Carpool Confidential

by Jessica Benson

  “You know, I’d been planning to give you a call back, but it sort of slipped to the bottom of my pile.” He chuckled.

  Why did I have a feeling I would have kept reslipping to the bottom in an endless loop if I hadn’t called? And why did that not give me a good feeling?

  “I matched those receipts up against Rick’s diary. Standard procedure,” he said before I could ask, “and the funny thing is they don’t match. Well, that’s not true, two of them did, but the rest he was either on vacation or here.” He sounded truly puzzled. “So I can’t quite figure out these itineraries or receipts.”

  That made two of us, but for me it was just one more missing piece. I tried the make lemonade approach. “Which two trips did match up?”

  “London and Tokyo,” he said.

  I felt the wash of relief. Those had involved substantial amounts of money.

  “But Rick collected reimbursement for those before his termination.”

  The wash of relief was swallowed up by the dizzying rush of blackness. The shock was almost like meeting an old acquaintance at this point. Rick had been fired? Honestly, it was getting hard to keep track of what I did know and what I didn’t. I called and left a message for Humphrey saying that sooner would be preferable to later. Then I called Randy.

  “So,” she said, “are you planning what to wear to Performance Space 6?”

  I didn’t bother laughing. “Ran, I think I need a lawyer to start working on a legal separation.”

  32

  It’s a Miracle

  I picked M.A. up at school. “Hi,” she said when we met in the school lobby. Her gaze dropped, she frowned. “So do you like not have any skinny-legged jeans?”

  “No,” I smiled sweetly, “I don’t. Because I’m over twenty and so, correspondingly, are my thighs.”

  “Katya probably has skinny-legged jeans.” She looked sad.

  “Katya,” I said, “wears thongs.”

  “She’s not very dependable.” She looked sadder.

  I put my arm around her. “No,” I agreed, and we went off to the doctor, who was absolutely lovely and took M.A. away for talking and tests and redelivered her to me in the waiting room saying she’d be in touch with the test results.

  “So?” I said when we left.

  “It was good.”

  And that was it. All the information I got. I made one last stab. “I really think you should go see a therapist.”

  “My mom made me go a few times but there was no point, I’m not nuts. What would I talk to a therapist about?”

  “Whatever you want. I do.”

  She looked at me. “So, everything? From like stupid things like if someone makes a humming noise while you’re reading and it bugs you?”

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  “And cosmic stuff like why the earth is such a fucked-up place with terrorists and climate change? And my parents are so screwed up? And—Oh my God!”

  “What? What is it, hon?”

  She was staring in a store window. “Those boots are like sooo cute!”

  So much for the cosmic stuff.

  I sent her home to drop off her new boots and pick the boys up and went over to see Letitia.

  “What do you want, Cassie?” she asked after I’d brought her up to date.

  Her maid came, filled our coffee cups, then left. The apartment was lengthily silent. Good—no, great—question. Even a few weeks ago, the answer was cut and dried. I wanted Rick, with his pressure-cooker job and his Finnish bottled water and his hand-ironed shirts and everything that came with it, back. But little by little, each new piece of information ate away at that certainty. Not only did I not know anymore, I was no longer sure that an intact family (that included Rick) was best for the boys.

  “I want”—I had to force myself to form a coherent answer— “I’d like to understand what happened and why. I don’t want the boys to suffer, and I think I’m entitled to a fair share of the marital assets.”

  “Are you saying you definitely don’t want him back?”

  “I’m saying I don’t know, but those things I do know.”

  “And the money—what about the short term? Are you OK right now, or are you trying to put a good face on being desperate?”

  “I’m not desperate yet, and the blog is starting to bring in real income. It’s more worry about the longer term. I’m making arrangements to have the Nantucket house rented out.”

  She looked down. “I’m sorry.”

  “Please don’t feel like this is your fault, Letitia.”

  “It so clearly is.” When she looked up at me, I noticed for the first time the slightest lines crossing through the Botox-frozen serenity, the tiniest softening of her chin. Proof that at some point no amount of money, no legions of plastic surgeons can disguise that we’re all marching in the same direction.

  “No, it isn’t.” I put my hand on her arm. “You weren’t perfect. None of us are. But that doesn’t give him any justification for this. None. This is all him, Letitia.”

  We were just sitting down to dinner when someone knocked on the door. No buzz from the doorman, so we all jumped to the same conclusion.

  “M.A.!” Jared yelled, getting up. “She can have dinner with us! Maybe she’ll say this lasagna tastes like ass!”

  I could only hope.

  The two of them tore down the hall.

  I dropped my napkin and followed. I was thinking that whatever her decision was about the baby, her nutrition really had to improve—but it wasn’t M.A.

  “Hi,” Rick said, like he was coming home from a day at the office.

  My just-swallowed bite of lasagna felt like it was going to come back up. The hallway tilted. I had to grope—for reality, for balance. Was he just coming home from a day at the office? Had this been real? Imagined?

  He stood there, in the door, looking at me. The boys were silent behind me. My emotions were rioting, ricocheting off the walls. My brain, though, was very logically ticking over the fact that just today I’d asked Randy to find me a lawyer.

  The boys came out of their shock. “DADDYDADDYDADDYDADDYDADDYDADDYDADDYDADDY!!” They hurled themselves onto him. ‘DADDY!”

  “Guys! Don’t knock me over.” Rick was laughing and trying to stay upright and hug them all at the same time.

  “Where’s your suitcase? Are you home forever? Why did mom say you were getting divorced? Do you still love us? What’s your new job? Do you like it? Will you come to soccer on Saturday? Can we see R movies now? Mom said no. And what about PG-13 ones? Did you know M.A.’s staying with us? She’s having a baby.” (How the hell did they know that?? And if they knew that, what else might they be up on?)

  I leaned against the wall. The boys were still in full swing, their words tripping over each other’s.

  “We’re having lasagna. You missed Thanksgiving. Did you hear that Grandma might marry Grandpa again? Guess what! We have yam fries at school now. They taste like ass. Once when you were gone Cad pooped on the floor and Mommy said the F word!”

  “She didn’t!” Rick said, laughing. “And who’s M.A.?”

  “Harmonye. That’s her new name.”

  “I see.” He looked at me. “You’re looking good, Cass. Did you lose weight?”

  “Why are you here, Rick?”

  “I’m back,” he said softly. “I missed you.”

  “Back back or back for Christmas?”

  He looked at me tenderly. “I guess that depends on you.”

  I was having a hard time not bursting into tears at how happy the boys were. It was like I’d somehow managed to block out how much they’d missed him because I’d had to in order to keep myself going.

  Rick looked…the same but different. His hair was longer, and he was thinner, too. I had to admit, he looked good. I’d somehow forgotten to really see him over the years, how good-looking he was.

  I had a quick mental flash of James Spence’s face. Rick was and always had been a handsome man. But James was in a different leag
ue. It could never be an even comparison, though. Looking into a face you know is somehow like looking through a lit window: you can always see in.

  “So. Can I come in?” Rick said quietly. Both boys were hanging off his neck.

  Our gazes met over their heads. The kids babbled on, more like themselves than they’d been in months. I stared at him while two halves of my brain (half 1: of course, honey, thank God you’re finally home. Did you bring money?) and (half two: I’d have to be out of my fucking mind to even consider letting you through this door, dirtbag) duked it out.

  “Why?” I asked. “Do you want to?”

  The boys got quiet then and sort of climbed off him as we stared at each other.

  “Later?” he said. It was like a plea. And then he settled it by walking past me.

  Noah and Jared whooped with excitement. “Come on,” Noah screamed, “let’s go set a place for him,” and they tore down the hall to set the table voluntarily for probably the first time in either of their lives.

  “Why are you here, Rick?” We were still standing in the foyer. The phone rang.

  “Cass”—Rick put his hand out—“leave it. Let’s have our moment.”

  I looked at him. He was smiling that old beguiling smile. The phone was ringing. And it was like I was being transported to the night he left. I remembered Sue calling and Rick doing the same thing, reaching out, saying, Leave it.

  This time, I turned away so his hand slid off my arm and picked up the phone. And what were the odds? It was Sue, her calls neatly bookending my husband’s departure and return. “Listen, Cassie,” she said. “The Trustees Committee is meeting next Friday at 5:30 and as Grace’s replacement on the Exec front—”

  “Um, Sue—”

  “Good old Sue,” Rick said. “Nice to know that it’s true—the more things change, the more they stay the same. Tell her a great big fat hi from me!”

  I looked at him. Had he learned irony somewhere while he was gone?

  “Is that Rick?” Sue said. “You must be absolutely thrilled he’s home! I’ll let you go, but let’s talk tomorrow. And, Cassie, want to hear something weird?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s totally ridiculous, but he’s been gone so much and for so long I was almost starting to think you were the blogger.” She laughed.

  “Really!”

  “What’s taking you guys so long?” Jared came flying around the corner. He was dancing from foot to foot, he was so excited. “Come on, come on.”

  I hung up the phone and followed Rick down the hall.

  33

  Tryin to Get that Feeling Again

  I tried to figure out what I was feeling while we were eating dinner and he was waxing lyrical on the joys of returning to my lasagna—which was actually (an almost unthinkable luxury financially these days) from Balducci’s, yet another reminder that things aren’t necessarily as they look. And all I could come up with was a mix of trepidation and skepticism. Why was he here?

  After dinner, he went down to the living room with the boys to hear everything about everything until they ran out of breath and were ordered to bed. I cleared the table, listening to the distant bursts of excited chatter from down the hall. I couldn’t make out any of the content, but the tone was clear. Noah and Jared were absolutely beside themselves with joy. Me, maybe less so.

  “Don’t sleep with him,” Randy said when I called to announce the Return of Rick. “And I’m not saying that just because I’m on a strict schedule and don’t want anyone else having recreational sex. I’m saying it for your own good. Oh, and keep the appointment with the P.I. and still make one with the lawyer.”

  “Just don’t make love with him. I don’t trust this at all. Damn. I have to go. That’s the broker calling back. We just put an offer in on the house,” Jen said.

  “Jen, that’s great,” I croaked. “Congratulations.”

  “Cross your fingers they didn’t accept it,” she whispered before hanging up.

  Believe me, I was.

  “For God’s sake. Whatever else you do, do not have sex with him. You could nullify your chances of citing abandonment as a cause of divorce,” my mother said. “In fact, that’s probably what he’s back for. To lure you into bed so he’ll come out better financially.”

  “Oh fuck! No wait, don’t. Cassie, whatever you do, do not fuck him,” Charlotte whispered from the bathroom stall of the restaurant at the Hotel on Rivington. “Because then you’ll have to write about it in the blog and it’s going to make decisions for you that shouldn’t be made that way.”

  I put down the phone, closed the dishwasher, dried my hands, and went to put the kids to bed. I could hardly wait for them to go to sleep so Rick and I could really talk. “Hey, Cass,” he said mildly, “are you going to be long?”

  “As long as it takes,” I said, sounding pissy and martyred even to me.

  He shot me a look that could have been anything from irritation to pity.

  Why couldn’t he do some of this? I couldn’t envision the situation in which I’d be sitting on my ass watching TV while he hustled around cleaning up, organizing, and putting the kids to bed. Especially my first night back after being AWOL for months. Of course, since I couldn’t imagine circumstances in any realm of fantasy or reality that would make me go AWOL for months, the whole thing was kind of academic. Anger was starting to rise in my face.

  “Mooommmmmy,” Jared bellowed. “Where are you? I neeeeed you now. RIGHT NOW!”

  “Be right there,” I yelled back. “Rick, do you think you could go talk Noah into bed while I see what’s going on with Jared? He’s not being incredibly cooperative. I think he’s sort of over the top with excitement because you’re back.”

  “I’ll go give them a kiss in a few minutes.” Rick was looking at the screen more intently than he was looking at me.

  He hadn’t helped out much at bedtime before his departure, so I don’t know why I was expecting it now. In fact, when was the last time he’d really been an active participant? More than doling out last kisses and tuck-ins? I couldn’t remember. I felt like I was seeing something about our life in clear black and white for the first time. When had he become such a hands-off dad? He certainly hadn’t started out that way.

  In recent years, his job had become so crazy stressful that I’d compensated, taking on more and more of his share on the home front until I guess he’d slid into doing pretty much nothing without me, or maybe either of us, even noticing. But he hadn’t worked a long, stressful day today. So why were we still stuck in those same roles? Why was it just assumed I’d do it all?

  I tried it from a different, more charitable, perspective, as I went to Jared. He’d worked so hard for our financial security that he’d ended up alienated from his own life and family. Maybe this whole thing had been a last gasp for help. Was it possible that the break, which had clearly not come in a good way, could in the end turn out to be a blessing-in-disguise kind of situation? A sort of dividing line between the old and the new? I felt a surge of hope, and some of the skepticism felt like it was sliding away. Perhaps a new beginning was possible. People made mistakes, learned from them, changed. It happened all the time, so why not Rick?

  I wasn’t going to find out tonight, though.

  By the time I’d switched the laundry and taken Cad for a quick before-bed walk, Rick was tucked in, sound asleep.

  “He’s back?” M.A. was suitably shocked when she came in at eleven, as promised. “Well, where the hell has he been?”

  “Good question. We hadn’t quite gotten to that yet, and now he’s asleep.”

  She gave me a look of profound understanding. “God, imagine if you guys weren’t too old to like do it. How disappointed would you be that he was asleep?”

  34

  Early Morning Strangers

  Rick was still asleep when I left to take the boys to school. I’d had to practically physically restrain them from waking him up.

  “I just wanted to make sure he was still
back, Mom,” Noah said, succeeding in tying my heart in little knots as I dragged him away from my bedroom door to brush his teeth. “I checked a few times in the night, too.”

  “Hey, Cass, do you want me to take the boys to school this morning?” M.A. offered. I had my head in the cleaning cupboard looking for dog poo scooping bags.

  I backed out of the cupboard. “Thanks, M.A. That’s so sweet of you, but I think I should do it, keep things as normal as possible.” I didn’t want to come right out and say He’ll probably be taking off again before long. “You know?”

  “Mo-om-my,” Jared shrieked down the hall. “I can only find one sneaker!”

  “Try looking in your room,” I yelled back.

  “No prob. I just figured since Rick was like asleep and everything last night, you guys probably haven’t had a chance to, you know, talk,” M.A. said.

  No, we hadn’t. Last night’s burst of optimism about making things work had pretty much burned itself out during the six-and-a-half hours I’d spent staring at the ceiling being un-fucking-able to believe that after months of gone-ness, Rick had passed out while I was walking the dog and was now sleeping like a dead person (one who’d died halfway across my side of the bed). Except for the snoring, which was a real and not altogether welcome reminder, he was very much alive.

  Half his clothes were lying on the bedroom floor, the other half on the bathroom floor. I knew he’d showered and shaved before bed last night because the bathmat had been left drenched on the floor and there were whiskers in his sink. He’d used my toothpaste—I knew because he was neurotic about squeezing from the bottom, rolling up, and recapping. I like squeezing from the top, OK? And I frequently don’t recap. He habitually needed five pillows, and, because he was always hot at night, had taken off my down comforter. He’d—not to be indelicate, but, well—declined to use the toilet brush after using the bathroom. He’d been home less than twelve hours, his presence was everywhere, and I was already sick of him.