by Anna Adams
“But am I detached? Can that be true?” Walking away was easier than working to save a dying marriage.
Evelyn caught her hand. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“You’re right.” She’d acted as though everything was okay at home. Then she’d gone about her own life as if Josh had no say in her decisions. The work she’d accepted, the hours she’d undertaken. She hadn’t even asked him to help her search for child care.
Deep down, she’d believed he might not be around to have his say. She’d never think like that again. She couldn’t let herself if she was committed to having more children with Josh.
“You’re not thinking of leaving him?” Evelyn tugged at the short curls on her forehead. She and Bart had salvaged their marriage out of the worst tragedy. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
“You are,” Lydia said, punctuating her declaration with a smile. “Don’t try to distract me from what you’re doing with these cookies.” She reached for one, swearing silently at her trembling hand. She sniffed the butter and brown sugar and the indefinable warmth of home cooking. “How long have you been hiding this talent?”
“Lydia, what about my son?”
“You have to let it go.”
“I don’t. I’m his mother.”
“I’m his wife.”
Evelyn stared at her with a hint of antagonism. “You must know how much he loves you.”
For some reason, Evelyn’s certainty threatened to raise Lydia’s doubts again. She didn’t answer.
Finally, the other woman sighed. “Okay.” She took stock of the kitchen as if it were all new to her, including the well-worn cookie sheets stacked in the sink.
She nodded toward the cookie Lydia had reached for before. “Try one. I love to cook, but Bart has high cholesterol, no matter what we eat or how much I make him exercise.”
Lydia tried to imagine Bart in his faded jeans, white thermal T-shirt and faded plaid flannel shirt, jogging the neighborhood in the latest running shoes. It was easier to picture him bench pressing the boat.
“Where’d you come up with the name?”
“Trudy was my grandmother.” Lydia opened the stove for a quick peek at the next batch. “I use her recipes.”
Lydia took a bite. “Mmm—it’s delicious,” she said, through a melt-in-her-mouthful.
Evelyn opened the fridge.
“Did you forget something?”
“Yeah. Cookies do not a breakfast make.” She pulled out the egg carton. “Though you’ll never taste better than mine.”
Lydia fingered a few crumbs off her upper lip and then licked them off her finger. “What if Josh turns you down, Evelyn?”
Her mother-in-law ignored that suggestion. “Two eggs? Cheddar cheese? Mushrooms?” She leaned into a cupboard beside the sink and plucked out an onion. “You wouldn’t ease my mind and let me toss in a hunk of ham or some bacon?”
“Answer me.”
Evelyn set her eggs and produce beside a cutting board. “He can’t. If he does, I…” She looked up finally, a bit of dough in her springy hair. “I don’t know what I’d do.”
Lydia stared at her. Around them, the kitchen clock ticked and the oven bell rang. She should have thought about her timing before she’d asked Josh to leave Hartford, but she was just as desperate as Evelyn for his answer. He had to choose her over that job. Their life together had to come first.
She walked to the bread box and took out a loaf. “You want some toast?”
“One slice.” Evelyn opened another cupboard and took out the toaster. A glance at Lydia made her pause. “Something’s wrong.”
Lydia tried to shake her head. She plugged in the toaster and inserted the bread. Evelyn began cutting tomatoes.
“You can talk to me. I’ve confided my worst secrets in you today.” Evelyn’s laugh rode on the gravel of long-ago cigarettes and the false hope she’d found in a vodka bottle. She sounded more real than Lydia had ever heard her.
“It’s nothing. Just change. You want it. I need it—with all my heart.” Hartford stood for disappointment and unspoken dissension and dread that had turned into justified fear. A tear sizzled on the silver toaster.
Evelyn dropped her knife. “I upset you.”
Lydia shook her head. “It’s the baby.” And the fact that Josh could hold a grudge for decades. And her own hopeless longing to escape pain and fear that seemed to smother her in that town house.
“You can fight grief a little, but sometimes you just have to abide until it takes its fingers out of your heart.” From behind, Evelyn slid her arms around Lydia’s waist. Shaking, Lydia hung on.
She cried for Josh’s comfort, too. All the wishing in the world couldn’t change anything that had happened, couldn’t teach either of them to forgive.
“Hey,” Evelyn said, “no more crying. I hate seeing you so sad.”
“I swing from hope to grief,” Lydia said. “Can’t seem to help it.”
“It’s called healing,” Evelyn said against her hair.
CHAPTER SIX
IT WAS ONLY when Lydia had to weave through weekend traffic on the busy square that she realized it was Saturday. Remnants of the previous night’s Halloween celebrations—which hadn’t reached out to the house on the cliff, blew around the cars and the wrought-iron fences.
In the swift breeze of an oncoming storm that had dotted the sky with clouds, children wandered, weary, at their parents’ sides. Moms and dads hauled their sons and daughters by unwilling hands, strangely oblivious, in their rush to finish a weekend’s errands.
Lydia parked in front of Lillian Taylor’s. The Florist wound in vinelike lettering up Lillian’s window. As Lydia opened the car door, her phone rang.
It was Evelyn. They’d finished breakfast, shared a walk down the headland and discussed fish chowder for supper. Then she’d showered, read the paper and stared at the news channel on TV.
After lunch, she’d left without telling Evelyn where she was headed. This task was private, something she wanted to do for Josh.
“Hey,” she said.
“Where are you? I went up to gather the laundry and when I came back you’d disappeared.”
“I’m in town. I yelled up the stairs.” She’d raised her voice a little.
“What are you doing? Josh is going to kill me if you make yourself sick.”
“I won’t, and you’re not responsible for me. I’ll be back soon, Evelyn. Need anything from the shops?”
“Hmmm. We could use some bread. Something crisp on the outside, nice and soft in the middle.”
Lydia’s mouth watered. “Sounds good.”
She shut her phone and went inside the florist’s. She quickly settled on a bouquet of wildflowers and daisies, just right for a little girl. Lillian wrapped the stems in cellophane for her and found a green vase. Afterward, Lydia went down to the bakery and picked up a hot baguette that only made her more hungry. She added a bottle of water to her shopping.
Then she drove to the church and parked outside the fence that bordered the cemetery. For just a second, sadness reached out with its spindly fingers, but she fought it off.
Clara had been gone a long time. People only remembered her with sadness. Lydia intended to add a little hope to the mix. She didn’t want to think of her lost son with only sadness in eighteen years.
She walked around the fence. Many of the headstones sat crooked. Most were tinted green. She strode up and down, pulling off the occasional vine, plucking dead flowers from old urns. At a stone that said, Quincy, Infant, April 1782, she added a couple of daisies. Josh’s family weren’t the only Quincys around here, but just in case…
At last, she found Clara’s stone. It said only Clara Quincy, Sister and Daughter, and the dates of her birth and death. No one had been here lately. Lydia pulled the weeds and vowed to find out whose job it was to tend this place.
When she finished, she set the vase on the ledge of Clara’s stone and poured the water in. Then she added the bouquet. She stood ba
ck, and the small grave looked better cared for. Lydia knelt down and flattened her hand to the moist ground. Wind threaded through her hair as she said a quick prayer for Josh’s sister and for her own son.
Nothing had changed, except this piece of ground was cleaner. Both children were still gone too soon, but she intended to survive grief and remember what might have been—anticipate what might still be.
She stood up, blinking in the cool air. Time to go back. Face her husband and offer some kind of compromise he could live with, too.
She drove on down the street, purposefully seeking out the high school Josh had attended—looking for some piece of her husband in this town he couldn’t love. Instead, she saw two dark-haired boys, bashing at a thick wooden door, which thank goodness, contained no windows.
Lydia stopped the car. “Hey,” she yelled.
The boys stopped. Their faces were blurs, but they wore the same sweats. One ran as if she were a minion of the principal’s. The other swung the baseball bat at the door again.
“Hey,” Lydia shouted again and started searching for a way inside the chain-link fence. The kid bolted. Before she could find an opening, he’d sailed over the top of the fence onto the other side of the wide yard.
Lydia tugged at the links, furious. Kids who vandalized their own school. Who’d they think paid the taxes around here? Their own misguided parents.
In a rage, she dialed Josh. He and Bart must have been too far out. His phone went to voice mail. “It’s me,” she said. “I’m over by your school and I just saw some kids trying to break in.” She turned, scanning the neighborhood, which seemed to be completely empty. Perhaps everyone had run in to hide their heads after she’d started screaming at the vandals. “I suppose I should call the police.”
But her anger drained away. The boys hadn’t damaged the solid doors, as far as she could see. Besides, she could hardly describe them. Tall, dark-haired, and fast on their feet.
“Call me,” she said and hung up. She stared at her phone. A “please” might not have hurt.
She didn’t tell Evelyn what she’d seen when she went home. For one thing, she felt guilty. She should have called the police. For another, she felt foolish, having yelled at two boys beating up their own school with a possibly deadly weapon after she’d ranted at Josh for years about his taking chances.
She took a book to bed, but must have fallen asleep. She woke to find Josh easing their door open, a towel draped low across his hips.
“You’re awake.”
Her glance fell down his body, and he hitched the towel tighter. She blushed. How long since she’d seen him naked?
“What happened?” Though he pretended not to notice, awareness prickled between them. “Did you call the police?”
“No—I know I should have. Do you want to go take a look at the school? They were beating on the doors with a bat. They may have gone back by now.”
Surprise lifted his eyebrows. He obviously hadn’t forgotten their earlier argument either. “Let’s hope not.” He took jeans and a sweater from the closet. “Why don’t you tell my parents we’re going out for a little while?”
“Okay.”
He stopped her at the door. “You sure you feel like going out? You’re not usually a napper.”
“The doctors said I’d be tired for a while.”
He let her go. She felt the heat of his fingers on her forearm even as she ran down the stairs.
His mom and dad were chatting in the kitchen.
“There’s peanut butter on my paper,” Bart said.
“Shh. She’ll hear you.”
“I love that girl, but have you tried to read through peanut butter?”
“I’m sorry, Bart.” Lydia grabbed a napkin and leaned over his shoulder. Finding the offensive spot, she rubbed it clean. “There, and I only got a little of the print.”
“Thanks,” he said, a laugh in his voice.
“Josh and I are running downtown for a few minutes.”
Evelyn looked up from her stewpot. “Now?”
“I have something to show him.” That was true enough, and a good way to introduce compromise. “Don’t hold dinner, Evelyn.”
“The chowder will wait. Josh loves fish chowder.” She lifted a spoonful to her lips. “Mmm, so do I.” She swallowed in a hurry, blinking at the soup’s heat. “This isn’t because of Grandma Trudy?”
“Not at all.” Hearing Josh on the stairs, Lydia went for their coats in the mudroom. “We’ll be back soon.”
“Take your time,” Bart said with a stifling look at Evelyn.
“Mom, I hope supper won’t ruin. Eat without us if you’re worried about it.” Josh took his coat and put it on.
“We’ve covered that,” Evelyn said. “We’ll eat when you get back.”
She obviously wanted an explanation but managed not to demand one. Lydia wished they didn’t have to be so secretive, but she wanted Josh’s advice before she explained what she’d seen to Bart and Evelyn.
In the car, he turned to her. “What happened?”
She told him everything she’d seen, plus thoughts she’d barely acknowledged. “What if it’d been you? You might have been that angry when your parents got out of prison. You could have become violent. But I wouldn’t have wanted someone to put you in jail.”
In the oncoming gloom of early evening, his eyes seemed darker, wider. “You’re usually ready to prosecute.”
“Don’t make fun of me, Josh. I’m trying to do the right thing.”
“But you can’t see what it is? Welcome to the real world.”
“You’re mocking me again.”
He laughed, but then drove in silence. At the school, they got out. “I’m going over the fence.”
“That’s trespassing.”
“I can’t see from here, Lydia.” He glanced around. “Although, I think you were right when you said they’d come back. We probably should call the police.” He jumped the fence with as much agility as the boys had and then loped up to the double doors. He tested the surfaces with his hands and then jumped off the porch. If she hadn’t known him, she couldn’t have made out his face from that distance either.
“I’ll look around.”
She nodded, her fingers in the links of the fence again. She felt alone, but not uneasy as she waited for Josh to take a turn around the school. He crossed the yard and looked at the fence where the boys had jumped over and then finished a circuit around the building. She backed away as he came closer.
“What do you think?” she asked as he grabbed the top of the fence and swung over.
“They left a few dents in the varnish, but God knows how old those doors are and how deep the varnish goes.” He wrapped his arm around her. When she leaned into him, he held on. “I’m surprised you were willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.”
“And pleased?” It was obvious in his voice.
“You’re not a judgmental woman, but my job has made you less—”
“Sympathetic?” Why not help him? She understood his meaning. “But I’ve felt as if I were defending myself all this time.”
“I see that now.”
“Should we call the police?”
“Let’s visit. It’s a small department, and the chief is a guy I went to school with.”
“A friend?”
“Not really. He was a jock. I was a little bit of a pariah.”
She grimaced, trying to hide her pain at his matter-of-fact tone. “Okay, but I really do have something to show you first.”
“Where?” His gaze hardened. “You haven’t been talking real estate with Geraldine Dawson, too?”
“Give me a break. You think I’m that unforgiving?”
He looked guilty. It hurt.
They got into the car. She pointed behind them. “It’s the cemetery.”
“Oh.” He’d probably guessed. “Sorry about that real estate crack.”
“It’s okay. Who’s Geraldine Dawson anyway?”
“A f
riend of my mother’s.” At the church, he turned in.
Lydia took his hand as they walked over to the cemetery. He knew the way and she remembered from this morning. He stopped in front of his sister’s grave. Lydia would have walked away to give him privacy, but Josh tightened his grip when she tried to free herself. She clung. Somehow this had become a place for their unborn son, too.
At last, he pulled her against him. “Thank you,” he said, his chin bumping her head. “She would have liked those flowers.”
Lydia nodded, her own throat tight.
“And I like seeing it cared for.”
“I said a prayer for her and for our boy.”
Josh held her as if he wouldn’t ever let her go. “Lydia, I—”
“Don’t volunteer something when you’re emotional. I know I shouldn’t have brought up moving this morning when you were leaving.” She cleared her throat. “I don’t want to go back to the town house, or to Hartford, but I want to be with you. I’ll consider anything you want to try.”
“What happened after I left?”
She smiled into his sweater. “Your mom and I talked.”
“Again?”
She hardly recognized his gruff tone. “She helped me see what I want—to fight and talk and disagree—and make love again. But real love, not the kind that keeps us limping along to the next crisis.”
“What did she say?” He looked as if he were waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“That I’m detached. I never thought of that, but you were busy with a job I hated. I pulled away. I figured you lived your life, and I’d live mine.”
“You discussed our marriage with my mother?”
“Stop, Josh. I can feel you getting annoyed. She said I try to pick the parts of family life I want to be involved in.”
“Meaning?”
“I love them. I—” She stopped. She couldn’t say she loved him. Not yet. “I’m your wife,” she said, “but I try to stay out of the chaos between you.”
