When he got downstairs, Caleb and Gracie sat on the hall bench, clutching their lunch bags. Emma stood like the family duenna, arms crossed against her chest, as Caleb swung his feet back and forth and Gracie gripped her backpack.
“Emma wouldn’t let us move, Dad,” Caleb complained.
“Because that’s what he told me.” Emma poked Caleb’s foot with her sneaker.
“Here.” Gracie reached for the chrome Thermos cup on the table. “Your coffee.”
“Just a second. I need something.” Ben dropped his briefcase on the floor.
“What happened to ‘not one minute more’?” Emma imitated Ben’s clipped tone. “We have to go, Dad.”
“One minute more,” Caleb repeated.
“Quit it, all of you.” Ben went into the small bathroom off the hall. He rummaged through the medicine cabinet for a few minutes and then slammed it shut. “Jesus Christ. Is anything in this house in the right place?”
He ran up the stairs two at a time. After checking the bathrooms upstairs and the linen cabinet, he yelled out, “Where’s the aspirin? Does anyone know where your mother keeps it?”
“We have to go. The trip bus will leave.” Emma sounded hysterical.
“Then find the damned aspirin,” he shouted as he pounded down the stairs.
Emma found and practically threw the pills at him—what the hell were they doing in the kitchen cabinet?
The moment they were buckled in, he sped out and onto Myrtle Street, getting only one short block before having to slam on the brakes and stop short at backed-up traffic.
“Damn, damn, damn.” Ben hit the dashboard with the side of his hand. “I’m sunk if I don’t get to the meeting.”
“What will happen, Daddy?” Gracie asked. “Aren’t you the boss?”
“Yes, sweet. I’m the boss. They can’t start without me, but I can’t have them think I screwed up.”
CHAPTER 5
Maddy
Would Maddy get credit for arriving at work scarcely ten minutes late? Sure, she’d promised to be here by seven, but the hour marker had barely passed. Would Olivia appreciate the improvement from her usual half-hour-or-more tardiness?
Probably not.
The difference between Olivia, best friend at work, and Kath, best friend since college, was that Kath saw Maddy’s flaws and pasted over them, while Olivia rendered them in Technicolor, asked or not, so Maddy could work on them.
Maddy’s red briefcase and matching sandals provided the single bright spots in her hospital-issue, social-worker-grade office. She had time to read maybe five emails before she and Olivia left for group.
“Hey! Good of you to come in!” Olivia put down a pile of pink telephone messages, leaned back, and grabbed her hospital mug emblazoned with a blue caduceus. Oh, the perks of their job.
Maddy smiled as though Olivia was offering nothing but true gratitude. Screw her sarcasm. It was too early. “You’re very welcome.” She held out a small greasy bag. “Coffee cake muffin.”
Olivia took the bag and then patted the roll sitting on top of her waistband. “Come on home and join your sisters.”
Maddy unwrapped her bagel. “I hate when you do that.”
Olivia lowered her glasses a bit and looked over them at her. “Do ya now? Well, I hate that folks in this town worship the Red Sox more than they treasure black kids. Everyone hates something.”
Olivia rushed to make fun of her body before anyone else could, and she didn’t give a damn if Maddy thought her Sicilian and Jamaican genes blended into Amazonian beauty. She treated herself hard—but no worse than she treated the rest of the world. If you had masochistic tendencies, then Olivia was your girl.
“Gotcha.” Maddy bit into the cream-cheese-covered doughy bagel. “I hate men.”
“Marriage not so good this week?”
Marriage not so good this year.
“Patience gets wearying—you know what I mean?” Maddy asked.
“Nope.” Marriage had eluded Olivia. She peeled the paper cover away from her muffin. “What happened?”
“Nothing. I don’t want to get into it.”
Olivia must have been massively sick of hearing her complain about Ben, the kids, her life. God knows Maddy had tired of hearing her own voice.
“Later.” Maddy took a notebook from her briefcase. “We’ll talk about it later. I have to prepare for Sabine’s hearing.” Sabine and her against the DCF, the Department of Children and Families—those weren’t good odds.
Sabine belonged to the Wednesday Blues Club. Some members still wore their black-and-blues; some only carried the memories of being beaten. Many had their pain doubled and tripled by having their mothering put on trial by DCF. Sabine was one of those—she was trying to regain custody of her kids.
Three children similar in age to Maddy’s children—a circumstance she didn’t want to imagine.
Despite the painful situations of the women of the Wednesday Blues, Maddy and Olivia loved the group. Compared to most of their hospital clients—the grieving parents, the end-stage cancer victims, the depleted spouses of Alzheimer’s patients—the Blues members might be battered, but they still had juice.
Olivia and Maddy rode to Dorchester in separate cars. Usually they drove in Olivia’s—she believed herself the superior driver—but Olivia would be going back to the hospital after group, and Maddy would be taking Sabine to the courthouse for the hearing.
The warm stuffy church basement where they held group smelled of long-gone parish suppers. Moira, the quietest and oldest, arrived first. Married for more than thirty years, her husband had knocked her up with a regularity that ended only at menopause. Never had hot flashes been so welcome.
Homemade oatmeal cookies sat on the pitted wood table every week; Moira’s husband thought she spent Wednesdays helping at the rectory and that she made the cookies for the priest. Grateful for the sugar, desperate for any bit of comfort in their lives that they didn’t have to pay or beg for, the women inhaled the treats.
“Hey, Mama,” Kendra greeted Moira. The young woman bounced into the room, movement and light to Moira’s stillness, with her flying braids wrapped in brightly colored clothes she’d designed and sewn, small and tight to Moira’s shapelessness.
As usual, the others seemed to come in as one. Pia, the youngest, was nineteen. Beautiful as a dream, raising three children, with an assault record from when she’d stabbed a girl who’d mouthed off at her daughter, she was shy, usually silent, and always sat next to Maddy.
Olivia cleared her throat at the five women in chairs. In a group with ten on the roster, they considered that excellent attendance. “Okay, who’s on first?”
“Me.” Amber’s stories exploded out each week. “So he’s back.”
“How do you feel about that?” Moira had picked up their jargon during her long tenure.
“How do I feel? That motherfucker thinks he can just walk in and start over like it never even happened? No effin’ way.” Amber touched her left wrist, which until last week had been in a cast. “But I gotta let him see Dion, right? A baby need his daddy.”
“Didn’t I hear you say you’d never, ever, till hell fucking freezes over, ever take him back?” Kendra asked. “Wasn’t that you yapping last week?”
Olivia held up her hand. “Hold off. Let Amber tell her story.”
Amber cut her eyes at Kendra and flipped her limp blond hair over her shoulder. “Tito was straight when he came over. And he’d bought all kinds of shit. Sneakers for Dion. A little tiny Patriots jacket and a football.”
“Dion’s only six months,” Moira said. “Does he need a football? Or sneakers?”
“Listen, Tito’s only done me up once,” said Amber.
“Who are you bullshitting?” Kendra asked.
“Whoa—” Olivia warned again.
Kendra sat up straight. “Well, it’s true. She’s lying. Tito did her a thousand times. Unless you’re only counting broken bones. Is that what you’re doing, girl?”
>
Now Maddy held up a traffic-cop hand. “Nobody ends up here because they want to. I know I’m repeating myself, but too bad. Obviously you aren’t all hearing it. You don’t fall in love with a man because he’s cruel; you end up in here when someone turns out to have a whole other side than you saw when you fell in love.”
Like Ben. So hotly in love with her, so determined to be her hero in the beginning. Maddy shut off the thoughts with an iron fist. It was normal. Every woman who worked with victims saw bits of herself. Look at Olivia, avoiding any relationship for fear she’d end up like her parents.
“Face it, they hide it in the beginning.” Olivia swallowed a bite of her cookie before her next word. “You fall in love because he’s your dream. When he turns into your nightmare, you don’t know what to do because it feels too late and—”
“Because he already has you hooked.”
Everyone turned toward the bitter voice. Sabine spat out words as though she paid for each one. It wasn’t unusual for her to intimidate the group, between her sinew-skinny body, hard as a ten-year-old boy’s, arms scarred from years of drugs, and fight-scarred fists. After speaking, she ran a hand over her brown burr cut. Sabine’s mother called her an ugly fish-belly half-breed and said Sabine was just like her rapist father. Maddy wondered if Sabine glanced at every white man, looking for one with her corn-green eyes and a dirty soul she believed would match her own.
“Tito’s like heroin,” Sabine said. “How’d you get off that?”
“I was never hooked,” Amber said. “I just chipped.”
Kendra snorted. Amber looked around for the right answer.
“We’re all just swinging with the tides sometimes, looking to catch an anchor,” Maddy said. “Waiting to find the right answer, the best path. The trick is, the problem is, you really can’t just wait—”
“I just want to feel good,” Amber said.
“I know.” Maddy nodded and tipped her head toward Olivia. They’d worked together enough years to know exactly when it was time to pass the ball.
“The problem is this,” Olivia said, looking at Amber but then directing her gaze around the entire room. “We can’t be waiting for someone to hand us respect, for a man to make us feel good, as though we’re puppies waiting to have our bellies patted. Happiness comes from a whole lotta different places. A man’s love is just one piece of that huge cake. And even harder? You gotta bake that damn cake yourself.”
• • •
Sabine’s mercifully short custody hearing could have been worse—some hope for the future seemed possible. At least they gave lip service to the role domestic violence had played in Sabine’s case. Still, pulling away from the Dorchester courthouse, Maddy felt as though she’d already worked an entire day. She’d offered to drive Sabine home, but was grateful she said no.
She pulled up to a stoplight and waited to make a right turn. There was heavy traffic, but she didn’t care. Even worn out, she felt good—lightened. A morning without driving the kids was a gift from the gods. Leaving while Ben slept had been strange, but she assured herself everybody would be just fine. Emma would get the kids dressed and give them breakfast. She’d already packed lunches. She’d even made fresh juice. Ben simply had to shower and get himself dressed. She should be so lucky.
A siren sounded. She looked in all the mirrors, wondering from which direction the ambulance was approaching. Flashing red lights sparked close behind her. A cop car. No surprise in this neighborhood—every corner offered drug deals.
Maddy pulled over to the curb, next to an empty lot littered with garbage. Across the street were a grate-shuttered bar, a rat hole of a liquor store, a Chinese restaurant offering only a boxed window in which one could shout orders through a small hole in a plate of clouded plastic, and a series of forbidding triple-deckers.
Three young men watched her with arms crossed, cigarettes hanging from their mouths. She hit the button to lock all the windows, waiting for the cop car to pass, a shiver passing over her as she imagined what horror awaited the arrival of the police.
The men’s eyes burned. The siren screeched. She was eager to be away from the unfamiliar streets, the wasteland of warehouses and empty lots.
She wanted to get closer to security. The safety of strangers was never a sure thing.
CHAPTER 6
Ben
Halfway to dropping Emma off in South Boston, Ben remembered the meeting papers sitting right where he’d left them. On the bed. He’d have to go back home, and just to make it as bad as possible, it was starting to rain.
Son of a bitch.
He’d be late for certain.
Son of a goddamn bitch.
The moment she closed the car door, he sped back home.
Forty-five long minutes later, holding the Boston Globe over his head, Ben ran into the house and up the stairs, leaving the door open, letting in the flies, the mosquitoes, and the jungle heat. Rain and sweat slicked his face. The bedroom was stuffy and hot; he’d closed all the windows when he’d left.
Stacks of papers and folders were scattered over, next to, and under the bed. He spread piles over the wrinkled bedcovers, throwing files one on top of another until he found what he needed. He opened the yellow folder and flipped through the pages. Yellow for administration, red for current cases, beige for closed, blue for fiscal, green for research, purple for political stuff, and brown for general crap that didn’t go anywhere else. Maybe he’d tell Elizabeth to start a new category: black for nobody gives a shit.
There. He found the file. One small victory.
• • •
Three minutes later Ben barely looked in his rearview mirror as he once again slammed out of the driveway.
As he pulled onto the Jamaicaway, he turned on the radio, punching buttons until he hit “The Enemy” by Anthrax. Pounding music calmed him, something Maddy didn’t understand. Rock knocked out the garbage he dealt with all day.
He passed the tired Plymouth in front of him. This traffic could make you blow your brains out. No one knew how to drive the Jamaica-way, an insane winding back road of a parkway that people drove as though it were a speedway. Ben wove in and out to get ahead, another thing that made Maddy crazy.
Some days he felt like there was just too much about him that Maddy wanted to change.
The curving road turned bumper to bumper. Ben crawled fifteen minutes to go half a mile with no way out, another reason for hating the piece of road from the dark ages.
Keeping an eye on the cars in front of him as he inched toward the rotary, Ben hit the CD button. “Jump” blasted out. Piece-of-shit song. He needed to jump this damn road. Only half an hour until the meeting started. Heavy rain slowed it all more. Moses could part the traffic like the Red Sea and he’d probably still be late.
This Elizabeth thing was playing closer to the fire than it should. After drinking two vodka tonics last night, she’d practically offered herself up in a prep school sort of way.
Cars spilled into the four-way from every direction. Some Buick Regal moron sitting like a lump of mashed potatoes blocked him. Ben tapped the horn. Regal got in first position and stopped. You got an opening, idiot. GO.
He could tell Lissie was interested. Not like she wanted to marry him, but the hunger of a young woman seeking a frisson of danger. Safe danger. At her age, he seemed like power. Give her a few years and she’d consider him a hack. She’d have moved on to those in line for real power: the men who’d run for office, who’d be in line for running the biggest firms in town. Or men from New York.
Regal sat as though driving the Buddha car. In the lane to Ben’s right, cars merged into the rotary on a regular basis.
Ben blasted the horn this time, joined by the growing line waiting.
Move, motherfucker!
He squeezed hard, passing in front of the Regal and cutting off a car from behind. Cars streamed around the circle. Ben forced his way in, watching the Regal in the rearview, still stuck there, the wallflower of cars, whe
n his cell phone rang. Lissie? He glanced at the screen, where Maddy flashed.
For the briefest moment he considered not answering. But that was an uncrossable line. Marriage meant always answering. Marriage meant being tied by the possibility of missing a deadline.
“Maddy?”
“Ben, you have to come pick me up.”
“What happened? Where are you?”
“The cops pulled me over—”
“What for?”
“Having an unregistered car. They towed away the car and left me standing on a deserted stretch of Dot Ave.”
“Unregistered?” Ben drove forward three inches. “The renewal application came months ago. Are you fucking kidding me? How could you forget to do that?”
“What’s the difference? Just come—this isn’t a place I want to be a minute longer. Where are you?”
“On the Jamaicaway. On my way to a meeting. Late. Jesus, take a cab. You got yourself into this jam.”
“No cabs will pick me up here—you know that. There’s no way to walk anywhere. You’re barely ten minutes away.”
“Jesus, if you’d just taken care of the renewal when it came, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“Ben, please. I need you. Just come and drop me off at work, okay? Then I’ll get my mother to help me get the car back.”
He pushed out an impatient sigh and counted to three. “Give me the exact intersection. I’ll be right there.”
• • •
Ben barely said hello when she got in the car. He’d already called Elizabeth to cancel everything. His hands clenched the wheel so hard he thought he might be able to snap the fucking plastic in half. He couldn’t even look at her.
“For God’s sake, how the hell could you forget to do something so simple and so important?” He spit the words out the side of his mouth as he headed back in the same direction from which he’d come. His Groundhog Day—driving back and forth on the Jamaicaway in some version of the road to hell.
“How many times are you going to say the same thing?” Maddy stared straight ahead as she spoke.
Accidents of Marriage Page 5