Henry was leaving for a week of baseball camp tomorrow morning, and Sandy had offered to watch the other kids so Jamie and Mike could have a date. Maybe she’d suggest they do it tomorrow night. They didn’t have to go anywhere special—they could even stay home together and watch a movie, like they used to back when they first met.
“Can I put on the frosting?” Eloise asked.
“These are biscuits, honey,” Jamie said. “There is no frosting.”
Without thinking, she reached to move the metal pan of pork chops with her bare hands. “Ouch!” She rushed to the sink to run her burned thumb and index finger under cold water.
Jamie heard a clatter and turned around to see the tray of biscuits bouncing off the floor. It landed dough side down, naturally.
“You broke it!” Eloise shouted at Sam.
“It’s fine,” Jamie said. She ran over and picked up the tray. She didn’t look at the crumbs and bits of dirt sticking to the dough; she didn’t want to think about how long it had been since she’d mopped her kitchen floor. “I’m going to show you a trick.”
She took a sharp knife and sliced the very top layer of dough off each biscuit. “They’ll be just as good,” she promised as she popped the tray into the oven. “Emily, can you make the table look pretty? Maybe pick some flowers from the backyard so we can put them in a vase.”
The backyard was a rectangle of grass bordered with a hodgepodge of flowers, since every year Jamie and the kids picked out an assorted packet, dumped it into a hole, and covered it back up—that was the extent of her gardening—but Jamie hoped Emily would be able to find a zinnia or something.
Mike’s beer! She’d put it in the freezer to chill and had nearly forgotten it. She pulled out the six-pack, glad to see no bottles had exploded, and set it in the refrigerator.
What next? She ran into the dining room and searched through the scarred old armoire she’d inherited from her parents’ house for a tablecloth. She found a green one they usually used at Christmas and decided it would have to do. She swept the junk off the table and into an old grocery bag and set it in the corner. She laid out plates and silverware and plastic cups for the kids and glass beer steins for herself and Mike. She dumped the salad into a wooden bowl and took a bottle of Kraft ranch out of the refrigerator and put them side by side on the table. She filled a pitcher with ice water and brought it to the table, too. She didn’t want to have to be jumping up and down during this meal, constantly fetching things.
She caught sight of the clock on the stove and frowned. It was after six o’clock. She reached for the cordless phone on the counter and dialed Mike’s cell, but her call went straight to voice mail.
“It’s me,” she said, trying to keep her voice light and cheerful. “Dinner’s almost ready, so . . . hopefully you’re on your way home.”
She felt a little light-headed and realized she hadn’t eaten anything other than a quick bowl of cereal today. She opened the oven door and checked the biscuits. They looked golden brown and smelled out of this world. She pulled out the tray and took one off, biting into it and savoring the fluffy sweetness.
“I want one!” Eloise cried.
“You’ll ruin your dinner,” Jamie said, her full mouth taking away her authority.
“You had one!” Eloise protested.
“I just had a bite,” Jamie said. “Just to test them and make sure they were good.”
“But I’m hungry!” Eloise wailed. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
“I want one, too,” Sam said, employing logic as his weapon. “It’s not fair for you to try them and not give us any.”
Emily came through the back door, her shoes tracking mud all over the mat and floor. She was holding an enormous branch from a hydrangea bush.
“I need a vase,” she said.
“I want a cinnamon roll!” Eloise cried. She was gearing up for a full-on tantrum now, her little chest heaving.
“They’re not cinnamon rolls, they’re biscuits,” Sam told her, sounding like a miniature professor.
“Just one bite each,” Jamie said. She broke the rest of the roll into two pieces and gave one to Sam and one to Eloise.
“Hers is bigger,” Sam pointed out.
“Why don’t I get one?” Emily cried.
“We’re just testing them,” Eloise informed her, spitting crumbs across the table.
“She’s gross,” Emily said. “Don’t talk with your mouth full!”
“Fine!” Jamie said. She broke another roll into thirds and gave a chunk to each child. “Everyone happy?”
She heard a sizzle and spun around to see the pot of water bubbling over. She reduced the heat, dumped in the macaroni noodles, and gave them a stir.
“I don’t like mac ’n’ cheese anymore,” Eloise said.
Jamie muttered a curse under her breath. “Can we just have a nice dinner? Please?”
Where was Mike?
She called his cell phone again, but he didn’t answer. She didn’t leave a message this time.
He didn’t show up for another hour. By then, the pork chops were cold, the salad was wilted, and the rolls were all gone. Jamie was on her second beer, her appetite having vanished. The kids were watching TV again; by this point she was beyond feeling guilty.
“Hey,” Mike said as he walked through the door. She heard it slam heavily behind him. A moment later he came into the dining room.
“Did you guys already eat?” he asked.
Jamie let silence be her answer.
“I called you,” she said. “A couple times.”
He took his phone out of his pocket and looked at the screen. “It’s dead.”
“Where were you?” she asked.
“Driving around,” he said.
Why didn’t you want to come home to us? Jamie thought. True, he hadn’t known about the special dinner, but Mike seemed to be taking every excuse to be away from them lately. No—away from her.
She stood up and began stacking the dirty plates and carrying them to the sink.
“I went to see Ritchie today,” she said. She didn’t bother to bring up the subject gently, as she’d originally planned. She was too angry. “He wants to testify for you. He’ll tell them you’re not a racist, and when they see how badly he’s hurt they’ll get it—the jury will know you were suffering.”
Mike didn’t react immediately. Then he said, “I told you I didn’t want to ask Ritchie to do it.”
“We have no idea what’s going to happen during the trial!” she cried. “We have to have a strong defense!”
“Did it ever occur to you I might be found not guilty?” he asked. “Did you ever think, hey, maybe we should get Ritchie to testify that my husband doesn’t react unless there’s a real threat, instead of trying to trot out my black friend to prove I’m not a racist?”
“I can’t afford to think that way, Mike! I don’t know what kind of people are going to be on the jury. We’ve got to save you any way we can!”
He shook his head. “Is that where you were today? Seeing Ritchie? Did you even have to go to the doctor?”
“Yes, I lied to you, okay? Because I knew you’d never ask him!” Why was he being so obtuse? She blasted the sink water, rinsing off the dishes and stacking them in the dishwasher. The wheel got stuck, and when she jerked it the whole rack came out and crashed down onto her bare foot.
“Ouch!” she said. “Why haven’t you fixed that?”
“I did,” he said. “Twice. You keep pulling it too hard.”
He came over, bent down next to her, and picked up the rack, and that’s when she saw the pink mark on his cheek. It was very close to the corner of his mouth.
“What is that?” she asked. She reached out a finger and touched it.
“What?” he asked.
“Oh my God,” she said, staring down at t
he sticky smudge on her fingertip. “Christie kissed you.” She jerked back, scrambling to her feet. Mike jumped up and reached for her shoulders, forcing her to look at him.
“She kissed me good-bye on the cheek,” he said. “After I dropped off Henry.”
She could smell alcohol on his breath. “And you had a drink with her!” she cried. “That’s why you were so late.”
“Just one . . .” Mike said.
His voice was drowned out by the roaring in her head. She was shaking so hard she felt as if she’d implode. She’d done everything possible to hold their family together, while Mike was off with his ex-girlfriend. He’d lied to her, too, even if it was just a lie of omission. Christie had been overly flirtatious with Mike before. Even Mike had agreed that sometimes she tried to cross boundaries. Was that what had happened tonight?
Jamie began to cry and pushed him away.
“Fuck you,” she said. “Our family is falling apart and you’re out drinking with your ex.” Her heart was pounding and her breath felt raggedy. She could still see a hint of pink on his cheek and she wanted to slap it off.
“Why are you so mad?” Mike looked incredulous. “Because of one drink?”
“It wasn’t just one,” Jamie said. “Was it?”
“What do you mean? I told you—”
“No,” she said. “Christie told me. You had pizza and beer with her, too.”
“Give me a break, Jamie. We talked, okay? That was all. We were talking about the case. Can’t I even talk to her?”
Not when you don’t talk to me, Jamie thought. A hurricane had swept through her body, leaving it bruised and battered. Her head was so muddled and heavy it was impossible for her to think about anything but the terrible smudge of pink on her finger.
“All you do is sit in the basement,” Jamie said. “It’s obvious you don’t want to be around me. You won’t even sleep with me anymore!”
“So everything’s my fault,” Mike said. His voice was so flat it was almost worse than if he were yelling. At least if he were yelling she’d know he still cared. “I’m guilty of everything, according to you. Good thing you’re not on the jury.”
He stormed out of the room, and she heard his heavy footsteps going upstairs. Then there was silence until Mike retraced his path downstairs and into the kitchen, where Jamie had slumped onto the dirty floor, next to the stupid broken dishwasher.
He was holding a duffel bag in each hand.
“When did you stop believing in me?” he asked. She blinked and looked up at him. His gaze was steely, but it flickered away a second after she met his eyes. It was as if he could hardly bear to look at her.
“Nothing happened with Christie,” he said. “Nothing ever has.”
“This isn’t just about her,” Jamie said. “You’re not the only one in trouble. You abandoned me, Mike!”
“You’re right,” he said. “This isn’t about her at all.”
Then he took his bags and left the room.
“Where are you going?” she called out, but the only answer she heard was the slamming of the front door.
* * *
Chapter Fifteen
* * *
THE SKY CYCLED THROUGH darkness, then began to turn light again as Tabby entered her second day of labor. Lou leaned against the fence, her mind drifting. She’d meant to check in with Jamie last night, but she’d been so focused on Tabby she’d forgotten to call. Jamie had probably been too busy to chat anyway. Lou hadn’t realized until she’d moved in how exhausting it was to constantly care for small children, and she wondered how Jamie found the strength to do it day after day—to cook meals, clean up endless spills, and referee squabbles, to ease socks onto wiggling little feet and cajole reluctant kids to change into pajamas and brush their teeth and get into bed, to read storybooks and throw in a load of laundry before racing back upstairs to warn the kids to stop talking and go to sleep, to do the hundreds of other things Jamie did every single day, so reflexively she probably didn’t even have to think about it. A mother’s love could power you better than any race car’s motor, Lou thought.
“Doesn’t Mike help with this stuff?” Lou had asked Jamie right after she moved in.
“Usually, yeah,” Jamie had said. She’d been trying to wash Eloise’s hands, which had inspired a shrieking fit in Eloise, who’d had a temporary tattoo applied to her wrist and was worried it would wash off. Jamie had finally rubbed a wet washcloth against Eloise’s palms, made a game out of counting her teeth while she brushed them, and picked up and carried Eloise to bed when the little girl thrashed.
“We generally divide and conquer,” Jamie had said. “Mike reads to Emily and Sam, or he tidies up downstairs while I do the bedtime routine. I’m just trying to give him a little break now, because of . . . everything.”
Now Lou wondered if that was the only reason. It hadn’t escaped her notice that Mike had been sleeping in the basement, or that a few days earlier, when Jamie had been entering the kitchen and Mike had been exiting it, he had pulled away abruptly, as if he didn’t want to touch her even in passing.
It was obvious Mike was angry with her sister. But why? Lou wondered.
She puzzled over it for a few minutes, then gave up. She certainly was no relationship expert—just look at her history. The thought led her to wonder what Donny was doing at the moment. He and Mary Alice might be enjoying a late dinner, maybe pasta primavera or one of Donny’s other specialties. They’d probably opened a nice bottle of Chardonnay, and were talking about the upcoming wedding. She needed to send Donny an email, to see if he wanted to have coffee. She hoped Mary Alice didn’t mind if they stayed friends. Now that Lou was gone from the quiet, lovely apartment, she found herself reminiscing about all the things she’d liked most about Donny: the way he turned on classical music when he got ready in the morning and could always name the composer, the way he lined up his shoes when he came home from work, the left always touching the right, like they were a married couple settling in for the night.
She wondered again what had kept her from wanting to stay with him. He didn’t have any glaring flaws, so it had to have been her fault. She’d hit a limit with her two previous boyfriends, as well—something that kept her from turning the corner to real commitment. She’d even seen a shrink after Jamie suggested it.
“There isn’t anything wrong in talking to someone about things that you’re struggling with,” Jamie had said. “I think it’s kind of heroic, actually. Not many people are willing to do hard work on themselves.”
“Heroic?” Lou had said. “You’re giving this the hard sell, aren’t you?”
Because Lou had returned to college to study zoology, she was eligible for cheap on-campus counseling. It wasn’t like she had any pressing social obligation tying up her Thursday nights anyway. She’d made an appointment through the student center and gone in for a session. Lou figured they’d chat for a bit and maybe she’d get some sort of prescription—she wasn’t sure for what—but it hadn’t happened that way. The shrink had merely smiled at her, taken out a new legal pad and a freshly sharpened pencil, and sat down across from Lou.
Uh-oh, Lou had thought, feeling as if she was in for more than she’d bargained for.
“Tell me about your family when you were growing up,” the therapist had begun. She had close-cropped brown hair and slightly slanted brown eyes and perfectly manicured fingernails. She wore a chocolate brown wrap dress and matching heels, and despite her warm smile, she intimidated Lou.
“Growing up?” Lou had echoed.
“Yes,” the therapist had said.
So Lou had talked a little bit about Jamie and how they’d shared a room. She’d mentioned how she’d walked to school and had swum the backstroke for the neighborhood pool’s swim team for a few years.
“Were you close to your parents?” the shrink had asked.
“Sure,” Lou
had said.
“What sorts of things did you do together?”
“Oh, you know,” Lou had said. “The usual.”
The therapist had set her pencil down on her pad, folded her hands, and waited. That was the thing about shrinks, Lou thought. They got paid by the hour, so they were perfectly comfortable with long silences. Silences didn’t bother Lou, either, but paying money for nothing did, so she tried to come up with something.
“Cereal,” Lou had finally said. “Jamie and I each got to pick a new box of cereal every week. Whatever we wanted—Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puffs. That was breakfast every day.”
“Mmm,” the therapist had murmured, and Lou had hidden a laugh, wondering if they learned how to make that noise in shrink school or from watching television.
“When something upset you in school, did you talk to your mom or your dad about it?” the therapist had asked after a long pause.
“Um,” Lou had said. “Well, I guess I mostly talked to Jamie. But I don’t get upset all that easily.”
The therapist had scribbled something on the pad. “Was your mother a stay-at-home mom?”
This Lou knew the answer to: “Yes.”
Things You Won't Say Page 26
