Four: Stories of Marriage

by Nia Forrester

  She felt the same way with Mrs. Lawson who greeted her at the door and took her bag, so that she could immediately put everything in the laundry or send it out for dry cleaning.

  “I’ll have something to eat ready for you out back if you’re hungry.”

  “Yes,” Robyn said. “So hungry. I slept on the flight and didn’t eat much yesterday.”

  “Give me fifteen minutes and I’ll have something for you on the terrace,” Mrs. Lawson said, unflappable as usual.

  Robyn didn’t even ask what it would be, because she knew Mrs. Lawson would make it delicious whatever it was.

  And it was. Robyn was standing on the terrace, looking out at the garden, feeling herself finally begin to relax when Mrs. Lawson brought out lunch. It was Caesar salad with succulent slices of steak, and a spicy lentil soup, with warm, buttered sourdough bread, nestled in a basket and covered in a checkered cloth. Sometimes it was the small moments, like this one, that reminded her of how good the life was, that she had with Chris.

  Sitting down and happily spreading her napkin on her lap Robyn remembered to ask after Chris and the children.

  “They all left at about eleven this morning,” Mrs. Lawson said. “The children were very excited.”

  “How about Chris?” Robyn laughed. “How excited was he, having to deal with all four of them on his own?”

  “Oh no, he had plenty of help,” Mrs. Lawson said, pausing before going back inside. “He had the foresight to ask Felicity along. And her mother went with them as well, so I think he’ll be quite alright.”

  8

  Thank you for having us along,” Elaine said. “We had a good time.”

  “Yes. Thank you, Mr. Scaife. See you on Monday!” Felicity turned and headed toward their car, but her mother lingered.

  In the backseat of Chris’ car, the three littler ones were sleeping. Landyn and Caitlyn in their car seats and Kaden already strapped in and slouched to one side, his head lolling backward. In the front, next to Chris, Jasmin was still awake and watching with interest, the exchange between him and Elaine.

  “That corn maze was a little scary. But I had fun.”

  “We did, too,” Chris said.

  What he meant though, was that the kids had fun. They had funnel cakes, and hot dogs, and sweet frozen drinks. He bought four pumpkins, because Mrs. Lawson said Robyn wanted to do a carving activity and picked up a half dozen sweet potato pies.

  In between eating all the junk, Chris paid for them to go on hay-rides and get fake-lost in the corn maze. He’d asked Felicity to come along for double her usual daily rate since it was a weekend, and Elaine had invited herself along as well. He didn’t mind so much, because while the kids were having their rides, and walking the maze, it was good to have another adult paying attention, especially while he kept track of Landyn who he let wander around within a safe circumference since he couldn’t do most of activities the other kids were doing.

  “I’d love to thank you properly at some point,” Elaine said now.

  “What for?”

  “This. And the other day. You know. I feel like … anyway I’d like to thank you.”

  “No need,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Coffee. You can at least let me buy you a coffee. If you come into town, stop by my studio and we’ll go have a coffee.”

  “Sure,” Chris said. “Sounds good. I’ll do that. You guys drive safely.”

  “We will,” Elaine said. “G’bye, Jasmin. It was great meeting you!”

  “Nice to meet you too,” Jas said, without anything approaching the same degree of enthusiasm.

  Chris waited until he saw Elaine get into her car and start the engine before he backed out of his space and joined the procession of other cars leaving the Mennonite farm.

  “That was fun, right?” Chris said looking at his daughter.

  Jasmin shrugged, looking down at her lap. “Yeah.”

  “C’mon. Stop playin’ I saw you grinning on that hay-ride just like Kaden and Caity.”

  Jas bit back a smile before she caught. “It was okay,” she said.

  “So, what’re you over there trying to look so sour about? Ate too much?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Then what’s up?”

  “You … you shouldn’t be going places with other ladies besides Robyn,” Jas said. She spoke quickly, like it took all her will to force the words out.

  “What other ladies?”

  Jasmin looked at him, her expression incredulous. For a moment, she looked like someone much older. This was the precise look she would one day give a boyfriend who was trying to feed her a line of BS.

  “Elaine?” Chris said. “You mean Felicity’s mom.”

  “Yes, her. She’s kind of … thirsty.”

  Chris spluttered out a laugh. “What you know about people being … thirsty?”

  “I know it when I see it,” Jas said. “She likes you, and she doesn’t even try to hide it even though she knows you’re married. That’s thirsty.”

  “Okay, that’s enough,” Chris said, realizing that he probably should set some positive parental example. “She’s just a nice lady who lives down the street from me and Robyn. We even went to a party together at her house. She’s not … thirsty. She’s just lonely.”

  “Sometimes that’s the same thing,” Jas said looking out the window.

  It was just getting dark when they finally got home, and by then Jasmin was asleep as well. Chris woke her, so she could go in; and before he even had to go find her to help, Robyn came out with Mrs. Lawson, taking Landyn and Caity, while he carried Kaden. It was only once he had gotten Kaden settled in his bed that he realized Robyn hadn’t spoken a single word to him when she came out to the car.

  He found her in the room Landyn and Caity shared, changing their son on the changing table he was quickly outgrowing. He slept through the changing until Robyn wiped him with one of the disposable cloths, which startled him awake. He whined and cried a little, then easily drifted back to sleep.

  Caity was already undressed and asleep in her bed, thumb in her mouth. Chris plucked it out and smoothed back his daughter’s hair. She looked like him, and Landyn more like his mother. It still sometimes blew his mind that he had two kids under five. It always blew his mind how much he loved every second of it.

  “Should we let them sleep so early?” he asked. “It’s not even seven-thirty.”

  “They’ll sleep through, I think,” Robyn said.

  The moment he heard her voice, he knew that she’d heard that not only Felicity, but her mother had gone on the field trip. And that was confirmed when she still didn’t look at him.

  “I’m going downstairs to see if I can get something to eat. Come join me when you’re done here.”

  She made a sound that was neither refusal nor assent, and Chris headed to the kitchen to scavenge some food. He would need his strength for the argument that was probably coming.

  Robyn found him sitting in the den, eating reheated soup and cornbread. It wasn’t exactly the hearty meal he had in mind, but he had to make do. Robyn, dressed in blue leggings and a grey tank top sat opposite him, folding her legs beneath her.

  “How was it?” Her tone was a study in forced casualness.

  Chris sighed. “Ask me what you really want to ask, Robyn.”

  She didn’t even take a breath. “Did Elaine go with you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But I didn’t invite her. She invited herself.”

  “And you don’t think that’s odd?”

  “Nope. Once I asked Felicity to come and help out and we realized everyone wouldn’t fit in my car, it made sense. Anything else?”

  Chris looked up at her and saw her processing his response. Maybe she was counting car seats and kids in her head, and concluding as he had, that having Elaine drive her car would only be a help.

  “So, you didn’t ask her to go?” She sounded slightly chastened.

  “No, I didn’t ask her to come.”

/>   “Okay,” she said finally. “Because, I really wanted to do this with you and the kids, and it just … it doesn’t feel good to hear that someone else …”

  “She’s not someone else. She’s no one. Okay?”

  Robyn nodded. “Are you sure?”

  “What d’you mean am I sure?”

  “There’s just … something. The way she looks at you or something. I don’t like it.”

  She was right. There was ‘something’ when Elaine Richards looked at him. Robyn probably thought it was sexual attraction, but Chris’ read it as something much more basic than that: loneliness and hunger for human connection.

  “Do you see me look at her like that?”

  Robyn shook her head, both to say ‘no’ and as if shaking out troubling thoughts.

  “And my trip was disastrous, by the way,” she said after a moment. “Even apart from missing the flight. I told you we lost Cristian, right?”

  “It happens.”

  “Jamal sure seemed to take it in stride.”

  Chris shrugged. “Because he knows how it is. By now he’s probably forgotten that kid’s name.”

  “He said it was a big loss though. That Cristian is probably going to be huge.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t just happen, like the weather. If he went with the wrong team, all those prospects could dry up overnight. And if he didn’t go with us, he definitely went with the wrong team.”

  Robyn exhaled, and Chris knew he had allayed her concerns. The truth was, losing Cristian was not a small deal. And Turner knew that as well as he did, but chances were, before their plane even hit the tarmac back on the East Coast, he had at least two other artists in mind whose profile would be bolstered to compensate for the loss. Turner was no lightweight, and like Chris, he always had a plan B.

  “I didn’t have the best attitude while we were there,” Robyn admitted. “He kind of had to reprimand me about complaining so much.”

  “Why were you complaining?”

  “Because I wanted to be here with you guys. Carving pumpkins, getting lost in a corn maze … eating those rubbery hot dogs.”

  Chris pushed aside the remains of his meal and looked at his wife. This stubborn, stubborn woman. He could tell her she could have been there eating hot dogs and walking through the corn maze if she wanted to. By simply opting out of the trip and opting out of the race to the top of SE’s legal department, she could have been there. But if he said that, she would reflexively resist. If there was a prize to be won, Robyn Scaife had to compete for it, and only afterward did she even consider whether it was something she wanted.

  “One way or another, baby, you’ve gotta commit,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means, if you’re in California for work, that’s where your head should be. And if you didn’t want to be in California, then you should have made some different choices to make sure you didn’t have to be. You’re like the kid in the candy store who wants everything he sees, and never thinks about whether he can even eat it all.”

  At that, Robyn’s face became expressionless, and she sat back.

  “That’s a horrible analogy,” she said.

  Chris came around the table that separated them and pulled her up, so he could wrap his arms around her.

  “A’ight, lemme see if I can do better. You’re like a fat man in a bakery, who wants to eat up all the cake. You’re … a … mouse in a cheese factory, who …”

  “I get it, I get it,” she said laughing. “And for the record, I am none of those things. Most especially not a fat man in a bakery.”

  He looked down at her, brushing his thumb across her lower lip.

  “You’re a wife whose husband missed her like crazy. Even though it was just one night.”

  Robyn stuck out her lower lip and blushed a little. Reaching up, she wrapped her arms around his neck.

  “You only ever say stuff like that because you know I like to hear it.”

  “That, and because it’s true,” Chris said.

  “I missed you too,” Robyn said twirling out of his arms and tugging him by the hand. “C’mon upstairs lemme show you how much.”

  Robyn fell asleep almost immediately afterward. But it was the shallow sleep of the sexually-sated, but not truly tired. She took mini-naps sometimes after he made her come, just drifting off with a slight smile of contentment on her face. And then she might open her eyes, a half-hour or even an hour later, stretching and purring like a cat, sometimes even reaching for him again.

  Chris didn’t sleep. He was wide was awake and had been for the past twenty minutes, his mind whirring and wandering, looking for a problem to solve. There were none, really. His business was running well under the leadership of a steady and experienced hand, his children were healthy, happy and whole, his wife lying next to him was as well; and his sister was in a place that was safe and familiar to her. He had plenty of money and could do just about anything he wanted. Life was good.

  The lack of a problem should not have been a problem, but it was. He felt uneasy in the absence of a clear role. Husband, father, brother were all good. Amazing even. But not enough.

  At the side of the bed, in the dark, his phone vibrated, and the face lit up. He reached for it and read the message.

  Namaste, it said. And then there was a smile emoticon. The ellipsis appeared and disappeared. Another message popped up. Coffee tomorrow? Sabrina’s on Main?

  There was no name assigned to the number, so it was the ‘namaste’ that clued him in. He remembered Elaine’s dark eyes dancing with laughter when she told him how sick she was of having to greet people in that manner at her studio.

  Chris looked at the message for a moment then set the phone back on the bedside table, unsure of whether he would respond. Text messages got lost in the shuffle all the time. People overlooked them, until the invitations they may have issued became stale or irrelevant. If he didn’t respond, and ran into Elaine Richards again, he would say he was sorry that he missed her and tell her again that her effusive thanks were not necessary.

  Turning toward Robyn, he slid down so his body spooned hers. He reached between her legs and felt them relax to make the way easier. She turned around, kissed him without opening her eyes, and moaned his name.

  “Chris …”

  9

  Robyn, I’ve got your son on the line.” Pam’s voice came through on the intercom.

  It always took a moment for that to penetrate whenever Pam made such an announcement, because her son, at least her biological son was hardly old enough to know what a telephone was, let alone use one.

  “Deuce? Is everything okay, sweetie?”

  “Yeah. Everything’s cool.” Her stepson’s voice was laced with amusement. “Why you gotta think something’s wrong every time I call you?”

  “Just making sure,” Robyn said, still scrolling through the document on her monitor she was reviewing.

  The reason she always thought that something might be wrong when Deuce called was that something usually was. Never anything huge and never anything ‘wrong’ really, because Deuce was a good kid, a really, really good kid. But he was spoiled. Only by his mother, and by Robyn, though. Chris was the only one who seemed to have the will to play the hard-ass with his too-handsome-for-his-own-good eldest child.

  And so, if Deuce wanted his father to do something, he generally appealed to Robyn as his intercessor, having learned a long time ago that his father generally wanted to say ‘yes’ whenever Robyn asked for something, and that own mother would be useless in that regard. Chris was most likely to reject a request from Sheryl on principle. The principle being that if Sheryl asked for something, anything, it was likely the wrong thing and hence subject to automatic refusal.

  “Are we going to see you for Thanksgiving?” Robyn asked.

  “Yup. For sure. That’s what I was callin’ about. I’ll probably have to take the train. And that’s gon’ be a pain, but yeah.”

  “Oh yeah
? How come?” Robyn asked.

  “My car’s all messed up,” Deuce said. “I think I might have to park it. Not sure it’d even make it back.”

  Robyn rolled her eyes. This kid was so transparent. “Wow. Really? Did you have someone take a look at it, or …?”

  “Nah, but it’s definitely the transmission and you know how it is with Beemers. Once you start getting into the big jobs like replacing the transmission, you may as well shit-can … I mean, you might as well junk the whole thing.”

  “Yeah,” Robyn drawled. “I have heard that.”

  She had heard no such thing. Because she had never owned a Beemer in her life. Now that she was married to a very wealthy man, she still hadn’t owned a BMW. Deuce on the other hand, had been driving one since he was sixteen. In fact, she remembered clearly the day he got the one he had.

  She had been pregnant with Caity, and Deuce had been a virtual stranger to her, the teenage son of the man who she had ill-advisedly fallen for and gotten knocked up by. The man who, at that time, she never would have imagined herself married to, because he had told her point-blank he wasn’t the marrying kind. Deuce had come over with his dad to her house after car shopping and Robyn watched the man-child sitting at her mom’s kitchen table eating chocolate cake and wondered wistfully if the baby she had would be as good-looking and as gregarious.

  “Deuce?” Robyn said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I have a meeting to go to in less than five minutes, so what car are we hitting you father up for?”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

  “Four minutes,” Robyn said.

  “Now you makin’ me feel bad. Like I don’t call you unless I need something.”

  “Well …”

  “Dang. It’s like that though?”

  “Meeting,” Robyn sang.

  “Robyn. For real. You know I love you like a second mother, right?”

  She laughed. “I hope so, Deuce. Because the amount of times I go to bat for you, you have no idea.”