Jamison can give that bottle-blond twinkie forty thousand, then he can give me a raise, too.” Marion punctuated her words with the lit end of her cigarette.
“If he knew how you found out he’d fire you.”
Marion lifted a shoulder in an exaggerated shrug. “I could find another job.”
“You seen the papers? It’s not so easy these days.”
Of course, the medical section of the help-wanteds had plenty of postings, something Tonya’s mother loved to point out. She’d gone to nursing school when Tonya was seven, determined to make a better life for herself. But it meant Tonya went straight from school to the after-school program at a local church. When her mom was late picking her up, the teachers got annoyed, glancing at their watches, donning coats and standing at the doorway waiting for her. Sometimes Tonya worried that her mom wouldn’t come, that she had been forgotten. Once her mother finished school and married Dr. Leonard, along came Buddy. Tonya became an afterthought, shuffled between parents. A week at Mom’s, a week at Dad’s, not belonging in either place.
Byron would never feel that way. If Tonya had a mantra, that would be it. Byron would always, always feel wanted and loved, no matter how broke they were.
“What exactly does it takes to become a CLA?” Marion asked.
“Fifteen months of coursework. Then you have to work for a year and take a test.”
“You’ve looked into it.”
“Last Christmas when I was bored to tears from putting mailing labels on Mr. J’s Christmas cards.” There had been six hundred of them. Six hundred Christmas cards, and Mr. Jamison was Jewish.
The CLA program at Tech had some interesting classes, but she couldn’t afford school. And no way she’d have time to study, not with her job, and Byron, and John not being much help at home.
“Maybe we should look into it,” Marion said.
“We? Who’s this ‘we?’” Tonya didn’t want to be in any sentence with Marion Whitestone.
Marion crushed the cigarette into the urn. “It won’t hurt to look into it. I swear, I’m not staying at this job for that measly salary while someone like Janet gets so much more. It’s not acceptable.”
Tonya didn’t comment as she entered the building. Her work waited for her, and then she had a husband to go home to.
The same could no longer be said of Lena Hastings.
LENA TIGHTENED THE SCREWS on her smile as she welcomed another guest into her home. The county councilman, she should remember his name. “How lovely of you to come by,” she said. She took his hand and felt his dry-lipped kiss on her cheek.
“Councilman Myers!” Sims appeared, intercepting the new visitor. “Let me introduce you to my wife and daughter. Connie? Over here!”
Lena approached the stairs, wondering if she should check on Becca again. She’d never forget that keening cry from her youngest when they carried Mitch’s urn from the church, how it had sliced through her. As Elliott gathered Becca in his arms, and he and Sims carried her from the church, Lena had found herself paralyzed by the unbearable sight of her mourning children. She remained in her seat until Phillip Calloway escorted her out, and even now, she tried to block out the echo of Becca’s cry.
When they got Becca home, Liam Burnside gave her a Valium “to settle her down.” She’d been asleep moments later, tucked under the frayed Saltillo blanket Abby had given her long ago, looking like she was four years old and needed a mother who had all the answers. But Lena had never been that mother, not for Becca. Lena had stayed beside her, watching her daughter sleep, wishing she could do something to help, until the constant ringing of the doorbell pulled her back downstairs. Was Becca okay? No, of course not, but she would be. She had to be.
“Lena?” She turned to find Phillip Calloway by the stairs. He gestured toward a spot beside the hall closet. “I know now’s not a good time. But we need to talk about the business. Soon, I think. When you’re ready.” Phillip crushed a cocktail napkin into a ball.
Why would he bring the business up now? She took a step closer, brows arched, arms folded. “Is something wrong?”
He rolled the cocktail napkin, the size of a plum, between his hands as if starting a fire. “Our business is a complicated . . . affair.”
Funny he should use the word “affair.” Who had he been in Bermuda with this time?
“I know,” she answered. “Mitch lived and breathed the business for thirty years.” Given his heart and soul to it. And what about you, Phillip? What have you given to Calloway and Hastings?
“I still can’t believe—” He fixed his stare on Mitch’s leather jacket hanging from its hook in the hallway. “I keep thinking he’ll walk through the door any minute.”
“He won’t. We all have to face that.”
He squeezed the napkin even tighter. “When do you want to get together? Probably be good if the boys were here. This week sometime?”
“Sure.” She thought it best to get it over with.
“I’ll call you.” He tucked the ball of paper into a pocket. When he reached for her hand, she felt it trembling.
“Phillip?” She tugged his fingers so he’d look at her. Tears trailed down his whiskered face. He cleared his throat, the way Sims had done earlier.
“I’ll see you soon.” H
e turned and walked out.
As Lena returned to her station by the front door, the across-the-street neighbors arrived, bringing the fourth macaroni and cheese, which Elliott collected, thanking them and coaxing them into the living room. Next came Florence Rollison, eighty-years-old and bent over with osteoporosis. She had been Lena’s mother’s best friend, a warm light in Lena’s childhood. “If there’s anything I can do,” Florence said, huddled over her three-legged cane. So many others had said the same thing. Lena hoped they had all signed the reception books so she could send cards thanking them.
The bell signaled the arrival of another guest. “How nice to see—” The hand reaching for hers belonged to Bill Tanner, dressed in gray and not wearing his clerical collar. She had never seen him without it before.
“Lena? What are you doing? You shouldn’t stand here like a Wal-Mart greeter.”
She jerked back as if he had burned her.
“I just mean . . .” Bill shook his head. The noise in the living room swelled, someone chuckling, someone commenting on the pimento cheese sandwiches. Bill pointed at the closed door to Mitch’s office. “Can we go somewhere quiet? Just for a moment.”
She followed him into the room she’d been avoiding. All was as it should be: the antique claw-foot desk, the floor-to-ceiling book cases, the cracked leather desk chair that Mitch refused to replace because it had been his dad’s. She approached the olive green drapes hanging over the window and pulled the cord, letting in light. Outside, the day was ridiculously sunny, the sky absurdly blue.
“How are you doing?” Bill asked, not in the way everyone else had. His eyes searched hers, as if they saw deeper than she wanted.
“I should get back to the guests.”
“You don’t need to be the hostess right now, Lena. Let the boys greet the company. Stop being so damned Episcopalian.”
She escaped his gaze, her own searching the small room. Mitch’s books filling the shelves. The computer he’d resisted using until he figured out he could talk to Elliott every day with email. The painting of six-year-old Becca that Lena had done in an acrylics class at the park; “Ah, that’s my kitten,” Mitch had said when she gave it to him. These memories flooded her. All the drawers and cupboards in her life that Mitch had filled.
“It’s my first time in this room,” she said.
“Many things will be hard now. Some will surprise you.” Bill’s voice had a hesitant edge, like he was disclosing something personal. She knew little about him. He was a nice man. A good friend and confidante to her husband who undoubtedly knew more about Lena than she wanted him to know.
“There are surprises every hour,” she said. “Like opening the refrigerator and finding half a tuna sub that Mitch had left there last week. He always brought home leftovers but never ate them. Elliott used to call them ‘Dad’s science experiments.’” She’d even hesitated in throwing it away, though it had long passed the point of being toxic.
“Grief will come in waves. Some will knock you flat over. But stand back up and know you’re strong enough to handle every one of them.” Bill’s knobby fingers gripped the ledge of the desk. “You handled the cancer; you can handle this.”
“I had Mitch to get me through that.” She shivered, chilled by the cool air squeezing through the panes of the picture window. It needed to be replaced, something Mitch would have tended to in any other room.
“I wish I’d been a better wife.” The words tumbled out before she could take them back. She stared down at the floor as if they were still lying there.
“He loved you.”
“But I didn’t deserve it. You know I didn’t.”
“There is no deserving that kind of love. It’s a gift.”
She closed her eyes and prayed, prayed, prayed that Bill didn’t start talking about God because she might smack him.
“My point is,” he said, “nobody is perfect. But to be loved as you are, warts and all . . . that’s an amazing thing.”
Lena could picture herself as a wart-ridden witch. She knew her darker side, something her husband had denied even after she’d left him for Royce. She had thrown the marriage away, all but abandoned Becca. She had begun a new life in the loft apartment: Lena the artist. Lena, Royce’s lover. Lena the fool.
Sometimes it bothered her that Mitch chose not to see the truth about her betrayal. Just a folly, he had said. We all make mistakes. But she was relieved, because it made coming home easier when she had so desperately needed to come home.
Becca wasn’t blind, though. Looking at the anger in her daughter’s eyes was like looking in a mirror. I know who you really are, Mom. Nobody else may know, but I do.
What would it be like when it was the two of them? So many things about her daughter terrified her, yet nothing had been more frightening than that howling cry at the funeral. The sound of Becca shattered. How was she, Lena, supposed to piece her back together?
“When does Elliott leave?” Bill asked.
“He called from the limousine and postponed his flight till the end of the week. I’m not sure why. He needs to get back to his life.”
“Maybe he needs to be with family more. Sims seems to have a good marriage. Maybe Connie can help him. Becca though,” Bill said, stroking the edge of the desk. “She may need some help. Fourteen is such a difficult age, and after all the family has been through—”
“Help,” she repeated, tasting the word. A therapist. A psychologist or psychiatrist for her broken child. She had suggested this to Mitch a few months before, but he had insisted this was a phase. “She’s still growing into her body.” “All girls are self-conscious at her age.” Lena had shown him an article about eating disorders. “Our Becca isn’t that bad off,” he had answered, tossing the magazine aside.
“Once she goes back to school and she’s around her friends—maybe things will normalize. When she gets back in her routine she’ll be okay.” She knew her words to be untrue.
Bill pinched his lip between his finger and thumb and tugged. “That should help. But she’s gotten so thin. I just thought—”
Lena stiffened. She wanted no more of this conversation. Not now. Not from her priest. She could hear the doorbell ring, more guests arriving.
“Becca is my daughter, Bill. I’ll do whatever I have to.”
“Of course.”
She eyed the door. “I think I’ll go check on her now.”
Lena wound her way through the guests, found Elliott, and whispered that she’d be upstairs. She moved quickly, ignoring the friends who tried to thwart her, but smiling in that polite way she had perfected as she hurried up the stairs to her daughter’s room.
Becca had tossed aside the blanket. She lay sprawled diagonally across the bed, her hair a tangle across the pillow. Dead to the world. Lena switched on the night light that had been there since her daughter was three. She slipped the black loafers from Becca’s feet, noting the chipped bright pink polish on her toenails, from the sleepover at Kayla’s two weeks ago. Would Becca’s feet get cold? Lena replaced the Saltillo spread, tucking in around her ankles, and eased down beside her. She stroked her daughter’s hair. Becca’s mouth opened a little, emitting a soft sound like an infant’s sigh.
Oh, this child. So lost, even before Mitch’s death. Lost and a stranger.
Lena glanced around the bedroom that was as familiar to her as her own. The yellow curtains they’d picked out when Becca insisted the pink ones were “Too infantile.” The cedar chest, a gift from Mitch for Becca’a thirteenth birthday, hardly visible under the stack of clothes tossed during her panicked dressing that afternoon. The wrinkled Hunger Games poster that had replaced the Twilight one six months before. On the back of the door, the calorie counting chart, spattered with red circles. Her daughter’s obsession.
Fifteen years ago, the news that Lena was pregnant had not been a welcome surprise. The boys had come back-to-back, the mighty diapered-duo darting about the house. They’d tried for a girl a few years later, but nothing h
appened and Lena concluded that at thirty-three, she was too old; ovaries had a shelf-life, and hers had expired. Then came the missed period and a little blue plus on her Early Pregnancy Test stick. Mitch and the boys had been ecstatic, though Lena couldn’t summon the same enthusiasm. She was ready to move on to the next part of her life: art classes or travel to Europe or Africa. A new baby interrupted those plans.
Not that she’d thought of aborting. She couldn’t, not with Mitch so happy and the boys bouncing like hungry puppies, proffering potential names for their unborn sibling. The pregnancy was wretched: months of morning sickness and swollen feet and back aches. The resonating clang of bars slamming down on her life.
Becca screamed her way into the world, a red-faced, colicky baby who wouldn’t sleep more than two hours and could not be sated. Lena would look at her child and picture a starving baby bird, beak wide open, unquenchable. Lena held Becca, rocked her, sang to her, but never did that child stop crying. Why couldn’t Lena feel for her what she had for her boys? Dr. Ryan called it post-partum depression caused by hormones, but the diagnosis did not absolve her. What kind of mother didn’t adore her newborn? What kind of mother craved freedom over her own child?
It got better with therapy and medication. Becca grew into a beautiful toddler; a chubby, dimpled critter who loved to waddle around in her father’s shoes. Her first word had been “Dada,” then “Ehwit.” “Mama” came a few weeks before “Simth,” but Lena hadn’t resented it, not really. At last Lena had become whole, able to smile and hug her little girl.
Becca rolled over, kicking the blanket away.
“Shhh,” Lena said.
That their relationship derailed again two years ago was Lena’s fault. The separation, the cancer, the return. All the turbulence Lena had caused, and Becca still paid the price for it. Every morning, they battled over cereal. Every evening, Becca compartmentalized her supper into microscopic bits. Every meal, a war of wills.
Becca clutched at her pillow, turning over again. Her eyes blinked open.
“How are you feeling, honey?” Lena had stopped calling her “honey” months ago. She didn’t know why.
