by T. D. Jakes
The finish was so close that instead of cheers, a hush fell as everyone stared at the electronic clock for each lane, trying to read the seconds, the tenths, the hundredths. And then, at almost the same instant, they comprehended the data: lane eight had won by a scant two hundredths of a second. Bryson’s team had finished runner-up. The partisans for the team in lane eight erupted in yells and whistles. Dave felt like a balloon with all the air squeezed out.
He watched as Bryson and his third-leg partner made the long walk to the other end of the pool to shake hands with their teammates and to congratulate the winning team. The boys looked disappointed, but not crushed. They gave their best, Dave thought. They stood a good chance of winning their next time out. Or the one after that.
“Well, it was a good race,” Julie said. “I wish you could’ve seen his team win, but at least you saw Bryson swim well.”
“Yeah, he’s got no reason to hang his head. He did the job; the other team just did its job a little better today, is all.”
“Well, that’s it for us today,” Julie said. “We might as well get him and head home.”
“Whatever you say.”
When Bryson came out of the dressing room, he gave his mom a little smile and a shrug.
“You swam a great race, Bryson,” Dave said.
“Thanks, Coach. Just wasn’t quite good enough, I guess.”
“Hey, you gave your team a lead,” Julie said. “The rest was up to somebody else.”
“I guess. Hey, Mom, can we get milk shakes on the way home?”
“He’s pretty torn up,” she said.
“I can see that,” Dave said, chuckling.
When he pulled into his driveway, Dave sat for a couple of minutes with his engine idling. He looked at Clarice’s car sitting in the driveway next to him and wondered if she was going to ask him about the meet. He thought about what he might tell her and realized that if he had his way, he wouldn’t tell her anything. He felt protective and proprietary about Bryson and Julie, about the time he’d spent with them. He didn’t want to share the words, the feelings, the experience of it with Clarice. The pride that had surged through him when Bryson won his preliminary heat, then his individual event—that was Dave’s own; it belonged to him. What would Clarice know about it? How could she understand the way it made him feel to know this kid cared enough about what Dave thought that it would actually make him nervous about his performance?
Could Clarice even comprehend something so far outside the boundaries of her career and aspirations? Was there anything in her that could still care about something just because it was important to Dave? He didn’t know. And as he switched off the engine and opened his door, he wasn’t sure he cared.
Dave hadn’t realized how tense he was until the well-trained fingers started digging into the muscles and tendons of his shoulders. He winced with the delicious discomfort of the massage, feeling the twang as each keyed-up nerve released its grip.
He was a little self-conscious about lying on a table with nothing but a towel covering him, but she’d assured him there was nothing to worry about. She was a professional and this was the way it was done. Still, he was glad he was on his stomach. The feeling of her palms gliding over his skin was starting to make him think about things that probably weren’t included on the list of services.
Oh, man . . . she was working up and down either side of his spine now, alternating between little circling probes with her thumbs and hard kneading motions with the heels of her hands. She sure knew what she was doing. Dave couldn’t remember when he’d been this relaxed.
“That feel good?” she asked him. Dave thought he heard a smooth, gliding sound in her voice . . . an inviting, husky tone. He felt himself starting to respond down there and felt a little embarrassed. Get a grip, man! Relaxed is one thing, but . . .
And then her hands moved lower . . . into the small of his back, then inching toward his buttocks. She sent one hand down his outstretched upper arm. He could feel the touch of her clothing against his back as she leaned over him. He could see her hand, so white against the dark brown of his shoulder, gently squeezing and releasing, squeezing and releasing. Her lips were close to his ear; he could feel her breath.
“Why don’t you roll over, and I’ll give you the rest of the treatment?” she said.
His heart was going like a trip hammer. His flesh was fully awake now, pressing almost painfully against the table beneath him.
“What . . . what are you talking about?” he said, unable to keep the tremor of desire out of his voice.
“Don’t you know?” Julie said, sliding her hand beneath the towel, lifting it from him. She eased a hand beneath his hips and gently turned his body toward her, and Dave suddenly realized he wasn’t going to stop himself, not this time . . .
Chapter Twelve
His eyes snapped open; he was staring at the ceiling of his bedroom. He swiveled his head to the left. Clarice was breathing slowly, her shoulders rising and falling as she slept with her back to him.
Dave’s heart was still racing from the arousal of the dream. Where had that come from? Sure, it was only a dream, and he had no control over what his subconscious did while he was asleep, but there was still something a little weird about having such images in his mind while his wife was asleep next to him. It was uncomfortable . . . in a sort of nice, guilty way.
He got out of bed and went to the bathroom. Maybe a hot shower would help him get his mind back on track. Come to think of it, maybe what he really needed was a cold shower.
Clarice was elated; the orthopedist had upgraded her right leg to “weight-bearing as tolerated,” which meant she could get a cane and bump these goofy crutches. It also meant she could begin putting more weight on the leg and maybe start walking a little bit without the cast. Julie advised her to keep the cast on when she went to work or ran errands, however. That made sense to Clarice; outside the relatively controlled environment of her home, she wanted to protect her healing leg from the unexpected. At home, though, she wanted to concentrate on returning all the joints and ligaments of her injured leg to the fullest possible range of motion. Her toes, she’d noticed in particular, still felt a little weak and chancy. Julie had told her she needed to rebuild their strength for when it was time to start walking without the support of a cane or crutch.
Clarice was certainly getting stronger under Julie’s supervision, no question about that. And gradually she was resuming more and more of her former routine. She was going to the office at least four days each week now and staying for a minimum of five hours each time. She’d closed two sales this month—one being the Farbers, who bought the house in Tanglewood with the new intercom system. She also had five promising listings. She was well on her way to resuming her star performance in the office.
Things were getting back on track in her world . . . except for David. The rift between them seemed to be growing, and Clarice didn’t know what to do about it. Actually, when she was honest with herself, she did know what she might do about it; she just didn’t feel capable of doing it.
Sometimes, as she watched TV on the couch and David rustled around in the kitchen or sat in his recliner and leafed through a magazine, she thought about saying something to him. She thought about stepping onto the shaky ground of her own uncertainties, of opening herself up to him for a discussion of what might be happening to their marriage and what might be done about it.
But the trouble with starting such a conversation, she knew, was that you never knew where it was going to end. If things got too honest, she was actually afraid of what she might say. Clarice knew that once certain bridges were crossed—or burned—the way back was hard, if you could get there at all.
And so, night after night, she stared at the TV and listened to him rummaging in the kitchen or flipping the pages of his magazines. The wall of silence and uncertainty just grew higher in her mind.
One day she came home from the office and saw David’s pickup in the driveway.
They’d finally settled with the insurance company, and David had gotten a Club Cab nearly identical to the one he’d lost. It was a little odd for him to be home this early, but not unheard of; if the shifts were running smoothly and the managers were all fully staffed, there might not be anything that needed his attention at the end of the day. As she levered herself out of her car and steadied herself on her cane, she thought little of it. She went in through the garage and tossed her keys on the counter. David’s voice was coming from the bedroom.
“What?” she asked, assuming he was saying something to her. But then he laughed and said something else too low to distinguish.
“What, David?” she said, moving toward the bedroom. Just as she reached the doorway, she heard him say, “Okay, then. Yeah. All right, I’ll talk to you later.”
She looked inside and he was sitting on the bed, his cell phone in his hand. He looked at her. “Yeah? What?”
“Who was on the phone?”
“Nobody.”
His face was impassive, as if a stranger on the street had walked up and asked him the time of day.
“Oh. Well, I heard you talking when I walked in and I just . . . wondered.”
He looked at her and gave her a shrug. She didn’t know how to respond, so she didn’t. But something was odd about the way he was acting.
The rest of that evening, when she knew he wasn’t looking, Clarice studied her husband. In most ways, nothing was different; he still walked the same, sounded the same as he moved through the house, watched the same TV shows, and read the sports pages just like always. He went to bed at his usual time. The silhouette of his presence was almost the same in her awareness as it had always been.
But only almost; something was different. It wasn’t so much anything he said or did, but was more like the absence of something. At first she blamed it on the chasm of noncommunication growing between them, but as she studied on it some more, she knew that wasn’t it—or at least not all of it. Even when David was withdrawn from her, angry at her, she could still feel him, in some way she couldn’t even explain to herself, reaching toward her, gauging her, measuring the distance between them. It was like he had some kind of interpersonal radar constantly sweeping the terrain between them, waiting for an opening.
Now it was as if the radar was switched off. Not only had he pulled away from her—he didn’t care. Or at least that was how it was starting to look to Clarice.
Behind her, she heard the bedroom door close. She picked up the remote and thumbed the volume down to a quieter level. She channel surfed for a half hour or so through the late-night talk shows and infomercials and reruns of shows from two or three seasons ago. After a while, she punched the power button and tossed the remote onto the couch beside her.
She’d actually shut David out, it seemed. She did a quick internal scan to see how she felt about that. In the depths of her depression immediately following the accident, when David had been so constant in his wish to help, to get her going again, she hadn’t been able to feel anything like gratitude—only frustration with herself, guilt for her inability to respond, and, she hated to admit, a sort of helpless aggravation with him for not being able to get it. A little later, when, with Julie’s help, she started to feel as if she were moving back into some measure of control, she still hadn’t found the strength or desire or whatever else she would’ve needed to reach across the growing abyss toward her husband. Now, with the rift between them all but complete, he’d finally quit trying.
Was it possible their marriage could really come apart?
Was she willing to do anything to prevent that?
Clarice sat up until well past midnight turning this question over in her mind. She constructed scenarios and envisioned futures, attempting to try on this odd new life she’d suddenly realized as a possibility.
What would her mother say? Mama had been dumped by two different men. Even so, Clarice never remembered seeing her mother cry. But the few times Clarice could recall asking about her daddy or the man who had sired her brother and sister, Mama closed up tighter than a clamshell. After a while, Clarice learned not to ask anymore. The experience that gave her mother an iron determination to make her own way and teach her children to do the same also left her hard and wary, like an old, sullen catfish that’d had too many hooks in its mouth.
Is that what’s happening to me? Am I trying to insulate myself from going through the same thing that happened to my mother—even before I have to?
Still lying on the couch, she finally drifted off to sleep.
When she woke up, the thick, buttered sunlight of morning was leaking through the seams in the blinds.
And David was already gone.
Julie’s cell phone rattled in her purse. She felt a bright ripple of anticipation as she dug it out and looked at the screen.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Julie.”
“Hi, Dave.”
“How’s it going this morning?”
“Oh . . . fine, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Yeah. Good, I mean. I’m good. How are you?”
“You busy today?”
“Pretty much, yeah. I’ve got patients all the way up until noon. You?”
“Oh, just paperwork. You know what they say: The job ain’t finished till the paperwork’s done.”
“They say that? Really?”
She heard his chuckle, low and warm. It spread a glow throughout her body.
“Well, I just wanted to see how you were doing this morning,” he said. “I’ll talk to you later, okay?”
“Okay, Dave. Take it easy.”
“You, too. Bye, now.”
“Bye.”
She touched the end button, feeling sad and happy in equal amounts and at the same time. She stared at her desk and shook her head, a sardonic look on her face.
What is going on here? As if you didn’t know. But . . . he’s married. Yeah, and so were you once. He’s a good man. A good man who’s unhappy at home. But he’s not your good man, is he?
His voice, rich and sweet as cocoa . . . the look on Bryson’s face when he saw Dave sitting beside her in the stands.
Her cell phone was ringing again.
“Hello?”
“Okay, so I didn’t really just call to see how you were doing.”
“No?”
“No. I called to see if you had plans for lunch.”
An alarm started somewhere inside her head, but as she sat there and concentrated on the image in her mind—Dave’s face, engaged and interested, his eyes looking into hers from across the table—the siren got softer and softer until finally it faded into the distance.
“No, not really.”
“Yeah? Well, that’s cool. What do you like to eat?”
“Umm, it doesn’t really matter. How about—”
“—Pasta,” they both said at the same instant. They laughed.
“Great minds,” he said.
“That’s what they say. So . . . Gino’s?”
“The place where we ate the day of the meet, right?”
“That’s it.”
“I’ll see you there. Around 12:15 or so?”
“It’ll be crowded, but okay.”
She ended the call, but this time she only felt happy.
At least, that was what she decided to tell herself.
Dave pulled into the parking lot. Julie was right; he’d be lucky to find a parking spot. He cruised around back and took the last remaining place, which happened to be in a spot of shade, he noted with satisfaction. Good karma, maybe.
He went inside, appreciating the blast of air-conditioning that met him when he pulled open the glass door. He looked around and saw Julie waving at him from a table in the corner.
Gino’s had once been some sort of fast-food chain; the squared-off architecture and plate-glass windows running down the front and one side gave Dave the distinct impression of burgers, fries, shakes, and various ice cream desserts served u
p by ticket number from the counter that now housed warming trays filled with sauces, pastas, and pizza by the slice. The guys who ran the place looked and sounded vaguely Mediterranean, maybe eastern European. But the food was delicious and reasonably priced.
And Gino’s was on the opposite side of town from Clarice’s office.
Dave scooted into the chair across the table from Julie.
“Hey.”
“Hey yourself,” she said.
“Been waiting long?”
She shook her head. “Like I said, it’s crowded.”
Dave glanced around and nodded. One of the Mediterranean guys was standing beside him, holding a pad. “You guys ready to order?”
“I’ll have the cannelloni special,” Julie said. “Iced tea to drink.”
“Same,” Dave said. The guy scribbled a couple of seconds, nodded, and left.
“When’s Bryson’s next meet?” Dave said. “I want to be there.”
She smiled at him. “You don’t have to do that, Dave.”
“I know. That’s not why I’m doing it.”
She dug a daily planner out of her purse. “Let’s see, it looks like Saturday—oh.”
“What?”
“It’s a road trip.” She told him the name of the club that was hosting the meet; it was in a city about three hours away. She said they’d probably leave after school on Friday and find a cheap hotel near the swim club.
“Do you know what time he swims on Saturday?”
“No, that won’t be posted until after his next practice, tomorrow evening. But Dave, that’s a lot of trouble—”
“Chill, sister,” he said, holding up a hand. “If I want to drive over on Saturday and watch my man Bryson, you don’t need to make a thing out of it, you know what I’m sayin’?”
She looked at him and shook her head, giving him a sideways smile. “All right. Fine. It’ll mean the world to him if you can make it.”