Nice to Come Home To

by Rebecca Flowers

  “What happened?” said John, when she’d hung up.

  “Patsy,” said Pru. “She’s moving here, with a U-Haul full of their stuff. And now Jacob’s not showing up to help, and she just told me it’s been days since she’s even talked to him.” Her mind was racing. She had to get to the bus stop, to check the schedule . . . no, she would rent a car. There was a Hertz on Fourteenth . . .

  “Jacob’s the guy she’s been seeing, right? The doctor?”

  She shook her head. “This is bad. I don’t know what to do.”

  “I can drive you up there,” he said. “Ludmilla can handle things here until dinner. I’d have to be back then. But we can get the big stuff unloaded, don’t you think?”

  Normally, she would have found a dozen different reasons not to accept the favor. It was always easier for her to offer help than to accept it. But she was so grateful that she wanted to throw her arms around him.

  In the van, they didn’t talk, but listened to the public radio station. Pru found herself looking at all the cars on the BWI Parkway, hoping to see a look-at-me blue convertible going in the same direction.

  John turned off the radio. “Where’s Annali’s father, in all this?” he said.

  “Jimmy Roy? My mother says they haven’t heard from him in a while. I guess he’s kind of a burnout. I always liked him, though. I think he means well.”

  “Were he and Patsy married?”

  “No. They were part of this big circle of friends, and the plan was they’d all raise Patsy’s baby together.”

  This was one of her sister’s more dubious schemes. Pru had met the friends, left-of-center hippie types, who had read Proust and On the Road and could talk about Cocteau’s Orpheus and often had to pool their money to buy a twelve-pack. They would jump in a car and head down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Jimmy Roy was the one with the most responsible job, working in the automotive department of Sears. Pru liked them well enough, but she was certain that Patsy’s vision of a communal life was doomed.

  Sure enough, the friends kept partying while Patsy took childbirth classes and scoured tag sales for a secondhand stroller. With a month left in her pregnancy, she began to understand that she was going to be not the biological mother of a child raised by a family of parent-friends, but left to feed and educate and worry over a child all on her own. Pru flew to Columbus to help her pack up her few things and drive home to their mother’s house, two hours away. Within a week, Patsy had found a house down the street to rent, and later, when Annali was six weeks old, a job teaching language arts at a private school for girls in Akron. The very house and job she’d just given up, to be with Jacob, who was currently nowhere to be found.

  “The father should be there,” John said, with so much vehemence that it surprised her. “Jimmy Roy. They need him.”

  “He was, in the beginning. All the time,” Pru said. “He’d come up to my mother’s at least every weekend. But then he had an accident on his motorcycle. He was in bad shape. He ended up having all these surgeries, and living in his mother’s basement. The next thing we know, he’s in the Antarctic, on a research boat. I know they hear from him, but I doubt that Patsy would welcome him with open arms, at this point.”

  “Well,” he said, “they should work something out. It’s not fair to Patsy or to Annali, this arrangement.”

  “Patsy doesn’t want anything that looks like a conventional marriage. Frankly, I don’t entirely understand it. Our parents had a great marriage. But . . . I don’t know. It just freaks her out, for some reason. Or it used to, before Jacob, anyway.”

  They pulled up in front of the beach house, just ahead of Patsy and Annali, who came roaring up in Patsy’s old Honda, pulling behind it the U-Haul trailer. Patsy hopped out, full of happy smiles. She wore a polka-dotted chiffon scarf over her hair and big sunglasses, and laughed while she ran up the steps to the house. Pru found it impossible to join in her enthusiasm. She unbuckled Annali from the backseat of the car, then gathered her up in her arms. Oh, how she’d been missing that warmth, those tight arms around her neck! Annali was in one of her self-made outfits: leotard and tights, ladybug rain boots, and a shiny red Wonder Woman cape. It would have been twenty degrees cooler, in Ohio, where she’d gotten dressed. Pru admired her cape and thought, Only a mother like Patsy would let her go out like that in the middle of November.

  All afternoon, while they unpacked, Pru watched her sister’s every move. Patsy seemed perfectly unfazed that Jacob was not showing up, or giving any sign at all that he would show up. Pru did catch her checking her cell phone several times, but she never seemed in the least bit dissatisfied. John and Pru, passing on the stairs, exchanged an uneasy look.

  “This is just so weird,” Pru said, under her breath.

  They got the queen-size mattress and box spring up the rickety stairs, two dressers, and carton after carton of clothes, books, teaching materials, and toys. Although it was a cool day, they were all bathed in sweat. At three o’clock, when it was time to go, Pru tried to persuade Patsy to let her stay and help get them settled. But Patsy, who was seized with the notion that Pru and John should be alone together, absolutely refused.

  “Get out of here,” she said, as if they were a couple of kids, and she the old married lady. “Go have your fun. We’ll be so close now, we’ll see each other all the time!”

  When they were in the van and heading south, John said, “So, what’s the deal with this guy? Jacob? You think he’s cutting out on them?”

  “I’m almost positive.” She repeated what Jacob had said in the car, about “explaining it” to Annali.

  He frowned. “It doesn’t sound good. What did Patsy say?”

  Pru shook her head. “She didn’t take it seriously.”

  “Maybe you should try again?”

  “I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “Would you have listened, if someone had told you that your marriage was in trouble? Is that the kind of thing that can come from anyone else?”

  “I guess not.” He quickly sank into silence. Pru had seen this from him before, this sudden mood change, usually at the mention of his marriage. One minute he would be attentive and animated and she would start to have hopes. The next, a sad look came into his eyes, he looked a million miles away, and nothing she said could shake him out of it. She turned and watched the passing scenery out of her window.

  She felt very irritated with John Owen. What did he want from her? What was he doing with her, what were they doing with each other? What about his girlfriend and his not-yet ex-wife? In-betweenness, how she hated it. She wanted to be at home now, with Whoop, who was probably thinking that she had finally abandoned him, too.

  They pulled onto New York Avenue, a major thoroughfare made narrow on both sides with construction blocks and orange cones. It was an ugly strip, banked by cheap motels, and peopled by the usual transient window-washers who approached with their squeegees as soon as the car slowed. Pru hated this entry to the city. You just couldn’t believe the road could possibly lead to anything worthwhile.

  Pru said, “Hey, I’m sorry, if I said the wrong thing, there.” She’d tried, but there was nothing friendly in her tone.

  “That’s all right,” he said, just as flatly. “It’s not your fault.”

  WHEN SHE GOT HOME, BEFORE SHE EVEN TOOK OFF HER coat, she sat down on the couch, and dialed the number for the beach house. Her head was still buzzing from the six hours’ round trip she’d spent in John’s van.

  “You don’t have to tell me everything,” she said, when Patsy picked up. “But at least tell me why you’re not freaking out about Jacob. I care about you, and I care about Annali, and I don’t understand what you’re doing here. I mean,” she said helplessly, “I’m glad you’re nearby. I really am. But I don’t understand you and Jacob. I just don’t understand what’s going on. Patsy, what’s going on?”

  Patsy was silent a moment. Then she said, “It’s not what you think.”

  “Well, what is it?”


  “I don’t want to tell you. I know how you’ll react.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’ll get all judgmental.”

  The word made her stiffen. Patsy could always stop her dead in her tracks with that word. Anything she didn’t want to hear was instantly “judgmental,” and Pru could never think of a rebuttal. She was discerning, not judgmental. There was a difference. Wasn’t there?

  “It’s just that, well, Jacob’s wife must have come back from wherever she was. He told me it might be harder to get together.” She paused. “Don’t say anything,” she said.

  Pru didn’t say anything. She was surprised, but not surprised. Jacob had a wife. It made perfect sense—all the weekends in Rehoboth, the way Patsy would look at him, sometimes, when he disappeared to take a phone call . . . In a way, it was a relief. It took the whole problem out of Pru’s hands. It was like she’d been trying to help Patsy pack for a trip to France, and it turned out she was headed to Malaysia. Or Jupiter.

  Pru didn’t have much experience with affairs with married men. She knew such things went on. Her friend Kate had had one—more than one—so she at least knew the routine. It seemed to consist mostly of keeping your expectations to a sub-minimum. But to get this far involved . . . to move across the country, with a child, to be near someone who was married . . . Pru sat there, in her coat, the only light coming from over the stove.

  “So,” she said, “what happens now? Do you just stop seeing each other. Or what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is this all okay with her? The wife, I mean?”

  “Well, they have some kind of an understanding. But we haven’t talked about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why are you getting so angry?”

  “I’m not angry.”

  “Then why are you shouting at me?”

  “I’m not shouting, I just want to know if the guy who my niece calls Daddy . . .”

  “Just shut up,” Patsy said.

  “Fine.”

  For a while, neither one of them said anything. She began unbuttoning her coat. Whoop came out of the bedroom to twine himself between her legs, purring.

  “He’s not the Great Pumpkin, honey,” she said, at last. “He’s not going to disappear just because you want a little clarity. Is that so wrong, to want to know if he’s on board with all of this, or not? Why don’t you wait to unpack the rest of your things, until you can talk to him? You know, maybe you should call the school, see if they’ve found a replacement—”

  “I have to go,” Patsy interrupted. “I’m exhausted, and so is Annali. You just have to trust me on this, Pru. It’s what my gut is telling me to do. It’s what my whole body says to do.”

  Great, Pru thought, hanging up the phone. Her niece’s entire well-being depended on a hundred twenty pounds of inert, unthinking, Jacob-obsessed flesh.

  Thirteen

  For days she kept trying Patsy’s cell phone, and the number at the beach house. Patsy never answered, never responded to any of Pru’s messages urging her to call as soon as she could.

  Pru wanted to be not shocked and saddened by this development, this Jacob-was-married thing. She hated thinking of herself as she suspected she really was, prudish. She was old enough to know that marriages were like children. They had lives of their own and didn’t necessarily act the way you thought they should. And that the rules were different for each one.

  But she was shocked, and saddened. She liked Jacob. She liked Jacob because Patsy liked Jacob, and Patsy never liked anybody, for very long. Pru could almost understand her sister’s actions, but Jacob’s? Did he have to get Annali to fall in love with him, too? It didn’t seem fair to say that Patsy had made her own bed and now must lie in it. She’d had plenty of encouragement to make that bed. Pru had seen it herself.

  It wasn’t that she had such puritanical positions on monogamy. Okay, maybe some of them were puritanical. Maybe her basic position—that monogamy was a good thing, and rather inflexible—was puritanical. But she wasn’t unevolved on the subject. Weren’t there worse things than being cheated on, weren’t there other ways of being disloyal? Of being unloving? Of betraying?

  She doubted that Jacob’s wife was completely in the dark about his affairs. (Affairs, plural? More than one? Probably so.) When Pru looked back at the past few months, she couldn’t see a lot of sneaky, suspicious behavior. There seemed to have been no limits on Patsy’s access to him. They talked on the phone every night, well into the night, according to Patsy. Of course, they’d never spent any time at his apartment in the city. Always the beach house. Perhaps that was part of the wife’s requirements, that he not conduct his extramaritals in their home. Pru wondered if they had one of those “open marriages.” She pictured an open marriage like a Venus flytrap, waiting to snap closed on some unsuspecting victim.

  Almost a week after Patsy’s move, Pru still couldn’t reach her. She was growing frantic. She went mechanically through her day with her head full of questions: When had Patsy found out that he was married? That first night, out on Pru’s stoop? Had he told her that the marriage was ending? Did she have hopes that it would? Patsy had to think that being nearby would change things. Pru simply couldn’t believe otherwise. Even for the love of her life, Patsy would never do something like that to Annali.

  She kept remembering the day they walked around Rehoboth with the puppy. Jacob showing off his “daughter.” There was a picture on her refrigerator that represented that day, drawn in crayon. Annali had asked her to draw it. It didn’t look any different from what it would have looked like if Pru had drawn it thirty years earlier, so lame were her artistic skills: Stick mommy, stick boyfriend, stick little girl, stick dog. Stick auntie. The crudeness of it made her sad now. Annali deserved so much better.

  She’d give Patsy one more day to call, Pru decided, before renting a car and driving up to Rehoboth herself. She was just about to turn off her computer and go to bed, when someone buzzed from downstairs. It was Patsy, her voice ragged and raspy, over the security speaker.

  “Let us up,” she said.

  She came in carrying Annali, who was fast asleep. Pru could see right away that Patsy had been crying. Her nose and eyes were red, and she was nervously chewing the inside of her bottom lip, as she always did when she was upset.

  Pru pulled back the covers on her bed, and Patsy lowered Annali carefully, until she was lying on her back. She smoothed Annali’s cap of curls from her forehead and kissed her. Patsy’s shoulders began to shake. Pru reached out and took her arm and said, “Come.”

  Patsy followed her out to the other room, and then she began talking.

  She’d just come from GW Hospital. She’d found Jacob’s car in the hospital garage and waited there until his shift ended. When he finally came out, she’d confronted him. Where had he been? Why hadn’t he called her back? Didn’t he care that they’d come all this way?

  It was like talking to a robot, she said. He told her that he was sorry to have given her the impression that he could ever be a serious part of their lives.

  “‘Serious part of your lives,’” Patsy said again, contemptuously. “Was he kidding?”

  He apologized if he’d led her to believe that he’d ever leave his wife for her. He hadn’t meant to, but if he had, he was profoundly sorry. “Led me to believe?” Patsy cried. “We only talked about it constantly. How he couldn’t wait for her to come back, so he could start the divorce proceedings . . . How he was hiring a lawyer, to look into adopting Annali . . . How we’d give her some brothers and sisters to grow up with—” At this, Patsy’s voice broke and she buried her face in her hands again, sobbing violently.

  Pru was crying now, too. At first she’d been relieved to hear that Patsy hadn’t actually been as deluded as she’d feared—but how reprehensible! To promise such a life, such sweet relief for two souls who had suffered so much—

  “Oh!” Patsy’s head snapped up. “You know what he said? ‘
I love my life.’”

  “Oh, honey,” Pru said.

  “Not ‘my wife,’” Patsy fumed, now pacing the apartment. “‘My life.’ ‘I love my life.’ You want to know why he said that? I’ll tell you why—because her father’s in charge of handing out research grants, that’s why. That is the only reason he’s with her, and not me.” She turned around to face Pru. She looked as shocked as she had when Leonard had shown them the little cat bones, in the basement. “How could he say no to us? I mean, how?”

  Pru had no idea her sister could be so gullible. She wanted to gather Patsy up in her arms, and she wanted to shake her, too.

  “I don’t know, honey. I guess there are other things that he wants more than love.”

  Patsy paced back and forth. One minute she thought he might still come back to them; another, she wished him dead. She cried and cried, and she drank most of a bottle of wine Pru had found in the refrigerator. Finally, Pru persuaded her to go to bed. She led her into the bedroom, and got her to lie down next to Annali. Annali rolled over in her sleep and put an arm around her mother’s neck. Patsy closed her eyes and her mouth turned down, then her face relaxed as she fell into sleep.

  Pru curled up in the bay window and looked out at the city. People were going to the movies, parents were putting their children to bed. Suddenly, she feared for them all. She remembered, as she did from time to time, that everyone was going to die. Plane crashes, heart attacks, the slow erosion of bones. How did we manage to forget this, she wondered, and get through our daily lives? It was astonishing to her. Everybody was going to die, but still they did the laundry, watered the plants, dug out the scum around the taps in the bathroom. They let themselves love others, who were also going to die. They created little beings, who they also loved, and who will, one day, cease to exist. What did it matter how love ended? So it ended for Patsy with Jacob returning to his wife, instead of with his death. Did it really matter so much? She thought of something her mother used to say, a warning she gave whenever they’d begun to fight over some precious object or another: “It’s going to end in tears, girls! It always ends in tears.”