Those We Love Most

by Lee Woodruff

  Maura focused on a photograph of their family pinned to the bulletin board over her desk. It had been taken more than two years ago at Six Flags amusement park and Sarah had been an infant. The boys wore the satisfied expressions of a day of excess sun, sugar, and excitement. She blinked back tears as she studied the snapshot. James’s wide, freckled smile was directed right at the camera, his bangs askew, and there were scarlet bands of sunburn under his eyes where she’d neglected to apply sunscreen that day. Maura pushed her chair back from the kitchen desk and rested her head in her hands. No, she would not hit reply. It was the least she could do for her marriage, the least she could do for James.

  15

  “So, what are your plans today?” Roger breezed into the kitchen, leather briefcase in hand. His suit was pressed and he had chosen a solid deep burgundy tie. Margaret always felt a sense of satisfaction at how his shirts started the day so crisp and white.

  “Oh, some bridge at the club this morning. Then maybe over to Maura’s later to play with Sarah.” Roger kissed her cheek absentmindedly and reached around her to pour a mug of coffee from the machine.

  “I’m off again this week. I have to leave Thursday, probably just an overnight,” he said casually, pouring the milk into his coffee and moving to sit at the table while she served him a bowl of hot oatmeal and bananas.

  “Where to? Tampa?” Margaret drew the word out longer than necessary.

  “Not this time. That may be inevitable next week, but this week it’s Cincinnati. Something easy, I think.” She relaxed her stance, slightly relieved it wasn’t Florida.

  “Oh?”

  “We’re looking at some new LEED commercial developments with Dan Hurwitz and his gang. Remember him? We need to beef up our expertise in that area.”

  She nodded. After he left the house, grabbing the newspaper for the train and whistling out the door, Margaret stood at the kitchen sink, thinking about how casually he had answered her when she had raised the subject of Tampa. Perhaps whatever transgressions he had committed there were long over. She could only hope so.

  Yet she knew with absolute certainty that Roger had been unfaithful, she had proof. It was a boarding pass from an airline that she’d found three years ago. A moment of carelessness on Roger’s part, emboldened, no doubt, by the foolish preening narcissism of a rooster in love.

  She’d been searching for a smaller suitcase, needing to pack for a visit to Stu and Jen right after their engagement. As an assistant professor of technology at Milwaukee’s city community college, Jen’s teaching schedule permitted little time to plan a wedding, and Margaret had eagerly volunteered to help. She had located one of Roger’s carry-on bags in the closet, and when she yanked it off the top shelf it had fallen open. A boarding pass stub from a flight to Tampa slipped out of the unzipped front pocket and onto the carpet. She had picked it up to throw it out until she noticed something scribbled on the back.

  “Come back soon. Miss you already.” It was signed “Love, J” with all the familiarity of a childhood sweetheart, and she studied the flight time and date to Florida, trying to imagine the hand that had written so breezily. Something thick had welled up and then clogged in Margaret’s throat. A weak cry escaped, almost animal-like, which she’d suppressed with her fist despite being alone in the house.

  On some level, she supposed, she had been bracing for this. It had been an unspoken thing, an intuition. Roger was a handsome man, patrician and charismatic. He traveled frequently, was exposed to all kinds of people in his business. Margaret had certainly been to enough of the annual meetings and some of the resort conventions to see the temptations, the eager supplicants and hussies who clustered in bars and at dinners, advertising their availability. She imagined them to be calculating and cunning about their conquests. But she’d always hoped, however blindly, that Roger was above that.

  She thought about what she’d read somewhere, that the human heart can only sustain that kind of crazy, googly-eyed love for roughly a year. Twelve months. And then it became something else, something more familiar and at the same time more critical. It separated out those couples that were going to break apart from those that were going to go on ahead, to make the commitment and stand by each other. So what happened after thirty years? And then forty?

  Margaret could still recall that moment of discovery with absolute clarity. She had let the sobs rise up in her throat and overtake her. There was no one to hear. She had sat pathetically on the carpet, legs splayed, as if she’d fallen, crying in great snuffling sounds. Oh what a sight she would make, she’d thought, if someone chanced to walk in and see her hoary, twisted face, the open suitcase and the note in her hand. How had she gotten to this place in her marriage?

  Her mind shuttled back to their first blind date; it was odd that Roger had recently recalled it. It was uncharacteristic of him to be so nostalgic, but she had been touched. Sitting across from him in the ice cream parlor that first night, all those years ago, she was struck by his self-confidence. Rakish was the word one of her sorority sisters had used to describe him, but it didn’t quite fit. He was too principled to be a rake, too full of regret when he inadvertently injured someone with a barbed or humorous comment. Tall, with chestnut-colored hair and a wide toothsome smile, Roger’s most striking feature was the openness of his slate blue eyes. They held a kind of expectant promise, as if he assumed the world wouldn’t dare let him down. It was as if he anticipated only good things. He’d come from a family of modest means in a small farming town in central Illinois, and he’d adopted the careful bearing and outward appearance of a man attempting to escape a penurious past while teaching himself to be invincible.

  Margaret had wanted to be a teacher when she had met Roger. She had hoped to go on and get her degree after college so that she could teach high school English, but they had fallen in love and married. She had gotten pregnant with Maura soon after that, and Roger’s first job had transferred him to Cleveland for a training program.

  She and Roger had been born into the era of quiet decorum. They were raised by strict Catholic parents who had lived through the Depression. Her path to marriage and a family was clearly defined. Theirs had been a quick courtship, like many other couples in the mid-1960s, in the post-Kennedy years of gathering tumult. Margaret would understand, in retrospect, that their generation had stood on the cusp of great social overhaul set in motion by the war in Vietnam and the sexual revolution in the next decade. Insulated from the burgeoning unrest by their small-town and traditional midwestern roots, they had simply flowed from dating to their engagement and then the wedding. Roger was the only man Margaret had ever slept with.

  He’d hungered for her early on in their marriage, locked eyes with her when they’d made love, spooned her at night in their sleep. But that desire seemed to thin after each child. Her fatigue, the predictability and routine of being a mother and homemaker, seemed increasingly in sharp contrast to his wheeler-dealer life on the road. It was the birth of their third child, Stu, which felt in some ways as if a string had snapped on a wonderfully rich old instrument. Juggling the demands of all three children, Margaret succumbed to the vortex of need, duty, and some days, exhaustion. Somehow she and Roger simply fell out of tune, and at some unknown point in time he had begun to share a bed with someone else. The naked betrayal of that fact hit her like the slap of an open palm as she’d sat helplessly on the rug that day three years ago.

  Crying and keening in a ball had felt surprisingly good. A kind of wary, spent calm settled in afterward, and she’d swiped at her wet eyes with the backs of her hands, feeling an exhausted relief as she crawled to the side of her bed and tilted her head back against the mattress. Spying her rosary beads on the bedside table, she brought them to her lap, beginning to mumble the prayers with her eyes closed, the sanctuary of words centering her through the innate hardwiring of her faith. When Margaret was finished, she leaned her head back again and gazed upward, observing a single strand of a cobweb waving gently from
the ceiling fan. It was that small detail that finally refocused and repurposed her.

  She sighed heavily and struggled up to her feet. Bending over at the waist, she slammed the suitcase closed and lifted it onto the bed, sticking the note in the pocket of her slacks. Margaret hadn’t consciously decided to keep it, she just didn’t want it polluting her bedroom, didn’t want it anywhere near them. And yet she couldn’t bring herself to throw it out. She had stuffed it into the bottom drawer of the old rolltop desk in the living room, which housed an archive of kids’ report cards and family medical records.

  Margaret could still recall exactly where the old boarding pass was, although she had never felt the inclination to look at it again. There were moments she would think of it, comingled in that drawer with the history and documented achievements of her loved ones, and wonder if J was still in Roger’s life. Or was there someone new? She had contemplated destroying the boarding pass, but in the end there was a twisted, inexplicable comfort, almost a security, in its secret possession. Roger had certainly forgotten it ever existed, and the carelessness of that, his disregard for her, was something best left unacknowledged.

  16

  Roger looked at his watch again in the crowded downtown restaurant. The associate he was meeting was now a half hour late. Ten or even fifteen minutes was acceptable with traffic, but this was ridiculous. Could the man have forgotten? He began to dial his secretary when a younger couple brushed past him, following the maître d’ clutching oversize menus, and the table jostled so that his water glass spilled. His mild annoyance bubbled over into open frustration. After this lunch meeting he had hoped to get over to Maura’s house, maybe take Ryan out to the backyard and play catch before the weather completely turned. Work was in a lighter phase between deals, and he was pleased to have the extra time to focus on his grandson.

  There was something so needy about Ryan now. At seven he was intensely curious about the world, and yet his loss, his sorrow, Roger sensed, was not always tended to by his parents, Pete in particular. Pete seemed to have retreated slightly since James’s death—there but not there, present but not actively so. He wondered idly if Pete had even thrown a ball with Ryan in the months since the accident.

  Roger had smelled alcohol on Pete’s breath at odd times on more than one recent occasion, but he had kept his comments to himself. There had been one evening, after a family dinner, when he and Margaret had observed Maura trying to wrestle the keys out of Pete’s palm. Pete had grabbed her arm angrily. Roger had come close to intervening, but in the end he had exercised restraint. Everyone was hurting in different ways, he reasoned. Still, the urge to protect his daughter had flared, but the normally easy channels of their more intimate conversations had changed with the death of James. He would not raise the subject with her.

  “I’ve been waiting here thirty minutes, Cristina,” Roger sputtered into his cell phone in the restaurant, scanning the line of suits at the hostess stand in the front. “I’m about to leave.”

  “Tomorrow,” his secretary said, after pausing to consult his schedule. “The lunch you set up with Mr. Pittman is tomorrow,” and Roger swore under his breath.

  “OK, my mistake,” and he snapped the phone shut. He must have written it on the wrong day. He’d done that with one or two other appointments he’d arranged himself in the past few months, mixed up a few times or dates. He’d continued to write it off to stress, to the terrible crushing weight they had all endured, were still enduring really, in the wake of James’s death. Roger waved the waiter over with a hurried gesture and requested the bill for his iced tea. He would grab a hot dog off the street cart and bring it back to the office. He’d had enough of the noise and the loud laughter inside the restaurant. The acoustics were terrible. It was one of those yuppie, hanging-fern-and-brass restaurants that seemed to come and go in downtown Chicago with regularity.

  Pushing through the revolving door of the restaurant at the base of a glass and steel tower, Roger hitched up his trousers and adjusted, for a moment, to the early November temperatures outside.

  He felt the buzzing of his cell phone and reached for it in his inside coat pocket. It was Julia. Images of her flooded into his head in muted colors. He could see the curve of her shoulder and the swell of her freckled breast. He envisioned the way her chin tilted upward, exposing the vulnerability of her neck when she laughed. Julia’s kind of woman was the equivalent of instant gratification, immediate payoff. And then he felt unaccustomed shame for the moment, shame in his failure to please her when he was last in Tampa. He’d been tired, still very much grieving. The phone’s insistent buzzing bloomed into a ring, and he was still for a moment, deciding whether or not to answer. With a sigh, he pushed the button.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Roger, it’s me. Is this a good time?” Her words came out in a waterfall rush.

  “It’s fine. Yes. Julia, how are you, love?” Roger’s voice softened imperceptibly, his features relaxed. Julia’s voice still had a soothing effect on him, a tonic.

  “Missing you. God, I’d love to see you.”

  “Me too. I’ve got to get back down there soon, but for now I’m grounded here in Chicago.”

  “You and your deals.” She laughed in an attempt to be breezy, but a slice of bitterness edged in. She was working hard to contain it, he could tell. One of the things that had attracted him to Julia when they had met at a hotel beach bar five years ago was her complete absence of extracting promises and pressing demands. It was as if, submissive and compliant, she was grateful to take whatever scraps he could offer, counting herself fortunate simply to have someone in her bed from time to time.

  Before meeting Julia, Roger had had only occasional one-night stands, to which he had never given much thought. The night he met Julia he imagined it would also be a single event, but something about her energy and vivaciousness had captivated him, and they had exchanged phone numbers. She offered the promise of spontaneity and joy, two things that had dimmed in Roger’s marriage. And then she had been seductively persistent, calling him regularly after that first encounter, entertaining but never insistent. He had found himself more and more eager to see Julia and had begun inventing business reasons to return to Tampa more frequently than was probably necessary. Five years of secret liaisons and furtive phone calls had passed with very little effort on his part. But right now his relationship with Julia was suffocating, it felt sticky and weighted, as if he were carrying rocks on his back as he tried to retreat. He continued the phone conversation with some basic chatter, remembering to ask a few polite questions, always the gentleman, he thought impatiently, and then he rang off with some excuse about a meeting.

  How could he possibly tell her, or did she already know, that somehow in that moment of their conjoined pleasure a stain had begun to spread over what they’d shared. He had felt it when he was last with her, as they lay together. It had grown and hardened like a small stone in the center of Roger’s chest. In some way it was as if his being with Julia when James was hit had made them both complicit in the tragedy.

  She was still three blocks from the upholsterer’s house when an SUV pulled out of a spot in front of a redbrick church wedged in between the row houses on Chicago’s northwestern margins. Recessed into the facade of the narrow parish church was a concrete statue of Mary, veiled head bowed with clasped hands. There were more than forty minutes left on the parking meter, a gift from the previous owner. Margaret needed the walk anyway; she’d been spotty about getting to her exercise class, and the sun was making an effort to poke through the slate gray November sky. As she strolled purposefully, she assessed the slight sense of decay and dilapidation in the once industrious neighborhood. When they had first moved to the area it had been largely Irish Catholic and now it appeared tired; it was hard to tell exactly who lived here.

  The houses here were smaller with cement steps and aluminum siding. They were working families’ homes, and yet there was still neatness and pride of ownership in
the majority of the orderly porches and small front lawns. Greengrocers and the occasional laundromat or shoe repair storefront were interspersed between the row houses. Window boxes on the facades had been emptied for the season, and the small patches of earth around the leafless trees in the sidewalk cement were barren, lending the streets an air of abandonment.

  Margaret caught a quick glimpse of him, a flash of recognition as she rounded the corner on the upholsterer’s street. Walking by the window of the neighborhood bar, at first she thought her mind was playing tricks on her, but something in the man’s expression, his profile, made her catch her step and slow. Sure enough, it was Pete. She was certain of it now. In the middle of a workday, miles from his office.

  Margaret shifted her purse and stepped just to the right of the window and pretended to busy herself looking for keys while surreptitiously studying her son-in-law. He was slumped over the wooden bar onto his elbows, ossified eyes staring ahead at the ESPN announcers. The position of the dartboard on the wall behind him made it appear that his head was framed in the bull’s-eye.

  From her vantage point at the side, his eyes held neither interest nor disinterest; they were numbly fixated on a pilsner glass of beer, the foam still frothy at the head. Above her, a noisy filtration system cranked smoky, stale air back into the street, and Margaret wrinkled her nose in distaste. It was a typical Chicago neighborhood bar, the kind of place you didn’t look at twice, with sticky counters and dried ketchup on the tables. But this wasn’t Pete’s neighborhood, and moreover, the fact that he was alone in the middle of the day seemed pitiful and curious. She wondered if Maura had any idea where he was, and then the unsettling thought flitted in. Margaret wondered how much her daughter would care.