Opening the paper sack Tracy pulled out a hot dog, still warm and wrapped in aluminum foil. Opening it, she looked it over, the now pale hot dog wrapped in a soggy bun that was much worse for the wear after having sat waiting for God only knew how long before she got home.
“Looks delicious,” she lied.
She braced herself to take a bite, but Brendan grinned and came closer, taking the hot dog from her. One arm around her waist, he pulled her against him and set the food back on the counter. He shrugged, then sat back onto one of the barstools.
“No, it doesn’t,” he said. He shook his head. “You were really going to eat that, huh?”
It was Tracy’s turn to shrug.
Brendan leaned in, and when she expected him to press his lips to hers, he instead kissed her on the forehead.
“Anyway, I’ve been here for a minute, so I should probably get home to Layla before it’s too late,” he said. “She has her whole bedtime routine she likes to do.”
Tracy’s head snapped back so she could look at him. “What routine?”
“The same stuff we always do. I’m guessing it’s your thing with her? The bath with the duck hair thingie, the hair-brushing, the singing …”
“She made you do that every night since I’ve been gone?”
“Or she screams bloody murder,” Brendan confirmed.
“I wouldn’t have thought she’d …”
“She’d what? Miss you? Hell yeah she misses you. Of course she misses you, Trace.”
“Does she ask for me?”
“Yes.”
Tracy could tell he was downplaying something. Maybe Layla cried for her every day. Maybe she was inconsolable. Her heart ached to think of it, and for the hundredth time, she doubted herself.
“Maybe I should …”
“Come home?” Brendan nodded, his expression serious. “Yeah. You should, baby.”
He kissed her on the forehead again and released his hold on her waist.
“I gotta go.” He turned away and headed for the stairs, pausing before heading down, and looking at her one last time. “And don’t think you have to eat those hot dogs. It was just …” He shrugged. “A gesture.”
Brendan watched from a distance as Tracy and Layla rolled around in the grass. While he sat on the park bench watching, Tracy lay on her back, holding Layla by the waist above her. Their daughter squealed and kicked her legs, her arms outspread as though she was flying.
“I think we should go for some ice cream,” Tracy called toward him.
“Yay!” Layla screamed.
She twisted free of her mother and ran toward the bench. Brendan caught and lifted her as she collided with his knees.
“Come, Dada,” she ordered. “Ice cream!”
“Who could say no to that?” Brendan said, standing.
Layla tugged at his hand, leaning in her mother’s direction, and Brendan watched as Tracy stood, brushing off her jeans, and shaking her head to dislodge any leaves or grass that may have stuck in her hair. That motion, the shaking of her hair, caught and held his attention. There was a certain grace to it, and a sexiness that made his stomach quake with something like longing.
Was he losing his wife?
It never would have occurred to him less than two weeks ago, that he might.
Once she had given it to you, Tracy was not shy about expressing her love. She said and showed it in a million ways since they’d been married and even in the years before. But lately, something was happening with her that, for the first time in a long, long time, she seemed disinclined to share with him. And he couldn’t lie. That was uncomfortable.
“Do you like being on your own?” he asked her as they turned toward the cluster of vending kiosks.
Between them, Layla swung back and forth, kicking her legs up into the air while they held tight.
“It’s not about me … liking it. It’s more complicated than that.”
“I think I might be smart enough to understand,” Brendan said. “That is, if someone wanted to explain it to me.”
“I will.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Maybe …”
“Tonight,” he said. It wasn’t a request. “When Layla is down.”
Tracy nodded haltingly. “I … okay. Yes, I guess we could.”
“Good.”
They got ice cream for Layla, and Brendan noticed that Tracy didn’t even balk at their daughter’s insistence on chocolate.
Chocolate stains!
Brendan remembered the countless times she had stage-whispered those words, instructing him to steer Layla away from anything that would ‘make a mess.’ Today, she didn’t seem to care. She handed Layla the cone without the slightest hesitation, and even fished out her phone to take a picture when at the first lick, she got a glob of ice cream on the tip of her nose. Then she grinned over at Brendan as if to say, ‘look at her. Isn’t our kid adorable?’
Without asking, she got two vanilla cones, handing his over before taking her own. Brendan didn’t ask for a cone, didn’t even know if he wanted one, but took it nevertheless. If he had wanted one, or had asked, he would have asked for vanilla. Because that was the only flavor he liked, preferably real vanilla, not just ‘plain’.
Tracy knew that, because over the years, she had become a student of his preferences. Now, she could look at a menu in a restaurant, any restaurant, even the ones they had never visited before, and effortlessly order for him almost exactly what he would have ordered for himself. She was flawless in her timing for replacing his shirts, basketball shorts, underwear; and chose new colognes he would like with an uncanny sixth sense that most people would assume only came after a relationship that spanned decades.
“Thanks, sweetheart,” he said, taking his first taste of the ice cream.
Thinking of all the ways Tracy knew him, helped his foul mood recede just a little. If there was something going on with her, he knew her at least well enough to know that it was not coming from a place of selfishness. Tracy had been about him, all about him, for years. Maybe it was time for him to let something be all about her.
Tracy looked up at the endearment and smiled. “You’re welcome.”
Her amber-hued eyes looked like warm honey when she smiled, and they held gazes for a few moments more, until finally she looked shyly away.
Layla, concentrating on her ice cream cone sat on a nearby dusty curb, her still-chubby cinnamon-toned legs stretched out. Brendan plopped down next to her, and Tracy took the other side. Layla looked from one of them to the other and giggled, looking pleased that she had directed the action for a change, that momma and dada had followed her lead rather than asking that she follow theirs.
It only took about a minute before the cone she was holding was dripping ice cream down the sides, and over her hand, and some of those drops made their way onto her lap or smeared her cheeks.
“Wipes?” Brendan asked.
“May as well wait till she’s had her fun and then clean up after,” Tracy said dismissively.
Brendan looked at her with narrowed eyes.
Who the hell was this? And what had she done to his wife?
“She’s sleeping. Finally.”
Tracy came padding back downstairs, her feet bare, and tossed herself onto the sofa, next to where Brendan was sitting, watching a game on mute.
“She put up a good fight though,” he said.
Tracy shook her head. “That’s for sure. I had to sing her three songs, read two stories and re-brush her hair before she conked out.”
At that, Brendan looked at her. There was unmistakable guilt in her tone, and a hint of sadness in her eyes. He turned off the television and gave Tracy his full attention.
“Any change in how she’s used to things being is bound to make her …”
“But the change is me not being here,” she said. “I’m responsible for the change.”
He said nothing, because it was true.
“So, you wanted me to
tell you what’s been going on,” she began.
“Yeah, if you feel ready to …”
“Can I …?” Tracy looked toward the kitchen. “I just want to get some wine maybe, before we get into it?”
“Are we about to?”
“About to what?”
“’Get into it’?”
“I don’t mean it like that. I mean, I just … Could I get some wine first?”
“It’s your house, Tracy. Get whatever you want.”
She looked at him. “Brendan. Don’t be like this.”
“I don’t know how else to be. I mean, it’s been almost two weeks of this already. Me in the dark, Layla in limbo … I’m trying to be patient. I really am, but …”
“I’m getting the wine,” Tracy said.
Brendan exhaled and waited until she returned, bringing an entire bottle of zinfandel with her, and two glasses though she had to know doggone well he wouldn’t be drinking any zinfandel. Reading his expression, she smiled.
“I thought it would be rude not to bring you a glass as well. Not to mention, how much of a lush it’ll make me feel like if this bottle winds up empty.”
She poured two glasses while Brendan watched, and took a sip, settling back on the couch next to him and folding her legs beneath her. She angled her body toward him and took a deep breath.
“Remember way back when we sort of broke up?” she began.
“When you found out you were pregnant with Layla?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Before that.”
“Before …”
“Well, it wasn’t really a breakup because we hadn’t really … I mean, we were trying to figure out how to be together. At least I was, and then we had that kind of … that talk and …”
She was stumbling over her words, and twirling the wineglass between her fingers, all while looking just over his shoulder, instead of at his face. And he detected a slight tremble in her shoulders as well.
Reaching out, he put a hand over one of hers, still holding the wineglass.
“Baby,” he said. “It’s okay. Tell me.”
“I was seeing a psychiatrist,” she said. The words shot out of her, as though she had forcibly expelled them.
Brendan sat back a little. “A psychiatrist,” he repeated.
Tracy’s eyes found his finally. And now they were searching, struggling to read his reaction.
“And so …” He narrowed his eyes. “You’re telling me now, because …”
“I’ve started seeing her again. And …”
“Why didn’t you tell me? When you saw her the first time.”
“Because.” Tracy paused to exhale. A deep profound breath that caused her shoulders to visibly shake. “Because,” she said, her tone matter-of-fact, “you already think of me as broken. I didn’t want to give you any ammunition to confirm it.”
“That’s not true.”
The words were instinctive. He didn’t think of his wife as broken. Complicated. Challenging. Sometimes downright exasperating. But broken? No.
“And ammunition?” he asked, grimacing. “Are you for real?”
“Well that’s the way I feel sometimes. With you. Like I have to be careful not to …”
“Tracy …”
“And it’s not just with you. With Riley. With Robyn. And Lord knows, that is definitely how I feel with my mother.” She gave a harsh laugh.
“So, because of that, you felt you couldn’t tell me, for years, that you once went to see a shrink?”
“Not ‘once went to see’. It was more than that. She helped me find my way back from a really dark place, Brendan. The only people I told were Riley and Russell.”
“Russell knew?”
That news was like a sucker-punch to the gut. He always knew that Riley and Tracy were like sisters. And that Russell was a good friend. Another man being a close friend of Tracy’s was not something that would normally sit well with him, but since Russell was gay, Brendan felt no threat. Now, he wasn’t so sure he shouldn’t have. After all, emotional threats were as real as sexual ones.
“Yes. Because he was there when I was going through it. He helped me. While you were gone, and Riley was preoccupied with a new baby, he helped me.”
“And you’re going again now? To this shrink.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I was beginning to drive you crazy. Beginning to drive myself crazy with the baby stuff. And then I talked to each of my closest friends, the people who know me best. And y’know what they all said to me?”
“What?”
“That maybe it’s not about a baby.” Tracy shrugged. “I mean, independent of each other, they all said without saying, ‘maybe it’s you, Tracy.’ So, I had to at least consider that …”
“That you might be ‘broken’?” Brendan began. “Tracy, you’re not …”
“That’s not what I’m trying to say.”
“Okay, so what’re you trying to say?”
“I’m not saying I believe I’m broken.” She spoke slowly. “I’m saying I think maybe we are.”
16
She was asleep, facedown like someone drugged when the phone rang. Tracy rolled over and reached for it, answering without checking first to see who it might be. Fewer than a half dozen people had the number for the landline in the condo, and she was too lazy to see whom them among might be calling.
“Hello?” Her voice was a dry whisper. There was encrusted drool at the corner of her mouth that cracked as she spoke.
“You know what I was thinking about?”
Tracy turned onto her back and propped herself up against the pillows, immediately energized by the sound of Brendan’s voice.
“I was thinking about that time we tried to make a sex tape,” he said.
“You were never really that into it,” Tracy said, smiling despite herself.
“Nah. That’s true. I wasn’t.”
“Which I thought was really weird, since guys are always into sex tapes.”
“Not me. Not with my wife.”
“But you would be into it with someone other than your wife?”
She was only teasing, but the line fell silent for a few moments.
“Not with anyone. Because the only person I would even consider doing that with would be you. But I wouldn’t want that.”
“I know. I was just … That was a bad joke.”
“What I’m trying to say is, I wouldn’t need that with you. You give me everything I need, Tracy. You’re enough, just as you are. Always have been.”
A silence fell between them, and then lengthened. There was no way, Tracy thought, that she would ever fall out of love with this man. No way.
“How …” She cleared her throat. “How was Layla tonight?”
Their daughter was a safer subject for now.
“She was good. I put her down early and poured myself a good, stiff drink.”
“You felt like you needed one?”
“Thinking about what you said about us being broken? Yeah, I felt like that was worth a little alcohol.”
“I didn’t mean … I just … Sometimes it’s tough to tell you things, or to stay focused when I’m trying to get you to hear me. You touch me and I just … dissolve.”
“I thought you were happy with our life …”
“I am.”
“… and that I give you everything you need …”
“You do,” she said, before adding, “mostly.”
“Yeah. Mostly. That’s the killing part.”
“Oh my god, Brendan,” she said, exasperated for a moment. “I’m not supposed to get everything I need from you. Don’t you see? How is that a healthy relationship?”
He fell silent for a long while.
Look, I don’t want this to get off track. I called because I wanted to say something.”
“What’s that?”
“I just wanted to say, I heard you. It didn’t feel good. But what you said about feeling like w
e’re broken? And I can’t say I understand it completely yet. But I heard you.”
Simone was waiting for him, sitting in his office in one of the visitor chairs facing his desk. Brendan paused at the threshold and observed her for a moment. The back of her head, short platinum blonde-hair, long neck, straight, erect back. She was wearing a baby-blue cotton-linen blouse that had the look of the finest, most expensive fabric.
“G’morning,” he said.
She spun at the sound of his voice and stood as he went around to his side of the desk and removed his suit jacket, draping it over the back of his chair.
“Good morning,” Simone returned, resuming her seat.
“Must be urgent,” Brendan said. “You just posted up waiting for me to get here, huh?”
Simone smiled and pushed across the table a coffee cup that Brendan only just noticed. She had one of her own as well.
“And you came with a bribe. Something must be up. What is it?”
He took the coffee and inhaled deeply before having his first sip. It was tepid, bitter, and didn’t have as much creamer as he would have liked, but it was high-octane, and that was all that mattered for the first cup.
“The numbers for the division. I wanted to …”
“Aren’t we meeting about that at ten this morning?” Brendan asked. “With Justin and the entire team?”
“Yes, but I thought I would come by and give you a heads-up.”
Brendan put the coffee cup back on his desk and leaned back. “Why d’you think I would need that?”
“Well …” Simone shifted in her seat. “I don’t think you need it. I just wanted to put some of what you’re going to hear in context, that’s all.”
“What am I going to hear?”
“That we had a loss this quarter. A big one.”
Brendan already knew that.
He didn’t wait for his division heads to deliver bad news, he kept on top of the numbers on a weekly basis, whether he shared that with them or not. But the status meetings were still important, because the numbers didn’t always tell the full story. Some losses were anticipated, and some gains were temporary and unsustainable. What mattered most was that the division have a plan, a vision that would make them profitable over the long haul. The only reason Brendan was having the meeting at ten was to hear Justin’s vision. The numbers—the really crappy numbers—he was fully aware of.
Four: Stories of Marriage Page 31