by Jean Stone
He'd landed on that hook but nothing more when Cassie burst through the French doors that led from the living room into the study and announced, “I'm never going back to school. I don't care what you say.”
Andrew closed his eyes. “What?” he asked.
“You heard me!” Cassie screeched and bolted from the study as quickly as she'd come in.
Which meant, of course, that Andrew had to stop what he was doing, go and find his daughter who was pacing in the kitchen, calm her down, and prod her into telling him what happened and why she did not plan to further her education into the sixth grade.
“It's all your fault,” she said, which was no surprise. Wasn't it always? “You're dating the school principal! How could you do that, Dad? Ms. Brouillard is a . . . a . . .”
Andrew supposed that at eleven, even his daughter's vocabulary was limited when it came to matters of the dating game. “An old battle-ax?” he asked.
Cassie scowled. “A what?”
Andrew laughed. “Honey,” he said, “I'm not dating Ms. Brouillard. I had lunch with her yesterday to talk about a project I have to do.” He had bought the thirty-seven-year-old battle-ax a grilled chicken sandwich at Friendly's and told her he was doing research about dating over thirty. He had inferred neither that he was working on his dissertation nor on the “Real Women” column. And he certainly had not implied that it had been a date.
Had he?
Or did a woman over thirty automatically think that when the man picked up the check for $13.95, he fully intended to marry her within the next six months or so?
Andrew sighed. “It's part of my new job, honey,” he tried to reassure his daughter. “The column I'm writing for John.” Among other things, John Benson was Cassie's godfather, a doting one, who had supplied her with the full contingent of American Girl dolls, though Cassie would have preferred collectible horses, and Junior Miss diamond earrings, though she'd wanted leather chaps.
Nonetheless, Cassie loved John. But that was not the issue now. “You're not dating Ms. Brouillard?”
Andrew shook his head. “No, honey. It will be safe for you to go back to school in September.”
She put her hands on her narrow hips, rolled her eyes and sighed. “Geez, Dad, why can't you just get a real job like other people?”
8
Elaine's house was exactly as Jo remembered. A “family” of white ceramic ducks lined one side of the brick front walk; pots of red geraniums stood as sentries on the stoop; above the door hung a green flag decorated with a yellow sun and pink letters that read, SUMMER.
The last time Jo had been there, a flag had read WINTER. It was so like Elaine: She took pleasure in the things that were homey and crafty, even if her choices weren't very stylish or didn't match one another. Jo wondered how difficult it had been for Elaine to be divorced, to no longer belong in the well-defined role of a man's wife and homemaker.
Now that would change, beginning with the wedding that her old friends would plan.
Jo rang the doorbell and Elaine quickly answered, her smile wide, her hair gelled and blow-dried with its high peak of bangs, her blue plaid cotton shorts and matching shirt neatly pressed. On her feet were white canvas sneakers and short socks with a pink ball at each heel. Behind her stood a short, broad man dressed in khaki pants, a shortsleeved shirt and tie. He was clearly older than Elaine—close to sixty, maybe. What he lacked for in hair, he made up for with a full and generous smile.
“Jo,” Elaine said, “Martin was just leaving, but say ‘Hi.'” She stepped aside and the man extended his hand. His smile had not faltered.
“Martin Schiffman,” he said in a voice that was just a little too loud.
Jo shook his hand. “The groom,” she said.
His head nodded with the same beat as his handshake. “The lucky groom.”
“Martin, stop,” Elaine said. “You'll make me blush in front of one of my oldest and dearest friends.”
“I've heard a lot about you, Jo,” he said.
The amenities continued for another moment, then Martin kissed Elaine on the cheek and went off down the driveway. Elaine led Jo into the living room of the four-bedroom, two-bath colonial house that was about to have a husband again.
“Isn't he great?” Elaine said. “I know he's a little old, but he's crazy about me. Imagine that!”
Jo smiled. “Of course I can imagine that, Lainey. And if you love each other, what difference does it make how old he is?” She cleared her throat, realizing that she sounded an awful lot like Pollyanna Lily.
They moved to the screened porch out back, where Elaine offered gin and tonic, but Jo said she'd prefer lemonade. They settled in and Jo took a long, cool drink.
“I thought while Lily was in New York we could start to renovate the shop,” she said.
“So you've finally agreed?” Elaine asked.
Jo shrugged. “I've been lured by the prospect of hanging out with you guys.”
“There are worse places you could live. And worse things you could do.”
Like staying in Boston and waiting for Brian to come back to her. Again.
After taking a long drink, Jo tried to smile. “We'll need a Dumpster or a rubbish person who will haul away the trash, then scrub the place from top to bottom. Sarah thought you might know of someone here in town.” Unlike Sarah, the artist in the woods, Elaine was active in everything from the PTO to the Fourth of July parade committee, not unlike Marion, not unlike Mrs. Kingsley, not unlike most of the other women of West Hope.
Holding up her hand, Elaine said, “Wait a minute. I'm the bride, not one of the partners.”
“You aren't going to work with us?”
“Not now, not after my wedding. I shall be a housewife, and this time I shall not screw it up.”
Jo could have replied with any of several uplifting replies, but she didn't feel like listening to Elaine's troubles with men. “Okay,” she quickly said, “but surely you know someone . . . a handyman . . . or handywoman?”
Elaine seemed to think a moment. “We could ask Frank,” she said at last. “Frank Forbes, you know.”
Yes, of course Jo knew. She took another drink and wished she'd taken the gin.
“Well,” Elaine continued, “what with the antiques business, I'm sure he's always hiring people to clean out houses when people die or get shipped off to nursing homes or whatever.”
Jo studied her ankles, then the patch of indoor/outdoor carpeting spread across the concrete floor, which she bet Elaine scrubbed every day as if her husband had never left her, as if her life had never changed. She wondered how other women managed, how they survived the process of suddenly being alone. Did they all scrub floors?
“Was it hard,” Jo heard herself ask, “when Lloyd left?”
The air on the porch seemed to have cooled. “Lloyd didn't leave,” Elaine said. “I told him to get out.”
Jo supposed that, when faced with a situation as ugly as divorce, the semantics of who really did what and to whom were important. She knew, of course, that Lloyd, an attorney who “should have known better,” had been screwing around with a county court judge. She thought he'd even married the woman. “Was it hard?” she repeated, though it seemed an understatement.
Elaine stood up. She went to the screen and faced the backyard, the picnic table, and a badminton net stretched between two trees, symbols of a house in the suburbs where kids grew up like one another and rarely broke from the mold. She plucked a droopy leaf from an African violet that sat on a small white wrought-iron table.
“For a while I thought I would die.” Her voice was a whisper.
Jo remained silent. In the few times she'd seen Elaine since the divorce, Elaine had not shared the details other than to say “Thank God he is gone.”
“I don't think I left the house for three months,” Elaine continued. “I made the kids do the shopping and yard work and anything that meant having to face the world, having to answer a question, or worse, listen to sympathy.
I even made the kids answer the phone.” She laughed and swirled the ice in her glass. “Then one day I said the hell with it. I got up and showered and dressed and marched down to the courthouse. I stood on the steps and told every person who was coming or going that the judge had stolen my husband, until Lloyd's brother, the cop, came along and said I was making a spectacle and asked me to leave. By then I felt a little vindicated.”
Elaine laughed again and returned to her white plastic chair. It was then that Jo realized the chairs were the same she'd seen at her new neighbor's on Shannon Drive. She wondered if Arnold's Hardware had featured them on sale.
“I have three kids, Jo. My oldest is twenty-one. I'd been married too long to the same man.”
“Maybe,” Jo replied.
“Oh. Without a doubt.”
Jo couldn't imagine doing the same anything for twenty-one years, let alone be married to the same man. Unless, of course, it had been Brian.
A bird outside made some kind of noise. Jo knew her mother would know the type of bird and probably what it was saying. Things were that simple in West Hope: birdsongs and badminton and white plastic chairs, with the pain of living layered somewhere beneath, cushioned by the grounding of everyday life.
“Well,” Elaine said, raising her glass. “Here's to our futures. Your business, my wedding.”
Jo smiled. They sipped. “Now tell me about your new man, and how wonderful your new life will be.” It was healthier, she was learning, to focus on the potential of tomorrow, than to dwell on the past.
Elaine's husband-to-be was named Martin Schiffman and he owned a Chevy dealership on Route 7 in Pittsfield. In the summers he also acted at the Berkshire Summer Theater, which Elaine found endearing because here was this automotive guy who played a great MacBeth. They had both served on the chamber of commerce board of directors for many years, and not long after Lloyd left, Martin's wife died of stomach cancer, and so there they were.
And now there was Jo. With a future of her own, for better or for worse, it was all up to her.
After two glasses of lemonade and half a plateful of sugar cookies, Elaine invited Jo to stay for dinner with Martin and see her kids—Kandie, Kory, and Karen (“You won't believe how grown-up they are!”)—but Jo said she'd promised her mother she'd be home tonight, thanks, another time. Before leaving, however, Jo made one phone call to the leasing office on Shannon Drive.
Yes, the apartment was still available. It required signing a six-month lease.
Yes, it could be ready by the end of the week.
She gave a verbal agreement and asked if they needed a credit card number as a deposit to hold it.
No, they did not. This was West Hope, not the city.
She then called the moving company in Boston that was scheduled to pick up her things on Friday. “I don't want my furniture put into storage,” Jo said. “I need it delivered to West Hope instead.” She had to explain that West Hope was in Western Massachusetts between Stockbridge and Lenox . . . had they heard of it?
“It might take a couple of days for your things to get there,” the woman on the other end of the line said. “Until we have a full load headed west.” It was as if anything past Exit 14 on the turnpike was uncharted frontier.
“No problem,” Jo said with relief. It would take her that long to figure out what pieces would fit and what would have to go in her mother's garage.
“Done,” she said as she hung up the phone. “Looks like I'm in business.”
Elaine gave her a high five. “Sure you won't stay for dinner? Or how about that drink?”
Jo declined, said thanks again, and decided she'd stop at the IGA: She'd surprise her mother with pasta primavera for dinner and strawberries for dessert. Because even though Jo would be living in the secretaries' building, her mother would be delighted that she'd come back to West Hope to stay, at least for the moment, at least for right now.
Juggling two paper (not plastic) grocery bags, Jo fumbled with the doorknob, then let herself in. Marion was seated at the table, studying what appeared to be the mail.
“Mother,” Jo said, “didn't you hear me?” She turned from Marion and set the bags on the counter. The late afternoon had grown oppressive again: time to bring out the fans. One thing that Jo had forgotten about “home” was that few people had air-conditioning, as if it would be a sacrilege to their Old New England ancestors who had suffered so much for them.
She'd forgotten to ask if Shannon Drive had central air.
She opened the refrigerator door, inhaled the coolness, and began to unload the shopping bags. She realized then that her mother had not replied.
“Mother?” she asked, turning back to the woman who rarely looked her age except in times of stress. Jo noticed that the lines around her mouth and the furrows of her brow were exceptionally deep now.
Marion set down the paper she was examining and peered at her daughter. She no longer needed glasses, thanks to her cataract surgery and the miracle lens implants she'd had last year. Still, her eyes looked tired, old. “Jo,” she said, “I've been waiting for you to come home.”
Jo closed the refrigerator door. She supposed she should ask, “What's wrong?” but Jo figured she'd know soon enough. “I was with Lily and Sarah and Elaine,” she said. “Lily wants us to open a wedding-planning business, Mom. I've decided to move back to West Hope after all.”
Instead of nodding and smiling and saying, “Oh, Jo, that's wonderful,” Marion stayed in her seat and tightened her lips.
“Mother?” Jo repeated, because Marion just sat there.
Then her mother cluck-clucked and quietly said, “I've asked myself a thousand times where I went wrong with you, Josephine. Over the years, I've asked myself a thousand times.”
Jo felt her insides buckle. She fought the urge to say she'd suddenly changed her mind, that perhaps staying in Boston would be a better idea.
But then there was the loneliness,
and the memories,
and the fact that she had now made a commitment to her friends.
Resigned, Jo sat down and waited to learn how her mother had gone wrong.
“When you first left home, I went into some sort of shock.”
Jo nearly groaned out loud. All these years later, couldn't her mother let it go? Couldn't her mother forgive her for her trespasses, the way Jo had forgiven Marion for hers?
“You may or may not believe this, but the hardest part for me to accept was that, so many years ago, though you trusted me enough with your secret, you didn't trust my advice. That you did not trust your own mother to take care of you and your child, to protect you from what the world would say and do.”
Jo watched the lines around her mother's mouth multiply. She knew better than to speak. She tried to stop the tears from welling in her eyes. On some level she had always known that the abortion had not been easy for either of them, that Jo had not been the only one to carry the suffering and the guilt and the sadness it had wrought.
“And then this morning you had a phone call and I've been sitting here just waiting for you to decide to come home.”
Jo knew what was coming next. She did not know how her mother had found out; she did not know how much she knew. But she knew her latest pain was about to be exposed. She held her hand across her stomach and asked, “Who called me, Mother?”
“The call was from the Boston Police. The Missing Persons Bureau. Josephine, what's going on?”
They hadn't found him. But another case had turned up a photo from South America in which someone looked suspiciously like Brian Forbes.
Did Jo want them to e-mail her the picture?
She wound the old-fashioned telephone cord around her fingers, aware that, though she sat at the telephone table in the front hall, her mother was in the kitchen and her mother was not deaf.
Besides, her computer was still in Boston. She'd have to go to the library to access her e-mail. She'd have to open the image there, with others all around.
A thin line of perspiration formed on her upper lip. “That won't be necessary,” she said. “I'll be in the city later this week. I'll stop by and look at it then.” She tried to sound calm, tried not to sound urgent. But when Jo hung up the phone and returned to the kitchen, one look at her mother unraveled her composure.
“I guess,” she said, “you should know the truth.”
Marion did not say a word; she just pulled out a chair for Jo to sit down.
9
Placing her hands on her mother's kitchen table, Jo began to share select parts of the story.
“He had come back to me,” she said slowly. “We'd been talking about our future. But Brian had been having a hard time getting his investment business off the ground. I believed in him, though. I thought that was important if we were going to get married.” Then she told her mother she'd decided to tell Brian about the abortion. If he could forgive her, their relationship might work. “I suggested we meet at McNally's after work. It was our favorite pub.”
She pressed her fingertips together; she did not look at Marion as she continued. She said they'd ordered beer and popcorn shrimp, that Brian had looked tired, but that things had seemed all right. Just as Jo mustered her courage to bring up the abortion, he held a finger to her lips. “Hold that thought,” he said. “I need to use the men's room.”
Jo sat back and sipped her beer and waited for his return.
She chatted with the waitress, who knew them both by now.
She said, “Hi, how are you?” to at least half a dozen regulars at McNally's, too.
She played out her words over and over in her mind. “I was so scared,” she would say. “I was so hurt that you'd left me.”
She finished her beer, but did not order another.
Then she saw Charlie, a man Brian played squash with. He invited himself to sit down.
“Brian will be right back,” Jo explained with a smile. “But we're having a private discussion.” She did not want Charlie to intrude. But Charlie sat anyway and began talking about things that did not interest Jo.
