The Bentleys Buy a Buick

by Pamela Morsi

  “He is visiting some woman on that street,” Erica said. “That’s not my imagination or speculation. He’s admitted it. He’s visiting a woman. He’s been visiting her long enough that people on the street stop and talk to him. He’s eating dinner with her. He’s eating with her instead of with me and Quint.”

  “I don’t have an explanation,” Letty told her. “But I do have the facts. Fact is, the guy is the truest man I’ve ever met. He is the only reason I still believe that it’s possible in this crazy world to find happiness out there. He has made my sister happy. And nobody I know deserves it more.”

  Erica felt the tears pooling in the corners of her eyes.

  “I want to believe in him,” she said to Letty.

  “Then do. Mom always thinks men are cheating on her. And somehow that always turns out to be right. Please don’t fall into the trap of having those expectations. You are better than that. Tom is better than that.”

  It was almost nine when Tom arrived home. He’d been so tired he’d started making mistakes and that was when it was past time to quit. For once, he wasn’t eager to face his wife. Well, he might have been eager if he could just curl up with Erica in his arms. But it had been a sad, disappointing day. And Erica was going to have to share in that.

  He came in through the garage door, secretly hoping that she’d be sound asleep and he’d have a great excuse not to talk to her. But she was sitting at the kitchen table, papers spread out in front of her. He walked over and kissed her on the top of the head.

  “Still hard at work, huh?”

  “I’ve got that workshop presentation tomorrow,” she said.

  “Oh, right, that’s tomorrow,” he said. “I’m sure it will be great.”

  “Melody left early today and left a lot of stuff hanging.”

  He nodded sympathetically. “Well, your part will be great.”

  “I probably need to go in early in the morning,” she said. “Can you take Quint to school?”

  “Sure.”

  He watched her gather all her papers together. She was careful and methodical. She kept everything in order. Tom only wished that his own thoughts were the same. He waited until she was completely finished. He would have waited indefinitely if there had been any chance of that.

  Tom took her hand and led her into the living room to get comfortable on the couch. Erica had her back against the cushions. He sat on the edge turned in her direction so that he could look directly at her.

  When he did, he saw that her jaw was set tight and her expression was guarded. She knew it was bad news. And Tom hated being the one to bring it.

  “Cliff and Trish are splitting up,” he said, getting the punch line out of the way first.

  Erica looked puzzled for a moment as if she didn’t know who he was talking about. That announcement came as a complete surprise.

  “Oh my God, what happened?”

  Tom didn’t want to get into a lot of details. “He didn’t come home last night. Trish was frantic. She called me this morning. When I tracked him down, he was at the beach in South Padre.”

  Erica’s eyebrows went up at that.

  “He was with a woman from the Auto Parts Store down the street.”

  “Oh, no,” she said.

  “I talked to him myself,” Tom said. “I told him to call Trish and tell her that he was fired, because I did fire him, and that he’d driven all night and now he was on his way home. I gave him fifteen minutes to fix it. I actually waited twenty. When I called Trish back, she hadn’t heard from him, so I told her where he was and who he was with.”

  Tom heaved a heavy sigh and shook his head. “I still can’t believe he didn’t take the chance I offered him. I threw the guy a lifeline and he let it drag in the water.”

  “Wait a minute,” Erica said, and edged forward in her seat. “You were trying to get the guy to lie to his wife?”

  “He was already lying to his wife,” Tom said. “And he’s been lying to her for, I don’t know how long. But he’s my friend and I wanted to let him know he still had an option to save his marriage.”

  “So, he’s been having this affair, lying to his wife, and you knew about it,” she said.

  Tom nodded.

  From her expression he could see that Erica didn’t like that. He thought he’d better try to explain. He rose to his feet and began to pace the living room as he talked.

  “I caught them together in the parking lot behind the shop,” he said. “This was a couple of months ago. Cliff said it was just a sex thing. He begged me not to say anything. And then the woman told me she had kids, too. She asked me not to say anything. I was just hoping the whole mess would blow over.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Erica asked.

  “Because I knew it would put you in the same position I was in,” Tom said. “Trish is your friend. I knew you’d feel you should tell her.”

  “Of course, I would have told her. She deserved to know.”

  Tom shrugged. “I was hoping she would never find out.”

  “So Cliff lied to his wife,” Erica said slowly, critically.

  Tom was surprised by his wife’s tone. Erica had risen to her feet and was standing right in front of him, her arms tightly crossed against her chest.

  “Cliff lied to his wife and not only didn’t you stop him, you lied to her, too.”

  “What was I supposed to do?” Tom asked. “Should I jump in and break up someone else’s marriage? Cliff was my friend, my oldest friend. I thought it was a slipup, a stupid mistake. I wanted him to get his act together. And I’ve always liked Trish. I think she’s been good for him, steadied him. They’re our friends. I wasn’t exactly anxious to rip her heart out and stomp on it.”

  Tom ran his fingers through his hair and then rubbed his eyes tiredly. “What a day!” he said. “Trish’s whole world got turned upside down. The lives of her kids, changed forever. She was hurt and scared and angry. And I’m the lucky bastard who got to make all that happen.”

  Tom shuddered at the memory of it. “Oh my God, Erica, you can’t even imagine how terrible I felt. I literally got queasy talking to her. And, trust me, Trish sure didn’t see my spilling the beans as any great favor. I think she may be as mad at me as she is at him. I doubt she will ever speak to me. Cliff won’t either for that matter. Of course, I knew that was going to happen as soon as I knew I’d have to fire him.”

  “As soon as you knew you’d have to fire him?” Erica repeated his words in the form of a question.

  “Yeah,” Tom said. “Things had just gotten worse and worse. In fact, I think my knowing about Stacy may have thrown gasoline on the fire. What he’d originally described as a ‘Saturday thing’ quickly became almost an everyday.

  He was constantly sneaking off the job to meet her. It made running the shop sheer hell. I couldn’t count on him. He just wasn’t being responsible. Now I’m thinking if he’d had to keep the secret from me, too, he would never have been able to get so deeply involved with her so quickly.”

  “So, you actually helped him cheat on his wife,” Erica said.

  “It wasn’t intentional,” Tom said.

  “Wasn’t it? It sounds pretty intentional to me. You find out Cliff is screwing some slut in the parking lot and instead of making him stop, you cover for him.”

  “‘Making him stop’—how could I have made him stop?” Tom asked. “Men don’t tell other men what to do. Especially about that kind of stuff.”

  “You mean sex kind of stuff?”

  “Yeah, sex, marriage, relationships,” Tom said. “I know you women talk to each other and advise each other and are in each other’s business all the time. Men don’t do that.”

  “Men are afraid to do that,” Erica said. “They all want to act so macho.”

  “It’s not fear and it has nothing to do with macho,” Tom stated. “Men just don’t care. We don’t care. What Cliff thinks about my marriage, about me and you, is not even on my radar. I don’t need his opinion. And he
doesn’t need, or want, mine.”

  “You could have tried.”

  “I did try. I told him that he was playing with fire. That he was risking everything. He agreed with me. He already knew it. But it didn’t stop him. He didn’t want to stop. If you don’t want to stop, nothing can stop you.”

  “You could have told Trish,” Erica said.

  “Do you think she would have been any happier finding out about it two months ago than she was today?”

  “But if she’d found out earlier, before he was so involved, and she’d confronted him, maybe they could have worked it out, gone to counseling, saved the marriage.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Tom admitted. “But I thought that, maybe, giving him some time, he might come to his senses, get back on fidelity highway and become the husband he used to be, without her ever having to know, or having to be hurt.”

  “So you’re saying that it’s okay to cheat, as long as the stupid, trusting wife doesn’t find out.”

  “I never said that.”

  “You’d want them to live a marriage that’s a lie.”

  “Well, yeah, if that would work,” Tom said. “Trust me, the truth isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.”

  “Oh, so you think it’s okay to lie,” she said.

  “I don’t think it’s okay. But there are lies in every marriage, every relationship.”

  “In our marriage? In our relationship?”

  “Yeah. Sure. Little things, big things, you know that as well as I do.”

  “What are you lying to me about?”

  Tom searched his brain for an example. It was probably a testament to the strength of their bond that nothing immediately came to mind.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “I lied about kids.”

  “About kids?”

  “Actually I lied over and over about kids,” Tom said. “At first when you wanted to try and have a kid, I wasn’t sure I would be any good at it. So while we were trying, I was secretly hoping that we wouldn’t get pregnant. And then when we did, I lied for the next nine months about how happy I was. I wasn’t happy, I was scared. The whole financial thing and the parenting thing and the whole thing. I didn’t want any of it, but I knew that you did so I lied about it.”

  “You didn’t want kids?”

  “I didn’t then. After Quint was born and he was so terrific and we are such a great family together, then I wanted kids. I wanted more kids. But then you wanted to go back to work. I know you like your job. You feel good about what you do. It gives you lots of personal success and a feeling of achievement. So you said, you thought one child was enough and I said okay, so I lied again.”

  “You want more children?”

  “No, I mean I did, I would, but I don’t. Our family is great like it is. What I’m just saying is that for two people to get along together for the long haul, being a stickler for the absolute truth can make more trouble than it does good.”

  “So you’re going to tell me what you think I want to hear.” Erica’s tone was strident and snide.

  “No, sometimes I’m going to tell you things that you don’t want to hear. Like how unreasonable you sound. I’ve already had one woman yell at me today. I was hoping to come home to one who would at least try to understand.”

  “What’s going on?” a small, sleepy voice asked from the door to the hallway. “Why are you shouting at each other?”

  Tom hadn’t realized they’d gotten so loud. Quint was a sound sleeper. If they’d awakened him, they were really screaming.

  “Nothing, sweetie,” Erica assured him quickly. “Just grown-up stuff.”

  “Come on, buddy,” Tom told him. “I’ll put you back into bed.”

  Tom could feel the blood pumping through his veins and deliberately calmed himself as he followed his son back to his room.

  In the dim glow of the night-light, Quint climbed back into his bed. Tom covered him up and tucked him in on the sides, the way Erica had shown him.

  “Are you mad at Mom?” Quint asked him.

  “No,” Tom answered. “I’m just tired and grouchy.”

  The little boy nodded and closed his eyes.

  Tom wondered if, in Erica’s view, he should have been honest with his son. Yes, he was mad at Erica. She refused to see his side of it and she’d dragged their marriage into Cliff and Trish’s mess. Or maybe he had dragged them into it. At that moment, he was too exhausted to know. But he was certain he didn’t want to argue about it anymore.

  He took off his shoes. He needed to make up with Erica. He needed to take a shower. And he needed to go to bed. The morning would be coming around too soon.

  Quint had his eyes closed, but Tom was listening for the change in the sound of his breathing that would tell him that his son was sleeping. While he waited, he stretched out across the top of the bedspread. And he promptly fell asleep.

  Chapter 19

  HER PERSONAL LIFE FELT shaky and scary, but Erica dragged herself out of bed the next morning. That’s what responsible people do. She had obligations at her job. It didn’t matter that she’d had a big fight with her husband, and that it had ended with him choosing not to sleep in their bed. None of that could matter this morning, because there were thirty-seven medical-records professionals taking time out of their own busy careers to attend a workshop at University Hospital.

  This was Melody’s project and it would be Melody who took the bows or the criticism for how it went. Still, Erica had signed on to help make it work. Mrs. Converse was counting on her. She wouldn’t let anybody down.

  She was dressed and ready to head out the door when Tom got up. He was groggy and smelly, still dressed in his work clothes. Erica let him get a cup of coffee before she spoke.

  “You said you’d take Quint to school this morning.”

  “Right. Got it, no problem.”

  They looked at each other across the width of the kitchen. Should she say something to him? She could apologize. Of course, she wasn’t actually wrong. Any apology would be for the argument, and not for the content. She would have to explain that. If she did, they’d be right back where they were last night and she didn’t have time for that right now.

  “I’ve got to go.”

  Tom nodded.

  “Wish me luck.”

  He shook his head. “My Erica doesn’t need luck. She makes planning and hard work pay off.”

  Tom took the two paces across the room to kiss her goodbye. His target suggested her brow or temple. Erica raised her face offering her lips and he pressed his own to hers for one brief sweet moment.

  “Knock ’em dead,” he told her.

  Erica nodded. “I’ll do my best.”

  She grabbed up her stuff from the table and headed out.

  As she opened the garage, he called out to her from the doorway. “Erica, I love you.”

  She turned and nodded. “I know you do,” she answered.

  Since she was leaving so early, missing all the commuter traffic, she took the sedan instead of the bus. Erica drove to the hospital and actually found a good parking space. She deliberately tried to focus her thoughts on the day ahead and not on the husband and child she left behind. In a leadership seminar she’d taken years ago, the speaker had stressed the importance of compartmentalizing. While you were on the job, you put your family life in a box that you only opened for emergencies. Erica really tried to do that. This morning, however, the lid kept snapping open and her husband would pop into her thoughts like a jack-in-a-box. A Tom-in-a-box. Erica went to the department. The place was dark and completely deserted. She locked her purse in her drawer, grabbed up the box with the registration materials and headed down to the classroom.

  The lights were on, which was a positive sign. She opened the door, expecting Melody to be there. She was not. Instead, she found the setup crew getting the tables put up. Either they hadn’t seen the schematic or they couldn’t read it, because they started facing everything longwise in the room, when the more discussion-frie
ndly plan had them going the other direction. Erica was so glad she was there before they got it all done incorrectly and left for their next task.

  Once that crisis was averted, the AV guy showed up with the wrong projector. He argued, Erica stood her ground. They weren’t showing vacation slides. These were computer screens and technical forms, and everybody in the room had to be able to see them perfectly.

  As soon as the tablecloths were laid, Erica began setting up the sign-in area. Where in the heck is Melody? she wondered. She didn’t really know how Melody wanted it done. It was such a minor thing, they hadn’t ever discussed it. Erica didn’t want to take over her coworker’s project, but a quick check of her watch suggested that for better or worse it needed to be done.

  She laid the ID pins out alphabetically and decided that the info packets were so bulky she’d just place them at every seat at the tables.

  Dietary was setting up the coffee, juice and cookies when Melody finally made it through the door. She looked terrible. Her skirt was wrinkled. She’d pulled her hair up into an untidy clip. And except for a smear of lipstick, she wasn’t wearing any makeup at all.

  “I overslept,” she said by way of explanation.

  Erica stifled the urged to scream at her. Instead, recalling how easily Melody had gone over the deep end the day before, she spoke as professionally and evenly as she could.

  “None of the attendees are here yet. There’s still plenty of time for you to fix your hair and makeup.”

  Melody reached up to touch her hair, as if she just remembered she had it.

  “Go on,” Erica prodded gently. “I’ve got things covered here.”

  Melody went off to the bathroom and Erica continued to get everything ready. The guy from AV finally showed up with the right projector, but was teed off at having to make a second trip. He just set it down on the floor inside the door and left.

  Erica was annoyed, but knew that it would be quicker to just set it up herself than to try to find the man and force him to do his job. She was pretty good at figuring out how things worked and had it set up to her satisfaction just half a minute before the early arrivals walked in the door.