Her Something Impetuous

by Hunt Harris, Kim

  “Wrong with you?”

  “You know, something just wasn't right. But I never dreamed it was that.”

  “How did you find out?”

  He actually laughed. There wasn't a lot of humor in it, but he laughed. “Bear told me. Bear was always Charlie's staunchest ally and most loyal friend. He thought Charlie had gotten a raw deal and he wanted to set things right. I had been hanging around this lawyer's office over on Dewey and he started coming in there, too.”

  “A lawyer's office?”

  “Yeah, I know, it sounds kind of weird to hang out at a law office. But Steve…well, he was just that kind of guy. Lots of people hung out there. Anyway, I found out later that Charlie had asked Bear to get to know me, see what I was like, find out if I was happy and doing okay, stuff like that.” Will shrugged. “Bear and I got to be friends, and then he started kind of hinting around. Asking me which one of my parents I looked like. Where did I get my height from? Was I adopted? I finally asked my mom and…well, eventually I figured out that I wasn’t adopted but I wasn’t Bill’s.”

  “That sounds rough,” Karen said softly. She killed the motor and sat back in her seat.

  Will crossed his ankle over his knee and leaned back, too. He pinched the crease of his jeans between his thumb and forefinger, over and over, looking out the windshield and obviously not seeing anything but the past. “Well…” he said slowly. “Lots of things are rough when you’re fifteen. But yeah, that wasn’t a good time. I finally made Bear tell me the whole story, since apparently he knew it. I’d met Charlie before, but I didn’t really know him.” He shook his head and gave a rueful laugh. “Of course, once I knew everything it all kind of fell into place. Why I was so damn tall and why I had blue eyes when both Mom and Bill had brown. Why Mom and Dad always watched me like they were waiting for me to screw something up. Why I always felt out of place even at home.”

  Karen swallowed and fought the urge to reach out to him. He would leave if she did, she knew he would. So she just kept silent and waited.

  “Did you get to know Charlie then?” she pressed on.

  “No. I wanted to, but…I don’t know. It was just too much at the time. I met him and I told him I knew the story, and he kind of hemmed and hawed and we were both excruciatingly uncomfortable. Mom was freaking out that Bear had told me and just knew everyone in town was going to find out. She told me her side of things. I didn’t hear Charlie’s side until a few months ago.”

  “What happened a few months ago?”

  “He tracked me down. Wrote me a letter that he had cancer and the doctors weren’t giving him long. He wanted to make peace and get to know me, he said. So I came back. And right before he died he told me his side of things.”

  “And?”

  Will took a deep breath. “And I think Bear was right. He got a raw deal.” He stretched his shoulders and shifted in his seat. “Mom told me Charlie hadn’t wanted to be a father, so Bill married her and they never heard from Charlie again. Charlie said he didn’t even know he had a kid until I was six months old and he ran into mom pushing me in the buggy at the grocery store. He tried to be a part of my life but they eventually decided it was for the best for him to stay away.”

  “For the best how?”

  “It was obvious, Mom said. Charlie wasn’t the kind of guy they would hang around with. They didn’t want to make up some story about who he was, a cousin or distant relative they’d taken pity on. There was no conceivable reason for him to be around me, and so Mom begged him to just go away and let me live my life. So…” Will stopped and cleared his throat. “So he did.”

  “All those years. How awful for him.”

  Will shrugged. “Yeah, well…” He shifted and reached for the door and attempted a smile. “I’d say we’re even now, on what we know about each other.”

  Karen went back to something he’d said earlier, the only time his voice had caught while he was talking. “You said he wasn’t the kind of guy they’d hang around with? Why not?”

  He shrugged. “Well, you know. He wasn’t exactly in the same social class as my parents.”

  As my parents, he said. Not as we.

  “He had the tattoo parlor then?”

  Will was silent for a long moment. “No, he was working at a service station, I think. Pumping gas and fixing tires, stuff like that. But it wasn’t just the job. Even if he’d been an accountant she couldn’t have married him. Like I said, it’s a class thing. You know.”

  She shook her head. “No. I don’t know.”

  His blue eyes met hers, studying her frankly. “Sure you know, Karen,” he said softly. “Sure you do.”

  Karen fell into bed a little before 1 a.m., thought she heard something outside and got up to recheck all the doors and windows and practice dialing 9-1-1 without actually touching the buttons, just in case she really wasn’t being paranoid, went back to bed and was almost asleep before she realized she had forgotten to pour the brandy over the stupid apricots because she kept thinking about what Will said.

  “Sure you know, Karen,” he’d said. “Sure you do.”

  What did she know? she mumbled as she dragged herself back out of bed at two a.m. to dump sticky dried apricots in a shallow pan (Midge’s orders) and pour brandy over them. Using three-fourths of a cup left plenty for a little sip for herself. She choked and bent over coughing in the middle of her kitchen for a full three minutes, turned to the east to give Midge the finger, then flipped the kitchen light out, practically crawling back upstairs. When she woke the next morning feeling beaten up and exhausted, she was still wondering what Will meant.

  From his tone she got the feeling that Will considered his mother an elitist snob. Was that what he was saying, that she was in that category?

  That was crazy. Just because she lived near the country club and drove a nice car didn’t make her a snob. It made her husband one. Michael was the snob. He made it clear every day for the past nineteen years that she was a disappointment, an embarrassment, not to be trusted in good company. Nothing she did was good enough, from the way she talked and the things she did to the friends she treasured and the way she dressed. Every time he went on a trip he brought home clothes for her she wouldn’t be caught dead wearing. If she wasn’t good enough for the snobs, then she couldn’t possibly be one of them, could she?

  Was it the sordid underbelly remark? Because if it was, Will could just get over that. She was used to old ladies who wanted their poodles’ toenails painted and young men who bought Chihuahuas for their girlfriends. She had a right to freak out over being arrested for having a box of crack and a woman wearing a thong coming on to her. Those were not the kinds of things she dealt with in the normal course of her day.

  She decided she had other things to worry about at the moment. What did she care if Will thought she was a snob? So what if he had a chip on his shoulder because he had a bad relationship with his parents? She had her own dysfunctional family to worry about.

  Yes, she did feel bad for him, because he’d told a sad story. Didn’t his mother have any clue that when she rejected Will’s father, she rejected Will? Could she have been so blind she couldn’t see that?

  But all that wasn’t her problem. Right now her focus was tipsy apricots and strippers who didn’t want to be found.

  She went downstairs and poked at her soggy apricots. Brandy didn’t smell so great first thing in the morning. She slid the pan back into the fridge and poured herself a bowl of Apple Jacks.

  Over breakfast she formulated a plan for the morning. She wasn’t supposed to pick up Will until lunchtime, because he said that was when the bars would open again. First she’d check in with Paws and Claws to make sure they didn’t need her. She wrote a note to remind herself to call Cait at her 10:30 break because she had a big Geometry test that afternoon and Karen wanted to wish her luck on it. She should probably also remind her to eat a good lunch with some protein so she wouldn’t be exhausted all afternoon.

  She sat back in
her chair and sighed. She sounded completely overprotective. Cait knew what she was doing. She knew how to take care of herself. All Karen’s reminders would accomplish would be to irritate Cait and give her practice at rolling her eyes.

  She called the store, and Monica assured her everything was running smoothly, no need to even think about them. They were fine. Karen hung up and tapped the phone against her palm.

  She could call Pam. It would be nice, leaving another useless voice mail. Give her a warm fuzzy at the thought of Pam making gagging noises and deleting the message before she’d listened to all of it.

  Karen groaned and pushed her bowl away, crossed her arms on the table and dropped her forehead onto them. She shouldn’t feel useless, she told herself. She should be proud that she’d raised two independent daughters who knew how to handle themselves. She should be happy that they didn’t need her anymore.

  No one needed her anymore. She was as free as a bird. Well, except for the cloud of impending prison-time hanging over her head.

  She wandered around the house for a while, putting things away, fidgeting and feeling restless and edgy.

  Terri was right. She didn’t know how to be alone. She’d lived with someone else all her life and the very idea of being alone was making her nuts. She was going to end up one of those old ladies who fretted over nothing and complained every time someone called because no one ever called. She needed to get a life that didn’t involve taking care of or worrying about anyone else.

  She took a shower and ordered herself to get out of her funk. She could either mope around the house and continue to mourn the loss of knowing every little detail of her daughters’ lives, or she could do something about it. Namely by snooping through their rooms in the guise of cleaning.

  She started with Pam. The room didn’t need to be cleaned because it hadn’t been used in weeks and the maid service came once a week. But she didn’t care. She cleaned off the shelf over Pam’s desk and wiped it off. There was Pam’s award for a decoupage bistro set she’d refinished for Family and Home Studies project…it had been called Home Economics when Karen went to school. The table and chairs now sat on Karen’s back patio, looking as lovely as everything else Pam did. The reason Karen’s house looked as nice as it did was because Pam had a flair for making everything welcoming and charming.

  Karen put the items back on the shelf, wiping them down as she did, and focused on hating Michael so she wouldn’t cry for Pam. She hated that she’d let Michael bully Pam into going to Roosevelt. Pam wanted to stay in Piedmont and go to the community college for at least the first year, but Michael had convinced her that if she did that no decent grad school would even glance at her application. As if life would end if she didn’t go to grad school.

  Pam, being Pam and always wanting to keep everyone happy, had agreed to go to Roosevelt if that was what her father wanted. Karen had argued at first, but in the back of her mind was the doubt – as always – that maybe Michael was right. Maybe Pam needed to do this even if she didn’t want to. After all, Karen didn’t know what the world was like these days. She hadn’t finished college; she’d been married for half her life and therefore had a security net that Pam didn’t have. She didn’t want Pam to be Karen’s age and wondering if she ought to have done things differently, regretting that she hadn’t made bolder choices and then feeling like it was too late.

  But it was so hard, leaving her tear-streaked, shy and introverted baby in that dorm room full of squealing, giggling, confident girls. It had been every bit as bad as leaving her for her first day of kindergarten. Worse, because she couldn’t pick Pam up at 2:30 and take her to the park.

  She caved and picked up the phone, dialing Pam’s cell phone. She was so startled that a real person answered that she didn’t speak at first.

  “Hell-oooo,” the person on the other end said.

  It wasn’t Pam, but she said “Pam?” anyway.

  “Who?” The girl giggled.

  “Pam Way. I called Pam Way.”

  “Oh yeah. She’s here. Just a sec.”

  Karen heard more giggling and shuffling and then the phone went dead.

  Karen dialed again.

  She got voice mail this time. She sighed and left Pam a message. “Hey, I’m coming up next weekend for a visit. Like it or not.” It wasn’t as if she had to worry about making her mad at this point, was it? “I’ll stay at a hotel, and I won’t make a big scene, but I want to see you. In fact if you want, I’ll call you from the quad and you can step out onto the dorm porch and wave at me, just so I can see for myself that you’re still alive.”

  She’d meant that as a joke, but suddenly her throat was so hot and tight that she couldn’t breathe. She blinked fast and pinched her leg. “I’ll talk to you later, Pam. I love you.”

  She hung up the phone and laid down on Pam’s bed, feeling more utterly alone and lonely than she ever had in her life. Hot tears ran down her cheeks and wet Pam’s pillow. She tried not to cry but then thought to hell with it. She was alone in the house, her marriage was over and her kids refused to talk to her, there was no one around to see if she bawled like a big baby.

  I really shouldn’t have given myself permission to do that, she thought fifteen minutes later when she blew her nose and realized it was still tender from her bout with her own right hook. She checked the mirror and knew that no amount of Victorious Woman was going to fix those red puffy eyes. And now she was exhausted.

  She did her best to fix her hair and makeup – after all, she wanted to look her best for today’s round of strippers, didn’t she? – and dug through her closet to find another purse since her favorite one had been stolen along with Will’s car yesterday.

  Michael had bought so many things for her during their marriage, clothes that were almost always too big even before she lost weight, too loud, too flashy. Early in their marriage she’d tried to please him and wear them. But she always felt like a peacock and one day she realized he wasn’t looking at her anyway so she went back to wearing what she wanted. It didn’t stop him from buying, but he never asked why she didn’t wear what he bought, and she learned to be grateful for that.

  She could see part of why he was so fascinated with Denise, because Denise dressed the way he’d always wanted Karen to dress. They both had abysmal taste in clothes. But his taste in accessories was a different matter. The man knew how to buy a handbag.

  She stood on a suitcase and found another cute bag he’d brought home from one of his trips, a chocolate brown Francesco Biasia that she’d thought was lost last winter. She had searched for the silly thing for two weeks and felt horrible because it had cost as much as their rent had when Michael was in law school. And there it was, sitting on her top shelf looking so stylish and pretty.

  She grabbed the bag and threw in some makeup and a little bit of cash, then stood in front of the mirror and squared her shoulders. She could do this. She could spend the day with the man for whom she had an unreasonable attraction and pretend like she didn’t. She could troll through strip clubs and remain aloof as if she didn’t notice all the tight buns and perky boobs. She could find a stripper and force her, somehow, to admit that Michael had paid her to frame them. And then she could come home and bake two-dozen muffins.

  She pasted on a smile, picked up her keys, and opened the front door.

  A basket of daisies sat in the middle of her welcome mat, looking fresh and hopeful.

  She stood and stared at the basket for a full minute. The second one in three days. Who would leave her daisies?

  She wondered for a moment if it might be Will this time. He knew now that she liked them, after seeing the first basket. But that would be kind of strange, getting her an exact replica of the one she’d already gotten from someone else.

  Terri maybe? She and Karen frequently did things like that for each other. But not anonymously. Maybe Terri was sorry for giving Karen a hard time yesterday about working with Will to find Kitty.

  Karen put the basket on
the kitchen counter. The phone rang, and she was still chewing her lip and wondering who’d left them when she answered.

  “Karen, it’s Larry.”

  “Good morning. Did you find a lawyer who would want to take my case?”

  “Actually I did speak to someone this morning who might be able to help you. But right now I have other news.”

  “Good news, please. I’m only accepting good news at this time. Sorry, but we’re all full up of the bad kind.”

  Larry was silent for a moment, and in that moment Karen’s heart dropped to her stomach.

  “Just kidding,” she forced herself to say. “Whatever it is, just tell me and we’ll deal with it.”

  “I spoke to Michael’s attorney this morning. He’s planning to file for custody of Cait.”

  Will battled occasional bouts of insomnia, and last night had been a big one. Again and again through the night he drifted off only to awaken because a parade of images marched through his head. An unrelenting and incoherent movie made up of images of his arrests, both past and present, interviews he’d conducted over the past ten years that had once invoked sympathy and now inspired fear. He did not want to be one of the guys who went to prison for something he didn’t do. And in the middle of the night no other scenario seemed possible.

  Even worse was the thought of Karen going to jail.

  Things wouldn’t go that far. They couldn’t. He wouldn’t let them.

  But how could he stop them?

  Telling Karen about Charlie and his parents had brought all that bullshit to the surface, too. So he had Charlie’s awkward first handshake, his mother’s angry face and Bill’s look of betrayal when Will told them that Charlie was dying and wanted to spend some time with Will swimming around his head for half the night. It all ran together until he was too exhausted to sleep.

  He finally gave up a little after four and got up to make coffee. He put family matters and ancient history on the back burner and decided to concentrate on what was important at the moment – namely staying out of jail and finding some way to take Michael Way down.