The Woman Next Door

by Barbara Delinsky

  “Any more news on why he did it?”

  “No.”

  “No word from his parents?”

  “Nothing.”

  Graham smiled sadly. “We can’t blame them. They are who they are. Many a kid’s had worse and didn’t resort to suicide.” His smile faded. “Who’s to say we’d do better?”

  “Me,” Amanda said, watching him in the mirror between strokes of mascara. “We’d do better.”

  “You think so?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I used to. But we haven’t been doing a good job of much lately.”

  Frightened of where he was headed, Amanda insisted, “We have. We’re hanging on.”

  “Shouldn’t we be doing more than that?”

  “Sometimes in situations of crisis that’s all you can do.”

  “Are we in crisis?”

  It was a minute before she capped the mascara and said, “Yes.”

  She met his eyes. “We need to talk, but I can’t do it now, and if today’s as bad as I think it might be, I won’t be able to do it tonight.”

  “Because you’ll be at school late? What about tomorrow?”

  “I’ll probably go there in the morning. The afternoon’s your mother’s party.”

  “Do you still want to go?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ll be wrung out.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “You always talk about keeping an emotional distance from your job. It isn’t working.”

  “No,” she conceded, because she didn’t want to fight about it. “But if not now, when? This is temporary.”

  “Good thing we gave up the baby bit,” he said and returned to the bedroom. “That would have been one complication too many.”

  She followed him. “We haven’t given up. We’re taking a breather. Taking a breather. That’s all.”

  He stopped moving, put his hands on his hips, hung his head. After a minute’s silence, he drew in a loud breath and raised his head. “Can I make you coffee before you leave?”

  “Yes. Thank you. I’d love that.”

  ***

  Graham vowed to spend the day at the office. Since it was Saturday, he would be the only one there, which meant more concentrated work. He was in the process of drawing preliminary designs for the Providence project and was eager to lose himself in it. This creative phase was the part of his job that he loved the most.

  Today, though, it didn’t hold him past noon. His mind began wandering and wouldn’t stop. He felt restless and impatient. He didn’t see anything new or exciting appearing on his computer screen, which was a blow to his professional ego. Dissatisfied, he turned off the machine at two, stayed at the office only long enough to check out the projects on which his associates were working, and then headed home. He made one stop along the way, for a dozen flats of impatiens.

  A short time later, wearing his grungiest T-shirt, shorts, and work boots, he took the flats to the front yard and began to plant. He had been at it for an hour, building up a sweat in the sun, when Russ came out with two beers and sat himself down on the grass.

  Graham took a long drink. The beer was cold and refreshing. “Where are the kids?” he asked as he pressed the beading bottle to his temple.

  “Tommy’s at a friend’s. Allie’s at school.” Russ gestured toward the beds. “You should let Will’s guys do this. Planting’s their thing.”

  “This isn’t planting. This is gardening. Gardening is personal and therapeutic. Besides”—he looked off toward the woods—“I’m not good for much at the office.”

  “Yeah. It’s lousy about Quinn.”

  Graham nodded and took another drink.

  “How’s Amanda holding up?” Russ asked.

  “She’s tired. But this is her job. Lately, she’s been feeling out of her element. So this is good.”

  “Out of her element, like with the baby stuff?”

  Graham nodded. “And my family. Even me.” He shot Russ a self-conscious look. “Excuse the self-pity, but I can’t seem to get away from it. I feel like—” He stopped, frowned, struggled to put his finger on the worst of it. “I feel like I keep trying to do what’s best in life and the same thing keeps knocking me down.”

  “What thing?”

  Graham shrugged the question off. He didn’t need to bare his soul—or his ego—to Russ. Yes, they were friends. But this was personal.

  In the next minute, though, the words spilled out. “My first marriage. Do you know much about that?”

  “Only that it ended amicably.”

  Cautiously, Graham asked, “Amanda didn’t tell you anything more?”

  “She said that the woman was a good friend of the family, but she only told me that to explain why your ex came here one day delivering a birthday present for you from your mother. Naturally, I asked more,” Russ said with a self-deprecating smile, “but Amanda wouldn’t give. Hey, what wife likes talking about her husband’s first?”

  “Megan’s more than a good friend,” Graham said. “She lives right next door to my mom.”

  Russ frowned. “Odd, for an ex-wife. When did that happen?” he asked, genuinely curious, truly innocent.

  That made it easier for Graham to talk. He didn’t have to defend anything, since Russ was clearly in the dark. “All my life. Megan and her family lived in the house next door. We grew up together. Aside from my siblings, she’s the oldest friend I have. We played together and studied together. We were sweethearts as soon as we knew what that meant. We dated through high school and college. Everyone just assumed we’d get married, and we did. First weekend after graduation.”

  “Wow,” Russ said with a bemused smile. “So why didn’t it last?”

  “It did for six years. Then she told me she was gay.”

  Pulling back, Russ huffed out a startled breath. “Whoa. Talk about unmanning a guy.”

  Graham had to chuckle at the way he said it. “Oh yeah.”

  “And you had no inkling?”

  “Not at the time of our wedding. We’d gone to different colleges. She roomed with her lover the last two years. I thought they were just good friends.”

  “But she was your lover, too.”

  “Definitely.”

  “Was she good?” Russ asked in a man-to-man voice.

  “You aren’t taking notes, are you?” Graham asked, only half in jest.

  “Nah. I’d like to know about the fertility thing—what a man feels about that—but this is personal. Just me, chronically nosy.”

  Put that way, how could Graham resist? “Megan was good when she wanted to be,” he said. “There were times when she wasn’t into it as much. I just assumed all women were that way.” Until Amanda. With Amanda, the chemistry had been raw and constant —until the process of making a baby had gummed things up.

  “Knowing how she was,” Russ asked, returning Graham’s thoughts to Megan, “how could she go ahead with the wedding?”

  “Very easily. And I can’t fault her for it. Part of her wanted to be married to me. It would have made her life simpler. Her family could never have accepted what she was. Marrying me would make everyone happy.”

  “Everyone but her. Did you feel where she was headed before she asked for the divorce?”

  “I knew she was withdrawing. I felt that. She stopped sharing things. She was managing a little bookstore in town, and spent more and more time there. She probably could have gone on living that way for a while, if I hadn’t pushed the issue.”

  “The gay issue?”

  “The kids issue.” Graham sputtered out a laugh and looked away. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “The same thing’s hanging up Amanda and me. So, what is it with me and women when it comes to having kids?” He looked back at Russ. “It’s like it’s the kiss of death.”

  “No. Not with Amanda. She wants kids, too.”

  “She wants to take a break from trying, that’s what she wants. Know how that makes me
feel?”

  Russ looked horrified. “Take a break from sex?”

  “No,” Graham said, then rethought the answer. “But it might as well be that. Know what infertility treatments do to spontaneity?”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Take your imaginings, and make them ten times worse—only this is not for a column, Russ. This is me needing to vent.”

  “Agreed,” Russ said.

  “Everything rigid. Everything on a schedule. Everything timed by body temperature and time of the month, and that’s not even touching on the business of donating sperm for artificial insemination—then add no baby to that.” He scowled. “I feel about as virile as I did when Megan made her announcement.”

  “But if Amanda’s taking a break from trying for a baby, isn’t sex better?”

  “You’d think it would be. Only we’ve argued ever since.” He stopped, embarrassed. “I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

  “That your marriage isn’t perfect? Whose do you think is?”

  “Yours.”

  “Are you kidding? Did I ever tell you that Georgia considered leaving me once?”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “It’s true. It was before we moved here. I was piecing together a professional life, not too well, and I wasn’t happy with myself. I took it out on her.”

  “How?”

  “I was moody. I was impatient. I was demanding. And critical. About petty things. Y’know?”

  “What’d she say?”

  “That I wasn’t being fair. That it wasn’t what she’d bargained for. That she’d just bumped into her old high school flame and that he was everything I wasn’t right then.”

  Graham sat straighter. “She said that?”

  “She did. She also said that she loved me and wanted to make our marriage work.”

  “Geez,” Graham breathed. “Didn’t you worry about the high school flame?” He would have been devastated if Amanda had said something like that to him.

  “It was a wake-up call. I got my act together.”

  “Do you ever worry about what she’s doing when she’s on the road?”

  “With men? No. I trust her.”

  Graham was about to ask whether the trust went both ways, whether Georgia worried about what he was doing when she was gone. He was thinking of Gretchen, but better sense told him not to go there.

  Russ said, “Every marriage is tested.”

  “Tested. Good word.” Graham tipped back the bottle and took another swallow. Righting his head, he thought about the challenge. “So right now she’s overwhelmed with the Quinn thing. That was bad timing, coming on the heels of the other.”

  “The timing’s never right with things like that.”

  Graham grunted. He set the bottle on the dirt and twisted it in until it stood on its own. Then he put his elbows on his knees and pushed his hands through his hair. “Somethin’ else to think about, though. Another bucket of cold water. I mean, when I think about sex, I think about the way it’s been for the last year—which is good,” he said out of loyalty to Amanda—and the fact was that during those orgasmic seconds he forgot everything but the pleasure. “But it’s for the sole purpose of having a baby. We have to get past that.”

  “Have to start over again,” Russ advised.

  “Recapture the feeling.”

  “Prioritize. Georgia’s always talking about that. Prioritize.”

  ***

  So what were Graham’s priorities? There was sex, Amanda, kids, and work. Not necessarily in that order.

  In what order, then?

  Amanda had to come first. Without her, none of the other three worked. He wanted to have sex with Amanda. He wanted to have kids with Amanda. And, sure, he could design backyards, shopping mall atriums, office parks, even highway roadsides without Amanda. But what would be the point of that? What would he do with the money, if not spend it on Amanda and their kids?

  Amanda was the one thing that his priorities all had in common. She was the linchpin on which the others depended.

  Yes, he hated it when she was distracted. When she pulled into herself and shut him out, it brought back everything he had felt when Megan had announced herself gay—inadequacy, humiliation, impotence. If Amanda couldn’t understand that—if she couldn’t apply her own skills to him enough to see where he was coming from—if she couldn’t do some prioritizing of her own and place him first—if, damn it, she couldn’t give him the benefit of the doubt when it came to Gretchen and her baby—there was no hope for their marriage.

  That said, no one was going to tell him he hadn’t tried.

  ***

  When Amanda came home after a long day at school and an even longer evening at the funeral home, Graham brewed her a cup of tea and ran her a bath. She was nearly asleep before her head hit the pillow, but he held her close—and found satisfaction in it. For the first time in weeks, he wasn’t angry that the passion wasn’t there. For the first time, he was content just to be there for her—whether she knew it or not.

  Chapter Eleven

  Amanda didn’t know that for the first night in a week she had slept in the arms of the person who meant the most to her. At some unconscious level she must have felt the comfort of his embrace; mentally, though, it didn’t register. She was simply and completely exhausted, coming off hours of hearing sorrowful stories from students too young to be telling them, but the suicide of a friend opened a Pandora’s box of guilt. One student confessed to having cheated on an exam, another to watching his mother and her lover, another to snorting coke—any one of the indiscretions seemed, in the perpetrator’s eye, far worse a crime than coming to baseball practice drunk, for which Quinn Davis had been punished and subsequently died. Amanda did her best to separate the two, arguing time and again that Quinn’s punishment had not forced his death. She sent a number of students to the religious advisors on her crisis team, but the weight of their stories stayed with her.

  Thus, burdened even in sleep, she awoke in Graham’s arms thinking that he was in bed with her to ease his conscience, holding her out of guilt. That easily, she found herself thinking like her mother again.

  Struggling against it Sunday morning, she slipped out of bed while Graham still slept and made the trifle for his mother’s party. She brewed a fresh pot of coffee and set the Sunday paper on the table, but by the time he woke up, she was heading for the shower, then back to school.

  ***

  Watching her go, Graham wondered if there had been something subconscious in his sleeping late. Sleeping was better than dealing with the unease between them.

  It was, of course, the coward’s approach and not at all what he had planned after talking with Russ. Ashamed of himself, he vowed to be more proactive. It wasn’t until afternoon, though, that he and Amanda were together long enough for any kind of serious talk, and then he couldn’t get her going.

  “The trifle looks good,” he tried. “Thanks for making it.”

  She smiled politely. “You’re welcome.”

  A while later, he said, “I thought about calling Mom this morning. But I decided against it. I figured I could wish her a happy birthday in person.”

  “I tried calling from school,” Amanda said. “She was in the bath, so I left a message.”

  “You’re a better daughter-in-law than I am a son.”

  “No. I’m just desperate.”

  “Desperate?”

  Another polite smile. “To make her like me.”

  “She does like you.”

  Amanda gave him the kind of look that said he was lying and knew it. Not knowing what to say to that, he said nothing at all.

  ***

  Arriving at an O’Leary affair was a physical thing. There were loud shouts and hugs, enthusiastic back-slapping and boisterous greetings. Amanda had been included in the ritual since the first day she had come with Graham. He had warned her that first time, and still she had felt overwhelmed. But she had loved it. The raucousness was everythin
g she hadn’t experienced as a child. She adored the genuine outpouring of feeling, the easy show of affection.

  It was all there this time, too. Today the difference was in her. Totally aside from Quinn’s death, which weighed heavily on her, being with Graham’s family—being with Graham’s prolific family —brought back the issue of the pregnancy that wasn’t. She smiled and laughed and hugged and was hugged in return, but she heard thoughts and imagined words. She felt as though everyone knew— as though everyone blamed her, since the problem they were having in conceiving couldn’t possibly lie with Graham.

  Determinedly, she immersed herself in the festivities, led by the hand of one child or another into one room or another. She had always been drawn to the toddler brigade, which meant that the children she had played with during the first years of her marriage were now six, seven, and eight. They adored her, and understandably so. More so than the other adults, she was willing to read to them, to play card games, or fall for corny jokes.

  “You are the prettiest aunt,” one niece said, clinging to Amanda’s side, looking up with a gap-toothed grin. “I don’t want you to have kids. I like having you all to myself.”

  What to say to that? Amanda couldn’t begin to think. The trifle came out well, though the mmmmms were inevitably directed at MaryAnne, who—in all fairness—had masterminded the party. If Dorothy even knew that Amanda had made the dessert, she wasn’t letting on. She made no mention of it during either of the times that Amanda sought her out to chat. Rather, she babbled on about the Garden Club or the Historical Society or even Megan, all subjects that she knew Amanda wouldn’t want to discuss.

  Still, Amanda was unfailingly polite. She smiled and nodded and asked as many questions as she could. Dorothy didn’t ask a single one in return. Eventually the conversation between them died.