Deep Down True

by Juliette Fay

  “Meaning?” said Kenneth.

  “Meaning it went okay.” Exhaustion nibbled at her temper. “Morgan seemed to like her. She seemed to know what she was doing.”

  “Seemed to,” muttered Kenneth. “Where did she get her degree? Where did she train?”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, I can’t remember, and I don’t care. Morgan agreed to go back—that’s what’s important.”

  “I just want to make sure she’s not some quack who’s going to light incense, hang a crystal around Morgan’s neck, and call her cured.”

  “Well, thanks very much for that vote of confidence in my ability to find a reputable therapist. If this is your idea of us not fighting, it isn’t going very well.”

  Kenneth inhaled noisily and let his breath out into the mouthpiece. “Okay,” he grumbled. “Please just tell me she’s board-certified.”

  Dana had no idea. “She’s board-certified,” she said.

  “Okay then.” He let out a little cough. “Well, there’s something else I’d like to discuss with you if this is a good time.”

  Something else? thought Dana. Our daughter’s in therapy, our son can barely keep his temper in check, our finances are a mess—and you’ve got something ELSE?

  He didn’t wait for her answer. “Tina likes to enter contests.”

  “Okay . . .” said Dana, wondering what that had to do with the price of tea in China.

  Tina’s salon played a radio station that did contests and giveaways, he told her. While a customer sat reading magazines and waiting for her dye to set, Tina would slip into the office and try to be the right caller. “Last week she won a hundred-dollar gift certificate to Perfectua—that pricey boutique at the Evergreen Mall? Barely covered the cost of a sweatshirt,” he muttered. Dana flinched at the name of Nora’s employer. “Anyway,” he continued, “she was automatically entered to win the grand prize.” He hesitated then, as if what followed would be bad news. “And today we were notified that she won.”

  Couldn’t possibly care less, thought Dana.

  “It’s an all-expenses-paid trip to Disney World. For four.” There was silence on the line, as if he were holding his breath, and then the words rushed out. “It’s for the week of Thanksgiving.”

  Dana almost said, So? But then the pieces of Kenneth’s little puzzle came together in her mind. He wanted the kids for a whole week. Including Thanksgiving.

  “Absolutely not.”

  “You can’t just dismiss it out of hand!” Kenneth fumed. “You have to at least consider it.”

  “It’s not an option.”

  “Dana, for godsake—”

  “I can’t talk anymore,” she said. “It’s been a long day. I’m going to bed.” And she hung up.

  On Saturday, Dana awoke to the sounds of long low wails, punctuated by quick, scratchy groans. At first she thought a coyote had gotten hold of some poor animal in the woods behind the house. Then she realized the animal’s death cries had a tune to them. Either there was a rabbit out there who knew the melody to Pachelbel’s Canon or Morgan was practicing her cello.

  Dana moved her sluggish body toward Morgan’s room. “You’re up early,” she said.

  “I was up a long time ago.” Morgan squinted at the sheet music as if it were written in disappearing ink.

  Dana sank down onto the bed. “But it’s not a school day.”

  “Exactly.”

  Dana nodded. “And you were so happy you didn’t have to go to school that it woke you up.”

  Morgan leaned the cello against her desk. “Can you take me to Peshawaug?”

  It was a town way out in northwestern Connecticut. “What’s in Peshawaug?”

  “It’s this place called the Wolves’ Den. They have real wolves there, and all this stuff about how they live. I have to do research for my paper.”

  “Can’t you get that on the Internet?” Dana had been looking forward to a relaxing day of catching up on laundry, making pancakes, and letting the kids watch too much TV.

  “It’s not that good. Some of it looks made up. Plus, we’re supposed to have primary sources. Real wolves is totally primary.” She twisted her hair back and forth. “Um . . . and that Bethany lady says I should do stuff that makes me feel better.”

  By noon all four of them were in the minivan headed west to Peshawaug. They ate sandwiches in the car, Grady growling and gnashing at a peanut-butter-and-ketchup sandwich. “See this?” He snarled, holding up a sandwich half. “This is Little Red Riding Hood’s arm!”

  “You’re more like a disgusting little pig than a big bad wolf,” said Morgan.

  “Here, piggy.” Alder handed him a napkin. “You have Red Riding Hood guts on your cheek.”

  They arrived as the tour was about to start and followed the crowd to the wooden benches by a chain-link fence that surrounded the wolves’ expansive habitat. A young woman staff member stood in front of the fence and began to talk as two wolves paced behind her. Wolves were born afraid of humans, she told them. The only way staff members were able to interact with them was by taking them into the building as pups, feeding and playing with them, so they would imprint onto humans. “We don’t train them,” she said. “Wolves aren’t trainable or tamable. In order to be accepted, we must live as the lowest in the wolves’ very strict social order.”

  She explained that in every wolf pack there were an alpha male and female who ruled the group. They were responsible for the pack’s safety and were the first to eat at every meal. If a lower-ranked wolf tried to eat before an alpha, it would be threatened and nipped. She demonstrated this with chunks of cheese she threw over the fence to them. The alpha always ate first. She went on to say that only alphas could mate. The other wolves were called “celibate subordinates” and served as hunters, nannies, and teachers to the pups. If they wanted to mate, they would become “dispersers,” leaving to start their own pack with other dispersers.

  Morgan scribbled furiously. At the end of the presentation, the staff member invited visitors to send up a “social howl.” Grady howled with gusto, his little tenor heard above the voices of the more hesitant adults and older kids. The wolves obliged by howling back, which sent Grady hopping up and down with enthusiasm.

  “Was that helpful?” Dana asked Morgan as they filed out.

  “Yeah,” said Morgan. “It was just what I needed.”

  Dana had turned off her cell phone during the presentation. When they got back into the car, she turned it on and the “Missed Call” message flashed. In fact, there had been several missed calls.

  “Dana, we have joint custody—joint, not you making the decisions and me just rolling over. I don’t know when you turned into someone who thinks she’s entitled to make unilateral policies, but I’m not going to stand for it. Call me back as soon as possible.” Dana deleted it.

  “Hey there, beauty! I know you’ve got the kiddos this weekend, but there’s this new invention called a baby-sitter . . . Just kidding, but you know what I’m saying, right? I miss my girl! Call me, okay?” She deleted it, reminding herself to return the call when she was alone.

  “I know you hate me for telling Nora about Morgan’s problem, and frankly I hate myself. Victor thinks I should have my head examined. But I can’t stand this silent treatment, Dana, and I think I deserve a chance to explain and apologize. I think you owe me that, so please call.”

  OWE you? thought Dana. She deleted the message.

  “Yeah, uh, this is Manchester Tire and Service. We got your Volkswagen Rabbit on the back lot, and it’s been sitting here for a couple months. You gotta either give us the thumbs-up to fix it or get it outta here by Thanksgiving.” She’d have to call Connie and see how she wanted to handle the car. She glanced at Alder, who was playing the license-plate game with Grady.

  “Maine!” Alder called out. “On that green SUV over there.”

  “I saw that first!” said Grady.

  “Liar, liar pants on fire,” she retorted. “Get your own Maine.”

&
nbsp; There was one last message. “Hi Dana. I don’t mean to intrude on your family time, but I was thinking about what you told me at lunch yesterday. You know, with Morgan’s issues and the Disney trip and everything. It’s a lot. And I just wanted to say if you need a little time off to sort things out, I’m fine with that. Honestly, you’re the best receptionist I’ve ever had, and I figure it’s in my interest to keep you happy—plus, you deserve it. Hope you’re having a great weekend. See you Monday.” Dana sighed and felt the tension ebb from her neck. She saved the message, as if its mere existence could serve as a protection against whatever troubles might lurk in the days to come.

  “Bath time,” she told Grady that night before bed.

  “I took one yesterday!” He put the television remote behind his back.

  “Well, that’s good for yesterday, but it doesn’t count for today.” She went over to the TV and pressed the “off ” button.

  “But I’m clean, I swear—smell me! Smell how good I smell!”

  Dana took this rare opportunity to gather Grady onto her lap. At seven he barely fit, so she had to squeeze him up into a ball, one arm behind his back and the other under his knees. He giggled and protested, but he didn’t try to escape. She stuck her nose into his neck, and he laughed even harder. “Swiss cheese!” she declared.

  “No way!”

  She sniffed toward his feet. “Rotten eggs. Forget the bath—you’re going straight into the washing machine!”

  They straggled up the two flights of stairs to the bathroom on the second floor, and she ran a bubble bath. When he got in, she collected his clothes to put in the hamper. The pants had something round and hard in them, and when she reached into the pocket, she pulled out a golf ball. Written in black marker across the tiny dimples were the words “You rock, Dude!”

  “Where’d this come from?” she asked him.

  “That’s mine!”

  “I’m not taking it,” she assured him. “I just asked where you got it.”

  He sank under the bubbles until only a thatch of his hair was visible. Dana waited. When he surfaced, he seemed surprised she was still there. “Dad said I could keep it,” he grumbled.

  “Dad gave this to you?”

  “Yeah.” Grady let out a resigned huff, as if he’d been caught with contraband. “We call each other ‘dude’ sometimes. Dad said I could carry it around when I miss him. Okay? So don’t lose it.”

  She looked at him there in the tub, soap bubbles clinging to his hair, and he seemed so small. With most of his body underwater, he looked much as he had when he was two or three.

  How did this happen? How did my baby grow into a boy with a golf ball standing in for his father ?

  “I’ll put it on your dresser so you’ll know where to find it.” And she left him there bobbing a plastic shark in and out of the suds. She pulled a sock out of his drawer to set the golf ball on so it wouldn’t roll onto the floor.

  She remembered finding a shirt of her father’s in the back of her mother’s closet years after he was gone. Her mother had shrugged. “I still loved him,” she said. “Even after what he did.” When she died, Dana and Connie cleared out her apartment and Dana looked for the shirt, half afraid to find it. But it wasn’t there. Their mother was a purposeful person; she wouldn’t have thrown it out by accident. Dana remembered thinking, She must have been ready to let it go.

  Clearly, Grady wasn’t ready to let anything go, nor fully accept his father’s reduced presence in his life. And it occurred to her that the desperation Grady felt might also be shared by Kenneth himself. How must Kenneth have felt searching for something to soothe his sad little boy and then writing these words to remind him of their private joke? How does it feel to hand your child an inanimate object and say, “Pretend this is me”?

  Dana had never had to do such a thing, and she hoped she never would. But standing there looking at the golf ball, she had a moment of sympathy for Kenneth.

  Later, when Grady had put on his pajamas and gotten into bed, she came back in to say good night to him. The golf ball was not on the dresser, and she knew without a doubt that it was with him, possibly under the pillow or more likely held tightly in the safe harbor of his hand.

  CHAPTER 34

  “GOSH, THAT WAS NICE OF YOU,” SHE SAID TO TONY as he unlocked the big glass door on Monday morning. “Calling to offer me some time off.”

  “Yeah?” he said, an uncharacteristic note of uncertainty in his tone. “After I hung up, I was worried you’d think it was over the top, calling you on the weekend like that. But I figured you’d need some time to figure out the logistics. Otherwise I could’ve just told you when you came in this morning . . .” He trailed off.

  “Not at all,” she assured him. “In fact, after the other messages I got, it was like when you open the mail and you think it’s going to be a bill and it ends up being a check instead.”

  “Good,” he said with a little sigh of relief, as they hung their coats in the closet. Tony unwound the scarf from his neck and tugged on the fringe. “So . . . you think you’ll do it?”

  “You’re going to think I’m crazy,” she said with a chuckle. “But I like being here. This is the easy part. What I really need is a break from everything else.”

  He smiled back at her. “All right. Well, the offer stands.”

  She reached out and gave his arm a pat. “You are the best boss, Tony. Honestly, no one could ask for better.”

  At lunch she told him about the golf ball, and he nodded knowingly. “Ingrid picked out things for the girls,” he said. “When she went to the hospital all those times, and then at the end . . .”

  “Oh, Tony,” Dana murmured.

  “Yeah, heartbreaking.” He shook his head. “She tried to do the same for me, and I got so mad.”

  “Mad? Why?”

  “Because I’m not a child, for godsake. I know the difference between a lifeless object and my wife! Besides, the whole world reminded me of her. Everything was a symbol of what I’d lost.”

  “Is it still that way?”

  He thought for a moment. “Yes and no. I’ve had experiences since then, taken trips, made new friends. It’s not all about her anymore, which is a good thing, I think. A healthy thing. I mean, how the hell could I have gone on like that? I’d be in the loony bin by now. But I look at my beautiful girls . . . and there she is.” He sighed. “There she is, and right where she should be.”

  He looked back up at her, the warm brown of his eyes calling her into his loss, his survival, and she felt a surge of pride that he would share it with her. She found herself reaching out and giving his hand a squeeze. His face changed, a fleeting reaction—surprise, she thought. Or maybe panic? She was his employee, after all. She shouldn’t be holding his hand across the chipped tabletop as if this were a lunch date at some Parisian café. She slid her hand back and made an excuse about needing to make some phone calls before her lunch break was over.

  Actually, she did need to make another appointment for Morgan. She left a message on Bethany Sweet’s voice mail. She called Connie and left a message about Alder’s car. There were still ten minutes left—who else could she call?

  “Hi, Jack, it’s Dana.”

  “Ohhh,” he said, his voice rising and falling like a taunt. “You finally had time to call back.”

  “I’m sorry, it’s just that the kids have had some . . . trouble. I hope you understand.”

  He let out a little grunt of appeasement. “I suppose,” he conceded. “I’m not the kind of guy to get in the way of a mom and her kids. I just didn’t think you’d forget about, you know . . . us.”

  “No, I didn’t forget. But you have to understand they’re my priority. Also, I know you meant well, but you can’t show up at my office like that. It makes me look unprofessional.” Especially when you’re disrespectful to my boss, she thought.

  “Well, that guy, he’s on some sort of power trip,” insisted Jack. “He couldn’t let you off for one hour? I mean, come
on! Who does he think you are—his slave?”

  A fury came over Dana so fast she felt as if she could hit something. “That’s a horrible thing to say, and it couldn’t be further from the truth,” she said tightly. “Tony Sakimoto is one of the kindest, most understanding guys in the world.”

  “Well, excuse me! I didn’t know he was the Second Coming, or I would’ve knelt and kissed his ring!”

  Dana narrowed her eyes at the phone. “You know what?” she said. “I’m not talking to you anymore!”

  “Well, neither am I!” he yelled, and the phone went dead.

  There’s another friend I’ve lost, she told herself. But she couldn’t seem to feel bad about it. In fact, she realized with surprise, what she felt most was relief.

  The sight of the first patient to come in after lunch nearly knocked her out of her chair.

  “Hey, Good Witch!” he teased, leaning on the counter. “I didn’t know you worked here.”

  “Dermott! Is . . . is everything okay?” She had this strange notion that maybe something had happened to Mary Ellen or one of the children. But why would he come here? And tell her?

  “Everything but my dental hygiene, apparently.” She stared at him. He stared back, perplexed. “Did my appointment get canceled? Mellie made such a big deal about dropping me off on time.”

  She looked down at the day’s schedule. There was his name. “Oh, yes, I’m sorry. I just didn’t know you were a patient here.”

  “Nah, it’s okay. I really wasn’t planning on coming, but Mellie insisted.”

  “Why weren’t you going to come?”

  “Well”—he smiled at her—“you know.” She hadn’t a clue, and it must have showed, because he added, “It’s kind of like getting your car washed before you junk it.”

  His eyes locked onto hers for a moment in that way he had, and she felt herself blanch. “Jeez,” he muttered, “I’m always doing this to you.”