Hanging by a Thread

by Karen Templeton

  While Pops takes foreeeeever to get a glass of milk, he and Luke talk about his work, local politics, some firehouse that had to be gutted because rats had taken it over, the Knicks. I eat and silently seethe, two things I’m extremely good at. After about five thousand years, my grandfather finally carts éclair and milk back out into the living room and I realize I have no idea how to get the conversation going again. Or even if I want to.

  I get up to put my plate in the dishwasher; Luke says, “He’s right, you look beat. And I’m slime for bein’ so caught up in my own crap I didn’t stop and think how tired you might be—”

  “Oh, please. When have any of us ever been too tired to help each other?”

  He gets a funny look on his face. “You sure?”

  “No. And if you expect advice, fuggedaboutit.” I dig an éclair out of the box, not bothering with a plate. “But I can listen. And I really want to know why you think Tina wants out.”

  The muscles tense in his face. “Because things have been strange between us for a while now.”

  “How long?”

  “I dunno. Months. A year, maybe.”

  I nearly choke. A year? How did I miss that?

  “Yeah,” he says. “I don’t understand it, either, we always got along so good. I mean, you and me, we always fought, got on each other’s nerves, right?” Our gazes bounce off each other before he looks away. “But not Tina and me. I mean, the way she’d look at me…like I was her hero, y’know?”

  Yeah. I know. Because he was. Because he was the big strong protector and she’d been the damsel in distress for as long as any of us could remember. But it worked both ways, because Tina’s wide-eyed worship fed Luke’s ego like no other. Nobody had ever needed him the way Tina did, and nobody had ever made her feel as safe as Luke did. In other words, they were the perfect match.

  “But now,” he continues, “I dunno, it’s like we don’t even have anything to say to each other anymore. I come home, we eat dinner, we watch TV, we go to bed. We have sex—occasionally—but I’m not sure why we’re bothering, to tell you the truth.” His eyes lift to mine, dark with hurt and confusion. “I’m scared for her, El, that she’s gonna fall apart again, like she did that one time in high school. I’m not stupid, I know something’s bothering her. But why won’t she talk to me?”

  In silence, I finish off the éclair, wishing there were about six more. Both because I need something to keep my mouth occupied and because my mood’s just swung dangerously close to self-destructive. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m tired, or my hormones are being punks, or what, but once again, my reaction surprises me.

  It’s not that I don’t feel for him, or Tina, because I do. My closest friends are both hurting, for godssake. Who else are they gonna come to if not me? Because that’s the way it’s always been. Except for one time, when I found out I was pregnant with Starr, I’ve always been the one the other two turned to to fix things between them. And up until this moment, I was fine with that, maybe because their needing me made me feel a real part of something. But now…

  Now I realize just how long I’ve actually only been on the outside looking in, living vicariously through somebody else’s relationship.

  How screwed up is that?

  So now, even as my mouth performs its appointed task as Duenna to the Deluded, my brain is desperately trying to scratch out of the kennel I’ve kept it in for the past twenty-something years. While I’ve been doing all this repair work for their lives, my own has fallen to rack and ruin.

  What the hell does any of this have to do with me? I want to scream.

  But I keep all this under wraps because Luke looks so miserable.

  “No comment?” he says.

  Great. If I plead the Fifth, he’ll take that as a confirmation of his suspicions. If I reassure him Tina never said anything about their marriage being on the rocks, either he’ll think I’m lying or he’ll start wondering what she did want to talk to me about. Talk about your no-win situation. While all this is rumbling around in my head, however, Luke says, “I just wish I knew what was going on, if she’s afraid to talk to me because of what she went through as a kid, if she can’t stand the thought of the marriage failing…”

  He yanks out a chair and drops into it, apparently out of steam. But I can tell, it’s not Tina who’s afraid of the marriage failing. I get a flash of their wedding day, both of them grinning like idiots, Tina as pretty as I’ve ever seen her in a dress I knocked off from a picture of some six-thousand-dollar number in Modern Bride. With the exception of two or three brief separations, they’d been going together for nearly nine years by that point. They were so comfortable together, finishing each other’s sentences like an old married couple. Like Luke, I don’t get it.

  “Hey,” I say lamely. “Everybody goes through rough patches.”

  His expression breaks my heart, because he knows this is more than a rough patch. Then he suddenly glances over my shoulder, the worry etched in his brow evaporating in an instant. “Hey, Twink! Your mom said you were asleep.”

  My daughter’s already in his lap, her skinny arms wrapped around his neck. Next to Leo and me, Luke’s her favorite person in the world. And I think I often slip to second place. Maybe third. Not that she doesn’t have positive male role models coming out of her ears—my grandfather, the legion of Scardinare males. Even Mickey Gomez, one of the tenants, who’s been teaching her Spanish. But her relationship with Luke has always been special, a relationship that’s worked both ways. Oh, yeah, Luke’s taken his “uncle” duties very seriously, even from before Starr was born.

  I let her have her éclair, which I cut into bite-size pieces so most of the chocolate and custard lands in her mouth instead of on her face, thinking saccharine thoughts about not being able to imagine my life without her. Trust me, I don’t always feel this way, so I’m going with the moment because it makes me feel good about myself. Like I deserve her.

  Luke listens carefully as she prattles on about her day, her yawns getting bigger and bigger as her eyelids droop lower and lower. Finally, chuckling, he stands, Starr clinging to him like a little sedated monkey, and carries her upstairs to put her back to bed. I don’t follow, because I know seeing him with her is only going to get my thoughts churning again about his being denied the one thing he really wants.

  But you know, nobody forced him to marry Tina. And she’s right: he did know going in she didn’t want kids.

  His decision, I tell myself. His consequences to deal with.

  “Man, she’s getting so big,” he says when he comes back downstairs.

  “Yep. Give ’em food and water and damned if they don’t grow.”

  He smiles, a sad tilt of his lips. “It’s late,” he says, lifting his jacket from the back of the chair. “I should go.”

  This time, I don’t stop him. We walk out to the front door; Leo’s gone up to his room, so no eagle ears are listening (I assume) as we stand in the foyer.

  “I saw your mother earlier,” I say. “Pete and Heather are finally getting married, huh?”

  Another smile, this time a weary one. “Yeah. At least there’s some good news, right?”

  I grab his arms, my impetuousness clearly surprising him. Not to mention me. I get another whiff of his scent, and something inside me goes, Huh?

  “You and Tina need to talk. Tonight,” I add, ignoring both his scent and the Huh?-ing. “You gotta get all this out in the open, tell her exactly what you’ve told me.” It’s a long shot, but maybe if Luke opens up, Tina will too, absolving me of a responsibility I realize I do not want. “I’m not a marriage counselor, a shrink or a priest, and I’m tired of getting caught in the middle.”

  He gives me a hard look and says softly, “Then maybe you shouldn’t’ve put yourself there,” and walks out the door.

  What the hell…?

  My cell rings, faintly. It takes me five rings to locate it, still in my purse on the kitchen counter.

  “Hi,” Tina says in
a voice I haven’t heard her use since she was about six.

  “Uh…hi?”

  I hear a whoosh of cigarette smoke. “Luke’s there, isn’t he?”

  “Not anymore. And no, I didn’t say anything.”

  “What? Oh…I didn’t think you would.” Surprise peers out from between her words, as though it never crossed her mind that I might. I can’t decide if I’m touched or ticked.

  “Teen—you two have got to hash this out. By yourselves.” I give her a second or two to absorb this. “And I think you know that.”

  When she next speaks, I can barely hear her. “God, Ellie…I’m so scared.”

  “I know you are, sweetie,” I say, as gently as I know how. “Which is why you have to talk to Luke. Trust him, okay? You know he loves you.”

  I do not like the silence that greets this observation. So I prod her for the answer I want. “Right?”

  “Yeah,” she says at last. “I guess.”

  “Tina?”

  “What?”

  “Promise me you won’t do anything until you’ve talked to him?”

  There’s another long pause, during which I can hear smoke being spewed.

  “Promise?” I prompt.

  “Okay, okay, fine.”

  “I mean, I know it’s your body and all that, but—”

  “Jesus, I get it, already!” I expect her to hang up, but instead I hear, “Luke’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me, you know? The thought of letting him down…it makes me sick.”

  I don’t know what to say to this. Then she says:

  “You really think I’d make an okay mother?”

  Like I know what kind of mother she’d make. But I inject a bright note into my voice and say, “Hey. If I can do this, anybody can—”

  “Crap, I hear Luke’s key in the door, I gotta go. I’ll call you tomorrow, ’kay?”

  I click off my phone and toss it back in my purse, thinking, man, I am so glad I’m not in her shoes right now.

  Especially since I’m not sure I’m doing such a hot job staying balanced in my own.

  “So what’s up with Luke and Tina?”

  Frances’s low, furtive voice ploughs into me when I emerge from her downstairs bathroom the following Sunday. Thank God I already peed. But I look Luke’s mother straight in the eye and say with remarkable aplomb, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Like that works. Knowing nobody will hear my screams for mercy over the din of Scardinares yakking away in the dining room—half the Italians left in Richmond Hill are in this house right now—Frances drags me into her home office and shuts the door, leaning against it for good measure. Underneath artfully tousled hair, bittersweet chocolate eyes bore into mine. A look I know is responsible for hundreds, if not thousands, of impassioned promises over the years to never do again whatever it was that provoked the look to begin with.

  “I know Tina,” she says with the exasperated affection of a woman who loves more than understands her daughter-in-law. And who, like everybody else, wanted nothing more than to see Tina finally get a fair shake, to really be happy. She’s hugging herself over a velour tunic free of any signs of having even been in a kitchen today. That would be because Jimmy Sr., not Frances, does all the major cooking. He says it relaxes him. Frankly, I think it was that or starve to death. “Since when does she miss the first viewing of an engagement ring?”

  I tell myself that since I’m not her child, I am impervious to The Look. “Maybe one of them’s not feeling well?”

  “So they’d call.” Her eyes narrow; my resistance dissolves like an ice cube in a frying pan. “You know something, I can tell you do. Luke’s always talked to you more than anybody else, ever since you were kids.”

  You remember what I said about not lying if I can possibly help it? This isn’t due to an overabundance of moral fiber on my part, it’s because I totally suck at it. My mouth goes dry; my cheeks flame. Then I realize that, since I haven’t heard from either Luke or Tina since the other night, anyway, whatever information I might be able to dispense is already outdated. Right?

  “Sorry, Frances. I honest to God have no idea what’s going on.”

  “Which I suppose is why your cheeks are the color of Jimmy’s marinara sauce.”

  “It’s hot in here?”

  The question mark at the end probably wasn’t very bright. But before she can move in for the kill, somebody knocks on the door. It’s Jason, looking particularly fetching tonight in several layers of shredded black T-shirts, torn jeans, and rampant despondency. He looks at me, his mouth struggling with the effort to smile. Kinda like my belly the one time I tried Pilates.

  “Starr’s wonderin’ where you were,” he says to me, then turns to his mother. “And Luke called. Said he was sorry they couldn’t make it, but Tina’s not feeling good.”

  “Oh?” Frances perks up like a hound catching a scent; Jason ducks her attempt to brush his hair out of his eyes. “He say what was wrong?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “He want me to call back?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Frances says, but I’m already out of the room to go find my daughter, so my butt is safe.

  Until the next day, when Luke calls me at work.

  “El! Guess what? I’m freakin’ gonna be a father!”

  chapter 5

  The joy in his voice is indescribable. As is my reaction. Although let’s go with stunned senseless, for the moment. I mean, yes, I’m relieved she’s changed her mind. I guess. But at the same time, I’m getting disturbing images of trucks heading straight for brick walls.

  Behind me—I’m taking the call in the middle of the workroom—Nikky and Jock are screaming at each other in different languages.

  “Wow!” I force out. “That’s wonderful! Congratulations!”

  “Isn’t it great? I mean, I had to do some fast talking to convince Teen it’s gonna be okay, but she’ll come around, I know she will. And maybe this’ll get things back on track for her and me, you know?”

  I swallow past a knot in my throat. “What did your mother say?”

  “I haven’t told her yet, Tina says she doesn’t want to tell anybody until she’s really sure. Something about getting past the first trimester. But how could I not tell you, huh? Anyway, gotta run, we’ll see you later. Dinner to celebrate, you and Starr, our place, maybe this weekend?”

  “Sure,” I say, but he’s gone.

  Well. This is great. Really. Luke’s gonna have Tina and a baby. Just the way it’s supposed to be. What he wanted. What I’d helped him get.

  Well, send in the big fat hairy clowns, why not.

  Behind me, Harold sticks his nose into the argument; the noise level is deafening. And heading my way.

  “Where the hell do you get off,” Harold is now screaming in my face, “accepting that return from Marshall Field’s?”

  You know, I am so not in the mood for taking the brunt of somebody else’s screw-up right now.

  “Since the order clearly states the delivery date was three weeks ago,” I say with the sort of calm I imagine someone resigned to their imminent death must feel, “I didn’t see as I had much choice. I couldn’t exactly send it back, could I?”

  Harold’s face turns an interesting shade of aubergine. And the finger comes up, close enough to my nose to make me cross-eyed. “Then I suggest you get on the goddamn phone, young lady, and do some fast talking and get them to take it back! We can’t afford to lose that order!”

  The first words that come to mind are, “So why didn’t somebody make sure they got the frickin’ order on time?”

  “Harold,” Nikky says as she comes up behind him. “Leave Ellie alone. It’s not her fault—”

  He whirls on her. “That’s right, it’s not. It’s yours, for being so goddamn disorganized you can’t even make sure your goddamn orders are delivered on time!”

  She doesn’t say a word. Nor does her expression change. But not even three la
yers of makeup are sufficient to mask the color exploding in her cheeks.

  Swear to God, I want to wrap my hands around the man’s blubbery neck and choke him until his froglike little eyes pop out of his head.

  “Nikky?” I say, “I’ll call the buyer, see what I can do. Maybe if we give them a small discount—?”

  “Like hell!” Harold bellows.

  “Hey!” I bellow right back, because frankly, I don’t care if Harold Katz thinks I’m the biggest bitch on wheels. “You wanna give me a little leverage here, or you want the whole order to land in an outlet mall in Jersey?”

  The aubergine begins to fade to a dusty magenta. “Do what you can,” he finally says. “Just don’t start out talking discounts, you got that?”

  He turns on his heel and storms off. I’m tempted to salute behind his back, but Nikky’s still standing there, looking at me as though I’ve either lost my mind or deserve a medal, I can’t quite tell. Then it occurs to me that, to add insult to injury, Harold didn’t suggest Nikky call the buyer. That he trusts some schleppy little assistant with about as much clout as a worm more than he does his wife, who happens to own the business.

  “You wanna call ’em?” I say.

  She seems to think this over for a minute. “I take it you’re not asking me because you don’t want to make the call.”

  “Truthfully, I’m not sure that anybody should be making this call. But I don’t mind doing it. If that’s what you want.”

  Her Lancômed lips twitch into a smile. “Start off with ten percent, on top of the standard seven/ten EOM.” The usual seven percent discount for bills paid by the tenth of the month following delivery. “And then pray the damn stuff sells so it doesn’t boomerang back to us, anyway.”

  Then she, too, turns and walks away, basically trusting me to fix things. Not that I mind—or care—but, excuse me? What’s happening here? Is this really the same woman who only a few days ago played hardball with that fabric vendor, who shrugged off her husband’s bad-mouthing as nothing more than a mild annoyance?

  Suddenly, I want to curl up in a ball and cry. Or go to sleep for a very long time. And I have no idea why. Aside from the fact that all the yelling has made my head hurt. But that, for the moment at least, seems to be over. Nikky, Harold and Jock have all spun off in different directions; all I can hear now is the hum of the heaters, the stop-and-start whirr of the sewing machines, the sporadic ringing of the phone and Jock’s totally irritating Easy Listening FM station.