By the way they laughed, this was the funniest thing Hilary had said since the boys were in eighth grade and they’d been roasting the football coach and Hilary had made some offhanded comment that the coach’s bald scalp sweated like a mozzarella. It had been one of those things where she could be on her deathbed and Seth still wouldn’t forgive her.
“I’ll get you a sandwich.” Kim sprang from her chair. “Egg-white salad on rye. That’s the way you like it? Right?”
“It’s fine, Kim. I’m fine, really. It’s okay. You don’t have to take care of me.”
“But the sandwich —”
“I really haven’t been all that hungry anyway.” Not until the words were out of her mouth did she realize that it had been the wrong thing to say.
“How long has it been since you’ve eaten?” Gina asked.
“Breakfast,” Hilary lied.
Actually, it was hard to remember. She’d been cooking for everyone else. She would get all those plates on the table and then she’d remember what was happening. That’s when she would think of Laura Moore and Seth. That’s when she would feel something alive and squirming in her stomach. Just like that, she’d feel sick again, like she’d been pitching around for hours in a car.
“Get her a turkey with pesto and cranberry smear and a large fry on the side,” Gina instructed Kim. “And get one of those oatmeal raisin cookies. The girl needs calories.”
“Gina,” Hilary asked, “how are things at the hospital?” Their silence was all the answer she needed.
The nausea came again. Hilary didn’t think she could work her way through a sandwich. But her friends had ganged up against her, which meant they were going to win anyway. Kim had already lurched toward the counter and pulled out her wallet. At the table, they all went quiet again.
“Stop it, you guys,” Hilary said. “I know you’re trying to help, but maybe I shouldn’t have come.”
In an attempt to rescue them all, Lynn launched into a convoluted story about cooking turkey for her in-laws this past weekend. She had the bird in the pan and she’d followed the recipe from Gourmet magazine where you slip lemon slices and rosemary beneath the skin. “All I was doing was cooking this turkey,” she said. “Joe’s mother walked in and said, ‘Oh, good heavens. You’re not stuffing that, are you? You’ll give us all botulism.’”
They shrieked with laughter. Hilary had forgotten how good it felt just to hear something funny again.
Lynn lifted her hands to indicate that she was speechless. “I just told her, ‘I’ve been doing turkey for twenty years for this family and we haven’t lost anyone yet.’”
Donna said, “My father spent the whole weekend telling us why we’re wasting our money on cable. He said, ‘I have Channel Two and I have Channel Four and when the weather’s good I get Channel Eleven and that gives me everything I need to watch.’”
To which Hilary couldn’t resist chiming in, “My mother told Pam stories about Eric and me dating each other. She told our dating stories to Eric’s new wife,” she said. Which set all seven of them to shrieking again.
A server retrieved their number and plopped Hilary’s baguette in front of her. Because they were all watching, she forced herself to take a bite.
“How was that?” At first, Hilary thought Fay was talking about the sandwich. But then she realized that Fay had been asking about Pam instead.
Hilary wondered if Fay noticed she had a hard time swallowing. Hilary covered her mouth with her hand.
Oh, Fay noticed all right. “That bad?” she asked.
It was Hilary’s fault for bringing it up. How easy it would have been to fall in line with the earlier thread of conversation. How easy it would have been to moan and let them assume the worst, and even then they wouldn’t understand how difficult things had been with Pam.
But just this morning, Hilary had come across the old “Love your enemies” passage in Luke. “Bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.” As surely as she swallowed a hunk of bread and turkey that tasted like sand, something told her to swallow the words she wanted to say, too. The truth suddenly appeared in her hand like a pearl. No matter how provoked Pam made her feel, she’d never be able to get over the hurt if she kept reopening the wound.
Now that the subject of Pam had been broached, it seemed like everyone at the table wanted to weigh in on Hilary’s other circumstances: “…already so weak when they took her in for the second surgery…,” “…could have happened to any of those kids. It could have.”
“I’m so sorry,” Donna said. “It must be so hard.”
What was Hilary supposed to say? “It’s hard,” she agreed. “I love my son. This weekend was supposed to be so happy.”
“To have all this happen when your husband’s wife has come to visit. I can’t imagine what she thinks. I can’t imagine what she’s been saying.”
And so, just like that, they’d gotten back to Pam. “You don’t want to talk about Pam, do you?” Gina asked. She must have read the resolve in Hilary’s face. “Your mouth looks tight.”
“It’s the sandwich,” Hilary said, trying to get them off the subject. “I told everyone I didn’t want this sandwich.”
“Have fries then,” Kim told her, dipping one in ketchup. “Here. Ketchup has lycopene in it. Eat healthy.”
Gina knew too much from being at the hospital. She had seen the grieving kids, the doctors who were doing their best to work a miracle, the visits from the police. She laid a comforting hand on Hilary’s knee. “It’s good you haven’t had shifts the past couple of days.” She paused. “I didn’t think it could get worse than it is already. But Pam’s made it worse, hasn’t she?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Hilary?”
There was a moth behind Gina’s head, beating its dusty gray wings against the window. Even in the crowded café, with the conversations flowing at the other tables, the cash register chiming each time a patron made a purchase, Hilary heard its wings drumming the glass. She watched it for the longest time because she didn’t dare meet Gina’s eyes. If she did, Gina would know the answer to her question.
Seth and Hilary finally got the chance to square off alone on the opposite sides of their garage foosball table. He maneuvered the handles, working the red players. Hilary was on the opposite side, working the black. For the third time since they’d started, Seth took a shot on a goal that about took his mom’s hand off.
The plastic ball ricocheted off the sidewall and careened right back to him. His shots were so angry, Hilary didn’t need her goalie to fend off his attack. He was wild, all over the game table. With each jab and yank of the handle, Hilary expected Seth to make some hotheaded comment about the Stuart Foundation and the lost scholarship.
I don’t care if those people took my scholarship away. I’ll stay home and get a job.
A trick shot to the left between Hilary’s defending midfielders.
I’ll show them. I’ll show them I wasn’t supposed to go to college in the first place.
A bullet to the outside, which bounced off the side of the field.
Dad should have thought about helping me before he decided to leave our family. Why would he think I’d let him and Pam help me now?
But Seth never said a word. He just got the serve over and over again, took aim, and slammed it. After all, Hilary reminded herself, he was yet another member of the human male species.
Seth way outclassed his mom in the fine-tuned-motor-skills department. He had a strategy going where he abandoned his attack players and controlled the ball from the rear line. Every time Hilary was finally able to get hold of a ball and volley it back, she shot with as much frustration as he did.
Laura was the huge presence in the room that stood between them, the thing neither of them dared speak about.
Seth made a spinning shot to the right that narrowly missed the goalkeeper. Hilary countered with a curve ball that went nowhere. Seth shook his head at her attempt an
d sent it blasting back.
Hilary returned the shot straight. The ball rebounded off the corner and dropped into the goal.
Seth was stunned. “You scored.”
Hilary held out her hand for the ball.
“I can’t believe you scored on me.”
When he placed the ball in Hilary’s palm, her fist curved around and she caught hold of her son’s fingers, too. He looked at her. They both knew they had to talk about this. His entire bearing changed. He literally drooped in front of Hilary’s eyes. He turned into someone who looked so forlorn and lost, he might as well have been eight years old again. Suddenly they weren’t talking about foosball anymore.
“I know you thought you could trust me, Mom.”
“Yes,” she said. “I did.”
Hilary went to make her serve on the game table. Seth gripped the foosball handles as if he were going after her, only he didn’t move. The ball did the quick-bounce thing until it came to a dead stop, out of play.
“They said it could have happened to anybody, Seth. They say it was just an accident. But you knew better.”
His chin jerked to attention. He looked at his mother. “I did know better, okay? You talked to me about it all the time.” He took the ball and handed it to her. Hilary dropped the ball onto the table and took a shot that might have landed in the next yard if Seth hadn’t blocked it and sent it flying in her direction again.
“I trusted you for the wrong thing, Seth. I trusted you to prove that I was right to everyone. No kid should have to do that, Seth. I expected you to be inhuman. So strong that you could carry the burden for both of us.”
“Mom.”
The ball came to a standstill again. Hilary gripped the foosball handles with both hands, staring at the painted men, their pointed black shoes, their team colors, their faceless heads. At last she let go, wrapped her arms around herself as if she were trying to hold in her whole heart. “It was wrong of me to trust you so much, Seth. It was wrong of me to trust you with my whole happiness. My entire sense of self-worth.”
“You think that, Mom?” When Hilary moved to embrace him, he shrugged her off, looking astonished. “You think you’re wrong about that?”
“I do.” She shook her head sadly. “I just don’t know how to do it any other way.”
Late the next afternoon, when Hilary arrived home after running errands, Seth wasn’t home. “Seth?” she called. “Are you here?”
Only the silent house echoed back at her.
“Seth?”
There was an inlet that snaked in from the lake about three blocks away from Hilary’s neighborhood. It followed a route that was nothing more than swamp fifty years ago and ended in a sort of flat-ended gully where Seth and his friends used to play pirates and catch minnows when they were young.
Whenever Hilary couldn’t find him, whenever she was looking for him and the house turned up empty, she knew that’s where he would be. She walked up the street, watching the sunset gold over the housetops. Everywhere she looked there were families in their yards, a man pruning his bushes, a woman shouting for someone to come to supper, a passel of boys playing softball in the street. She rounded the corner and saw Seth in the distance, a solitary figure against a darkening sky. She felt her breath catch in her throat.
He was skipping rocks. She could tell by the way he was searching the ground. He found a stone and side-armed it toward the water.
“Hey,” Hilary whispered as she came up behind him.
“Hey.”
“I came to see if you were okay.”
Seth pitched a rock and only got two skips before it sank underwater. He immediately searched for a better stone. “Yeah, I’m okay.”
“Then I’m okay, too.” Which was all Hilary needed to say. She didn’t need to teach him more lessons. Life is going to do that without me, thank you very much.
Hilary considered joining him, but she didn’t. She considered stepping up beside him and helping him scrounge for just the right rock, but she sensed that would be intruding in his personal space.
“I’m going back to the house,” Hilary told him. “But I was thinking about going to a movie later or something.”
Her feet crunched over stones as she climbed toward the road. She was halfway to the sidewalk when he called her back. “Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks.”
“For what?”
“For coming to find me. For playing foosball. For standing on the other side of the table and taking my shots.”
“You’re welcome.”
Then he was beside her. “You shouldn’t walk home alone in the dark.”
“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. I’m perfectly fine on my own.”
“I know. I’ll come, though.”
It made no difference that she had been walking alone in the dark along these streets for the past twenty years. Hilary had never been so happy to have an escort. And she could tell something was different between them; the wall had come down. Seth chatted easily at her side.
Or maybe “chatted easily” would give the wrong idea. It wasn’t like conversing back and forth.
In all of Hilary’s experience with the kids who parked themselves at the house, this was the way she knew it happened. She’d learned to keep her ears peeled for clues. She’d learned to be a sort of respectful amateur detective. She’d gleaned info about what was going on in their lives when it accidentally presented itself. And she’d learned whenever one of them got ready to talk she’d better step back and get ready. Seth didn’t converse. He started to talk and he just spouted.
His subjects were all over the board. He let Hilary in on the little-known fact that Laura flirted with him behind Emily’s back, which really freaked him out. He told Hilary he didn’t know what was going to happen between him and Emily after they parted in the fall. He admitted he’d like to know what it was like to date people he didn’t know growing up and he told Hilary he thought Em would like to try it, too.
Hilary peppered his musings with thoughts of her own. “You’re still so young,” she told him. “Anything can still happen. You don’t want to tie yourself down yet if you don’t have to.”
“I like talking about girls with you, Mom,” he said in a burst of warmth. “You know so much.”
“Yeah, I know so much,” Hilary reminded him. “I am one.”
He laughed like he thought that was funny and Hilary gripped his arm. “Seth.”
“If I do go off to school, I’ll probably call and tell you what’s going on. I’ll probably ask your advice all the time.”
“You think so?” Hilary teased him. “If you don’t, I might have to drive wherever you are and stalk you. You know, the helicopter mom that can’t let go. Always hovering.”
“I’ll probably call you as much as I call Em.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“Emily has been so great these past few days. It’s hard to imagine a time in my life when I won’t care about her.”
“There won’t ever be a time like that,” Hilary said.
He stopped in his tracks and caught his mom’s elbow. “You think so? You really mean that?”
“Sure I do.” Hilary went off on a long-winded explanation about how once a relationship happened, it was always going to be a part of your life. How it existed even after it ended because it formed a part of who you were.
It didn’t mean that you were still mooning over someone, Hilary continued in her philosopher’s voice, and Seth interrupted her. “Mooning, Mom? Are you sure you want to use the word ‘mooning’? That’s like from the fifties or something.”
“Yes. I want to use the word ‘mooning.’ It’s my word. A good word.”
“Make me a promise. Will you be careful who you say this stuff to? Where I come from that means something totally different.”
Hilary realized where he was taking her regarding the word “mooning,” and things didn’t seem quite so serious anymore.<
br />
“Look. This is what I’m trying to tell you.” Hilary pretended to be exasperated with him even though she wasn’t. He’d gotten her stuck on the vision of someone mooning someone, and so help her, if she didn’t keep a straight face, she’d do something ridiculous and let him know she thought he was funny.
“You think about people in your past sometimes. You wonder about them. You wonder how they’re doing, what’s going on in their lives. You don’t go calling them up or looking for them on Facebook or anything.” Which was a slight exaggeration, because she had spent one red-eyed night checking out a few members of her graduating class to see how certain young gentlemen had fared. “You just send a prayer their way. A bright thought of gratitude. Wish them happiness. You’ve got your own life now and it’s good. So you go on.”
“So that’s what it’s like,” Seth said, “now that it’s over between you and Dad?”
Hilary had thought they were talking about Emily. She hadn’t realized she had been leading the conversation in exactly this direction. “Yes,” she said in a tentative tone that let Seth know she was just now deciding the answer. “Yes. I think it is.”
Chapter 21
Hilary’s cell registered a voice message when she checked it the next morning, and when she flipped open the screen John Mulligan’s name appeared. She listened to the lawyer ask if she’d be willing to meet him, doing her best to keep her expression bland.
“What’s wrong?” Seth asked as she clicked the phone closed. “What is it?”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s nothing,” Hilary said.
But Hilary wasn’t sure. There had been something in John Mulligan’s voice that she didn’t like. The way he’d asked her to join him at a spot away from his office. The way he’d asked her not to speak to Seth about it before they had a chance to talk.
“What are you doing today?” Hilary asked. “You got plans with Remy? You and Emily going to do anything?”
But Seth shook his head. “Remy starts his new job at the fish market this afternoon. Emily’s going downtown to find some new shoes.”
His Other Wife Page 17
