Best Kept Secret

by Amy Hatvany

  As usual, Martin was late that night getting home from the office, and even after I’d called his cell phone twice and left messages asking him to pick up Charlie’s cough medicine at the pharmacy, he’d forgotten.

  “I have to go do my interview tomorrow,” I told him. I stood in the living room, holding my son, swaying back and forth. If I set him down, he cried. If I put him in a lukewarm bath, he screamed. My arms were the only place he was calm. “Can you stay home with Charlie?”

  “I can’t,” Martin said. “I have a huge presentation in front of the executive team. I can’t miss it.”

  “And I can’t miss this interview,” I said. “I’m on deadline. I haven’t asked you to skip one day of work since Charlie was born, Martin. Have I?”

  “If it were any other day, I’d say yes,” he said, avoiding eye contact and my question. He fiddled with the remote control, trying to figure out how to get the screen off the Rolie Polie Olie DVD I’d put in to entertain Charlie.

  “So your job is more important than mine?” Charlie’s skin was sweltering, his breath hot and slow against my neck. I was fairly certain he’d fallen asleep again.

  He set the remote down hard on the coffee table and finally looked at me. “My job pays the bills.”

  “Oh, that’s nice,” I said, seething. “Because I make less money, my work isn’t as significant as yours?”

  He didn’t blink. “You can’t live off what you earn. So yes, in the grand scheme of things, I’d say it’s less significant.”

  It was everything I could do not to tell him to fuck off, but I didn’t want to swear in Charlie’s ear and wake him up.

  Martin saw the look on my face and held his hands up in front of his chest, palms toward me, in a gesture of mock surrender. “You’re the one who wanted to do the freelance thing, Cadee. You know you don’t have to work.”

  “I know I don’t have to. I want to. Is that so hard to understand?”

  “It is, actually,” he said. His blue eyes flashed. “From the minute you had Charlie you were adamant about not letting other people raise him. You swore you wouldn’t be like your mom.”

  “I’m not like her,” I said, incensed that he would hit so far below the belt.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure. At least she had a good reason to be away from you so much. She had bills to pay. You need someone to take care of Charlie tomorrow just so you can go find fulfillment.”

  I glared at him, fury rising like a wave inside me. “What I need is for his father to help take care of him when he’s sick.” I adjusted Charlie in my arms and he whined, rubbing his snotty nose against my bare shoulder.

  He gave me a glowering look. “I do take care of him. I bust my ass to make enough money so my wife can stay home with him. Like we agreed she would.”

  “Don’t talk about me in the third person,” I said through gritted teeth. “I’m not just your wife.”

  “No, you’re a mother, too,” he shot back. “Shouldn’t your child be more important than some stupid interview?”

  “Shouldn’t your child be more important than some stupid presentation?”

  He fell silent after this, visibly fuming to the point that his body shook. I didn’t know how he could discount my work like this. I felt torn enough already, needing to leave Charlie when he was ill. His father was the logical choice to take care of him. I didn’t think it was too much to ask.

  After a few minutes of silence, Martin spoke with an exasperated sigh. “Can’t you reschedule your interview?”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Can’t you reschedule your presentation?”

  Round and round we went. In the end, I gave in and asked Alice to watch Charlie for me, enduring her reproachful stare while I explained why it was so important I make it to the interview. Charlie and I both sobbed when I left him, and while I managed to finish the article, I had a hard time forgiving my husband for the things he’d said.

  Still, I told myself, this was a normal way to live—that every family was busy, that most couples struggled with spending enough time together and finding balance between work and family life. All mothers had to make sacrifices. When Jess or my mother asked how we were doing, I smiled brightly and said, “We’re great. Busy, but really great.” I repeated this line enough times in my own mind to believe it was true. But my husband seemed to drift further and further away. Only a temporary side effect of young parenthood, I reasoned. He’d come back around and everything would be fine.

  Of course, it wasn’t fine. We fought frequently over his long hours at the office and how much he was missing out on at home. “Charlie doesn’t care about how much money you make,” I told him as gently as I could. “He cares about how often you’re there to tuck him in at night.” Martin loved his son, I knew, but he simply brushed off any input I gave him about how his behavior was affecting us. He, however, felt free to dish out criticism about me. As the months passed, his belittling of my career grew worse.

  “It’s not like you’re a hard-hitting journalist,” he said one night after Charlie had gone to bed. We were sitting on opposite ends of the couch, once again discussing my need for more time to work. “You spit out cute little essays about what it’s like being a mother or how to get a job. The world’s not going to end if you don’t write anymore.”

  Tears filled my eyes and the air stopped short in my lungs at his words. I had to remind myself to breathe before responding. “I can’t believe you would say something like that to me,” I whispered, my chin trembling.

  He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Do you have to take everything so personally? I’m only making an observation.”

  It struck me in that moment just how much like his mother he’d become. “Martin, if you think that wasn’t personal, then you’ve got bigger issues than we can deal with on our own.” I swiped my eyes with the bend of my wrist. “I think we need to see a marriage counselor. We need someone to help us learn how to work through this stuff. We keep going round and round on the same issues.”

  He gave me a cold stare. “No, you keep going round and round on them. You nitpick everything. If anyone needs a therapist, it’s you.”

  Did he really not see we had problems? Could he be that self-absorbed? My eyes went dry and a cold sensation crept into my chest. I suddenly realized that not only was I unsure if I still loved Martin, I was pretty certain that I didn’t like him anymore. I met his stare with one of my own. “Are you saying you won’t even try to fix this with me?”

  “There’s nothing for me to fix. I’m being the provider we agreed I would be. You and Charlie want for nothing. If you think we have issues, they’ve got nothing to do with me.”

  I did go see a therapist briefly, who agreed that if Martin was unwilling to work on our marriage, it was most likely doomed. I also asked her about Charlie, since I worried about how a divorce might affect him. “Happy kids have happy parents,” she said, peering at me over her bifocals with kind gray eyes. “Witnessing the two of you constantly at each other’s throats could inflict much worse damage on his development.”

  Armed with this knowledge, and after a few more months of Martin’s continued denial of our problems, I gathered up the courage to contact a lawyer and tell my husband I wanted a divorce. He was shocked and angry, but surprisingly didn’t put up much of a fight when I asked him to leave. I decided my son and I would be fine. My mother had been a single parent. So had Alice. I had no doubt I could do it, too. Martin was gone all the time anyway. I’d been on my own all along.

  The day Martin moved out for good, he stood in front of me in our living room, bags packed. He searched my eyes with his. The fury in his face was so pronounced it almost looked like he was wearing a mask. He inhaled deeply and released the breath with a hiss, like a punctured tire. My gaze traveled the sharp planes of his cheekbones, the high, smooth forehead, the full curve of his lips. I thought how Mother Nature took the best of both of us and put it all into our son.

  He took a step toward me and I
immediately stiffened, anticipating his touch. He saw this and stopped just short of me. There was barely an inch between us. I could smell him, the woodsy warmth of his favorite soap, the cinnamon spice of his skin.

  “Are you sure?” he whispered.

  I nodded, a sharp, quick movement, my lips pressed together in a straight, hard line. A new coldness resided in me after his final refusal to even consider counseling; a chunk of ice moved over my heart and froze any feeling I had left for him. I felt distant, detached. It’s not something I chose, just something that was.

  “Okay, then,” he said, turning around to grab the last of his bags. “I guess that’s it.” The door closed behind him and a moment later, though he’d only just left, it was almost as if he’d never lived there at all.

  Three

  Charlie! You need to turn off the television and come talk with me.” It was nine o’clock on a cool June morning, and I stood in his bedroom with my hands on my hips, staring at a scribbled mess on the wall. Only a month shy of his fourth birthday and my son considered himself a Van Gogh, regardless of the medium upon which he chose to display his work.

  His face popped around the doorway, his eyes darting from me to the wall. “What, Mama?”

  I pointed at the wall. “Did you do this?”

  “No.” He dropped his gaze to the floor.

  “Don’t lie to me, Charles Sutter.” I swore I wouldn’t be one of those mothers who used her child’s full name as a threat, but there I was.

  “I’m not.” He stomped his little foot.

  I went over to him and crouched down, taking one of his hands in mine. “Sweetie. No one else lives here but us, and Mommy knows she didn’t color on the wall. So I’ll ask you one more time. Did you do this?”

  His dark head bobbed once, but he still didn’t meet my gaze. “Sorry.”

  “I forgive you, Charlie bear, but please don’t do it again.” I sighed. “Now, let’s get you dressed so we can get to play group.” The Mommy and Me group I’d been attending since Charlie was five months old was welcoming a new member, Hannah, a former stockbroker who had just adopted an adorable, chubby two-year-old girl from China. She had invited a few mothers over to her high-ceilinged, open-concept rambler for an introductory lunch and play time for the kids.

  “I’ll do it myself!” he proclaimed. He dashed to his dresser and began yanking out handfuls of clothes I had just folded and put away the night before. He tossed the first batch to the floor, reaching in the drawer for another handful.

  “Charlie, don’t!” I said, running over to stop him. He pulled on the T-shirt I attempted to take away from him.

  “No!” he said. “It’s my shirt, Mama!”

  Oh, dear Lord. I took a deep breath and stepped back. “Charlie, I am going into the kitchen. I will see you there in two minutes, and whatever you have on, even if you’re still in your undies, we are going to play group.”

  He giggled. “Even if I’m naked?”

  “Yes.” Trying not to smile and thus completely undermine my threat, I gave him a stern look and walked out of the room.

  An hour later, we arrived at Hannah’s place with me in jeans and a ratty blue sweatshirt and Charlie in too-tight purple swim trunks and a bright yellow sweater. Four women including myself showed up, and now stood around the marble-topped island in Hannah’s kitchen. Since it was unseasonably chilly, instead of being outside, our children were playing directly off the kitchen in the toy-laden, toddler-proofed “great room,” a space that when I was growing up would have been called the den.

  “Cadence, you should come to my party on Friday,” said Brittany, whose daughter, Sierra, was born a few months before Charlie and seemed to hit every developmental milestone—rolling over, crawling, eating solid foods—well before my son. Brittany, like me, worked from home, which I originally thought would be a commonality that bonded us. I soon discovered that while I planned to make my freelance work a career, Brittany saw hers as a scrapbook supply specialist as an excuse to kick her husband out of the house and throw a party. I genuinely liked the other women in the play group, but outside of our children being about the same age, we didn’t really have that much in common. Our relationships remained pretty much on the surface; our conversations centered around the kids. Most of the time, this was enough.

  “Oh!” Renee squealed. “You totally should come, Cadence. The new flower hole punchers she has are super cute.” Renee was a former elementary schoolteacher, mother to three-year-old Juan, and prone to using the phrase “super cute” in just about every conversation she had.

  “I would,” I said, trying not to visibly flinch, “but I’m on deadline. I don’t think I’ll have time.” When I first met Brittany, I had tried to forge a friendship with her, valiantly attending several of her parties over the past three years. I even purchased some of her company’s products to put together Charlie’s baby book, but only managed to complete the first four pages. And using the word “complete” might have been pushing it.

  “What about Sunday’s knitting night?” Renee asked, as she dipped a strawberry into the cream cheese and Marshmallow Fluff dip Hannah had set out with a platter of fruit. “We’re working on a blanket for Hannah’s new edition.”

  I gave a faltering smile to Hannah, who kept her eye on the children as they played. “I wish I could,” I said, “but Martin brings Charlie home on Sunday nights. I need to be there.” After watching so many of the other women find satisfaction—joy, even—in activities like these, I sometimes wondered what was wrong with me that I only found more excuses not to join them. I felt like I did back in high school, not wanting to be a cheerleader or head up the homecoming committee—I didn’t have a bubbly personality and didn’t care about the theme of a prom. And yet, I ached to fit in with the girls who did, like a hippo trying to fit in with a herd of gazelles.

  “That’s too bad,” Brittany clucked. She smoothed her sleek blond pageboy. “It must be so difficult to work without Martin there to help out.”

  “I manage.” I shrugged and looked down to the floor. These women knew that Martin and I had divorced, but I kept the details to myself. “I need to use the ladies’ room,” I said, rearranging my face into a cheery expression. “Will you excuse me?”

  “Down the hall and on your left,” Hannah directed.

  I stepped through the entryway and down the short hallway. In contrast to her modern kitchen, Hannah’s guest bathroom was a flashback to the mideighties, painted a pale shade of peach accented with a seashell wallpaper border and bright turquoise hand towels. As I put my hand on the doorknob to rejoin the group, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. The space beneath my eyes was bruised from lack of sleep—my best hours for writing came after Charlie was in bed, and these days that time seemed to be getting later and later. My wild curls were pulled back in a clip, but I’d missed several strands and they spun out from the sides of my head like corkscrews. I let go of the doorknob and tried to smooth them, remembering a time when I checked myself in the mirror before I went out, not after I’d arrived at my destination.

  I sighed. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to be here. I should have stayed home and worked on the article about food allergies I needed to turn in to Alpha Mom magazine the following week. Play group was more for Charlie’s sake than for mine anyway. Still, I showed up, just like I had for Sign with Your Baby classes and Toddler Yoga. I remained ever-determined to do with my child the kinds of things my mother had never done with me. In September, he would start going to preschool five mornings a week instead of just three, so it was easy to reason we could stop coming to play group then. School would provide him all the play time with other kids he’d need.

  Back in the kitchen, I walked past the women toward the great room. “I’m going to check on Charlie,” I said, and the women smiled and nodded, continuing their conversation about the newest Pampered Chef knife set.

  My son sat alone at the toddler table, scribbling away on a piece of paper with a th
ick, blue crayon. I dropped into the other tiny chair, a little horrified by how much of my hips hung over the seat.

  “What are you drawing?” I asked, tilting my head so I could see the image on the page.

  “ ’Pider-Man,” Charlie said. He was intent on his work and didn’t bother to look up.

  “Of course you are.” I wasn’t sure where his obsession with the superhero came from; he’d never seen the movies or watched the cartoon. I blamed excessive product placement—did a three-year-old really need a toy cell phone emblazoned with Spider-Man’s face? Probably not, but I’d bought him one, nonetheless.

  “Can I help you color?” I asked my son.

  “No, I got it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You’re doing a good job coloring on the paper.” He gave me a mischievous grin, then went back to his picture—an abstract mess of red, blue, and black. Our refrigerator was covered in a multitude of similar depictions. I watched him for a minute, until he set his crayon down and held up the paper in a triumphant gesture.

  “All done!” he announced. “It’s for you.”

  “It is?” I took the paper and gave him a huge smile. “I love it. Thank you.”

  “Welcome, Mama.” He jumped up and walked over to the corner where Leah, Hannah’s newly adopted little girl, was playing with a pile of blocks. He happily plopped to the floor and she pushed a few toward him. Again, I watched him, proud to see my child sharing the way I’d taught him.

  There was a knock at the front door. Just as Hannah took a step to go answer it, the door swung open and in walked Susanne, one of the few women in our particular Mommy and Me group who still worked full-time. Susanne’s husband, Brad, stayed home with their daughter so Susanne could run her highly successful insurance brokerage, but when her schedule allowed, she brought Anya to our meetings herself. Susanne was curvy, like me, with straight black hair, a ghostly white, creamy complexion, and was never seen in public without a slash of bloodred lipstick. Outside of my sister, she was also the person with whom I spent the most time. When Susanne wasn’t busy working and Charlie was with Martin, we occasionally got together for conversation and a bottle of wine. I admired her blunt nature and quick wit, not to mention her professional success. She was one of those women who seemed to balance it all, and part of me hoped by spending time with her, that particular skill might rub off on me.