by Pamela Morsi
“Usually?”
Cliff shrugged. “It’s been going on awhile,” he admitted. “It’s not like…it’s like…it’s a Saturday thing.”
“A Saturday thing?”
“Yeah, on Saturdays when Stacy’s husband is home with the kids, she cuts her aerobics class and we have a quickie.”
Tom shook his head as he looked at his friend. It had always seemed as if they had so much in common, shared so many dreams and aspirations. He thought he knew Cliff as well as he knew anybody. But apparently he didn’t know the guy at all.
Stacy came out of the back of the van wearing jogging shorts and a T-shirt with an athletic logo. She jerked open the driver’s door of her Mazda as if she intended to flee without a word, but then she hesitated. She raised her head and looked Tom straight in the eye.
“Please, you can’t say anything.” The words were pleading, but the tone was authoritative. She wasn’t asking him not to tell. She was ordering Tom to keep his mouth shut. “It would cause trouble and hurt my kids. You don’t want to hurt my kids.”
“No, of course I don’t want to hurt your kids,” Tom assured her.
“Don’t worry,” Cliff piped in, offering the woman an almost lighthearted reassurance. “Tom’s my best friend. We can trust him.”
Her smile was hesitant, but Tom saw that it was indeed a smile.
“See you next week,” Cliff said.
Stacy nodded, jumping into the minivan and backing out of the parking space.
As Tom watched, a sick, sad feeling settled on him with a dampening weight.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” he said.
Cliff shook his head. “You need to forget you ever saw anything,” he told him.
“What about Trish?”
“Trish?” Cliff asked, feigning puzzlement, as if Tom had abruptly changed the subject.
“Yes, Trish. Your wife, Trish. Remember her?” Tom was angry and his tone was sarcastic.
“I love Trish,” Cliff answered. “I love my kids. I’m not falling in love with somebody or quitting my marriage. I’m just getting a little bit on the side. Hey, I’ve known you a long time. I remember those days when our policy was screw first and ask questions like ‘what’s your name?’ later.”
“That’s when we were stupid kids with dicks for brains,” Tom pointed out.
Cliff shrugged. “We may be older,” he said. “But that part of a guy never gets wiser. Come on, you can’t tell me that you’ve never got a little bit on the side.”
“Uh, yes, I can tell you,” Tom answered. “I’d never cheat on Erica. You were best man at our wedding. I’ll bet you heard me promise not to.”
Cliff snorted derisively. “Everybody promises,” he said. “I doubt if anybody really means it.”
“I meant it. I still mean it.”
Cliff waved away his words. “Okay,” he said. “So you’re Mr. Straight Arrow these days. Good for you. But I need variety.” Cliff was calmly buttoning his shirt. He was relaxed, relieved. As if a crisis had been successfully averted. “Trish is a good wife and a great cook,” he told Tom. “She’s fixed up our house real nice. And she’s the best mom our kids could ever have. But we’ve been married almost eight years. She’s not exactly a hot tamale in the sack.”
“That’s not what you said when you two were dating,” Tom pointed out. “You told me that she had moves that nearly made your eyes roll back in your head.”
Cliff shrugged. “Yeah, well, she does have great moves. And it’s not like I don’t still do her a couple of times a week. But Stacy has different moves and it’s all just sex with no sappy ‘I love you’ stuff. I don’t even have to kiss Stacy. She just takes off her pants and we do it. It’s all fun.”
“How fun is it going to be when Trish finds out?”
“She’s never going to find out,” Cliff said. “Unless you’re determined to tell her. If you want to break up a couple of marriages and cause a lot of grief for everybody, I guess it’s your right to do so. If that’s really what you want to do.”
“It’s not what I want to do,” Tom said. “It’s not what I’m going to do. But this kind of stuff always comes out. Trish will find out and it won’t be worth it.”
“Trish will never find out,” Cliff said confidently.
“You’ll have to stop meeting Stacy,” Tom said. “You’ve got to stop taking the risk.”
“Aw, come on,” he answered. “I’m not giving up Stacy. Not till we’re both really done with it.” His statement was adamant and without the slightest hint of self-reproach or regret. “You’re not thinking about how smart this is,” Cliff continued. “I could be picking up hookers. Paying out money for it and bringing home diseases. Doing Stacy is…it’s almost like a gift to Trish. I’m a better husband because I’m a happy husband.”
“I don’t think Trish would see it that way.”
Cliff laughed and slapped Tom on the back. “No, she wouldn’t,” he agreed. “Females are all possessive and territorial about stuff that’s just strictly physical. It’s a craziness in them, but they can’t help it. So what’s a guy to do except protect them from the things that they just don’t need to know?”
Tom agreed to keep the secret, but he didn’t like it.
“You can’t even tell Erica,” Cliff cautioned. “Women stick together. She’d be on the phone to Trish is ten minutes.”
“I won’t tell Erica.”
“Good,” Cliff said. “There are somethings in married life that a man is just better off keeping to himself.”
Chapter 5
ERICA CONTINUED READING ALOUD, slowing down, allowing her voice to go softer and softer. Beside her, snuggled up in his Lightning McQueen bedding, Quint had fallen asleep. He had an almost perfectly heart-shaped face with soft, blemish-free skin and a sturdy chin that had just the hint of being like his father’s. His eyelashes were amazingly long, his small nose was upturned a bit, and his mouth opened slightly as he slept.
He was beautiful. She’d thought that the first moment she’d seen him, even when he was all red and slippery and screaming. She’d thought it every day since. But you don’t say “beautiful” to boys. They get all squirmy about a word like that. Instead she told him that he was “tough” and “smart.” But she wanted him to grow up to be “kind” and “honest” as well.
They had not been so sure about having children. Tom had worried that he might be as ill equipped for parenting as his own mother had been. Her addiction problems and stunted sense of responsibility had left Tom to make his way through life mostly on his own. She had dumped him on strangers, forgotten him in strange cities and even once had him taken from her by Protective Services before she’d moved him south of the border.
“It turned out to be good for me, in the long run,” Tom had assured her long ago. “I figured out at about five or six years old that nobody was going to take care of me, but me. So I became self-reliant. I can always depend upon myself.”
Erica looked down at her sleeping son of that same age and shuddered at the thought of him being alone and vulnerable in a dangerous border town while his mother floated somewhere on a cloud of booze, pills and cocaine.
That had happened more than once to Tom. He’d had almost no upbringing at all, no experience to draw upon. From the time they began talking about children, he looked to Erica to provide the framework with which he was so unfamiliar.
Erica had had her own concerns. Her family history of constant divorce with her and Letty caught in the middle, caused Erica to fear the extra pressures of having a child. She understood and supported Tom’s desire to own his own business. But she knew there would always be lean years and inevitable uncertainty. Financial risk was hard on the best marriages. And what would she do if ever forced to choose between the security of her child and the ambitions of her husband?
Tom and Erica had talked openly of both their dreams and their worries about expanding their family. Their marriage was so good, the idea of voluntarily choosing to rock
the boat seemed almost foolish, as if they were asking for more problems, more stress. Strangely, stating up front what they felt about themselves and about each other brought them closer together. And when they finally made the decision to try for a baby, they were united, confident and eager.
And having Quint had turned out to be so much more than they had imagined. The depth of love that one can feel for a child came as a surprise to both of them. Regret was a sheer impossibility.
Erica set the book aside and leaned down to plant a featherlight kiss on his temple. She turned off the lamp and tiptoed out of the room in the glow of the night-light.
From the living room she could hear the television. Tom was all settled in to watch the basketball game. It would be an excellent time for her to take a long leisurely soak in the bath. Or she could clean up the kitchen. The latter seemed much more pressing than the former, but she decided to do neither. Instead she went into the living room, kicked off her shoes and snuggled up next to Tom on the couch.
“How are we doing?” she asked.
“Manu is incredible,” he answered, referring to one of his favorite NBA players. “How can a guy make a shot on one leg with his off-arm while falling down? Only Manu can do that.”
“Well,” Erica said. “Manu, and my husband, Tom.”
He chuckled. “That’s one of the things I love about you, babe. I guess blind loyalty comes with very bad eyesight.”
“I think you play great.”
“If you call ‘playing great’ beating my six-year-old at a game of H-O-R-S-E, yeah, I’m totally great.”
“You should play with the guys again,” she said, referring to the pickup games at the park down by the lake.
Tom shook his head. “Why should I spend my spare time with those dunderheads when I can spend it with you and Quint?”
“Guys need other guys.”
“That’s all I’ve got all day is guys,” Tom said. “Believe me, when I get home I want to sit next to someone soft and nice smelling.”
She laughed a little and he wrapped a muscled arm around her neck to pull her close enough for a kiss on the end of her nose.
The noise from the TV crowd heightened and they both turned their attention just in time to see Manu steal the ball from Chase Heddington, star guard for the opposing team. Manu went galloping at top speed toward the Spurs’ basket. Heddington, now chasing him, was unable to block the shot and settled for giving him a nasty push into the photographers crouched at the sidelines.
Tom and Erica responded in unison with a cry of complaint.
Manu was awarded two free throws.
“It should have been a flagrant,” Erica said.
“You almost have to go for the head to get that call,” Tom said. “It was an intentional and there’s no bonus for that. Heddington can afford the foul.”
“I don’t like him anyway,” Erica said.
Tom eyed her questioningly. “Heddington? He’s a great player. He’ll be a Hall of Famer one day for sure.”
Erica snorted in derision. “I don’t care how well he plays basketball,” she said in a very matter-of-fact tone. “All that stuff that came out about him cheating on his wife with that porn star. She was his high school sweetheart and she stayed with him when he was injured in that car wreck. She nursed him back to health and struggled financially until his career got back on track. Now she spends half the year raising their kids by herself while he’s on the road. And what is the thanks she gets? He’s out canoodling some tattooed skank who wants to use him to get fifteen minutes of fame.”
Beside her Tom was silent, thoughtful.
“You know I’m right,” she stated.
Her husband shrugged an agreement, but there was a definite lack of fervor on his part. “I think the guy made some very bad choices,” Tom said. “But that’s about as far as I can go. We don’t know anything about their marriage.”
Erica was surprised.
“We know he made vows he didn’t keep,” she said. “In my book that makes him a low-life jerk.”
She watched a frown appear on Tom’s forehead. “Sometimes guys, and women, too, they just get their heads messed up for a while. I don’t think that it always means that they don’t love their wife or their husband or that they want to throw out their marriage. They’re…just messed up. Temporary insanity or something.”
At that moment Tim Duncan got the rebound, took two lumbering, long-length steps and made a ridiculous last-second shot that flew more than half the length of the court before it swished through the net as the buzzer went off.
The discussion of infidelity was sidetracked. But during the half-time break, as Erica soaked in her hot bath, the remembrance of it kept her from truly relaxing. She couldn’t stop herself from wondering when and why her husband’s views on adultery had become so moderated.
It was not marriage, it was basketball, she assured herself. Tom was defending an NBA star, not stating his own inclinations. Tom was not the cheating kind, Erica reminded herself. When he gave his word, he kept it.
She leaned back in the tub and laid a washcloth over her eyes, willing herself to relax.
“Men cheat, it’s just their nature,” her mother had told her when she was just a teenager. “They will say they love you. And they’ll even mean it. But if you’re a smart woman you never trust them.”
Erica snorted derisively at the memory. Her mother was angry and bitter. Maybe the men Ann Marie fell for were like that, but Erica had Tom. And Tom was just not that kind of guy.
The beginning of the workweek was a busy one in the shop. Cliff was in a great mood, but from Tom’s perspective it was for all the wrong reasons. Every peep of his cheerful whistling made Tom feel as if he were part of a conspiracy, a conspiracy to deceive their wives. Cliff even showed up early one morning to work on the restroom plumbing.
“What are you doing?” Tom asked.
“I’m getting this shower working again,” Cliff answered.
The bathroom’s shower was in disrepair. No one had ever used it since the day they’d moved in. It mostly was utilized as a closet for storage. Cliff had removed the boxes to the shop floor, scrubbed up the tile and attached a showerhead to what had formerly been a capped pipe overhead.
Tom’s brow furrowed in confusion. “If you’re looking for jobs, Cliff, there’s half a dozen on the clipboard. I don’t think we really need a functioning shower.”
“I think we do,” Cliff said, grinning at him like the cat that swallowed the canary. “We can wash up here so we don’t go home smelling of grease or oil or gasoline…or another woman.”
Cliff chuckled delightedly at this last. Tom didn’t find it funny at all. He’d agreed to keep his friend’s secret. But he did not appreciate its broadening scope.
“I’ve got work to do,” he said, turning his back on Cliff and purposefully getting on with his day.
From the clipboard he sorted out the jobs that needed to be done and assigned them based on the talents of his employees and the time typically needed for completion. He tried to be smart about who was best at what. But he also tried to be fair. He never asked anyone to do more work that he did. And he took his turn on the crappy tasks that nobody really wanted to do.
Tom not only did his share of the mechanic work, but he handled all the estimates, set the assignments and kept up with the money.
Still, he made time to devote himself exclusively to the Buick. He’d been in, out, under and over her and he felt as if he had a very thorough knowledge of the car. Clara, he began to call her. She wasn’t just a pretty Buick—she was unique, and Tom found himself thinking about her, referring to her, by Mrs. Gilfred’s pet name.
Besides the problems with the carburetor and the worn belts, he thought the transmission was leaky and there were some serious rust problems on one of the ankle boots. Still, it would all be fixable and increase the value of the car beyond the price of repairs.
With Mrs. Gilfred’s hearing problem, Tom thought
she was not quite as good on the phone as in person. So on Tuesday he left a message on her answering machine that he would be coming over. He gathered all his paperwork on the vehicle and drove over to her home in Leon Valley.
There was no answer when he rang the doorbell loud enough to wake the neighborhood. He waited on the porch for several minutes. With no car to drive, she couldn’t have gone far. A bus trip to the grocery store, maybe, or visiting with friends down the street.
Tom pushed a little pile of newspapers out of the way and seated himself on the porch steps, reading over his work sheet as he waited for her. It was several minutes before the presence of the newspapers clicked in his head. He turned to check her mailbox and sure enough it was overflowing with junk mail and ad circulars.
His brow furrowed. Maybe she was out of town, visiting family or seeing the sites.
Down the street he saw another woman, probably twenty years younger than Mrs. Gilfred, raking the leaves in her yard. Tom loped over to her calling out a “Good Morning!” as he approached.
She stopped her work long enough to give him a look of acknowledgment.
“I’m Tom Bentley,” he said, by way of introduction. “I own Bentley’s Classic Car Care. I’ve got Mrs. Gilfred’s Buick in my shop. Have you seen her lately?”
He handed the woman his business card. She looked it over before she answered.
“An ambulance came and took her away on Sunday afternoon. That’s all I know,” she said. “Ask Miss Warner in the blue house. I think she’s a friend of the old lady.”
Tom did exactly that. The neighbor just on the other side of Mrs. Gilfred seemed very pleased to have a visitor of any type and insisted that he sit on her porch for a glass of lemonade.
“Poor old thing,” Miss Warner said of Mrs. Gilfred, who couldn’t have been more than a few years senior to Miss Warner herself. “I don’t know if it was her heart or a stroke, but something happened and she fell. She’s lucky she didn’t break a hip as well as the rest of it. The nice man from the EMS said he thought she probably lay unconscious on the floor for hours. Then she came to and crawled to the phone to call 9-1-1 herself.” The woman tutted and shook her head. “She was always like that. Very self-sufficient. My mother said those women always end up alone, because men just don’t feel the need to take care of them. But then, if rumor can be relied upon, she was never truly interested in men.”
