First to disembark was the monitor. Behind her came a boy. Brad would later come to know him as Jimmy Ellis. Behind the boy was Abbie. They were chatting. Jibbering and jabbering, as his daughter liked to call it.
“Hi, Dad!” she called out, and she was smiles, all beautiful little-girl, tug-at-the-heart-strings smiles, as she walked up the steps into Morgantown Elementary.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Friday, September 12
“I want to make love to you, Brad,” the voice on the other end of the line was saying throatily. “I want us to fuck our brains out, just like in the good old days. You were always so gooooood in bed.”
Heather’s drunkenness came through clearly. Whether this was her idea of a joke or if in some demented way she was expressing desire, Brad didn’t know—and didn’t care. He pressed the phone against his ear so tightly it almost hurt. Not because he was hanging on her every word, but because he feared the whole newsroom was going to tune in.
“Heather . . .” he began.
“I want to sink down on your big, throbbing—”
“You’re drunk.” He spit the words into the phone.
“And you’re a cocky asshole.” She spit back, her voice turning to ice, just like that. That was what had always frightened Brad, the split-second shifts of mood. From glad to sad in the time it took to snap your fingers. As long as he’d known her, he’d never been able to figure out if that was really Heather, an emotional seesaw, or a trick she’d picked up in acting class.
“Thank you,” he said, “from the bottom of my heart.”
“An emotionless cocky asshole who cares only about his fucking newspaper and his fucking awards and his fucking ego. You’re a selfish prick, Brad. That’s the worst kind of thing to be.”
“And you,” Brad hissed, “are one of life’s all-time losers. Headlined any Broadway plays lately, Heather? Hmmm? Any TV movies of the week? Any Cosmo covers in the works, or aren’t crow’s-feet in this month?”
It was a low blow.
The kind of low blow that had greatly accelerated the decline and decay of their relationship during its final destructive months. He’d vowed once they were history, once the decree was signed, sealed, and delivered, that he would never stoop to that level (he considered it her level, just as she considered it his) again. And with a couple of notable exceptions (including one extremely ugly scene on the sidewalk of Park Avenue South), he’d kept that vow. But now—now, for some reason, it was too tempting.
His barbs were true, as were hers. That is what gave them such lethal impact. He knew what her career had degenerated to. He knew where her dreams had gone, melted into the ground. Waiting on tables while waiting for the big role that was going to catapult her to the top again—and knowing deep in her soul the chance of its happening was next to nil. If there had been a soft spot for her left in him, he might have acknowledged the real-life role she’d been forced to play and felt a degree of sympathy. Because the veer Heather Pratt’s once-stellar career had taken really was a tragedy, in its own small way.
But time was long since past he could feel anything but contempt. He imagined it was the same for her.
“Up for a Pulitzer again this year?” she sneered. “I can’t tell you how very, very proud we’d all be, seeing you rewarded for defending truth, justice, and the American way. You know, until you moved out, I guess I never realized how awesome it was to be so close to a real superhero.”
His bile was up, and he wanted to swear. He wanted to call her the word he’d used in his interview with Dexter. That would have been very satisfying, but he couldn’t. Out of the corner of his eye he’d noticed Rod and others watching him but pretending not to.
“Heather,” he said, straining for control, “you have five seconds to cut the shit. If you don’t, I’m going to hang up. Then I’m going to buzz the operator and tell her to hold my calls. And don’t make this a test. I mean it. I don’t have time for any more of your crap.”
That had a sobering effect.
“I called because of Abbie,” she stated flatly.
“What about her?”
Jesus, Brad thought. Now we’re going to get into the custody issue all over again. The ghosts don’t go away, do they? And I thought I’d put enough distance between us. The North Pole wouldn’t have been far enough.
“Don’t sound so hostile. I am legally entitled to have her once a week, you know.”
Brad did.
That had been the settlement: Brad getting primary custody, with Heather having visitation rights on weekends and many of the major holidays. Considering how fathers usually fared, his lawyer had assured Brad, it was a remarkably good deal. Not that it had come cheaply or easily. Or without a little pretrial nastiness, mainly depositions and motions related to what Brad’s lawyer was convinced they could paint in open court as Heather’s alcoholism. In the end, that was what had swayed her: the threat of a public lambasting, one that surely would drive the final nail into her acting coffin. And so, just before the trial had been scheduled, she had given in.
“I know you’re entitled to once a week,” he said solemnly. “Well, I can’t take her this week, or the next couple, for that matter. Something’s come up. It’ll have to be October.”
He’d expected this to happen. It had happened when they all still lived in New York, at most two miles apart. When it was convenient, when it fit into her schedule, Heather took Abbie. But when there was something better on the horizon (something better in June had been the Poconos with her new beau, a doctor), she passed. There was no reason to think things would improve by their moving to the Berkshires.
“You can tell her yourself,” Brad said coldly. “I’ll say you’re going to call.”
“That’s big of you, Brad.”
Reluctantly he gave Heather their home number. Then he hung up.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Wednesday, September 17
Thomasine and Brad were through lunch and were lingering over coffee when Abbie burst into the Boar’s Head Inn with the big news about Saturday’s fair.
For the better part of an hour Thomasine had been briefing Brad on her thesis. This was the field portion of her research, she explained, and she expected it to last at least into the spring; she’d taken a one-year lease on her Main Street apartment just in case it went over. Three quarters of her work would consist of tape-recorded interviews, with the other quarter devoted to library and court investigation. The plan was to focus on the core of about fifty Indians who had been centrally involved in the land suit. Find out where they stood today. Find out about their jobs, their incomes, their political affiliations, their children, their religions, their health insurance (if any), on and on and on. A soup-to-nuts profile of a shattered tribe.
That had been the plan. Executing it was turning out to be something else again.
She’d been in Morgantown going on a month, she lamented, and she’d managed to find exactly one Quidneck who was willing to talk. The bitch was that he was an older man, with a shaky memory and an attention that spanned no more than ten of her 350 or so questions. As for the other forty-nine principals, tracking them down was turning out to be far more difficult than either she or her adviser, an accomplished academician, had imagined. They seemed to have become a migratory group, heading off to upper New York state for a year or two or five, heading out West for good, packing their belongings into the back of a pickup and riding off into the sunset without bothering to say good-bye or leave a forwarding address. Except for the older man, whose usefulness would be limited, the eight or nine she’d found wanted nothing to do with her or her research. There’d been enough grief during the trial, they told her. What kind of fool would want to go through that all over again?
So it wasn’t shaping up as a stroll down easy street, Thomasine informed Brad. The best research never did.
Brad had been doing most of the listening and little of the talking. He was fascinated by this woman’s work, by this woman, and
he was impressed. For several years after college she’d worked as a stockbroker in Boston. Probably made a killing at it, although she didn’t come right out and say that. But brokering wasn’t for her. It was, she said, a profession overcrowded with assholes, an intrinsically greedy, shallow business where God was spelled BMW and heaven was two words, Club Med. The analogy she used—Brad almost choked laughing, it was so ridiculous, yet so on target—was Chinese food. Looked great, tasted great, and it passed through you in about an hour. About three years ago, when she was twenty-seven, she’d quit. No big apocalypse, no premature mid-life crisis, just “Good-bye, fellow brokers, I’m out of here. Going to study something that’s intrigued me since I was a little kid hearing about the first Thanksgiving, and that’s Indians—and what exactly happened to them in the centuries since that feast. And don’t ask me to explain it any better than that, because maybe I can’t.”
Thomasine looked up from her coffee, and there was Abbie, bounding into the dining room. Thomasine and Brad had just struck their deal: She would consider being the subject of a feature story, provided he would first let her camp out as long as she desired in the Transcript’s library. She was hoping the morgue would provide some valuable leads.
“If it isn’t the big kindergarten student herself,” Brad said, embracing his daughter. He’d told her he’d be at the Boar’s Head for lunch, although he hadn’t said who would be joining him. Not being sure exactly what to say about Thomasine, he’d decided to let events unfold by themselves.
“Hi, Dad!” she said. Then, turning, “Hi, Thomasine.”
“Hello, Abbie. You remember my name,” she said affably. The whole lunch had been like that—a surprisingly pleasant, relaxed hour that had more than lived up to Brad’s expectations.
That day she’d come into the paper, Thomasine had come across a bit uptight. Maybe she’d just been shy. Maybe that had been her business side. After dining with her, Brad could understand why Abbie had so taken to her that night on the porch at the Boar’s Head.
“Sure I remember,” Abbie said. “You’re the Indian lady.”
Thomasine chuckled. “I guess I am.”
“That’s what she’s been doing,” Brad said. “Filling me in on the Indians.”
“They used to live around here,” Abbie said.
“That’s right. A whole tribe of them.”
“And they used to wear feathers and they had bows and arrows, too. Sometimes they caught fish, and they cooked them on great big fires way out in the woods. Yup. That’s what they did.”
“What a smart girl,” Thomasine said.
“Did you know they wore clothes made out of deer’s skin? They did, you know. Mrs. Fitzpatrick told me. She was married to an Indian once. But I don’t think he wore deer clothes. I think he dressed regular.”
“I think you’re right,” said Thomasine, who’d heard Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s life story the second night she’d stayed at the Boar’s Head.
“Dad,” Abbie said, pulling at his sleeve, “can we go to the fair? Mrs. Lincoln told us there’s going to be a fair on Saturday.” Mrs. Lincoln was Abbie’s kindergarten teacher.
“So I heard,” Brad said.
“I was supposed to see my mommy this weekend,” Abbie explained to Thomasine, “but she called and said I couldn’t come because she has a very bad cold. Isn’t that too bad?”
“Yes, it is,” Thomasine agreed. Brad had mentioned in passing that he was divorced and that his ex-wife lived in New York. Reading between the lines, Thomasine had concluded that she was not the most stable character.
“But she said she’ll be all better next month, and I can see her then. Besides, I think the fair will be fun. I’ve never been to a fair. They don’t have fairs in New York, do they, Dad?”
“Not this kind of fair, honey.”
Brad was livid all over again. That bitch, he thought. That lying bitch. Heather had called Saturday. Asked to speak directly with Abbie, not even a hello or how are you for Brad. Abbie’d been on the phone ten minutes. When she hung up, she told Brad what her mother had said: that she missed Abbie terribly, that she wanted desperately to see her, but that she couldn’t for a couple of weeks, she’d come down with a terrible cold and not only wasn’t feeling up to speed but didn’t want her dear daughter to get it.
Brad knew it was a lie. He knew because she hadn’t mentioned a word about any cold when she’d called him the day before. And since when had Heather kept something that big a secret? Histrionic Heather? Melodramatic Heather, miss an opportunity like that? Please . . . No, it was the worst kind of lie—an unimaginative and juvenile lie that might . . . just might . . . fool a five-and-a-half-year-old. And it wasn’t the only lie she’d told. Abbie didn’t know, of course, but Brad had picked up the extension and eavesdropped on their conversation. He’d heard Heather tell their daughter how many times she had tried to call since they’d moved, but there hadn’t been an answer, or directory assistance didn’t have the number, or it had been busy.
Lies or no lies, Heather’s call seemed to have been therapeutic. It was the first contact Abbie’d had with her mother since leaving New York, and she’d been almost giddy over it the rest of the day. Abbie wasn’t so young that she wasn’t affected by the divorce and the separation—it would continue to take its toll, in ways that might not surface for years, Brad was sure—but neither was she old enough to be bitter or even angry, not the way he was so bitter and angry. He was beginning to suspect that Heather could treat Abbie like dirt or elevate her to queen, and it would not affect his daughter’s gut feelings. Good mom, bad mom, indifferent mom, Heather was Abbie’s only mom. Thinking of Heather’s power made Brad sick.
“Can we go to the fair, Dad? Please? Pretty please?”
“Oh, if you’re a good girl, I think it can be arranged.”
“Goody! They’re going to have cows and horses and pigs and even some baby lambs, they’re so cute, and there’s going to be rides, and games where you can win prizes, and candy apples . . . what are candy apples, Dad?”
“They’re apples that have been dipped in caramel,” he explained. “Very tasty.”
“And very messy,” Thomasine added.
“Jimmy Ellis says he’s going, too,” Abbie said breathlessly. “Maybe we could meet him there. Maybe you could come, too, Thomasine.”
She hesitated before saying, “I’d love to, but I have to be in Providence this weekend. I have a meeting with one of my teachers.”
“Oh,” Abbie said thoughtfully. “Well, maybe the next fair.”
“You’ve got a deal.”
Abbie pointed at her father. “Block your ears, Daddy,” she ordered.
“Why?”
“‘Cause I have to tell Thomasine a secret and you can’t hear. Go ahead. Block them.”
Brad did.
Abbie got up on tiptoes and whispered in Thomasine’s ear: “Do you like my dad?”
“Yes,” Thomasine whispered back. “I think he’s a very nice dad.”
“Goody!”
“Was that the secret?” Thomasine asked. Across the table Brad was keeping his ears covered. He looked comical.
“Nope. The secret is: I think my dad likes you, too. But don’t tell him I told you, OK?”
“OK. It’ll be just between us.”
Thomasine looked at Brad, and for the very first time she had a fantasy about him. She wondered what it would be like to kiss him. Not a deep, lingering kiss, not a kiss that would propel them toward dizzying heights of passion, but something fleeting, a quick brush of lips and cheek, contact that could be explained away, if necessary, as merely an accident. Could it really have been two years since she’d kissed a man?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Saturday, September 20
If Brad could have stopped the wheel of life from turning, if somehow he could have reached into the cosmic clockwork, ripping out the gear that would have stalled it forever, he would have chosen to stop it on Saturday, September 20. That was the da
y he and Abbie spent at the fair. Time could never steal a single detail of that spellbound day—from its beginning, when Abbie cooked Aunt Jemima pancakes and bacon for them both, to its end, with Abbie asleep on the couch, a red-coal fire crackling, and Brad slowly nodding off, a look of contentment spread wide across his face.
Except for the incident with Jimmy Ellis—a very minor blemish, or so it seemed then—that entire day was as close to perfect as they come.
The Berkshire Agricultural Fair had been a tradition for more than a century (NOT A YEAR MISSED SINCE 1878! the red, white, and blue banner fluttering over the ticket booths proclaimed), and for year-round folk, it ranked with Pittsfield’s Fourth of July parade and Lee’s Christmas tree lighting ceremony as one of Berkshire County’s absolutely de rigueur events. Encompassing thirty-five acres of permanent fairgrounds in nearby Stockbridge, it had the proverbial something for everyone: animals, rides, games, crafts, fortune tellers, funny-shaped vegetable booths, food, a dog track for the bettors, of which this God-fearing part of the world had more than its share.
They arrived at opening time, 11:00 A.M.
“Can we see the bunnies first, Dad?” Abbie asked as Brad pored over the program, fifty cents from the man on stilts. “Please?”
“Sure, pumpkin.” He ran his finger along the map, found the 4-H tent, and briefly surveyed the fairgrounds before figuring out which way to head. They were just setting off when the Ellises, Jimmy and Ginny, found them. Abbie handled the introductions. Brad and Ginny shook hands and allowed as how they were very glad to finally meet, they’d each heard so much about the other through their children, who were fast becoming the best of friends.
“I didn’t think we were going to make it,” Ginny said after dispensing with the obligatory small talk about school, the newspaper, and the pristine weather today. “Jimmy was sick half the night. Threw up and had a fever.”
“That’s too bad,” Brad said. Having been there himself, he knew there was nothing worse than being a single parent with a sick kid.
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