Nelda had a smart comment for her, but bit her tongue. They’d both recently lost children tragically. There was no point in being cruel about it, although she’d change her mind when the next comment slipped out of Bernice’s mouth.
“Of course, you wouldn’t know what I was talking about.”
“What does that mean?” Nelda spat out. “I guess Marie dying doesn’t count.”
Bernice backpedaled, having completely forgotten about Nelda’s own loss. “Of course it matters. It’s tragic. What I meant was the picnic and all. Marie didn’t have much to do with the picnic.”
Nelda let her yammer on without responding. Her mouth didn’t stop as they walked down the hall to the reception area and out to the limousine.
“Now there are two ungrateful old ladies,” the nurse said. “It will be peaceful around here for three whole days.”
“We’ll see,” her colleague said. “Have they ever lasted more than a night away?”
“No, I guess not. What do you think it’ll be this time?”
“Who knows? Let’s just enjoy their absence while we can.” They nodded their heads in agreement as the limousine pulled away from the curb, Nelda and Bernice bickering at each other clearly visible behind the tinted windows.
Pam had broken her resolve not to cook three meals a day for all of these people, because tonight was special. In the coming days, it would be catered or take out. Her sisters were already planning to contribute breakfast the next day. She looked at her watch, having expected Ed to be back from the store more than an hour before. The meatballs baked, and the sauce was heating up, the water to cook the spaghetti almost boiling. She wanted everything ready the minute her mother and mother-in-law arrived.
“What could be taking Ed so long?” Gladys Ford asked. She looked over at Lisa, who was holding the baby, looking out over the water. “Can you call his cell phone?”
“I’m sure he’ll be home any minute,” she replied. “I don’t like calling him when he’s driving.”
“Can I do anything to help?” Gladys asked Pam. She’d already set the table.
“Do you want to go up to the kid’s wing and make sure everything is ready for the ladies? They should be pulling up any second.” Bernice and Nelda would use Marie’s old room. If Brent didn’t show up, they’d use that bed, too. But as it stood, the house was full. Her sisters and their families were sharing the mother-in-law apartment above the garage, flowing into the upstairs guest rooms also used by Gladys and Ed. Lisa and Ed and the baby would be in her old room. Anyone else needing accommodations could stay at a bed and breakfast down the beach from the house. It was beginning to feel a little like the old days to Pam, and she was sure having the elders there would perk everything up. She reached for the pasta to place in the hot water when the house phone rang.
“Mrs. Smith?” It was a shaken Ed.
“Yes, are you all right?” She heard a sob.
“Is Dan there?”
“Not yet, but I’m expecting him any second. What’s wrong?”
“I need to talk to him right away,” Ed said, urgency in his voice clear. “But I don’t want you to say anything to Lisa or my mother, please.”
“Okay, you have my word. Does he have your cell phone number?”
“No!” Ed shouted. “He needs to get to the police station as fast as he can. Tell him to get down here.”
She heard murmuring in the background. And then the phone went dead. She looked at it, and glanced out into the house. No one was paying attention to her, so she went into her bedroom to make the call. She dialed Dan’s number, and he answered right away.
“What now?” he asked when she explained the problem. “Okay, I’ll head over. Best not wait dinner for us, though. If he needs a lawyer, it may take a while.”
They said goodbye and Pam went out into the kitchen. She was going to lie. Lisa was talking to her aunts, showing the baby off, and Gladys was chatting with Big Ed when the doorbell rang; it was Nelda and Bernice. With the commotion of their arrival and the fuss made over the baby, no one mentioned Ed again until they were seated to eat.
“Where’s Ed and Dan?” Lisa said, frowning. “Did you hear anything from Dan, Mother?”
Pam was passing a bowl of salad to Nelda. “They met in town and got busy doing something together,” she said vaguely. “They should be home any second.”
Pam was getting concerned with the ticking of the clock, but no one mentioned them again. Getting everyone settled in their rooms, doling out glasses of wine on the veranda once all the children were in bed, Pam was finally alone in the kitchen. She’d found her stride sometime before dinner, the place that brought so much satisfaction in the past. And although she couldn’t say for certain that it was a nice feeling to have, she was relaxed and happy working in her kitchen like she used to. She definitely missed Marie and Jack, though. And Brent, who hadn’t called her yet. Hopefully, he’d be there sometime that weekend. Her thoughts were disturbed by the ringing of the phone. She saw Dan’s cell phone number.
“What is going on?” she asked, going into the pantry and closing the door behind her.
“He should be released any second,” Dan said. “He’s being booked for indecent exposure, but they’ll release him into my custody.”
“Indecent exposure? I am sorry, but I don’t see Ed exposing himself to anyone,” Pam hissed into the phone.
“Well, you’ll just have to trust me. The arrest was made, and it’s a matter of public record now.”
Pam was speechless—this on the heels of Lisa’s confession of Ed being reluctant in bed. Did mankind just recently lose their collective minds? Why in god’s name would a newlywed man choose exposing himself over making love to his wife?
“Are you still there?” Dan asked.
“When are you coming home?” she said shortly. “And what should I say to his wife?”
“Like I said, I’m afraid it is going to be reported publically, so let him explain it to her. You should take cover in your room. I’m going to suggest that he pack his family up tonight and go home. We don’t want intrigue around all those people.”
“Whatever you think. I am still in shock,” she said.
She went back to the guests that were still up. By ten, she heard Dan’s key in the door. Lisa was back in her room, nursing the baby, doing a good job of hiding her anger at her husband after disappearing for six hours. Pam stood in the hallway and looked at Ed with as blank an expression as she could muster. She’d learn later that her car had been impounded. Dan would take care of it the following Tuesday.
“You better go deal with your wife,” Dan told him.
Ed looked horrible, pale and haggard, clearly mortified and regretful. He walked through the kitchen to the children’s wing, gently knocking on the door.
She said, “Come in,” thinking it was her mother.
“Ed! Where in hell have you been?” She stood up with a sleeping baby at her breast and went to him. “You look awful. What happened? What was so pressing that you had to go with Dan, abandoning us for the entire afternoon?”
“Look, I’ll explain when we get home. We can’t stay tonight with all of these people here. I’ll get the diaper bag, and let’s go.”
Lisa wasn’t going that easily, though. “No, I don’t want to leave, Ed. You can tell me here. Now I’m getting frightened.”
He made eye contact with her. “Trust me, Lisa, you will not want to deal with this here, in your mother’s house with your relatives in the next room. You have to trust me one more time.”
Lisa grabbed her purse and took a cursory look around the room. There was nothing there that she didn’t have duplicates of at home. Ed left the room with the diaper bag, and they made a beeline for the mudroom, avoiding having to stop and chat with his parents, who were still awake, drinking wine with Pam’s sisters and their husbands on the veranda. They could hear laughter and see the flickering light from the gas fire pit as they dodged through the room.
Pam locked the door behind them, wishing she could advise her daughter in some way. Evidently, Lisa wasn’t going to be able to stick her head into the sand. She would be forced to deal with her husband’s failures and fragilities.
They buckled Megan into her car seat without trouble, slamming their doors and buckling their own seatbelts. Lisa was aware that Ed’s hands were shaking, his mouth was shaking, his legs were shaking. It was happening with enough force that the car was shaking. She looked at him, wanting to lash out, but not knowing anything except he’d failed to come home and to keep her informed. Not wanting to upset him further, she held her comments. Whatever happened would soon be revealed, and she could wait until they got home.
He turned to look at her.
“Keep your eyes on the road,” she said angrily.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what happened?”
“No. Not until we get home.”
The usual ten-mile journey felt like it was twice that distance. Ed pulled the car into the garage, and Lisa got Megan out of the backseat without wasting a step. “Get her diaper bag.” Ed did as she asked. She waited for him to unlock the door, and it wasn’t until she was watching his shaking hands trying to get the key into the lock that she noticed he had black ink all over his fingers.
“What’s going on? Why do you have ink all over your hands?” Did he have an accident with a pen? Then the words “finger-printed” drifted through her head. A flush of heat spread through her body. She didn’t say a word yet, wanting to get the baby into her crib before she attacked him.
He looked down at his hands and then back to her, but she pushed by him to get to the nursery. She went up the stairs as quickly as she could and put the baby down without waking her. Going into the hall bathroom to wash her hands, she looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the face staring back at her. Although she hadn’t confronted it yet, she knew in her heart they were in trouble. She had a moment of clarity. She could deal with it as her mother had dealt with problems all of her life: by ignoring it, or facing it head on. Grabbing the towel, she dried off her hands and shut the light off. Their bedroom was dark; he must be down in the kitchen waiting for her. She held on to the handrail, her mind empty for just a moment, but her heart still hammered out a staccato beat.
“Okay, what the heck happened? You were gone for six hours, and now I see that you have fingerprint ink all over your hands.”
He’d tried to wash it off when she was upstairs, but it still showed, the ink having worked into the crevices of his skin.
“Did your mom tell you anything? About my call to the house?”
Lisa shook her head. “No, not a word. When did you call her? Why didn’t you call me?”
“I was arrested, Lisa. I needed Dan to get to the police station. It’s true they’ll only give you one call. No more than one. Dan must have decided not to tell you. I don’t know because we barely spoke on the way home.”
“Well? What did you get arrested for?” She felt sick. She went through several scenarios in about sixty seconds. In the first one, Ed was caught stealing from the 7-Eleven. He goes in and demands money from the clerk. No, he wouldn’t do that. He goes into the store and takes a bag of potato chips and flees, but the owner catches him. Ed runs like a girl, so it would be easy to catch him.
“I was arrested for indecent exposure.”
He’d gone to the sink and was filling a glass from the tap even though she kept after him to drink only filtered water. Now wasn’t the time to correct him. She watched him put the glass under the faucet, not allowing it to run at all, so it would be warm and taste like pipe. The faucet was new, as was the farm sink. Ed didn’t like either one, but Lisa had to have it. Pam gave her the money, and she made sure all the renovations that they did were high end, out of reach with Ed’s salary, but just on target with her allowance. Why she thought of the sink and the money thing just as he’d confessed those ugly words, indecent exposure, was a mystery, although she’d begin to grasp her responsibility in a second or two.
“Who’d you expose yourself to?” she asked softly. The next scenario was of Ed pulling into the front of a 7-Eleven, approaching a bevy of adolescent girls at the Slurpee machine, and unzipping. Why the 7-Eleven motifs kept popping up wasn’t explainable; none of this was explainable.
“A cop,” he said. He was nervous, and she could tell there was a big part of the story to get to yet, and she needed to stay calm, not to yell at him for being slow. Ed could be really slow.
“And how did that come about?” she asked, completely confused now. There was simply no scenario to explain him exposing himself to a cop unless he wanted to be jailed, so she didn’t say anything else. She watched him drink from the glass and put it back in the sink, rinsing it out first although it only had water in it to begin with. She’d trained him well.
He took a deep breath. “Could we sit down first?” he asked, nodding toward the table. She hated the thought of an unpleasant association in her kitchen. It was such a great kitchen. She had grey quartz counters and subway tiles, hardwood floors and big windows. They’d left the windows uncovered, but tonight she wished there was something over them in case a neighbor was watching this unfold. She didn’t know how much longer she would be able to keep it together.
“Let’s go in the den, okay? I feel exposed in here tonight.” She hoped this wasn’t going to ruin her house for her.
He followed her into the den. It had cooled now, a late spring evening, and she pointed the remote at the fireplace and pushed the on button. A blue flame spread across the fake ceramic log. Was it really just that morning that they’d laid on the beach together, that she’d tried to fondle him under a towel?
“Please leave the lights off,” she said. She didn’t want to watch his face grow any paler; he was already pasty, a gloss of sweat on his forehead. She wanted him to go take a shower but needed this horror show to be over with first.
“You were going to tell me how you happened to show yourself to a cop,” she said, reminding him, avoiding the word “exposed.”
They sat on the couch together, she facing him with her arms wrapped around her knees, and him facing the fire. He looked over at her.
“How much detail do you need?” he asked.
“Well, why not tell me everything? Where were you?”
“I was in the car,” he explained. He told her about pulling behind the Taco Bell and eating and then thinking about his life, and how he was failing her sexually. He didn’t know why, he explained, but he suddenly wanted to know what it was like to masturbate. He looked at his wife.
“I’d never done it before,” he lied. “I was thinking about you, too.”
“Oh, so now it’s my fault,” she said, disgusted. “Get on with the story, please. You were jacking off in my mother’s car, is that correct?”
He nodded. “Yes. But I didn’t come. I was ready to, and when I reached over for a Taco Bell napkin, the cop was standing there, knocking on the window.”
Lisa couldn’t help it. She was either going to beat the crap out of him, he was just asking for it, cowering there on the designer couch, or burst out laughing. She chose the laugh, although the humiliation it would cause her husband would propel him further on his downward spiral.
“Oh my God! I can see it now. Your dick in your hand and looking up to see a cop. You can’t imagine the picture I have in my head.”
Ed looked at her. “No, actually, I can. That was a great description. Very fitting for my wife to think it was funny. Our relationship is so fucked up.”
It was as if he’d thrown a bucket of ice at her. He’d never complained before, and now when she really needed him to get on his knees and beg her for forgiveness, he was being a jerk. She decided to get more information out of him before he clammed up.
“So, did Dan come to the rescue? He never showed up for dinner either, and now I know why.”
“Yes, he did,” Ed replied.
“Did he drive you ho
me from the station?”
Ed nodded his head, knowing what was coming next. “And where, if I may ask, is my mother’s car?”
“It was impounded. But Dan said he’d take care of it on Tuesday. They don’t release cars on a holiday weekend.”
Lisa got up and started to pace, thinking about what had taken place. The local police caught her husband with his dick in his hand. He didn’t really expose himself to anyone. The cop should’ve known there was a possibility that he might see something if he peeked in parked cars. Ed was a good guy, not a sex addict who had to do it every moment like her father did. He was just unlucky. Or was there something else she was failing to recognize? She stopped pacing and looked down at him, pathetic guy, skinny and hunched over. When had he lost so much weight? It was clear that there was more here needing investigation. She went to sit down beside him, putting an arm around his shoulders.
“I’m sorry I laughed about it, Ed. You’re right; our marriage is fucked up right now. Do you forgive me for laughing?”
He looked into her eyes and nodded. “Can you forgive me for embarrassing your family? When this gets out, I might lose my job. No, I will lose my job. You can’t flash your penis around a town like Babylon and not suffer some repercussions.”
Lisa burst out laughing when he said it, although she knew he was probably right.
“Ed, stop. Let’s just deal with one thing at a time. Your parents are at my mother’s house. We can’t abandon Pam and sit here in hiding all weekend. It’s a good thing it’s a holiday. No reporters are going to bother spending much time looking at police records.” She hoped she was right. Standing up, she pulled on his hand until he was on his feet.
“Let’s go to bed, okay? I guess we don’t have to worry about having sex for a while,” she said, chuckling. Yep, that was the last thing on her mind and would be the last thing on his for a long time.
The Tao of Pam: Pam of Babylon Book # 6 Page 6
