***
It was a good thing she had extensive mommy training, because Jesse took a single look into the bathroom and turned the color of wallpaper paste. “I’m sorry,” he said, backing away from the door, “but I’ve never been very good at this kind of thing.”
“He’s sixteen,” she said, eyeing Mikey, hunched over the toilet bowl. “He must have been sick at some point in his life. What did you do then?”
Mikey raised his head and wiped his face with a wet cloth. “He usually calls Aunt Trish,” the boy said.
Rose ran a hand through her hair and sighed. “Leave,” she said. “Go. I’ll take care of this.”
She didn’t have to say it again. Her new husband disappeared in record time. “Coward,” she muttered, as Mikey bent over the toilet and heaved once again.
It was a long night, nearly three a.m. before Mikey’s stomach finally settled down. Rose tucked him into bed, left him with an emergency bucket and a clean wet cloth, then fell into bed, depleted. She woke grainy-eyed and headachy when Jesse got up for the day. “Stay in bed,” he said. “I’ll take the kids to school.”
But true sleep eluded her. She slept and woke, slept and woke, her waking moments interspersed with patchy and bizarre dreams. By eight-thirty, she knew she’d caught whatever miserable bug had Mikey in its grip. Her stomach felt like she’d been kicked by an angry mule. There was a violent pounding in her head, and her joints had that achy feeling that always accompanied the onset of a fever.
At nine o’clock, Jim Davidson called from Lighthouse to invite her in for an interview. “I’d love an interview,” she said. “But right now, I have the flu.”
“It’s goin’ around,” he said in a Southern accent as potent as turpentine. “The schools are full of it.”
“The way my life has been going lately, why am I surprised?”
“It doesn’t last long,” he said cheerfully. “Just two, three days. Want to try for Thursday?”
“You’re not worried about catching it?”
“I have two daughters in Jackson Falls Elementary. I’m pretty sure I’ve already been exposed.”
She and Mikey spent the day sharing the couch, watching soap operas and game shows and taking turns in the bathroom. When she could take no more of the inanity of daytime television, she said, “Do you know how to play poker?”
He shook his head no.
“Want to learn? I can only take so much of As the World Turns.”
When Jesse and the kids came back home, she and Mikey were embroiled in a ruthless game of blackjack. “I’m corrupting your son,” she told her husband.
With obvious dismay, he eyed her bathrobe, her uncombed hair, her pink plastic bucket. “You’re sick,” he said.
“You got it in one, hot shot.”
“I hope I don’t catch it.”
Rose glared at him, wondering how she could have ever found him attractive. “Thanks for the support.”
“It’s nothing personal,” he explained. “But if I’m out sick, they’ll call in a substitute, and the kids will fall behind.”
“Just stay away from me,” she said, slapping the ace of spades onto the stack on the coffee table, “and there shouldn’t be any problem.”
To make amends, Jesse called his family doctor to ask what flu medications were safe for a pregnant woman to take. Then, under the guise of being helpful, he took Luke and Devon out for pizza and a movie. Certain that his real motive was fear of catching the flu, Rose hunched over a bowl of chicken noodle soup and plotted his early demise.
Wednesday morning, Mikey returned to school. Feeling considerably better herself by then, Rose showered and dressed for the first time since Sunday. Then she sat down with a cup of tea and her résumé and made notes for her Thursday morning interview with Jim Davidson.
But her peaceful morning didn’t last long. At ten-thirty, Jesse came home, looking like the Undead. He passed her without speaking, went into the bathroom, and upchucked.
So much for domestic bliss.
***
Jim Davidson was a bear of a man with shaggy black hair and a full beard, and when he shook her hand, she winced. He certainly didn’t look like a Ph.D. psychologist. But the diploma was on his wall to prove it. “I’m from Kentucky,” he said with that charming twang. “I grew up in a little hamlet right in the heart of Appalachia.”
“How’d you end up in Maine?”
He grinned, his teeth flashing white in the dark beard. “Life has its funny little quirks of fate. My wife’s from Rangeley. We met at UNC and she brought me home with her. I fell in love with the place, and I’ve been here ever since. And you know, this part of Maine’s not really so different from Appalachia. As my old granny used to say, ‘Peoples is peoples, no matter where you go.’”
He outlined for her the agency’s mission, its woeful dearth of a budget, its typical clientele. Leaning back in his rolling desk chair, he propped booted feet on the gray metal wastebasket and clasped his hands together over his considerable girth. “Statistics,” he said, “tell us that domestic violence knows no socioeconomic boundaries.”
“So I’ve heard,” she said wryly.
“But reality,” he said, warming to his subject, “isn’t quite so clear-cut as those statistics would be having us believe. Rich men may beat their wives as often as poor men, but you don’t see the wives coming to us for help. What you will see here is probably similar to what you saw in the city. Our clients are, by overwhelming majority, the rural poor. They don’t have the economic, educational, or family resources available to your upper-middle-class woman. They get caught up in a cycle of poverty and abuse and learned helplessness that feeds on itself until it becomes a big, vicious, hairy monster.”
“So the primary difference I can expect to see here is the rural environment.”
He held up a meaty finger. “That’s one difference,” he said, and held up a second finger. “Number two is that, in case you haven’t noticed, everybody here is white. Coming from the South, it took me some getting used to.”
She hadn’t given it much thought, but now that she thought about it, when she’d gone to the supermarket for milk and bread, she hadn’t seen a single non-Caucasian person. “A whole different culture,” she said, thinking aloud.
“Absolutely. While I hate stereotyping, facts are facts. Your city kids, black and white, are likely to be listening to Nine Inch Nails and Alice in Chains. Up here, we’re a little behind the times. They’re as likely as not to be listening to Sawyer Brown.”
“Never heard of him. Who is he?”
He grinned. “Sawyer Brown’s a they, not a he. Ask your husband. Bet he can fill in the gaps in your musical education.”
***
Nothing was so pathetic as a strong man felled by disease. When she came home grinning because she’d gotten the job, Jesse was grumpy enough to make Devon look like a cross between Doris Day and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. He lay on the couch in front of the television, remote control in hand and a hangdog expression on his face that would have been comical if she hadn’t known precisely how awful he felt. Rose plumped his pillow and brought him flat ginger ale and checked his temperature. “Still 102,” she said briskly as she shook the thermometer back down.
“I don’t understand how this happened,” he said. “I never get sick.”
“For God’s sake, Jesse, you’re just as susceptible to germs as the rest of us. Did you think you were Superman?”
He closed his eyes and moaned. Rose patted him on the shoulder and escaped to the kitchen. She was washing the breakfast dishes when the door opened behind her and Trish Lindstrom Bradley breezed in. “Hi,” she said. “I hear my brother’s got the plague.”
Rose eyed her balefully, wondering if people in this godforsaken place always entered without knocking. Was there some unwritten social morè that she had yet to learn? Or was it merely some endearing sisterly behavior? She reminded herself that Trish was her husband’s sister and that her wisest
course would be tolerance. “He has the flu,” she said. “I’m just getting over it myself. I sure hope you don’t catch it.”
Trish pooh-poohed her concern. “I’m immune to that kind of thing. Mind if I say hi?”
The woman was obviously also immune to sarcasm. “Suit yourself,” Rose said. “He’s on the couch.”
While Rose washed the dishes, Trish cooed and clucked over Jesse like he was a small child. If this was the way she’d always treated him, no wonder he was such a wimp about being sick. Rose poked her head into the living room. “Coffee or tea?” she asked in a voice so syrupy she almost gagged on it.
“Coffee,” Trish said, “if it’s not too much trouble.”
While the coffee was brewing, Trish tiptoed into the kitchen. “I think he’s fallen asleep,” she said. “Poor baby. I hear you were sick, too.”
“Wretched. So was Mikey.”
“But your kids managed to escape it?”
“So far. Cream and sugar?”
“Both.” Trish went to the cupboard, took out a mug, and helped herself to the coffee. “Sugar bowl’s empty,” she said, moving with unerring accuracy to the proper canister to fill it. “I have to admit,” she continued, “I was stunned when Jesse married you.”
Rose raised her eyebrows. “Oh?”
“Nothing personal,” Trish said, opening the dishwasher and dropping her spoon into the basket. “It’s just that I’ve always harbored this crazy notion that someday he and Colleen might get back together.”
“I see.”
Trish wriggled into a chair and helped herself to a jelly doughnut from the box on the table. “I suppose it was a bad match,” she said. “Jesse and Colleen. It’s just that, when Casey left him practically at the altar, we were all crushed. They’d been together since they were kids, and—”
“Whoa! Wait a minute. He and Casey were a couple?”
“Sorry. I assumed you knew. They were engaged. Then she met Danny Fiore and fell like a ton of bricks.” Trish shrugged casually. “It was all a very long time ago. Jesse started dating Colleen, and then she got pregnant, and he felt obligated to marry her. And—” Trish seemed to realize what she’d said, and flushed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t meant to imply—oh, hell. Open mouth, insert foot.”
“No offense taken. At least Colleen had an excuse. She was a teenager. I’m thirty-six. You’d think by now I would have figured out how birth control works. So what happened?”
“Colleen just wasn’t cut out for marriage and motherhood. After a while, she started getting restless. One day, she told Jesse she didn’t want to be married any more, and she packed her bags and left. And that was that.”
Rose glanced toward the living room, where Jesse slept fitfully. “What about Mikey?” she said. “Don’t tell me she just up and deserted him, too?”
Trish toyed with the handle to her coffee mug. “I don’t want you to think that Colleen’s a bad person. Mikey spends a month with her every summer. She calls him on his birthday, at Christmas, sends him expensive presents. But her life isn’t here any more. She’s in Manhattan, working in some high-powered ad agency, and I guess she finds that more fulfilling than motherhood.”
Nothing could have willingly separated Rose from any of her children. The very idea was inconceivable. “That poor kid.”
“Jesse has done his best to make it up to Mikey,” Trish said. “But it hasn’t been easy, being both mother and father.”
Of course it hadn’t. She knew firsthand how difficult it was to juggle both jobs in one. “He’s a good father,” she said. “A good man.”
“Yes,” Trish said. “He is. And the next woman who hurts him will be answering to me.”
It was impossible to mistake the meaning of her words, equally impossible to take offense at her bluntness. “I know exactly how you feel,” Rose said. “I have four brothers of my own.”
“Then you’ll understand why I’m asking this question.” Trish tore off a piece of jelly doughnut and began methodically shredding it. “Why did you marry my brother?” Her eyes met Rose’s directly. “And don’t tell me it was because you were in love with him. That’s bullshit, and we both know it.”
Rose’s hands went to her abdomen in a protective gesture that was instinctive and for the most part unconscious. “It seemed to be the right thing to do.”
Trish’s gaze followed her hands, lingered there. And then she nodded. “Fair enough,” she said.
***
The first thing she noticed about Torey Spaulding was the three-day-old shiner that a heavy application of makeup hadn’t been able to conceal. Slender to the point of emaciation, Torey could have been anywhere between nineteen and thirty. Her skin was pasty, except where enhanced by Revlon, but her hair was a surprisingly warm shade of honey blonde.
“I know Buddy don’t mean to hurt me,” she said in her quiet voice as those slender hands methodically shredded a tissue. “He just gets a little carried away sometimes. Most of the time, it’s my own fault. I say something I shouldn’t, and he just blows.”
Rose, who’d been taking notes with a pencil, pressed so hard the lead snapped. “What makes you think it’s your fault? Does he tell you that?”
“Sometimes. But mostly it’s because I know what it takes to set him off. I just forget sometimes. Long as I’m careful, he don’t get mean.”
“So you feel responsible for his actions.”
Torey shrugged. “Like I said, sometimes I’m not careful enough.”
Rose leaned back in her chair and tapped the pencil against the edge of her desk. “Does he hit you in front of the kids?”
“He don’t mean nothing by it,” Torey said quickly. “He just has a short fuse.”
“What a prince,” she muttered.
“Huh?”
“Nothing. Look, Torey, it’s not my job to offer advice. I’m here to give you options, to help you clarify what you want, and hopefully to show you how to get there.”
For the first time, Torey showed enthusiasm. “My friend Donna, she came here to Lighthouse when she and Sawyer was splitting up, and the lady helped her get a job. Got her training and everything. I got no training for anything except waiting tables. But if I had a job, maybe I could—” She trailed off, shrugged those bony shoulders. “You know.”
“Well, then,” Rose said briskly, pulling out one of the gazillion forms her new job required. “If you’ll just fill this out, we can get started.”
***
Hours later, she was still thinking about Torey Spaulding as she shuffled through the mound of paperwork on her desk. She was chewing thoughtfully on the tip of her pen when a noise at the door caught her attention, and she looked up to see her husband leaning casually against the door frame.
The heat began deep in the pit of her abdomen, swept upward to her breasts, flushed her face, and shot in little tingles down her arms and legs. She’d thought he looked good in the gray suit he’d worn to Rob and Casey’s wedding until she’d seen him in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. It should be illegal for a man with a body like his to wear jeans that tight. “Hi,” he said. “Ready to go?”
Rose dropped the pencil and glanced at the wall clock. She’d forgotten that he was picking her up because the Honda was in the shop again. Flustered by his presence, more flustered by her own reaction to him, she scooped a massive pile of papers into her briefcase and grabbed her coat. “Ready,” she said.
Vicky Lansky, the receptionist, beamed as they passed. “G’night,” she said. The twenty-something Vicky had already confided to Rose, in between giggles, that she’d had a crush on Jesse when he’d been her tenth-grade homeroom teacher. It seemed the man had legions of admirers, all of them female, all of them coming out of the woodwork to remind his new wife of just what a catch she’d gotten. Was there a woman anywhere in this godforsaken wilderness who wasn’t smitten with her husband?
“You know,” he said as they pulled out of the parking lot onto the state highway, “it’s probably tim
e you junked your car and bought a new one.”
“I can’t afford a new one.” They passed the bowling alley, with its neon sign advertising Budweiser on draft and the county’s best pepperoni pizza. A car payment would suck up too much of her paycheck. If the time came when she had to go back out on her own, she would need every penny of that money for survival.
“I’ll buy it for you. Anything you want. I worry about you, driving around these back roads in that old bomb.”
The last thing she needed was to be indebted to him. “Thanks,” she said, “but I like my old car. We’ve been together for a long time.”
Although he didn’t respond, she was pretty sure it wasn’t the answer he’d been hoping for. Jesse stopped for the town’s one traffic light, and a group of young men hanging out by their mud-spattered pickups at the back of the IGA parking lot snagged her attention. “Do you know anything,” she said, “about a guy named Buddy Spaulding?”
He glanced at her quickly. “Where’d you hear that name?”
“Let’s just say a little bird dropped it in my ear.”
Jesse shifted gears, pulled smoothly away from the light. “Buddy’s a local badass. Lives in a trailer out on Indiantown Road. Supposedly makes his living hauling pulp, selling car parts, that kind of thing. But the local grapevine says the pulp business is just a cover for his real cash cow, the prime crop of cannabis he grows in the woods out back of the trailer. Of course, you can’t always believe the grapevine.”
She chewed on it for a bit. “Any criminal history that you know about?”
“I do believe he’s been a guest of the county on a few occasions. Brawling, OUI, jacking deer--”
“Stop! Time out. Doing what to deer?”
His smile caused tiny feathers of pleasure to tickle her insides. “Sorry. I forgot you’re from a different universe. Jacking deer is illegal hunting, at night. You turn a powerful spotlight on a herd of deer in a field, and they’ll just stand there, paralyzed by the light. And then you pick ‘em off, one by one. Kind of takes the challenge out of the sport.”
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