“Oh please. Like you don’t have Chris wrapped around your finger.”
“I have a better idea. I’ll persuade Shawn to buy it instead,” Robyn said.
“Shut up. You’d better n …”
“Ladies.” Brendan turned to look at them both, pretending to be stern. “You’re messing with my enjoyment of the tour.”
Riley stuck her tongue out at him.
“I don’t understand why Tracy isn’t here, come to think of it,” Robyn said. “Of the three of us, she’s the only one who would have no shame about acquiring a little … toy like this.”
“Too bad her husband ain’t in the big leagues like y’all’s,” Brendan said. “I would buy this for my wife in a heartbeat.”
“Aww!” Riley tackled Brendan with a hug from behind, looping her arms round his waist. “I’m going to tell her you said that. If she gets out of bed long enough to hear it, that is.”
“I know,” Robyn said. “She’s been wiped out these last couple of days. If she isn’t napping in the middle of the morning, afternoon and evening, she’s wandering around the house with a loopy little Mona Lisa smile.”
“Yeah,” Riley said musingly. “What exactly have you been doing to her Brendan?”
“Baby, c’mere a second.”
They all looked up at the sound of Chris’ voice, calling Robyn over.
“Oh god,” she said. “He’s going to ask me what I think.”
“I’ll come with you,” Riley said, releasing Brendan and following Robyn. “For reinforcements.”
Brendan watched them go and shook his head, smiling. Although the way she tended to invite themselves into his private business could wear on a man’s nerves, he was glad that Riley and Robyn were in his and his wife’s lives. The three women were as tight as sisters, which was good, since he, Shawn and Chris were squad for life.
They were right, though, about Tracy’s mellow, somnolent mood. Just before his mother left for North Carolina, she seemed to have turned a corner, and now she was almost placid, just like …
Brendan stopped mid-step and recalled the scene in the bedroom just before he left—Tracy on her back, the pillow across her middle, a hand atop it, and her sleepy, vacant smile. He remembered that look, and this mood.
It wasn’t unprecedented, but Tracy had been like this only one other time in their relationship.
His heart skipped a little, then sped up. It sped up a lot, almost like it wanted to jump out of his chest and over the side of the damn boat.
Like a slideshow, scenes from the last week came to him—her refusal of sushi at the Japanese place, the wine she hadn’t drunk since they’d been here even though everyone else was pretty much tipsy all the time; the sleepiness, the mellow live-and-let-live mood … The list of clues was a long one.
Tracy was pregnant.
sitting indian-style in the center of the great room, Tracy was surrounded by cushions. It took a moment for Brendan to absorb that she was getting her hair ‘styled’ by Layla and Caitlyn, and her makeup done by Jasmin. With two pairs of grubby little hands slathering her with creams and powder, lipstick and eyeshadow, Tracy looked like something out of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. At least Jasmin was doing much better with her hair. Chris’ almost twelve-year-old had managed to comb Tracy’s curls into two somewhat neat braids, though the part that separated them was as crooked as an unpaved country road.
“How was the boat?” she asked looking up as everyone entered. “Did Chris get it?”
Riley and Robyn paused and took in the scene, then gently suggested to the girls that maybe the game of beauty shop should wrap up so that everyone could get ready for lunch. Chris and Shawn were out back getting the grill ready for some lobsters and corn on the cob they had picked up in town, but Brendan had come in to find his wife, wondering whether when he saw her, he would know for sure.
“Well, did he?” Tracy asked, getting to her feet. She smiled at his expression. “Do I look crazy? What did they do to me?”
“You look pretty, Momma,” Layla insisted.
“Thank you, baby,” Tracy said. “You and Caity did a really good job.”
“They did a job alright,” Robyn said, patting Tracy on the shoulder. “You might want to wash your face before all of that sets in.”
“No, Auntie Tracy!” Caitlyn wailed. “Don’t wash it.”
“She has to, sweetie. Makeup isn’t … ahm, allowed at lunch,” Robyn improvised. “Now let’s clean up here.”
“Hey,” Brendan said, nodding in the direction of the hallway that led to their bedroom suite. “Let’s …”
Tracy handed Jasmin the handful of hair accessories and walked ahead of him down the hall, reaching up to feel her way around her new hairstyle.
“You didn’t answer me before. Did Chris wind up getting the boat? I actually think it would be …”
Brendan held her arm and turned her around, backing her against the wall. He was about to kiss her. Just because. But the makeup was too distracting, and he laughed instead.
Tracy laughed with him. “Okay,” she said, prying herself free. “I have to see this.”
She went jogging toward their room and disappeared inside. Moments later, Brendan heard a shriek followed by laughter. Grinning, he followed and found Tracy standing in front of the dresser, frantically wiping her mouth clean of the bright, garish fuchsia lipstick that not only covered her lips, but surrounded them.
“These children really have to learn how to color inside the lines,” she said.
Standing behind her, Brendan slid his arms around her waist and tugged her back against him. He opened his palms to cover her abdomen, letting them rest there. Tracy who had been furiously scrubbing away at her face with wipes from Layla’s bag, froze. With her free hand, she covered his.
“Are you?” he asked.
After a moment, Tracy nodded.
“Wow,” Brendan said.
In the mirror, Tracy watched his face closely. He smiled, and bowed his head, kissing the side of her neck.
“I knew my guys would find their way, sooner or later.”
He may have sounded cool, but his heart was doing that thing again, that palpitating, fluttery thing that felt suspiciously like … panic.
She hadn’t been drinking but she may as well have been, because she felt high. The secret she had been carrying around for more than a week was out. At least, out to the one person she most wanted to tell. And now she was giddy.
The only other person who knew was Brendan’s mother, and only because she had guessed it. Before she left for North Carolina, Nancy made her promise to tell Brendan.
You’re going to need him, she said. And he already needs you. You should think about going home, love.
Tracy had returned home that night, even though she didn’t exactly announce to Brendan that that was what she was doing. This trip to Southampton had been a convenient distraction from the ease with which she had succumbed to the lure of just being with him, regardless of the issues and questions that were still unresolved, at least in her mind.
A baby meant that she didn’t have time to work through the ‘steps’, or the ‘process’ or whatever Dr. Greer was calling it.
Your drug, she’d told Tracy, is him. Your dependency is having Brendan depend on you. Without the high you get from that drug, you struggle.
In fairness, the doctor had never recommended she move out. She had only encouraged Tracy to work on finding ways to focus on herself without subsuming her wants and needs in tasks that met the wants and needs of Brendan and Layla. It had been Tracy’s idea that it would be easier to do that from the safe distance of the condo. After all, what did one do when they had a dependency? They abstained.
Away from their home in Brooklyn, it was easier not to fall back into the pattern of over-nurturing, and over-controlling. It was safer to be away.
But nowhere felt safer than where she was right at this moment.
Brendan, on whose lap she was sitting, had
one arm wrapped around her and in the other hand was holding a beer. Riley and Shawn were half-asleep, entangled together in the hammock suspended from the roof of the beachside deck, and Chris had Robyn’s feet in his lap, massaging them while she sat on the opposite end of the outdoor loveseat. They were all stuffed to the gills with seafood and most of them were more than half-past drunk and not inclined toward conversation. The only sound was that of waves crashing against the shore.
Inside, through the glass that separated the deck from the den, she could see that the kids were asleep on blankets, spread out on the floor. Riley had set up a movie for them, with popcorn that she had portioned out in red-and-white striped boxes, like they used to sell popcorn in at the movie theater. With the lights low, they had lasted only an hour before they conked out, though it was barely six-thirty.
After an enormous lunch, there was the obligatory game of spades, which Tracy sat out because she didn’t know how to play, and then another big meal. Now, even the adults were all practically comatose, but content.
Tomorrow Robyn and Chris were hosting a beach party. Chris’ eldest would arrive with two friends to spend the night, as would Jamal Turner and his girlfriend. Robyn had invited the neighbors to stop by, and a few other people who were in town for the long weekend. The house would be crowded and noisy, and fun and full of life. A chef was coming, there would be an open bar, music.
Feeling Brendan’s lips press against the back of her neck, Tracy leaned into it, and sighed.
Things were going to be much better now. She could feel it.
21
Don’t tell anyone!
That had been Tracy’s sharp reminder, just as they entered the great room to greet Chris’s newly-arrived guests. She was guarding the news of her pregnancy for at least sixteen weeks and didn’t even want Riley or Robyn to know in case telling people “jinxed it.”
Wearing a canary-yellow backless dress, Tracy went ahead of him into the room and beelined toward Jamal Turner’s girlfriend, who always looked a little shell-shocked at these events. Beautiful girl, but she clearly felt out of her depth. Whenever Turner wandered too far, her eyes followed him, as though she wanted to be sure that her safety net would be within reach if she needed him.
Tracy gravitated toward her, Brendan thought, because in a lot of ways, she and Tracy weren’t that different. It didn’t matter how beautiful, poised and aloof other people thought she was, there was part of Tracy that was always afraid she didn’t measure up. Something about Makayla Hughes reminded her of herself. And just as she was self-protective, she seemed inclined to protect Makayla as well.
She had been the same way with Robyn when she first entered their inner circle as the new woman on Chris Scaife’s arm.
I think this one is going to stick, she’d told Brendan at the time. I think this is different.
Brendan hadn’t been as sure. Especially when Robyn got pregnant. That, he thought, would definitely make their relationship a wrap. If ever there was a dude who liked to travel light, Chris Scaife was it. Even though at the time he had three kids by two different women, he hadn’t exactly made friends with his status as a father by the time he met Robyn.
And knowing Chris’ family history, Brendan understood.
Women didn’t get how intense pregnancy could be for a man.
After the smiles, the hugs, and the congratulations the rest was hard work. The kind of work that a woman had to do essentially on her own. Sure, a man carried heavy bags, rubbed her feet and belly, and moved furniture around while she was hormonal and wanted to ‘try to freshen up the place’ in anticipation of the baby, but the work, the real work was all hers.
And with Tracy, that work was hard.
From the beginning, there had been drama. Just weeks after she found out she was pregnant, there was a scare. And it didn’t get much better throughout.
On and off there were cramps, bleeding, unscheduled trips to the doctor. In the first two trimesters, it had been so bad that during the day, Brendan felt himself grow tense whenever his phone rang at work, fearing that Tracy was calling with bad news. And during the night, if she so much as got out of bed for a drink of water, he sprang upright in a panic.
“Need a drink, man?”
Brendan staggered forward a little when Jamal Turner clapped him on the shoulder. Dude didn’t know his own strength.
“Nah. I’m good.”
“You must’ve heard about what happened with your boy. That why you standin’ over here lookin’ all constipated?”
“What boy?” Brendan looked at him.
“Justin. All that mess with his wife.”
“What mess with his wife?” Now, Turner had his full attention.
“Oh. Shit.” Turner covered his mouth. “You didn’t hear. Come to think of it, if I was Justin, I wouldn’t be too eager to tell you either, you bein’ his boss and everything.”
“Hear what, man?”
Turner yoked an arm around his neck and looked around the room.
“Shawn should hear this too,” he said. “Since it’s y’all’s company.”
“Turner … you better …”
“Yo! Shawn!”
Across the room, Shawn looked up and Turner beckoned him over, motioning in the direction of the deck out back. Once they were all outside, it was relatively quiet. Most of the guests were further down on the beach where tents had been erected for them to enjoy the cookout without cooking themselves in the aggressive late-summer heat.
“What’s up?” Shawn asked, leaning against the railing
Brendan looked at Turner who was shaking his head, trying to hold back laughter.
“Last night,” he began, speaking excruciatingly slowly. “Mila Hoyt … was arrested.”
“What?” Brendan leaned in closer.
“Yeah man. Looks like she showed up at some chick’s apartment and knocked the shit out of her. Then Justin shows up ‘cause apparently, he knew where Mila was headed, the cops came … it was one big cluster. Mila got taken away in cuffs, and the chick …”
“What chick?” Shawn asked.
But Brendan already knew.
“Simone Wolfe,” he said, shutting his eyes.
Shawn’s head whipped around. “Who we just fired?”
“Yup.”
“But … why would …?”
“That motherfucker better not have lied to me,” Brendan said between his teeth.
“Wait. What’s going on?” Turner looked confused. “She worked for you too? She his side-piece or somethin’?”
“She better not be,” Shawn said. “‘Cause that shit could get … expensive.”
“He told me she wasn’t.” Brendan shook his head, grimacing. “I believed his ass, too.”
“At this point does it matter?” Turner reached for a toothpick from a nearby table and unwrapped it, beginning to chew on the end. “Who needs that kind of messy shit in their company?”
“You’re one to talk,” Shawn scoffed. “You fucked your way through SE before you got to the throne.”
“Yeah, but it was all very discreet and adult,” Turner said holding his hands up. “A few dirty looks between women maybe. Nothin’ involving the NYPD.”
“I’m firin’ his ass,” Brendan said. “Turner’s right. I don’t even care if he fucked her.”
“B,” Shawn said. “Calm yo’ ass down. You can’t make the man responsible if he got a wife who’s a little hotheaded.”
“Says the original hothead himself,” Turner quipped.
“Shut up,” Shawn said.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. But more than halfway into his drive back to the city, Brendan started to see the folly in his plan. Whatever happened between Justin, Mila and Simone had already happened, and could not be undone. Showing up at Justin’s house would change nothing about that situation. In fact, he didn’t even know if Justin and Mila were home.
And if he showed up at Simone Wolfe’s place, what good would that do? In fact,
it might do more harm than anything else if upon seeing him, she decided that So Def was responsible for what happened, rather than Mila Hoyt.
When Brendan called Simone into his office to let her go, she’d greeted the news with impenetrable, Scandinavian cool.
I see, she’d said.
That was all. I see. No questions, no expression of surprise or dismay, just those two words. And beneath them, she had a look of knowing, like she always suspected things would play out that way.
And then her lips had tightened into a thin line. When he asked her if she had any questions, she said she did not, and then asked whether she was free to go.
She didn’t even finish out the day.
All of that, Brendan had done on the strength of Justin’s word that he had never once touched Simone, and that if she was let go, there was nothing in their interactions that could be construed as sexual harassment. Now, he wasn’t so sure he should have believed it.
Shawn was right, Jamila Hoyt was a hothead. But she wasn’t uncontrollable, or anything like that. Brendan had known her for years and she was definitely not a sister to mess with, but nor was she the kind to let a mere flirtation between her husband and another woman send her to lockup.
Turning his mind away from the Hoyts for a minute, Brendan thought about his own family. By now, Tracy would have heard from Shawn or Turner that he’d left, and that it was work that had called him away. Yet, she hadn’t called.
When he left, he’d spotted her in the corner of the room still with Makayla, eating something from a toothpick. She was smiling and looked happy, and the conversation the two women were engaged in looked animated. And though he knew he should, Brendan didn’t want to interrupt, just to tell Tracy something she wouldn’t have wanted to hear. So, he left.
That decision, right about now, was beginning to feel like it might have been the wrong one. But rather than focus on his own wrongness, he returned his thoughts to Justin, and the new asshole he was about to rip him, just as soon as he got to his house.
The Hoyts home and neighborhood were not unlike Tracy and Brendan’s—a restored brownstone in a part of Brooklyn that had recently undergone a lot of demographic changes. While he waited for someone to answer the bell, Brendan looked around. There were red clay potted plants with blooms at the corner of every step ascending to the front door. And on the outer wrought-iron gate, a jaunty sign that said ‘Hello!’ in bright letters.
Four: Stories of Marriage Page 35
