“I know, but what if I’m latching onto Jack out of fear or cowardice?”
“You won’t.”
“Won’t I?” Frieda shook her head. “This morning when I was driving to the store I noticed that the air-conditioning wasn’t working. I called Jack to ask if he could recommend a good mechanic and he immediately volunteered to take my car to his mechanic tomorrow afternoon. It’s been so long since I’ve heard the words ‘let me take care of it’ I’m afraid I was seduced. Why didn’t I just ask you or Phil or George for the name of your mechanics? Why did I turn to Jack?”
Ruby patted her daughter’s hand. “At the risk of sounding as if I’m dismissing your concerns, I think you might be making too big a thing out of this.”
“Am I? The last thing I want is to find myself using Jack as a handy escape from having to be on my own. Being on your own takes serious courage. You know that better than most. I’m just not sure I have it in me to carry the weight of my days all alone. But that doubt isn’t a good enough excuse for orchestrating a marriage.”
“First of all,” Ruby said, “you’re right. It’s not. Second of all, you’re so much stronger than you realize, Frieda. And I’m not talking about superhuman strength and courage, the stuff of a Marvel comic character. I’m talking about the really heroic stuff, the day-to-day chores and duties and responsibilities that keep life livable. Answer me honestly. Do you keep a comfortable home for Bella?”
“Yes,” Frieda said promptly. “If by ‘comfortable’ you mean I make sure that we keep to a regular schedule and that I don’t allow random strangers into the house, I do.”
“Good. Do you cook healthy meals and clean the bathroom on a regular basis? Do you pay the bills in a timely manner and save or invest what money is left over?”
“Yes to all of that.”
“And what else?” Ruby asked. “Brag a little.”
“Well, I’ve taken steps to upgrade my professional skills. I took a refresher course in copyediting technical documents and one in writing marketing copy for fifteen- to twenty-five-year-olds. There’s been no appreciable payoff yet,” Frieda added, “but there might be.”
“Good,” Ruby said. “And?”
“I’ve consciously worked on the healing practices my grief counselor advised,” Frieda said. “I haven’t always gotten the results I hoped for, but I do try.”
“That’s the point, Frieda. You try. You don’t sit around moaning and wringing your hands. Which is not to say that a tiny bit of moaning and hand-wringing is always a bad thing. But it should never occupy too much of your time.”
“I know, Mom. It’s just that living on your own takes a special kind of courage. When Bella leaves home, which she probably will not long from now, I wonder if I’ll be able to face yet another reduced reality.”
“Not reduced,” Ruby corrected. “Don’t think in those terms. It will be a different reality. It will be a challenge. You’ll make changes. You’ll adopt a dog or a cat or even a bird. Animals make excellent companions, sometimes better companions than human beings. You’ll find a hobby or take courses at the local college. You’ll travel. You’ll survive. Besides, maybe by the time Bella leaves the nest you won’t be walking through the world without a partner. Anything is possible, Frieda. Never forget that.”
Something I should keep in mind, Ruby added silently. Like the possibility that if George and I marry we’ll live happily ever after and I’ll never have to endure the horrors of another divorce.
“I’ll try. Mom, you knew Veronica Tennant pretty well, right?”
“I guess you could say that. She was a regular member of The Page Turners, as you know. When she was hospitalized I used to visit her every day.” Ruby smiled. “One year we manned the apple-bobbing booth together at the Harvest Festival. We wound up soaking wet, but we had a lot of fun.”
“So what was she like? I want to know what sort of person Jack fell in love with and married.”
“You can’t compare yourself to Veronica,” Ruby warned, “just like you can’t compare Jack to Aaron. Well, you can, but you shouldn’t.”
“I know, but still . . .”
Ruby shrugged. “All right. Veronica was able to find humor in almost every situation, even when she was ill. She loved to read. Seriously, she put the rest of The Page Turners to shame. And she really did love teaching. It was terrible for her when she finally had to give it up entirely. Jack might have told you this already, but Veronica badly wanted a child. She would have made a fine mother.”
Frieda smiled. “She sounds like a hard act to follow.”
“You’re up to it.”
“That’s so something a loving mother says to her child,” Frieda pointed out. “In short, not necessarily the brutal truth.”
“You know I’m a terrible liar,” Ruby pointed out. “Do I sound as if I’m lying now?”
“No,” Frieda admitted. “So you’d be okay if something develops between Jack and me? You loved Aaron so much.”
Ruby smiled at her daughter. “It’s your life, Frieda. You don’t need my permission or approval to live it. That said, yes, I did love Aaron; I still do. But I very much like what I know of Jack. He was wonderful to Veronica until the bitter end. Few men could have done better. He wasn’t afraid of the down and dirty chores that need to be done for a dying person, and that beats cards and flowers any day.” Jack was just like Steve was at Tony’s end, Ruby thought. A godsend.
“That’s so true,” Frieda said. “It’s the small, personal gestures that count most of all. Like what a mother routinely does for her child. Thank you, Mom, for everything. For the yummy meals and the sound advice. For providing me with an education. For making me laugh. I don’t say thank you often enough.”
“Yes, you do,” Ruby corrected. “Your wanting to be here with me this summer proves more than words could ever prove that you love and respect me, as I do you.”
Frieda got up from her chair, leaned down, and kissed Ruby’s cheek. “Well,” she said, “it’s back to work for me. Thanks for the pep talk, Mom.”
When Frieda had gone inside Ruby returned to her book—but not before thanking whoever or whatever was out there for the gift of her daughter.
* * *
The ceiling fan could use a little adjustment, Ruby thought as she lay on her bed, half mesmerized by its creaky motion. But only half mesmerized. She was wondering if Frieda realized how much she looked like her father. The same wide-set eyes. The same high cheekbones. The same generous mouth. The similarities had been pointed out to Frieda as a child, but maybe she had chosen to forget or to ignore her resemblance to Steve Hitchens.
Ruby sighed and crossed her hands on her stomach. This summer memories of life with her former husband were rarely far off. If only she weren’t reminded of the bad times as well as the good, like the day only weeks before Steve’s defection when Phil had confronted her with his suspicions. “I think Steve’s going to run, Ruby,” Phil had said. “It’s something I see in his eyes. Call me crazy, and I hope that I am, but . . .”
So Ruby had called him crazy, and wrong. Phil’s suspicions were not something she had been prepared to hear, in spite of the fact that she was harboring her own worries. In some ways her marriage hadn’t been solid from the start, but the summer Frieda was eleven things had taken a turn for the worse. Steve had become withdrawn and moody; there were nights he didn’t come home for dinner and when pressed for a reason he would reply angrily. “You’re not my keeper, Ruby,” he would say. “I have my own life!” And the other women. There were always the other women.
Later, when Steve had been gone close to a month, Ruby had apologized to Phil for having in effect shot the messenger. “Thank you,” she had added, “for having the grace not to say, ‘I told you so.’”
“Believe me,” Phil had said. “I take no pleasure in being right. None whatsoever.”
“At least he didn’t leave in the middle of the night with only a note to explain his absence. At least he had
the guts to face me before he left.”
“With some nonsensical reason for abandoning his family.”
“It wasn’t nonsensical, not to him,” Ruby had argued. “I know Steve, Phil. At least I know him now.”
That night . . . That dreadful night when Steve walked away. Ruby remembered every detail, from the tan shirt Steve was wearing, to the small tear in the screen door that led from the kitchen into the minuscule backyard, to the sound of the old analog clock over the stove, ticking away the final minutes of her marriage.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Steve had said to her. “I should never have gotten married.”
They were alone in the house; Steve had arranged a sleepover for Frieda at a friend’s house. Now Ruby knew why.
“You should never have gotten married to me?” she demanded. “Is that what you’re saying, that you don’t love me, you’ve never loved me?”
“Oh, I love you, Ruby,” Steve said. “That’s what makes this so damn hard. I love you, but I made a big mistake by marrying you, by marrying anyone. I should have had the courage to walk away long before now, before I got myself into this mess. Before I got you into this mess.” He had started to cry. “I’m so sorry, but I can’t stay here. I just can’t, not with you, not in Yorktide.”
“How can you leave Frieda?” Ruby had demanded. “How can you do such a thing?”
Steve had put his hands over his face for a moment. When he lowered them the look of anguish on his face tore at Ruby’s heart. “Where will you go?” she asked. “How will I get in touch with you?”
“I’ll call you, Ruby,” Steve said finally. And then he hoisted his duffel bag onto his shoulder and without another word he left.
And that was the last time Ruby had seen Steve Hitchens, the man she had loved and married, the man she had given a child.
It was weeks before Ruby received a call from him. He had not changed his mind. He was not coming back. He hoped Frieda was all right. Ruby filed for divorce and was granted sole custody of Frieda. Steve did not demand visitation rights. He dutifully sent child support payments, though they were seldom on time. Occasionally he sent a little extra in Frieda’s birthday card, maybe a five-dollar bill, accompanied by a few scrawled lines. Hope you and your mom are doing well. Can’t believe you’re another year older. Generic sentiments, never anything more. It was as if Steve Hitchens had never been a part of their lives. It was as if he had never nursed his daughter through chicken pox or danced waltzes around the living room with his wife. It was as if he had never played The Tooth Fairy and slipped coins under Frieda’s pillow. It was as if he had never looked Ruby in the eye and told her he loved her beyond what words could express.
Ruby got up from her bed, turned off the creaky ceiling fan, and left the room. For a very long time she had been angry with Steve for the love of which he had deprived their child. But, Ruby reminded herself as she went downstairs to the kitchen to start dinner, all of that was in the past, in spite of the memories playing like a film through her head.
Besides, Frieda might have been marked by the circumstances of her childhood—what adult hadn’t been? But she hadn’t been scarred. There was a difference.
Chapter 70
On a scale of one to ten, Frieda’s anxiety rated an eleven. Introducing her daughter to the man she was dating—if that’s indeed what was going on with Jack—would be trying under any circumstances, but introducing them so soon after the truce she and Bella had established . . . It’s not a truce, Frieda told herself as she took a blue linen blouse from her closet. We were never at war, Bella and me. What we did was reconnect. And everything will be all right this evening. Everything will be fine.
People were adaptable. Human beings learned how to accept new circumstances. They bounced back after the worst tragedies. Frieda stepped into her jeans. Tragedies like the loss of a parent.
Eleven-year-old Frieda had known in that uncanny way adolescent girls know truths about the adults around them that her father was unhappy. His behavior had been odd for months. He would come home late for dinner, without a reason or an apology. He would sit in the living room staring into space. He would make excuses for not joining his family when they socialized with Phil or the neighbors.
Frieda remembered how she had tried to put a smile on her father’s face in those final weeks. She had hugged him whenever he came into a room; she had made him a friendship bracelet using bright green and blue string (his favorite colors); she had baked him his favorite oatmeal cookies. But her father had been too distracted to appreciate her efforts, assuming they had even registered with him.
She would never forget the moment her mother broke the news of her father’s defection. Frieda had had so much fun at Barbara’s; they had eaten pepperoni pizza for dinner and stayed up late watching an old black-and-white version of Dracula and Barbara’s mother had made them waffles for breakfast. Frieda had raced through the front door of her home the next morning, eager to tell her parents about how Mrs. Miller had let them put Reddi-wip on their waffles and about how she thought Dracula wasn’t scary at all.
Frieda had found her mother in the kitchen. Her eyes were red and a bunch of crumpled soggy tissues were on the table before her. Frieda remembered her mother trying to explain the inexplicable. Even now, at the distance of all these years, Frieda could almost feel the deep bewilderment she had felt at that moment. “But why did he leave?” she had asked her mother. “I don’t understand. Doesn’t he love us anymore?”
“He does love us,” her mother had told her, her voice hoarse from crying. “He just can’t . . . He needed to go away. I wish I understood it better so that I could explain it to you in a way that might make sense. But I’m afraid that I don’t.”
The rest of that day had passed in a blur, and the day after that as well. Frieda remembered feeling nothing much but confusion; she remembered asking her mother question after question, some vague, some terribly specific. “Is everything going to be different now?” And: “There’s a package of razors in the bathroom medicine cabinet. It was Daddy’s. What do we do with it? Can we keep it for when he comes back?” And: “Can we live here anymore? Do we have to move now that Daddy’s gone?” And: “Does Phil know where Daddy went? Can Phil go and find him?”
Then came the overwhelming feelings of guilt, the conviction that somehow she was to blame for her father’s going away. And then came the shame in having been abandoned, the conviction that she hadn’t been special enough to keep hold of her own father. Every morning she felt the mocking eyes of her classmates on her; every time she and her mother were downtown she felt the pitying looks from the adults of Yorktide.
And then came the anger, anger first at her mother for having messed up their lives. “Why didn’t you stop Daddy from going? Anyway, it’s your fault Daddy left. You made him leave! You were always telling him to do stuff and bossing him around.”
It was odd. Frieda could clearly remember so much of what had been said in those dark days, but she could not recall what her mother’s reply to those accusations had been. Had she tried to defend herself? Had she scolded Frieda for being disrespectful? The answer was lost to time.
Time—Frieda checked her watch, hurried into the hall, and called for Bella. “Bella! Are you ready to go?”
Bella emerged from her room. “As I’ll ever be,” she said with a smile.
Here goes nothing, Frieda thought as she descended the stairs with Bella right behind her. And then she amended that to: Aaron, help us, okay?
* * *
Frieda steered the Subaru into the parking area of The Razor Clam. Her anxiety was still strong, but if Bella was nervous she was hiding it well. She had chatted all the way from the house about her day at Phil’s shop and about the woman who had bought the chandelier Bella had taken such care to clean crystal by faceted crystal.
“Is that Jack?” Bella asked when Frieda turned off the engine. “Over by the fence?”
“Yes,” Frieda said. “How did y
ou know?”
Bella shrugged. “Good guess. Besides, he looks like he’s waiting for someone.”
Jack raised a hand in salute as Frieda and Bella joined him. “Hi,” he said. “Bella, I’m Jack. It’s good to meet you.”
Frieda was glad Jack had taken the initiative to introduce himself. She realized she was tongue-tied.
“Hi,” Bella said. “I think I’ve seen you around before.”
Jack smiled. “You probably have. I’ve seen you, too. Small town after all. Nowhere to hide, supposing you wanted to.”
Bella smiled back at him. “Sometimes living in a small town drives me nuts,” she said. “But sometimes it’s okay.”
Finally, Frieda found her voice. “Let’s order,” she suggested.
The three walked to the shack-style restaurant and examined the menu printed on a board nailed by the order window. “I always get the fried clams,” Jack said. “I mean, there are all these other things on the menu and yet every single time I come here I get the fried clams.”
“Maybe you just know what you like,” Bella said. “When we order pizza from this place back home I always get sausage and mushrooms. I know I’d probably like other stuff, too, but I’m definitely sure I’ll like the sausage and mushrooms.”
Jack nodded. “Yeah, I think that’s it. Why take a risk? If you can count on something, count on it.”
“But what if one time your favorite thing tastes bad for some reason?” Bella went on. “Like maybe the sausage is too chewy or the fried clams are too greasy. Then what do you do?”
“I don’t know,” Jack admitted. “I hadn’t thought about it.”
“I’d give it one more try. Or I’d stop going to that place and try the sausage and mushroom pizza at a new place.”
Frieda smiled to herself. The conversation was less than stimulating, but she was very glad that Jack and Bella were talking. The topic simply didn’t matter.
“Well, I’m going to try the mussels this time,” she announced. “I think my goal should be to work my way through the entire menu before the summer is over.”
Home for the Summer Page 27