32
The following Saturday afternoon, I heard a key in the front door, then the sound of it opening. “Mama?” I called, coming into the hall from the kitchen, wiping my hands on a dish towel. She had gone out to lunch and shopping, claiming she never got a day off anymore, despite Rosa’s evidence to the contrary. “You’re back ear—oh!”
Larry was in the hallway. I knew I should have gotten the locks changed.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“This is my house.”
“On paper. What do you want?”
A muscle twitched in his jaw, and I braced myself for the confrontation. “To see my children,” he said, a wolfish smile spreading across his face. “Surely you can’t deny me that. Especially not when they spent their Fourth of July with another man.”
Nancy would have killed Arnie if he was the one who blabbed, so it had to be someone else. He did still golf there; he just didn’t enjoy socializing off the course. “They spent the Fourth splashing in the pool and running around with sparklers like every other kid at the club.”
“Who arrived and left in another man’s car.”
My hands went to my hips. “What exactly are you implying, Larry?”
“You had your fun,” he said. “I had mine. Let’s call it even and get past this.”
“My fun ? Not all of us bring sex into the workplace.”
“Come on, Bev, you have to know that’s why he hired you.”
“He hired me because I know how to win a campaign.”
Larry laughed, a deep belly laugh full of malice. “You’re married to someone who can win a campaign. So you’re right. Maybe he hired you because he thought you’d bring some of my secrets to the table, but what do you know other than how to be a housewife?”
He had moved closer. But I wasn’t going to be cowed. “Interesting, then,” I said.
“What is?”
“That you married me. Would you have if my father was a plumber and not Bernie Gelman?”
The muscle twitched in his jaw again. Nothing else gave away how angry he was.
“Because once upon a time, you seemed to think my political sense was useful. But some men can be honest and actually recognize that I have value.”
“Value? You’ve got him parading around country clubs and talking to women!”
“Amazingly, women can do more than cook you dinner, bear your children, and service you at the office.”
“You’re making a spectacle of yourself,” Larry said. “I know you want to hurt me, but do you think you’ll be able to keep this house if I lose my job because you want to dive into pools fully dressed with your new man to make me look like a cuckold? At the club I pay the dues for, no less.”
“You can’t threaten me with that. I hired a lawyer, and I know my rights. And you have to support me in the same manner you did while we were married.”
“Not if you’re the adulterer, I don’t,” he said. “And that pool stunt was pretty damning.”
I had a meeting with my lawyer set for the following week. I didn’t know if the PI had turned anything up yet or not, but I doubted it, because Greg had promised to call me if he found solid evidence. But I had nothing to hide.
“You can waste as much time as you want on that,” I said. “But you and I both know that isn’t me. And if you find anyone to say otherwise, they’re going to be perjuring themselves. Can you say the same?”
“Good luck proving anything,” Larry said. “I’m not going anywhere without a fight.”
I shook my head. “I’m not afraid of you, Larry Diamond.”
“Drop the adultery part,” he said. “Agree to that and quit your job, and I won’t contest a no-fault divorce after the election.”
I stared at the man I had spent six years sleeping next to, waking up an hour before him to be the perfect wife, only to see a stranger in my hallway. “Which part of that is more important?” I asked quietly. “You not having adultery on your record or me quitting?”
“Both.”
“And if I’m not willing to agree to either of those conditions?”
His eyes gleamed the way a cat’s did before it killed the mouse it had been toying with, and despite what I had said a moment earlier, the expression on his face did scare me.
“Keep the house,” he said mildly. “There are worse things to lose.”
Then he strode past me to the den, where the kids were watching television. “Daddy!” I heard Robbie shriek.
“Who wants to go on an adventure with Daddy?” he asked. Both kids yelled that they did.
“Not so fast,” I said, storming into the room.
“What?” he asked, his voice dripping with insincere sweetness. “No court is going to say I can’t see my children.” He told Robbie to hop on his back, and he picked Debbie up in his arms. “Who wants ice cream?”
“Me! Me!” Debbie cried.
He kissed the top of her head, his eyes locked on mine. “Good. You’re going to be spending a lot more time with Daddy in the future,” he said. “A lot more.”
“They need to be back for dinner,” I said shrilly.
“What’s the matter, Bev?” he asked, grinning viciously. “You sound scared.”
And over my protests, he carried them out of the house, without so much as a diaper for Debbie.
I sank down at the kitchen table, my hands suddenly shaking. He didn’t want the kids. I knew that. He didn’t have the faintest idea of how to care for them. No judge would grant him custody over me.
But if he was willing to cheat, he was willing to lie.
And if I didn’t give him what he wanted, this wouldn’t be a fair fight.
I thought about Fran, who had lost everything.
“No,” I said out loud.
“No what?” my mother asked.
I jumped a mile, banging my knee on the underside of the table and swearing colorfully.
“Such language,” she said, feigning shock, as if she hadn’t uttered a similar phrase when she discovered Debbie had colored on her Hermès purse.
“I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Should I have knocked?” she asked, removing her hat. “I was under the impression that I lived here now.” She cocked her head toward the den. “Where are the children?”
“Larry was here.” I rubbed my bruised knee. “He took them.” I looked at the clock on the wall—I had been sitting there over an hour, worrying.
“Took them where?”
“I don’t know.”
She studied me carefully, then took a seat at the table. “I see. Well, they’ll be back soon. He has no idea how to change a diaper. They’ll get hungry and cranky, and he’ll bring them home.”
My mouth was dry. “I hope so.”
“What did he say?”
I recounted his veiled threat.
“No.” She shook her head. “No judge in the world would find you an unfit mother.”
“But if he can manufacture some affair—”
“That’s where you have a leg up.” My whole childhood, she had drilled into me that I was never to interrupt. But when she did it, it was so smooth, I almost didn’t notice. “You don’t have to manufacture anything. It happened. All you need to do is get the girl to testify.”
I shuddered. I had no desire to try to convince Linda to do anything. “She wouldn’t.”
“Whyever not?”
“Because she’s probably in love with him. You know how those young affairs go.” She bristled slightly, and I realized she likely didn’t. She married my father at twenty after all. I doubted there had been anyone before him. “Besides, he’ll fire her. She won’t risk that.”
“That’s easy, then,” my mother said. “You offer her a job working for Michael.”
“What?”
“Simple. And far less exertion working as just a secretary.”
“Mama!”
She reached across the table and grabbed my hand, suddenly completely serious. “Beverly, you do what it takes. If I teach you nothing else, you learn that. You do what you need to do to survive.”
Then, as suddenly as it had come off, the veneer was back in place, and she stood up. “I’m going to get changed. Then I’ll make spaghetti. The kids will be hungry when they get home.”
“Spaghetti?” I asked. She never let them have messy food and insisted on leaving the kitchen when I made it for them.
“It’s their favorite, isn’t it? Let’s make sure they remember who knows and loves them best.”
I watched her swish out of the room, buoyed by her indomitability.
When she returned, she handed me a slip of paper. “Call while I cook.”
“Who is it?”
“A locksmith. We may not play dirty, but that doesn’t mean we have to play nice.”
I wrapped my arms around my mother. “Thank you.”
She patted my back twice and then extricated herself. “Enough of that. Make the call and then be ready with a smile when they get back.”
She pulled a pot from the cabinet and filled it with water, then tied an apron around her waist, humming softly as she flitted around the kitchen for pasta, sauce, and a spoon.
By the time the food was cooked, the kids were back, hungry and cranky as predicted, Debbie’s diaper soaked through. Larry didn’t come inside.
Monday morning, I called my lawyer and told him what had happened. “Is there any chance he gets the kids?” I asked.
The pause that followed was enough to worry me. “Under normal circumstances, no,” he said slowly.
When he didn’t say more, I pressed him. “Why aren’t these normal circumstances?”
“They likely are. As long as he can’t prove adultery against you.”
“Me?” I didn’t have to feign outrage.
“Look, Mrs. Diamond—”
“Bev,” I reminded him.
“Bev. I believe you. But if he manufactures solid-enough evidence, it turns into a case of ‘he said, she said.’ And if we don’t have evidence of his infidelity, things get a lot trickier.”
“But isn’t that illegal?”
There was a very loaded pause. “Ye-es,” he said, drawing the word out to multiple syllables. “How much do you know about Tom Stanton?”
Tom Stanton had been Sam’s opponent six years earlier. Sam won in a landslide when a teenage mistress came forward pregnant with an out-of-wedlock child that she said was Tom’s. “Mostly what was in the papers,” I said.
Another long pause. “My partner represented him in the paternity suit. She dropped it entirely when he lost the election.”
I sat for a moment, trying to figure out why he was bringing that up, and then—“You don’t think Sam paid her to lie, do you?” I tried to remember what Larry had said about the whole ordeal, but he had been very hush-hush, telling me that I didn’t need to worry about things like that. After all, I was a newlywed.
A few months earlier, I would have told Greg that he didn’t know Larry if he could even insinuate such a thing.
But it turned out I was the one who didn’t know Larry. And the man who had stood in my house threatening to take my children—well, I didn’t know what he was capable of.
“I will find the evidence,” I said resolutely. “You can count on that.”
“Good,” Greg said. “He can claim whatever he wants, but if we have solid proof, the court will almost always side with the mother.”
I thanked him, and he said he would draft up a visitation agreement to send to Larry’s lawyer, as no judge would agree he could walk in and take the children whenever he felt like it.
But that “almost always” echoed frighteningly in my head as I kissed their little heads and tucked them in that night.