The drive was short and, when they got there, their visit even shorter. Jennifer sat on the front steps, as if waiting for them. She was still in her Goldilocks costume, and she looked paler than normal. Bridget was about to ask if she was feeling all right and if Michael was there, but Jennifer wasn’t wasting time with chitchat.
“The kids are all asleep,” Jennifer whispered. “Even Cassandra and Shelby dozed off. So why don’t you let them all stay overnight? No need to wake everybody up. We’ll send them home first thing in the morning, okay?”
“Are you sure?” Bridget said. “Having three extra children in your house is a lot of wor—”
“I’m sure,” Jennifer interrupted. And there was such an acutely distraught look in her eyes that Bridget didn’t dare disagree. “You two have a nice night. A romantic one,” Jennifer continued with a very forced-looking smile. “I’ll talk to you later.”
Then, with a quick squeeze of Bridget’s arm that seemed to implore her to “Go,” Jennifer waved them off and hurried into her house.
Bridget glanced at Graham.
He swallowed and said, “Well, okay then. Let’s go home.” He gazed at her sadly. “I’ll put on some coffee and we can talk.”
She nodded, and when they got home, she had steeled her resolve to be as open and as honest as she possibly could. Graham was her husband, after all. Sure, he could be frustrating, and so often she felt as though he didn’t see her, but he didn’t deserve to be lied to. Or even to have information withheld from him.
She tugged off her red cloak, sat down at the kitchen table and faced him. “I’m sorry,” she began. “I should’ve told you about Dr. Luke asking me to lunch. It was just as a thank-you for the meals I brought into the office, and nothing at all happened between us,” she hastened to assure him. “But I still could’ve mentioned it, and I didn’t.”
“Why?” Graham asked her. “Why didn’t you mention it? D’ya think I wouldn’t care? Or that I’d care too much?”
“I’m not sure,” she confessed. “Both of those possibilities scared me.” She studied the tight line of his jaw, the worried creases on his forehead. “What would you have thought?”
“I would’ve wanted to know why he asked you out. His intentions, you know? And what yours were when you said yes to it. If it’d just been some meal with a friend, you wouldn’t have hidden it.” He shrugged. “So, what I would’ve thought—and what I do think—is that there’s more to the story, Bridget. And that, even if nothing happened, you’ve got some kind of thing for this guy.” He glanced away from her. “Coffee’s ready.”
She bit her lip. “Graham, I—” She watched him pour a cup for each of them, but she couldn’t bring herself to drink any of hers yet. “There isn’t a thing. We’re really just frien—”
“Yeah, yeah. ‘Just friends.’ I heard you before. But, hold that thought for a sec and tell me something. Where’d the idea to add extra work hours come from? You suddenly were thinking we needed more money? You were already planning on changing up your work schedule just a couple of months after you started? Why didn’t you tell me about those plans?”
She knew she had to tread carefully over this issue or he’d be insulted. Graham had always been a good and solid provider, but they weren’t swimming in extra cash. And they had needs as a family now that they hadn’t in years past. “No, honey, I’m not changing anything yet. I was asked about it, but I hadn’t really explored the idea a whole lot. At first I thought Dr. Jim and Dr. Luke approached me about going full time just to be nice or, maybe, because they liked my cooking. But they’ve brought it up a few different times now, and they seem serious about wanting someone in the office who’s almost always there. Plus, one of the other receptionists is pregnant and likely to reduce her hours in a few months.”
Her husband raised his eyebrows at this. “Oh?”
Bridget felt a fresh jab of guilt. She had known about Pamela’s pregnancy for a few weeks but hadn’t mentioned this detail to Graham. She had been given the information in private and tried to convince herself that she hadn’t wanted to break Pamela’s confidence by blabbing about it. Of course, that was a total excuse. Pamela would have understood her need to discuss the idea with her husband. Really, Bridget had just wanted to wait because, well, up until now, Graham hadn’t really been listening to her.
“Anyway,” she continued, “I wouldn’t have agreed to anything without talking with you first. I was just trying to figure out how many expenses we might have coming up balanced against my duties with the kids at home. I don’t want to shortchange them on either time or experiences.”
Graham crossed his arms. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, if Cassandra wants to sign up for dance classes again this winter, I want her to be able to do it. Her ballet teachers think she shows a lot of promise.” Bridget shrugged. Their daughter was leaner and more willowy than she’d ever been. The idea of wearing those tight and pointy toe shoes for any length of time sounded like a form of ancient foot-binding torture to Bridget, but Cassandra seemed to like it. “And Evan is having fewer and fewer stomach cramps on this new diet, so he may need special foods and some extra doctor appointments, even if we’ve found the solution to his problem. Then there’s Keaton…” She just let this thought trail off because even Graham knew how Keaton always needed them to buy him new things. A new soccer uniform because he’d accidentally ripped holes in the first one. A new retainer because he’d managed to toss his old one out with his lunch one day. A new set of fine-point markers because he’d loaned out his school set and never gotten it back.
Of course, there were also her own fantasies of adding cooking school tuition to the family expense list, but she didn’t mention that either. She wasn’t prepared to push it too far that night.
“I want the kids to have everything they need,” she told him, “but I also don’t want to be so scattered between work and home responsibilities that I’m not there for them. It’s been a little trickier to juggle the two this fall than I thought.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Graham took a big gulp of his coffee and winced. “I think you made a bunch of choices already.”
Now it was Bridget’s turn to ask what he meant.
“You like being at work. You’re happy there. At home, you kinda zone out. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you spend half as much time trying to impress us as you do the people in your office. Although all your efforts don’t seem to be winning over that witchy woman we saw tonight.”
She sighed. “Dr. Nina. No.”
“And what she said about you and this Luke guy”—he raised his eyebrows at her—“makes it sound like you two are kinda a couple or something. Or at least real obvious about wanting to be.”
She swallowed. “That’s not how it is at all. I wish you’d go in there and meet him. Then you’d see.” Graham was a man of habit and still went to the same dentist he’d had as a teenager, even though that meant a forty-five-minute drive. He’d never so much as visited Smiley Dental. “I think Dr. Luke is a really nice guy. He’s funny and thoughtful and smart but not in a show-offy way. He’s good at his job. And friendly. Everyone else likes him a lot, too.”
Her husband’s eyes narrowed. “So, he takes everyone else out for private lunches?”
“No,” she said quickly. Then amended, “Well, I don’t know, actually. I don’t think so.” She was finally ready for a shot of caffeine. She let the heat from the mug burn her fingertips for a moment before releasing her grip. Still too hot. “I—I appreciate him. Qualities about him, like the way he listens to me,” she admitted.
“And I don’t listen to you?”
Ah. There was the big question. The even bigger question was whether she was going to tell him the truth.
She forced herself to take a sip of her scalding coffee, just to stall. She wanted to shrug off Graham’s query, but nothing would change if she did. And, actually, thanks to Nina’s big mouth, she was beginning to see that her office behavio
r was, perhaps, not what she’d imagined it’d been. That through no fault of Dr. Luke’s, she’d been under his spell a little bit, and maybe the only way to break the enchantment would be to speak fully and honestly to her husband about that relationship, and what it meant to her.
“You…you’re less interested in some of the things I like to talk about,” she managed to say. “I feel like I’m boring you sometimes.”
“Like when?” His posture stiffened. “Like when you’re describing all those weird foreign foods? Is that what you talk about so much with your dentist friend?”
She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. “See? That’s exactly what I mean. I love describing those ‘weird foreign foods.’ I love making them, too. But you don’t want to hear about it. You don’t want to eat it. You give the kids permission, by having that attitude, to treat me the same way and to be judgmental about something I’m really excited about. And, Graham, I’m sick of it.” She pushed away her coffee cup and looked him in the eye. “I’m really lonely at home. I try to support all four of you, but none of you can do the same for me. I’m just wallpaper in the house most of the time. Wallpaper that does a lot of cleaning and chauffeuring. So, yeah. I don’t just like going to work, I love it. I’m a person there. I’m someone that nice and smart people listen to and respect. And, no. No, you don’t listen to me. And you haven’t in years.”
He stared at her silently for more seconds than she felt comfortable with, his ceramic mug weighting down his hands until he finally set it on the table. He inhaled deeply, opened his mouth to speak and then shut it. Several other seconds went by before he tried it again. “I didn’t know you felt that way,” he said, bowing his head. “I guess what I want out of life, my idea of a good day, is kinda simple. I do my job, come home, have a nice normal meal with my family, watch some TV and go to bed with my wife. Nothing complicated and nothing different from what I’ve always wanted. Maybe you need more than that. Maybe I’m holding you back from getting it.”
He looked so sad sitting there, she wanted to tell him that everything was okay. That she wanted him to be just the way he was. That it’d all be all right. But that was only partially true and she’d vowed to be fully honest this time.
“Graham, you’re not holding me back.” She would have liked to stretch her hands across the table and grasp his, but he’d leaned away. “I made choices about what to do with my life that were based on a lot of things. Most of them I don’t regret at all. I love you and the kids. I’m glad to be able to be here for you all. But they’re growing up and my role in their life is changing. I need—” She hesitated, trying to think of how to explain it. “I need something more than just blindly going through my day and getting work done. I need to have beautiful-smelling flowers in my house. I need to make really interesting meals sometimes. I need to be able to be passionate about something and not have the people I love most ridicule me.”
She saw him swallow and nod very slightly. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I wasn’t trying to put you down. I just wasn’t—”
“I know.” She sighed. “And I wasn’t trying to deceive you or keep secrets from you. I was only trying to find a way to be happier. And Dr. Luke is nice to me. He wants to hear about appetizers like Smoked Veal and Cucumber Tartlets or Asian Asparagus Rolls.”
Graham winced and then tried to mask it. She noticed anyway. “I, uh, I’m not such a big veggie fan,” he said, “but w-we can try them if you want. I’ll tell the kids they have to eat a couple of bites, and maybe…who knows? I’m sure they’ll be great.” He shot her a forced grin.
She laughed for the first time in hours. He was trying hard, but he looked kind of green at the idea of eating asparagus. Graham hated asparagus even more than Keaton hated shrimp. “That’s okay,” she told him. “I don’t have to make something like that. Something I know you’ll despise. And maybe it’s too much to ask the kids to eat lots of unusual things anyway, beyond one or two new side dishes a week.” She paused and finally reached across their kitchen table for his warm, rough hands. He reached back and grabbed her fingers tight. “But maybe you and I could try to have dinner out every once in a while. Maybe we could go someplace sort of romantic, where we could talk and taste-test a few new things.”
“Things made with beef?” Graham asked, his tone hopeful.
“Sure,” she said.
Though there were many other questions left unasked, and a great many marital issues that hadn’t yet been brought to the table to discuss, this was a start. One quiet, honest moment in their own house. A moment that—at least temporarily—tore down one of the unhealthy walls of silence between them and made an attempt at repairing some of the neglect and inattention that had been dogging them for a decade or more.
And, as a pleasant side effect of their candor, it turned out they had a rather romantic night after all.
In Jennifer’s neck of the Deep Dark Woods, Michael had completely shut her out. There was no chitchat over coffee at their kitchen table and, while she was frustrated by this, the observer in her couldn’t help but analyze it. Pick it apart. Examine the implications. Why wasn’t her husband doing his usual emoting routine? Where was the drama? The bad poetic lines?
The obvious reason was, in fact, the one he’d given her—in two short, snappish sentences—when she dared to ask him if they could talk.
“Not tonight, Jennifer. We have five children in the house,” Michael said before switching on the silent treatment and closing the bedroom door in her face. She almost laughed, it was so uncharacteristic of him. Worse still, she couldn’t believe she actually kind of missed his usual verbosity, even when it came in the form of his complaints.
The result of being left alone in a house full of sleeping (or silently brooding) people was that she could contemplate her mistakes at length but, for good or bad, could take no action. So she hid in the darkened living room, pushed herself into one corner of their sofa and covered her and her Goldilocks outfit with a comforter. She replayed her damning phone call with David over and over in her mind, trying to garner what Michael might have interpreted from overhearing just her side of the conversation.
Clearly, she couldn’t smooth over the fact that she had lied about the phone battery needing to be charged. But to explain why she had lied would, likewise, mean explaining about the text messages David had sent her, even if she omitted the inappropriate innuendos of said texts. And that would lead to explaining about their prior months of contact…because an ex-boyfriend you haven’t seen in almost two decades didn’t suddenly have access to your cell phone number, did he?
She sighed and buried her head in the comforter. Even if Michael’s ability to reason his way through these steps by the use of pure logic didn’t happen immediately, eventually he’d get there. And the thought of how that would hurt him made her stomach twist and roil with anxiety.
But, were she to be completely honest with herself, there was also a live wire of excitement sparking beneath her apprehension. As with so many aspects of her life, there weren’t many possible areas of change or even frequent opportunities to take simple actions that might shift the course of anything important. But this incident required it of her. She needed things to change, and the certainty that something would be altered, some small step taken as a result of this unfortunate incident, gave her hope enough to close her eyes and drift into an uneasy sleep.
The next morning, however, the glare of daily life, especially harsh after the relative peace of the post-midnight hours, sent the nausea and worry flooding back into her system. She had just enough time to sneak into the bedroom—where was Michael?—so she could change out of her costume and comb her hair before the kids raided the kitchen.
“Good morning,” she told the children, just as the front door swung open and an exhausted-looking Michael stepped inside.
“I brought home donuts, eggs and sausage patties,” he announced, speaking to the kids with jollity so fake Jennifer couldn’t believe his daughte
rs didn’t comment on it. Refusing to meet her gaze, he set down his carryout bag on the kitchen counter and looked extra-intensely at the collection of children milling around the table. “Got some great stuff for you guys. Veronica, could you grab a few plates?”
“Sure, Dad,” their eldest said, padding her way barefoot across the kitchen floor and retrieving enough dishware for all of them. To help, Jennifer dug through the silverware drawer and pulled out forks. She tried to hand them to Michael, but he persistently ignored her. Veronica saw her holding out the utensils, though. She eyed Jennifer strangely, but then grabbed them. “I got it, Mom.”
“Thanks, honey,” she murmured.
Veronica and Keaton wanted only donuts. Shelby and Evan were served the eggs and sausage (Michael made sure there were no glutens anywhere on Evan’s plate). And Cassandra, preferring a donut but wanting to be like Shelby, her new role model, asked for a little of each. Jennifer poured everyone either milk or orange juice and stood to the side, watching.
Michael nabbed a vanilla-glazed long john and disappeared into the basement.
So, this was the way it was going to be.
After the kids gobbled their breakfast and Shelby and Cassandra played one last video game, Michael emerged from downstairs and swept Bridget’s three children into his car. On their way out the door, he informed no one in particular that, after he dropped the kids off at their home, he was “going to run errands.” A vague statement made in an odd tone of voice, one that militantly refused to ask anyone’s permission. Not that she would have tried to stop him.
Jennifer exhaled when they left, not even realizing until the car had zoomed out of the driveway that she had been holding her breath.
Friday Mornings at Nine Page 25