Out of Time

by Deborah Truscott

  *****

  Later that morning, I called Julie.

  I had been thinking about my midnight phone call to Cameron. The warfare between us couldn’t go on forever because I absolutely meant what I said about the children. I would not permit them to be caught in the crossfire.

  Cameron has a lot of issues. He’s a jerk but technically he isn’t a bad father. He’s disinterested, absentee and tuned out, but certainly not abusive. Given this, he was within his rights to drop in and out of the children’s lives whenever it suited him. He would be a fixture, if not a very reliable one, for the next couple of decades. And whether we were married or divorced, Cameron and I still had two children to raise and I didn’t want them to be the accidental victims of some endless ongoing feud between the two of us. And for all his failings (and boy, did he have them), I was pretty sure Cameron didn’t want that, either. With time, I knew we could agree on this one thing.

  Meanwhile, it would help if I could figure out what he was really up to. There was his visit to the cottage. There were his phone calls to me. There was the woman’s voice in the background the night I called, urging him back to bed. And there was that comment he made that night … We can work it out, Kathy. Wasn’t that what he said?

  The fact was, I needed to get the lowdown on on him. I needed to run this by someone who was up on Fredericksburg’s current events. Someone with an ear to the ground. Someone abreast of the local gossip.

  Someone like Julie.

  Julie is a self-reliant, independent woman, but she’s also an old-fashioned lady. She’s the sort of person who composes exquisite thank you notes. She has a gift for every nuance of etiquette. She attracts people as effectively as a flame does moths. She knows everyone, which, in turn, means she knows everything — and if she doesn’t, she can find out.

  So after a long morning session of current events (during which Robert compared — rather cleverly, I thought — the post-war occupation in Iraq to the British occupation of the mutinous Indian subcontinent), I repaired to my bedroom (the one I was no longer sleeping in), settled myself on the bed and picked up the phone. I dialed Julie’s office and listened while the phone rang in Fredericksburg.

  “Colonial Graphics. This is Julie Howell.”

  “Hi, Julie.”

  “Kathy Lee! Well, hey, girl! Is it true? You’re finally and officially leaving Cameron?”

  For a moment I was speechless. “You’ve been talking to Lila,” I said finally.

  “Well, first she called to invite me to Sunday dinner and then she called to uninvite me, so we’ve done quite a bit of chatting. But you’ll be relieved to know I’m coming to dinner next Sunday evening because you’re absolutely, positively going to be home by then.”

  I laughed. “Yes, I promised that I would.”

  “Sunday’s the second, but your mother says we’re supposed to pretend it’s the Fourth so we can set off fireworks over the river.

  I had forgotten about the holiday. “That sounds like fun,” I said, thinking, a little wickedly, how much Robert would simply love to celebrate America’s independence. “Really, it does.”

  “And it’s appropriate, when you think about it. You’ll be celebrating your freedom from Cameron.”

  I started to reply to this, but Julie wasn’t finished. In fact, it seemed she had a speech prepared.

  “I know you don’t really celebrate divorce,” she went on. “I’m not trying to be flip and I’m not trying to minimize what you’re going through. But you can celebrate your life, all the many good and wise things in it, growth and good changes. It won’t be easy, but you’ll get though it. We’ll all be there for you. Your mom, your friends. Me.”

  For a moment we both were silent. I was touched and a little humbled by her words. Somehow thank you seemed an inadequate response, but I tried to say it anyhow, until Julie brushed me off.

  “I never liked the son of a bitch anyway,” she said.

  “Now you tell me.”

  “Oh, I told you, all right. You just never listened.”

  “I listened. I just didn’t believe you.”

  “You were infatuated. Deaf to advice. Headstrong and blind to the facts.”

  I wasn’t sure what facts she was referring to but the infatuated and headstrong part was undeniable. I made sounds of dutiful agreement.

  “You know,” she went on, “it’s funny you’ve called this afternoon since I was going to call you tonight.” Her voice dropped conspiratorially. “I’m supposed to find out if you’re seeing a man.”

  For a moment, I was too startled to speak. Had Phillip had called Lila since yesterday? Had he mentioned Robert?

  “Naturally, I told your mother how silly that was,” Julie went on. “I told her I simply could not imagine our level-headed Kathy Lee fooling around with some guy on the side, even if you were leaving Cameron for real. Like, you know, you were some sort of man-trap or something.”

  I wasn’t sure I was flattered by this, but I didn’t think now was the time to get offended. “Really,” I said, agreeing with her. “Me of all people.” Pause. “So when did you last talk to Mother?”

  “I don’t know. Saturday night or Sunday morning, I guess.”

  Before Phillip met Robert. So the idea of me seeing a man was just a shot in the dark. Which didn’t mean Phillip hadn’t told her since, but truthfully, I was didn’t think he had.

  “Why do you ask?” Julie probed.

  “I was wondering how she sounded to you.”

  “Like she always does. Why? How does she sound to you?”

  “Worried,” I told her frankly.

  “Well, that’s not surprising, Kathy Lee. You’ve been gone for ages.”

  “Days,” I corrected her. “I’ve needed time to think. I needed to figure out what I’m going to do and how I’m going to do it. I wanted to come up and get the kids, but Mother hates the idea of me driving, so—”

  “It’s redemption, Kathy Lee,” Julie cut in. “She wants the kids. She thinks she helping you, you know, in your Time of Trouble.”

  I was so surprised that for a moment I couldn’t say anything. “Did she say that?” I asked finally. “I know she worries, but did she actually say—”

  I broke off, aware of an ache deep within my chest.

  “She didn’t have to, Kathy. Don’t you get it? If she takes care of Blythe and Sammy for you, she makes up for … when she left you.”

  “That wasn’t her fault.”

  “And this isn’t yours.”

  We were silent for a minute while I absorbed what she said. I would have pursued the subject with her, had she not spoken first.

  “So does Cameron know you’re divorcing him yet?”

  “No.” I confessed, returning (reluctantly) to the topic at hand. “I want to talk to Henry first, get him to refer me to someone good, maybe someone in North Carolina…But listen, Julie — do you have time to talk? It’s about Cameron. Coincidentally.”

  “Okay,” Julie said, sounding serious. “Shoot.”

  “I think he’s fooling around.”

  “When is he not fooling around?”

  “No, Julie. This time he’s really cheating. I think he’s bringing a woman to the cottage.”

  Silence. Then Julie said: “Lila would kill him He’s got to know that. And he’s so, I don’t know, so enamored of her.”

  “Exactly. So if he’s willing to risk his standing with Lila, then—”

  “This is serious. Which mean’s he’s serious. About someone.” The line hummed for a few seconds. “Wow,” Julie finally breathed. “Are you sure?”

  I told her about finding Cameron’s new clothes in my closets and drawers, about his phone call Friday night requesting that I clear out so he could use the cottage over the weekend.

  “And he wouldn’t want to use the cottage by himself,” Julie said.

  “No,” I agreed, “he wouldn’t. And then on Sunday night he called again. He said he wanted to remind me about some dinner par
ty we’re supposed to go to next weekend, not that I will. The thing is, I get that this dinner party is right up there with a papal audience, but I think he really called just to pick a fight. Like, I had already I screwed him out of a romantic weekend at the beach, so maybe he just wanted to make me miserable for a while. Or maybe he really does want to make sure I have this dinner thing on my calendar. But the fact that he called at all is … unusual.”

  “You’re right,” Julie said thoughtfully. “It doesn’t sound like him.”

  “But there’s more.” I could sense Julie’s interest prick up on the other end of the line. “I called him the other night. Monday night I think, though it was around three A.M. So early Tuesday morning.”

  “You called him at three A.M.?”

  “To talk about the kids and all. You know. And at one point he said … he told me we could work it out. He wasn’t talking about the kids. He was talking about the marriage.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “No. Why salvage things if he’s serious enough about someone to bring her to the cottage? I mean, what if Mother found out, et cetera? There’d be no going back.”

  “Exactly. Unless sometime between his visit with the broad and the night you called he had a change of heart.”

  “Jeeze, let’s hope not. But then there’s this: just before he hung up, there was a woman’s voice.”

  “At three in the morning.”

  “Yep. Probably not a staff meeting or a consult, huh?”

  “Ya think?”

  “On the other hand, maybe it was a consult. Of sorts.”

  “You want to know what he’s up to.”

  “I want to know if he really is serious about someone. Because if he is—”

  “Your life gets a lot easier. Okay, give me a couple of hours. I’ll call you back.”

  I hung up the phone, leaned back against the pillows and closed my eyes. I thought about my mother and my children. I thought about redemption, and I wondered if Julie was right. Lila didn’t need to redeem herself. She had done nothing wrong. When she left to heal herself at Havenhurst I never felt abandoned or deserted. Certainly, I was never hurt or angry. Or, if I was, I had gotten over it. Surely, I had long since forgiven her.

  Hadn’t I?

  Suddenly, I was perilously close to tears. Get a grip, Kathy Lee, I told myself. I shook my head to clear it, then winced and pressed my fingers to my forehead.

  I had a headache. I sorted through contributing factors and came up with Cameron. Something he said recently nagged at me — well, quite a number of things nagged at me — pushing (rather mercifully) ruminations about my mother to the back of my mind. Ah, I thought, remembering. His crack about the credit cards.

  So I reached for my purse and dumped the contents out on the quilt. Robert had come in from the deck. I could hear music floating up from downstairs and I realized, suddenly, that over the last week we had worked our way chronologically from Baroque to the nineteenth century Romanticists — our out-of-sequence foray into Tchaikovsky notwithstanding. I tipped my ear, listening to the chords rise from the first floor. Wagner, I decided. I am not fond of Wagner. During her “spells,” Lila always took refuge in Wagner, so I don’t associate him with the happier moments of my life. And this, I decided, sounded suspiciously like Siegfried’s Funeral March.

  I sighed, opened my wallet and thumbed through the credit cards. I had charged my dress on Cameron’s American Express, but Robert’s shirt, our lunch at Ocracoke, dinner at the Sanderling and even our plane ride had been paid for with my Visa card. I put the card aside and made a neat stack of Cameron’s Diner’s, AmEx and gold Mastercard. Next I went through the department store cards and realized they were all in Cameron’s name except for Belk’s, which I’ve had since college. Macy’s, Nordstrom’s, Neiman-Marcus and several more all went on Cameron’s pile. Parting with them cost me a pang.

  I was gazing at the credit cards lost in deep thought when the phone rang. It was Julie a good hour before I expected to heard from her again.

  “You’re quick,” I said.

  “I called in some markers, netted some interesting results. Cameron was seeing Deidre over at that ad agency on Lafayette Boulevard.”

  Deidre was one of the Graphic Girls. “But he isn’t any more?”

  “He got interested in real estate. An agent. My sources think he fell for her pretty hard. As in utterly besotted.”

  Aha!

  “But she dumped him.”

  Damn!

  “For cheating on her with Suzanne Nilson, one of Deidre’s co-workers.”

  That would be the other Graphic Girl. “How besotted could he be if he was cheating on her?”

  “This is Cameron we’re talking about.”

  “Good point.”

  “Anyway, he was wooing the real estate gal by taking her to the cottage,” Julie went on. “Probably thought all that beachfront would be a turn on.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Why did he want the cottage this past weekend if his girlfriend has already dumped him?”

  “He was hoping to revive the romance.”

  Well, this was good news.

  “But don’t get your hopes up,” Julie cautioned me. “Apparently the real estate sweetie’s got him pegged. Won’t see him at all. He’s said to be heartbroken. If you can imagine Cameron with a heart and all.”

  “So who was with him the night I called?”

  “Not the real estate agent. One of the girls from the ad agency.”

  This wasn’t helping my headache. “He can’t be all that brokenhearted,” I said.

  “Maybe it was a medicinal screw.”

  “You know, I still don’t get why he’d try to hurry me out of the cottage, even if he was trying to revive the romance. Wouldn’t it be far simpler just to take her somewhere else? The Inn at Little Washington, someplace like that? Why hassle me?”

  “Maybe that was the point.”

  I thought about that, but nothing clicked. “So the bottom line is simple,” I said. “Cameron’s true-love ditched him, which means—”

  “He’ll be less inclined to cooperate with you, “ Julie finished for me.

  I sighed heavily. “Julie, tell me: How do you find out all this shit?”

  “Reading Fredericksburg is like reading tea leaves,” she replied. “You just have to know what to look for.”

  Chapter 33

  I hung up the phone, contemplated my credit cards piles and thought. Not about Cameron (too confusing), or Lila (too complicated), and certainly not about weird guys in white cars (too spooky), but about finances. I had a saving account in my own name with a couple of thousand dollars in it, but the bank was a local Fredericksburg savings and loan with no branch offices south of Richmond. I had debit card with me, but that account was held jointly with Cameron. I had another account, however, one I held jointly with Lila, and that bank was right here in Avon. It was an account that Lila opened up for us years before I got married (back when most shops and stores took only local checks), and which we now use mainly for household expenses. Lila keeps the checkbook — a large, ledger style one, relic of pre-debit card days — in her desk downstairs. I even made a deposit the last time I was here, but I wasn’t sure of the balance and made a mental note to check the ledger.

  Wagner gave way to Mendelssohn, which was a relief. It was his Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture, for some reason one of my favorite pieces of classical music. I tossed Cameron’s credit cards into the drawer of the night table and began stuffing my cards back into my wallet, along with my cash. When I looked up, Robert was watching me from the doorway.

  “My mother’s father was a merchant,” he said abruptly, his voice curiously flat. “My father scorned him because he was in trade, but married his daughter for her portion. He never forgave my mother for her antecedents, but he spent her money anyway.” He paused, his expression abstracted. “My merchant grandfather grew to despise my father,” he went on, “and he desp
ised the system of primogeniture even more. After my mother died, he made me a handsome gift of money, a trust. I received the income at twenty, the principal at thirty. I have never touched the principal. When I left for India I assigned the income to Edmund and Nancy, to be administered by their uncle Richard. When I left for America, I placed the principal — which, being past thirty, was now mine to spend or invest — in the children’s names, under Richard’s management. I have lived entirely on my pay since India.”

  I looked at him, amazed by the detail of his recollection.

  “Seeing you set your finances aright made me think of it,” he offered.

  “It must have been hard, living solely on your pay,” I said. I was pretty sure that officers of the King’s army didn’t make a lot of money. The idea was that they were gentlemen, and therefore had private, family incomes.

  “It was easy in India. Harder in America. I have a modest amount, invested in the three percents, from my father’s father, which pays out annually. That helps — helped — with larger expenses.”

  “But you hamstrung your future, didn’t you? If you ever want to … retire or something—” (Marry, I almost said.)

  “In some respects, a soldier has no future. But my children do. It is a relief, Kathleen, remembering this, knowing that I have made some provision for them.”

  There was sadness in his voice. Impulsively, I reached my arms out to him. He swept me up and carried me across the hall.

  *****

  That afternoon, tangled together in sheets and slick with each other’s sweat, I felt the beat of Robert’s heart against my own. Beyond our opened window the sea spilled against the beach and then receded in a steady, ancient rhythm. A faint breeze fretted the sheets and whispered across our bodies. Robert’s breath stirred my hair, his skin slid with insistent heat against mine. His shoulder shadowed the sun. I opened to his embrace.

  In retrospect it seems we lived in grace, blessed by a string of perfect days. Then again, maybe they weren’t perfect. Maybe they were close and hot, the way June days often are as they slip into July. But to us they were matchless, flawless days. Glorious days. Days of great happiness.