16. Jo
SIXTEEN
jo
Jo goes about her afternoon as usual, but the thought of a young woman with a head injury lingers in the back of her mind. She’s about to put her cart away in the closet where she stores it when she sees a familiar figure standing at the nurse’s station with Dr. Chavez: it’s Vance Majors, Jude’s husband.
Jo takes her time putting her cart back and gathering her purse and lightweight cardigan, then closes the door behind her and waits unobtrusively for Dr. Chavez to walk away.
“Vance,” she says, approaching him carefully. “Is everything okay?”
Vance turns to her with surprise. His eyes are tired. “Oh, Jo. Hi.” He runs a hand through his hair and exhales. “Things are not really okay.” He looks like he might cry. “Jude slipped today and hit her head.”
Jo inhales sharply; she never imagined for one second that the young woman with the head injury could be a friend of hers. “Oh, Vance. Oh, I’m so sorry. How is she?”
Vance’s eyes follow Dr. Chavez as he sets a clipboard down on a desk and walks into another patient’s room. “I’m not sure, to be honest. They think she fell into the water and was there for a minute or two before our neighbor could get over there and pull her out. She’s had a pretty good knock to the head, and being in the water for a minute or two wasn’t good. She hasn’t woken up yet, but her heart and brain activity are normal so far. They think there might be some swelling to her brain…we just don’t know.”
“Oh my god, the children,” Jo says on a sharp inhale, putting one hand to her chest. Where are Hope and Faith?”
Vance’s eyes look incredibly tired. “The neighbor girl is watching them. Our parents and siblings are all in New York and Texas—like you, we don’t have anyone here.”
Jo makes a snap decision. “I’m done with my shift now. I’ll stop and get the girls, and they can come to my house. I’ll watch them until you know more, or until you can come get them. They can sleep over if they need to.”
“Jo, that’s really kind of you…I can’t ask you to do that.”
“You’re not asking.” Jo puts a hand on his arm.
“But Bill is sick—won’t he mind?”
Jo is momentarily puzzled. She’s about to say that Bill isn’t sick when she remembers that he’d told her Arvin North had approved his absence for a few days with the excuse that a doctor has told him to take the time off.
“Right, right,” Jo says, thinking on her feet. “No, he won’t mind. He’s shut himself away, and I’ll keep the kids busy. I’ll go get the girls right now if you want.”
Vance appears to relent. “Okay, if you think it’ll work for your family. That would be so helpful. It would take one thing off my plate.”
“Absolutely,” Jo pats his arm. “I was going to do something easy for the kids tonight for dinner, so I’ll just make a few more fish sticks and then let them swim. Don’t you worry about a thing, and call me if you need anything.”
With that decided, Jo drives over to Vance and Jude’s and collects Hope and Faith, along with enough provisions that they can swim and even sleep over at the Bookers’ house, if necessary.
The evening is almost made easier for Jo with the addition of two more children; the change in dynamic makes her three behave differently—better—and Nancy takes on the informal role of babysitter to her younger sister and to Hope and Faith. For his part, Jimmy largely ignores them all. As the kids are playing, Jo cleans up the dinner dishes and calls Frankie.
“No!” Frankie shouts immediately. “Jude fell into the pool? Oh my god!”
Jo recounts the entire story to her, ending with the fact that Hope and Faith are currently at her house, and that she hasn’t heard any updates from Vance as of yet.
“I wonder what happened. Have the girls said anything?”
Jo looks out the window to the spot in the thick-bladed grass beneath a tree where all four girls are tossing a ball back and forth, giggling each time one of them misses it. Jimmy is laying under a different tree with a comic book, ignoring them all.
“No, they seem kind of unaware, to be honest,” Jo says as she watches them. “I went to pick them up, and the teenager from next door was watching them. They haven’t said anything at all about their mother.”
“So then maybe they weren’t there when it happened?”
“That’s a possibility. But where would they have been? And, Frankie,” Jo says, interrupting her own train of thought, “how lucky is Jude that a neighbor happened to be close enough to rush over and save her?”
Frankie flicks her lighter on the other end of the phone line and Jo can hear her take the first inhale of a fresh cigarette. “Indeed.” She’s quiet for a moment. “It’s all very mysterious, but of course, terribly tragic.”
“She’s going to be fine though,” Jo says, mostly to reassure herself. The look on Dr. Chavez’s face as he’d spoken to Vance that afternoon had been worrying. “She has to be fine.”
“You’ll keep me updated?”
“Of course. I’ll call you as soon as I know anything.”
In the end, the girls do end up sleeping over, and Vance comes to retrieve them first thing in the morning. “Thank you so much, Jo,” he says sheepishly from her front doorstep. “I owe you one.”
“You owe me nothing.” She’s put on a pair of capri pants and a blouse, but the only makeup she’s had time for is a swipe of lipstick after brushing her teeth. “Come in for a cup of coffee?”
Vance wipes his feet on the doormat and follows Jo to the kitchen, where he looks slightly out of place. He waits to be pointed to a chair, and without thinking, Jo gives him Bill’s spot. “The kids are still sleeping,” she says as she pours him a steaming mug of coffee. “I can wake your girls if you like.”
Vance’s eyes are rimmed with dark circles and he looks like he hasn’t slept. “Actually, do you mind if they sleep a bit more while I run home and take a shower?”
“Of course not. I’ll get them breakfast.”
“Thank you so much. I’m just going to have to piece things together while Jude is in the hospital. I got a couple of days off of work here, and my mother has agreed to fly in from Houston.”
“Oh, Vance,” Jo says. She slides into her usual seat at the table with a mug of coffee in her hands. “Why don’t you leave the girls here again today while you handle things. Seriously, they’re fine. And if we need a change of scenery, we’ll go to the library, or call Carrie and see if her kids are interested in a trip to the beach or something.”
“Jo, you are a lifesaver,” Vance says. He looks relieved. “Bill is a lucky man.”
Wordlessly, Jo sips her coffee. She’d like to believe that Bill is a lucky man, but her attitude lately has left something to be desired, and she’s well aware of that. Why is it that she’s so willing to step in and be there for someone else’s husband in his hour of need, but she has such a hard time doing the same for her own? Of course, the answers are not so simple—there are emotions and feelings and plenty of tangled thoughts involved in her own marriage, and right now all she’s doing is being a friend to Vance and Jude, which is so much easier.
“Thank you,” she says to him, looking at her placemat instead of at Vance’s face. “Vance, I have to ask, is Jude okay? Not just presently, but in general?” He’s quiet, and this forces Jo to look up at his face, which is set in stony silence. “I mean, there was this one day when all of us girls were together, and I didn’t want to gossip about it so I haven’t mentioned it to anyone, but I found Jude in the kitchen…drinking Carrie’s vodka.”
Vance says nothing, but stares into his cup of coffee for the longest minute Jo has ever lived through. When he finally looks up at Jo, there is worry in his eyes. “I think it’s a bit of a problem,” he says. “But I need to get her well before I think about trying to get her to stop drinking.”
Jo bites her lip as she nods. “Absolutely. And I’m not trying to be nosey, Vance, I was just worried.” She wants to tag on something nice—a compliment about Jude being a great mom, or a good friend, but truth be told, she doesn’t have those kinds of feelings about Jude. Not yet, anyway. But she wants to know the woman better; she wants to help her, if she can.
“Thank you.” Vance takes a long drink of coffee and then pats the table his hand. “Okay,” he says, standing up with the bone-weary type of exhaustion that comes from spending a sleepless night in the hospital. “I’d better shower and get this day started. I want to get back to the hospital as soon as possible and see if there have been any changes.”
“Don’t you worry about a thing here, alright? If the girls need anything from home, we’ll just swing by there and they can run in and grab it.”
“The front door is unlocked,” Vance says, patting his pockets for his keys and wallet as he makes his way to the door. “And, Jo?”
Jo is in the living room, escorting him to the door. She pauses. “Yes?”
“Thank you again. I really appreciate this, and your discretion about…everything.”
“You got it, Vance.”
“And then we put on the dress and Frankie played a song and we all danced,” Kate is saying to all the other children as she stands in the sand in her little flowered swimsuit. “And I think someday I’m going to dance on New York, too!”
Jimmy looks like he hears his sister’s grammatical mistake again, but rather than correct her, he turns to Marcus instead. “Want to go in the water?”
There are three years between the boys, but Marcus is an easygoing kid who is always up for whatever Jimmy wants. They frequently ride their bikes around the neighborhood, play catch together, or talk about sports. With a shrug, Marcus follows Jimmy to the water.
“I want to hear more about this whole Rockette business,” Carrie says from her spot on the giant blanket as she watches Frankie with awe.
Jo has gathered all the women and children—minus Jude, of course—that afternoon for a beach picnic, and the little girls are playing together in a group while Marcus and Jimmy do their thing. Barbie is nursing Huck under the blanket that she has thrown over one shoulder, and her toddlers are happily digging in the sand with shovels.
“Oh, pshhh ,” Frankie says, waving one hand and not looking at any of them. “That’s yesterday’s news. I was on stage dancing, and now I’m just an old married broad.”
Carrie huffs. “Old, my behind. You look like a movie star.”
Frankie finally looks her in the eye. “Well, I’ve done some things that might seem glamorous on the surface, but I’m no brainiac. Not like those girls who are working with our husbands now.”
“Come again?” Barbie has been watching Heath and Henry build a sandcastle as she nurses Huck, but she turns back to them now. “What girls?”
Frankie sighs. “They got a whole slew of female engineers who just started. I heard they like to go to the Black Hole after work with our boys. What do we think about that?”
“We do not like it,” Barbie says defensively. “We do not like it at all. And Todd hasn’t even mentioned it.”
Jo feels trouble brewing, so she tactfully changes the subject. “Tuna or egg salad?” she asks, holding one of each sandwich in the air for the children to choose from. They all make their picks, and then she hands bottles of soda around to the women as they take a sandwich or politely pass.
“Dieting,” Barbie says with a sad smile. “I need to lose some baby weight, otherwise I’d love an egg salad.”
“Oh, honey. You don’t need to lose a pound,” Carrie says. She’s dressed in an oversized dress made of lightweight fabric, and she’s hiked it up to her thighs so that her legs are basking in the sun. She adjusts the wide-brimmed hat on her head as she watches the children playing together. “You’re all stunning. In fact, we all are . We need to stop letting men and society tell us that we aren’t good enough.”
“Forget about the rest of the world. Before I even leave the house, my mirror tells me I’m not good enough,” Frankie says drily.
Carrie reaches over and swats Frankie’s bare leg with a rolled-up magazine. “Stop it! And you all mark my words: we might eat celery sticks and starve ourselves now to fit in, but someday there will be a lot of pushback to this. People will understand how hard it is to be a woman, and they won’t expect us to give birth and then immediately have a tiny waist again.”
Barbie switches Huck to the other breast as she shoots a disbelieving look in Carrie’s direction. “I don’t think so,” she says with a sad look. “My mom has been on me since I was ten to stay skinny. She told me no man would want a fat woman, and I’ve never seen anything to say otherwise.”
Jo frowns at this, but she sees both sides of the coin on this issue. She wants her girls to grow up in a world where they don’t look at every bite of food and wonder whether it will go directly to their hips (and if it does, who cares!), but she also knows that there are zero messages coming from society at large that don’t have to do with being slim, pretty, and feminine. It’s a tug-of-war in her own heart; she’s already absorbed all the messages herself. Without even thinking about it, Jo can substitute coffee for breakfast, or skip dessert even when it looks mouthwateringly delicious.
Jimmy and Marcus come running back from the water’s edge with handfuls of wet, sandy shells that they dump right onto Jo’s blanket. She’s growing accustomed to the sensation of sand infiltrating every corner of her life, so rather than complain about the mess, she just smiles at them. “Found some treasures, boys?”
Jimmy puts his hands on his narrow hips and stares at the pile of shells. “Maybe. Gotta see what else is out there.” The boys run off again, dashing for the waves that break right there on the white sand beaches.
“Any word on Jude?” Carrie asks Jo with a concerned look as she pops the lid off her bottle of Tab. She turns the soda around and reads the name on it. “And what is this?”
“A new Coca-Cola soda without sugar. Better for your diet,” Barbie says, sipping her own bottle of Tab.
Carrie rolls her eyes at the word “diet” and goes on. “Anyway, do we know how she is?”
Jo shoots a pointed look in the direction of where the little girls are playing together and drops her voice. “Vance was by this morning and said he needed to head back to the hospital, and I told him I’d keep the girls with me. They haven’t said a word about it, so I’m not sure if they even know what’s going on.”
“Strange,” Barbie says. She’s rocking back and forth with Huck dozing in her arms. As she sits there, four-year-old Heath brings a shovelful of sand over and pours it on her toes. Barbie wiggles her feet and smiles at her oldest son. “I wonder what’s going on. Maybe one of us should drop by the hospital this afternoon with a snack for Vance?”
“Or maybe Jo can use her hospital connections to call and find out how she is,” Frankie suggests as she pulls a pack of cigarettes from her purse. She looks at everyone else and then tosses the unopened pack back into her bag. “Sometimes I think I should just quit smoking altogether.” She grimaces.
“Or maybe do it less,” Carrie offers helpfully. “I know it’s a habit, but you could replace it with something else.”
“Like eating more and getting chubby?” Frankie shoots her a look.
Carrie groans. “You could stand to eat a few cupcakes, girl.”
“Don’t worry,” Barbie teases, still rocking back and forth as she sits. “As soon as she starts popping out babies, she’ll thicken right up!”
The women laugh, but Jo catches a glimpse of Frankie’s face. There is a flicker of something there. They haven’t discussed the fact that Frankie and Ed don’t have children yet, but Jo senses that there are things lurking beneath the surface when it comes to that particular topic, and she doesn’t want to see Frankie get put on the spot right there during a lovely picnic on the beach.
“Maybe I should run by there,” Jo says as a way to change the subject. “The hospital, I mean. I could take Vance some sandwiches and just check in.”
“Sure,” Carrie says. “You can drop all the kids off with me and I’ll watch them while you go over. You’re the one who is closest to this situation anyway.”
“Drop them all off?” Jo asks in surprise. “Jude’s girls and all three of mine? You want to have seven kids running around your house?”
Carrie smiles as she scans the group, counting heads. “Yeah, sure. My two are easy, so what’s five more? Besides, my mom raised seven of us while my dad was away during the war. I think I can manage it for an afternoon.”
Jo admires her pluck, but isn’t sure she’d be as easygoing about seven kids running around her house on a blazing hot afternoon. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll do it and be quick about it.”
In the end, they don’t need to do any sort of musical chairs with the kids, as Jo gets back to the house with the station wagon full of hot and sandy children to find Vance waiting in her driveway.
“Hey,” he says, lifting a hand. “I just got here. Jude gets to go home this evening, so I thought I’d run the girls back to our place for a quick bath and a change of clothes,” he says, laughing as his twins race over to him and wrap themselves around his waist. “And then all three of us will go and pick Mama up.”
“Where is Mama?” Hope asks her father.
“She’s been resting while a doctor looks after her,” Vance says. “And now she gets to come home to us. So let’s tell Mrs. Booker thank you for watching you these past couple of days, and you two gather your things so we can go home and get ready for Mama’s homecoming.”
The twins race off to get their toothbrushes, favorite dolls, and nightgowns, and Jo sends her three kids through the gate and into the backyard to hose themselves off before going into the house. She and Vance are in the driveway alone as she pulls a cooler and the sandy blankets from the back of her station wagon and sets them on the grass.
“How is she?” Jo asks him gently.
“Mild concussion, and she doesn’t remember falling into the pool at all. The brain swelling was minor and seems to be diminishing quickly, so I would consider us lucky and in good shape.” He blows out a breath and leans against Jo’s car. “I have a lot on my plate at the moment, Jo. I don’t mean to bend your ear about it and take advantage of your hospitality, but…” Vance digs the heels of his palms into his eye sockets and rubs them. “I want her to get well is all. I’m sure Bill wouldn’t understand because he’s got you and his life is all squared away, but sometimes things are really messy.”
Jo leans against the car right next to him so that they’re nearly shoulder to shoulder. She looks out at the street they live on, squinting as a woman two doors down walks to her mailbox, flips open the little door, and slides out a stack of envelopes. The woman raises a hand at Jo and smiles. Jo waves back—this is Marianne, wife of one of the Project Mercury astronauts, and while they don’t know one another well yet, she’s been nothing but friendly. Marianne stops to pick up a piece of mail that slips from her hands, then disappears back into her house, closing the front door after her.
“Listen. Vance.” Jo crosses her feet at the ankles as Hope and Faith come out with their overnight bags in hand. “You’re going to be okay. And no one’s life is perfect, so please don’t think that you’re alone in the messiness of marriage and family, okay?”
Vance turns just his head and looks down at Jo, who is about six inches shorter than he is. “You think?”
Jo gives him a nod as she pushes away from the car with her hip. “I don’t just think—I know.” She gives him a close-lipped smile as the girls bombard their dad, clearly ready to go home and get back to their own routine.
Vance prompts the twins to say thank you to Jo for her hospitality, and she ruffles each of their heads in turn. “Anytime,” Jo says, meaning it. She shoots Vance a meaningful look. “And if you need anything at all, you’ve got my number.”
Jo watches as Vance pulls away with his girls in the backseat, wondering how things will go as Jude comes home and recovers. She’d like to spend more time pondering it, but Bill will be home from Arizona tomorrow, and she has her own messy, imperfect family stuff to worry about at the moment.