Cherry Baby

Chapter 65

“Well, look who’s here. I wasn’t expecting to see you anytime soon.”

Tom’s dad was in the driveway, working on his truck. He was wearing a coat and holding a travel mug. And smiling at Cherry

like she was about to say something funny.

“Hey, there,” Cherry said, walking up the drive.

She’d never had much of a relationship with Tom’s dad. Tom had never wanted her to.

Tom used to stop by his dad’s house several times a week. He’d bring leftovers. Mow the lawn. Go through the mail. If Cherry

was with him, he’d have her wait in the car. “There’s no reason for you to have to deal with him, too,” Tom would say.

“Is he so bad?”

“He’s not so good.”

Cherry walked up the driveway. “Is Tom around?”

His dad shook his head. “She wants to know if Tom’s around . . . Where else would he be? Oh, I know—Bever-ly Hills. ‘Swimming pools,’ ” he half sang. “‘Movie stars.’ ”

Cherry nodded, making herself smile.

Tom’s dad was big like Tom. And he was fair like Tom. Heavy. Red-faced. With bushy eyebrows and a scruffy beard. She was pretty

sure he was the reason Tom wouldn’t try a beard, even though it might look nice on him.

Cherry couldn’t get up to the house without squeezing past her father-in-law—or walking into the snowy yard and making a big

show of avoiding him.

“I guess I’ll have to see that movie of his,” his dad said, standing squarely in front of Cherry. “That’s what they tell me. Even though I’m not in it. I’m not in the comic strips, either. The funny papers, we used to call ’em, you know?”

“That’s right,” Cherry said. “We did.”

She only really knew Tom’s dad from sporadic holidays and birthday visits. She’d sat next to him at their wedding rehearsal.

She’d never had a real conversation with him. She wondered if anyone ever did. His dad only seemed to ask rhetorical questions.

“I’m not in any of them,” he said. “I have people who would tell me if I was.”

Cherry nodded.

“But you’re in them,” he said, grinning. Cherry might call it a leer if the very idea wasn’t so upsetting. “Baby, Baby, Baby.”

“I don’t think it’s meant to be a memoir,” she said.

“Ha! She doesn’t think it’s meant to be a memoir! Maybe I should have been drawing little cartoons—instead of working on boilers.

Seems like a pretty good grift, huh.”

Cherry smiled. “I wouldn’t call it a grift . . .”

He took a drink from his mug. “Well, you’re gonna get your share, aren’t you? You put your money on the right horse. Who would

have guessed?” He started laughing. “Not me. I thought he was the one who gambled right. I used to tell him, ‘Good job, Tommy. That girl will keep the bills paid.’ ”

“Is Tom inside?” Cherry pointed at the door.

“I don’t really read comic books,” his dad said. “I never have. I tell people that I don’t need the pictures, you know? I

don’t need to see Jane run. But people like his stuff. They’re always telling me so. I’ll bet you like it. He made you famous. Baby, Baby.”

Cherry took a step back.

“‘Baby, baby, baby,’ ” he sang, “‘where did our love go?’ ” He laughed and took another drink.

“Cherry?”

Cherry looked up at the house. Tom was standing in the door.

“Your wife’s here!” Tom’s dad shouted without turning around. “Wasn’t expecting to see her around anytime soon.”

Tom was already walking toward her. Cutting through the snow to avoid his dad. He was wearing his bright white Nikes.

When he got to Cherry, he put his hand on her back and started leading her down the driveway.

“We were just catching up,” his dad called after them.

“Sorry,” Cherry said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

Tom shook his head and kept them moving.

“I wanted to talk to you,” she said, “and you didn’t pick up.”

“I was in a meeting.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” he said. They were already to her car.

“I forgot how he is.”

“Yeah.” Tom was standing between Cherry and his dad. He wouldn’t look at either of them.

“Please can we talk?” Cherry whispered.

“Yeah,” Tom said, opening her door. Then he looked over at her and seemed to realize what she’d asked. “No. Cherry . . . what

more is there to say?”

“I think maybe everything.” She stepped closer to Tom. Away from the car. “I can’t imagine running out of things I want to say to you.”

He frowned down at her.

“Will you come home with me?” she asked. “So we can talk?”

Tom shook his head, still frowning. “No. I can’t keep going back there. I can’t handle having to leave.”

She grabbed the bottom of his T-shirt—not to yank on it, just to hold on. “I won’t make you leave,” she said.

She wouldn’t. If things got terrible, Cherry would be the one to leave. She’d leave him the house and the dog. She’d move to California.

Tom was staring at her face. Still frowning.

“Please talk to me,” she said. “Somewhere.”

Tom told her to meet him at a diner down the road. Cherry had never been there before.

When she got to the restaurant, it was closed. They didn’t serve dinner.

She waited by the door. Tom pulled in and parked.

“They’re closed,” she said, before he got to her.

“Oh.” He looked around, like something else might be open. But this wasn’t a business district. There was just this diner,

and a car wash, and across the street, Abbie’s Road Beatles-themed pizzeria.

Tom looked back at Cherry.

She shrugged.

Abbie’s Road was still tiny. And still strange.

Tom held the door for her, and Cherry walked to the far end of the empty dining room, in the opposite corner from “Octopus’s

Garden.” She sat down under a mural of Paul McCartney eating pizza with a walrus.

Tom stood by the table. “What do you want?”

“Whatever you feel like,” she said.

She watched him walk over to the counter. He ruffled the back of his hair.

Cherry needed to see him make that gesture again.

She needed to keep seeing it, as his hair went gray.

Tom came back to the table and set a glass of ice and a can of Coke Zero in front of her.

He took off his peacoat—he must have grabbed it from the house before he left. He was wearing a nice brown pullover sweater

underneath. It looked new. And expensive. Pendleton, maybe. Maybe a Christmas gift.

He sat down across from Cherry and sighed a little. Then looked up at her expectantly, like this was her show.

“I . . .” Cherry said.

Tom waited.

“I don’t know how to get through this,” she said.

He waited.

“Like—” She gestured between them. “I don’t know how to get through the part where I’m angry and hurt and I don’t trust you.”

Tom rested his elbows on the table.

“I want to get through it.” She was talking fast. “I want to be on the other side of it—I think I wanted you to pull me through it somehow, with your bare hands. I wanted you to come home and bang down the door.”

Tom looked down at the table.

“But instead . . .” Cherry forced herself to keep talking. “Well, you acted like you’d been expecting it, Tom—like you were

just waiting for me to end everything. Like you were relieved.”

He looked up at her. “I wasn’t relieved.”

Cherry’s voice broke: “Why didn’t you come home?”

His shoulders twitched. It wasn’t even a shrug. “Because I didn’t feel like I deserved to be there. I started to think . . .”

He looked in her eyes. “Maybe I never deserved to be there.”

Cherry shook her head. Her voice dropped to a murmur. “Don’t say that.”

He tilted his head. “Why? Because it’s true?”

She shook her head again. A tear slid down her cheek.

“If you don’t believe you deserve good things,” Cherry whispered, “how can I believe I’m a good thing?”

Tom’s eyes widened and started to shine. He pushed his jaw to the side, like she’d punched him. Neither of them looked away.

“Tom!” someone shouted.

For a second Cherry thought it was someone who recognized him, but it was just the girl at the counter.

Tom stood up. He wiped his eyes on the back of his wrist. A minute later, he came back to the table with a salad for Cherry

and sat down.

“You were right,” Cherry said. She had to keep pushing forward. She had a list in her head, an agenda; there were things that she needed to say. “I never let you apologize—because that would have made it real. I would have had to acknowledge what was happening.”

Tom nodded. “I get that,” he said gruffly.

“Do you still want to apologize?” she asked.

He looked surprised. “Now?”

“I mean . . .” Cherry lifted a shoulder. “Yeah?”

Tom studied her face—maybe to see if she meant it. Then he leaned forward on his elbows. “Cherry, I’m sorry,” he said. “I

was lonely and depressed. And it had been so long since you and I . . . since we’d felt like ourselves. Together.”

Cherry nodded.

“I felt like you were angry with me all the time,” Tom said.

“I was.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, for . . . for suddenly having a life without me.” She pressed her lips together, crumbling. “You weren’t supposed

to have a whole life without me. We were supposed to be in this together.”

“I didn’t have a whole anything,” Tom said. “I didn’t even feel like a whole person.”

Cherry clenched her hands in her lap. She was trying not to cry like a little girl. She was crying like a little girl. “Tom,

were you having an affair with Rachel?”

“I don’t know,” he said hollowly.

“How can you not know?”

He shook his head. Like he didn’t know that either.

“Did you sleep with her?”

“Once,” he said. “After you told me you wanted a divorce.”

Cherry felt like she was dying. (Again.) (Before all this, she hadn’t known you could be so sad that your bones ached.)

“It was a mistake,” he said. “I’d been drinking.”

“Tom, you’ve been drinking?”

“Now? No. Then . . . yeah. Sometimes. I’d had a few drinks the night you called . . . That was the first time we’d ever kissed,

for what it’s worth.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what it’s worth.”

“So you’re not . . .”

“I’m not . . . ?”

“Seeing Rachel,” Cherry said.

Tom made a face. “No. I wouldn’t have—Just, no. We haven’t even worked together since then.”

“Did you have to tell Ophelia?” Tom’s editor. Rachel’s boss.

He looked beaten. “I didn’t have to tell her. No.”

Cherry felt a new wave of humiliation and pain rush through her. She waited for it to pass. It didn’t. She crossed her arms

on the table and laid her head down.

“I’m sorry,” Tom said somewhere over her head.

“Okay,” she said. “I hear you.”

“Cherry . . .”

“I hear you.” She waited for the pain to settle before she lifted up her head. She looked in his eyes. “Do you really want

to come home?”

“Yes,” Tom said.

“I don’t understand why. You could start over.”

“You really think that sounds appealing to me?”

“Yes,” Cherry said emphatically. “You could have something that isn’t already fucked up. In a place with no bad memories. The

whole world is at your feet, Tom—literally. You could have . . .” She shook her head. “. . . anything.”

Tom leaned over the table. Angry. “Cherry, if you don’t believe that you deserve good things, how am I supposed to believe

that I’m a good thing?”

“Tom!” the girl at the counter called out.

“Fuck,” Tom said, sitting back. He shook his head like he was trying to clear it. “What are we doing here?”

“The pizza’s just okay,” Cherry said quietly, “but the theming’s extraordinary.”

He shot her a helpless look. Nothing like a smile. Then stood up.

He came back with a pizza and two plates, and set them off to the side. Like he’d brought the pizza for people sitting at

the other end of the table.

Then he sat down right next to Cherry, on the same side of the table. Facing her. He took her hand.

She let him.

Tom hunched forward. “I don’t want the world,” he said. “I want you. You’re my lucky day, Cherry. You’re the only home I’ve ever known, and I don’t want . . . something else. I don’t want a fresh start with someone I’ll never love half as much. I just want to find my way back to you.” He squeezed

her hand. “Let me come back to you. Let me come home.”

She looked in his eyes. “Tom . . .”

“I got lost,” he said. “I’ve been so lost.”

Cherry let go of his hand. She stood up. Her chair tipped backwards but didn’t fall.

“Cherry?”

Cherry, Cherry, Cherry.

Baby, Baby, Baby.

“I’m getting a box for the pizza,” she said. “We can eat it at home.”

They had to take two cars. Which was awkward.

Tom beat her to the house. He was waiting on the porch for her, holding the pizza box.

He watched her walk up to the door. Stevie was already barking at them.

When Cherry got to the porch, Tom fished his keys out of his pocket. “Are you sure about this?” he asked.

She nodded.

“If you kick me out again,” he said, “I’m not leaving.”

Cherry didn’t flinch.

“Not right away,” he added.

She laughed. It made her tearful. “Are you saying that if I kick you out, you’re going to leave really slowly?”

Tom smiled at her. But not with his eyes—his eyes were scared. “I’m serious,” he said.

“Okay.”

He pushed his key into the lock.

“Tom, wait—” Cherry put her hand over his wrist. “There was . . . I was seeing someone, and we—”

He shook his head. He brought his hand up to her cheek, leaving the keys hanging in the door. “Shhh, baby, I know. We don’t

have to—You don’t—I mean, unless you need to say it.”

“I don’t need to say it,” Cherry said.

Tom held her cheek. “Can we leave it out here?”

Out here in the snow, Cherry thought. In this lost year.

Could it be that easy?

Could Cherry just empty her pockets and shake out the pain and anger? Wipe away thirty-two kinds of tears?

What if she left Rachel out here? With her red hair and jumpsuits.

And Russ, too. With his gorgeous eyes and good intentions. (Could Cherry really forget Russ? Maybe not. But she could let him go. She could let him drift.)

Cherry had died so many times since Tom left. And since she told him to stay away.

She’d felt her bone marrow fester.

She’d spent months picking herself up in tiny pieces and painstakingly putting them right.

Could she set those months aside?

Could she hand this man those pieces?

This man who had failed her.

Who’d abandoned her.

Who’d let the winds blow him far, far away?

No.

No.

No.

Yes.

She nodded. “Tom . . .”

“What is it, baby?”

“I know you said you didn’t want a fresh start, but you’re getting one anyway.”

Cherry opened the door.

She pulled Tom inside.