by Pamela Morsi
He went back into the office and re-called the parts store. “This is Tom Bentley again. What is Stacy’s last name?”
The woman replied without hesitation.
“Do you have her home phone number?” Tom asked.
“She’s not there. I told you, she’s on vacation.”
“I could leave a message on her voice mail,” Tom fudged.
“Oh yeah, sure.”
He heard the woman clicking through a couple of screens before she gave him the number. Tom wrote it down and then made a mental note to remind his own employees not to give out personal information on each other.
After ending the call to the parts store, he phoned the number he’d been given, not knowing what he might encounter or what he even had to say. When a man’s voice picked up on the third ring, he decided that honesty had to be the best policy.
“Hi,” he said. “This is Tom Bentley from Bentley’s Classic Car Care. I’m trying to find Stacy.”
There was a hesitation on the end of the line.
“So you’ve lost her, too.”
“Huh?”
“Aren’t you the son of a bitch who’s been screwing my wife for months?”
Tom was momentarily speechless. Had Cliff somehow thrown suspicion on Tom? Was that how he’d been doing it? Was that how he’d been keeping his wife from suspecting anything? Why Trish had been so angry at him?
“No, I’m not,” Tom replied firmly. “I am the boss of the son of a bitch who’s been screwing your wife for months. He didn’t show up for work this morning and his wife is terrified.”
Stacy’s husband was silent for a moment and then gave a disgusted snort. “Now that figures,” he said. “The creep isn’t even man enough to face his own wife. What Stacy sees in these low-life cowards I’ll never understand.”
Tom noticed the plural. “Cowards?” he repeated. “More than one.”
The man didn’t answer directly. “She always comes back to me,” he said. “Once things get out in the open, she’ll run off with the guy for a week or two. But she always comes back. Stacy won’t leave the kids for long. And I’m not about to give them up. I shouldn’t have to give them up, not even part-time. I’ve done nothing to be punished for.”
Tom didn’t understand the man’s logic, or whether he was right or wrong or both. And he didn’t care.
“Do you have any idea where they are?” he asked.
“Not for sure. She loves South Padre. I’ve found her before down there at a place called Coronodo Condos.”
“Thank you,” Tom said before hanging up.
Briscoe was standing in the doorway. Tom went out and found the kid another task he could do without help. He talked with a customer and then finally got back to the office to open up his laptop and check the internet for the beach property.
When he had the number he opened the bay four door and got into the Buick. The engine turned over like butter and hummed as sweetly as a sewing machine. He put the top down and drove the vehicle to the back lot where he parked in the crisp cool sunshine of a November morning, and the memory of his childhood came flooding back.
He’d ridden in a car like this to Delila Vera’s wedding. He remembered it now and was astonished that he’d forgotten it. They had lived with Delila for a while in Colombia and she’d shown up later in Mexico, like so many did. But Delila had changed. She had fallen in love with a man who owned a shoe store. It was a small, insignificant shoe store. And he was an older, ordinary man, a widower with two young children. But she had fallen in love with him and it had changed her. She had given up the drugs and the street life. She had worked for him in his store. And on that beautiful autumn day, they had driven in his beautiful old car to the tiny church in his village to get married.
Tom and his mother had been Delila’s only guests. They’d washed and dressed in the rooms above the store. Delila had loaned her mother a dress. And there was a clean shirt and trousers that belonged to the man’s son. Tom’s feet were bigger than the son’s, so the man had given him a pair of sneakers to keep.
The wedding had been simple and sweet. Afterward, Tom had never seen any of them again. But that day, that wedding day, had been one of hope. It had been one Tom had put his faith in. If finding love and family could give Delila a new life, then it was possible for anyone. Even his mother. Even himself.
Tom leaned back into the Buick’s aging upholstery and allowed the sun to shine on his face. The world could be a terrible place. There was sadness everywhere and lives that were destroyed, people who were wounded. Traps that snared. Dreams that died.
He found himself smiling. Because there was hope. Delila’s wedding had proved that to him. And every day his own marriage to Erica reinforced it.
I love you, he’d said that morning to his wife. Those were very small words that couldn’t begin to encompass the fullness of his feelings for her, about her. It was too big a meaning to be held in his brain. Too grand a concept for a regular guy to be able to express. He loved her. And that was a driving force, an engine, that could never be contained with internal combustion.
Tom sat there in the sun for a few more minutes before he heaved a sigh, pulled out his cell phone and got to the business at hand. He dialed the number of Coronodo Condos on his cell phone.
He went through a couple of layers of trouble. The property manager was loath to verify who was staying where. The condos did not have private phones in the rooms. Finally he convinced the lobby superintendent that it was an emergency and he agreed to check the apartment while Tom waited on the phone.
Tom grabbed a chammy and began one-handedly wiping down the Buick as he waited. Finally Cliff was on the phone.
“Hello.”
“Cliff, this is Tom,” he said. “Don’t talk. Listen. You’re fired. Now, I’ll give you fifteen minutes to call your wife. And I’ll even give you a hint of what you might say. You might say that you lost your job and you were afraid to face her. You just started driving and kept on going. Tell her that you’re coming home now and you’ll be there in a couple of hours. That you love her and that you’re sorry and that you want to work things out.” Tom barely paused. “If you go that route, then I’ll keep your secret until I go to my grave. I’ll give you a good recommendation and you can blame everything on me.” Tom thought it was a very fair offer. “As I said, you’ve got fifteen minutes. If you don’t call your wife, then I will and I’ll tell her what a lying, cheating bastard you really are. And I’ll also tell her where her divorce lawyer can find you. Fifteen minutes.”
Tom didn’t wait for a response. He clicked the phone off and looked at his watch.
Chapter 18
ERICA AND MELODY WERE having one final meeting on the EMR workshop, but it was not going well at all. Erica could barely focus on the material in front of her. She was still reeling from her spying fiasco of the night before. She replayed her whole crazy behavior over and over in her head. She was as bad as her mother. No, she was worse. Her mother would never have gotten that close without actually getting some information.
And Tom, this morning, talking about it as if there was nothing out of the ordinary about him visiting a customer at home. He’d even let it slip that it was a “single female, living alone.” Did he not think she noticed! Did he think she was stupid!
The wave of irrational anger was followed by a pit of fear in her stomach. “I love you,” he’d said. And his expression was as open and honest and sincere as it had been on their wedding day. Could he be lying? Had he always been lying?
Erica managed to get a grip on her imagination. Tom was a car mechanic and a loving husband and father. If he had strayed, it was not some diabolical plot. It was…it was… Erica couldn’t quite complete the thought. Was it a deal breaker? If her husband had been unfaithful would she leave him?
She didn’t know. She was her mother’s daughter. Ann Marie had no respect for women who stayed with philandering husbands. Still, Erica could not contemplate a life with
out Tom. Could not imagine Quint bouncing back and forth between her place and Tom’s. Lots of women did it. But lots of them didn’t have a choice. Erica didn’t know if she had a choice. If she did, she couldn’t be sure what it would be.
She’d read the same sentence in her notes three times. Finally she underlined it and looked over at Melody.
Her workshop leader didn’t seem much better off than she did. Melody seemed nervous, edgy, uncomfortable She had an open bag of M&M’s on the table and she was scarfing them down by the handful.
“Did you get the extra time?” she asked Erica.
Erica glanced up.
“From Dr. Glover,” Melody clarified her question.
“Oh yeah, of course,” she answered.
“Of course,” Melody repeated in a tone that was snide. Then she got up and left the room.
Erica didn’t know what that was about, but she decided to ignore it. With everything going on at home and the workshop happening tomorrow, she simply couldn’t take on Melody’s drama right now. The woman would have to learn to deal on her own.
Erica decided that an hour or so of letting tempers cool would be the best thing for both of them. Deliberately she tried to focus on the presentation. She assumed that Melody would eventually be back to the conference room. But when she didn’t return and Erica had done all she could do, she put the papers back in order and carried everything to her desk.
In her cubicle, she pulled up her in-box and began coding charts. She figured she’d need to play catch-up. Melody would undoubtedly want to finish up the meeting this afternoon. Erica didn’t want to lose any more time than she already had.
She didn’t see Melody at the lunch table, but decided to take her sandwich back to her desk. Erica toyed with the idea of calling her sister, or even her mother, but ultimately decided to leave the phone in her purse. She did click open her screen and was reading and making notations between bites.
“Are you working or breaking?”
The question came from Mrs. Converse, who was standing at the entrance to the cubicle.
“Actually, I’m breaking,” Erica said. She held up her sandwich as proof.
“You’ll recall that I have strict rules about taking scheduled breaks,” she said. “Downtime is vital to maintain quality work. My employees are not machines. Your brains require rest.”
“Sorry,” Erica said. “We have the workshop tomorrow and I thought Melody might want to do some last-minute polishing this afternoon, so I was trying to cover a few more charts.”
“Melody told me the workshop was ready to go,” Mrs. Converse said.
Erica thought that was probably debatable, but she wasn’t about to dispute the project leader’s judgment.
“She’s gone for the day,” Mrs. Converse continued. “She wasn’t feeling very well and she wants to be her best tomorrow.”
“Melody went home?”
Mrs. Converse nodded. “So you’ll have all afternoon to work on your charts.”
At that moment Erica wasn’t worried about the charts. There were a million small details that needed to be taken care of before the participants showed up the next day. The list of follow-up calls alone would take a couple of hours. Maybe Melody was making the follow-up calls from home. Or maybe she wasn’t. Erica thought about asking Mrs. Converse and decided against it. If Melody forgot about the follow-ups, that was really dropping the ball. Erica wouldn’t even suggest to the supervisor that her coworker had done such a thing.
“Okay then,” Erica said, forcing a big smile on her face that she hoped wasn’t too fake. “Maybe I’ll just turn the screen off and call my sister for a lunchtime chat.”
Mrs. Converse smiled.
Erica, of course, didn’t call Letty. She pulled out the follow-up list and started with the Dietary Department, verifying the catered lunch. Then she placed a call to the Physical Plant double-checking that the room they were using was still available for their use and that the appropriate tables and chairs would be set up in the positions they’d requested. She checked with all the speakers, making sure they knew when they were to speak and where. It didn’t take her long to realize that she wasn’t duplicating Melody’s work. Melody hadn’t contacted anyone. She must have simply neglected it completely.
Erica managed to get some charts done late in the afternoon. She decided to take the presentation home and polish it up as best she could. By the end of the day, she was exhausted. Also slightly grateful. She’d been so frantic trying to get everything done, that her worries about her marriage and her husband had been put on the back burner.
However they came front and center when she went to pick up Quint.
“I’m working late again tonight,” Tom told her. “I’ll be home as soon as I can.”
She wanted to argue with him. But she could see how busy he was. He had two cars up on lifts. He was working on one and supervising Briscoe as he did work on the other.
“I’ve got something important I need to talk to you about,” he said.
The seriousness of his tone made her heart catch in her throat.
“What is it?” she asked him.
Tom shook his head. “We’ll talk tonight, at home.”
Erica agreed. She took Quint home. He was even more talkative than usual, perhaps he sensed that his mother was hardly listening.
She tried to get back into the workshop presentation, but was actually grateful when the phone rang, even if it was her mother.
“So, have you thought about your entry for the Christmas parade?” she asked.
“Uh…no.”
“Well, it doesn’t have to be a float, you know. It can be something else. Quint’s not in a tumbling group, I suppose. What about his Little League team?”
“What about his Little League team?”
“They could march in the parade as your entry,” her mother said, in a tone that suggested the answer was obvious.
“You told me that we wouldn’t have to have an entry,” Erica reminded her. “You said if we just signed our name and you paid our fee that would be the end of it.”
“Well, of course it’s not the end of it,” Ann Marie said. “You can’t just not show up. You’ll have to come up with some kind of entry. But you have a month and you’re so creative about these things. What’s happening with the car?”
“The car?”
“Yes, Letty’s car. She left that horrible excuse for a car in our driveway and borrowed the van from Melvin.”
“Oh, yes, Letty’s car.” Erica dragged herself quickly into the lie. “Yeah, I expect her to bring the van back this afternoon.”
“That’s good,” her mother said. “She told Melvin she would bring it back this morning.”
“I’m sure she just got busy and couldn’t get over there,” Erica said.
“I don’t want you girls taking advantage of Melvin,” Ann Marie said. “He is very easy to manipulate and I don’t want you doing that.”
“We wouldn’t manipulate the poor man. We know that’s your job.”
Her mother’s sharp intake of breath was indication of a direct hit. If she’d had any doubt, the sudden dial tone she heard a second later confirmed her aim.
Erica grinned at the phone. But it was short-lived. Her mother’s life was such a long-term, unending mess. It was easy to take potshots. Erica reminded herself that her own little nest might not be quite as perfect as she’d always thought.
A few minutes later Letty called.
“Have you lost your mind?” she asked. “Why would you start a fight with Mom? Do you not have enough trouble already?”
“I was defending you,” Erica answered. “At least I sort of was. She suggested that borrowing Melvin’s minivan was somehow manipulating him.”
“It wasn’t my idea to borrow a car so you could spend the night stalking your husband.”
“I was not stalking. And I couldn’t take my own car. Why didn’t you return it this morning like you said you would?”
/> “Because I might get a question or two if I returned a car that smells like spilt milk and urine. What the heck did you do in there anyway?”
“It’s a long story,” Erica said.
“I thought you were always willing to share with your sister.”
“Somethings my sister doesn’t need to know.”
“Like why you would pee in the car,” Letty said.
“I didn’t pee in the car, I peed on myself and then I had to sit in the car.”
Letty laughed.
“I can’t believe you find this funny,” Erica said. “My husband was in the house with a strange woman. I nearly got caught. There were people screaming and chasing me. Seriously, it was not funny.”
“If you don’t want me to laugh, then you have to tell me everything,” she said.
Reluctantly, Erica gave her a condensed version of her personal nightmare on Helm Street. When she finished, Letty actually laughed harder than she had before.
“I am having a crisis in my marriage and you find it funny,” Erica accused.
“You’re not having a crisis,” Letty assured her. “You’re seeing a mirage.”
“He said he has something serious he needs to discuss with me,” Erica told her. “What if he confesses? He may be coming home to tell me everything, get it off his chest, beg for forgiveness.”
“I don’t think so.”
“But what if he does?”
“Then you’ll deal with it,” Letty said.
“I don’t know how,” Erica said. “I don’t know what I’d do. I love him. I don’t want to lose him. But if he cheated on me, I don’t know if I could forgive him.”
“I doubt anybody knows that until they’ve been in that situation,” Letty said.
“Mom does,” Erica pointed out. “I think this is the only time in my life that I’d want to be Mom. That I want to be so sure of myself and certain about what is the right thing to do.”
“I am certain of you,” Letty said. “I would trust your decision making over anyone I know. But I don’t buy into your speculation. Tom is not a cheater. He’s just not a run-around-on-your-wife kind of guy.”
