Choosing Charleston

by T. Lynn Ocean

  I’m not sure what answer I was expecting, but ‘a few months’ wasn’t it. A week, maybe. Or a one night stand. A one night stand with the woman who’d gone shopping with me to buy Robert a birthday present not too long ago.

  Or even long term. An ongoing affair with the same woman who had brought the salad and dessert when we’d broiled steaks. Perhaps Robert had dated Corin before we were married and it was simply sex for old time’s sake. But, ‘a few months’? ‘A few months’ indicated intimacy. ‘A few months’ indicated urgency. Fresh desire that was invasive, powerful and demanding of attention. Had they texted each other in the middle of the day just to say hello? Or sat up late in the evenings instant-messaging each other on the computer? Or selected their clothing for the day based on pleasing the other during a late afternoon lunch rendezvous?

  I felt dizzy and closed my eyes for a minute to mentally regroup as Charleston sped by. I wasn’t sure I still wanted to go back to New York with him. I didn’t even want to look at him. ‘A few months’ with Corin also meant he’d only been faithful to me for a few months.

  “Robert, we haven’t even celebrated our one year anniversary.”

  “Carly, I’m sorry. So very sorry.”

  “Plus, you said you loved her. It was very clear, -- the ‘I love you’ thing. I don’t know about Corin, but you certainly had me convinced.”

  Using the tuning buttons, I changed the radio back to my favorite Charleston station. “I think you were happy at having been discovered, because it gave you the opening you were looking for to divorce me.”

  “You’re wrong, Honey,” he said immediately. “The whole divorce thing was really…me feeling guilty. I never wanted to hurt you. I felt so awful and horrible about what I’d done to you, that I punished myself by breaking us up. I knew I didn’t deserve you. But when you left, it made me realize I can’t live without you. I need you, Carly. I want to make a family with you. I know you said you were coming home soon anyway, but I couldn’t wait anymore. I had to come and get you.”

  I studied his profile as he expertly wove in and out of traffic. Self-assured movements, the relaxed fit of quality clothes, the sincere expression on his clean-shaven face. Looking at the manicured fingers resting on the bottom of the steering wheel, I remembered why I’d fallen in love with him to begin with. In addition to being a successful businessman, he looked damn good in a suit and tie. Out of the suit and tie, he was still handsome and charming. The adorable puppy dog that people wanted to pick up and hug, despite the fact that he just chewed up their favorite pair of Italian leather slides.

  “Please forgive me,” he pleaded, coming to a red light and taking the opportunity to look at me. “Let’s just put this behind us and make it work.”

  Exhaustion hit me like a sudden downpour of rain. I didn’t want to contemplate anything anymore, and I didn’t want to argue with Robert. During the past week, I’d already made my decision to reconcile. Whether he’d been with Corin two nights or two months, I was going to have to forgive and forget. Move forward and get past the bad parts.

  “Okay, Robert. I forgive you.”

  There was a time-stand-still pause before he grabbed my hand with a squeeze.

  “Really? You forgive me?”

  A horn behind us beeped. The light had turned green.

  “Yes.”

  Somewhere deep inside, I’d known all along that I wanted to keep my marriage together if Robert wanted to. I wanted to celebrate a tenth wedding anniversary… and a twentieth and a fiftieth. I wanted to have children in the years to come. I wanted to build a loving, stable relationship with someone – the same kind of relationship Mamma had with Daddy. I had to believe our short-term separation would somehow make the marriage better and felt powerless to do anything other than take my husband back.

  Robert told me he loved me and, relieved, turned up the volume as Edwin McCain belted out “Far From Over”.

  We drove the remaining ten miles to Mamma and Daddy’s house in silence, Robert bobbing his head to the beat of the music and me wondering if the bowling ball of mixed emotions stirring in my gut was what forty and fifty-year veterans of marriage meant when they attributed their longevity to compromise.

  Chapter Ten

  “Maybe we should just have some soup and crackers since it’s so late,” Mamma said after we got home. We’d spent the day at the hospital and, other than vending machine fare, nobody had eaten. It was nearing eight o’clock, well beyond both the cocktail hour and the cooking hour in the Stone household.

  “Oh, I know!” Jenny said. “I brought you a Speedy Cooker. It’s a new item we’re selling on the show and they’re terrific. Do you have any meat we could cook?”

  “There’s a pork loin,” Mamma said reluctantly.

  In the past, whenever Jenny insisted on demonstrating a new In Home Now product, odd things happened. Most memorable was the time she gummed up the jets in Mamma’s whirlpool tub and transformed it into a cascading fountain.

  “A pork loin is perfect!” My product-savvy sister declared. “With the convection bake feature on your new oven and the Speedy Cooker, the meat will be ready in twenty minutes! Then we’ll just slice it for sandwiches. We can even add some flavor. The Speedy Cooker comes with a free Flavor Fusor feature; you can infuse the meat with something like port wine or bourbon for a really incredible taste.”

  Jenny’s arms gracefully extended in the practiced manner of a Price Is Right model awaiting a chorus of ‘ooohs’ and ‘aaahhs’.

  Mamma was skeptical. “This thing goes inside the oven?”

  “Of course. See, heat from the oven cooks your meat from the outside in. But the Speedy Cooker cooks from the inside out. Put the two together and voila! You’ve cut your cooking time by two-thirds, and the faster cooking time seals in the meat’s natural juices.”

  Mamma looked at me for an opinion. I shrugged my shoulders. It was her oven.

  “Okay,” she relented. “But let’s forget about the infusion thing. I think that right now I’d rather just drink the bourbon. Can someone make me an old fashioned?”

  “I’d be happy to,” Robert offered. He was trying to score points with Mamma. She isn’t as quick to forgive as I am.

  Like a curious kid, Granny stayed in the kitchen to help Jenny with the pork loin. Those of us who knew better settled in to read the newspaper or watch some television. Mamma called Daddy’s hospital room to check up on him one more time for the night and, after a conversation loaded with ‘I-love-you’s’ and ‘me-too’s’, reported that he was feeling fine and watching an old John Wayne movie.

  “You sound like a teenager,” I mumbled, not without jealousy.

  “Your daddy and I still love each other like we did way back then. We knew we were going to get married before we even graduated high school.” Mamma’s eyes twinkled. “Even our families got along well, except for that one feud my granddaddy Wade had with your daddy’s grandpa over the used truck that was supposedly a lemon. But the day we got married, they shook hands and split the repair bill.”

  Instead of pulling her long hair up into a twist like she usually did, it was gathered into a ponytail at the back of her slim neck. She was wearing a pair of black cotton slacks that were as near to jeans as she’d allow herself to get, and they fit her snugly. The years had treated her very well and, from a distance, she could have been easily mistaken for someone twenty years younger. I studied her, proudly, hoping I would look as good when I was her age. And hoping my marriage would see just a fraction of the intimacy that she knew with Daddy.

  Robert served Mamma her drink, brought me a glass of wine and found some bottled beers for himself and Stephen. Taffy sat on the screened porch, intent on watching the darkened driveway, waiting for Daddy to come home.

  “That newfangled cooker reminds me of a spit,” Granny said, plopping down beside me on the sofa. “We used to cook meat on a spit atop a fire when I was a young’un. Best rabbit or squirrel you’d ever eat.”

&nbs
p; “After we taste Jenny’s pork, we might be wishing for some rabbit or squirrel,” I muttered.

  “I used to be a pretty good shot with my twenty gauge, you know,” Granny said, remembering her childhood. “I was somethin’ to be reckoned with.”

  Out of seven children, she’d been the only girl.

  “Pappa wouldn’t let me have more’n three shells at a time, and if I didn’t come home with something, it was awful embarrassing. Especially if one of my brothers had done gotten themselves a rabbit or two.”

  Although her short term memory was almost nonexistent, her long term memory could be quite vivid and something about cooking with Jenny had turned it back seventy years. I told her I was glad I didn’t have to eat rabbit and we talked about gross stuff like skinning rattlesnakes until I realized my wine glass was empty and went to retrieve some more.

  I walked into the kitchen just in time to hear Jenny scold quietly, “Robert!” and to see his hand drop from her upper arm.

  “Oh, hey, Honey,” he said a bit too quickly. “Your sister was just telling me about Body Buddy – the new workout drink – and how great it is at toning muscle.”

  My ears grew hot and I could feel the blood rushing to the surface of my skin. First my husband screws my neighbor. Then he feels up my sister. I wanted to punch him right in the middle of his perfect nose.

  “Oh. So I suppose you were just checking out her bicep? You just got through telling me how much you miss me. How much you want me to come home. That you love me. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Oh, c’mon, Carly. It was just a playful squeeze on her arm. I know my infidelity was horrible for you, and I am so sorry. But it’s made you oversensitive.”

  He pulled me into a one arm hug against his side and in the aftermath of my verbal outburst, I wondered if I was overreacting. I was too close to the situation to tell. I looked at my sister. Jenny shook her head and I could see an apology in her eyes. She flirts with all men. It’s just her nature. But she hadn’t expected Robert to reciprocate by putting his hands on her.

  “What’s that I smell?” she said, wrinkling her petite nose and seizing the opportunity to change the subject.

  Pushing Robert away, I turned my attention to sniffing the air. Something was definitely burning and it smelled like a mixture of broiling meat and melting plastic, with a tinge of something unidentifiable that may have been metal. It took only a few seconds to discover that the source of the poignant odor was originating inside Mamma’s new oven.

  “I can’t get the door open. The handle’s locked!” Jenny said, trying to decide whether or not the situation warranted a full blown panic.

  A paper thin stream of acrid smoke emanated from the top of the oven door and spiraled upward before snaking along the ceiling. Hearing the commotion, or perhaps smelling the odor, Mamma and the twins appeared.

  “How can it be locked?” I moved in to get a better look at the oven door.

  “Oh, Lord! It’s been turned to the ‘self-clean’ setting,” Mamma said. “The door locks automatically.”

  “The self-clean mode reaches six-hundred-and-fifty-degrees and the door locks as a safety measure,” Jenny-the-product-spokesperson explained. “It’s actually a very nice feature on this make of oven.”

  “Since we can’t get the door open, let’s just turn it off,” I told Mamma, trying not to breathe the toxic smell into my lungs.

  “Right!” Mamma rushed the knob and panicked, turned it so hard that it broke off in her hand. Nothing was left sticking out but a tiny metal post that would require a tool from Daddy’s workshop.

  The oven was still on and still trying to clean itself at six-hundred-and-fifty degrees.

  “We don’t like pork loin anyway,” the twins said happily with visions of Wendy’s cheeseburgers or Arby’s roast beef sandwiches dancing in their young heads.

  “Especially one that’s been speedy-cooked,” Stacy said.

  “The meat’s hard to chew,” Sherry explained.

  Insulted, Jenny started to argue with her six-year-olds but stopped beneath the glare of Mamma’s look. Something was on fire inside her new oven and if anyone should be angry, she should.

  “Did someone say we’re having stew?” Granny asked, joining the party.

  “No, we’re having pork,” I told her. “But the oven door is locked shut and the Speedy Cooker appears to be melting.”

  “Well, I didn’t lock it,” Granny said. “I just turned the dial, like Carly told me to do.”

  “You mean Jenny,” I clarified, for the record.

  “I told you to turn it to ‘convection bake’,” my sister cried through a coughing spell. “Not ‘self-clean’!”

  Taffy trotted up to sniff the air around the oven. After a quick assessment, her tail began to wag. Any time there was a calamity in the kitchen, it usually meant extra food in her bowl. And burnt people-food was better than dry dog food any day.

  “This never would of happened using a good old-fashioned spit,” Granny declared with a click of her dentures and walked out of the kitchen. “Best rabbit you’ll ever eat. And we didn’t have to do none of that amusing, neither.”

  “Infusing,” Jenny shouted to her retreating back, taking the situation personally. “The free infusion feature is what sells the product!”

  “Maybe the infuser is really just a miniature fire extinguisher, of sorts,” I said. “You just add the water to the meat up front, before the fire begins.”

  Jenny glared at me.

  A pool of menacing smoke was gathering above our heads and Stephen, toting Hunter on his shoulders, came to investigate. Accustomed to Jenny’s product trials in their home, he evaluated the crisis calmly. After putting his son down a safe distance away, he tried the oven door and realized it was locked. Then he looked at the space where the control knob should be. A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.

  “Oh, good Lord,” Mamma said. “What would your daddy do in this situation?”

  “He would turn the power off at the circuit breaker, which would be quicker than me digging through his tools for a pair of pliers,” Stephen answered. “And then he would call for pizza delivery.”

  “Yay, pizza!” Sherry and Stacy chimed in unison.

  “It would appear you’ve had to do this before,” I said to Stephen, opening a window.

  His smile was a combination of patience and humor and love for my sister. “Let’s just say I could locate the individual circuit breaker that supplied any electrical outlet in our house, in the dark, with my eyes shut.”

  Mamma led Stephen to the breaker box, Robert tagged along for something to do, my sister and I opened the rest of the kitchen windows, and Taffy sat patiently in front of the oven to wait, tail moving slowly back and forth like wiper blades set on intermittent.

  * * *

  “Well, I’d give the Speedy Cooker high marks,” I told Jenny after I’d ordered three large pizzas from Sharkey’s.

  “Oh shut up. And anyway, it wasn’t the Speedy Cooker’s fault.”

  “I wonder if that burnt plastic smell will linger?”

  “Well what do you expect at six hundred and fifty degrees? The Speedy Cooker is designed to work in an oven set at three hundred and fifty degrees.”

  “Well, if I were you, I’d warn your viewing audience not to try and speed up their Speedy Cooker by using a higher temperature.”

  When our food arrived, we unceremoniously ate it from paper plates, sprawled in front of the television in the living room. Daddy’s absence was discomforting and the house retained a twinge of smoky chemical odor, but Mamma’s spirit was bright. Her oven had survived, a catastrophe had been averted and Daddy would be back at home with her tomorrow.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Are you sure you didn’t do something to your hair? You look different somehow,” Cheryl told me for the third time in as many days. She was another of the firm’s mediators and we’d been hired at the same time. We’d gone through orientation and train
ing together, and were pretty tight. She was the closest thing I had to a best friend in New York.

  I was back at work, in bustling Manhattan, sitting at my desk while trying to assimilate nearly three weeks’ worth of absence into one half-hour update. I’d been back for several days, but had been assigned to help one of the attorneys with a high profile court case, and was just now getting a chance to look at my own workload.

  After Daddy came home from the hospital clutching a pamphlet on stress and a prescription for an anti-anxiety medication, Jenny and her clan headed west while Robert and I headed north. Jobs and yards and social commitments screamed for our attention and the time had come for all of us to return to our everyday lives.

  Armed with a thermos of Mamma’s coffee and enough food for five picnic lunches, I’d taken the lead with Robert following closely behind in his red Mercedes two-seater. While his presence behind me was comforting in a possessive sort of way, I had felt somewhat trapped, like a sheep being mindlessly herded back to the reality ranch. The sensation lasted two or three hundred miles, until I convinced myself it was just remaining anger. I decided that, if the marriage was going to work, I needed to get over it. I needed to erase the image of the two of them screwing on my yellow cotton sheets. I needed to quit thinking about how much I was going to miss Charleston. Quit fantasizing about the man I knew only as Trent. And quit wondering how long it would take for me to immerse myself in the local New York culture. I was determined to make the best of my decision to stay with Robert and, if not embrace the northern lifestyle, at least try to appreciate it.

  Pawling was a small town in the hills of Dutchess County, about seventy miles north of my office in Manhattan. Most homes in Pawling were situated on several acres and many would be considered mini estates. It was beautiful country with mountainous views and trendy restaurants. Although commuting distance for those of us who work in the city is two hours, my neighbors happily make the workday trek, grateful for their ability to live away from the inner city.