Thad and Orrin Loring had a chess game underway on the back porch. Lorrie watched them for a few minutes. Her father and Gil had known each other for years. They’d been involved with the American Legion post since Lorrie could remember. Orrin had always taken her to the pancake feeds and fish fries. In fact, that’s where’d she’d first met Tom.
Tom hadn’t given her the time of day until high school, and then she’d wondered if it was only at the insistence of his father that he’d asked her out.
Orrin had bragged up Tom and encouraged her to see him. He’d never really said much about Tom’s brother running off and he’d bestowed a generous check upon them as a wedding gift. What would he think if she told him that man out there in the yard wasn’t Tom, after all?
Shrugging off the thought, she went in and helped her mom with the dishes.
“You look awfully tired,” Ruby commented, moving past her daughter to wipe the table. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were pregnant again.”
“I didn’t sleep very well last night,” she said.
“The kids stayed here, so you had to make the most of your night, eh?” her mother said with a wry grin.
“Something like that.”
Ruby hung the dishcloth over the sink divider and her expression turned serious. “Hon, are you okay?”
Lorrie nodded.
“You know I’m here if you want to talk.”
She nodded again.
Ruby moved forward and held her in a floral-scented hug. Lorrie’s eyes smarted and she clung to her mother for a minute, fighting back the tears and the overpowering sense that her life was spinning out of control. She wished she could talk to someone about this. But she couldn’t. Not yet. Not until she had things sorted out in her mind and was able to put a little objectivity into her thinking.
“I’m just tired, Mom.”
“I’ll pick you up a B complex when I shop,” Ruby offered. “Have you been taking your calcium?”
Lorrie pulled back and actually grinned. “You’re such a mom.”
Lorrie’s sister Lorna arrived, along with her husband and daughter, and soon the afternoon turned into evening. Dan and Lorrie herded their family into the Explorer.
Having the kids with them made the trip home seem almost normal. Bram and Jori bickered and Dan had to stop and assign them different seats. Autumn bubbled on and on about the nest of baby finches in Grandma’s hanging begonia, and Thad thumped a rhythm on the back of Dan’s seat while he listened to music through his earbuds.
If it hadn’t been for the sick, empty feeling that gouged Lorrie’s heart every time she happened to glance at Dan, things might have seemed ordinary.
But it was there between them. A chasm as deep and wide as any earthquake could create. A transgression with no solution, no answers, no end.
Supper time seemed almost normal to Dan.
“Will you swim with me when it’s dark tonight, Daddy?” Autumn asked.
“It’s too late for you once it’s dark,” Dan replied.
Her lower lip stuck out.
“How about if I swim with you after supper?” he asked.
Her cherubic face brightened. “Yes! Will you play mermaid with me?”
“Which one of us is the mermaid?” he asked.
“Me, silly,” she replied.
“I thought so.” He grinned and ruffled her bangs.
“Gramma said she saw mermaid tails for swimming. Can I have a tail?”
Dan glanced at Lorraine.
“Maybe for your birthday,” she said.
Autumn beamed as though that reply was a yes, and if he knew Lorraine it probably had been.
“We’re getting plenty of sun these days,” Gil said.
Dan agreed. “The crop looks good.”
“Looks like spraying helped, too,” his father said.
Dan nodded.
After the family had eaten, Lorraine placed the leftover cakes in the center of the table. “We’ll have to slice these narrow to make it go around.”
“None for me,” Gil said, pushing his plate back.
Automatically, Tom sliced himself a chunk of the lemon chiffon and balanced it on the knife to his plate. He took a bite.
“What’re you doin’ eatin’ Tom's cake?” Gil asked.
Tom looked up, fork poised. “I wanted a slice of this one. Anything wrong with that?”
Dan and Lorraine exchanged an uncomfortable glance and a wave of realization passed over her expression. “Nothing wrong with that,” she hurried to say. “You can eat any kind you want.”
“He never used to like lemon,” Gil grumbled.
“People can change,” Lorraine said. “There are a lot of things I didn’t eat when I was a kid that I like now.”
Deliberately, she sliced a piece of the chocolate and placed it in front of Dan.
He stared at it for seconds, wondering what the gesture meant. A funny feeling settled in his chest. She was acknowledging who he was. She had protected the secret by defending Tom wanting a slice of the other cake. He looked up, but she was serving the kids and didn’t meet his eyes.
He pierced a forkful of cake and brought it to his mouth, barely tasting it. With obvious relish, Tom polished off his slice in no time. Little by little, Tom’s personality was being revealed. Uneasily, Dan glanced at his father, but he’d refilled his coffee mug and was placidly stirring in his sweetener. He still didn’t have a clue.
“I gotta get my swimming suit on.” Autumn hopped down and picked up her battered box of crayons and a Frozen coloring book she’d left on the counter. Before disappearing into the family room, she gave Dan a delighted grin and waved with a flip of her hand beneath the book. She was the cutest little thing he’d ever seen, big eyes and curls and smiles. His heart melted every time he looked at her.
He winked. “Meet you at the pool.”
“Dad?”
Dan focused his attention on Thad. He had a new haircut this summer, shaved on the sides and longer on top. Dan didn’t much care for it, but remembered the wild things teens had been doing with their hair when he was in high school and decided it was pretty tame.
“Remember that talk we had about me working at the Kenneys’ truck garden?” Thad asked.
Dan nodded. “I talked with Mr. Kenney. Is that what you want to do?”
“Not really.” Thad shrugged. “It’s too far to drive all the time until I can drive myself. It can wait another year or so.”
Pride welled up in Dan’s chest. “That’s really mature of you, Thad.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, well, it would mean a lot of evenings, too, and I wanna play softball.”
Dan resisted grinning. “We start picking the north orchards tomorrow. I’ll give you a raise for picking and for the Festival.”
“Awesome.” Thad got up and started to leave the kitchen.
“Tha-ad.” Lorraine called in a singsongy voice. “It’s your night to help with dishes.”
“Can’t I do ’em later?” he asked, turning back.
Lorraine gave Dan a pointed look.
A painfully normal situation compared to the undercurrent passing between him and his wife.
“Do them now, son,” Dan said gently.
The words slipped out naturally. Lorraine’s hands stilled on the plates she’d been stacking. She looked up and their eyes met.
They hadn’t discussed Thad.
When had she realized that Thad wasn’t his son? Yesterday? Just now?
Dan fled upstairs to get his trunks on.
corner
Chapter Six
Somehow Lorraine had made it through the afternoon, through supper, through the evening. She tucked Autumn, smelling like hair detangler, into bed and kissed her soft, shiny cheek with a sweet sadness she could barely endure.
“Where’s Daddy?”
“He’ll be here. He always tucks you in.”
Autumn nodded. “I love playing mermaids with Daddy. He’s fun.”
&
nbsp; “Daddy’s pretty good at everything, isn’t he?”
Her daughter nodded solemnly. “I had a fun day. I had a fun night at Gramma’s last night, too, but I did miss you guys a teeny bit.”
“I missed you, too.”
“Me an’ Bram and Jori slept in your old room, and Thad slept on the back porch. I worried a bear would get him.”
“There aren’t any bears in Nebraska, darlin’.”
“Uh-huh, at the Hemry Dormly zoo.”
“Yes, at the zoo—the Henry Doorly zoo—but they’re very careful not to let the animals get loose.”
“Good. ’Night, Mama.”
“’Night, darlin’.” She left the night-light softly glowing and the door open. She remembered the very real fears of childhood. Worries of zombies being nearby or Freddie Krueger on the loose. Fears of unknown things under her bed at night. All so ungrounded in reality, and yet so painfully real. They were careful not to let Autumn watch scary movies, but kids picked up things at school.
Thank goodness children had no concept of the real terrors waiting in life.
Lorrie closed herself behind her bedroom door and surveyed the spacious room. She opened and closed Dan’s drawers and looked in his closet. The cowboy hat he’d bought in Texas sat, brim up, wrapped in tissue paper on the top shelf. It was his dress-up hat, one he’d seldom worn, purchased during a vacation to Fort Worth and Dallas. The kids’ school pictures, those depicting missing teeth and cowlicks, were taped to boot boxes. On top of his bureau sat a wooden race car Thad had made in shop class.
Everything reminded her of some part of their life together. He was everywhere in this room. In this house.
Lorrie undressed, put on a nightshirt, sat on the bed’s edge, and realized something. She was thinking about her husband as if he were dead.
And he was. The husband she’d thought she had didn’t exist. Had never existed. She was grieving, and she had a right to her grief.
She heard his voice down the hall as he spoke to the boys and wished Autumn a good night. A nervous unease rippled in her chest. The way he’d looked at her after supper, after calling his son “son” had torn at her. Did he deserve all the guilt she’d seen behind his guarded expression? She had to tell him.
He didn’t come to their room. He must have gone to his office where he sometimes did paperwork or studied or worked on his hybrid projects in the evenings. The house grew silent. Lorrie turned on the bedside lamp and tried to read the same novel she’d been reading for two weeks. She couldn’t concentrate. She couldn’t relate to the silly story, anyway. The fictional couple would eventually work out all their contrived problems and live happily ever after.
She opened the drawer of her nightstand and chucked the book inside, slamming the drawer and reaching for the remote control. She watched a couple of recorded episodes of Big Bang Theory, Dan’s favorite. He always laughed out loud at Sheldon’s comically rigid logic.
Laughter erupted from the television and she realized she hadn’t heard a bit of the dialogue. The door opened, surprising her.
Dan went into the bathroom. While the shower ran, her heart tripped double time. She had to say something. How had he lived all those years with that secret eating away inside him? She couldn’t bear the way it felt to keep the truth about Thad to herself now that she knew Dan's pain.
He appeared in a pair of boxer briefs, his dark hair towel-dried and combed back. She watched a commercial for a phone provider. He climbed into his side of the bed.
Several minutes passed while the program finished and the credits ran. “When did you realize?” he asked. “About Thad, I mean.”
Her heart slammed against her ribs. Why did she care if he hated her? He’d hurt her this much, why did she care if he hurt, too? “I thought about it yesterday,” she said.
“It never made any difference to me,” he said, his voice sounding choked. “But now... now I think it’s not fair to Tom. Maybe he should know—”
“No!” She said the word automatically—vehemently.
Dan looked at her in surprise. “Have you thought about it?”
She pointed the remote and turned down the volume. “Of course I’ve thought about it.”
“Well, did you think that maybe Tom deserves to know he has a son? It would kill me to lose that—” he gestured with one hand “—connection we have. I’ve been a father to him since he was born. But what I did wasn’t fair to a lot of people. Especially to you.”
The sorrow in his words ate at her. The confession soured on the end of her tongue, waiting for her to garner courage. Seconds passed.
“So you don’t want me to tell him?” he asked.
She phrased it a dozen different ways in her mind.
“Lorraine?”
“Tom doesn’t have a son.” There, she’d blurted it out. She couldn’t seem to get enough air to fill her lungs.
“What?”
She couldn’t look him in the eye. Staring at his bare chest wasn’t comfortable, either. She focused on the lampshade. “There’s something you don’t know. I never told you because—well, I guess I didn’t want you to think I’d trapped you into proposing to me. I really believed I was pregnant. That night when I came and told you, I thought for sure I was. You asked me to marry you, and everything was going so well.... We were happy.”
In her peripheral vision, he didn’t move a muscle.
“The next week I got my period.”
The muted television in the background was the only sound.
“I didn’t tell you. The wedding was planned, our parents were going along with it, you were—I thought you had somehow changed and....” Lorraine fidgeted with the hem of the sheet. “Well, anyway, I didn’t even have another period. I got pregnant with Thad right away. It didn’t seem to make any difference then. We were happy.” Finally, she turned her gaze to his face. “Do you know what I’m saying?"
His lips moved before he spoke, and finally the words came out—quietly—almost fearfully. “Thad is my son?”
She nodded.
His eyes glistened. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and covered his face with his hands. Lorraine reached for his bare shoulder, but drew her hand back before she touched him. Tears trickled down her own cheeks and she wiped them on the sheet.
Without warning, he threw back the covers, crossed to open the sliding doors and disappeared outside.
Lorraine couldn’t bear the sense of loss, the fear of what their combined deception had cost. As confused as he’d made her, she was miserable without him. She waited a few minutes before she followed.
He stood with both hands braced on the wood railing, his face tipped to the heavens, moonlight defining the planes and hollows of his muscled torso. Below them the sound of the pool filter gurgled steadily.
She wanted nothing more than to step behind him, press her cheek to the warm flesh of his back and give him comfort, draw comfort. She had to hold her hands at her sides and stop three feet away.
“Not telling you was a betrayal,” she admitted. “I see that now. I don’t expect you to forgive me, but I needed to tell you.”
He turned his head and shoulders toward her. “A betrayal? I guess so. But telling me tonight was a gift. Thank you,” he whispered.
An ache yawned in her chest. The man was a saint. His acceptance and forgiveness made her feel more than ever like a heel. How could he deal with something like this in a matter of minutes? It seemed she’d been confused and hurting forever. “Couldn’t you get mad?” she asked. “Couldn’t you call me a conniving little bitch and throw something?"
She threaded her fingers into her hair and stared at him.
“Do you think that would make you feel better?” he asked. “Trust me, it wouldn’t.”
“Maybe,” she said, dropping her hand and slapping her thigh. “Maybe it would. Maybe I wouldn’t have to feel like the only one who has trouble dealing with deception.”
“There’s a big difference,” he sa
id. “You’ve just told me that the boy I love with all my heart, and thought was Tom’s, is my own son. This is one less complication I have to regret and deal with.”
“But…” she inhaled a shaky breath “I let you think he wasn’t your child.”
“You’re right. It hurts like hell. But I’m certainly the last person to condemn someone for not telling the truth.”
She dropped onto one of the cushioned deck chairs. “You’re not a very good fighter,” she accused. “You never have been.”
It was a familiar lament. One he’d always replied to with, “No, but I’m a hell of a lover,” and she’d had no recourse but to agree and laugh and make him prove it.
The reminder of their history together hung in the air like the heat and humidity of the September night.
He went inside.
Twenty minutes later, she followed and slid into bed, lying still, and feeling more alone than she’d ever known was possible. Sometime before sleep claimed her, the warmth of his legs touched hers. She only had to turn a little to curl her body against his. Neither of them spoke and she wasn’t even sure he was awake. Feeling better than she had in days, she closed her eyes and drifted into sleep.
A long, tiring week followed. Gil taught Tom how to sort, a task that the two could handle together, considering Gil’s limited stamina and Tom’s one good arm. The itinerant workers showed up and worked hard. The college students that Dan had hired were good workers, pleasant around the children, and on Saturday they promised to be back early Monday morning to help work the last section.
Gil wasn’t a very intuitive person. That’s why his covert glances and occasional queries about Lorraine bothered Dan. If Gil had noticed the strain, how was all of this affecting the children?
The children. An enormous weight had been lifted from Dan’s heart. His children. All of them. On Sunday afternoon, the family relaxed by picnicking and playing softball in the side yard. Dan missed balls, struck out time and again, and just couldn’t seem to pay attention. He finally had time to look at Thad, watch him play, admire his youthful energy and his handsome features.
A Husband By Any Other Name Page 8
