by Julie Kenner
“It’s a fun house, Katie,” he said, taking my hand and urging me into the spinning tube that we had to run through if we were going to make it to the other side without falling. “Not one of Forza’s skill tests.”
I managed a hmmphing sound—courtesy of Eddie—but was laughing by the time we reached the end of the tube. “Uh-oh,” I said, pointing to the black curtain in front of us. “A haunted section?”
“You better go first. I’m scared.”
“Yeah, right,” I said, but I pushed past him through the curtain and into a near pitch-black room. So far, that was about the only thing remarkable about the room. And as I’d done dark before, I was less than impressed.
Then the floor began to move.
It rolled, a thick layer of carpet and foam laid over tubes that rose and fell as you tried to walk—try being the operative word, because with the very first undulation I toppled sideways and landed, laughing, in David’s arms.
“Okay,” I said. “This is getting better.”
“Much,” he agreed, his voice low and his breath steamy.
I was pressed hard against him, the movement of the floor working against me as it pushed me even closer to his body. He’d grabbed me right below the waist when I’d fallen, and now his hands drifted down, cupping my rear.
“Eric,” I whispered, then, “No. David, no.”
But all he said was, “Yes.” And as the word died on his lips, his mouth closed over mine with such passion and desperation that it drowned out everything except the beating of my own heart.
I didn’t want to kiss him back, so help me, I didn’t. But where Eric is concerned, there’s a limit to my strength, and it took every ounce of resolve in my body to press my hands against his chest and break free of his hold.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, swallowing my words more than saying them. I stumbled forward, not caring anymore if he was following and not paying attention to the rest of the fun house.
When I reached the end, I pushed my way past the black strands of plastic that hung like retro beads from the ceiling, then found myself blinking in the bright sunlight.
Damn him.
And damn me, too. For liking the way he felt and for thinking that it was okay to go down memory lane like that. Especially after he’d warned me. Because he had. I’m not as strong as you, Katie, he’d said. I never have been.
He’d warned me, and I’d listened. But I still hadn’t heard.
I turned, realizing he was probably about to exit the fun house, too, and right then I’d had my fill of David. I hurried around the contraption and lost myself in the crowd and my thoughts. I knew I should be looking for my family, but I needed a few minutes to myself, and so I bought a soda, then walked aimlessly, taking in the sounds and smells of the carnival.
After twenty minutes or so, I realized I needed to get with the program, and I looked around to get my bearings. I found myself standing in front of a nomadic-style tent that looked like something straight from the Old Testament. An old woman stood in the doorway, barefoot, her face craggy from age and exposure. She wore a peasant-style blouse, a colorful skirt of flowing, gauzy material, at least five gold chains around her waist, and one huge, gaudy necklace from which dangled a truly ugly amulet with two intertwined lines intersecting a circle. She looked like a gypsy, and that, along with her European accent, had me slowing down and paying attention.
“Come in,” she said, her red fingernails beckoning me closer. “Come and hear your fortune, little one.”
“I’m not sure I want to know my fortune.”
She chuckled. “Ah, an honest answer. Better than the excuse I usually get.”
“What’s that?” I asked, interested despite myself.
Her face scrunched up and she spoke in a whine. “Can’t stop. In such a hurry.” She looked me dead in the eye. “They never are, you know. The ones who say so. Not like you.”
I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry. “What do you mean?”
One shoulder lifted in a grand shrug. “Eh. Always in a hurry, you are. It hangs on you, you know.”
I slowed, looking at her, something about the self-assured tone of her voice making me wary. “What does?”
“That need. That pressure. Off to fight the beast again. Isn’t that right, dearie?” she asked, with the same sweetness that I imagined of the witch who invited in Hansel and Gretel.
My hand slid into my purse, my fingers finding my knife. “You seem to think you know a lot about me.”
Her gaze dipped down, skipped over my purse, then rose back to my face. She held my gaze for one beat, two. Then she waved a hand toward a weather-beaten sign above the entrance to the tent. “Fortune-teller,” she said. “I see all. And you wear your personal demons on your sleeve.”
“Who are you?”
“Me? I am no one special. Merely someone who watches. Someone who learns. Someone who tells.”
“Have you been watching me?” I took a step closer, my posture aggressive as I sniffed her breath and looked in her tent. Her tent was empty. Her breath, normal.
Not that that was a foolproof test, of course, but coupled with the small crucifix I now saw tucked into the indentation of her neck, I’d be willing to lay odds against demon.
“I watch what is in front of me. What I see, though, it troubles me.”
“Yeah, well, some of what I see troubles me, too.”
“It would,” she said, with a knowing nod. “How could it not? You opened the door to the darkness—you walked right through it.”
I shivered, a cold chill passing over me. “What are you talking about?” I asked, though I feared I knew perfectly well. How she knew about the Lazarus Bones, though . . . That, I didn’t know.
“The darkness, dearie. You felt it, yes? All around you. Pushing. Pulling.” Her eyes met mine, flat and terrifying. “The darkness won. Don’t let it win again.”
“Who the hell are you? Why have you been watching me?”
“Kate.”
I turned, sucking in air as I saw Stuart amid a throng of people, his long steps carrying him right to me.
I turned to look back, but the woman had slipped into her tent, uninterested in either my questions or my husband.
“Stuart!” I said, trying for bright and cheery. “What are you doing here?” I managed a smile, but at the same time I scanned the crowd, looking for my daughter.
“Publicity photos. Someone suggested some pictures at the carnival would be good for the campaign, and Clark jumped all over that. So here I am.”
“Here you are,” I repeated.
“What are you doing here?”
“Oh, well, you know. Laura suggested it, and I thought Timmy would get a kick out of it. So, you know. We came.” I shrugged helplessly, my wobbly smile fading as I saw a familiar face in the crowd behind him. I reached for his arm, planning to pull him into the fortune-teller’s tent, but it was too late. Allie burst through through the crowd, a teddy bear clutched in one hand and David’s elbow tight in the other.
“Mom! Mom! Look what Da—”
Stuart turned at the sound of her voice, and Allie’s eyes went wide.
“What I won,” she finished lamely.
David, apparently sensing blood, broke free, then peeled off to the right, letting the crowd swallow him whole and leaving me alone to handle damage control.
Honestly, sometimes it sucks being me.
Thirteen
There are times when I wish that Stuart were the yelling type. Yelling, I could handle. I could glare and say that nobody talks to me in that tone, no matter how upset they are. I could yell back. I could flounce out of the room, insisting that I wouldn’t return until he calmed down. (The only problem with that plan being that I’ve never really been the flouncing type.)
Stuart, however, wasn’t yelling. For the last three hours, in fact, he’d barely spoken a word, and the words he had spoken were utterly, remarkably, damnably civil.
Yet another reason he’d w
in the election. The man knows how to control his emotions. That was for damn sure.
The same could not be said for me.
I fidgeted. I twisted. I started conversational threads that hung out there, finally dying a slow, painful death from lack of fertilization.
Mostly, I spun the little arrow on Hi Ho! Cherry-O and plucked cherries from a paper tree. It wasn’t cathartic, but it was safe.
“My turn!” Timmy said, then flicked the arrow so hard that all our cherries shifted on our trees, as if an earthquake had hit our orchard. “Two!” he said, holding up two chubby fingers.
“Good boy.” I pointed to the game board. “So what do you do?”
“Pick two cherries,” he said, then proceeded to dump four into his little yellow bucket.
“Not four, squirt,” Allie said. She’d managed not to look Stuart in the eye since the carnival, a feat that had required no small amount of physical contortions. Now she was concentrating on her little brother, her back turned oh-so-casually toward her stepdad.
“Two,” she said. She held up two fingers to illustrate. “Put two back.”
Timmy’s face scrunched up. “But I wanna win.”
I looked over at Stuart. This was the part where we usually shared a knowing grin. But he wasn’t looking my way. Instead, he was looking at the back of Allie’s head with a mixture of confusion and pain that about ripped my heart in two.
I think it might have been easier if Stuart had demanded to know what the hell was going on. If he’d pulled me and Allie aside at the carnival and given us both no end of grief. Frankly, he had the right.
He hadn’t done that, though.
Instead, he’d looked at each of us in turn and then said he’d see us at home. He’d left, leaving me to wallow in guilt and Allie on the verge of tears.
Laura and I had spent most of the ride home assuring Allie that none of this was her fault. That I’d chosen to let her out of her punishment, and that it was me Stuart was mad at. By the time we got home, she seemed less on the verge of tears, but stiffer around Stuart than I’d ever seen her.
As for me, I pretty much wanted to throw up. I’d wanted to help the relationship between my daughter and her father, but the way I’d gone about it had put a huge dent in her relationship with her stepfather, the man whose house she shared, and who’d put up with the onset of puberty right along with me.
I didn’t want to hurt either of the men in my life, but to be honest, both of them had to take a backseat to my daughter. Right now, though, I didn’t have a clue how to make Allie feel better. All I knew was that I’d blown it and that somehow, someway, I had to make it right.
On the game table, Timmy was still clutching desperately the two cherries he didn’t want to let go.
“Go on, Timmy,” I said gently. “Put them back on the tree. You can get them on the next spin.”
He pooched out his lower lip, but complied, and I considered that a step up from last week, when he’d tossed the game board across the room.
What can I say? The kid likes to win.
Fortunately for family peace, he actually did win this game, spinning all the right spins and pulling cherries off the tree while Allie, Stuart, and I were plagued with birds, dogs, and spilled buckets.
“I win! I win!” He jumped off his chair and marched around the kitchen, his bare feet making smacking sounds on the tile floor as he headed for his cabinet. He yanked out a cookie sheet and banged on it in time to his delirious cries of victory.
“No!” Allie shouted. “Make the little beast stop. He’s too loud. Too loud.” She ran forward and scooped him up, swinging boy and cookie sheet high as they both laughed. “If I let you down, will you be quiet?”
“No!”
“If I let you down, will you be quiet?”
“No!”
“If I give you candy, will you be quiet?”
“Allie!”
“Yes!”
“Deal.” She set him on the floor, then shrugged at me. “A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”
As she stole a packet of M&Ms from my freezer stash, I looked sideways at Stuart, happy to see that he was smiling.
“Look, Daddy,” Timmy said, running to show his father this amazing, forbidden, bedtime prize. “Want one?”
“Yeah, sport,” Stuart said, pulling Timmy into a bear hug. “I think I do.”
He held his son tight, and I had to look away, afraid if I watched the two of them any longer I’d start crying.
Apparently, Allie felt the same way, because she stood there behind Timmy, then whispered, “I’m sorry, Stuart. I’m really, really sorry.”
My heart twisted, knowing that she wouldn’t be apologizing for anything if she hadn’t saved my life Friday night, and I debated the wisdom of revealing all to Stuart right then. I’d told Laura why I wanted to wait until Wednesday, and those reasons were all still sound. Still, some of the variables had changed, and maybe now was the time to come clean.
I didn’t have a chance. Before I could get my thoughts in order, Stuart gestured for her to come to him. As Timmy clung to him like a little monkey, he took one of her hands. “I’m sorry, too. Let’s chalk it up to adolescence and overreactive parenting, okay?”
“Okay,” Allie said, but I could tell she didn’t really understand.
“I mean I’m ungrounding you, Allie.”
“You are?”
“Yeah, kiddo. I am.” He looked at me—really looked at me for the first time that night. “Okay?”
“Sure,” I said, sounding as baffled as Allie looked.
“Okay, then.” He stood up, holding Timmy close to his chest. “My night to bathe the rugrat,” he said without being reminded. He headed into the living room, Timmy squirming and giggling in his daddy’s arms.
Allie looked at me, her eyes wide and her face pale. Then she took off running after them. At the table, I closed my eyes, listening to the sound of my family.
I heard a loud sniffle, then the clomp, clomp of my daughter barreling up the stairs. A few moments later, I heard Stuart’s more regulated footfalls, then the squeal of pipes as the water in the kids’ bathroom began to run.
I sat a moment longer, nursing a now-cold cup of coffee. Then I stood up and started to clean the kitchen.
Honestly, it wasn’t one of our more stellar attempts at family night, but we’d survived. And I think that meant a lot.
Stuart was sitting on the closed toilet and drying off Timmy when I stepped inside, then leaned against the doorjamb and watched the two men in my household. Stuart looked up and smiled at me, his hands full of a wriggling, giggling little boy, and something in his expression told me that all was forgiven.
I swallowed a throat full of tears, certain I’d gotten better than I deserved in this man. Hell, in this marriage. And definitely with my kids.
“Kate?”
“Sorry,” I said, wiping my eyes. “You’re a great daddy.” I shrugged. “That’s all.”
“And that makes you cry?”
“Tonight, I think pretty much anything is going to make me cry.”
He pulled the Nemo towel off Timmy, then gave his bare bottom a swat. “Go put on a nighttime Pull-Up, okay?”
Timmy gave a thumbs-up and hurried naked from the bathroom. Inevitably, I’d find twenty-seven Pull-Ups scattered across his floor five minutes from now, but in the moment the sacrifice seemed well worth it.
“Come here,” he said, and I came. He settled me on his lap, and I balanced my feet on the edge of the tub, one arm around his neck and my face pressed against his shoulder. “Did I do the right thing?” he asked.
I leaned back so I could look him in the eye. “What do you mean?”
“With Allie. Dropping the grounding.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “And I’m sorry.”
He shook his head, exhaling loudly. “I don’t need to hear ‘I’m sorry.’ I want to hear that you love me.”
“Of course,” I said hugging him tight.
“Desperately.”
“That’s enough for now.”
“No, it’s not,” I said, leaning back in his arms and searching his face. “I should have told you. I shouldn’t have just taken her to the carnival. I should have called you. Discussed it with you. Argued with you that night you grounded her in the first place. But I should never have taken her like I did. Even if you hadn’t found out, it wasn’t fair to you. I undermined your authority, and there’s no reason on earth that justifies doing that.” The words poured out, and I meant every word I said. I’d blown it on this one, and now my whole family was paying the price. It was, I knew, time to fess up. “I’m sorry, Stuart. I’m so, so sorry, and I owe you one whopper of an explanation.”
“Just tell me one thing. Is our marriage in trouble?”
“No,” I said fiercely, the answer both true and automatic. Yes, I loved David or, at least, I loved the man he used to be. But my marriage was solid.
“Then there’s nothing else to talk about.”
"But...”
He put a finger on my lip, then shook his head. “I don’t want to hear anything else. Please, Kate. Right now, I only want to hold you close. At least for the next five seconds before Timmy comes looking for us? Can you give me that? Just you and me tonight and no justifications or explanations filling up the space between us?”
I hesitated only a nanosecond, his wishes warring with my need to ease my own guilt. “Yes,” I said, snuggling close. “Of course I can.”
I woke up at Six A.M. to the clock radio blaring, then sat bold upright, frantic that I hadn’t yet been to the grocery store for the dinner party that night.
That panic lasted about forty-seven seconds, and then I remembered that it was—thankfully—only Monday. I had more than twenty-four hours to worry about the dinner party. Today, I only had to worry about the committee members who were coming to work on the Easter party.
I made a mental note to thank Laura again for inviting everyone to descend on my house, and to subtly suggest that the next time she thinks a group project is a good idea she ought to hold it in her own living room.
