61
I felt like I barely sat down in October. My mother gradually moved her things back home, where she was now sleeping, but still came to watch the kids—an arrangement that I promised would end after the election. I did worry vaguely about what money would look like if Larry quit Sam’s campaign to run for office and I wasn’t working, but, legally, that was his problem, not mine.
My parents attended Yom Kippur services without us.
Nancy came with me to the divorce hearing in the middle of the month. Michael offered to as well, but I didn’t think that would look great after the kissing photos, even if the judge was supposed to remain impartial to anything not presented in the hearing. Besides, Michael had multiple events a day leading up to the election.
And the reality was that I didn’t need him there. Greg had thoroughly prepared me on how it would all work, and now that Larry and I were no longer in contention about the facts of the divorce or the specifics of child custody, it was easy. And I was spared details of Linda’s testimony. A simple statement that Larry was unfaithful with her was considered enough, especially combined with the hotel logs, and Larry offered no objections.
Larry nodded to me as we left the courthouse, and I offered a half smile. It was a strange, ridiculously quick dissolution to something that we had vowed would last forever. But even Rome had fallen eventually, and it was narcissistic to believe that I could, by sheer force of will, be the one to stop a clearly sinking ship. And if I was being perfectly honest, I felt a sense of relief that it was finished.
“So are you and Michael going to make it official now?” Nancy asked me in the car. She was dropping me back at the office before heading home. Stuart had driven Linda to the hearing. I had said she could come with us, but he thought that would look bad and said that he would bring her instead. He waited at the back of the courtroom while she testified and then left with her once she was dismissed.
I shook my head. “I don’t know where he is on that, but we need to focus on the election. And if we’re together right after we both said there was nothing between us, we look like liars.”
“So November 7, I should plan to take the kids overnight?”
I couldn’t help but laugh.
My mother was smoking at the kitchen table when I got home from work. “How did it go?” she asked me.
I opened the window over the sink and fanned smoke toward it. “As well as it could,” I said. I heard laughter through the screen and looked outside to see my father playing catch with Robbie, while Debbie perched on the patio table, clapping loudly every time either of them caught the ball. I smiled at the scene.
“Excellent,” my mother said, stubbing out her cigarette and standing. She pulled an apron from the drawer and tied it around her waist. “I suppose someone needs to start dinner.”
The clock over the stove told me she should have started it an hour earlier. The kids were going to be cranky messes. “Mama,” I said, reaching out to put a hand on her arm as she put a pan on the stove. “Thank you.”
She didn’t reply immediately. “You’re welcome,” she said finally. “And I suppose thank you as well.”
“For what?”
She gazed out the window at my father and the kids, the edges of her lips curling up in an unconscious smile. “I don’t think I would have left if you hadn’t needed me.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
“Yes,” she said. “I think it was.”
“I don’t follow.”
She crossed to the refrigerator and pulled out the chicken breasts that had been marinating since the morning. “Do you remember when you were little and you would get croup?”
I shuddered. I had spent two nights in an oxygen tent in the hospital. I mostly remembered the sterile room and the sense of terror, but I still had nightmares about that. “I do.”
“I dragged you to every specialist there was until we found a doctor who told us to take you outside. It was the opposite of what everyone else was saying, but we were desperate. And it worked. I wrapped you in a blanket and sent your father out in the cold with you while I packed a bag for the hospital. But when I came outside to get in the car, you had stopped coughing. The doctor explained that the cold air shocks your system and stops the coughing.”
“But what—?”
She turned toward me. “We needed a shock to our system. I resented your father so much. I had thought, when he retired, that it would be our time. And it wasn’t. And he couldn’t hear me.” She looked out the window and smiled again. “He hears me now.”
I let my eyes drift out the window as well, only to watch Robbie’s throw hit my father in the groin. I moved toward the back door as he doubled over, but my mother stopped me with a hand on my arm. “He’s fine,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
She shrugged. “It’s not like we’re trying to have more kids.”
“Mama!”
“What? Besides, I hear him better now too. Do you know he cooked dinner the other night? I mean, it was awful, but he wants to do more. If we go running out there now, it looks like we don’t think he can handle the kids.”
I returned to the window. He was standing, a child wrapped around each leg as he tried to walk toward the house. “It looks like you’re right,” I said.
She winked at me. “I always am.” She speared a chicken breast with a fork and laid it in the pan. “And absence really does seem to make the heart grow fonder. He’s like a teenager in the bedroom now.”
“Ew,” I said. “I’m going to go change out of my work clothes. Don’t worry about food for me. I may never eat again now.”
The sound of her laughter followed me down the hall and up the stairs.