“Well, at least that mystery is solved.” Joe released a sigh of relief. “What are you planning to do now?”
“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “I don’t want to live with the thought that I might run into him at any moment. What I wish is that he would go back to prison where he belongs and I could continue to pretend that he doesn’t exist.”
“From what I remember,” Joe said, “you were never able to ignore his existence.”
“I tried to,” she said.
“You’re going to have to find a way to get over this if we’re going to feel like a family again,” Joe said. “It isn’t fair to Bobby to live with the kind of anger and emotional turmoil you’re going through right now. It’s toxic to all of us.”
“It would be lovely if I could just flip a switch and forget all about it, but I don’t know how to change my feelings,” she said. “I’m a simple person. I feel what I feel. And as you just pointed out, I’m not very good at acting like everything is okay when I’m bleeding inside.”
“Dad!” they heard Bobby call from the kitchen. “Dad! Can I have some more milk?”
“I’ll go get it.” Joe left the room to tend to his son.
Her behavior during the past half hour was not like her. It made her feel like an angry, miserable excuse of a mother. Having Joe upset with her too was just too much. It made her feel as if she were being punished even though she hadn’t done anything wrong.
She hadn’t robbed a bank. She hadn’t killed anyone. And yet today she’d had an argument with Bertha so severe that she had almost thrown up. She’d also been chastised by her husband for frightening their son and had been pretty useless at work.
This was Carl’s fault. Every last rotten thing that had happened today was Carl Bateman’s fault.
Rachel didn’t often get headaches, but when she did they were doozies…and she could feel one starting now. She went into the kitchen, pulled some ibuprofen out of the cabinet, and started to swallow two capsules with a glass of water. Then she stopped and spit them into the sink. Pregnant women weren’t supposed to take painkillers.
Joe started cleaning up the crumbs from Bobby’s snack and saw the bottle in her hand. “Headache?”
“A bad one,” she said.
“Go lay down,” he said. “I’ll finish supper.”
“Thank you.”
The day and the war of emotion she had been through had exhausted her to the point that Rachel fell into a deep sleep that didn’t end until about two o’clock in the morning. She awoke disoriented and thirsty. Joe was not with her. She wondered why he was still up at this time of night. Was he ill? Was he watching television? Reading? He still had the discipline of “early to bed and early to rise” that he had developed as an athlete. It was unlike him to stay up this late. She put on her robe and went to find her husband.
When she got to the kitchen, she found it clean. She glanced into the refrigerator and saw that Joe had been as good as his word. He had made the stir-fry, evidently eaten it alone, and then put it away.
Joe was not in the living room, but there were papers spread out on the coffee table where he’d been working. One was a handwritten list of their household expenses and a total. On another sheet were numbers involving their combined take-home pay. One thing was apparent: if she didn’t keep her job, or if Joe didn’t find one soon, they would be in serious financial trouble.
There was also a list of possible jobs. Some were in the area. Most involved the need to move away. Several involved commercial endorsements she knew he didn’t want to do.
It appeared he had given serious consideration to an offer from Ohio State University. The letters OSU were written in big letters and circled. Below that were the words “Pitching coach!” Apparently OSU had the same idea as the Dodgers. Next to that was a number she assumed was the potential salary. Assuming their expenses didn’t go up too significantly, it would be enough to live on. Underneath, he’d scribbled the words, “Small apartment during week?” Then he’d marked that out with a large X. Evidently he didn’t consider it a viable option to live in Columbus two hours away and only come home on the weekend. She agreed. There would be weekend games and travel. She and Bobby would seldom see him unless they moved there.
She could handle it, but Bobby? Not so much.
It looked like Joe had gotten an offer from Allstate too. He’d mentioned that one to her earlier, but she had been so obsessed with Carl’s release that she’d not listened closely. Now she read over the offer in its entirety. It would involve becoming an insurance broker and working as a front man for the office in Cleveland. It was more generous than the OSU salary. Obviously Allstate was banking on Joe’s reputation to bring in new clients. Getting to sit across the desk from the great Micah Mattias as he took care of their insurance needs would be quite a draw for a lot of baseball fans. But not only would their family have to move to Cleveland, Joe would hate every minute of it.
It broke Rachel’s heart.
She went back down the hallway and then to Bobby’s room—the only room in the small house she had not yet looked for Joe. She found him asleep, fully clothed, on his son’s bed, with his hand lying protectively on his little boy’s shoulder.
Quietly closing Bobby’s door, she went back to the bedroom she and Joe shared. It was the first time since they were married that Joe had chosen not to sleep by her side.
Chapter 33
Things were awkward between them the next morning. She was hormonal and weepy—which she tried to hide behind a studied politeness. He was stiff and quiet. Normally, she would have fled to her aunts’ for comfort, but she definitely was not ready to see Bertha yet.
It was a relief to go to work, but she struggled to get through the day.
When she got home that night, what she wanted to do was to lay down on the couch and sleep, but there was dinner to fix, and as a wife and mother, it was up to her to fix it. Or at least, that was how it felt.
She was deep into food prep when she heard a voice.
“Don’t,” Joe said.
Rachel turned away from the kitchen counter, where she had been getting ready to make hamburgers from a couple of pounds of fresh ground chuck.
“Why?”
“Because you’ve worked all day, you’re pregnant, you’re tired, and you don’t need to try to cook dinner on top of everything else. Remember the meltdown from last night? I don’t want to repeat that.”
“But we need to eat.” Rachel did not want to discuss her meltdown. “And I don’t want to go out. I’ve been all over Tuscarawas County today, asking questions and trying to track down information.”
“What happened?” Joe asked.
“Someone dug a six-foot-deep trench in the spillway of Henry Yoder’s pond while he and his wife were visiting their daughter in Pennsylvania. Drained the whole thing. Nothing but dead fish lying there in the mud when they got back.”
“That was a lot of bother for someone to go to.”
“Hours of digging just for meanness. It will take months for the pond to fill back up, and that was the main source of water for his cattle.”
“Is Henry also part of your aunts’ church?”
“Yes. I wish I could figure out a motivation, but nothing I come up with makes sense.”
“Well, I’ve had an easy day compared to yours,” Joe said. “All I’ve done is work on my car.”
“Working on your car couldn’t have been that easy.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, Bobby was helping you, wasn’t he?”
Joe laughed, and that made her feel better. “Okay, so I spent most of my time trying to keep him from killing himself with my tools, but let me fix dinner anyway.”
“You don’t have to ask me twice.” Her feet hurt, and her back too. This business of having a little person growing inside her was taking a toll. She was feeling the effects, especially in her waistband that was becoming too tight. Even buying a larger size of slacks wasn’t
working anymore. She really needed to get a maternity uniform.
She sat on a stool at the kitchen counter and secretly unbuttoned her waistband.
Joe tucked a dish towel into his belt, washed his hands, and began a complicated business of whisking up sauces and spices and then folding it all into the meat.
“Where did you learn to do that?” she asked. “I just planned to fry the meat into patties for hamburgers, but you always do something special to make it taste better.”
“I learned this at my mother’s elbow,” Joe said. “Darren did too.”
“Darren can cook?”
“When he feels like it. The thing is, when we were boys and Mom and Dad were working in Africa, we didn’t always have the best food to work with. Mom had to get inventive to make things taste good. We didn’t have television or that many things to entertain us, so helping her in whatever kitchen we were using was about as entertaining as it got somedays.”
“What kind of things did you cook?”
“We had to improvise a lot. I actually got pretty good at hunting small game by throwing rocks. Mom would clean whatever I brought home and figure out a way to make it edible. Learning to hunt like that might have helped my pitching accuracy later on. Who knows? It’s amazing what you can get good at when you’re hungry. Darren never developed the knack, but he was always tagging along. I made him carry my bag of rocks for me.”
“Speaking of Darren…”
He followed her glance, looked out the window in the kitchen, and saw his brother walking up the driveway.
“Can you get the door?” He continued to knead the seasonings into the ground chuck. “My hands are messy.”
She opened the door, without trying to force her waistband closed. Her shirt tail covered things enough for modesty.
“Hi, come on in, Darren. Your brother is making burgers.”
“Are you using one of Mom’s recipes?” Darren sounded hopeful.
“Yep,” Joe said. “Want to stay and eat with us?”
“Sure would!”
After forming the burgers, Joe put them on a grill they kept on the small back patio. A pot of canned baked beans warmed beside them—to which he had added a dollop of honey and a half teaspoon of allspice. Rachel found some Vidalia onions, which she sliced, and Darren tossed a salad. Bobby brought out the potato chips, and soon the four of them were digging in.
“Nothing against Amish food,” Darren said with his mouth full, “but every now and then a man needs a good burger. It’s hard to find one around here. Lots of noodles, chicken, and pastry, but not much in the way of burgers. You should open a restaurant.”
“Yeah, right,” Joe said. “I’ve got about three things I can make well and that’s it—burgers, baked beans, and sometimes I do a pretty good job of grilling a cheese sandwich.”
“And peanut butter sandwiches, Daddy,” Bobby said. “You make good ones of those.”
“You should open a restaurant and call it Joe’s Bar & Grill,” Darren continued as if he hadn’t heard Joe’s objection.
Joe laughed. “Like nobody has ever used that name before.”
“I’m afraid the aunts would have a problem with the ‘bar’ part of it. They’re teetotalers,” Rachel said.
“Can’t you just picture Bertha coming in like Carrie Nation with an axe—smashing up all the liquor bottles?” Joe asked. “Now, there’s a mental image.”
“She might do it too,” Rachel said. “Bertha’s never been shy about expressing her opinion.”
“Seriously, Micah,” Darren said, “There might be a niche here in Amishland for a good hamburger joint. Maybe a sort of sports bar.” He glanced at Rachel. “But without the bar.”
“I know absolutely nothing about running a restaurant.”
“A lot of athletes own them,” Darren said. “They might not do the cooking, but they oversee them and lend their name to them. It could be a great business opportunity.”
Rachel saw Joe freeze at the words “great business opportunity.”
Joe’s younger brother had sponged money off Joe for years, using it for one failed “great business opportunity” after another. Her husband had come to the sad conclusion that Darren didn’t have the grit to stick to anything long enough to make it a success. His brother always seemed to think that his big break was right around the corner, if Joe would just lend him a little more money.
Their impromptu dinner had been going well until Darren started taking the idea of Joe starting a restaurant a little too seriously.
“You could have a baseball theme,” Darren enthused. “You could name the hamburgers after baseball terms. Like Micah’s Slider…or Joe’s Grounder. Or…”
“Hate to burst your bubble, but restaurants need start-up money,” Joe said. “And I don’t have it.”
Darren stopped mid-sentence. “What do you mean, you don’t have it?”
“The financial guy Henrietta set me up with? He ruined me,” Joe said. “Took off to parts unknown with my money and that of several others.”
“But the house…?”
“Sold at a loss.”
“You mean it’s all gone?” Darren seemed dumbstruck. “Everything you made down through the years? All those big contracts!”
“Don’t remind me.”
“Any chance of getting it back?”
“Not much.”
“Man, I’m sorry, bro. I hope someone gets hold of that guy and makes him swim with the fishes.”
“Can we go swimming with the fishies, Daddy?” Bobby glanced up from his plate. “Can we?”
“Sure.” Joe tousled his son’s hair. “We’ll take fishing poles along too, for good measure. Okay?”
“ ’kay.” Bobby went back to his meal.
“Be careful what you say in front of my son, Darren,” Joe said in a low voice. “He’s only six.”
“Right. So. About that business opportunity we were discussing…”
Chapter 34
The fish Bobby hoped to catch and cook had not materialized, so Joe was toasting a grilled-cheese sandwich. He was also worrying about Rachel. Her obsession with Carl Bateman was affecting everything.
He wondered whether things might have been different had she gotten professional help when she was a child. There were counselors who specialized in children who had seen traumatic events. It was a specific skill, one he knew neither Bertha nor her sisters possessed. They had done what they could, loving well the child they had been given. They had managed to raise up a woman with integrity, compassion, and a strong work ethic. Considering what he’d witnessed in the hospital, they had also raised a woman who had way more demons than he’d imagined.
He wished it were possible to go back and reach the child that she had been, but it was too late for that. All Joe could do was love her and try to be patient and sympathetic with what he saw as paranoid behavior. With Rachel, of course, her paranoia took the form of aggression. It wasn’t in her nature to be passive. She had already asked the Millersburg police to keep a close eye on Carl and to let her know if there was any hint of illegal activity.
So far, the only thing they could report was that Carl sometimes smoked during the evenings on the steps of the church and had recently taken in an abandoned German shepherd mix.
Rachel had seen both of these activities in the light of suspicious behavior and mentioned it frequently to Joe. Smoking on the church steps? He was probably considering his next crime. A German shepherd mix? She had discovered he had trained dogs in prison. Perhaps Carl was training this one to be an attack dog. He would certainly have the skills.
It seemed to Joe that Carl had become the main focus of Rachel’s life instead of him and Bobby. He was sick to death of hearing the man’s name. At least she had sense enough not to talk about it in front of their son. But when they were alone in bed at night, he often fell asleep with her still musing aloud about what Carl might be doing.
At least she hadn’t tried to go back to the church and confron
t him. That she did so even once worried him, because he really didn’t know who Carl was or what he was capable of. It felt to him as though Rachel was poking a hornet’s nest. If she pushed this man too far, bad things could happen.
How Joe wished she would get over it and be able to relax and enjoy the process of nurturing a new life. It was such a miraculous time, and he wanted to enjoy it with her—not fret and fume together over an old ex-convict.
He loved her more than anyone or anything on this planet—with the exception of Bobby. He had felt as if their souls were knit together. Therefore, it was especially annoying to him that he experienced so much impatience with her inability to let go of the anger.
He had always tried to fix the things that went wrong—at least those things within his power—and he was now frustrated by his inability to change this situation. All he could do was hope and pray that his brilliant and beautiful wife would soon figure out a way to live on the same planet as Carl Bateman. And hopefully she could do so without another emergency trip to the hospital.
That was one of his greatest concerns. He feared she would simply “go away” again. Stress-induced amnesia… It was so antithetical to Rachel’s strength of character that it was hard to imagine the depth of trauma still within her.
The ER doctor wanted Joe to make sure she saw a counselor. Rachel tossed that idea aside the minute he mentioned it. No need to see a shrink, she said, when she felt fine. There was way too much to do to bother with that sort of thing.
He’d not brought it up again, but it continually niggled at the back of his mind that she was making a mistake in not going. As he waited for Bobby’s grilled cheese to finish browning, he glanced out the window…and was surprised to see his brother coming up the sidewalk. The last thing he’d expected was Darren showing up again so soon.
Joe loved his little brother, but he didn’t enjoy him. There seemed to be a hole inside Darren that couldn’t be filled, no matter how much he attempted to impress people with boasts about his accomplishments.
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