Before Karol could get the thought out of her mind, her middle child came thundering down the stairs, sporting the paint he wasn’t supposed to use in the house. Rob stood quickly to take the situation in hand, but Karol waved him off, taking Judah upstairs to face his mess, while she was drowning in her own tangled thoughts.
When she emerged again, her mother had made a hair appointment—with the help of Dianne with a y, no doubt—and Mia was dressed in an outfit that Karol had never seen. The surprise was that her daughter looked happy about it. She enjoyed nautical looks, and Faith the Second had just happened to pick the right sailor suit. Where Mia would ever wear it again, Karol had no idea but she was thankful for the gesture, especially after the day she’d had.
“Thanks, M—” A sharp look from her mother made Karol swallow the word that she heard hurled at her so many times a day. Mom. “Faith. Thanks, Faith. I really appreciate it.”
She produced similar outfits for the boys in varied sizes. Judah had a fit over it. Ryan stared at it for a full minute proclaiming it “nice,” tugging on the shirt over the one he already wore and retreating to the corner with a book. With the way he was acting lately, that was a relative success. “Pops picked them. I thought it’d be a bust, but I guess he does know something after all.”
Karol cringed at the way her mother talked about her father, knowing that her dad wouldn’t have said a word in his own defense if he’d been there. The way she called him Pops was bad enough. Faith was the older one actually, by two years. “Mom, please don’t call him Pops. He has a name you know. Eric. Do you ever call him that?”
Her mother shouted for the boys to clean up and come downstairs. She held one of the shirts up in the air and waved at Rob, in the front yard, smoothing things over even further with the husband next door. The way they were laughing, maybe it was a little too smooth, but Faith didn’t seem to notice.
“Eric? Oh, I don’t know. I guess I still call him Pops even though you left the house long ago. He likes it.”
He didn’t like it. Karol knew that from the face that he’d made when she started saying it. She was eight years old and her friend Tonya’s mother was going on and on about “Daddy this” and “Daddy that.”
It turned out that she was talking about her husband. They had a son who was a junior and to keep them separate, she just called her husband Daddy. He loved it. Pops, Karol’s father, did not. He stated this a few times, but as always with Faith, she didn’t listen. And now, decades later, he still tightened his jaw before he answered to it.
“You like it, Mom. He doesn’t. I think it’s a little strange that you insist on being Faith, but he just gets to be Pops. But then, you always did get to decide which part we all got to play.” Karol regretted the words as soon as she’d said them, but it was too late to get them back.
The boys ran off to change without being bidden. Even cauliflower-eared-always-listening-to-see-what’s-going-on Mia followed behind her brothers. She must have seen the look in their grandmother’s eyes. If Karol had seen it sooner, she might have joined her husband on the front lawn. When she did see it, it was too late to escape.
Faith had frozen in place at the close of her daughter’s words. She kept her pose and pivoted slowly, reminiscent of the best supermodels. Her words scratched from deep in her throat, somewhere raw and painful.
“Do you think you know what it takes to keep a marriage together? Do you think you know how to raise decent children, work a job and keep your man in your bed? How to stay whole even when your world is in pieces? Well, baby, you don’t know. Not yet. So don’t judge Faith so quickly. You don’t know…Eric as well as you think you do. To be honest, you don’t know that husband of yours too well, either.”
Karol took a deep breath and tried to apologize, but her mother was already up and gathering the children into the car. She planned to take them to the Mary Brogan Museum to the latest exhibit, one she’d read about in the Tallahassee Democrat. Convinced the children were already ruined from the dearth of artistic freedom in their lives, she still promised to do what she could.
“Look, Faith. You don’t have to do this. If I’d known you were coming…It’s just been a hard time. I’m sorry for what I said about Dad—Pops. I don’t know everything. Not about the two of you, anyway. I do take issue with what you said about Rob, though. I know him better than I know myself.”
Karol’s mother slid into her SUV and put on her sunglasses. She told the kids to buckle up while she rolled down the window, speaking barely above a whisper.
“Honey, you know nothing about that man. If you did, you’d realize that it was he who sent your little friends next door away. I’m shocked that it took him so long to do it. Your Eric would have moved you away from here years ago.”
Before Karol could reply, the window closed and the car took off, leaving her in a wake of dust and no small amount of doubt.
She knows.
It was all Rob had written in his late-night e-mail to his friend Singh. He couldn’t say more because he didn’t know more. In fact, he didn’t know anything for sure but he’d been married long enough to know when “I’m okay” meant just the opposite.
For two days, Karol had been stiff and quiet, cleaning and cooking like some kind of Stepford Wife. Usually, Karol focused on the children during the day and except for the dishes, which Rob hated, they did the housework together when he got home from work. When his mother-in-law returned with the children on the day of her visit, Rob knew that something was wrong. It had started with the children greeting him at the door wearing coordinating outfits and fearful looks. Rob wasn’t sure how, but Faith had incriminated him in some way. She’d seen through him despite all his efforts.
Karol turned over slowly, but he knew she wasn’t sleeping. He rested an arm along hers, but she turned away, toward the wall.
This was war, and Rob knew it.
And war required time and strategy that Rob didn’t have. He could have held her shoulder and whispered the truth into her ear, but an all-night argument seemed less than appealing. If only Singh had done his part and told Hope, he wouldn’t have been in this predicament, but Singh had it hard on his end, too. No man wants to fall beneath his woman’s expectations, to remind her that underneath it all, he is just…a fallible human. A sinner. And yet, that was the truth of it for husbands and wives, too. But it’s the man who takes it hard when his wife’s eyes don’t look at him the same. Rob knew the feeling firsthand, he’d gone through it just today.
Lord. I don’t want to fight.
They didn’t fight much. They’d only had a few really bad fights, early in their marriage, but he knew that once Karol got going on this one, there wouldn’t be a quick resolution.
And then there was his friend to think of. Singh obviously hadn’t told Hope the real reason they had moved away. At this point, Rob would be in even more trouble if Singh had told his wife and Karol talked to Hope and found out that her best friend already knew.
Wake her up. Tell her.
But then, maybe Karol knew nothing. Maybe she was really okay after all. Maybe he should just go to sleep.
She is not okay.
Karol turned back to him and opened her eyes. “Thanks for being so kind while Faith was here. I know these visits are a lot to take. Thank you.”
With a deep sigh, Rob curled closer around his wife, smoothing his hand over the scarf tied over her hair. “I don’t mind. I love your mother. She gave me you, didn’t she? It’s you that I worry about. The kids, too. You all seem…upset.”
He’d expected Karol to be an emotional wreck after her mother left and they had time to be alone, but she wasn’t. Her tears had dried into a steely resolve. She’d apologized for not having the kids in hand since Hope’s departure. Rob countered, assuring Karol that the children were his responsibility, too, but by then she was far gone into superwoman territory, a land with only a narrow window of escape. He hoped that the minutes of pretend sleeping had calmed her down.<
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“I’m okay. Thoughtful, but okay. This week taught me a lot. It’s going to keep teaching me if I let it.” Karol didn’t move away from him, but she didn’t respond to him, either.
So much for her calming down. For Karol, yelling and screaming meant light at the end of the tunnel, but even icy words like this meant that plans were being made in her mind, questions were being asked…If Rob wasn’t careful, he’d be accused and proven guilty without ever saying a word. This had gone on long enough.
Rob sat up in the bed and rested his back against the wall. Karol laid her head over in his lap, but she didn’t say a word. She wasn’t going to ask the questions this time. He was all on his own.
“I never meant to hurt you. You have to understand that.”
Karol didn’t indicate one way or another whether she understood it. She didn’t move.
“It’s not that I didn’t love Hope and Singh. I did. I still do. It’s just that I love you more. I missed you…”
She sat up slowly, arms crossed across her abdomen as if in defense. “So what are you saying? You asked them to leave?”
He reached for her arm, but she jerked away. The emptiness between them seemed to grow in the darkness. “It’s not that simple. There was more to it—”
“Not really. Did you or did you not ask Hope and Singh to leave? Yes or no?”
Rob cracked his neck, one of Karol’s pet peeves that he only did in private. He hadn’t meant to do it now, but tension that rose up his shoulders and into his throat threatened to choke him. Rob wanted to tell the whole story, to spread the blame a little thinner, to leave a way for himself to get out of this, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. This was his wife asking about his actions, not anyone else’s. The only way out was the truth. “I asked Singh to pray about it. It just wasn’t healthy the way things were—”
Karol held a finger up to her mouth. “Stop. Talking.”
“Wait. Look, I know you’re mad, but that’s not helping anything. We’re going to have to talk this out—”
“Shh…”
When Rob quieted down, he heard what Karol had already, the beat of a drum. They almost bumped heads as they jumped up and headed downstairs. A drum set had arrived the morning before, a final gift for Mia from Faith, whose one request was that the gift not be returned or given away. Rob had shrugged it off and stored the congas in the garage. How much trouble could a four-year-old girl get into with a couple of drums anyway? he’d asked himself while hauling them to the garage.
A lot of trouble evidently.
As Rob and Karol raced down the stairs, he checked the clock on the DVD player—three o’clock. It seemed to take forever to get to the garage as they rounded the furniture in the new arrangements Faith had left behind. Just as they cleared the last chair, the drumming stopped. Karol and Rob stared at each other in the dim light, both looking afraid now instead of angry. Had one of Karol’s tubs of unfinished projects fallen on their little girl’s head?
A few more steps brought the answer and an unwelcome surprise: next to Mia and her new drum set was Neal, their now red-eyed neighbor.
Rob gave him a nod of thanks before grabbing Mia up and heading back upstairs, trying not to think of the bad things she could have gotten into in the garage alone. Behind him, Karol made ashamed apologies that Rob probably should have had a part in. He whispered a prayer for forgiveness, kissed his daughter, carried her upstairs and tucked her in, knowing that the best of his apologies this night were yet to come.
The Brat Project
Find out if there are city nuisance complaints for children—Neal says no, but go downtown anyway and get info.
Read dog behavior modification articles—something has to work on these kids!
Buy earplugs.
Get new and additional locks for doors.
Get an estimate on enclosing porch.
Ask fence people to move up installation date.
Take Karol to lunch and try to get her to understand where we’re coming from. Neal’s suggestion. I’m not up for it.
Check on Fallon’s presale numbers for her latest release.
Update Heather on the final details of Fallon’s black college tour.
—Dyanne’s to-do list
Chapter Five
Despite her husband’s compassion for them, Dyanne was starting to think that maybe the kids next door were going to wreck her plans, after all. To keep that from happening, Dyanne put Project Pregnancy into overdrive. All she had to do now was get prepared for Fallon Gray’s book tour and get her baby proposal tightened and printed up. Neal wouldn’t be able to refuse her. He never had before. Not really, anyway. Still, she knew better than to push him too far at the wrong time. Like now.
Before Dyanne could reveal her plan, Neal beat her to it with a surprising proclamation of his own.
“I know we moved out here to relax, but it’s turning out to be more work than our lives back in New York. I don’t know if I can take it all. One minute it’s maddeningly quiet and the next, there’s some kid beating drums in the middle of the night. Maybe we should sell, once the summer is over.”
Dyanne thought about saying that maybe that was God’s way of getting him ready for the late nights with their baby, but that would probably only terrify him at this point. Neal’s job, his business was steady. It’s what he was used to. The biggest imbalance in his life was…Dyanne.
She, on the other hand, was intimate with the dizzying fear that everything could fall apart, including her marriage. She didn’t wish that on anybody, the fear she felt all the time, as though something was chasing her to the next goal, the next step of the life she’d planned out for herself. Most of all, she was afraid of letting down her guard as her mother had: settling in and getting comfortable. She could still remember the look on her mother’s face when her father had come home and asked for a divorce. Her mother had laughed, thinking it was a joke. All these years later, it still wasn’t funny. It never would be.
“Don’t give up so easy, Neal. Sure, it’s going to take a while for things to calm down, but they’ll be back in school in the fall. Just give it some time. You wanted this. We both did.” She rubbed her husband’s shoulders and tried to focus on him instead of wondering how far off schedule this was going to put her conception.
And of course, there was the biggest thing consuming her thoughts—Fallon’s tour. She’d never get it all done if Neal wanted to do another move now. Dyanne needed to do some follow-up calls to a few bookstores on the collegiate part of Fallon’s book tour. During the four days planned for Atlanta, Fallon would be speaking at a college, a megachurch and bookstore on almost every day. A noted psychologist and conference speaker, Fallon got some of her best sales after campus events. Other publicists never seemed to understand the dynamics of the process and rarely sent their authors on the university circuit.
Dyanne made it work because she analyzed the strengths and connections of each author separately and after seeing Fallon fill in at a graduation once, she’d created a university leg in every one of Fallon’s tours. The key to it all was getting the kids to fall in love with you. Then, they called and e-mailed their parents, who told their friends and it all went on from there. Perhaps the same tactic would work with her neighbors’ children….
Neal placed his hands over hers and turned to face her. “You’re so sexy when you’re distracted, you know that? If you weren’t trying so hard to get a baby, I’d take you up those stairs and—”
“Don’t let that stop you. A baby ain’t gonna hurt nothing.”
Both of them dropped hands and turned to the door. Dyanne had been thinking pretty much the same thing, but someone else, someone who was supposed to be far, far away had said it. It took them a few seconds to take in the large, lively woman standing in their open front door. Fallon Gray, Ph.D. Live and in color. The wrong color. Her blond dread-locks were now a black Afro cut close to her scalp.
Though Dyanne tried to recover quickly, knowing how
easily Fallon was offended, she didn’t move quickly enough. The woman swung through the door with a leather duffel bag, wearing an eggshell man’s suit and low heels. The absence of her goldilocks, as Fallon had affectionately called them, gave her a totally different look. Dyanne’s eyes were drawn to fist-size earrings dangling from Fallon’s ears.
She took a deep breath and smiled, grateful that at least one thing hadn’t changed. Her bestselling author still smelled of patchouli and oranges and hadn’t lost her old woman’s crush on Neal.
Fallon motioned to Dyanne’s husband with a curving nail. “C’mere, baby. Go on out to the car and get my bags. Maybe that’ll wear off some of that frustration from not taking Dee Dee upstairs and all.”
Emerging from his shock, Neal started for Fallon with open arms, laughing as he went. “How in the world did you find us? And what are you doing here?”
Dyanne, who’d only managed to mumble a few half-formed words, wanted to know the same thing. Although she was a beast of a businesswoman when she had time to plan things out, impromptu and in-person encounters definitely weren’t Dyanne’s strong suit. And interacting with Fallon required some preparation. For all Dyanne disliked about her father’s religious fervor, she had to admit being brought to her knees in prayer more than a few times by the colorful woman in front of her, who now looked nothing like the ten thousand promotional pieces that had been circulated the week before. Dyanne’s anger brought her out of her shock.
“So what’s with the hair? You know I sent out all those postcards with your locks, right? We talked about this. You have to stick with the image people know. Build the brand.”
Fallon flopped down on their new leather couch. She kicked off her shoes as though she’d lived there longer than they had. “One thing at a time, baby. First, I have to answer Handsome here. Let’s see now—” she fumbled in her bag “—how did I end up here? The company sent me some amended schedule talking about I was supposed to be going to Miami or somewhere by myself and that you had moved to Florida and they were considering matching me up with another publicist.”
Mom's the Word Page 5
